A blow for free speech

Here's an excellent piece by V Venkatesan breaking down the legal details associated with the FIR (and subsequent summons) issued against Ashis Nandy. It is a refreshing change from the usual equivocating defences of Sections 153A and 153B of the IPC (which criminalise "promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony" and "Imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration" respectively) on grounds of maintaining civil harmony, national security, religious comity and what-not. Perhaps the best objection to these provisions is that of P Ananda Charlu, former President of the Indian National Congress:

"[S. 153A is] a dangerous piece of legislation and has been impolitic (among other reasons) by necessitating government to side with or to appear to side with one party as against another. In my humble judgment, it will only accentuate the evil which it is meant to remove. Far from healing the differences which still linger, or which now and then come to the surface, it would widen the gap by encouraging insidious men to do mischief in stealth…"

The point is similar to that made by Louis Brandeis when he noted that "sunlight is the best disinfectant"; the criminalization of politically unpalatable forms of speech merely pushes their expression underground, and thus prevents the State from taking positive steps to redress the grievances which lie at their root. More notable is the fact that Ananda Charlu was making his point in 1886, well before Brandeis, and at a time when freedom of speech in India was virtually non-existent. Ironically, not withstanding India's independence and the constitutional guarantees for the protection of speech, we now seem to have moved further away from Charlu's position than closer to it.

Thank God for Earthquakes?

Simon Jenkins, in this fine Guardian piece, analyses how the earthquake in Xinjiang is a foreign policy blessing for many:

"You don't have to be cynical to do foreign policy, but it helps. A sigh of relief rose over the west's chancelleries on Monday as it became clear that the Chinese earthquake was big - big enough to trump Burma's cyclone."

Add to that China's relatively good behaviour, and then, Jenkins notes, the Western prophecy (of sit-and-wait-it-out-till-democracy-magically-blossoms) miraculously self-fulfils itself:

"To add to the relief, Beijing was behaving better than it has over past calamities. Since this might have been thanks to the west's "positive engagement" with China's dictators - even awarding them the Olympics - we could possibly take credit from the week's tally of disaster. Sorry about that, Burma."

Some of it is knee-jerk comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the piece is informed, at its heart, by a profound dissatisfaction with the motives of Western mandarins:

"After days of hand-sitting and abuse-hurling, the thesis that "diplomatic pressure" is going to burst the dam of Burma's hostility seems naive. I have read not one observer who believes this regime will admit aid workers, while many accept that it would be unlikely to contest a dump-and-run airlift under appropriate air cover. If the west refuses even to plan such an operation, it would be more honest to admit to doing nothing and stop counterproductive abuse of the regime.

What is sickening is the attempt to squeeze a decision not to help these desperate people into the same "liberal interventionist" ideology as validates billions of pounds on invading, occupying, destabilising, bombing and failing to pacify other peoples whose governments also did not invite intervention."

This deserves to be read.

Expose: India is classist

Vir Sanghvi, in this quite hilarious article, stumbles onto a shocking fact about India:

"We are still shamelessly class-ist. We regard certain professions as so contemptible that any reference to them is treated as an insult."

And in what context did he reach this radical conclusion?

"[MP from Kerala] Abdul Wahab was supposed to board an Indian Airlines (now called Air India) flight at Kozhikode airport on Tuesday. He arrived at the aircraft late, escorted by the Indian Airlines manager. The aircraft’s pilot began shouting at the manager and complaining about the delay.

Why there was a delay is a matter of some controversy. According to Wahab, he had reached the airport on time, and had waited patiently in the VIP lounge to board. He suggests that Indian Airlines may have taken too long to emplane him. The pilot initially claimed that he had arrived late and expected the aircraft to be held up for him, but this claim has now been tempered.

What happened next, however, is clear. Wahab told the pilot to stop shouting at the Indian Airlines manager and said that he was no more than a ‘glorified driver’."

Hit the link for the best of what passes for class analysis in the mainstream media nowadays. I'm going to find myself a hockey stick.

Free speech for non-citizens?

