SC/ST quotas in promotions, and the coming ‘caste wars’

If there were any doubts that the proposed Constitutional amendment to remove legal obstacles to the provision of quotas in promotions for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes will drag the debate down to the lowest common denominator of  caste-based identity politics, what we witnessed in Parliament on Wednesday should remove them.
The pushing and shoving between Samjawadi Party MP Naresh Aggarwal and Bahujan Samaj Party MP Avtar Singh Karampuri is merely a trailer, as they say. The real picture will unfold only now. The physical jostling is only a metaphor for the larger scramble in the political domain as each of these parties – and others too – seek to advance the interests of their core constituencies.
Although the Samjawadi Party’s objection to the constitutional amendment proposal is voiced on the ground that the provision is unconstitutional, the real objection lies elsewhere, and is unconnected with any high-minded principle. The Samajwadi Party will be persuaded to give up its inhibitions about the unconstitutionality of the provision if, for instance, the provision for quotas in promotion were not restricted to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes alone, but extended to the Other Backward Classes as well.

The tussle in Parliament on Wednesday is a precursor of bigger battles to come..

DMK president M Karunanidhi, who has elevated casteist politics to a high art, too backs the Samajwadi Party’s stand, and wants the quotas in promotions to be extended to Other Backward Classes as identified by the Mandal Commission.
And suddenly, the Congress, which initiated this constitutional amendment provision in the hope of harvesting political benefits in the guise of advancing “social justice” is caught in the crossfire of the identity politics that characterises Uttar Pradesh, between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, both of which notionally support the UPA government from the outside.
That disquiet over being at the risk of falling between two stools was manifest in Parliament on Wednesday, when the Congress treasury benches – barring the Dalit MPs in the Congress – did not rise to challenge the Samajwadi Party’s objections to the constitutional amendment bill that its own Minister, V Narayanaswamy, introduced in the Rajya Sabha.
In effect, the caste-based tensions are coming to the surface because the proposed measure is seen as pitting the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes against Other Backward Classes in the most cynical fashion. The clamour for reservations within government is increasingly being seen as a zero-sum game, where a concession to one is seen as a loss to another.
Of course, if history is any precedent, parties across the spectrum will find a way ahead by extending the quote in promotions benefit to Other Backward Classes too – either now or at a later date. But that will only trigger off another round of competitive casteism, because once all ‘lower castes’ and Scheduled Castes become entitled to the same benefits, they now have to seen to be advancing the case of their constituencies relative to other sub-castes as well.
This is entirely in keeping with the way the discourse over reservations has evolved over the decades. Introduced as an exception to one segment of the population that had legitimate claims to having been socially discriminated against, it has become the rule, where even groups that don’t quite deserve the benefit (since they never faced social discrimination) – such as Jats in Rajasthan – have begun to qualify for it. At every successive stage, the provisions for reservations have been so debased as to take them farther and farther away from the original intent of providing an exceptional, time-bound benefit to a small constituency of socially backward people.
And a provision that was intended as merely an enabling instrument has perversely gone on to become a right, to be claimed by ever widening circles of caste groups.
When the Mandal Commission recommendations, under which reservations were extended to Other Backward Classes, were introduced in 1989-90, the opposition came principally from upper caste groups. At least some of the opposition came from genuine concerns that the Mandal Commission’s methodology for arriving at its classification of “other backward classes” was flawed. For instance, the then Left Front government in West Bengal found it could not trace some of the castes that the Mandal Commission had listed:  the same was the case in Odisha. Odisha Chief Minister Biju Patnaik at that time pointed out that some 20-plus castes that had been listed by the Mandal Commission as belonging to the OBCs were already recognised as Scheduled Castes, and that some of the surnames that the Commission had listed as identifying ‘lower castes’ were used by ‘upper castes’ as well.
Yet, the attempt then and now has been to project all opposition to the flawed recommendations of the Mandal Commission as arising from ‘upper caste’ elitisim. The hollowness of that claim is increasingly becoming manifest, with the tussle now principally between the SCs/STs and Other Backward Classes.
The Mandal Commission’s recommendations decisively churned Indian politics, not always for the better.  The politicking over Mandal also distracted the country from a looming economic crisis, which erupted in full force in 1991.
The political atmospherics, and the economic backdrop, of Mandal present a striking parallel to the events of today. At a time when the economy is on a downward spiral, a new ‘caste war’ politics is being unleashed, which will, its patrons hope, shift focus momentarily away from the succession of scandals that have beset this government – and from its colossal underperformance on the economic front.
As it did in the post-Mandal era, this new political churn, based entirely on caste-based identity, has serious negative consequences for Indian polity, economy and  society.

