Don’t force us to join the India Loyalty Programme

Shobha De in The Times of India


One of my all-time favourite anthems is A R Rahman’s stirring tribute to his motherland — India. Each time I hear his voice soar as he sings ‘Maa tujhe salaam…Vande Mataram’, I get goosebumps and a lump in my throat. I had the same intensely emotional response earlier this week when I watched Amitabh Bachchan fervently singing ‘Jana Gana Mana’ at the start of the India-Pakistan cricket match in Eden Garden.(Editor's comment - I think the singing of the national anthem at entertainment events should be banned!) Feeling the way I did, I figured I was experiencing genuine love for my beloved country. As definitions and tests of patriotism go, I had certainly passed mine… in my own eyes, of course. If I’d felt deeply moved, if I had moist eyes, if I was getting mushy and sentimental, clearly something wonderful was happening within. I didn’t have to deconstruct it… I felt it. That was good enough. Gut feelings say it all. If you tune in to the many nationalistic songs your heart remembers, you will instinctively recognize the extraordinary frisson they generate — some would call it patriotic fervour. This is the only truth you need to identify. Why should anyone be asked to produce arbitrary ‘proof’ of patriotism?

It’s such a pity that random netas are subjecting citizens to these ‘tests’ and questioning their commitment to the country. If such a test does exist, why not make it public and let people decide whether or not to appear for it? Pass or fail — please identify the examiners. Who appoints them? Is there a panel of experts drawing up exam papers? May we ask for the listed criteria? Will raising flag poles on top of each school, college, government building, convert Indians into overnight patriots? Assuming that does indeed happen, will there be a jury that has the final vote on the subject? Who frames the ultimate laws of patriotism and what will these be? Singing the national anthem twice a day? Shouting slogans in public places every week? Placing the right hand over the heart each time the flag is spotted? Wearing the tricolour on the sleeve? Organizing workshops on proper patriotic behaviour? Perhaps, designing appropriate uniforms which will have to be sported by one and all on national days and important holidays. There is safety in conformity, say those who conform!



ROUSING RAHMAN: If a nationalistic song gives you goosebumps, then you must love your country

That was the upside. Now, let’s look at the downside: What happens to those who refuse to adhere to the rule book and choose to demonstrate their love for the country in their own singular way? Will that be ‘allowed’ by authorities and their designated troops? Is a special cell going to be (officially) created to keep an eye on the un-patriots, pseudo-patriots, self-confessed ‘traitors’, suspected deshdrohis? How will their crimes be identified, tabulated, judged and punished? Special courts? Judges with extra powers? Along with a few kangaroos jumping around inside court premises, just in case the judge misses a key point during the trial?

Why are we doing this? Are we not confident enough of our identity as Indians? And who are these hyper-patriots trying to browbeat citizens into complying with new-fangled ‘India Loyalty Programmes’? The ugly truth is several netas strutting their patriotic plumes and baying for the blood of those not joining the chorus, have criminal records and serious charges pending in courts. Do lusty cries of ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ absolve them of all the muck? If for any reason, rational or irrational, someone does not raise a politically approved slogan, does it suddenly debilitate the state? Does India totter because a few citizens refuse to mouth salutations on demand? Let’s get a few things clear: hoisting flags, singing anthems, shouting slogans do not make a nation great. Progress does.

Patriotism is pretty hard to define. It is nuanced and complex. It is about loyalty to one’s country, above all else. Which is why it is dangerous and juvenile to label anybody a ‘deshdrohi’ for not participating in political posturing. Anybody can chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ mechanically, and not feel a thing about the country. A hardcore traitor could shamelessly chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ and win applause. Words like mata and pita are invested with a great deal of emotional weight. Which country earns the right to be defined as a mata or pita? The country that wins the hearts and trust of its citizens and inspires them to invest the same level of love, respect and reverence towards it. These feelings cannot be artificially manufactured. A nation that generates these emotions organically, devoid of manipulation and pressure, automatically creates generations of proud patriots. India has always been such a country. We really don’t need minders and monitors to tell us how to be patriotic. Do us all a favour, you bullies — just vamoose, will you?

The Economist's Concubine

Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate


In recent decades, economics has been colonizing the study of human activities hitherto considered exempt from formal calculus. What critics call “economics imperialism” has given rise to an economics of love, of art, of music, of language, of literature, and of much else.

The unifying idea underlying this extension of economics is that whatever people do, whether it is making love or making widgets, they aim to achieve the best results at the least cost. These benefits and costs can be reduced to money. So people are always looking for the best financial return on their transactions.

This is contrary to the popular separation of activities in which it is right (and rational) to count the cost, and those in which people do not (and should not) count the cost. To say that affairs of the heart are subject to cold calculation is, say the critics, to miss the point. But cold-hearted calculation, reply the economists, is exactly the point.

