Rediff interviews Dr Udit Raj, chairman of the All India Confederation of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The interview was fascinating, I think, because it offers a nice counterpoint to the world of protestors who come from a largely urbanized middle-class environment where caste is largely meaningless and highlights the levels of us-vs-them identity politics that drives much of Indian politics. This retort from Dr Raj particularly highlights why the divide is so visceral:

For long, in many places 70 per cent to 80 per cent seats were open in the general category. The upper castes were using it. Right? Now they have been given 50 per cent of the total seats whereas the upper caste population is just 15 per cent. I think that is good enough. What more do the upper castes want?

Ultimately, one’s views on quotas will be colored by the India one sees. There are those who want a meritocratic India free of the curse of caste, where the disadvantaged are helped using sound economic principles such as better primary education and easy student loans. Then there are those who see quotas as a shortcut to success, for who dividing up every pie the country has (from institutions of higher learning to private industry) according to the caste divisions of the country makes perfect sense. (I can’t wait until they try this particular formula in Parliament, by the way.)

What I am most appalled about is that there is not one leader in the country who can make the case for sound economic welfare for the poor without carving the country up on the basis of caste. Punishing modern India’s middle-class for historical wrongs seems to violate every principle of natural justice, upto and including the Fundamental Right to Equality India’s constitution grants to its citizens (by limiting opportunities available to a person based on his caste, not his ability). I am not very hopeful about this, but I hope Manmohan Singh has the spine to resign and call for fresh elections before he is asked to preside over this travesty.

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JK notes that the good people at the Shiv Sena are protesting a book that paints Shivaji in an unflattering light. Of course, Indians are not alone in banning what they don’t like, it’s just that they do it more often (and with more enthusiasm) than Western Europe. The irony is that most Western Europeans and Indians celebrate their right to free speech without being aware how fragile it really is. The lack of a strong First Amendment in both places means that freedom of speech is malleable, subject to the tastes of the ruling classes (or mobs) of the day. Freedom of speech means nothing if it does not include the right to gore sacred cows.

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Indian industry begins a caste census to figure out exactly how diverse its workforce is. Of all the boneheaded issues Arjun Singh and the Congress could set on the nation’s agenda, this has to be one of the worst. This is on par with LK Advani’s Rath Yatra and VP Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report as a ploy against the BJP. (And this one, like the Rath Yatra and the Mandal mess, will end badly for its perpetrators.)

If India’s leaders were serious about abolishing caste, they’d follow a socio-economic approach to identifying persons from disadvantaged backgrounds irrespective of caste and offer them primary through post-graduate scholarships and on-the-job training (if corporate India plays this right, this might happen yet — they could offer this as a quid-pro-quo for not having caste quotas forced on them).

Proponents of caste-based reservations point to affirmative action rules in place throughout the world. However India is unique in that it is probably the only country where affirmative action is practiced on a non-ethnic (a.k.a caste) basis. There are many problems with affirmative action on the basis of caste. It assumes all members of a particular caste are at the same level of development, which is not true. It does not provide any assistance aid to disadvantaged people belonging to other religions (caste being a peculiarly Hindu concept). And most fundamentally, it flies in the face of centuries of reform in Hinduism that sought to abolish caste.

Of course, abolishing caste would be very problematic for our more venal politicians (that’s almost all of them) for who people voting along caste (and religion) lines are a huge convenience: creating a culture of entitlement gives them proven ‘vote-banks’ without having to worry about things actual developmental issues. Hence we end up with the curious result of a caste census in the 21st century in the hallways of private industry in the second-hottest economy in the world. God save India.

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Within hours of reading about the Blank Noise Project, I read this. Sick. Sick. Sick. Looks like Bombay is picking up where Delhi left off.

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The US and India sign a deal that gives India access to US nuclear technology even as the inevitable critics speak out:

“It will set a precedent that Iran will use to argue that the United States has a double standard,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, a leading opponent of the deal. “You can’t break the rules and expect Iran to play by them, and that’s what President Bush is doing today.”