There's one aspect of the recent furore about the treatment of Taslima Nasreen which I believe hasn't received sufficient attention: the question of her citizenship. Unlike the producers of Jodha(a?)-Akbar, for example, she is not a citizen of India. She is a visitor at the courtesy of the Indian government, and as such is subject to restrictions on the enjoyment of certain rights which Indian citizens can avail of freely. To argue that what the Indian government has done in her case is unconscionable (and I refer here to her being asked to leave, not about her 'house arrest') is to take a position on an issue about which reasonable disagreement can exist.

The Constitution's founders, in their wisdom, founded the republic on the following basis:

'We the People of India having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign Democratic Republic and to secure to all its citizens...liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship' (the Preamble to the unamended Constitution)

The limitation of the enjoyment of the right of free expression was quite deliberate, as may be seen from the wording of Art. 19(1)(a):

'All citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression'

Understanding the Constitution as it stood in 1950, therefore, it appears quite evident that certain freedoms are not automatically available to non-citizens of India. Parliament may, at its discretion, have extended these freedoms to such individuals, but this is not mandated by the Constitution. Thus, there's nothing immediately unconscionable about restricting the speech and expression rights of Taslima.

I don't think it should automatically follow, either, that the Indian government has an obligation to extend these constitutional freedoms to non-citizens in general, and to Ms Nasreen in particular. An Indian's citizenship is a valuable part of her identity, we have certain peculiar rights and obligations to enjoy and uphold by virtue of our constitutional position in the Indian state (since the Union of India rests on the endorsement of we, the people). To extend the enjoyment of the rights available to Indians to everyone else wholesale is to depreciate the value which one's own citizenship has. We have certain rights by virtue of our Indian-ness; either we have been born to the country, and have political, cultural and/or social ties (however distant) to it, or our parents do, and we enjoy the same ties by virtue of our relationship to them, or we have demonstrated a commitment to the idea of India by living there for a certain period of time (these are the requirements of Art. 5, and the Citizenship Act). Ms Nasreen is a political refugee, and it is quite a matter of pride that she chose India as her base away from persecution (as did the Tibetans, but more about them a little later), but she chose to live here at the pleasure of the government, and on the terms which it imposed on her, as on other visitors. In this respect, she is different from those who protested her presence in the country: the government is constitutionally obliged to respect their wishes, but it is not so required to protect her speech rights. When caught between the demands of (some of) its constituents, and the interests of a visitor, the government chose the former. It can well be debated whether this was the right postion to take, this is a matter on which reasonable disagreement can exist. It is unfair, however, to hold that there is only one position which the Indian government could morally take on the issue, to do so is to ignore the ethos of our Constitution: that being Indian means something special, and the enjoyment of the rights of Indian citizenship are a mark of distinction in this respect.

This is not to appear to be a rabid nationalist, far from it. Cosmopolitan arguments carry a good deal of influence with me, and I cannot deny that I have fully enjoyed the protection of good laws in the countries I have lived in as a guest. However, cosmopolitanism is not a universal value, it is possible to have reasonable (and morally acceptable) disagreement about whether a State should be cosmopolitan or not (e.g. Bhutan), and the degree to which it should be accommodating of the rights and interests of others who are not part of its political constituency. In light of India's experiences with imperial domination not too long ago, it is perhaps not surprising that its citizenship requirements are so onerous. Perhaps some day this will change, but that day is not here yet.

A word about Tibetan refugees and speech rights: I am a strong critic of the government's policy to bar Tibetan refugees from protesting in Delhi. This needs a longer discussion than a post-script, but I will outline my position in brief here: given the strength of the Tibetan government-in-exile's association with India, and the invaluable contributions of the Tibetan community to the State and the regions where they have settled, it is unfair to deny them the protection of the rights which other citizens enjoy. Questions of line-drawing, and substantive distinctions may well arise, but I think the point should not be over-emphasised too much. It would be tough to compare the contributions of the 100,000-odd Tibetan settlers in India with those of Ms Nasreen, and not just for reasons arising out of numerical superiority.

A short requiem for Indian civilization

In which civilized country does this happen?

