Former Union Minister Babul Supriyo Quits Politics, Cites Loss of Ministry as a Reason

The former junior minister for the environment says he will resign from the Lok Sabha too, but did not set a date.

Kolkata: BJP MP from Asansol in West Bengal, Babul Supriyo, said on Saturday that he was quitting  politics, citing, as one of many reasons, the fact that he was dropped from the Union council of ministers in the recent reshuffle.

In a lengthy Facebook post, Supriyo said that ahead of the West Bengal assembly election there had been a difference of opinion between him and certain BJP leaders in the state. He added that infighting between senior leaders harmed the party and broke the morale of its workers.

Without mincing words, he made it clear that he will not join any other party, saying that he is a “one-team player”. However, a few minutes later, he updated his post and deleted this sentence.

Supriyo reiterated that he would “obviously resign” as Lok Sabha MP; however, he mentioned no timeframe.

“Heard everyone’s words – father, (mother) wife, daughter, two dear friends…After realising everything, I am leaving. To do social work, one can do it without being in politics. Let me organise myself a little first,” he wrote.

Reacting to Supriyo’s announcement, Trinamool Congress state general secretary and spokesperson, Kunal Ghosh said, “The Lok Sabha is in session. The speaker is presiding over the house. But without resigning there, a drama is on Facebook. He was dropped as minister, cornered in the party, and is making a desperate attempt  to get attention from Delhi leaders.”

Supriyo joined politics just before the 2014 general election and contested on a BJP ticket from Asansol. After Narendra Modi became the prime minister, he was made the Union minister of state for urban development.

Over the years, Supriyo gained popularity among rank and file BJP leaders in Bengal and cemented his position. He attacked the TMC on issues of corruption and underdevelopment and became a fierce critic of Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee and her nephew, now party general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

In the 2019 general election, Supriyo won for the second time from Asansol with a margin bigger than the first time. He again found a place in Prime Minister Modi’s council of ministers, when he was made minister of state for the environment, forests and climate change.

Rivalry with Dilip Ghosh

However, post-2019, power centres emerged within the party’s organisation in Bengal, and infighting between top leaders became common. Supriyo made open statements against party state president Dilip Ghosh.

Slamming one of Ghosh’s controversial statements, Supriyo said, “the BJP has nothing to do with what Dilip Ghosh may have said. It is a figment of his imagination and BJP governments in UP, Assam have never resorted to shooting people for whatever reason whatsoever.”

BJP’s Dilip Ghosh. Photo: Twitter/@DilipGhoshBJP

The rift between Supriyo and Ghosh widened over the years. On another occasion, Supriyo exploded in front of Union home minister Amit Shah during an organisational meeting. He accused Ghosh of bypassing him to form the organisational committee in his Asansol constituency. Ghosh, who was also present in the meeting, defended his actions.

Earlier this month, after Supriyo was dropped from the cabinet, Ghosh told the media “They (high command) asked for his (Supriyo’s) resignation so that someone else can take up the responsibility. That is how a party functions; you need to have faith in the due process. If he were to be fired instead, would that have made things any better?”

Ahead of the Bengal assembly election, when leaders were switching from the TMC to BJP virtually every day, Supriyo opposed rebel TMC leader Jitendra Tiwari’s entry into the saffron party. Tiwari was then the MLA from Pandabeswar constituency in Paschim Barddhaman district and was also the mayor of Asansol municipal corporation. For years, Supriyo and Tiwari were fierce political rivals.

“What my top bosses decide is a different thing but I will try my very best with all my might and honesty to ensure that NO TMC leader who tormented, tortured (both physically and mentally) my grassroot level BJP colleagues in Asansol, don’t get entry in BJP,” Supriyo then said.

However, two weeks before the election, in the presence of Dilip Ghosh at a programme in Sreerampur in Hooghly district, Tiwari formally joined BJP.

Struggling to find suitable candidates for several high stakes seats in Bengal, the BJP fielded five sitting MPs along with Supriyo. The BJP MP contested the Tollygunge constituency but lost to TMC candidate Aroop Biswas by a margin of over 50,000 votes.

After losing, Supriyo blamed the voters of Bengal, writing in an FB post, “Neither will I congratulate Mamata Banerjee for her win in Bengal nor do I wish to say that I ‘respect’ the people’s verdict because I sincerely think that people of Bengal made a historic mistake by not giving Bharatiya Janata Party a chance and by electing this corrupt, incapable, dishonest government and the cruel lady back to power!! Yes, as a law-abiding citizen, I shall ‘obey’ the decision taken by the people in a democratic country. That’s it!! Nothing more-Nothing less.” The BJP leader, however, deleted this post from his Facebook account.

Rumblings in the BJP’s Bengal unit started right after the election results were out. BJP workers have been revolting at the grassroots level across the state, amidst allegations of massive organisational breakdown. Allegations are also rife of the BJP leadership abandoning workers amidst political violence and allegations of intimidation by TMC leaders.

On June 11, BJP national vice-president Mukul Roy returned to the TMC fold after spending 44 months in the BJP. Almost on a daily basis, a large number of lower level BJP workers  are joining TMC. Many Trinamool defectors who joined the saffron party months before the election have now stopped attending BJP organisational meetings and some of them have expressed their willingness to return to the TMC.

In 1992, Supriyo quit his job at Standard Chartered Bank. He then embarked on a journey to become a playback singer in Bollywood. Before joining the BJP, Supriyo acted in many Bengali movies, mostly cameo parts.

Reimagining a Post-COVID School for India

In the twilight of dwindling private capacity to access schooling, school education appears more and more as a common good, bound up with social commitment and public action.

Debates are rife, for justifiable reasons, about how soon, at what level and in what manner schools need to be reopened in the aftermath of the second COVID-19 wave in India. In fact, in different parts of the globe, this experience is hugely varied, ranging from total school closure to fairly uninterrupted schooling to partial and phased reopening.

In our continent-like country too, the country-sized states are experimenting with different plans and actual steps to reopen schools, since a unified formula is inappropriate for this vastly divergent socio-economic, physical and even contagion topography. Remember when floods or other calamities hit rural hinterlands in the country, forcing school closure in those ‘affected’ areas, schools continue to remain open in cities and towns in other parts of even the same district, and province, let alone the same national universe.

