The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Indian agriculture in global vortex
by Balraj Mehta
THE agricultural sector in India too is being dragged into the vortex of the liberalisation-globalisation process. This is indeed the most disturbing feature of the second phase of the on-going market-friendly economic reforms which the government, headed by Mr A.B. Vajpayee, has decided to implement. Its political popular implications for the BJP are bound to be as adverse as they have been for the Congress party which initiated under duress this reform process.

MIDDLE

A cat called Ginger
by O. P. Bhagat
THERE were many trees near my daughter,s apartment. So the first animals I expected to see in Brookline were squirrels. In one or two of her letters she had written about them. Those American squirrels were larger, much larger, than their Indian cousins, she said. I was curious to see them soon after my arrival.

POINT OF LAW

SC banishes refugees of poverty
by Anupam Gupta
IT is without doubt one of the most astonishing judicial decisions of the new millennium. A decision which, though a dramatic benchmark in the jurisprudence of poverty, actually reflects the poverty of jurisprudence. Overturning without discussion one of the finest judgements of the Supreme Court of India, and taking upon itself a burden that no court in the world has ever presumed to discharge, a three-member Bench of the Supreme Court speaking last Thursday banished all slums from the nation’s Capital, purportedly for ever.

DIVERSITIES — HUMRA QURAISHI

“Towards Freedom” under scrutiny
by Humra Quraishi
NEEDLESS to state that when there is little trust in the very men who are governing the country, every move or action undertaken by them is bound to be held in suspicion, as though something is getting pulled out from that “agenda bag”. Yes, I am referring to the latest move of the Indian Council of Historical Research to suspend publication of two volumes on the freedom struggle, written by historians Sumit Sarkar and K.N. Panikkar.

75 years ago

February 21, 1925
Lord Lytton as Viceroy
WE are not greatly perturbed by the statement of the Delhi Chronicle, which is no longer an official organ, that Lord Lytton is likely to succeed Lord Reading as Viceroy. So many such statements have been falsified in the past that it will be no matter for surprise if this one will share the same fate.

Trains are for burning

ANOTHER railway accident involving a high-speed passenger train, the second in the past few days. Like the earlier one in UP, in the latest one too unwary travellers were burnt to death. Railway compartments, whether fully reserved sleeper coaches or those in the crowded slow trains, threaten to become moving death traps, giving no chance to the hapless victims to escape horrible death.. Explanations will come thick and fast and so will a slew of promises to shut out the possibility of a repeat tragedy. Of course, that is a knee-jerk reaction, rehearsed and repeated a hundred times in the recent past. From the Minister down to high profile officers and their minions, everyone will issue statements dripping with simulated sympathy or rush to the spot to supervise relief work. All this until the next accident and the next publication of the names of victims. This time though there was a shocking twist. Unidentified officials, senior enough for newspapers to publish their reaction, darkly talked of sabotage. “We are not ruling out sabotage or mischief,” they said sagely. The sabotage theory is the latter-day version of “God alone knows” and frees the officialdom of both responsibility and a stricken conscience. But this line of defence exploded within minutes. A news agency man, who rushed to the burnt train and talked to those lucky enough to duck death, quotes them to say that a group of young men were drinking liquor, smoking and, well, fighting before the fire broke out. Liquor spilled on the floor and a carelessly tossed cigarette butt did the rest. This sounds very plausible as alcohol is highly combustible and a drunken youth loses his fear of death and also the sense of proportion.