'Seventy-five-year-old Rajpati Devi of Kharagpur died on the streets of Calcutta early on Thursday, after being denied entry into a government-run hospital through the night.

The liver cancer patient died unattended after being referred by Nil Ratan Sircar (NRS) Medical College and Hospital to Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, where she was refused permission to even enter the premises.'

But all is well, for the babus are in action. Or are they?

' “We have not received any complaint yet. I will get in touch with the institute director and ask for a report once we get the complaint,” state health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra told [Telegraph] Metro late on Thursday.

The vice-chairman of the institute’s governing body added that the health department would “definitely look into the matter” once it received a formal complaint.'

I understand how well-intended concerns about the use of the label 'civilized' to create distinctions between nations are, but sometimes politically correct squeamishness just has to take a back seat to proper indignation. Can anyone, with a straight face, claim the mantle of civilization for India anymore?

PS - this post has been festering for a while, mainly in response to this, this, and this. If, as Emerson had us know, the true test of civilization is the kind of man it turns out, we've come a long, long way from the India which produced Tagore.

A New Bengali Radicalism?

Ashis Chakravarti, in this Telegraph column, wonders if the Nandigram protests in Kolkata provides 'two simple messages':

'One, Bengal at last perhaps wants an alternative to the CPI(M). Two, the search for it cannot end in a return to the Seventies'

I'm not sure if this is true for all Bengalis, but as an analysis of the change in attitude towards violence among the bhadralok (especially those who had openly embraced militancy during the Naxalite period), the column makes for interesting reading. There's also more to the Ghare Baire reference in the piece than Chakravarti lets on, but that's matter for a different post.

Celebrating ad hoc justice

I've been hearing many positive comments about stuff like this, and the public's reaction to the Rizwanur case in general. The middle class Bengali, tamed to within a shade of domestic felinity, now fully occupies himself with illusions of reclaiming the tiger's mantle. I am reluctant to join in the general enthusiasm for the popular reaction in cases like this, for much the same reason as some have problems with celebrating the 'indomitable spirit of Bombay'. I fear that we are becoming a nation of people who seek justice in the details, for whom instances of individuated claim resolution are sufficient to quench the desire for redressal. Instead of diverting our energies towards systemic reforms, to use such tragic cases as rallying points to press for an end to police impunity in general, we pat ourselves on our back for our candle-lit vigils, and our 'hard-hitting' editorials.

We had found ourselves in a great moral moment last month: we had the opportunity to not let the tragic death of Rizwanur go unatoned, and to use the tremendous groundswell of sentiment to actually press for radical change in the way we are governed. Instead, the CBI files a case against Todi, the CM calls on Rizwanur's family, and we are easily satisfied. Come tomorrow, and it's back to business for us, and for the defunct, dysfunctional bureaucracy which holds us in its thrall. Through our callousness, we are all complicit in the deaths of a thousand Rizwanurs. And no amount of lighting candles is going to change that.

Rethinking West Bengal's caste-free status?

Yogendra Yadav calls the Left Front out for double-speak and hypocritical commitment to rights-talk in this Indian Express op-ed today. Pointing out the inconsistency in the CPM's actions, and it's positioning as "a party that swears by human rights and lofty democratic ideals lies vast hypocrisy", Yadav also notes that Nandigram isn't the first time something like this has taken place in West Bengal:

"The story of Alipurduar goes back to January 10 1987, twenty years before Nandigram. On that day, UTJAS had organised a rally of what they estimated to be about 50,000 people in Alipurduar, the headquarters of Cooch Behar district. As the rally started, they noticed something unusual: The police was nowhere in sight. Soon the rallyists found themselves surrounded by and under attack from the armed cadre of the CPM. The rally was dispersed as unarmed protesters were beaten and chased. The police surfaced, only to arrest the victims, once the party cadre had finished their job.

Note the parallels between Nandigram and Alipurduar: The Party faces a political challenge, decides to nip it in the bud and executes an onslaught in sync with the police and administration. The only difference this time was that there was unexpected resistance. And that an anti-SEZ movement makes more news today than a dalit movement did twenty years ago. There were no Gopal Gandhi or Tanika and Sumit Sarkar then to point out that the emperor had no clothes."