The journey and spread of the novel coronavirus across the country notwithstanding, its scourge has remained differently devastating in its diverse constituent corners. Therefore, a variety of ‘school-like’ civil society initiatives and those by teachers’ networks, volunteers, and students have come up in lockdown and post-lockdown periods to somehow keep unbroken the tenuous pedagogic chord between the near-‘missing’ children and the ‘missing’ school.

These efforts in the perilous setting of the pandemic, though inadequate in the vast sea of neediness, encourage us to reimagine the idea of schooling and to push beyond just the debate about reopening schools to raise a prior question of the kind of school that our children may return to. The seeds of such rethinking are already available in the ways in which schoolchildren are articulating what they value about their classroom life and what they are terribly missing in these days and months of school closure. It is their yearning for friendship and sharing, even for classroom fights, and their eagerness to meet up with their teachers face-to-face that sound in ringing notes in many conversations with them.

The school-averse, drop-out prone, isolated child is therefore more of a product of a stifling system than a natural persona. The pandemic has similarly reinforced the idea of camaraderie and collaboration among schoolteachers who are routinely castigated as unaccountable and unenthusiastic in their duties. A large section of them are watching with concern how the pandemic is exacerbating the preexisting inequalities and how the burden of suffering is being disproportionately borne by their underprivileged students, falling prey to the binds of child labour or child marriage.

Lessons from the pandemic for school education are many, the paramount among them being an urgency for a collective understanding of some of the key reforms that are needed in our post-pandemic school system, the possibility for which has been thrown open, rather paradoxically, by the pandemic itself. Surely, in rethinking school reforms, we are not caught in the syndrome that ‘nothing will change unless everything is changed’. Small and incremental changes rather than a grand overhaul often provide a reliable micro-foundation for a functioning macro-structure. In debating a few such issues, the seeds of which are already germinating in the current troubled climate, no claim is, however, made here about being exhaustive.

Decentralised evaluation

We have listened to quite a few young students, aspiring to be school and high school graduates, and their parents, lamenting the missed chance during the pandemic to appear for the board examination in order to finally enjoy the thrill of a ‘well-deserved success’ once the results are out. Even if we discount the opposite scenario of swallowing ‘a bitter pill of failure’, let us concede that a taste for accomplishment is one of the prime movers of our educational drives. Again, from the standpoint of the education authorities, a centralised board-controlled examination system is claimed to be an assurance for maintaining standards and impartiality.

Here lies a real possibility for reasoned debate, followed by research-informed action, in favour of school-based evaluation, with some element of board supervision and oversight. This is in fact the model that is emergent at this pandemic hour, though a systematic neglect of school evaluation and the usual primacy of board examinations for all these years have added further complications. Highly centralised, high-stakes board examinations are the legacy of the colonial era, exuding chronic scepticism about the neutrality and integrity of decentralised evaluation. Yet, the same system reposes faith in the objectivity of schoolteachers when it comes to the matter of everyday teaching and evaluation.

If there are concerns about whether the ‘locals’ are ‘fit for’ evaluation, the answer would be that they become fit ‘through’ evaluation. Schoolteachers, like any other professionals, become responsible when they are given the responsibility and freedom.

Representative image of school students. Photo: PTI

School and school meal

If evaluation needs to be decentred, what needs to be centred in the post-pandemic assistance programme of the central government is the rolling-out, and not rolling-back, of the programme of school meals and meals at Anganwadi centres. That children’s education is integrally linked with their health and nutrition, that classroom hunger impedes classroom attention in a major way, are the truisms of the ‘normal’ times that have come to their full relief at these ‘crisis’ times.

A recently published longitudinal study of the country’s school meal programme highlights intergenerational nutrition benefits of the scheme by demonstrating that there is lower stunting among children with mothers who had access to school lunches. Therefore, the interruptions to schooling and to the midday meal scheme during the pandemic – the distribution of dry food-grains notwithstanding – are and will be hurting the nutritional health of this and the next generation as well.

What warrants a special attention in the post-COVID educational imagination, therefore, is an urgent shift in the step-motherly sponsorship that these schemes are receiving by way of steadily dwindling central budgetary allocations in real terms in the recent past.

School as the ‘commons’ 

During the pandemic private school parents, in particular those with children attending ‘low’ fee private school, have found it increasingly difficult to pay school fees. Similarly, the management of such budget schools have also found it hard to pay salaries to their teachers no matter how meagre they are. Some of these parents are turning towards government-run schools for their children’s schooling as well as to get dry food grains that these schools are distributing among their students.

In this twilight of dwindling private capacity to access schooling, school education appears more and more as a common good, bound up inextricably with social commitment and public action. It is time therefore to revisit the individual-responsibility view of schooling that has dominated our thinking for quite some time under the spell of a for-profit model of education.

It is time to acknowledge that the digital divide generated through remote learning has deepened educational inequalities during the pandemic; and it is time to assert that a public-spirited view of a democratic and inclusive school as opposed to a fiercely competitive ‘educational horse race’ is the idea that a pandemic-stricken society needs to cultivate.

Manabi Majumdar is affiliated with the Pratichi Institute, Kolkata.

Following Controversy, MHA Website Skips Nisith Pramanik’s Educational Qualification

While the ministry website clearly mentions the highest education qualifications of Nityanand Rai and Ajay Kumar Mishra, two other junior ministries in the home ministry, it skips the details of Nisith Pramanik.

Kolkata: On the ministry of home affairs website, the education qualification of Nisith Pramanik, the new minister of state for home, are conspicuously absent. However, the website carries the education qualifications of Nityanand Rai and Ajay Kumar Mishra, two other junior ministers in the home ministry.

The noticeable omission in the 35-year-old Pramanik’s profile comes in the aftermath of a controversy around discrepancies in his educational qualification as mentioned on Lok Sabha’s website and two affidavits submitted before the election commission of India in 2019 and 2021. The Wire had reported the discrepancies on July 8, the day Pramanik assumed office.

The noticeable omission of Nisith Pramanik’s highest educational qualification on the ministry of home affairs website.

He is the youngest minister in the Modi government and the first-ever Union minister from his home district, Cooch Behar, bordering Bangladesh in the northern part of West Bengal.

Choosing him as a deputy for home minister Amit Shah had surprised many Bengal BJP veterans because Pramanik had joined the party only ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He was a TMC youth wing leader till 2018, when he was expelled for anti-party activities in the aftermath of the panchayat elections. He has 11 criminal cases against him.

It is being seen as the party rewarding him for ensuring the BJP’s victory in eight of the nine seats in his district in the recently-concluded assembly election. The party suffered a setback in all but four of the state’s 23 districts, though it was expected to challenge the ruling party.

