Eat, pray, love, smoke

It's much more fun to make up one's own versions of history, as I've been doing ever since I got to Bali. The real story supposedly has to do with Balinese kings and their courtiers committing puputan -- ritual mass suicide -- in response to a Dutch onslaught (as who wouldn't, if the option was cold milk for lunch and pea soup for dinner?). But I like to imagine that it happened differently.

In version 1, Australians up in Perth were frightfully bored, as the nearest nightlife was over in Sydney. This was a 5-hour flight away, and was in any case full of more Australians. Then the Perthians, or whatever they call themselves, discovered that the fragrant isle of Bali was just 3 1/2 hours away. This island too had no nightlife but it was full of people called "Balinese" who wore flowers over their ears (and those are just the male Balinese!) and could be induced to do just about anything as long as it involved aesthetics and grace. The Balinese agreed to open restaurants and hotels where the hospitality was quiet and gracious, the food divine and the pricing modest. All they wanted in return was sufficient income to live a quiet and graceful life. This suited the Australians just fine. Although Bali soon became a province of Australia, a delicate fiction was maintained whereby it belonged to its nearest neighbour, Indonesia.

Story 2 goes like this. A chunk of India the size of a moderately large island got detached and drifted away. As it drifted, the new islanders took stock of the situation. "We're finally free of India!" exclaimed the first chieftain. "So let's now invent our own lifestyle". "OK", the other chieftains chorused, "where shall we start?". Some suggested abandoning the Hindu religion, but others said no, it had some nifty gods and in any case it was such a flexible religion that pretty much anything could be done under its banner. So they decided to abandon only the things they didn't like. Vegetarianism was the first to go. "Then the nearest available dosa will be in Malaysia" fretted one of them, but the others, who had never liked dosas anyway, promptly silenced him. They decided their diet would consist of rice, seafood, chicken, pork and beef, specially the last two. "Even on religious occasions?" asked the pro-dosa faction. "Specially on religious occasions" the others chorused, "and moreover we'll have a religious occasion every month, on full moon day". And so the national dish of Bali became "Babi Guling".

But the next brilliant idea would transform the island unrecognisably. "Let's give up spitting when we walk and honking when we drive", suggested a chieftain. At this, the others looked blank. "This is possible?" they asked. "Sure" the chieftain replied. "It will make our life infinitely more pleasant. Can you imagine dining by the roadside and being able to hear yourself talk?". The idea soon began to catch on. "If we don't spit, will we be more healthy and therefore able to smoke whenever we like?" another demanded. "Sure" came the answer, though what was actually said was "becik becik" since they now had their own language. Soon Bali was invaded by foreigners from every country, though primarily from the neighbouring ones. "Is your country like India?" the foreigners asked. "Becik becik", the Balinese replied, "except we don't spit anymore. We also don't honk, or cheat visitors, or play 20-20 cricket". "Lovely" said the foreigners and the number of tourists going to Bali per year grew to about one-half the number bound for India, despite the incredible disparity in size.

In version 3, Bali started out with a bunch of Balinese who already didn't spit, or honk, or cheat, or swear, or harbour any ambition to dominate the world. Their only ambition, if one can call it that, was to eat tasty, healthy fresh food in a quiet place. And wear flowers above their ears.  Whenever possible they would work, patiently and quietly, emitting gentle smiles if disturbed and lighting up a cigarette every now and then. They prayed in the mornings, making neat little packages out of banana leaf and containing flowers and a little rice -- which was always first offered to a deity before being consumed at home. But then someone advised the disciplined Balinese how they could get rich. Being open-minded, they gradually started to adopt customs from neighbouring countries, such as "malls" and "go-go dancers". This brought in  tourists and made them richer and richer. But they didn't know what to do with money, since they only needed it to eat, pray, love and smoke, and not too much was needed for all that. This led to runaway growth, with the Australians and other friendly neighbours dropping in and staying for months at a time, spending all their money and tiring themselves out by partying on the beach all night. Meanwhile the Balinese just went on eating and smoking and looking more and more relaxed.

Frog Porridge

The food in Kuala Lumpur is wonderful, as long as you remember that over here "air" means "water" and "susu" means "milk"... I also saw the following dish advertised -- but did not actually try it!