Nothing new here for those who've lived in West Bengal, but what is even more interesting is what follows after:

"This gap between the CPM’s preaching and practice did not surprise me. I have been looking at Christophe Jaffrelot’s research on the social profile of MLAs in India. His analysis shows that the proportion of upper caste MLAs is on the decline all over the country since the 1960s. There is only one exception: In West Bengal the proportion of upper castes has increased in the state assembly after 1977, after the Left Front came to power. A coincidence? Not if you calculate the caste composition of successive Left Front ministries: About two thirds of the ministers come from the top three jatis (Brahman, Boddis, Kayasthas). Perhaps you did not notice that West Bengal was the last major state to come out with an OBC list to implement Mandal. You might say, the CPM believes in class, not caste. Fair enough, but then why is the CPM in Delhi so aggressive about championing Mandal? Why does it present itself as more Mandalite than thou?

Or read the data supplied by the West Bengal government to the Sachar Committee. With 25.2 per cent of Muslim population, the state government has provided just 2.1 per cent of the government jobs to Muslims. West Bengal has the worst record of all Indian states in this respect. Gujarat has just 9.1 per cent Muslims and has 5.4 per cent Muslims among government employees. The irony, of course, is that the CPM was the first party to come out with a statement demanding implementation of the Sachar Report!"

Yadav's conjecture is a serious one, in essence arguing that in spite of the pride it takes in its apparent castelessness and commitment to secular tolerance, the West Bengal government is far worse off in respect of increasing opportunities for Muslims and lower castes than other states, even ones which have a proven track record of ill-treatment of minorities. This also turns much of the received political wisdom about caste and religion in West Bengal on its head, for it challenges the commonly held notion that institutional discrimination against lower castes and Muslims in Bengal is hardly prevalent.

Postscript: More on caste in Bengal:

Anjan Ghosh, "Cast(e) out in West Bengal" (Seminar)
Sandip Bayopadhyay, "Bengal's Caste Prejudices" (The Statesman)
VB Rawat, "Dalits Ask for Justice in West Bengal" (Countercurrents Newsletter)
Sukanta Bhattacharyya, "Caste, Class and Politics in West Bengal: Case Study of a Village in Burdwan", Economic and Political Weekly, January 18, 2003 (noting that, based on the study of data in one village in this district, "the numerical strength of the lower castes and lower classes has been established at the level of panchayat and other organisations. But at the leadership level, concentration of power is found in the hands of the middle peasantry", and further, "At the level of the elected village body one would expect a communist party to have a high percentage of agricultural labourers and poor peasants [Lieten 1992]. My findings show an absence of this group in the party level, which does not signify any radical restructuring of the rural power structure.")

Good old-fashioned whining

Two Harvard-educated Rhodes scholars lay out their tale of great woe and deep misfortune. My heart bleeds for the battering they have had to take at the hands of cruel Fate:

Oxford Blues (do read the comments, they are often more sensible than the rest of the piece)

Moral of the story, don't go to Oxford (or any graduate school) if you are:

a. Ill-prepared for independent work, high expectations, a limited income and poor weather (aka "real life")
b. Can't bear to be away from Mum and Dad holding your hand, paying your bills and cooing to reassure you that everything will be alright
c. (from personal experience) Prone to liver trouble, or other alcohol-related occupational hazards

Dalits at a crossroads

The Frontline runs an interesting analysis of why Dalits still have to face terrible atrocities on a regular basis. Significantly, it provides statistics to show how serious the problem is -

"The 2005 Annual Report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs states that a crime against Scheduled Caste (S.C.) communities is committed every 20 minutes in the country. It records that 26,127 cases of atrocities against S.C communities were reported last year. In 2004, the recorded number of crimes against Dalits was 26,887. The 2005 report states that there were 1,172 cases of rape of Dalit women, 669 cases of murder, 258 cases of kidnapping and abduction and 3,847 cases of causing hurt. There were 291 cases under the Protection of Civil Rights Act and 8,497 cases under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act."