On the MHA’s website, Rai profile says he has a BA (Honours) degree from R.N. Degree College of Baba Saheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar University, while Mishra’s profile states that he has attained a B.Sc. degree from Christ Church College and a bachelor of law degree from D.A.V. College, Kanpur University.

Also read: Amit Shah’s New Deputy Nisith Pramanik’s Educational Qualification Triggers a Controversy

Pramanik’s profile only says, “He studied at Bhetaguri Lal Bahadur Shastri Vidyapith, Bhetaguri, Cooch Behar.”

The Bhetaguri school has facilities for education up to higher secondary (class 12), but Pramanik’s election affidavits submitted before the ECI before the 2019 Lok Sabha election and the 2021 assembly election mentions that he had appeared in the secondary school exam from that school (class 10). Class 10 has been mentioned as his highest educational qualification in both his affidavits, while his Lok Sabha profile claimed he has a bachelor in computer applications (BCA) degree.

Soon after he took oath as the new junior minister for home ministry, TMC leaders from Cooch Behar district had pointed out that it was not possible for one to enroll for graduation without having passed higher secondary (class 12).

The MHA profile does not mention the BCA degree. However, the Lok Sabha profile continues to carry the same information.

The ministry profile also mentions Cooch Behar district of West Bengal as his place of birth. This comes in the aftermath of allegations that Pramanik originally hailed from Bangladesh. Congress Rajya Sabha MP Ripun Bora had even written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing media reports, that Pramanik’s remaining family members living in Bangladesh celebrated his ascent to India’s Union cabinet. Bora urged Modi to conduct a probe to find out Pramanik’s citizenship status.

Pramanik has so far made no comments on either of the controversies – regarding educational qualification and alleged Bangladeshi origin. Bengal’s senior BJP leaders, too, have declined to comment on the controversy, saying it was a matter to be addressed only by Pramanik or Central leaders.

“The minister should clear all the confusion around his educational qualification and citizenship status,” said Udayan Guha, a former TMC MLA whom Pramanik defeated by a thin margin of 57 votes in the recent assembly elections.

Pramanik’s candidature in the assembly election despite being a Lok Sabha MP was seen as a reflection of the BJP’s planned cabinet for Bengal in case they came to power. However, as the party fell widely short in numbers, Pramanik chose to give up his assembly membership. That assembly constituency, Dinhata, is to witness a bye-election, in which Guha will contest on a TMC ticket by all chances.

The school from which Nishith Pramanik is claimed to have obtained his BCA degree. Photo: Special arrangement.

Earlier, Guha had even uploaded a photo of the nondescript Balakura Nimna Buniyadi (junior basic) school from where Pramanik claimed to have obtained his BCA degree, asking if it was believable that a BCA course was conducted in that school. It teaches students up to class 5.

UP: Two Days After Judge, Gunman Injured in Road Accident, 4 People Taken into Custody

Additional district judge (ADJ) Mohammad Ahmed Khan, posted at the Fatehpur District Court, and his gunman were injured in a road accident when they were returning from Allahabad on July 29 night.

Kaushambi (Uttar Pradesh): Four people were taken into custody for questioning after an additional district judge and his gunner were injured in a road accident two days ago, police said on Saturday.

Additional district judge (ADJ) Mohammad Ahmed Khan, posted at the Fatehpur District Court, and his gunner were returning from Allahabad on Thursday night when the accident took place.

In his police complaint, the ADJ has said that during his posting in Bareilly in December 2020, he had rejected the bail application of an accused and he had threatened to kill him along with his family.

The ADJ also said that on Thursday, his car was hit by another vehicle, which had four people.

Kaushambi SP Radheshyam Vishwkarma said a case was registered on the basis of the complaint of the ADJ and further investigations were underway.

Four people, including the driver of the vehicle which hit the car of the ADJ, were taken into custody and later three of them were released, the SP said.

The three people who have been released after questioning are involved in survey work of a bridge on the Ganga river by the UP Bridge Corporation in Shahzadpur, he said, adding that the vehicle which hit the ADJ’s car was being used on rent for the bridge work for the past 15 days.

‘Govt Scared of Discussion in Parliament Over People’s Issues’: Priyanka Gandhi

“They are used to questions like ‘how do you eat mangoes’, therefore, they are scared of discussion in parliament on issues that concern people like price rise,” she said regarding the government.

New Delhi: Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Saturday attacked the government, alleging that it is “scared” of a discussion in Parliament on issues that concern people like price rise.

Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha have been rocked by Opposition protests since the monsoon session commenced on July 19 over the Pegasus snooping controversy, farm laws and price rise.

“They are used to questions like ‘how do you eat mangoes’, therefore, they are scared of discussion in Parliament on issues that concern people like price rise,” Priyanka Gandhi alleged in a tweet in Hindi.

Union minister Pralhad Joshi on Friday said the government is ready for discussion on issues “directly related” to the people.

The protests are over a “non-issue, non-serious issue”, said Joshi, the parliamentary affairs minister.

Fascism Come in All Shapes and Sizes But the ‘Family Resemblances’ Can No Longer Be Denied

Umberto Eco’s inventory of proto-fascist characteristics comprised 14 elements. It will not be difficult for us to recognise the variant of many of these in Narendra Modi’s New India.

On the morning of July 27, 1943, a mother in a village in Piedmont, Italy sent her young son out on an errand. The family had just learned from a cryptic radio news broadcast that Benito Mussolini had been deposed and arrested, and she wanted to know more. So the son, a gangly 11-year-old, went to a nearby newsstand to pick up a newspaper.

Writing about that episode many years later, the boy recounted the multiple shocks he experienced that fateful morning. One, he found newspapers, but their names were all different now to the ones he was familiar with. Two, a quick glance at the headlines told him the newspapers were reporting on the same event, but differently from one another, something he had scarcely seen before that day.

Again, each paper carried on its front page a statement signed by six political parties: Democrazia Cristiana, Partito Communista, Partito Socialista, Partito d’Azione and Partito Liberale. Where had all these different parties sprung from, he wondered. Born and raised in Fascist Italy, the boy had up until then known that each country had only one political party, and in Italy that party was the National Fascist Party. So, what explained this puzzle?

