Govindan Nair

Examining the Evolution of Dalit Politics

Two recent books chronicle the rise and fall of an influential Dalit movement and a significant Dalit politician.

<em>Dalit Panthers: An Authoritative History</em> and <em>Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati</em> provide useful insights into the evolution of Dalit politics. Credit: Twitter/PTI

Dalit Panthers: An Authoritative History and Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati provide useful insights into the evolution of Dalit politics. Credit: Twitter/PTI

Do the recent events at Bhima Koregaon presage a new trajectory in the struggle of Dalits to secure their place as equals in the Indian polity, a resurgent phase of Ambedkarite politics?

Two recent books – one on the short-lived but influential Dalit Panther movement of the 1970s, and the other on Mayawati, the most significant Dalit politician since Babasaheb Ambedkar – provide useful insights into the evolution of Dalit politics.

Until the 1970s, Dalit political aspirations were sought to be met through the Republican Party of India (RPI), which was derived from Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation, and through scheduled caste leaders co-opted in the political mainstream – principally, the Congress party. While the RPI was rendered largely ineffective by internal strife, mainstream political parties did little more for Dalits than exalt them as vote banks.

Wishing to move beyond the complacent and self-seeking politics of the RPI and Congress, idealistic young Dalits saw a model in the militant Black Panther movement in the US; while more sober elements, exemplified by Kanshi Ram, chose a path between radicalism and tame collaboration.

J.V. Pawar justifiably claims that Dalit Panthers: An Authoritative History, is an ‘autobiography’ of the movement. “I have actively participated in the movement,” he says, “not just as a spectator or writer, but as one of the people who initiated it”. As co-founder, organiser and general secretary of the Dalit Panthers, he had personal custody of the organisation’s documentation and correspondence, enabling him to compile a meticulous account of the movement’s eventful life.

J. V. Pawar. Credit: YouTube

Opting out of college during his post-graduation, Pawar claims that he and poet Namdeo Dhasal founded the Dalit Panthers – other accounts list more names – in June 1972 in (then) Bombay. Comprising mainly educated Mahar youth from families that had converted to Buddhism with Babasaheb Ambedkar, one of the Panthers’ first actions was to observe India’s 25th Independence Day as ‘black independence day’ and to conduct a mock parliament session outside the legislature drawing attention to crimes against Dalits and calling for the annihilation of caste.

Resorting to protest marches and demonstrations, pamphleteering and inventive sloganeering, the youthful Panthers fearlessly confronted the entrenched might of the Congress and muscle-power of the Shiv Sena. The first mass arrests took place when the Panthers staged a protest during the visit of the central minister Jagjivan Ram, who they regarded as a Dalit ‘turncoat’. Gestures like the symbolic burning of the Manusmriti and Gita, commemoration of Dalit valour at Bhima Koregaon and a large rally on Ambedkar’s death anniversary at Chaitya Bhoomi (where he was laid to rest) enthused Dalit youth across Maharashtra and brought a large number of new entrants.

The reluctance of non-Buddhist youth to shed their Hindu identity was an impediment to bringing them into the fold but, according to Pawar, the Panthers were able to effect a transformation of mindsets to overturn traditional notions of caste and sub-caste.

As the Panthers extended their agitationist activities, taking up cases of Dalit exploitation and confronting the perpetrators as well as government authorities, “merely a warning from the Dalit Panther (sic) was enough to set things right”, and “even established goons would tremble” before them, asserts Pawar. By 1974, “the Dalit Panther (sic) had spread to all levels of society and was considered a force to reckon with”.

But cracks soon appeared in the Panther leadership. The main bone of contention was whether to take the communist path or to stay focused on caste (varna) struggle. Pawar recounts with some bitterness Dhasal’s flirtation with the leftists before opportunistically joining the Congress bandwagon, the jostling of Panther leaders for prominence and publicity and the petty jealousies against Pawar’s own stewardship of the group and against his ally Raja Dhale.

J.V. Pawar
Dalit Panthers: An Authoritative History
Forward Press, 2017

Lacking coherent structure and organisation, the Panthers had split into at least three splinter groups by 1977, each campaigning for a different candidate in the general election following Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. To deflate the rebel groups, and to stymie the mushrooming of nefarious activities by persons claiming to be Panthers, Pawar and Dhale formally disbanded the Dalit Panthers in March 1977. In a dismal epitaph to the Panthers’ meteoric life, Pawar remarks: “The dissolution of the organisation put an end to the immoral activities of many.”