The article notes that this happens in spite of adequate legal provisions for the protection of Dalits against violence and discrimination, and in contrast to the otherwise effective implementation of affirmative action policies -

"Successive governments have brought in legislation and programmes to protect the rights of Dalit communities. The safeguards enshrined in the Constitution stipulate that governments should take special care to advance the educational and economic interests of Scheduled Castes, that untouchability is unacceptable and that all Dalit communities should have unrestricted entry in Hindu temples and other religious institutions. There are political safeguards in the form of reserved seats in State legislatures and in Parliament. The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, are designed to advance these safeguards. But prejudices die hard.
The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, is considered to be one of the most powerful pieces of legislation of its kind. But its implementation is unsatisfactory. The police, whose ranks are filled with members of the upper castes, are often reluctant to file cases under the Act, which provides for heavy punishment not only for the offenders but also officials who fail to take action. Often, the police take advantage of the victims' ignorance and file cases under the milder Indian Penal Code. Only 8,497 cases of the 26,127 cases registered in 2005 came under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which clearly shows the trend. Instances of the police refusing to register cases or even to accept complaints are widespread."

Perhaps most interestingly, the article puts a large amount of blame for the culture of toleration for Dalit mistreatment at the feet of Dalit leaders -

"The divided Dalit movement appears to be at a crossroads, with many of its leaders across the country losing their credibility. The "leaderless" violence in Maharashtra, many observers said, was a reflection of this reality. Fakir Bhai Vaghela, vice-chairperson of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, pointed out that while violence in any form could not be condoned, it should make Dalit leaders study the sentiments that caused it. "The sense I get is that [the] Dalit masses are getting increasingly upset at politicking between the leaders of the community and they want these leaders to come on a common platform that would advance Dalit interests in a united manner," he told Frontline. A number of small Dalit formations work in distant villages to get grievances redressed at various levels and to bring about a qualitative shift in the Dalit perspective about liberation. It is these groups that keep the flame alive."

One area in which the article does not venture is to examine the link between the hawk eye politicians and political activists keep on the enforcement of affirmative action policies, but the relative complacency they display for the enforcement of civil rights legislation (which are intended to help those Dalits who are truly unempowered). Is the problem of victimised Dalits in India today compounded by problems of class, in addition to the historical social disadvantage they have faced?

Letter against Sec 377

Here's a petition signed by several Indian notables urging abolition of Section 377 of the IPC, which criminalizes "unnatural offences" and provides that

"Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section."

Look out for the preface, written by Amartya Sen, who draws an interesting parallel

"(1877), as it happens, was the year in which the American Civil War began, which would ultimately abolish the unfreedom of slavery in America. Today, 145 years later, we surely have urgent reason to abolish in India, with our commitment to democracy and human rights, the unfreedom of arbitrary and unjust criminalization."

A little more eyewash

And now for the UPA government's latest instalment of cosmetic lawmaking. After reservations for OBCs, it is now the turn of cash incentives for marrying beneath one's caste. Apart from the moral concerns involved, continuing to perpetrate caste hierarchies by rewarding upper castes, for example, it is also unclear as to what exactly this "incentive" is meant to achieve. Given that such measures already exist (in Gujarat the same amount is disbursed, with little known effect upon caste discrimination), the effectiveness of this initiative is quite dubious.

For those who take issue with my terming reservations for OBC "cosmetic", please see Dipankar Gupta's outstanding article in the Hindustan Times.

Pakistan in the War on Terror

The NY Times calls Pakistan's involvement in the war on terror "a double-edged sword" (registration required). Noting the involvement of the July 7 bombers with Pakistan, and the gratitude expressed by Blair for the assistance extended by the Pakistani authorities in foiling the recent air terror threat, the article concludes that -

"But for Pakistan, success of this kind is a double-edged word. It allows Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to exhibit the country’s importance as a front-line ally in the global war against terror. But it is also a tacit acknowledgment of what a nexus Pakistan remains for would-be terrorists from halfway across the world."