Equally startlingly, the messages from those parties celebrated ‘the end of the dictatorship’ and ‘the return of freedom’: freedom of speech, of the press, of political association. “My God, I had never read words like ‘freedom’ or ‘dictatorship’ all my life! By virtue of these words, I was reborn as a free Western man,” the boy noted in his recap five decades later of the day that had transfigured his world, lighting it up like never before.

This was Umberto Eco, novelist, culture critic, semiotician, philosopher and social commentator, in his celebrated 1995 essay Ur-Fascism, an expression meaning eternal or ‘permanent’ fascism.

With just a few rapid pen-strokes, Eco etches here a fascinating thumb-nail portrait of fascism – a portrait that evokes the intellectual-moral climate engendered by fascism in particular. And this personal portrait is his point of departure for the larger message Eco is putting out: which is that though fascism has shown up in several different shapes and forms in different countries at different points in time – indeed, though it has evolved continually over time since the 1930s – we can still talk in terms of a common archetype of fascism. It is very important, Eco reminds us, that we do not lose sight of this archetype, or else we will forget that fascism is still around us, ‘sometimes in civilian clothes’:

“It would be very easy for us if someone would look out onto the world’s stage and say: ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to march through the streets of Italy once more!’ Alas, life is not so simple. Ur-Fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises.”

While foregrounding the commonalities across different varieties of fascism, however, Umberto Eco does not pass in silence over their differences, either. Thus, he notes how German Nazism was a lot more monolithic than Italian Fascism or Spain’s ultra-Catholic Falangism.

“There was only one Nazi architecture, and one Nazi art. If the architect for the Nazis was Albert Speer, there was no room for Mies van der Rohe.  ……In contrast, there certainly were Fascist architects (in Mussolini Italy), but alongside their pseudo Coliseums there also rose new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.”

Unlike Hitler, Mussolini ‘had no philosophy: all he had was rhetoric’. Not that Hitler was cramped for want of rhetoric, but his intellectual equipment, such as it was, was at least consistent with its own diabolical fashion, while the ideology Mussolini swore by was a tangle of contradictions: it valiantly sought to reconcile monarchy with revolution, republicanism with totalitarianism, a privileged Church with an education system geared fully towards a cult of the Duce, total social and political control with a free market; even his anti-Semitism often lacked conviction, at any rate in his early years in power.

None of this means Italian fascism was more ‘tolerant’ than its German peer, but only that, politically and ideologically, it was much more chaotic than Nazism.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany, June 1940. This picture was found in Eva Braun’s photo albums seized by the US government. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

If these inconsistencies across the different variants of fascism mean anything, however, it is merely that “you can play the fascism game many ways, but the name of the game does not change”.

“According to Wittgenstein, what happens with the notion of ‘Fascism’ is what happens with the notion of ‘play’. A game can be competitive or otherwise, it can involve one or more people, it may require some particular skills or none, there may be money at stake or not. Games are a series of diverse activities that reveal a few ‘family resemblances’.”

It should be worth our while to try locating these ‘family resemblances’ in the current context of escalating totalitarian tendencies across democracies, more particularly India. We need, of course, to bear in mind that Eco’s postulates are a quarter-century old already. ‘Do they still make sense today?’ is a question we cannot, therefore, help asking ourselves. And to answer that question, we must go over his postulates first, keeping in mind Eco’s stated caveat:

“These characteristics cannot be regimented into a system; many are mutually exclusive and are typical of other forms of despotism or fanaticism. But all you need is one of them to be present, and a Fascist nebula will begin to coagulate.” [Emphasis added]

Umberto Eco’s inventory of proto-fascist characteristics comprised 14 elements:

1. The cult of tradition. “The truth has already been announced once and for all, and all we can (and should) do is continue interpreting its obscure message”. In other words, there cannot be any advancement of learning. This belief system gave rise to “the Nazi gnosis (which) was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements”.

2. The rejection of modernism. The natural sequel to the cult of tradition is a stubborn rejection of the modern world. “The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were seen as the beginning of modern depravity”. In this sense, Fascism squares with irrationalism.

3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action is beautiful in itself, and therefore must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” Therefore culture, since it is identified with a critical attitude, is always suspect. Little wonder that the Fascist vocabulary is bespangled with gems like ‘goddamn intellectuals’, ‘eggheads’, ‘radical snobs’, ‘the universities are a den of communists’.

4, Dissent is treason. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and distinguishing is a mark of modernity. Debate/dissent does, by definition, strike at the root of traditionalism, and so it is inherently treasonous.

5. Fear of diversity. The first call of a fascist movement is a call against intruders, because all regimentation grows and thrives on the natural fear of difference. Fascism is therefore racist by definition.

6. Stoking the social reservoirs of frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups”.

7. The obsession with conspiracies. “At the root of the fascist psychology lies the obsession with a plot, preferably an international one.” The followers must feel besieged at all times: besieged from the outside, but also from the inside. It is the Enemy that defines the Fascist identity.

8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of the rhetorical focus, the enemy is at the same time too strong and too weak”. The followers must feel humiliated by the enemy’s vaunted wealth and power; but they must also believe that they can – indeed, that they will –  defeat the enemy.

9. Life is a permanent state of war. “For Ur-Fascism, there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle”, uninterruptedly. Therefore, pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.

10. Elitism in the reverse, or popular elitism. The weak only deserve contempt, so every leader in the fascist hierarchy both looks down upon his subordinates and is himself looked down upon by his superiors. This creates a virtually unending pecking order of elitism where the hierarchy is yet inviolate.

11. Everyone is a hero, and death is his reward. In the Fascist ideology, heroism is not an exception, but the norm. “This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death”, of self-immolation and self-sacrifice.

12. Machismo and misogyny. “Since both permanent war and perennial heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power onto sexual questions”. This is where machismo comes in: it implies both disdain for women and intolerance of a ‘nonstandard’ sexual orientation like homosexuality.

13. Selective populism. In Ur-Fascism, individuals have no rights, but only the ‘people’ – conceived of as a monolithic entity expressing the ‘common will’ – have. And it is only the Leader who is vested with the power to interpret the common will, so that the people neither exercise nor even delegate any power, their role being confined to playing their role as the people. 

14. Newspeak is the new lingua franca. All Ur-Fascist literature, including scholastic texts, revel in the use of an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments of complex and critical reasoning. A related objective is also to undermine culture and the cultivated taste for quality, because quality, in the fascist’s book, is retrograde.

The Indian variant

As one comes to the end of this catalogue, one cannot escape the thought that Umberto Eco might well have been writing with an eye on the India of 2021, and not just drawing from lived experience of 1930s’ Italy.