The limitations of the Dalit Panthers’ agitational approach brought home to Ram, a shaven Dalit Sikh government official, the crucial importance of organising the troops. Introduced in the early 1970s to the writings of Ambedkar by a Mahar Buddhist colleague, Ram would become the leading Dalit visionary and organiser whose impact would be felt in Indian politics for the next four decades.

In Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati, published in 2008, Ajoy Bose, a veteran journalist, recounted in gripping detail Ram’s vision of actualising Ambedkar’s maxim that “political power is the key”. This found expression in the extraordinary journey of a Dalit girl from beginnings noteworthy only for their deprivations and ordinariness to becoming chief minister of the country’s most populous and politically-significant state, and being touted as a future prime minister of India.

The revised title, Behenji: The Rise and Fall of Mayawati, of Bose’s updated version reflects the denouement in Mayawati’s fortunes brought by debacles in consecutive state elections and the 2014 parliamentary polls. With the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) altogether absent in the Lok Sabha and reduced to a rump in the Uttar Pradesh assembly, Bose avers that “it would be near impossible for her to become a dominant force in either the country or her home state again”.

Ajoy Bose
Behenji: The Rise and Fall of Mayawati
Penguin Books Limited, 2017

In the new edition of Behenji, Bose omits some of the administrative details relating to her last stint as the chief minister, while adding new chapters to cover the sea-change in the politics of the nation and of Uttar Pradesh. As her authoritative – though not official – biographer, he says that with these updates he has “decided to draw the curtain down on Mayawati’s historical but turbulent saga”.

Bose established himself as an authority on Mayawati with his first edition of Behenji, published when her rising growth curve presented tantalising future prospects – both for the protagonist as well as for the biographer. The second edition, written soon after Mayawati’s rejection by the voters of UP in 2012, assessed what went wrong but still seemed confident of her revival. Events since then, however, seem to have led Bose to conclude his association with the Mayawati story seeing little journalistic mileage to be derived from it. While it is difficult to disagree with his assessment, one would hope that some years into the future, with the benefit of sober hindsight, an even-handed biography of this iconic Dalit – with inputs from the subject herself – will become available to the lay reader as well as to the scholar.

After three short stints as UP chief minister, helming shaky coalitions, Mayawati had resoundingly won the 2007 elections to head a government with a comfortable BSP majority. Attributing the victory to astute ‘social engineering’ whereby upper castes, and Brahmins in particular, were enticed to vote for BSP candidates, the party’s remit was expanded from bahujan samaj to sarvajan samaj. However, social engineering was a chimera, argues Bose: a manifestation of opportunistic manipulation by Brahmins, and the outcome of political expediency.

Ajoy Bose. Credit: Penguin India

By 2017, Mayawati was left with little more than her Jatav base. Brahmins had long abandoned her, seeing more gains elsewhere; Muslims were dismayed at her inactivity in the face of repeated communal clashes; non-Jatav Dalits were antagonised by her purported minority bias and were progressively wooed back into the Hindu fold. Isolated in her splendid mansions, Mayawati had lost touch with ground reality and seemed bereft of ideas on how to make a comeback.

Dalit empowerment is Mayawati’s lasting contribution to the Indian polity. She has “given a sense of self-confidence to the community that even Ambedkar or Kanshi Ram could never give,” says Bose. Now, however, that empowerment needs to find expression in a new manifesto extending beyond reservations and quotas, to make Dalits equal partners in India’s development story.

She painstakingly built the BSP and mobilised her constituency to produce a winning formula at the polls. But disinclination to delegate and decentralise, and distrust of competent subordinates, besides failure to meet the aspirations of young Dalits, has brought the BSP to a state of paralysis.

Mayawati was successful in implementing two pillars of Ambedkar’s dictum “Educate, Agitate, Organise”. To stay relevant she must employ the third: Agitate. Ironically, for someone who began as a youthful activist cycling from village to village spreading the empowerment message, she subsequently developed an aversion to mass action and street agitation – which has only been accentuated by her megalomania and delusions of exalted political status.