Lessons from the N-E exodus

NARENDAR PANI

Migration strengthens the idea of India, but its economic drivers are not exactly glamorous. — K. Bhagya Prakash

Regional disparities have increased in post-reform India, leading to higher migration. This has been accompanied by the rise of identity politics that targets migrants. The Internet is, therefore, just a convenient scapegoat.

September 5, 2012:  

The recent exodus of tens of thousands of persons of the North-East, from Bangalore and other southern cities, has been treated as a problem created by malicious rumours sponsored by a foreign hand.

The response has thus been concentrated on the messenger, with a great deal of debate on controlling the Internet and SMS. Very little attention has been paid to the more fundamental question of just why did these rumours find such fertile soil in which they could grow so rapidly?

Without an answer to this question, we risk shooting the messenger at great cost to democratic freedoms while the exodus-generating wounds continue to fester.

When we step back from the immediate crisis and try to understand the longer-term trends underlying the panic that drove persons from the North-East back to their States, even though social tensions were at a peak in Assam, it is difficult to miss the role of migration in the post-liberalisation economic strategy.

Prior to the reforms of 1991, addressing regional disparities had a prominent place in economic policy. Industries were regularly given incentives to move to backward areas. After the reforms, these incentives disappeared from the policy discourse. Instead, States competed with each other to attract investment by offering incentives to set up industries in their most advanced sites.

As a result the more developed parts of the country developed further, even as the less developed regions remained largely where they were.

Labour from the less developed regions then had necessarily to move to the more developed regions in search of work. This migration was not confined merely to the people from the poorer regions of the State moving to relatively nearby urban centres, but to migration across much larger distances such as from the North-East of the country to southern cities.

Identity politics

It is possible to provide a positive spin to this large-scale migration across the country. The fact that Indians can gain employment in any part of the country does strengthen the idea of India. It also improves the prospects of our large cities becoming multi-cultural centres. And as migrant workers send a part of their wages back home, it helps a transfer of resources from the more prosperous parts of the country to the slower growing regions.

This idyllic picture is, however, blurred by at least two other features of the last two decades and more. First, the terms of employment in the post-liberalisation era have been marked by greater uncertainties. Rather than the long-term career options that were the ideal in the years before 1991, the focus is now on short-term employment.

Moving up the career ladder is to be done by crossing over to more lucrative jobs. The high attrition rates do not allow much space for stable workplace institutions, including trade unions. The migrant workers then live in an atmosphere of temporariness with few local institutions they can turn to in times of acute distress.

Second, and arguably more important, the political ethos that has emerged over the last three decades is quite inconsistent with large-scale migration across the country.

Identity politics has become the lingua-franca of the political space. Ideological battles are often based on implying one identity to be greater than another. Political battles are then largely, if not entirely, a matter pitting religious identities versus caste identities versus class identities versus regional and language identities. And as politics has become more competitive, the reliance on identity politics has only increased.

easy targets

Migrant workers are the easy target of this identity crossfire. The numbers are clearly stacked against them. Even when migrant workers are a majority of a city’s workforce, each regional group can be targeted separately. The riots in Assam were sought to be countered by mobilisation of other minorities in Mumbai.

This was, in turn, countered by Raj Thackeray mobilising the majority in a counter-rally and using that occasion to target other regional minorities from Bihar in Mumbai. It is then no surprise that at the first signs of social tensions migrant workers have no option but to pack up and leave.