Questioning whether the failure to combat terror operations from its soil is an intentional failure on the part of Pakistan, the article notes that -

"Still, Pakistani officials say they have been reliable allies against terrorism. It is impossible, they say, to keep tabs on everyone operating in difficult terrain in a country twice the size of California. “So there are maybe 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, or 500 people like this — we don’t know,” said a senior Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “Whenever we get information like that, we do get hold of them.”"

There's some more about the exact links some recently apprehended terror suspects had with Pakistan, and how terrorists slip easily into Afghanistan from Pakistan. All in all it's not an earth-shatteringly revelatory piece, but a good place for someone unfamiliar with the issue to get an update on Pakistan's role in the war on terror.

"The Myth of the New India" - NY Times Op-ed

An excellent op-ed piece by Pankaj Mishra in today's New York Times (registration may be required). Calling out the foreign media, and sections of our own, for incessantly crowing about India's financial and economic success, Mishra points out that

"But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country's $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106 (emphasis added)

Nor is India rising very fast on the report's Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day."

Noting that democracy is the only truly effective redressal mechanism which the people (i.e. the majority of India) have at their disposal is the power of the vote, Mishra also reminds us that

"But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism"

Go read it.

Visualizing Development

Google has brought out a new tool which allows you to look at how countries of the world perform on various development indices. It's available here. Once you're done fiddling around with the software (and I'm guaranteeing that you will mess about with it, it's very cool), do a comparative analysis of India, Mexico, South Africa, China and Brazil. Note that on almost all of the indices of development (except economic growth, where it's second, and life expectancy, second last after South Africa) India performs pathetically compared to these nations with whom we are supposedly similarly positioned.

Caste in the Indian Media

Siddharth Varadarajan writes about the upper caste bias in Indian English language media here. It tells a sad story, but I had two reservations (no pun intended) about the piece -

a. It limits its analysis to the English language press. It would be interesting to see if this is a pan-Indian media problem, or limited only to this segment of the journalistic community. While still unfortunate and deplorable, it would not strike me as surprising that the English language media reflected the biases of the majority of their viewers (urban, upper middle-class etc)

b. The bias in reportage could also be explained by the real fear of the media's hiring policies being affected by the government moves on private sector reservation. As it would seem hypocritical to protest against reservations in the private sector, yet represent voices in favour of reservations in education, a broad policy of representing anti-reservation views seems to make sense purely from a selfish perspective.

Go read the piece anyway, it makes a vitally interesting argument.

Reservations: A Civilized Debate

Here is Pratap Bhanu Mehta's letter of resignation from the Knowledge Commission, here's Yogendra Yadav's response, and Mehta's rejoinder. As Dilip D'Souza points out, the exchange is almost unique in the exceptionally polite manner in which it is carried out.

Both the letters agree on a single point - that the new reservations for OBCs are merely an extension of the politics of gimmickery which has come to symbolise affirmative action policy in India today. My position on reservations is here, and this latest drama has done little to change my views, except perhaps to strengthen my objection to reservations of all forms.

Is Calcutta Ugly?

A very strange article in the Telegraph, commenting on efforts to create beautified zones in certain sections of Calcutta. The author asks, first -

"What sort of an eye would find Calcutta beautiful? Some would argue that such a gaze would have to be blinded with love. Or else, foreign enough to find in bad taste and dreariness exotic forms of the postcolonial. There is a certain slant of light in which a garbage heap, a roadside urinal, clouds of exhaust, a shopping mall, NRI apartments, or even a flyover might become radiant with beauty."

Thereby suggesting that s/he has already pre-judged the question of Calcutta's "beauty". S/he then claims that -

"At the core of Bengali public culture lies a form of irredeemable bad taste. This is as evident in the heaped-up gaudiness of the Marble Palace as in the ridiculous statues of regional heroes that have replaced the city’s imperial pantheon."