Mayawati must necessarily re-invent herself and her philosophy but, sadly, displays neither the will nor the capacity to do so. Bose concludes that at the present juncture “the prospects of a Dalit party being able to promote the interests of the community do not look very likely”.

In the light of deepening caste fissures in the country, it is not surprising that the baton of Ambedkarite politics is passing to agitationists such as the Bhim Army, and youthful protestors like those in Bhima Koregaon.

Govindan Nair is a retired civil servant who lives in Chennai after more than three decades in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and overseas.

‘Where India Goes’ Gives a First-Hand Analysis of India’s Poor Early-Life Health and Stunting

Where India Goes is essential reading not only for policy-makers and development professionals, but for anyone interested in the paradoxes of development in the early 21st century.

Where India Goes is essential reading not only for policymakers and development professionals, but for anyone interested in the paradoxes of development in the early 21st century.

In India, out of every thousand babies born 43 die before their first birthdays – more than in any of our South Asian neighbours (other than Pakistan). Credit: Reuters

An ‘open-defecation-free’ India in 2019 is a chimera. Decades will pass before that goal is achieved. In the meantime, millions of babies in India will die due to poor sanitation. Millions more will, through their lives, bear the stamp of impaired physical and cognitive development caused by the toilet practices of their neighbours.

This is the brutal prognosis of Diane Coffey and Dean Spears in their timely and out-spoken book. Having set up their home in a village in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh “where we could learn first-hand about the poor early-life health and the process of stunting that affect so many children in India”, Where India Goes reflects their lived experience and presents extensive research and analysis conducted through the Research Institute For Compassionate Economics (rice), an institute they established.

Diane Coffey and Dean Spears
Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste
Harper Collins, 2017

The figures are not unknown: The vast majority (70%, as per the 2011 census) of rural households in India defecate in the open. Out of every thousand babies born 43 die before their first birthdays – more than in any of our South Asian neighbours (other than Pakistan); India’s infant mortality rate is a fifth higher than countries with corresponding GDP per capita and three times more than in China or Brazil; the proportion of undernourished children below 5 is much higher than the average for Sub-Saharan African countries.

Children in Bangladesh, where latrine-use is virtually universal, are comparatively taller than children of similar income groups in West Bengal. The Muslim paradox is telling: Muslim households in India are on average poorer than Hindu households, but their babies are more likely to survive childhood – because Muslims are more prone to using toilets.

Multiple studies, using a variety of methodologies, have established the correlation between child health and exposure to faecal germs. Endemic illnesses and under-nourishment afflict children in communities where open defecation is customary – even if their own households eschew the practice – decreasing their productivity and earning capacity as adults.

Referring to this as “one of the greatest human development challenges of our times”, Coffey and Spears argue that speeding the decline of open defecation offers a one-off opportunity to accomplish a quantum improvement in the quality of life and to add value to the pool of human capital.

The problem is unique to India. The prevalence of open defecation here is not explained by under-development or poverty; nor is it a matter of education levels or governance, access to latrines, availability of water or quality of available toilets. Rural Indians are not ‘forced’ to defecate in the open; they do so by choice.

“Poor sanitation persists in rural India”, the authors contend, “because of unique social forces – in particular, caste”.

In villagers’ minds, open defecation is a far superior choice to storing faeces in a government-provided latrine pit that would need to be emptied by hand, an activity which invokes a generations-old struggle between people who are still too often thought of as ‘Untouchables’ and those who still too often exploit, exclude and humiliate them.

Ironically, from the initial programme for rural sanitation in 1986, through various clones, up to the Swachh Bharat Mission of today, the emphasis has always been on latrine construction.

Diane Coffey. Credit: RICE institute website

With ‘beneficiary’ households not committed to using them, it is not surprising that a majority of the toilets reportedly constructed through the years exist only on paper, providing a source of rampant corruption. It is estimated that only one in five of the toilets said to have been constructed since 2001 was in place in 2011. In a village that Coffey and Spears studied, latrines were found to have been provided by the government sans underground pit, toilet pan, outlet pipe, door and roof. But the ‘beneficiaries’ were not complaining: they used the incomplete structures for a variety of domestic purposes, and continued blithely to defecate in the open.