Ironically enough, the conflict between the political and the economic over the last three decades has only served to further strengthen identity politics. As workers move across the country into environments where local institutions, at best, ignore them, they have few options other than creating institutions based on their own regional identities. This provides an ideal situation for politicians who thrive on identity politics to practise their craft. If workers from State A are threatened in State B, politicians in State A can threaten to retaliate against workers from State B.

With identity politics feeding on the uncertainties of migrant workers it would be futile to expect the mismatch between a unified national economy and local political expediencies to be corrected by steps in the political space. It may be much more useful to bring the goal of reducing regional economic disparities back to the centre stage of policy making.

Anyone who saw the fear in the eyes of young men from the North-East pushing themselves into packed, moving special trains on a three-and-a-half-day journey from Bangalore towards a trouble-torn Assam, even though there wasn’t a single incident of violence in the southern city, will surely recognise that we need a much more serious response than controlling the Internet.

(The author is Professor, School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.)

India's Forest Area in Doubt

Reliance on satellite data is blamed for over optimistic estimates of the nation's forest cover

By Natasha Gilbert

Forest officer Ranjit Gill says that he has evidence of widespread deforestation in Meghalaya. Image: Ranjit Singh Gill

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazine
To judge from India’s official surveys, the protection of its forests is a success. Somehow, this resource-hungry country of 1.2 billion people is managing to preserve its rich forests almost intact in the face of growing demands for timber and agricultural land.
But a senior official responsible for assessing the health of the nation’s forests says that recent surveys have overestimated the extent of the remaining forests. Ranjit Gill of the Forest Survey of India (FSI) claims that illegal felling of valuable teak and sal trees has devastated supposedly protected forests in the northeast of the country. He and other experts also say that an over-reliance on inadequate imaging by an Indian satellite system is making such destruction easy to overlook.
In February, the FSI, part of the government’s Ministry of Environment and Forests, released the India State of Forest Report 2011. This biennial survey used images from India’s remote-sensing satellite system and estimated that forest covered 692,027 square kilometers of the country — roughly 23% of India’s land area — a decline of just 367 km² on the tally reported in 2009, and a much smaller loss than in Brazil, for example, where more than 13,000 km² of forest was cleared over the same period. But Gill, a joint director of the FSI, is openly critical of the FSI’s assessment.
“We have to accept the grave reality that the current figure of forest cover in India is way over the top and based on facile assumptions,” Gill argues. To bring these allegations to light, he has mounted a legal case for consideration by India’s Central Empowered Committee (CEC), a panel of experts appointed by the nation’s Supreme Court to rule on issues concerning forests and wildlife.
Gill alleges that the government of Meghalaya state in northeast India has failed to act sufficiently on evidence that illegal felling and coal mining is ravaging the region’s protected forests. He says that he has seen the deforested areas at first-hand, and reported them to the state government (see ‘On the stump’). He is also concerned that the 2011 forest report records large areas in Meghalaya as open or dense forest, when he believes that much of the land had been cleared and then allowed to regrow saplings or bamboo.
On a field survey last year, Gill and three FSI colleagues saw that parts of the Dibru Hills protected forest in Meghalaya had been illegally felled. He confirmed his field observations with 2006 data from the LANDSAT Earth-observing satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey. The satellite data showed that roughly 150,000 trees in the area had been cut down in the preceding years, across an area of about 10 km².
Gill also points to an investigation in 2006 by Meghalaya state’s forest and environment department. The report, which he obtained through a freedom-of-information request and showed to Nature, found illegal saw mills operating in the area, as well as freshly felled logs. The region has “come under tremendous pressure and suffered serious depletion, which has reached alarming proportions”, that report says.
According to documents submitted to the CEC, the Meghalaya state government claims that only 670 trees were felled in the Dibru Hills forest from 2004 to 2007. In Gill’s view, “the records and reports of the government of Meghalaya are not a true picture of the positions on the ground”. P. B. O. Warjri, chief secretary of the government of Meghalaya, told Nature that Gill’s claims are “not true”.
But another state government report obtained by Gill documents similar illegal deforestation in the nearby Rongrenggre protected forest, where 60–70% of the tree cover has been lost. The report also found evidence that local forest rangers were involved in the illegal timber trade, and that illegal coal mining in the area was taking place in “full knowledge” of the rangers. Gill is concerned that similar lapses are happening, and not being reported, in other parts of the country.