There is a well-practised drill after each such tragedy. An enquiry, a preliminary report and a final one, but no action against the guilty. Take the Saturday mishap. Fire was first noticed in a sleeper coach, which means that there was a ticket collector either there or in any of the vestibuled others. Why did he not stop the boys from drinking, which is strictly banned in trains? It is possible that it is a daily occurrence and the junior official must have thought since drinking in the train did not result in a conflagration yesterday, it would not today either. This is so typical of the Indian mindset and every accident is, in a manner of speaking, “performed”. There is a cover-all excuse and that is to assign the death and destruction to “human failure”. It was human failure which let two trains collide head on in West Bengal’s Kaisal station, killing nearly 300 passengers. There was much gnashing of teeth in the first few days, climaxed by the suspension of five very senior officers. But less than a year later, all of them are back in business. What is more, the enquiry is still on and the railways invariably keep the findings under wraps. After the Khanna shocker when an express train ploughed through a derailed passenger train, the then Minister unveiled a technology-based plan to forever prevent accidents. The central idea was to provide communication facilities within each train and between trains. Obviously, Punjab Mail was not considered deserving of entering the safety norms of the new millennium; the chances are that only those trains in which VIPs like MPs travel are blessed with satellite communication facilities.The Railway Board chairman has claimed that there are 182 training centres, and 52 of them concentrate on safety aspects. Frequent accidents prove that the training system is faulty. Or, is it that long years of indifference and frequent mishaps have made the workers insensitive to this vital aspect?

Ghalib's haveli and beyond

ON the 131st death anniversary of Asadullah Khan "Ghalib" on Tuesday the Lt-Governor of Delhi symbolically started the process of restoration of the haveli in which the 19th century poet spent the most creative years of his life. Had the countless admirers of his poetry from among his contemporaries thought of preserving the house in which Ghalib lived as a place of literary pursuits it may not have fallen into the hands of a coal merchant. And had a few public-spirited individuals not sought the intervention of the judiciary for turning it into a memorial to the greatest Urdu poet ever, the haveli may still have been used as an outlet for selling coal. Those entrusted with the task of restoration believe that years of neglect and abuse have caused irreparable damage to parts of what was once a sprawling and magnificent structure. Now that the project for the restoration of the most famous haveli in Gali Qasim Jan has been formally launched the Delhi Government should waste no time in implementing the second part of the Delhi High Court's order regarding the renovation of the grave of Zauq, who was Ghalib's contemporary and an equally gifted poet. The court was understandably shocked to learn that the grave of Zauq in old Delhi had been turned into a public urinal. The fate that befell the haveli of Ghalib and the grave of Zauq is a telling comment on the indifference of the people to the need to preserve their rich legacy. The indifference can be understood in the context of what can be called a "surfeit of goods", but it should never be condoned. As a result of the collective apathy to preserving the country's rich cultural heritage a large number of "moveable properties", including manuscripts, items of clothing and warfare, priceless jewellery and statues, currently adorn the museums of culturally more aware nations across the globe.

The country can easily become the top tourist destination provided public and private enterprise join hands in salvaging what can be saved from among the countless monuments in all parts of the country before seeking expert help for marketing India. However, keeping in mind the lack of infrastructure and official apathy to the need to identify at least the top heritage sites in the country selling India may appear to be an impossible assignment to handle. Only last week Mr Herbert Stovel, a programme director with the International Centre for the Study of the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Properties set up by UNESCO, expressed surprise during a visit to Mumbai over India's indifference to identifying sites which can be accorded the status of world heritage. Smaller countries in the region like Nepal and Sri Lanka have shown far greater initiative in responding to UNESCO's offer of help in the matter of preserving what are considered world heritage cities. Galle and Kandy in Sri Lanka and Patan, Bhaktpur and Kathmandu in Nepal are among the cities which have been accorded official recognition under the terms of the World Heritage Charter. But India has not sent the name of even a single city for inclusion in the world heritage list. Why? It would literally be a "monumental mistake" to ignore Mr Stovel's observation that "in the ultimate analysis it is the people who make or break their heritage". Is it too much to expect that the restoration of Ghalib's haveli would prove to be a turning point and the response of the people to the need to preserving the rich culture and heritage of India would henceforth be positive?

POPULATION POLICY LACKS SUBSTANCE
Political safety net not enough
by Ashish Bose

AT the height of the Emergency, the government announced its National Population Policy on April 16, 1976. It was an excellent policy, very ably drafted by Dr Karan Singh, the then Minister for Health and Family Planning, but for a fatal error — it permitted compulsory sterilisation. To quote the policy:

“We are of the view that where a state legislature decides that the time is ripe and it is necessary to pass legislation for compulsory sterilisation, it may do so.”