The pioneer of the economic approach to love was the Nobel laureate Gary Becker, who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago (where else?). In his seminal paper, “A Theory of Marriage,” published in 1973, Becker argued that selecting a partner is its own kind of market, and marriages occur only when both partners gain. It’s a very sophisticated theory, relying on the complementary nature of male and female work, but which tends to treat love as a cost-reducing mechanism.

More recently, economists such as Columbia University’s Lena Edlund and University of Marburg’s Evelyn Korn, as well as Marina Della Giusta of Reading University, Maria Laura di Tommaso of the University of Turin, and Steiner Strøm of the University of Oslo, have applied the same approach to prostitution. Here, the economic approach might seem to work better, given that money is, admittedly, the only relevant currency. Edlund and Korn treat wives and prostitutes as substitutes. A third alternative, working in a regular job, is ruled out by assumption.

According to the data, prostitutes make a lot more money than women working in ordinary jobs. So the question is: why is there such a high premium for such low skills?

On the demand side is the randy male, often in transit, who weighs the benefits of going with prostitutes against the costs of getting caught. On the supply side the prostitute will require higher earnings to compensate for her higher risk of disease, violence, and blighted marriage prospects. “If marriage is a source of income for women,” write Edlund and Korn “then the prostitute has to be compensated for foregone marriage market opportunities.” So the premium reflects the opportunity cost to the prostitute of performing sex work.

There is a ready answer to the question of why competition does not drive down sex workers’ rewards. They have a “reservation wage”: If they are offered less, they will choose a less risky line of work.

What warrant does the state have to interfere with the contracts that are struck within this market of willing buyers and sellers? Why not decriminalize the market altogether, as many sex workers want? Like all markets, the sex market needs regulation, particularly to protect the health and safety of its workers. And, as in all markets, criminal activity, including violence, is already illegal.

But on the other side, there is a strong movement to ban buying sex altogether. The so-called Sex Buyer Law, criminalizing the purchase, though not the sale, of sexual services has been implemented in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Northern Ireland. The enforced reduction of demand is expected to reduce supply, without the need to criminalize the supplier. There is some evidence that it has had the intended effect. (Though supporters of the so-called Nordic System ignore the effect of criminalizing the purchase of sex on the earnings of those who supply it, or would have supplied it.)

The movement to ban buying sex has been strengthened by the growth of international trafficking in women (as well as drugs). This may be counted as a cost of globalization, especially when it involves an influx into the West from countries where attitudes toward women are very different.

But the proposed remedy is too extreme. The premise of the Sex Buyer Law is that prostitution is always involuntary for women – that it is an organic form of violence against women and girls. But I see no reason to believe this. The key question concerns the definition of the word “voluntary.”

True, some prostitutes are enslaved, and the men who use their services should be prosecuted. But there are already laws on the books against the use of slave labor. I would guess that most prostitutes have chosen their work reluctantly, under pressure of need, not involuntarily. If men who use their services are criminalized, then so should people who use the services of supermarket checkout employees, call-center workers, and so on.

Then there are some prostitutes (a minority, to be sure) who claim to enjoy their work. And, of course, there are male prostitutes, gay and straight, who are typically ignored by feminist critics of prostitution. In short, the view of human nature of those who seek to ban the purchase of sex is as constricted as that of the economists. As St. Augustine put it, “If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.”

Ultimately, all arguments against prostitution based on notions of inequality and coercion are superficial. There is, of course, a strong ethical argument against prostitution. But unless we are prepared to engage with that – and our liberal civilization is not – the best we can do is to regulate the trade.

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Jamat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood & Capitalism.

On Jamat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood & Capitalism. (Video is in Urdu)

Osborne needn’t say sorry – after all his Budget was just a suggestion

Mark Steel in The Independent

There’s no need for George Osborne to say sorry for trying to cut money to the disabled: he says it was a genuine mistake, and he couldn’t possibly know that cutting money to the disabled would lead to the disabled being poorer in any way.

How could anyone have predicted that taking away money for carers who get people dressed and take them to the toilet might have worried anyone at all? Is he supposed to be psychic? There was every chance these measures would have been welcomed by the disabled. They’d have been free to mess on the floor instead of fussing about going backwards and forwards to a toilet, leaving plenty of time to pursue other leisure activities such as go-karting.

We all make mistakes. Some of us put cardboard packaging in the wrong recycling box. And some of us try to take £4 billion off the disabled. We can’t say sorry for everything can we? In any case, Osborne’s explained the reason for these cuts is to build a strong economy, and there’s no greater sign of a strong economy that someone with spina bifida laying in their pyjamas for three years because we’ve made redundant the carer that used to get them dressed. And, to be fair, there was an element of genius about his Budget. Because up until last week, it was believed to be impossible to come up with benefit cuts so appalling that Iain Duncan Smith would oppose them. Osborne should receive the credit due for overturning such a natural law. 