Of course, Iran signed the NPT and India did not, but India’s case does not rest on technicalities, nor is the notion of ‘discriminating’ in favour of a particular nation anything new in the non-proliferation game:

The deal’s opponents also like to argue that, in order to be fair and equitable, the same agreement must be extended to all other declared nuclear states that have remained outside the NPT—namely Pakistan. That assumes that treating all non-NPT states in the same way would somehow make the regime more legitimate. In practice, though, the nonproliferation regime’s survival has depended on discrimination. Japan is allowed to reprocess spent fuel and stockpile plutonium, but South Korea is not. South Korean scientists secretly enriched uranium to weapons grade, forged uranium metal from imported fertilizer, and secretly reprocessed plutonium—yet Seoul was not reprimanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), even though Iran is facing sanctions for similar activities. Discrimination “in favor” of India, then, is not an unprecedented act that necessitates immediate redress by extending a similar deal to Pakistan. And if the larger point isn’t clear enough, consider that the United States is being condemned for an agreement on civilian cooperation with India, whereas there is no discussion of the impact of Chinese nuclear weapons designs transferred to Pakistan (from which they have traveled to Iran, Libya, and North Korea).

It is somewhat bemusing to see perfectly intelligent men like Rep. Markey cling on to the very-60s notion that a country can be kept from developing nuclear weapons by force of a treaty (and the implied threat of sanctions) alone. Today, nuclear technology — especially almost-as-devastating ‘dirty bomb’ technology — is dispersed enough that non-state actors can get hold of it. The NPT is about as useful in this world as farriers are on an autobahn. Most leaders recognize this and know it makes sense to co-opt India, with its clean record on proliferation — hence the visits by Chirac and Bush in quick succession to New Delhi. Yet the world will have to suffer a last dance by the non-proliferation dinosaurs before a new order emerges out of the unworkable present.

(Updated 3 March) I think this comment on Daniel Drezner’s blog best captures the discomfiture of the non-proliferation faithful. Essentially, to them this deal is a moral hazard:

… you miss the point. The point is that there are procedures for things in this world and when you bypass all precedants and procedures and render them meaningless, you may get the thing you want, but you are also fundamentally changing how the world works, particularly if you keep ignoring procedure over and over again or only half-heartedly go through its motions (as in the case of the start of the Iraq war).

(Italics mine.) The problem, of course is that the procedures were never much good anyway — all it did was allow a declared weapons power (China) to covertly arm Pakistan and North Korea, and an undeclared power (Pakistan) to atomize nuclear tech to the world’s hotspots (North Korea, Iran). Like it or not, the world has changed and the comfortable world the NPT envisages looks increasingly out of sync with reality. Here’s hoping some of the nuclear idealists take off their blinkers long enough to realize that.

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It is interesting to compare Bush’s statement on the Dubai Ports World affair that

I think it sends a terrible signal to friends around the world that it’s okay for a company from one country to manage the port, but not a country that plays by the rules and has got a good track record from another part of the world can’t manage the port.

with Chirac’s surly responses re Mittal Steel’s Arcelor bid. On the other hand, the US hasn’t been entirely free of the sort of knee-jerk reaction I would normally expect from India’s Communists: Hillary Clinton is planning to introduce legislation that bans the sale of ports to foreign governments (Dubai Ports World is an UAE-goverment enterprise, not quite the same thing) and Baltimore Mayor dramatically declares

…turn over the Port of Baltimore, the home of the Star Spangled Banner, to the United Arab Emirates? Not so long as I’m mayor and not so long as I have breath in my body.

While Patrix notes that many conservatives are up in arms about the deal, from where I stand the opposition seems to be bipartisan, clueless and reflexively believe that enterprises based in the Middle-East are somehow a terrorist risk¹ (as a wag pointed out — Madame Tussauds is owned by a Dubai holding company now; can we expect bombs embedded inside wax statuettes next?). It is especially ironic that so many Democrats — normally up in arms against racial profiling — are rushing to judge a company on the basis of its origin rather than its record.

¹A belief that Muslim/Arab companies (and possibly governments) are more vulnerable to being compromised by terrorists is a more understandable one. However given that the ownership by a Dubai firm does not change the day-to-day running of the ports (or Madame Tussauds, for that matter), I consider it unlikely that ownership alone can present a security risk.

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The riots in Paris are regrettable but I am astonished about the number of people who expressed surprise that this sort of thing could happen in France. Back in April 2003, I pointed to Barbarians at the Gates of Paris and in the light of recent events it makes chilling, prophetic re-reading.