It was not so much this policy as the body-snatching methods adopted by the sycophants of Sanjay Gandhi, the extra-constitutional authority during the Emergency, which led to the fall of the Indira Gandhi government.

The Janata government of Morarji Desai which came to power in 1977 quickly changed the nomenclature “Family Planning” to “Family Welfare” and announced a new population policy on April 28, 1977. It was made clear that “We are totally against any legislation for compulsory sterilisation either at the central level or by the states”. The policy quoted the President’s Address to Parliament which said:

“Family planning will be pursued vigorously as a wholly voluntary programme and as an integral part of a comprehensive policy covering education, health, maternity and child care, family welfare, women’s rights and nutrition.”

Indira Gandhi’s population policy statement was of profound importance for political demography. It clearly recognised the prospect of the states which were performing well in population control facing “reduction of representation in Parliament while those with weak performance in family planning tend to get increasing representation”. To remedy this anomaly, the policy decided that “the representation in the Lok Sabha/and the state legislatures will be frozen on the basis of the 1971 Census until the year 2001”. The Morarji Desai government rightly accepted this part of the old population policy and the subsequent governments also accepted this position.

The Swaminathan Committee which submitted its Draft National Population Policy to the Narasimha Rao government on May 21, 1994, observed:

“As of now, the seats in Parliament and legislatures are frozen till the year 2001. Consistent with the goals of this policy, it is proposed to extend the period of frozing of seats up to the year 2011”.

As the country gets ready for the 2001 Census of India, the prospect of taking note of the new population figures, which will reflect the differential growth rates of population among the states, and in particular, the sharp contrast in the rates of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in comparison with Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan (what we call the North-South demographic divide), assumes great urgency. The Vajpayee government suddenly woke up and announced a new National Policy on Population on February 15, 2000. The policy says:

“The 42nd Constitutional Amendment has frozen the number of representatives in the Lok Sabha (On the basis of 1971 Census levels), and is valid until 2001. In order to enable state governments to fearlessly pursue the agenda for population stabilisation, this freeze must be extended until 2026.”

Thus the Vajpayee government has more than endorsed at least one recommendation of the Swaminathan Committee. Of course, the necessary constitutional amendment will have to be passed by Parliament. If this is not done, Uttar Pradesh will be rewarded with 100 seats in the Lok Sabha (instead of 85) and all the southern states will lose a number of seats, reducing their political leverage. The Vajpayee government has done well in ensuring this political safety net.

Leaving aside the well-being of our politicians, what about the economic well-being of one billion people? What does the new population policy propose?

The policy announced on February 15, 2000, has immediate, medium-term and long-term objectives. It spells out 14 national socio-demographic goals. In addition, 12 strategic themes are listed. It proposes a national commission on population chaired by the Prime Minister, similar state commissions chaired by the respective Chief Ministers, a coordination cell in the Planning Commission and a technology mission within the Department of Family Welfare.

The policy aims at achieving the socio-demographic goals by 2010 when the total fertility rate will be brought down to the replacement level, and ultimately population will be stabilised by 2045.

The main strategy behind the new population policy seems to revolve round strengthening the existing Department of Family Welfare, obviously with an enhanced budget. But the Swaminathan Committee had put forward a strategy which obviously is not acceptable to our bureaucracy. The philosophy behind the Swaminathan Committee’s recommendations centred round relating population to the eco-system (in particular, to water and energy), to the basic needs (package approach and not isolating family planning), to social development (in particular, gender issues) and to a decentralised model of development through panchayats, zila parishads and nagarpalikas (after the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution).

The committee had, in fact, recommended the downsizing of the Department of Family Welfare and merging family planning with health. It wanted a new mechanism — “Population and Social Development Commission” which “will function in a manner similar to the other commissions of the government with executive powers such as the Atomic Energy and Space Commissions”.