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He probably announced his intention in a gentleman’s club, declaring over a bottle of port: “Gentlemen, I hereby declare I have discovered cuts so gargantuan, so magnificently despicable, I contend the fellow Duncan- Smith shall scream with fury at their injustice.” Then the others must have stood upright and bellowed “Preposterous, Sir. Such cuts are not possible within the known universe. To discover such reductions would confound the very essence of mathematics, you are a fool, Sir.”

And they had a point, because Duncan Smith was dedicated to cutting benefits. When he got home from his job of cutting benefits, he used to cut more benefits in his spare time for fun. His wife would knock on the shed door on a Sunday afternoon, saying “Come and have a rest, dear, you’ve been in here since six this morning”, and he’d reply, “I won’t be long, I’m just working out how to make people in a coma attend job interviews.” And he went berserk about Osborne’s cuts.

So instead of saying sorry, the Chancellor must have expected to ride into the House of Commons on a white horse while his MPs begged him to touch them in the belief it will make them taller and live forever.

His problem was the reaction from everyone else as well as Duncan Smith. The Conservatives seem to believe their own newspapers and assume they have no opposition, so they can do whatever they like, as most people will think ‘“I don’t mind that the Tories have stopped my disabled aunt going to the toilet, because at least their leader sings the National Anthem’”.

David Cameron must be encouraged in this belief by the way that, whenever Jeremy Corbyn is speaking in Parliament, his own Labour MPs sit behind him sneering and flicking through Viz magazine or doing the puzzles in Take- a- Break. You expect them to start making humming noises and flicking paper clips at his head while he’s responding to a statement about Syria.

But on this issue, so many people were furious that the Government had to abandon huge chunks of their plans, and Nicky Morgan adopted the imaginative line that the entire Budget was “just a suggestion.”

This is certainly a modern touch; to deliver a Budget – a 90-minute, precisely written detailed speech, pieced together for months and concerning exact plans for every aspect of the economy – and then say “But hey, that’s just a suggestion.” Next year, the Budget speech will start: “OK let’s all get in a circle and go round saying our names, then we can break up into workshops and write down some ideas on what we think should be spent on what stuff, then come together for feedback after lunch.”

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In some ways he’s already gone further than that, because now he’s been forced to abandon his plans, his figures are four billion pounds out. But he says that doesn’t matter as he’s on course to meet his target anyway. So he didn’t even need to make the cuts, he just fancied doing it anyway. Maybe he thought it’s not fair the disabled get all this disability money every single year, we should let other groups have it for a change; people who keep tropical fish, perhaps.

Combined with all his targets he gets nowhere near keeping, it suggests he sees numbers as an unnecessary distraction. In his Autumn Statement he’ll tell us: “It does appear that when I was working out the country’s money, I multiplied when I should have divided so we’ll have to sell the Navy, but hey ho, the important thing is if you ignore the figures we are stronger and sounder than ever before.”

It’s possible that what forced the Conservatives to change their plans for the economy, for the second time in a few months, is a vast, if not always visible, opposition. And however chaotic Labour may appear, at least under Jeremy Corbyn they now oppose the cuts.

Or maybe Osborne is honest, and as he said, this episode proves he listens. Similarly, if the police catch a burglar robbing a house, and the burglar then agrees to put back the stuff he tried to nick, this proves the burglar listens, and we should in no way expect him to say sorry.

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When the state becomes the nation

G Sampath in the Hindu

What has not received adequate scrutiny is the present regime’s doctoring of the very idea of a nation

Sixty-eight years after independence, India has suddenly rediscovered nationalism. At a recent meeting of its National Executive, the Bharatiya Janata Party affirmed nationalism as its guiding philosophy. Its leaders announced that a refusal to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ signifies disrespect to the Constitution.

In case you were in winter hibernation and have just woken up, no, we are not at war like, say, Syria is. No imperial power has invaded us like, say, in Iraq. But all of a sudden, a country hit hard by a stuttering economy, growing unemployment, agrarian distress, and wracked by malnutrition, illiteracy, and environmental degradation seems to have decided that its topmost national priority is to settle the question of who is an anti-national.

Alphabet soup

In this nationalism debate, both within Parliament and without, a variety of terms have been used to describe the brand of nationalism invoked by the NDA government to identify anti-nationals: from ‘pseudo-nationalism’ to ‘aggressive nationalism’ to ‘Hindu nationalism’, ‘cultural nationalism’, ‘chauvinistic nationalism’, ‘hyper-nationalism’, ‘regimented nationalism’, and ‘partisan nationalism’. Only a few commentators have used the word ‘fascism’, which too is a particular kind of nationalism.