In part, this list is chillingly contemporary in the Indian context with its stress on the cult of tradition, its apotheosis of ‘pure action’ (called ‘masterstrokes’ by the big media), or its recognition that dissent can equal betrayal.

It doesn’t fail to remind us either that there are clear semantic compatibilities between Goebbels (‘When I hear talk of culture, I take out my pistol’) and the modern-day Hindutvawadi: words/expressions like ‘presstitutes’, ‘the Khan Market gang’ and ‘the JNU mafia’, or the righteous counterpoising of ‘Harvard’ with ‘hard work’ are all unmissable throwbacks to the era of classical fascism.

TIME magazine cover with Narendra Modi.

The bogey of the intruder, the ‘other’, is as potent a weapon in the hand of the Indian state today as it was in Hitler’s. As is the obsession with conspiracies of every kind.

Eco was being particularly acute when he noted how the middle class was emerging as the hotbed for fascist ideology, what with the old-time ‘proletarians’ either transmuting into the petty bourgeoisie or coalescing into the politics-eschewing lumpen proletariat. Standing yet at the threshold of the Internet millennium, Eco was uncannily prescient about the novel forms that ‘selective populism’ was slated to assume in future: “There looms in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected (and carefully targeted) group of citizens can be presented as the Voice of the People.”

Both these prognostications have come true for India already. Indeed, if, as Eco suggests, the presence in a society of even one of the ‘family resemblances’ described by him was enough to make it a candidate for the Ur-Fascist qualification, India will soon be well on its way to full-blown fascism

As eerily accurate as Umberto Eco’s delineation of fascism is, it is only intended as an aid to resistance. “Our duty”, he says, “is to unmask it (fascism) and to point the finger at each of its new forms – every day, in every part of the world…. Freedom and liberation are never-ending tasks. Let this be our motto: ‘Do not forget’.”

The concluding stanza of a Franco Fortini poem Eco quotes in his essay can be both sobering and inspirational for us today:

But we have read the dead men’s eyes
And the world’s freedom is the gift we bring
While the coming justice is close
Clenched in the hands of those same dead men.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

Haiti Police Say Former Supreme Court Judge Suspect in President’s Killing

Haitian police had earlier this week issued an arrest warrant for Wendelle Coq-Thelot, a former Supreme Court judge who was ousted with two other judges earlier in February.

Port-Au-Prince: Haitian police on Friday outlined fresh accusations against a former Supreme Court judge over her links to the assassination of President Jovenel Moise earlier this month, saying she had met with some Colombian mercenaries accused of killing him.

The assassination of Moise has plunged the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation deeper into chaos, and launched an international manhunt for mercenaries and the murder masterminds across the Americas.

Haitian police had earlier this week issued an arrest warrant for Wendelle Coq-Thelot, a former Supreme Court judge who was ousted with two other judges earlier in February when Moise alleged a coup was being planned against him.

Coq-Thelot’s whereabouts are unknown and she could not be reached for comment.

Colombian mercenaries and Haitian-Americans arrested in the wake of Moise’s murder said they had met Coq-Thelot, according to inspector general Marie Michelle Verrier, the spokesperson for the National Police of Haiti.

“Several of them have indicated that they have been to Mrs. Coq’s home twice,” Verrier told reporters. “These people gave to (police) details of documents signed during the meetings at Mrs. Coq’s home.”

Police have raided Coq-Thelot’s main home as well as other residences in the countryside, Verrier said. A wanted poster for Coq Wandelle has also been launched.

Many questions remain over who was behind the assassination this month and how the killers gained access to the president’s home. Haitian officials blamed a squad of mostly Colombian mercenaries, three of whom were killed by police.

A top Moise security official was arrested on suspicion of involvement on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, Colombia called on Haiti to guarantee the legal and medical rights of 18 Colombians detained on the Caribbean island for alleged participation in Moise’s assassination.

J&K Police Say Top Pakistani Ultra Among Two JeM Militants Killed in Encounter in Pulwama

The inspector of general of police said Mohammad Ismal Alvi alias Lamboo alias Adnan was from the family of JeM chief Masood Azhar.

Srinagar: Security forces on Saturday killed two Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) militants, including a top Pakistani ultra belonging to the family of the group’s chief Masood Azhar and involved in the planning of the 2019 Pulwama attack, in an encounter in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district, police said.

Security forces launched a cordon and search operation in the forest area of Namibian and Marsar and the general area of Dachigam this morning, following inputs about the presence of militants there, a police official said.

He said the search operation turned into an encounter after militants opened fire at a search party of the forces, who retaliated.

In the exchange of firing, two militants were killed, the official said.

Inspector general of police (IGP), Kashmir, Vijay Kumar said, “Topmost Pakistani terrorist affiliated with proscribed terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Lamboo, killed in today’s encounter.”

The IGP said Mohammad Ismal Alvi alias Lamboo alias Adnan was from the family of JeM chief Masood Azhar.

“He was involved in conspiracy and planning of Lethpora Pulwama attack and figured in a chargesheet produced by the National Investigation Agency (NIA),” Kumar said.

Suicide bomber Adil Dar blew an explosive-laden vehicle in a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy on February 14, 2019, on the Srinagar-Jammu national highway at Lethpora in Pulwama district in south Kashmir, killing 40 CRPF personnel and injuring several others.

“Identification of the second terrorist being ascertained,” Kumar said.

The IGP also congratulated the Army and police for the successful operation.

Backstory: Like a Scalpel, the Pegasus Investigation Has Exposed the Cancer Within the Body Politic

A weekly column from The Wire’s ombudsperson.

The Pegasus story is far from over and as it unravels, it keeps providing us with glimpses of the depths we are plumbing as a country and society. Not having the gift of hindsight it would be difficult to gauge where it will take us, but suffice it to say that like a scalpel, it has cut through the opacity of our political system and revealed a malignant cancer within.

The Wire – as one of the news organisations tasked with a collaborative investigation anchored by Forbidden Stories, the France-based publicly funded network of journalists working to support the work of other journalists, and with technical support from Amnesty’s Security Lab – took its responsibilities seriously. Coordinating with 15 other news organisations in 10 countries, it has since July 18 – when the story first broke – generated more than 100 Pegasus-related reports, analyses, explainers, most of them written by its staff and commentators, making up in reportorial prowess what it lacks in numerical strength.