A strange order

I'm back to blogging after a hectic month and more. The proximate stimulus for my return is the recent Supreme Court interim judgement on the Babri Masjid case.  The Supreme Court has wisely described the Allahabad High Court judgement of September 2010 as "a strange order".  Blogging about it here on the day after that judgement, I had wondered if my late father -- who had once been a high court judge -- might have raised the following questions about it:

"Should an aggressive action lead to benefit for the aggressor in the form of a compromise? Are religious groupings the appropriate beneficiaries of a title suit when public interest is involved? And can the law opine on the birthplace of a god?"

The learned Supreme Court judges have so far not addressed these questions. All they've found strange about the High Court judgement is its idea of dividing the land into three portions: one to the Nirmohi Akhara (a Hindu group believing in no attachments, other than -- strangely -- to a piece of land where the Babri Masjid stood), one to the Waqf Board (an organisation constituted by Parliament to be in charge of Muslim holy places) and one to Lord Ram himself, in his current reincarnation as a "shapeless and formless" legal entity.

While so many people welcomed it as a "compromise", I had found the Allahabad High Court judgement bizarre from a legal and ethical perspective. The mosque was toppled in 1992 before the very eyes of the nation, following a vicious campaign led by L.K. Advani that collaterally damaged the fabric of this country and propelled the BJP to power. One would expect a judgement on this politically staged catastrophe to redress such a major legal violation, that took place in living memory, by restoring the status quo ante (or, given the warlike nature of the supposedly devout parties concerned, perhaps the status quo ante bellum).

Nothing of the sort was evident in the Allahabad High Court judgement, which on the contrary sought to twist religious sentiment into legal fact and thereby debase India to the level of the many nut-case theocracies  populating the planet. (If you think I'm overstating the issue, please compare the Wikipedia definition of "theocracy": "a form of government in which a state is understood as governed by immediate divine guidance", with Justice Dharam Veer Sharma's description of the disputed land as "It is personified as the spirit of divine worshipped as birthplace of Lord Rama as a child.")

It's now up to the Supreme Court to remedy this. I have always had considerable faith in this court (even though it famously bent just a little to please Indira Gandhi) and I've always believed they would see through the fallacious and apparently motivated Allahabad High Court judgement. Yesterday they took the tiny step of describing the judgement as "strange" but a larger step will come. If, as I expect, they will attempt in some way to restore the status quo ante with respect to December 1992, the land will essentially go back to the Sunni Waqf Board. Then the BJP, which has actually welcomed the recent Supreme Court observation, will find itself all confused and lost, and will presumably have to save face by staging another agitation. Or even another vicious campaign (it's easy to guess who would lead it this time). Will India descend into the loony bin of religious fundamentalism all over again? Stay tuned.

Dark star

Even as Indians gear up to watch the India-Pakistan match, nobly sacrificing their working day for this purpose, the secondary buzz in the press is about banning a book: "Great Soul", curiously subtitled "Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India" and authored by Joseph Lelyveld. The outrageous content of this book is, supposedly, that Gandhiji had a gay relationship with a German bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, in South Africa.

This controversy raises a number of fascinating points. First, as with any other controversy or event, the Indian press rarely does any research on issues but just keeps parroting what it has been fed, even while a rank amateur (like myself) equipped with nothing more than an internet browser, can unearth a lot more information. The book in question  is not believed to have made the specific allegation above, at least not directly. The hullabaloo has arisen from a rather different direction: an opportunistic review of the book by right-wing historian Andrew Roberts.  A direct quote from the review, which can be found here, is very revealing:

" "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for ­mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals." 

In case you missed it, Robertsji is attempting to trash progressive intellectuals in general, and of course Gandhiji in particular. If you re-read the quote above you will note how he is careful to say the Lelyveld book merely provides "information to discern..", an honest admission that the tasteless adjectives "sexual weirdo", "political incompetent" etc are the handiwork of Roberts himself, who has converted his book review into a polemic motivated by his own far-right world-view. In fact the Gandhi-trashing is part of a much larger Robertsian canvas of re-configured history: Indians would have achieved self-rule sooner without Gandhi, who managed to constantly "irritate and frustrate" Jinnah; Gandhi's Quit India campaign was "designed to hinder the war effort" and had it been successful, would have led to Japanese genocide of Indians; ultimately India got independence not because of anything Gandhi did, but because the "near-bankrupt British led by the anti-imperialist Clement Attlee desperately wanted to leave India anyhow".

It is within this luridly Raj-nostalgic repainting of history that Roberts pulls out a bunch of personal material about Gandhi, including -- but not limited to -- the supposed gay relationship. And actually within the tiny portion of the article that actually reviews the book, he accuses Mr. Lelyveld of "making labored excuses for him [Gandhi] at every turn of this nonetheless well-researched and well-written book". So Lelyveld is hardly the villain here.