The fear of pollution associated with a toilet and, especially, a storage pit on the household premises, is only exceeded by the horror of having to empty the pit when it fills. Social mobility makes Dalits aspire to similar social norms and, hence, equally averse to household toilets.

As it is near impossible today to find willing people for the job, the problem of emptying storage pits – which are mistakenly believed to fill up in a matter of months rather than years – is a major impediment to toilet use. The authors pose a hypothetical question: will the economic demand created by a successful latrine-building programme bring a resurgence of something similar to manual scavenging, rolling back what progress has been achieved towards social equality?

Dean Spears. Credit: RICE institute website

Clearly, behaviour change lies at the heart of the challenge of open defecation in India. For a start, policy-makers should acknowledge the socio-cultural dimensions of the issue and set aside their aversion to talking about caste and untouchability.

The Swachh Bharat mission adopts an essentially technocratic approach, allocating a miniscule portion of its resources to behaviour change. The community-based strategy it proposes will work only to the extent the community buys into the challenge of modifying societal rules of purity and pollution.

“Above all, embrace the problem”, Coffey and Spears advocate. “Both the government and international development should be vocal about the causes of widespread open defecation in India. Struggling against untouchability is working towards the end of open defecation in India, and vice versa.”

Where India Goes is essential reading not only for policy-makers and development professionals, but for anyone interested in the paradoxes of development in the early 21st century. Presenting rigorous quantitative analysis for a lay person’s understanding alongside qualitative insights based on personal interactions, the book is an engaging and rewarding read.

As Angus Deaton, the Nobel laureate, puts it in his foreword:

It is one of the great achievements of this book that it works on so many levels, untangling the intellectual puzzles with the verve of a good mystery, telling us the stories of people who are suffering, how they live their lives, why they think and behave as they do and what sort of interventions might help or hurt them.

Govindan Nair is a retired civil servant who lives in Chennai after more than three decades in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and overseas.

The Remarkable Collaboration Between Two Extraordinary Psychologists

‘The Undoing Project’ extends the academic thread of Michael Lewis’s earlier book, while bringing to life the riveting story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

The Undoing Project extends the academic thread of Michael Lewis’s earlier book, while bringing to life the riveting story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Courtesy: Penguin Random House

“No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance,” said the New York Times about Michael Lewis. In his highly-acclaimed Moneyball, Lewis narrated how a poorly-rated baseball team (Oakland Athletics) used data in novel ways to identify market inefficiencies and thereby developed new approaches to playing strategies and player recruitment. The new knowledge brought Oakland astonishing success, and the information model came to be emulated by other teams and, Lewis argued in his book, could be applied to diverse other fields.

Moneyball spurred Lewis to explore the reasons behind market inefficiencies, especially the way the human mind worked in forming judgements and, inevitably, he was led to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The Undoing Project extends the academic thread of Lewis’s earlier book, while bringing to life the riveting story of that remarkable pair of Israeli psychologists.

Kahneman and Tversky were both descended from Eastern European rabbis; but in the Holy Land neither believed in god. Both had “shockingly fertile minds” that urged them to study psychology to unearth simple truths of human behaviour. They knew that they were smarter than most and sensed that they were destined for special things. Their similarities, however, ended there, and it remains a mystery how they formed one of the most influential intellectual partnerships of all time. Lewis dissects their complex relationship in this fascinating book.

Two of the brightest stars of Hebrew University in the 1950s, they were markedly different in comportment. Tversky was a swaggering native while Kahneman, scarred by the Holocaust, was a recent immigrant. Tversky was ebullient and cock-sure, while self-doubt and uncertainty were Kahneman’s hallmark. Everyone wanted (in today’s speak) to ‘friend’ the charming and extroverted Tversky, although his was “the most terrifying mind” they had encountered. Kahneman was a pessimist, withdrawn and painfully sensitive to criticism.

Until the day Kahneman invited Tversky to address the students in his psychology class, they had had little to do with each other. Tversky that day had the unprecedented and unsettling experience of not just having his presentation shredded by Kahneman’s interjections but of having to reorient his very worldview.

The regard that Kahneman and Tversky developed for each other at their first encounter led to their coming together a few months later to produce their first paper, ‘Belief in the Law of Small Numbers’ in 1971. Considered one of the most important theses ever written, it underscored the failure of human intuition in making judgements and reaching decisions. Simply put, they wrote that people mistakenly believed that a small sample taken at random would be representative of a large group – that it would have a similar distribution pattern, something that is manifestly not true.