Other tropical-forest researchers share Gill’s fears about India’s forests. “The ongoing loss and attrition of native forest in India is quite widespread, although it isn’t being captured by the government’s satellite data on forest cover,” says William Laurance, a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. “Much of this forest disruption is illegal, and encroachment into protected areas and reserves is not uncommon, in my experience.”
Anil Kumar Wahal, the director of the FSI, denies that forest cover has been overestimated. The FSI team that conducted the field visit in May 2011, of which Gill was part, “reported a few sporadic patches of felling, and old stumps in the field, but nothing as glaring as felling of vast swathes of forest”, he says. But Wahal admits that the “selective” cutting of trees “would not register in the satellite imagery due to the technological limitation of the medium-resolution sensor used for the purpose of forest-cover mapping”.
Gill notes that the instrument, which flies on an Indian remote-sensing satellite, produces images with a resolution of 23.5 meters per pixel, too coarse to unequivocally identify small-scale deforestation. Instead, he says, the forest survey should use a newer instrument, already operating on an Indian satellite, that provides a resolution of 5.8 meters per pixel.
The FSI uses the lower-resolution instrument for its national survey because it offers continuous coverage of very large areas, explains Wahal. “Gap-free data are really essential,” he says. “Using high-resolution data would also entail much more manpower and time, so a balance has to be struck.” The FSI is, however, using the higher-resolution instrument for some small-scale surveys, he adds.
Gill argues that the FSI still needs to conduct more on-the-ground surveys to corroborate its satellite estimates of forest cover. Without this reality check, it can be difficult to tell the difference between native forests and, for example, bamboo. He is calling on the CEC to order a visit to the forests to investigate the extent of the destruction. A verdict is expected from the CEC by the end of the year.
Last year, India’s government grabbed headlines with a US$10-billion, decade-long plan — the National Mission for a Green India — to create or improve 10 million hectares of forest. But if Gill is right, it faces a more urgent task: to chart and protect the forests that remain.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on September 4, 2012.

Which companies are funding political parties and how legal is it

After reports about Vedanta’s $8 million donation to Indian political parties EAS Sarma discovers that two companies which funded the BJP, two public sector entities which funded the Congress and one company which funded SP have all made illegal donations. Here's how

 

Vedanta Resources Plc, Anil Agarwal’s controversial multinational company is not the only one to have made illegal donations to Indian political parties, says EAS Sarma, former secretary with the Union Government. In another letter to the Chief Election Commissioner, Mr Sarma has pointed out that as per information compiled by Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), during 2007 to 2009 the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received donations from two companies. Similarly, the Indian National Congress or INC (yes, this is the real name of Sonia Gandhi-led party, which is often referred as just ‘Congress’ or “Indira Congress” or Congress-I) and Samajwadi Party (SP) also received donations.

 

Nippon Investment and Finance Pvt Ltd, one of the promoters of Videocon Industries, donated Rs1 crore while a Honda group unit gave Rs15 lakh to the BJP as donation. Venugopal N Dhoot, chairman and managing director of the Videocon Group is one of the directors of Nippon Investment and Finance. During the same period, Mulayam Singh Yadav-led SP also received Rs10 lakh from the Honda group while Congress received Rs2 lakh from State Trading Corporation of India (STC) and MMTC, both owned by the Union government.

 

“Under Sections 3 & 4 of Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act (FCRA), 1976, political parties are not permitted to accept contributions from foreign companies or companies controlled in India by foreign companies. In addition, under Section 293A (1)(a) of Companies Act, political parties cannot receive contributions from government companies,” Mr Sarma pointed out.

 

He said, “These contributions are clearly illegal. There are other companies which seem to be foreign companies the details of which need to be ascertained by Election Commission (EC) on its own. If there are other foreign companies, political parties would have violated FCRA provisions. They need to be proceeded against.”

