Ayurveda Gurus use Allopathic Treatment

 

BJP Will Be Defeated in UP, Samajwadi & Allies Will Get Clear Majority: Former Delhi LG Najeeb Jung:

The BJP’s ‘2ab’ factor that’s missing from SP, BSP, Congress in UP elections

Dilip Mandal in The Print

The Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, and the Congress in Uttar Pradesh are mostly banking on the anti-incumbency factor to dislodge the Yogi Adityanath government. But is it enough? Discontent is only one part of the electoral matrix and who the voters choose also depends on what they are offering.

Here, I see a lack in the opposition parties. I call this deficit the extra ‘2ab’ factor. In his 2015 speech in Toronto, Canada, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that while India and Canada growing separately would be a² + b², when joined together they would be (a+b)², which is equal to a² +b²+2ab, with the ‘friendship’ giving an extra ‘2ab’.

I would like to extrapolate from this formula and say that if ‘a’ and ‘b’ are the general, run-of-the-mill-type poll promises, then all four political parties— BJP, SP, BSP and Congress—have made more or less similar announcements. If we check their manifestos/pledges/speeches and social media posts, we can easily observe identical poll promises like improving law and order, women empowerment, development, capacity enhancement in the education sector, creating employment and so on. As all the four political parties have ruled the state of UP and that too for a considerably long spell, everyone knows that no party is going to do miracles.

The ‘2ab’ factor is missing in the campaigning of opposition parties, if we use Modi’s maths.

Policing, development, increasing capacity in education and hospital beds are matters of governance and all parties deliver something in such areas. Take the example of expressways. Mayawati and the BSP can claim that the Yamuna Expressway was made during their tenure. The SP government led by Akhilesh Yadav can claim the Ganga Expressway, whereas the BJP made the Purvanchal Expressway. Similarly, all parties are claiming that their performance was better than others in the field of law and order. Most of these claims are contested by rival parties, and voters have to depend on the pitch and tone of the claims to reach some conclusion. This is the limitation of a² and b².

So what about the extra ‘2ab’?

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Also read: Samajwadi Party promises social justice, but look who got tickets in 2022. Not enough Muslims

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Extra ‘2ab’ that BJP offers

I call ‘2ab’ the emotive factor. If a politician ignores voters’ emotions then they are taking a big risk. Most people make decisions or form opinions on the basis of emotions. That is the reason that many despots, despite performing quite badly on all economic and human development fronts, win electoral battles.

Donald Trump won in the US in 2016 not because he was promising anything great for jobs and growth, but because he vowed to make (white) America great again. Narendra Modi wins not because people believe that he will make India a $5-trillion economy, create two crore jobs every year, ensure that by 2022 every Indian lives in a pucca house and bring back black money from Swiss banks. His voters never ask for accountability on these counts. He wins because he connects to the emotions of a majority of Indians — Modi came back in 2019 without having delivered on his economic and human development promises.

In the UP elections, the BJP made promises about the economy, job creation, agriculture growth, health, education and so on. This is its general a² and b². But it has something extra, the ‘2ab’ factor. That consists of things which Yogi Adityanath and Narendra Modi are talking about or hinting at. For example:

–        We will not allow Yadav Raj to return.

–        We are making a grand temple at Ayodhya. We have transformed Kashi. We will also deliver the promises on Mathura.

–        Prominent Muslim leaders are in jail. In some cases, their properties have been confiscated. They will not be allowed to grow again.

–        We will ensure that cows and other Hindu religious symbols are protected.

–        We will not allow ‘Love Jihad’ to happen. Your girls are protected from Muslim boys.

–        We will not allow Muslims to turn India into Ghazwa-e-Hind.

–        We will work for Hindus. But more importantly, we will not work for Muslims.

This does not mean that BJP is not campaigning on the basis of development and welfare schemes. The short list above only demonstrates that it is promising something extra.