I don't understand how the Marble Palace, originally conceived as a private pleasure house, rather than a facet of "Bengali public culture" proves the argument (later examples include the New Market, designed by a decidedly non-Bengali architect R Bayney of the East India Railway Company). While one may criticise Bengal (and Bengalis) for a roster of vices, poor cultural taste isn't usually high on that list. In the final paragraph -

"It is surely significant that there has evolved no “Bengal School” of architecture worth speaking of, apart from the still-born Tagorean whimsies in Santiniketan. So that beautifying Calcutta is merely an exercise in conserving its colonial buildings — architecturally, the only good things to have happened to it."

Err, as anyone who's lived in North Calcutta would attest, there are some beautiful houses there, as also schools, University buildings and the like, which could do with some government upkeep, and are just as deserving of praise as the "colonial buildings". Perhaps the author should get out more often?

A Giant Falls

John Kenneth Galbraith is dead. Some of the best obituaries I found honouring him are here -

a. The NY Times' highly comprehensive account of his life
b. A students' perspective
c. A view from inside the Beltway
d. A look back at Galbraith's life
e. The Express on a "good man"

And to get a glimpse into his wonderful mind, see the KSG Forum's "The World According to Galbraith", recorded when he was 93.

The Devil in Delhi

Anjali Puri indulges in some very middle-class soul-searching (assuming middle incomers do have such things as souls) about Delhi in the latest Outlook.

"Political mecca, consumerist haven, now Metro chic... Delhi's all that. But it's also crass, crude and callous, a city sans a soul."

The arguments for this are based on oft-repeated standards -

1. The "maleness" inherent in Delhi's attitude to life, reflected in the treatment of the disabled, and of women
2. The power-hunger which plays out at every level in the city, and the culture of power agglomeration which everyone hates and indugles in at the same time -

"This world revolves on who you know and where you fit, and the disease has long spread to the rest of the capital, where name-dropping is both art form and survival skill. From chowkidars to builders, the city is adept at sorting out its occupants by income, social status and professional standing—to work out how they can be used. Yesterday's objects of desire are taken off guest lists within a day. (Ask Natwar Singh or Brajesh Mishra.) Name plates and visiting cards displaying self-generated titles such as Former Minister, Former MP, Former Principal, Former Chief Justice of India and Retired Ambassador abound. Loss of status is the Delhiite's ultimate nightmare, and he'll hang on to it with bleeding nails, if required"

3. The lack of "cultural manners" among Delhi-ites, and the general lack of sensitivity displayed to fellow users of common spaces

4. All this, combined with its nightmareish urban planning, make it a uniquely unliveable destination for most

"But the lasting image of the Delhi neighbourhood is not the park, but the street, clogged with the signs of the city's growing numbers and affluence...cars, chauffeurs, security guards baking under a summer sun...says writer Mukul Kesavan..."Delhi sometimes feels like a crude boom town—like Topsy, it has 'just growed', but with no settled norms for urban living." Would its citizens help each other, you wonder, if the city was submerged, Mumbai-like, by floods, or run for safety while their neighbours drowned?

The comparisons with other Indian cities are fascinating, of course. Compared to Bombay's significant slum population, for example, how many of Delhi's residents have to live above malfunctioning drains and drink contaminated water every day of their lives? Compared to Bangalore's "invisible" poor, how many Delhi-ites have to live a migrant shifting lifestyle, moving from construction site to site with their families in order to make a living? How many of the South's metropolises can lay claim to accommodating people from all over the country, each to his own greed, with equal opportunity? Once established in Delhi, how many inhabitants are in a mad rush to get out, like Calcutta, where only the dogs aren't potential exiles?

Having spent a significant portion of my life in the city of gin-drinkers, I can vouch for how difficult it all seems to the thresholder of India's elite, with our most valuable izzat being threatened and challenged at every stage. Yet, how much worse is Delhi than other Indian cities its size? Bombay, Chennai, Calcutta and Bangalore have spawned and inspired generations of homegrown creative elites, whose imagery has influenced our perception of these cities. Delhi, a city of permanent migrants, on the other hand has rarely been effectively chronicled by anyone native to it in the recent past. Is it fair to judge Delhi this harshly on our own ignorant biases, then?