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Most Chennaites will not be coming to work today; the rains preceding this tropical storm have made travel within the city virtually impossible. That would mean today would be the first time (since I moved to Chennai in June 2000) that the city has lost a day of work for any reason. In a country known for frequent strikes — Bangalore was shut down for a day in 2000 when the actor Rajkumar was kidnapped, Hyderabad had its day when police fired on a mob, Calcutta shuts down because of strikes so often it isn’t even funny — this says something about the work ethic of the city.

Here’s hoping the storm misses, and they get back on their feet soon!

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Outlook magazine has a rather astonishing aside in a story covering IIPM: TR Vivek writes (screenshot)

The Indian blogging community (or blogosphere, as it likes to call itself) is essentially a bitchy, self-indulgent and an almost incestuous network comprising journalists, wannabe-writers and a massive army of geeks who give vent to their creative ambitions on the internet. Given that the average blogger-age is 25 years, it’s clear bloggers love to indulge in hearty name-calling and taking college-style potshots at others. This is probably why some of them get into trouble.

Of course, Outlook would never indulge in self-indulgent cheap potshots. Oh no.

Thankfully for Outlook, the average Indian is still far too deferential to authority and India far too unwired for it to really get hit where it hurts — on the bottom line — the way the US media is. However the gratuitous name calling is likely to do Outlook little good because ultimately the vocal, articulate, well-to-do urbanites who comprise India’s blogosphere are ultimately its best customers, and instead of working with them it is clear some writers within the magazine have chosen to take an adversarial, condescending stance.

The outcome of that — a battle between a weekly magazine versus an always-on network increasingly reaching the most well-heeled of that magazine’s customers in an increasingly wired country — is foregone; it is a question of when not if. And given Mr Vivek’s snarkiness, I am not sure many would shed tears for him and the magazine he writes for.

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JK over at varnam.org has a great post asking ‘What Argumentative Indian?’ to Amartya Sen’s new book. I wasn’t very happy with the book either because it seemed to me while it did a good job of supporting his thesis that many ‘Western’ notions were in fact not so Western after all, it did not do a good job of explaining why despite these ideals much of the West ended up with secular democracies while India ended up first a rag-tag bunch of kingdoms that was easy pickings for the British (who then through their education system created a new generation of educated Indians who re-introduced concepts of civic democracy and nationalism back to the country).

It seems to me that the prodigious intellectual output of India during the Vedic period had given way to near-intellectual bankruptcy around 10BC. The chief culprit that destroyed India’s intellectual depth, I would say, was an increasingly rigid and unforgiving caste system, which had a side-effect of compartmentalizing knowledge and denying a first-class education to all (incidentally making Sanskrit effectively a court language and sealing its fate by making it incomprehensible to the masses, and as a third-order effect creating India’s modern tower of Babel). A rise in superstition and ritual mirrored the decline in education, as cows became ‘holy,’ temples became richer and rituals more elaborate. Brave and occasionally successful attempts to present alternatives to this dysfunctional society would abound in the next 500 years (starting with the Siddhartha Gautama and leading up to the Bhakti Movement and the Sikh gurus) but they had little impact on the majority of India’s Hindus who returned to worshipping rats and snakes, believing in Karma and generally accepting their lot in life.

And in a few hundred years much of India would come under Mughal rule, and (Akbar’s catholicism in religious matters notwithstanding) her history would roughly mirror those of other Islamic empires: people-rich empires (rich enough in people and uncaring enough of talent, it is said, that Shah Jahan had the hands of the creators of the Taj Mahal cut off that they may never recreate its wonder again) turning out intricate works of art, craft and clothing; but ignorant of the European renaissance and the rumblings of scientific enquiry emanating from the West, blissfully unaware that their ignorance of these would soon prove their downfall.

Yes, as the good Professor argues, Indian had achieved a high level of intellectual achievement at a time when most Europeans were in bearskins. What to me matters more is that Europe came out of her dark ages and saw a continent-wide Renaissance that it followed up with a scientific and industrial revolution. Whereas India never thought of herself as being in one and as a result various renaissance movements (Mahatma Phule, the Brahmo Samaj, Periyar) had extremely limited effect, even socially.

It is no wonder the Vedic period is unfailingly eulogised by traditionalists who then blithely ignore the rot that set into India in subsequent years. Perhaps the most telling fact about this loss is that it became necessary for Amartya Sen to write his essays to help his countrymen ‘rediscover’ these ideals in the first place.

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