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Also read: ‘Time to vote for Ram’: BJP plays Hindutva card in Ayodhya as it fights anti-incumbency

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UP is not great again

The problem with the SP, BSP and Congress is that they do not have the ‘2ab’. In the battle of emotions, they do not have substantial offerings. They have failed to provide a counter-narrative to the communal emotive campaign of the BJP. The opposition parties are mostly talking about governance and trying to invoke memories of a time when they were ruling UP and trying to compare it to Yogi’s tenure. The SP, BSP and Congress are hoping that voters will go down memory lane to remember how things were 5, 10, or 30 years back, respectively.

SP has that extra bit in terms of assurance to the Muslims that they will be safe. But the Muslim vote is not enough to win many seats. The BSP used to have its own mojo — it would usher in Bahujan Rule. But now it is going soft on this plank due to electoral arithmetic. Despite that, the promise that a Dalit will rule UP again will certainly fetch it votes.

UP is still largely an underdeveloped, agrarian economy with hardly any big ticket foreign investment or big industrial projects. It lies at the bottom of state rankings in terms of health, education and women empowerment. Uttar Pradesh’s per capita GDP is comparable to the most underdeveloped countries such as Vanuatu and Benin. The only solace is that its numbers are still higher than Bihar. No party can claim that it has made UP great.

So, in the last five years, the BJP has delivered on emotional factors and promises instead. And in the end, the electoral outcome will probably depend on that emotive ‘2ab’.

 

MSP won’t bankrupt India. It’s complex, but so is disinvestment

Debunking six myths about the MSP for BJP and allies, free-market wallahs and ecological warriors. Yogendra Yadav in The Print 


 

A spectre is haunting India’s ruling class – the spectre of MSP. Over the last few days, various sections of this ruling class – political allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party, economic ideologues of free-market and some ecological warriors – have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre and stymie the possibility of India’s farmers getting a fair price for their produce.

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dramatic, though over-delayed, capitulation on the farm laws, the fear of the ascent of the rural has left the Indian bourgeoisie petrified. Minimum Support Price (MSP) is now the new battleground. End of “reform” – arguably the most abused word – is the latest war cry. Ever since the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) has reminded the PM of its pending demand of a legal guarantee of MSP, we have witnessed a flurry of articles, editorials and debates out to block the possibility that the PM may concede this one as well. MSP is the “bane of agriculture” and the demand for its legal status “totally unreasonable” says the 50-word editorial of The Print, which I often agree with.

As in much ideological propaganda, this tirade against MSP is full of ignorance, prejudice, and fabrications. I cannot imagine such ill-informed canard getting space on national media if it concerned share market, Provident Fund, debt restructuring or anything that touched upon the interest of the “middle class”.

As this historic farmers’ struggle enters end-game, it is vital to debunk some of the misinformation and disinformation that surrounds the current debate on MSP. 
Farmers shifting goalpost?

The first lie is an accusation: Farmers are shifting the goalpost by inventing the demand for legal guarantee of MSP once the demand for repeal of three agricultural laws was conceded. This is nonsense, contrary to the well-known and widely publicised position of the SKM. Demand for MSP realisation has been prominent on the charter of demands, next only to the repeal of three laws, at every stage of this struggle, from the very first memorandum to the 11 rounds of negotiations and the Kisan Sansad. The government’s power-point response to the SKM’s demands acknowledged this issue. This has been one of the main demands in the public domain, reiterated in almost every public speech. There is nothing new or surprising about it. Assured remunerative price has been a flagship demand of the farmers’ movement for decades.
‘MSP already exists’

The second lie is plain and simple: MSP is already available. So, why bother about legal status? Sadly, the PM’s rhetoric of “MSP tha, hai aur rehegi” has given fresh lease of life to this myth. The truth is that MSP has existed mostly on paper. The government’s own data shows that only 6 per cent farmers actually benefit from it. (I think a realistic number is around 15 per cent). That is why, over the years, farmers, movements have made three demands.