But branding a democratically elected government as fascist – even though history tells us that a fascist government can be voted to power – is typically viewed as an exaggeration; as a misguided attempt to revoke the moral legitimacy of the government in power. Besides, in a constitutional democracy, it is never difficult to adduce evidence in support of an administration’s democratic credentials.

Rather, what concerns us here is the nationalism debate. The question is not whether India is on the verge of fascism but whether the particular kind of nationalist ideology espoused by the ruling dispensation has anything in common with the ideology of fascism. To answer this, we can do no better than go back to the father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, and his seminal work, The Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1935.

Mussolini’s five principles

In this essay, Mussolini identifies five principles as central to a fascist ideology. The first and most fundamental is the primacy of the state’s interests over an individual’s rights. As he writes, “The fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State (italics mine).”

The second principle is the primacy of the state over the nation: “It is not the nation which generates the State… rather it is the State which creates the nation.”

The third is the rejection of democracy. “In rejecting democracy, fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equilatarianism,” Mussolini says, dismissing both democracy and equality in one go.

Fourth is the state’s non-secular character: “The Fascist state sees in religion one of the deepest of spiritual manifestations and for this reason it not only respects religion but defends and protects it.” For the Italian fascist, it was “Roman Catholicism, the special, positive religion of the Italians.” One doesn’t need to spell out what the “special, positive religion” of the Indian fascist would be.

Fifth, tying the other four principles together is a conception of the state as the repository of all virtue. For Mussolini, the state is “the conscience of the nation”.

At the heart of the brand of nationalism that is currently seeking to establish its hegemony over India’s cultural and political landscape is the idea of the anti-national. No doubt purely by coincidence, Mussolini’s five principles — primacy of the state over citizen’s rights and the nation, contempt for democracy, investment in a national religion, and a belief in the nation-state as a moral agent — converge neatly in the discourse of the ‘anti-national’. The microphone that amplifies this discourse is the sedition law.

Speaking about the sedition law, Kanhaiya Kumar made a distinction between ‘raaj droh’ and ‘desh droh’. ‘Raaj droh’, according to him, is a betrayal of the state, whereas ‘desh droh’ is a betrayal of the nation. The British needed a sedition law because the natives had every reason to betray a colonial state that was oppressing them. An independent state that is democratic would not need a sedition law for the simple reason that it is, in principle, subordinate to the nation. The nation, in this democratic paradigm, is essentially a cultural construct given currency by groups of people who have agreed to be part of one nation. This agreement is an ongoing conversation, as Rahul Gandhi observed in Parliament. In Mr. Kumar’s words, “India is not just a nation but a federation of nations.”

Put another way, it is impossible for an Indian to utter anything ‘anti-national’ because anything she says would always already constitute the self-expression of a cell of that body known as the Indian nation. While enough has been written about the present regime’s distortion of the idea of India, what has not received adequate scrutiny is its doctoring of the very idea of a nation. This is taking place at four levels: conflation of the state with the nation; conflation of the nation with the territory; presenting criticism of the state as a crime against the nation; and finally, applying a law meant for those undermining the state, on those acting to strengthen the nation. When such doctoring happens, it is often the case that those who control the state machinery are people seeking to harm the nation. It is perfectly possible to strengthen the state and destroy the nation at the same time – no contradiction here.

Therefore the most effective response to the challenge posed by the discourse of anti-nationalism is not joining the competition to decide who is the greater or truer nationalist but to delink the nation from both territory and the state. This is also the only way out for the Left that finds in an (anti-)nationalistic bind every time it is subjected to the ‘litmus test’ of Kashmir.

If the Indian nation is not synonymous with Indian territory – a territory that is a contingent product of colonial history – but an idea vested in a covenant among the Indian people, then the Left can take a stand on Kashmir that is in consonance with the principles of democracy without becoming vulnerable to the charge of being ‘anti-national’.

Delinking the nation from the state also prepares the ground for exposing the dangers of a nationalism that fetishes the state at the expense of the people. And once this danger is exposed, fighting it becomes easier, for history and morality are both on the side of the anti-fascist.

The moral repugnance that a fascist ideology evokes is such that no respectable individual, not even those who witch-hunt anti-nationals on prime time every night, can openly endorse fascism. The strategy of Mussolini’s heirs will never be to openly espouse their ideology — as Mussolini did — but to pursue it covertly. This is the significance of the question Kanhaiya Kumar posed to the Prime Minister: “You spoke about Stalin and Khrushchev, but why didn’t you speak of Hitler too?”