People’s “intuitive expectations are governed by a consistent misperception of the world”, the paper concluded. Even statisticians, who should have known better, commonly succumbed to subjective interpretation of evidence, in other words to biases.

Michael Lewis
The Undoing Project
Penguin UK, 2017

While their first paper showed how people overlooked statistically correct answers to problems, they next explored the systematic biases or cognitive limitations impairing real-world decision-making. Their research challenged the idea that human beings are rational actors and, exposing the flaws in existing concepts of human behaviour, they proposed more persuasive theories to explain how people make choices. All modern theories of decision-making have been guided by the rules of thumb that they formulated. They termed these “heuristics”.

They argued that when people make judgements they liken whatever they are judging to a representative prototype they bear in their minds. ‘Representativeness’ became the first heuristic. The next, ‘availability’, causes people to believe a familiar scenario to be more probable than it actually is. ‘Anchoring and adjustment’ let people’s ignorance colour their judgement.

Decisions in practically all high-level professional activities, the duo insisted, would be “significantly improved by making experts aware of their own biases, and by development of methods to reduce and counteract the sources of bias in judgement”. Even historians are prone to cognitive biases; to taking whatever facts they have at hand to formulate neat narratives. Lewis describes how Amos once lectured a gathering of historians leaving them “ashen-faced”.

“Eighty percent of doctors don’t think probabilities apply to their patients, just as 95% of married couples don’t believe that the 50% divorce rate applies to them.” Teasing out the frailties of human judgement, Kahneman and Tversky evolved a new approach to economic theory, their collaboration culminating in ‘the prospect theory’ (1979), which became the second most cited paper in all of economics.

Michael Lewis. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Although they continued to publish together until Tversky’s untimely death, their partnership alas unravelled, becoming increasingly fraught in the last years.

While Lewis meticulously maps out the contours of the work Kahneman and Tversky did together, making it comprehensible – even enthralling – to the lay reader, what distinguishes The Undoing Project is the superb portrayal of the extraordinary synergy of two idiosyncratic and disparate geniuses.

“What they were like,” says Lewis, “in every way but sexually, was lovers. They connected with each other more deeply than either had connected with anyone else.” Both were family men, but their wives would admit that their mutual connect was more intense than a marriage. They were both turned on by the other and found each other more interesting than anyone else. “They’d become a single mind.”

Observers recall how Tversky and Kahneman completed each other’s sentences and seemed to think in tandem. Few had an idea of how they worked on their papers, except for noting roars of laughter and whoops of delight that emanated from behind the closed doors of seminar rooms in which the two spent hours together. Their ideas spawned and incubated with such spontaneity that it was impossible to attribute them specifically to either Kahneman or Tversky. In their joint papers they would appear as lead author alternately.

Perhaps the denouement was inevitable. Even they were not immune to the fragilities of the human mind. Tversky was the more brilliant, but without Kahneman’s ideas and intuition his output would have been decidedly less significant. Kahneman, on the other hand, realised that he could do without his partner and was wounded when the popular and out-going Tversky, inadvertently or otherwise, monopolised the limelight and seized the lion’s share of glory for their joint work. The break-up of Kahneman’s marriage and his leaving Israel physically separated the collaborators for the first time and drove a lasting wedge in their relationship.

Ironically, it was while working on ‘the undoing project’ – an exploration of the tendency of people’s minds to spin alternative realities in order to avoid the pain of emotion – that the wedge became unbridgeable. The ideas and sweat behind this project were all Kahneman’s, but Tversky neglected to give him the credit Kahneman expected. Kahneman would later confide that he regarded this as the beginning of the end.

The break had become almost total when Tversky was diagnosed with cancer in 1996 and given, at best, six months to live. Kahneman was the second person he called with the news. In the following months, a shattered Kahneman phoned his friend almost every day. Distraught, disoriented and dishevelled, he delivered the main eulogy at the funeral.

When Tversky, who never craved honours – they came to him unsought – was informed some days before the end that he was on a short-list for the Nobel Prize, he replied, “I assure you the Nobel Prize is not on the list of things I’m going to miss.” Kahneman, who believed that he had long deserved the prize, finally won it in 2002 – for work he had done with Tversky years before.