All the above made me rather more curious about Andrew Roberts and some browsing led me to a fascinating article about him by journalist Johann Hari titled "The Dark Side of Andrew Roberts". Hari tells us that Roberts is a staunch defender not just of the British Raj but of white supremacy in general and specifically of the Jalianwala Bagh massacre. The Wikipedia entry on Roberts mentions that he supported the war in Iraq and the war against "Islamofascism", describing the latter as a World War in which yet again "the English-speaking peoples find themselves in the forefront of protecting civilization".

So I, at least, find it rather easy to dismiss Robertsji. But what about Gandhiji? Was he really as Roberts claims, a racist, a fanatical faddist, a sexual weirdo, a "ceaseless self-promoter" and also a bisexual? And here the going gets tricky. Whatever one may think of the accuser, there is something in these comments and the accompanying quotes that makes one ponder. The easiest charge to dispose of is the one about being bi, or gay. Let's assume it's exactly true as claimed -- but then so what? There was no element of coercion in it and the relationship -- whatever it was -- seems to have been consensual and satisfying (there is of course the issue of Gandhi possibly being unfaithful to his spouse, but this is also involved in some of the other "sexual weirdo" charges that I find more worrying). So attempts currently under way -- specially by the Congress party -- to suppress/ban the book on the rationale that the "gay" references are demeaning, are particularly misguided.

 So then here's the worrying part. Did he refer to black South Africans in these terms: "Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized"? Did he say about white rule "We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do... We believe also that the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race"? Did he say to his 18-year-old grandniece Manu "We both may be killed by the Muslims, and must put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked."? And did he later defend this act by saying "If I don't let Manu sleep with me, though I regard it as essential that she should, wouldn't that be a sign of weakness in me?".

If the answer to all these questions is "yes", as I believe it probably is, then the nation must accept that the Great Soul was, in some measure, almost all the things that Roberts claims. Except "political incompetent", which was always the most absurd of the charges, though of course the main one from the point of view of Roberts.

So where does that leave us? I can't say. A great person can have many flaws, one supposes. But  the Government of India will have a hard time saving Gandhiji's reputation from a bunch of unsavoury charges -- unless they decide to ban his own writings.

P.S. As for the book by Lelyveld, anyone really interested can download it to their PC from this link at amazon.com for a mere 15 dollars.

"Present regime... as part of the problem"

Again I'm putting  up a posting inspired by a comment on  my previous one. This is my third article on corruption and I expect there will be more, since few issues are more fascinating or more relevant in India today.

The comment was from Cheeta, who wrote among other things:

"The entire system has been hijacked at the top by bandits, whose only morality is self-gain and whose only aim is to take more and yet more. We not only allowed these criminals to gain power but rewarded them with both high office and adulation. That's what really, really needs to be addressed: cleansing the system of these modern-day dakoos and recovering the loot. Alas, the present regime is not up to it. They're right there as part of the problem; not any portion of the solution."

Let's set this view off against my last two postings, wherein I argued that corruption is a participatory phenomenon on which all categories of the powerful conspire in various ways to preserve their power. In this connection I also pointed out that upper-middle-class views about corruption tend to sound distanced  and helpless while in reality we are well-connected and privileged and we benefit, as a class, from corruption.

Now what I see in the above comment is a distanced write-off of the UPA government in India, and possibly, by implication, any other government that might be made up of similar people (this would include, say, a BJP-led government) and  indeed the entire Indian political class. I would like to argue that such writing-off is not borne out by facts on the ground. Precisely in its "distancing" tone, such comments (which I hear on a daily basis) mistake the complex interplay of multiple forces carrying India into the future for a simple, linear narrative of greed and generic evil.

It would be hard to write a nuanced (and ultimately partial) defense of the present political class of India without taking a few hundred or a few thousand pages. So I'll try to  make my basic case in a few  relatively short points and leave the rest for further discussion.

1. Everyone agrees that development is what India needs. However the objective reality of India's vast size and diversity means that what constitutes development is itself open to enormous debate. Do we need large dams to irrigate farmland, or do we need to preserve the dwellings and livelihoods of people who --  after all -- are our own fellow citizens? Do we need rapid urbanisation or greater rural  infrastructure? Do we need governmental control or privatisation? Is primary education more important or higher education? Within higher education should one emphasise universities or vocational courses?