Recommending a restructuring of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the Swaminathan Committee had observed:

“The principles of integration and decentralisation envisaged in the policy call for a restructuring of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The target-oriented approach of a centrally sponsored/vertical programme has to yield place to a people-oriented decentralised approach... there will be one health care package of MCH (maternal and child health) and family planning as well as the other centrally sponsored programmes...”

It is worth noting that the Swaminathan Committee’s recommendation about giving up targets was made in May, 1994, while the United Nations Population Conference in Cairo, which recommended the abandoning of targets was held in September, 1994. Such is the power of imported goods, including imported ideas, that the targets were quickly given up from April 1, 1996, while the Swaminathan Committee’s report has been kept in cold storage. And now almost everybody (including demographers) wants to jump on the bandwagon of reproductive health (in India, mercifully, it is called reproductive and child health), such is the power of foreign funding.

But is it possible to have only reproductive health without having health? What about the health of the breadwinner who dies of malaria or TB or any other communicable disease? Will it not shatter the health of the entire family whose survival will be at stake? Is it not true that India’s First Five Year Plan (1951-56) had put family planning in the basket of health, and under misguided foreign advice, family planning was put in a separate basket from 1966 with big money pumped in? And after Cairo we are asked to go back to health — mind you, reproductive health (which includes safe abortions and control of AIDS).

Of course, we must save our women in the reproductive age group and see that the “unmet” need for contraceptives (the new international jargon) is met by the government. But our villagers ask: “What about the unmet need for drinking water, primary health care and schools?” Our field work shows that there is a virtual collapse of primary health care. All over India, water is getting more and more scarce. All our political parties have promised safe drinking water to our people for the past 50 years, a promise which remains unfulfilled. Thanks to the aggressive campaign on AIDS control launched by international agencies, we are assuring safe sex to the people through condoms.

We come back to political demography. As we have consistently pointed out ever since 1985, our population problem will not get solved unless we succeed in the four BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh). In the long-term projections of India’s population (up to 2051) made by the Population Foundation of India, in Kerala Punjab and Tamil Nadu, the growth in the number of people is likely to be near zero by 2021, followed by several other states, but in the four BIMARU states population is likely to increase even during 2046-51.

In fact, these four states will account for 66.3 per cent of the total growth of population of India (as against their share of 42 per cent during the 1981-91 decade). In other words, the domination of the BIMARU states will vastly increase in demographic terms right up to 2051. Unless we address ourselves to the fundamental issues, the population problem will not get solved. The new population policy seeks solutions within the four walls of the Department of Family Welfare at Nirman Bhavan. Will the political safety net alone protect future governments? The basic needs of the people must be met. Family planning must be a part of the basic needs package. Then alone will it succeed.

(The writer, a former member of the Swaminathan Committee on Population Policy (1994), is honorary Professor, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi).

Indian agriculture in global vortex
by Balraj Mehta

THE agricultural sector in India too is being dragged into the vortex of the liberalisation-globalisation process. This is indeed the most disturbing feature of the second phase of the on-going market-friendly economic reforms which the government, headed by Mr A.B. Vajpayee, has decided to implement. Its political popular implications for the BJP are bound to be as adverse as they have been for the Congress party which initiated under duress this reform process.

The first step in this direction has been to lift what are called quantitative restrictions as per the norms laid down by the World Trade Organisation on the export and import of agricultural commodities, including foodgrains. WTO norms imply that exports and imports may be regulated only by fiscal instruments such as Customs duties rather than administrative controls. But Customs duties will have to be at “reasonable” levels and eventually phased out.

The imposition of Customs duties or import duties may protect to some extent the Indian large-scale corporate industry. But fiscal instruments cannot protect agriculture at its present condition and stage of development in India. Even the developed countries hold different positions on the US scheme for the liberalisation of farming and marketing of its products. An agreement on agriculture under the WTO auspices eluded the WTO ministerial meeting at Seattle and will be a subject of sharp controversy and hard bargaining in the next round of consultations and negotiations at Geneva. There was, therefore, neither any compulsion nor was it desirable in these conditions for the government in India to liberalise import-export of agricultural commodities, including foodgrains. But this has been done as part of the obligation under the bilateral agreement signed by the government in India with the USA.