Govindan Nair is a retired civil servant who lives in Chennai after more than three decades in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and overseas.

How PILs Have Placed the Judiciary Above the Law

In Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India, Anuj Bhuwania examines how the higher judiciary, using PIL as its principal weapon, micro-manages almost every aspect of governance.

In Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India, Anuj Bhuwania examines how the higher judiciary, using PIL as its principal weapon, micro-manages almost every aspect of governance.

Delhi high court: PTI

A comical video of a prominent retired judge of the highest court of the land lambasting politicians in general and prescribing the guillotine for them as the cure for the ills of the country has been doing the rounds on social media. While his sentiment might have struck a popular chord, the polity should be glad that the learned judge did not, before he retired from the bench, actualise his idea through public interest litigation (PIL) – the malleable instrument created by the judiciary to assuage its populist impulse and vent its hubris.

As Anuj Bhuwania underlines in Courting the People, PIL constitutes “a revolution in judicial procedure”, conferring unimpeded and unaccountable authority on appellate judges.

The radical departures from basic legal practises, dilution of rules and improvisation of processes through the instrumentality of PIL has enhanced the powers of the higher judiciary verily to the point that places it above the law itself. In a recent article, Gautam Bhatia, the jurist, underscores the transformation of the Supreme Court to “a great, over-arching, moral and political censor”.

“PIL was a tragedy to begin with”, Bhuwania asserts, “and has over time become a dangerous farce”.

Emerging as an attempt by the Supreme Court to restore its image after its ignominious capitulation to the political executive during the Emergency, PIL, Bhuwania explains, is the court’s response to Mrs Gandhi’s populism.

Anuj Bhuwania
Courting the people: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India
Cambridge University Press, 2017

Declaring the Indian judicial system ill-suited to a country beset by poverty, illiteracy and exploitation, where the majority lived in villages and was ignorant of legal rights, Justice Bhagwati – regarded as the father of public interest litigation in India – saw democratisation of access to courts as the solution. In the Judges Transfer case (1981), he laid down the original PIL manifesto – opening of the doors of the higher judiciary to ‘public-spirited citizens’ wishing to espouse the cause of the oppressed or seeking to enforce performance of public duties; and tailoring of the rules of court procedure for the purpose.

Rajeev Dhavan, the legal scholar, likened this to a new social movement, “led, essentially, by middle-class judges, academics, newspapermen and social activists who feel that the law can be ‘turned around’ to provide solutions for the poor”.

Judges came to see themselves as social activists and not as mere jurists. PIL judgements were to be analysed in terms of social impact and not so much on the soundness of legal arguments. Bhuwania laments the reckless overhauling of legal institutions and the consequent diminution of judicial process ensuing from “a self-conscious departure from the very fundamental principles of modern law”.

Re-invention of the judicial process for PIL permitted institution of a case on the basis of a simple missive to a specific judge or suo moto introduction whence the court took up a policy issue and appointed a preferred lawyer as amicus curiae. Not bound by the parameters of adversarial trials, traditional rules of establishing evidentiary value could be discarded and half-baked data adduced by the court’s appointees could be accepted without question. Periodic – sometimes verbal – interim orders of the bench would send executing agencies scurrying to comply, and impressionist solutions and guidelines issued by the court became binding as law. Court-appointed personnel would monitor implementation of diktats. Omnipresent media would cover all this greedily.

Anuj Bhuwania. Credit: Twitter

In the name of the poor, asserts Bhuwania, “a new kind of judicial process had emerged, entirely court led and managed, sometimes even initiated and implemented by its own machinery.” Illustrating his thesis with several Delhi-based PILs, he focuses not on the outcomes of these cases, but on “the profound injustice of the judicial process adopted in them”.

Courting the People elucidates how the higher judiciary, using PIL as its principal weapon, had practically taken over Delhi by 2006, making it the centre-point of the court’s reformative attention and micro-managing almost every aspect of the mega-city’s governance. Commencing with M. C. Mehta’s petition in 1985 against stone-crushing units allegedly polluting Delhi’s air, the case progressively expanded to take the form of a juggernaut “omnibus PIL” embracing preservation of the Yamuna river, mining in the Aravalli range, protection of the Ridge forest and, famously, Delhi’s ‘hazardous’ large industries and units that did not conform to the Master Plan – notably commercial establishments in residential areas, leading to their chaotic and egregious ‘sealing’.