 

Here is the report prepared by ADR...

 

 

Mr Sarma had earlier written to the Election Commission about Vedanta, with extracts from its annual report. “The company (Vedanta) is not permitted to make such a dubious contribution in the UK and other European countries. However, the company has condescended to contribute to our own political parties for ‘supporting the political processes...’ and encourage and strengthen the democratic process!” said the former secretary.

 

Calling Vedanta’s action as “violation of the laws of the land”, Mr Sarma, requested the Election Commission (EC) to consider imposing an outright ban on all such contributions, as is the case with the democracies of Europe.

 

According to the former secretary, donations to political parties should not amount to blatant corruption and bribery and an affront to the rule of law. Here are the three concerns raised by Mr Sarma in his previous letter to the EC...

 

1. The Vedanta group is a London-based foreign multinational company and its contributions attract the prohibition envisaged under Sections 3 & 4 of Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act, 1976 (as amended from time to time). Under Section 3(1)(e), in particular, “no foreign contribution shall be accepted by any political party or office bearer thereof”. This stipulation applies to Vedanta and all other companies controlled by it. As such, both Vedanta and those political parties that have received the donations are liable to prosecution under this Act. ECI should quickly consult the ministry of home affairs on the legal aspects involved.

 

2. Sections 29B & 29C of the Representation of the People’s Act, 1951, requires that the concerned political parties should make a declaration to ECI on the donations received thus from private companies. ECI should ascertain whether the concerned parties have complied with this.

 

3. Section 293 A(4) of the Companies Act requires the companies making the donations to political parties to disclose the same with the details explicitly in their respective profit & loss account statements. The ministry of corporate affairs should cause a verification of this and take necessary action in case there is any infringement. 

 

Requesting EC to investigate expeditiously these statutory violations and proceed against both the political parties and companies involved, Mr Sarma said the Commission should carry out the investigation transparently so that there may be public accountability.

PIB launches mobile version of website to help cellphone users

New Delhi: The Press Information Bureau (PIB) has launched a mobile version of its website to help cellphone users seamlessly access information on the move.

"The URL of the mobile website is pib.gov.in/mobile. Mobile users who want the full functionality and display of the regular website can access it through the URL pib.gov.in/mobile," a PIB official said.

The new site has been customised to display latest press releases on the home screen and offers links to other matters on the website, he said.

To make the website accessible to places where internet connectivity is poor, the site does not display the 'heavy' content such as photographs and videos on the homepage.

At present, the mobile version displays only English content. In due course, Hindi and Urdu content of the main website will also be available on the mobile version, he said.

North-east troubles

By Vani Mahesh

Assam has been burning with political unrest and insurgency for years on end. Unfortunately, many of us in mainland India neither know the history of this disturbance nor its effects on people who live there.

Suravi Sharma Kumar’s Voices in the Valley attempts to showcase the social and political horrors of small town Assam as well as the beauty of the land. The novel is a four-decade account, from the 1960s to the late 2000s, of Assam, told through the protagonist, Milli.
The story kicks off with the Indo-China war of the 1960s. The Chinese army has advanced into Kohoragaon, an idyllic village on the banks of River Luit. The village, which includes Milli’s family, packs up and flees overnight. The once tranquil hamlet becomes a hotbed of terror — banks close operation, asylums and jails free inmates, and the last remaining British citizens take to private jets and fly home.

Soon, the Chinese army declares a ceasefire and the village settles back to its slow rhythm. The story fast forwards to the 1970s when Milli starts narrating what she sees around her as a teenager. At a family level, she sees that she is clearly a second-grade citizen being a girl and the only future the family has planned for her is to marry her off.
Ill-treatment meted out to girls in poor, orthodox families has provided the fodder for a million stories already. Yet, here you are compelled to read on since you know that the story has a bigger scope. There is the natural teenage rebel in Milli, but she has also been subdued over the years to silently accept parental decisions. With no luck coming in the way of marriage, given her mangalik horoscope, Milli is allowed to study
further.