The simple answers to the questions above are, in each case, "all of the above". But these are also the simplistic answers. How do we prioritise? Is it possible for a single right-thinking citizen like myself (or Cheeta) to prescribe the correct choices? Or does it take a combination of expert inputs, as well as pressure from different groups with competing interests? I believe it's certainly the latter. The UPA government has done a fair job in getting expert inputs and many of its leaders are impressive, scholarly folk who certainly know a lot more than I do about governance: P.Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh and Prithviraj Chavan come to mind. How well the Prime Minister has handled the pressures of electoral politics is surely open to some debate -- however, I don't think that e.g. walking out of the coalition with DMK when the Raja issue started to surface was the "obviously best" choice, as people keep saying nowadays. A collapse of government would have an economic cost. How many percentage points of our economic growth should we be willing to sacrifice for such a noble act? I don't know the answer but it's not simple, and clearly the rich have the maximum luxury of contemplating this possibility without personal cost.

2. Despite everything, India is an emerging and powerful global presence and  a lot of poor people are moving daily into a better standard of living. This is thanks to ALL factors involved: the business community, professionals and academics, farmers, labourers, the judiciary, bureaucrats and politicians... The fact that such an incredible diverse "team" could pull together over a long time is a miracle. Truly inept governance could have easily collapsed the understanding that makes all Indians -- on average -- work for India. That this isn't happening is remarkable when  you consider that so many other countries are today on the brink of revolution/civil war/regime change (with devastating  consequences for growth at least  in the near term). I don't see why the Indian political class shouldn't get some credit for this stability.

Yes it's true that one shouldn't be given special credit for doing what one is supposed to do. But  keep in mind that an important component  of politics in most countries -- the highly educated class -- has in post-independence India largely seceded from politics. Politics is not a career they would themselves embark on or wish on  their children. Indeed, far from working for India, the children of the most highly educated Indians simply migrate overseas. When an entire empowered class declines to shoulder any part of the burden of running the country, we ought to appreciate the people who are actually doing it.

3. A very specific point. The single most powerful blow against corruption in India today has not come from hand-wringing or even from an intelligent suggestion by middle-class people. It came from Sonia Gandhi's pet project of implementing the Right to Information act. We may remind ourselves what a landmark this has been by reading Price-Waterhouse Coopers' study on the RTI act, circa 2009. The Executive Summary is quite compact and well worth a read.

The Wikipedia entry on the RTI act also contains some useful historical background. Among other things it recalls that in the previous NDA-sponsored Freedom of Information Act, "there were no penalties for not complying with a request for information." So today's rigorous implementation of the act, which is seriously working, is entirely to the credit of the present government. You can read here about how the Adarsh and other housing  scams were uncovered using this act.

In the RTI process some corrupt Congress politicians and allies have come out deservedly bloodied. Yet the government continutes to support the act, and the affected persons (Ashok Chavan onwards) have been sacked. Hardly the action of "bandits, whose only morality is self-gain".

For lack of space and expertise I won't discuss the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the National Knowledge Commission and the Unique Identification Authority of India.

I don't deny, of course, that everything could be better. Equally, it could all be worse.

Impact versus morality

To Rahul and Neelima, thanks for raising a key point in your comments to my previous posting Ruining the land and thereby provoking this new posting.

The question essentially was: "is it as bad to give Rs 20 to a cop for `chai-paani' (a bribe) as to loot crores of rupees?" Indeed the two are not comparable in their impact on the nation. But if you're talking of impact, consider a different comparison. Economics not being a conservative system (in the physics sense) it is possible hypothetically for a person/government to loot crores and still deliver more to the country in terms of real benefits (health, employment, infrastructure, stable economy) than someone else who is scrupulously honest but -- out of either incompetence or apathy -- fails to carry out any development, thereby condemning the poor to a short and miserable life. So if the impact of corruption, rather than absolute morality, is the question, some of the crore-makers might have a defense. The question would become not: "did you loot crores?" but: "did you loot crores and still fail to deliver?". If you think about it, much of the buzz about the Commonwealth Games had this tone to it, since the organisers were perceived to be guilty of precisely the latter sin.

I'm deeply uncomfortable with such a morally relativist view, but I put it forward because it deserves discussion and because the poor have good reason to be less uncomfortable about it. In fact the upper and even middle class have the luxury to say "no corruption, even if that means no development" because that proportionately hurts them less than the most vulnerable sections.