We can call these three components of the demand for MSP. One, the promise of Minimum Support Price should have a sound statutory status, instead of remaining just an executive order. (A working group of Chief Ministers headed by Narendra Modi recommended this component to PM Manmohan Singh in 2011. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices also reiterated this demand in its 2017-18 report.) Two, the government should make good this promise by creating a well-funded and effective administrative mechanism that ensures that every farmer actually received at least this minimum price for her entire produce. (Successive governments, including this one, have repeatedly promised this without putting such a mechanism in place). Three, there should be a fair and comprehensive method of computation of MSP that takes full cost into account and is extended to all agricultural produce. (This was recommended by the Swaminathan Commission). All these three asks remain unfulfilled to this day.

 
Environmentally unsustainable?

The third lie is presented under an ecological garb: Legalisation of MSP would lead to over-production of water-guzzling paddy and delay the much-needed diversification of crops. This reasoning is fallacious: The over-dependence on paddy (and sugarcane for that matter) is not because of generous MSP, but because of skewed procurement. While the government declares MSP for 23 crops, it makes good this promise only for wheat and paddy, and that too in select states. No wonder all farmers in these states are hooked to these crops that are not environmentally sustainable. The solution does not lie in withdrawing MSP, but in making sure that the farmers realise MSP in other crops like chana, makka, bajra and various dals. The government should offer attractive MSP for pulses (as recommended by the Arvind Subramanian committee) and oilseeds and ensure their purchase.
Will it distort the market?

The fourth lie is dressed up as elementary economics: Any tinkering with prices by way of MSP would distort the market. Yes, it would, just as TRAI regulations distort telecommunication market, just as ban on surge prices distort road and air transport market. Ever heard these free-market wallas complain against these distortions? Do we not fix minimum wages lest they distort labour market? Should we allow aspirin to be sold for Rs 1,000 per tablet? As for the fear of food prices going up, the way to control it is to offer subsidised food to the poor, not to deny fair price to the producer. The fact is that “free market” is and must be regulated all over the world to meet overall societal objectives. Farmers are offered subsidies and price support all over the world. If price assurance is a bad idea, why declare MSP in the first place?

Impossible for govt?

The fifth lie takes bureaucratic form: MSP may be a good idea, but it is practically impossible. How can the government purchase all the produce of all the 23 crops? Where would it be stored? What would the government do with it? Or so goes the argument. The simple response is: No government needs to do something as silly as that in order to ensure that all farmers receive MSP. My colleagues and I have repeatedly argued that there are multiple methods for ensuring MSP to all farmers. The government can procure more than it does today, especially in pulses, coarse grains, and oilseeds. For the rest, the governments need not purchase. The farmer can be given deficit payment for the gap between the MSP and market price, as was done by the Haryana government this year for bajra. Government can do selective intervention in the market, or use protectionist policies in international market, to prevent prices from falling. And, in the last instance, it can use punitive measure to disallow trading below MSP. All this is complex, yes. But developing a mechanism for MSP delivery is no more complex than designing disinvestment or drawing up mining contracts.
Will India go bankrupt?

Finally, the fiscal lie: India would go bankrupt! My colleague Kiran Vissa and I had debunked this fear-mongering by presenting a rough estimate, with complete breakdown, of how much would it cost the government to make up for the gap between the existing MSP and the prevailing market price. Our calculation for 2017-18 showed the overall cost to be Rs 47,764 crore (just 1.6 per cent of the Union Budget that year and less than 0.3 per cent of the GDP). If the MSP were to be raised to the level recommended by Swaminathan Commission, it would still cost Rs 2.28 lakh crore (about 7.8 per cent of Budget and 1.2 per cent of GDP). Can India afford it for the welfare of nearly two-thirds of its population? That is the real question that the country must face.

Thanks to this historic farmers’ movement, the country has woken up to a political reality: Farmers do not belong to the dustbin of history, they are very much a part of India’s present and future. A legally binding system of fair calculation and effective delivery of MSP to each farmer is a logical corollary of this realisation. As A.R. Vasavi says, it’s time to move towards “Maximum Support Policy”. It is all about political will now.

