Who will Speak for the Farmer?

On a news channel last week, Amit Shah represented the BJP party and tried to answer questions from journalists. When asked pointedly about farmers losing their land to business corporations, he began to show his irritation, and finally sneered, "If you are so interested in farming, why don't you raze down this building and do kheti?".
     I recall teachers in rural schools demeaning children by saying, "So, do you want to keep cutting grass? Do you want to be a farmer all your life?". I feel Amit Shah too may have faced such teachers in his school days, and therefore has developed this deep feeling of humiliation and a contempt for anything to do with 'village' and 'farmer'.
     At a Garhwal-based NGO, I have seen an entire generation of village school-going children growing up with this psychological inferiority complex. This is indicative of what is happening all over rural India. When these children grow up and migrate to urban centres, their feeling of inferiority is converted into a contempt for farming and village life, and they cultivate an outer veneer of superiority. In due course, some among them join politics, some bureaucracy, some NGOs, and some become journalists in the media.

Jaitley's Tragedy

Uncomfortable in the open?

   In the late 1980s, when satellite television was being demonstrated as a possibility, a senior journalist friend told me with a smug satisfaction, "Just wait till we have live coverage... the camera will expose all these chaps, it will show the expression on their faces". Sadly, he is no more, but I recalled his clairvoyance during the recent coverage of Amritsar and Chandigarh in all TV channels.

    Television can indeed expose things for what they are, specially outdoors during election time, when politicians have no place to run or hide. Take for example, Arun Jaitley, the BJP candidate from Amritsar. The camera showed him on his road show waving here and there - that established his credentials as a candidate. Then the camera went mid-shot and showed him standing cheek-by-jowl with other party personnel. They weren't his regular Delhi club pals, these were the local Amritsar cadre, who were pressing their sweaty kurtas against his, and Arun Jaitley looked distinctly out of place. Then the camera went closer up, and it showed a face held in steady grimace; it was the face of a man in pain, caught by circumstances in a wrong place. The camera will speak, my late friend had predicted, and last week, I saw that the camera did speak, quite clearly.

Aap, Media & Us

   Is Aam Aadmi Party's accusation of deliberate misreporting by television media valid?
   Over the last fortnight, I have watched all Hindi and English news channels regularly, and have seen consistent evidence of a clear and pronounced slant in reporting against AAP.
   Arvind Kejriwal says the turnaround happened with his Gujarat visit, and I can testify on the strength of the evidence I saw that he is right about the timing. At the beginning of the Gujarat roadshow, all important channels were covering it as they should because the public support was visible and it was certainly 'news'. They even showed footage of Kejriwal's Ahmedabad rally which questioned Modi directly, but after that, something seems to have changed. Was it because Kejriwal went to Narendra Modi's office, demanding answers to questions about Gujarat's so-called development?
     Whether this timing is only coincidence, I do not know, because in the interim came the AAP protest outside BJP's office at Delhi which showed both party workers in poor light. Did the media cool off to AAP after this event? May be. But even so, not one media channel questioned why the police did not question even one BJP worker while they booked 14 AAP workers and took two of their leaders to police stations for questioning. This is a valid journalistic question, especially on the strength of TV visuals which showed that the stoning began from the BJP office, and it was much later that both were equally culpable.

Modi Serves Tasteless Tea

   I watched Narendra Modi on his ‘chai pe charcha’ in New Delhi. He tried his best to hide his discomfort, but it was visible. Modi is clearly not a ‘people person’, but that is not by itself any big negative point. I have come across so-called ‘people-friendly’ socialists who whiled away their time in coffee shops, gossiping their way through life, coming to no good (for eg. Convict Laloo Yadav)
     But this inability to relax before people is, I feel, a sign of a lack of social fulfillment which is also a larger problem in society. Working in hierarchical reward and punishment structures, we only know how to behave with those ‘above’ or ‘below’ us. This system saps us of our instinctive need to relate with a oneness and getting fulfillment, a quality of sahajta, a natural acceptance of the other.