This case, says Bhuwania, “almost single-handedly led to the de-industrialisation of Delhi” and affected the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families. As in the PIL relating to vehicular pollution in Delhi when thousands of auto-rickshaw drivers were rendered jobless without being heard, and in the one which evicted lakhs of slum dwellers without them being made parties to the case, “it was as if the court had no duty to take care of the workers’ interests”.

He argues further that while PIL fed the reforming zeal of the judiciary, it also provided a pliable weapon to express its class-based neoliberal worldview. Public transport had to pay a far heavier price for Delhi’s pollution than private vehicles; auto-rickshaws were forced to comply with stringent new norms unlike, say, diesel cars; the poor were unjustifiably blamed for environmental and civic degradation and deprived of their homes and livelihoods; workers of industrial units that were forced to close suffered disproportionately as compared to factory owners and scores of flagrant land-use violations – by commercial complexes, farm houses and the like – went unchecked.

“The wrath of PIL is clearly a selective one”, concludes Bhuwania. PIL is a mirror image of the populist contemporary politics it assails, rendered the more dangerous for the absence of any of the protections that circumscribe populist political mobilisation in a democracy.

Govindan Nair is a retired civil servant who lives in Chennai after more than three decades in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and overseas.

Why ‘You Cannot Build Democracy With a Gun’

Vijay Prashad’s The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution provides a helpful interpretation of the processes that have led to the current state of the Arab world, but hazards little about the future prospects for the region.

Vijay Prashad’s The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution provides a helpful interpretation of the processes that have led to the current state of the Arab world, but hazards little about the future prospects for the region.

Residents of a Damascus suburb pick up the pieces after an airstrike. Credit: Bassam Khabieh, Reuters/Files

Vijay Prashad’s The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution tries to detect sparks of hope in the morass of the 21st century Arab world. Despite the author’s inclination to spot ideological markers that augur new beginnings and his conviction that the Arab Revolution “remains alive and well in the hearts of the Arab masses”, there is little to relieve the spectre of unremitting chaos in those unfortunate countries.

In the past fifteen years, four Arab nations – Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen – have been laid to waste as a consequence of theories of regime-change and humanitarian intervention, and a fifth – Egypt – has relapsed to military rule belying the dreams spawned in Tahrir Square in that distant 2011 spring. Prashad, a professor of history and a veteran journalist, meticulously dissects the demise of Arab nationalism, de-mystifying the politics while humanising the tragedy. The blame for the interminable tragedy, he places squarely on Western powers espousing neo-liberal ideas supported by misplaced policies of the Bretton Woods institutions.

Vijay Prashad, The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution, Leftword, 2016

The spearheads of the Arab Spring, Tunisia and Egypt experienced, in Prashad’s eyes, bourgeois revolutions, where unpopular leaders were deposed through mass political action. “The tentacles of elite power remained intact,” however, and both countries today are not significantly different from what they were five years ago. While in Egypt a Western-backed military coup removed the elected Muslim Brotherhood government that had replaced Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia’s elected government was spared that fate by an organised working class whose presence in the streets precluded the sort of crackdown that took place in Egypt. The West allowed the old guard, in a pliable new form, to return in Egypt and Tunisia; but stopped at nothing short of complete destruction of the old Arab nationalists of Iraq, Libya and Syria, even while the Arab monarchies were granted freedom to pursue their own repressive agendas.

Prashad asserts that however real the Sunni-Shia divide is, it does not drive the political turmoil in the region. That narrative is authored by the geo-political rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, spurred by the machinations of the West and Israel. There was no inherent antipathy between the sultans of Arabia and the king of Iran. It was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that posed issues which the Saudi monarchy saw as an existential challenge to itself and as an insidious influence on its neighbourhood. The fact that a Muslim king had been replaced by an Islamic form of republicanism, with the introduction of an elected parliament and the establishment of modern institutions which even allowed women to participate. Early on, the US had decided that its own preservation lay in protecting the Arab monarchs and their oil wealth. For its own interests, the US government deepened the sectarian divide by fanning Saudi fears about Iran.