Why Modi govt miserably failed in communicating impact of much-needed farm laws

 

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Yogendra Yadav Gets Emotional | Talks about his family, farmers, and Deep Sidhu

 

Indian Secularism Is Pakhand! Politicians And Intellectuals To Blame Says Yogendra Yadav

Interview with Yogendra Yadav of Aam Aadmi Party

Interview is in Hindi

Welcome to closet illiberalism

 

Vidya Subrahmaniam in The Hindu

   

 

Caste might be cast in stone judging from the way the dominant discourse gets conducted in India

“Caste is the most overwhelming factor in Indian life. Those who deny it in principle also accept it in practice. Life moves within the frontiers of caste and cultured men speak in soft tones against the system of caste, while its rejection in action just does not occur to them...” Socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia said this in 1964 but the words might be as relevant today as they were five decades ago.

The Ashis Nandy controversy illustrates the paradox of India’s opinion makers preaching caste equality while instinctively, reflexively, articulating positions that bunch them up on one side of the caste divide, thus reinforcing the very order that they have rejected. K. Satyanarayana exposes this contradiction with devastating examples in his article in The Hindu (editorial page, “The question of casteism still remains,” February 5, 2013). Mr. Nandy’s defenders have made the untenable legal claim that he should be judged not by what he said at the Jaipur Literature Festival but by his past record and scholarship. But worse, gradually the defence, which was originally grounded in Mr. Nandy’s right to free expression, has deteriorated into a free-for-all against Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBC) — who are presumed to have become “sacred cows” protected by “draconian” laws. If to question Mr. Nandy is intolerance, what does one call this rant?

Mr. Nandy’s initial statement was a qualified one: he said the Indian Republic was saved because the corrupt of today were from the “Scheduled castes, OBCs and now the tribals.” But the nuances went for a toss with his stunning insistence that West Bengal was free from corruption because “in the last hundred years, nobody from the OBCs, SCs and STs has come to power there. It is an absolutely clean State.” Forget the backhanded compliment to the Left Front leadership which has been deemed to be clean for being upper caste. The inescapable inference from this is that upper caste means no corruption regardless of the period of reference — today or a 100 years ago.

 

Nandy’s statement as peg

Per se this is indefensible. Yet if for no other reason than to make the caste debate meaningful, we also need to look at Mr. Nandy’s subsequent clarification — more so because contained in the clarification is an uncomfortable truth that the Indian intelligentsia has tiptoed around for too long. To quote Mr. Nandy: “What I meant was that most of the people getting caught for corruption are people from OBC, SC and ST communities, as they don’t have the means to save themselves unlike people from upper castes who can hide their corruption.” 

The Nandy episode would have been well served if this statement had become the peg on which to examine the persisting caste prejudices and double standards that allow one kind of corruption to be exposed and the other to be hidden. However, it is important to understand that exposés and blackouts happen not only because one section is smarter than the other, which surely it is, but because the dominant discourse in India – as is evident from l'affaire Nandy itself — continues to be shaped by the socially advantaged classes. The media, as surveys have established, are a classic example of this stranglehold but upper caste dominance is as much a reality in academia and other key policymaking institutions. This collective is superficially progressive. Yet at a subconscious level, its members harbour all the entrenched biases, resulting in the backward castes being censured far more severely than their “twice-born” counterparts for the same alleged crime — be it ostentation, self-promotion, a specific legal violation or patronage of a particular caste group. 

Mayawati and the Gandhis

A case in point is the differential treatment extended to Mayawati and the Nehru-Gandhis. This difference endures despite xenophobic intolerance of the First family by right-wing sections of the middle class. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief’s wealth and her self-projection — creating parks and monuments, naming projects after herself and celebrating lavish birthdays — have been obsessively written about by a media that ignored her political achievements until she compelled attention by forming in 2007 the first majority government in Uttar Pradesh in 17 years. The star of that watershed election was Ms Mayawati but the media ignored her, choosing instead to be embedded with Rahul Gandhi whose party finished last and is still stuck there. 