Unlike in 2019, when the last time Pegasus made headlines in India, this time the list of those spied upon has increased not just in number; not just through WhatsApp but through direct forays on mobile phones; not just comprising journalists and human rights defenders, but those who could be considered among the pillars of Indian society and democracy. Seema Chishti, who reported on the Pegasus hack on WhatsApp accounts in 2019 for the Indian Express, points out in a recent piece for The India Forum, that while earlier “the government got away by deflecting attention”, today, given the prominence of those sought to be hacked, India’s democracy would have to pay a heavy price if the state is not made answerable.

The Wire’s body of work – print and video – on the Pegasus scam has been broad-ranging. On July 18, as the story broke, there was an explanation of what exactly was the journalistic labour entailed: identification and verification of the individuals to whom the revealed numbers belonged followed by a “forensic examination of the phones in use by them for the period covered by the data, which, in the Indian case was approximately mid-2017 to mid-2019” (‘Pegasus Project: How Phones of Journalists, Ministers, Activists May Have Been Used to Spy On Them’, July 18). Over the next 12 days, we have seen analyses (‘A Test for Pegasus – and Indian Democracy’, July 21), editorials and explainers (‘Watch: What Is Pegasus and How Can You Protect Yourself Against it?’, July 22), and some international reportage (‘Before His Election in 2018, Mexican President Was Encircled By a Massive Spying Campaign’), although there could have been more of this given the fact that a scam of these proportions also demands rigorous international remedy. There was in addition a detailed delineation of the evolution of this investigation (‘Revealed: How The Wire and Its Partners Cracked the Pegasus Project and What It Means for India’, July 30).

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

There has been coverage of responses from media bodies to an issue that crucially affects Indian journalism and journalists (‘‘Govt Should Come Clean’: Three Press Bodies Condemn Pegasus Surveillance on Journalists’, July 19) as also a fair summation of the Modi government’s stances (‘Government Cites Old RTI Response To Deny Pegasus Link, Says Media Didn’t Do Due Diligence’, July 18) and (‘BJP Fields State Leaders to Tackle Pegasus Allegations, Uses ‘International Conspiracy’ Bogey’, July 21).

But most crucial were the pieces that lent political context to the unfolding nightmare. The Pegasus investigation has provided important evidence of the extent to which the BJP and its governments at the Centre and the states have used surveillance and phone hacking for their political aggrandisement. In fact, snooping and hacking technology have become central to the government’s politics. So intrinsic has such technology become to decision-making, so used has the Modi government become to taking institutional shortcuts with the aid of data procured through dubious ways, that it has almost lost its capacity to play by constitutional norms. A commentator for The Wire is pessimistic about whether this government will ever extricate itself from the “quagmire of official illegalities” because of its fatal attraction for “outside the box” methodology (‘For the BJP’s Failed Chanakyas, the Allure of Pegasus Was Irresistible’, July 29).

Another opinion piece, ‘How Long Can India Ignore the Ramifications of the Pegasus Scandal?’ (July 29) argues that the Modi government, by sitting on its hands at a time when affected governments are rushing to investigate Pegasus impacts, is actually painting itself into a corner. One can only conclude that the same impunity which characterised its deployment of the spyware is now marking its preferred method of response: deflection, defiance and denial. It gambles on popular ignorance and indifference to issues of surveillance. It wagers on the hunch that freedom of expression, privacy, bodily integrity are arcane constructs that don’t connect with the everyday world of the ordinary citizen and voter. It also gambles on that giant liner on the political horizon – the unsinkable Narendra Modi – and is convinced that it will bail out all the tug boats in the Pegasus ocean that are in trouble.

Will such cynicism survive the Pegasus moment? Undoubtedly all countries need to protect themselves from threats to their national security. Intelligence gathering is innate to this process and could impinge on the right to privacy of some individuals. But this is precisely why such surveillance needs the strict oversight of parliament and the judiciary. Liberal democracies internationally institute at least four tiers of accountability for such interventions: parliamentary accountability; judicial accountability; expert accountability and complaints mechanisms.

In India, because there is none of this and its government and ruling party disdain such measures, we have the untenable situation where it is the security of the ruling apparatus that is paramount and has been made synonymous with national security. After all, it is the insecurity of the BJP government and the prime minister that sings out loud and clear when Ashok Lavasa, an election commissioner who had the moral integrity to call out Narendra Modi’s poll violations during the 2019 general election (‘Ashok Lavasa Placed on Snoop List as EC After Flagging Modi’s 2019 Poll Code Violations’, July 19) is snooped upon, or even a private citizen like Jagdeep Chhokar comes under the net for his efforts as co-founder of Association for Democratic Reforms to make the election system more accountable.

Without such oversight, the police and intelligence services can transmogrify from genuine apparatuses working for national security into personal lapdogs of the government and party in power. Even a parliamentary discussion on these very serious issues is being fobbed off and Members of Parliament seeking to raise them on the floor of the House are painted as enemies of the state and disrupters of parliament.

An effective pushback against such governmental impunity and arrogance would need the power of the people. The outrage over illegal surveillance must go beyond opposition parties and a few public commentators and observers to become a mass movement. As we have seen in case after case in the Pegasus scam, this is no abstruse issue. It has consequences not just for our liberties but for life itself (‘Hacking Software Was Used to Spy on Jamal Khashoggi’s Wife Months Before His Murder’, July 18). Shoshana Zuboff talks in her book of surveillance capitalism but its frequent partner – surveillance government – is also a Big Other. She writes about how surveillance capitalism “outruns society and law in a self-authorized destruction of the right to sanctuary”. What is this right to sanctuary? It is the right to remain private; it is the right to the protection of a space called “home”, where as she puts it, “we first learnt to be human”. If the walls of this home are torn down, if cameras invade this space, it is our right to being a human being that is destroyed. We have, all our lives, instinctively internalised this right to sanctuary without having a name for it and now we have a Supreme Court verdict that provides a legal framing for it. With the Pegasus expose, the time has come to internalise this right in our democratic functioning. The BJP government’s intransigence cannot be allowed to stop us.

Illustration: The Wire

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Islamophobia and misogyny ride the internet

How do we make the internet a safe space for women? This question assumes urgency after the extremely ugly, misogynist projection of Indian Muslim women on an app, ‘Sulli Deals’, that was hosted on the San Francisco-based GitHub Inc (‘Act of Intimidation and Harm’: Rights Activists on ‘Sulli Deals’ App Targeting Muslim Women’). Details and images of 80 Indian Muslim women, culled from their social media accounts, were put out in a supposed “auction”, complete with a “Deal of the Day” feature.