At this point, the writer firmly establishes Milli’s resolve to go beyond the ordinary. She is not a passive college goer but an active student leader. Flatly refusing to play a rejected bachelorette time and again, she continues her studies into post graduation. The story now takes a political turn with its focus on Assam in the late ‘70s. North-eastern India is gripped by anguish with infiltration from Bangaladesh. The locals go ballistic as the government takes no action to stop illegal immigrants but wants to cash in on their votes instead. There is a severe student uprising everywhere and Milli jumps headlong into the movement.

While the novel has a well thought-out plot, there is a lack of depth and style in the narrative and characterisation. A complete absence of clever one-liners, play of words and humour, all of which are quite taken for granted in contemporary fiction, makes the prose here a tad prosaic. In her enthusiasm to bring to foray as many facets and idiosyncrasies of Assam as possible, the writer introduces too many threads and characters that are never dealt with again. Milli visiting her cousin Bibha for example — though the reader gets a glimpse into the life in a tea estate, the incident looks completely out of place. The love story between Monalisa and Mihir, characters we have never heard of before and will never hear of again. The dogs in a hospital eating after births and a havoc-wreaking wild tusker that is found dead — they look force fitted to show the apathy of the government. Given the number of interesting but unrelated-to-the plot incidents, this novel probably would have worked better as a collection of essays.

The story is far more tightly controlled in the last quarter of the novel. Without giving away spoilers, Milli’s marriage and her rise up the political ranks juxtaposed with her sister Mayuri’s turbulent life, provide a satisfying end to the novel. Simply put, it is a good one-time read. The author interweaves the personal and political life in Assam well to give a strong sense of the place.

Press Council Of India Wants to Regulate Social Media, Is It Feasible?

“Social Media needs to be regulated and not to be controlled since self-regulation is futile and meaningless”, considers Press Council Chairman of India, Markandey Katju.

PCI chairman Markandey Katju

Press Council of India (PCI), the statutory board that governs the conduct of print media from 1966 has stirred the ongoing debate on social media regulation in the country. Last week the Indian government was in the news for it’s rampant blocking of websites and social media accounts since these were considered to be influencing the communal tensions related to the North-East.

Recently the PCI held a meeting on 27^th August, 2012, at New Delhi and passed a resolution that the Government of India should initiate a suitable legislation to amend the Press Council Act, 1978. According to the new requested amendments, PCI wants the electronic media (both broadcast and social media) to be regulated by PCI. In addition to this, with the new amendment the PCI wants it to be renamed as “The Media Council.”

The PCI Chairman, Markandey Katju has been urging this change to happen from the time he joined PCI. However, the PCI Chairman made it clear that the PCI is in favor of regulation and not control, and this regulation should be by an independent statutory authority like the Press Council of India and not the government. Katju also cited the recent example of the North East tensions and requested the government that it should not be delaying any more on such a grave issue.

Reactions and Feasibility

The statements from Katju and thoughts from the PCI has found a strong opposition from both the news channels and print newspapers. The News Broadcasters Association (NBA) has shown extreme disappointment on this resolution, as reported by The Hindu. However, the move has seen support from some sections and it remains to be watched what stand the government takes.

Social Media is a double-edged sword and needs to be used wisely. Having said this, I am surprised that not a single mention has been made either by the government or any official on how they plan to enhance their social media activities. Instead officials are behind controlling and curbing the powers of social media rather than thinking about how it could be used effectively.
Time and again, I have debated on the feasibility of regulating social media content. Removing hate speech is justified but then to what extent and when do we draw line between freedom of speech and hate speech. These are matters of severe concern for the Government of India in the coming days and it should brainstorm to find better and new ways to engage on social media.
The new resolution passed by the PCI not only lacks rationality but also it is not feasible on ground. Today if you raise a complaint against any print media, it involves a lot of process and is time consuming. Now as we know the speed at which content is produced in the world of social media where everyone is a publisher, so even if the government sets up a team to monitor content on social media then too it would be a mammoth task!
Some interesting times we are heading into where along with having a presence and engagement on social media, organizations, agencies and governments are forced to think about their reputation too. But for now the issue of regulating social media is not going to die soon.