“Anti-Iran morphed rapidly into anti-Shia rhetoric and practice,” notes Prashad. “It is how Saudi proxies have operated in Syria and in Iraq and why Saudi Arabia began its endless war in Yemen.”

Wahabism would have been unthinkable in the diverse and secular Iraq that existed before the US invasion in 2003. The occupation forces dug into fissures between the Shia and Sunni sects to smother any chance of reconstruction of Iraqi nationalism. The US occupation provided oxygen to al-Qaeda and its ilk, who the locals began to refer to as “the Saudis of Iraq”. Nothing in the soil of Iraq, says Prashad, suggested incipient sectarian brutality; under US sponsorship it developed and bloomed fully. The global war on terror declared by the US and its allies “did not erase the terrorists; it manufactured them”. ISIS dates its origin to the anti-US insurgency in Iraq. The danger of sectarian wars, he points out “is that they have no endgame. They will not end with a utopian outcome. They can end only where life becomes evil.”

Prashad adds that in similar fashion “the West – and Israel – have been content to see Syria bleed and weaken. No outcome is desirable to them.” Since the Syrian government was incapable of fulfilling people’s aspirations, Arab money intervened – backed by the adventurism of Western powers – to play out their own respective agendas. From a political dispute, the Syrian stand-off plunged into a confounding war among a number of proxy armies from neighbouring countries, the al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Kurds and Assad’s forces, with overt and covert gimmicks of Russia, France and the US further poisoning the quagmire.

The Death of the Nation maintains that the lessons from Iraq were not learned: they were repeated in Libya and again, calamitously, in Syria and Yemen. Was there an alternative to regime-change that might have saved these countries from devastation and chaos? If the West and its allies had not chased total victory, could a negotiated settlement have been fashioned to forestall the resultant catastrophe? Bear in mind that bodies like the African Union had offered to mediate; and Saddam Hussein, on his capture, begged to negotiate; while [Muammar] Gaddafi, before he was lynched, pleaded that he be allowed to surrender.

Vijay Prashad. Credit: Twitter

The Arab Revolutions were the outcome of the inter-play of three forces, contends Prashad. First, ‘political Islam’ which had originated as an Islamic component of the anti-colonial struggle. Exemplified in the Muslim Brotherhood, this was also a modernising influence and therefore, distinct from Wahabism. While it remained largely in the shadows, political Islam incubated in mosques everywhere, touching the lives of large numbers and developing a mass base and strong cadre. Second, the “youth bulge” in the Arab demographic presented a phalanx of under-employed, educated young people frustrated at the lack of economic and social opportunity and at the stultifying political atmosphere. The third strand – and in Prashad’s view the most significant – comprised of the organised working class and migrant residents of urban slums, who came together on everyday issues to demonstrate and strike, and to provide the spark for insurrection.

These forces combined to spur large sections of the population to rise against dispensations representing the security state on the one hand and neo-liberal policies on the other, triggering a revolution against economic deprivation and political suffocation. Prashad views the Arab Revolution as a “civilisational” uprising, but he does not offer anything more than anecdotal basis to support his wishful assertion that the memory of the popular upsurge “makes an irreversible slip backward impossible”.

On his extensive travels, Prashad comes upon a cross-section of individuals dreaming of revitalised Arab nationalism “as a cord that binds people across the widened sectarian divides”: Iraqi women’s activist Yanar Mohammed challenges the Americans: “You cannot build democracy with a gun”; journalist and theatre person Hadi al-Mahdi laments: “I am sick of seeing our mothers beg in the streets”; a young al-Nusra militant in Lebanon confides: “If I had a job, I would not do jihad”; Omar Abdulaziz Hallaj, “a wise and distinguished architect from Aleppo” works quietly with others like him to build trust to bridge the sectarian divide and buttress Syrian diversity.

Looking at visuals of the apocalyptic devastation in Aleppo and other parts of the region, one despairs for Hallaj and other voices of reconciliation. The Death of the Nation provides a helpful interpretation of the processes that have led to the present state of the Arab world but – unsurprisingly, for Prashad is no soothsayer – it hazards little about the future prospects for the region.

Govindan Nair is a civil servant who has retired to his books and seaside home after more than three decades in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and overseas.