The identities of the creators of this app are still not known. The Delhi Police, while it has filed a case, has not named them. It remains a case against “unknown persons”.  More recently, 56 MPs, cutting across party lines, have written to the Union home minister Amit Shah, demanding an investigation and punishment for the offenders.

What about GitHub, the platform that hosted the app? Set up in 2008, it has a tidy revenue stream. Perhaps it is because of this that it has moved extremely cautiously on the issue with its present CEO Erica Brescia, doing only the barest minimum. She tweeted that the app has been taken down, but there has been no formal response on this from GitHub, and no attempt to reveal who the criminals who put up the app were. In other words, those behind the app seem to have made a clean getaway and will probably use their malicious talent to create content of this kind in the future.

The man who is widely regarded as the creator of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, has expressed his concern over the way the net has come to be used as a tool of gender exploitation and repression. In a letter written last year which appeared on the website of the World Wide Web Foundation, he came to the conclusion that the net is not working for women and girls, especially women from LGBTQ+ communities and those marginalised by race and location. The three aspects that worried him specifically were lack of access; algorithms used by artificial intelligence systems that reproduce and deepen existing inequalities and, finally, safety concerns with online violence. Lack of safety also translated, he noted into sexual harassment, including “private images being shared without consent”.

The impacts all this has on the lives of women are multifold, ranging from fear, anger, and disbelief to a feeling of being violated. As Noor Mahvish, a student – one of the three women interviewed by The Wire (‘Watch | ‘Our Humanity Is Snatched Away From Us’: Muslim Women Speak Out Against ‘Sulli Deals‘, July 13) puts it, “Today Muslim women are being sold like clothes on the internet.” She also points to the Islamaphobia that infuses such content and the intrinsic connection between online apps of this kind and offline crimes against women.

Remember colleagues under attack

As many as 228 Indian journalists have been targeted by both state and non-state actors in the year 2020, according to the National Alliance of Journalists (NAJ) and the Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ), quoting data put out by the Rights and Risks Analysis Group (RRAG).

They were attacked offline and online, they had FIRs lodged against them and some of them were jailed under draconian laws like the UAPA and NSA. Thirteen journalists were killed. In this list of targeted journalists were 12 women who were not just trolled online but had to face threats of violence, rape and murder. Freelance Kashmiri woman journalist, Masrat Zahra, had charges of UAPA brought against her. Currently in Germany, she has accused the J&K Police of targeting her parents because of her work (‘Kashmiri Journalist Masrat Zahra Claims Police Assaulted Her Father’, July 29).

NAJ and DUJ have demanded the quashing of all frivolous FIRs against journalists and a speedy trial for those embroiled in serious cases. They also call for a special law for the protection of journalists and their right to investigate, report and comment freely and fairly.

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Readers write in…

Elgar Parishad detenues deteriorate and their endless trauma 

Writes Meena Kandasamy, well known author and activist: “As you may be aware, the incarcerated in the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case have been languishing in jail for over three years even as trial appears a distant dream. While their health deteriorates rapidly, the threat of COVID-19 is ever present inside over-crowded jails. Six out of the 16 have contracted the virus at least once. Father Stan Swamy’s passing in custody was an egregious violation of the right to life amounting to institutional murder. While access to medical care and counsel are denied, the so-called evidence on the basis of which they remain behind bars has been revealed to be a criminal fabrication that has been systematically planted on their digital devices over many years. With the latest revelations on Arsenal’s findings, this continues to be a period of immense anguish for the families of the incarcerated even as they stand vindicated. We wish to demonstrate our collective solidarity with them and have also issued a public statement demanding the immediate and unconditional release of the incarcerated. We hope this will inspire and give strength to more and more people to come together against this climate of fear and demand justice for every political prisoner.”

The 16 arrested in connection with the Elgar Parishad case. One of them, Father Stan Swamy, passed away in custody. Photo: The Wire.

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How is the NSO any different from the KGB?

Ramana Murthy, a reader of The Wire, based in Hyderabad: “It is almost certain that this government has bought and/or authorized the use of Pegasus. Now, whatever undemocratic actions have been taken by governments in the past, Pegasus is at another level altogether (‘Pegasus Project: 155 Names Revealed By the Wire on Snoop List So Far’, July 27). How is NSO different from the KGB or CCP? Shudder to think of what comes next and what will happen in 2024. We are already getting indications in UP in the form of poll preparations for 2022. Who should bear the blame for this situation: the present regime or the people who are solidly behind it?”

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Go for the big guns

Shantanu Guru has some observations to make on the film industry-pornography nexus: “It’s good news that after the Narcotics Control Bureau has caught drug peddlers Mumbai, Raj Kundra has been arrested for his involvement in a pornography video racket (‘Businessman Raj Kundra Arrested in Porn Films Case’, July 20). It appears that the entire film industry in Mumbai is in the gutter. The question is when will the real biggies of Bollywood – many of them A-listers – get caught? All I would like to tell the regulatory and policing authorities is to get to work on this fast. Jai Hind!”

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The site hangs

Lizzie Mathias from Udipi has a glitch to report: “I am an avid reader of your news portal and it was a smooth reading. But of late when I open the site it hangs and I have to close the app and miss important articles. I find there is no way I can upgrade it. What should I do?”

Write to ombudsperson@cms.thewire.in.

A Cost-Benefit Analysis Can’t Capture the Social Justice Aspect of Scholarships

In May 2021, the Institute of Economic Growth recommended that the government do away with scholarships for SC, ST girls. But was this the right conclusion?

In May 2021, the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) released findings from a study on the efficacy of a scholarship to Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) girls aimed at reducing dropout rates and child marriages. The report appeared to be a damning indictment of the poor implementation of the scheme and recommended scrapping the scheme entirely.

However, the report also attracted the ire of activists who claimed that instead of withdrawing the scheme altogether, the IEG should instead recommend measures to improve its implementation given the fact that child marriage rates are more than 40% in some states according to NFHS (National Family Health Survey).

According to an RTE policy brief from January 2021, 10 million girls in India are at the risk of dropping out of school and several media reports have already confirmed that children are dropping out in droves.

It is well documented in social science research that each year of secondary schooling decreases the likelihood of child marriage significantly. UNICEF has already warned that 10 million additional girls globally are at the risk of child marriage due to COVID-19. Moreover, in India, instances of child marriage have significantly increased in BiharMadhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana according to various reports.