If instead the discussion is about morality, then the monetary extent or impact of one's corruption does not matter so much. The question to determine the degree of corruption would now be on the lines of "if you are corrupt, did you actively seek to become so or did you merely give in to the opportunities for corruption available to you?". And here I believe most people actually do not seek to be corrupt, but at the same time most people who find themselves in a corrupt society tend to participate in the game without much reflection on rights and wrongs. A frighteningly large proportion of people I know (including young people) feel it's OK to fudge a travel claim or medical claim and pocket a few hundreds of rupees in cash. If the same people are put into a ministry, would they not pocket a few crores using the same philosophy?

Ruining the land

The Kinks, a highly underrated British rock band, came out with a song called "Money and Corruption" in 1973, whose chorus goes as follows:

"Money and Corruption
Are ruining the land
Crooked politicians
Betray the working man,
Pocketing the profits
And treating us like sheep,
And we're tired of hearing promises
That we know they'll never keep."

The bandleader and composer of this song, Ray Davies, had not to my knowledge ever been to India. So it's safe to assume this song was written in reference to his own country. But now the lyrics appear  to have been written specifically for India circa 2010-11.

For several months now, the middle-class in this country is in a tizzy about corruption and can't stop talking about it. With good reason apparently, for corruption is shameful, and it's obviously quite degrading to find one's entire country indulging in it. But after sitting through months of newspapers articles and coffee-table chat about the recent cases of corruption in India, I find myself more and more skeptical of the received wisdom, and would like to describe my skepticism here.

Richard Feynman once said: "You can know the name of [a] bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird." I  think it's the same with corruption. When you read different people's comments about it, you learn little about corruption but a lot about the people.

What I've been hearing from various friends, relatives and colleagues, and what I'm reading in  the newspapers, purports to show we are all disgusted, and outraged, and shocked. But when I listen carefully to the words of the people in question (mostly Upper Middle Class) I find, behind the outrage, clear evidence of a guilty conscience. Virtually everyone in this class is a direct beneficiary of corruption in the form of black money (even though a Malabar Hill lady once assured me it was the paan-wallas who had all the black money!). Now this is basically tax money stolen from the government of India -- and the common excuse that "politicians would steal that money anyway" really amounts to a confession. The total amount of black money is estimated at up to  50 percent of GDP, which -- I assume -- makes the 2G spectrum scam look like a picnic in the woods.

The same class is also guilty of small and large actions that they undertake regularly and consciously to maintain their privileged position  in society -- namely, bribing police and other officials. The excuse is that such corruption is necessary "to get things done". Since I have a fine-tuned antenna that warns me when I'm listening to humbug, I generally ask the following series of questions when a concrete incident comes up: "Were you actually asked for a bribe?", "If yes, did you try telling the official you don't pay bribes?", and "Was the bribe for something that the official was legally obliged to do anyway or for something illegal that you wanted the official to do especially for you?". The variety of responses is fascinating, but most often the respondent turns hostile and changes the subject to "That's how things are done around here" and "you don't know about the real world".

The two characteristics I get from  this are: (i) distancing: "Corruption is a fact of life, I don't actively participate in it", (ii) helplessness: "I can't do anything but comply with corrupt people, see how vulnerable and disempowered I am/we are". This is fascinating because we are not talking about tribals in Bastar but owners of companies in Bombay, or journalists at NDTV, or -- dare I say it -- scientists at TIFR. "Distanced and helpless", rather than "connected and privileged"? Sure!

Each one has apparently excellent reasons for putting  up these excuses, and in the end each one ends up blaming  the one class of people we all rarely meet: politicians. Now due to the sheer weight of numbers, politicians in India are mostly elected by the poor. So the logical conclusion of this tirade against corruption appears to be that people in Malabar Hill are ultimately threatened and exploited by villagers and tribals (and paan-wallas). No one is foolish enough to say this, except the lady I referred to above. This Upper Middle Class world-view is so patently silly that it's only conveyed by winks and nudges.

Readers of this blog will point out that I appear to have missed the central issue. Not everyone is UMC, and surely common people (truly middle class, or working class, and truly not connected) do suffer because our politicians are in fact corrupt? Of course they do, and of course they are. But take a look at the standard newspapers and tell me how much space they devote to actual problems faced by (i) common people e.g. a labourer who wants to register a police complaint or get a document, (ii) government officials e.g. a young man or woman who would like to enrol in the police force but must pay a bribe for this and therefore is committed to travel down the slippery slope of corruption at the very outset.

Such stories and others like these might at least get us started on a serious discussion, involving questioning of the myriad methods that the powerful in every society use to maintain their power. Instead of the chest-thumping stuff that conveniently distances the speaker so that corruption is always someone else's fault.