     Anyway, the important point here is that Narendra Modi is a politician and prime ministerial candidate; he will have the eyes of the nation on him all the time. A political leader affects and influences the mood of the nation with his very demeanour. The nation has suffered a despairing and listless mood because of Manmohan Singh’s wimpish demeanour. When Rahul Gandhi comes on television, he muddles his way through interactions with people, and creates a mood of dullness in the whole drawing room. Modi, in his interactions at ‘chai pe charcha’, was stiff and bureaucratic – he gave standard babu-like answers to issues, there was no creative spark in him. He spread his own discomfort into our drawing room.
     Remember how Shri Anna Hazare moved and inspired a whole nation? Such a demeanour is not cultivated, it cannot be practiced or imitated, I feel it comes from an inner confidence, from an inner clarity, from an inner simplicity.

     A Different Bedi:
     Kiran Bedi’s performance at the ‘chai pe charcha’ is also note-worthy. She was obviously bowled over by Modi’s presence, she was so shaken up she addressed him as ‘sir’ more than ten times in one minute. She was like a nervous constable in front of a DSP, and it was indeed strange to see this transformation in her behaviour, which is usually so dominant and in-your-face. I wondered if the word ‘servile’ could describe her demeanour, so I looked it up in the dictionary. It said:

Servile: adjective : having or showing an excessive willingness to serve or please others;

            Synonyms: obsequious, sychophantic, excessively deferential, subservient, fawning.

     Yes, that’s it.

     It is sad that our politics and bureaucracy, and indeed our private corporations, are so colonial in their structure. It is so mercilessly hierarchical that you are a brute and dominate those under you, and at the same time you are servile and subservient to those above you; such a system itself begs to be transformed.

Re-colonization of India

There is a lot of news in recent months about foreigners increasing their control in Indian companies, both private as well as public sector companies, in some cases even buying them fully. You may recall some of the following news items:

:- Vodafone has applied for, and got permission, to increase its holding to 100 per cent.
:- Nestle is buying back its shares from the market to increase its holding from 62 to 75 per cent.
:- Cairn India is spending Rs 5,725 crore to increase its stake from 65 to nearly 75 per cent.
:- British pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline Plc is increasing stake in its Indian subsidiary from 50.7 per cent to up to 75 per cent, spending Rs 6,400 crore.
:- Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever Plc has just completed increasing its stake in Hindustan Unilever Ltd upto 67.28 per cent.
:- Walmart has bought Airtel's complete share in their newly formed joint venture Indian company to launch retail malls. Walmart is now a 100 per cent owner of the Indian company.
:- The government is selling 100 per cent of public sector company Hindustan Zinc Ltd to controversial mining company Vedanta Resources Plc.
:- The government cabinet committee has also decided to sell 100 per cent of the public sector aluminium maker Balco. Vedanta already owns 49 per cent stake in this PSU - now it wants total control of Balco.

I wanted to investigate this trend further, in order to find out the full extent of: 1) total foreign holdings in Indian companies, 2) total foreign investment + debt exposure of the nation, and 3) government policy on this issue. Here is the summary:

On the present disorder in the nation

1. Three facts about the present state of the nation:
1. The economy is in crisis.
2. Our political leadership is powerful, but clueless.
3. Our educated class has failed us
2. On the economic crisis:
1. A depreciating rupee, a widening fiscal deficit, a serious current account deficit - all these are only technical indicators of an economic system which itself is false.
2. The actual crisis is that the economic system we have adopted is flawed at the core. It stands isolated without sharing the concerns and goals of the social system and ecological system; indeed, we can say that the present economic theory shows no understanding of human beings and human communities.
3. Real life is lived with people, real life is lived with nature, so social harmony and ecological harmony are natural goals for a human community. It is a reality that living involves livelihood. The action of livelihood is not outside society and nature, it is within this field. 
4. The aggressive action of modern economics is directly related to the development of modern technology. Today's economic energy is drunk on the power of science and technology - it has gone out of control and separated itself from society and ecology. Indeed, it is a fact now that economic growth and development is claimed even when social structures like villages, community and family are being fractured, and even when ecological systems of soil and forests and rivers are being destroyed. We, therefore, say that such a growth and development is false.