Representational image for child marriage. Photo: Reuters.

A committee set up by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare last year found that child marriage rates are highest among SC and ST girls. Moreover, the use of child marriages as a means to survive huge income and health shocks – like a pandemic – is also well known. The pandemic could potentially undo decades of progress in education and eradicating child marriages according to a UN report.

Therefore, it is shocking that the IEG has recommended withdrawing the scheme when it should be trying to improve its implementation.

A key fact to note here is that the IEG has not made the study or its methods publicly available. Thus, the fate of an important social justice scheme will likely be determined by a report shrouded in mystery.

Also read: COVID-19 Has Undone Years of Progress for Adolescent Girls

What do we know about the study?

According to the report in The Telegraph, the IEG studied the scheme’s impact in seven states and arrived at the following conclusions:

  • Both teachers and students are unaware of the scheme.
  • Parents face difficulties in obtaining caste certificates.
  • Schools find it difficult to upload data to an online portal.
  • The amount given is too small to bring an attitudinal change with respect to child marriages.
  • Students have to wait for two years to get the money, which is often delayed.
  • The scheme’s relevance has decreased because the prevalence of child marriages have fallen: We are not sure how IEG thinks that 5 million girls being married under 18 each year is a small number, which apparently accounts for a third of the global total and is the highest worldwide.
  • Similar state government schemes are more popular – though we are not told which schemes these are and if they are comparable in terms of budget and implementation, with this scheme.

Lack of transparency 

It is surprising that the results of a policy relevant study have not been made publicly available. We, at Bahujan Economists, could not access the report even after multiple attempts. The methodology and methods used in this report need to be made available to the public – particularly those for whom policies such as these are designed, as well as the broader research community.

Given the amount of scrutiny economic studies have to normally undergo before getting published, it is unusually convenient that IEG has decided to keep the report confidential. Without access to the report and methodology, the results are suspect due to a variety of reasons.

The results could also be influenced by a biased sample selection. The report does not disclose which states are included in the study. It is common knowledge that states like Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu fare much better in the delivery of public services while others like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal – which is the only state we know is included in the study – do much worse than the national average.

Therefore, the states included in the IEG study could have influenced the outcomes they report. Moreover, while the study has only been conducted in seven states, the recommendation to withdraw the scheme has been made with a national application in mind.

It is hard to make sense of the hurried response by the Union government, which went ahead and slashed budgets allocated to this scheme last year without any consultation with either the community or experts on education policy. Our collective, Bahujan Economists, is therefore forced to take note of maligned intent on part of both the government and the researchers.

Also read: No Scholarship Money, No Laptop, No Hostel: LSR Student Dies By Suicide

The need for understanding the context, apart from technicalities 

IEG argues that the scheme is inefficient and the system cannot implement it properly. According to them, the costs do not seem to be justifying the benefits. However, IEG should remember that the amount spent on this scheme – Rs 110 crore until last year – is only about 0.006% of GDP at 2019-20 current prices.

In comparison, the cumulative amount of subsidies (concessions) given to corporates during 2014-19 was over 4.3 lakh crore, according to a report. The government, somehow, magically seems to discover money when needed for corporate subsidies, but is apparently unable to spend a minuscule fraction of the GDP for vulnerable children who are at the risk of dropping out of schools.

The cost ineffectiveness of welfare schemes is an argument that the critics of such programmes have voiced time and again be it for NREGA, PDS, mid-day meals, or the National Food Security Act.

However, researchers like Farzana Afridi and Desai et al have shown that not only have these schemes achieved massive gains in improving the lives of the most vulnerable, but they have also shown that the benefits from such programmes far outweigh their costs. Simply being cost-ineffective (if at all) is not enough to justify scrapping a scheme like this. Ensuring equity in education is a social justice issue and hence, the relevance of schemes such as this should not be determined solely through a cost-benefit analysis where the benefits are often vaguely defined.

School girls attend their classes at secondary school, Kaya, near Udaipur. Photo/Syed Altaf Ahmad/Unicef India/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Moreover, critics often caution against the ability of the state to implement welfare schemes. According to them, rampant corruption, red-tapism and a corporate-political nexus hinder efficient implementation. However, as we have learned with experience, such schemes can and in fact are implemented effectively if there is sufficient demand for accountability from citizens.

Consider the case of Tamil Nadu. As Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen note in their book, India: An Uncertain Glory, official poverty estimates in Tamil Nadu in the 1970s and 1980s were higher than all India average. The state was also characterised by highly regressive social norms. However, the same period saw the initiation of a slew of bold social programmes, many of which later inspired national programmes. Tamil Nadu today ranks among the best in delivery of public services be it mid-day meals, NREGA or PDS. As a result, Tamil Nadu now stands right at the top when it comes to human development indicators.

If our experience of public policy at large in the last 10 to 15 years has taught us anything, then it is that the implementation of welfare programmes can be improved. Contrary to what the critics might have us believe, things are getting better – like the revival of PDS in various states, for instance.

Therefore, it is rather confusing as to why the IEG would not suggest measures for improving the implementation of the scheme and instead recommend scrapping the scheme altogether at such a critical juncture.

Remedial suggestions for the problems outlined by the IEG report 

We suggest that the state should undertake a large-scale advertising campaign to raise awareness about the scheme. Schools should also be instructed to inform pupils about the scheme. The application process should be simplified as much as possible to remove any administrative hurdles affecting scheme implementation.

We agree with IEG when it says that the scholarship sum of Rs 3,000 is too meagre to make a difference. We recommend that the government increase the sum to Rs 10,000 per student. The increased monetary budget would be too small a price to pay for the potential costs of having millions of girls drop out due to the absence of state support.

Furthermore, a grievance redressal mechanism should be set up to handle complaints and queries from students and parents as such mechanisms have proven to be extremely useful in improving accountability, transparency and service delivery of public services in the last decade or so.

Lastly, we suggest that the government should set up an inquiry to figure out the structural barriers like no access to schools, discrimination, lack of remedial classes or inadequate support, and lack of short-run gains on education that prevent SC, ST girls from accessing education. This issue requires a much larger intervention than a small scheme. Structural changes are needed and this scheme is only a small, albeit important, part of the solution.

Aarushi Kalra and Mohit Verma are with Bahujan Economists. Kalra is pursuing a PhD in Economics at Brown University, United States.