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.

Gross National Disaster

After many months of travelling across rural India, I have had the opportunity last week to sit down in Mumbai and read the papers. I find many things that are disturbing. I see trends which people had foreseen, and yet they are happening, and that is even more disturbing. This is not about things that happen to 'other people', they concern us, our society, our nation, our earth; they portend the future. It will be worthwhile to see them.

* * * * *

I gather that the newspapers have now found out that the economy is in trouble, that the financial system is in a mess:

- Foreign exchange reserves at 285 billion dollars, just enough to cover seven months' imports.

- Rupee crashing vis-a-vis the dollar.

- Current Account Deficit (net outflow of foreign exchange) now at 4.8 per cent (of GDP), which is alarming, says RBI.

- Non-stop inflation over the last 18 months, food commodities hit all-time high.

I remember that in 1991, I saw very similar headlines. This is like an action replay, except that things are much worse now, because in the interim period, the nation's economic integrity has been compromised with structural changes, and large parts of the country have been mortgaged.

I also remember that the central characters of 1991 are the same as today: Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram and Montek Ahluwalia. It is my view that if any one group has to bear the larger blame for the nation's economic disaster and deep-rooted financial rot, it is this threesome of PM, FM and Chairman of Planning Commission . They have wilfully ignored the Indian reality and have instead bowed to the dictates of the World Bank and the IMF. Since this threesome also does salaam to Sonia, and she is the one with the 'remote control', I suppose she is also answerable for this Gross National Disaster.

Here is another set of headlines that I see:

The dependence inside Independence

Both India and the United States of America (USA) have been colonies of the English, and both claim that they are now independent. That their people are independent. Among these, the US is the senior 'independent' state, India is the junior one, and is imitating the senior in all its shades of modern democracy. So it is worthwhile to look at what we are following, to have a clear picture of what this path is leading us to.
This imitation of the US rests upon English systems that we have already copied and laid as the political foundation - a collection of 550 people in Delhi's Lok Sabha and about 4000 in the Vidhan Sabhas of different states who will 'govern' the remaining 100 crore people (1 billion people). Come to think of it, if there was one ruler, say a king, then we would say, unhappily, that we were ruled by just 0.0000001 per cent of the population. In the modern democratic system, the math does not change much, we are now ruled by a mere 0.00045 per cent of the population. But, you may say, 'we' get to choose or elect the 0.00045 per cent of people. Yes, of course, sort of; let us have a closer look at this.
It has been recorded that during the recent Presidential and Congressional elections in the USA, nearly six billion dollars was spent on behalf of candidates¹, i.e., 6 followed by nine zeros. In Indian terms, converting to rupees, that is over 30,000 crore rupees, which in numeral form is Rs 30,00,00,00,00,000, i.e., 3 followed by twelve zeros! This is an absurd number to ordinary folk, because it stuns the imagination.