Compare the relentless focus on Ms Mayawati’s financial assets with the easy ride given to Robert Vadra. The Vadra real estate papers were avidly consumed in private, they had been available for years with the principal Opposition party, but the veil on the Gandhi son-in-law’s vast business empire was lifted only after Arvind Kejriwal made bold to mention the unmentionable. Today, while Ms Mayawati finds the law chasing her, there seem to be no such anxieties for Mr. Vadra. In Prime Minister Vajpayee’s time, similar deference was shown to his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya.

 

Tracking the BSP

I had my first real brush with deep-seated caste attitudes in 1988 when I was in Allahabad for a Lok Sabha by-election contested by Rajiv (Gandhi) challenger V.P. Singh. His opponents were Sunil Shastri from the Congress and Kanshi Ram from the BSP. Singh was the media darling and Mr. Shastri derived his importance from being his principal opponent. The BSP faced a near media blackout, and as it turned out, the party was equally contemptuous of the “manuwadi” press. BSP volunteers blocked me off from their meetings, saying they knew what I would write. Over the years, as I tracked the BSP’s astonishing growth, I could not help but notice the unfailingly skewed media coverage of the party, whose rallies would be reported, not for their content but for the traffic chaos they caused. 

As a part-time journalism teacher in 2005, I would discover the same unconscious bias in the essays turned in by my students. Writing on Ms Mayawati’s birthday, they left out the political aspects of the event, concentrating instead on her diamonds, her “flashy” clothes and the size of the cake she cut. They would accept later that diamonds and silks were worn by other women politicians too but that somehow, these outward manifestations hit the eye more in the BSP chief’s case. There is an ironic reality here that must be understood in its proper context. What people saw as distasteful flamboyance was a political tool that Ms Mayawati consciously employed, especially in the formative years when it was important for her to raise the self-esteem of her constituency. This was explained to me by the part Hindutva, part OBC Uma Bharti. The Dalit girls in her village were forbidden from crossing the threshold into even OBC homes. But they would rebel in their own way, wearing Mayawati hair clutches and imitating her mannerisms, thereby signalling that they would not be kept down by force. The handbag, symbolising status and accomplishment, is similarly a deliberate presence in the much-criticised Mayawati statues. 

Admittedly, the showmanship can get excessive, as it did in 2010 when the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister wore a gigantic garland of currency notes, estimated to add up to several crores of rupees. This kind of extravagant cash display undoubtedly raises questions about source and accountability. However, in all the outrage over this incident, the media missed mentioning that Indian politicians have traditionally been weighed against coins. At election time this becomes a means of adding to the party coffers without the bother of disclosing the source. 

There is equal duplicity around the perceived caste consciousness of parties such as the BSP and the Samajwadi Party (SP). As a journalist posted in Lucknow in the late 1980s, I was witness to the transfer of power in Uttar Pradesh from the Congress’s Narain Dutt Tiwari to the Janata Dal’s Mulayam Singh Yadav (now with the SP.) The latter took charge to immediate accusations of Yadavisation of government and bureaucracy. Nobody cared to find out which castes ruled in the previous regime. In 1984, 93.8 per cent of the principal secretaries and secretaries to the U.P. government were from the upper castes and 78.6 per cent of the District Magistrates were from the upper castes, including 41 per cent of Brahmins (Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution). 

Political empowerment of the backward castes is a dramatic reality today. But social attitudes have stayed frozen. Why else would 50 per cent of all Central schemes and projects be named after the Nehru-Gandhis? Why would there be a chorus of protests over Mayawati statues but not over the renaming of the Borivali National Park after that champion of democracy, Sanjay Gandhi? In her outstanding book, The Grammar of Caste, Ashwini Deshpande cites evidence from four pioneering studies on the Indian urban labour market to conclude that employers discriminate between equally meritorious candidates on the basis of their caste identities. “Employers talk the language of merit and confess a deep faith solely in the merit of the applicant. However, they also believe that merit is distributed along lines of caste, religious and gender divisions. Nowhere do employers see this as discrimination. It is as if they were describing a neutral and unbiased state of the world.” Back to 1964 and Ram Manohar Lohia?