The liberalisation-globalisation of trade in agricultural commodities, which is being pressed hard by the USA, is based on the assumption that international surpluses are and will always be available for their import, if and when necessary, by all countries. Significantly, in making this assumption, the USA gives prominence to private holdings of foodgrain stocks for global trade. Indian people are aware of the hazards of dependency on foodgrain imports from private sources abroad, especially the USA. The conditions attached to the PL 480 supplies of foodgrains from the USA in the sixties were very adverse, both in economic and political terms, for India. Food security is indeed of paramount importance for India for economic as well as political-strategic considerations and has been regarded as a national commitment so far. This commitment has been diluted by the NDA government.

The position of Indian agriculturists is gravely stretched at present. The Green Revolution, so-called, in some parts of the country has so far achieved only near self-sufficiency in respect of “effective” demand in the market. Nearly one-third of the population in India still suffers from debilitating malnourishment for want of adequate foodgrains at affordable prices in the market. The extension of the Green Revolution from the assured irrigation area to the rest of the 70 per cent rainfed cultivable land requires a special effort and large investment. But little has been done in either direction.

It is not fortuitous that deceleration in the rate of growth of agriculture in the nineties of the last century has coincided with a sharp decline in public investment in irrigation and land improvement. In spite of good monsoons, the average annual rate of growth of crop production has been only 1.7 per cent, which is lower than the rate of increase of population. The upshot is that the available supplies of agricultural commodities, in particular foodgrains, are not enough to meet the subsistence needs of the growing population in India. Export surpluses in a genuine sense cannot obviously be generated in this condition. Yet agricultural commodities, including foodgrains, have been exported from time to time. The foodgrains buffer stock has come down, sometime heavily, so that it has subsequently been replenished by imports. The spurt in the prices of agricultural commodities in the domestic market too has been sought to be moderated by their import. The logic of import-export trade in the case of agricultural commodities just does not work in favour of the domestic economy and consumers.

The vulnerability of Indian agriculture and 70 per cent of the people of India who depend on it for livelihood at extremely depressed standards has by now become stark. The liberalisation-globalisation prescriptions have not been as vigorously applied so far to agriculture as industry. But the problems of rural development and mass welfare, treated as secondary, have added to the problems related to the efficient economic growth process and the making of the Indian economy internationally competitive. The trends in respect of investment and production and productivity, which have already surfaced in the case of Indian agriculture, are indeed disturbing.

A shift from food crops to non-food crops has been taking place. This has serious economic and social implications. The production of coarse cereals and pulses too is declining. The production of local varieties of rice and wheat has suffered a setback. High-yielding varieties, which require the application of costly imported inputs, have become predominant. With the rising prices of inputs for increasing agricultural production and productivity, marginal and small farmers have been placed at a clear disadvantage in their economic activity and social relations in the rural areas. Hence their migration to urban areas on an increasingly large scale in a desperate search for some gainful work and social identity.

Populist policies inspired by narrow political-personal advantages, which have great fascination for politicians when in power transitorily, cannot, however, be of much help. Populist schemes, poorly conceived and badly implemented, are still being launched from time to time even though their political appeal has ceased to be convincing. The universal crop insurance scheme is a case in point. The move to revamp the foodgrains public distribution seemingly in favour of the poor has turned out to be a hoax. The talk of giving priority to the growth of agriculture and rural development has gone no further than niggardly increases in budgetary allocations even as the large shortfalls in the expenditure and gross under-utilisation of allocated funds have been scandalous. This has not been due to administrative inefficiency so much as because of hectic efforts to catch up with the logic of market-friendly “efficient” growth path.

Security of tenure for farming, let alone land redistribution, is no longer admitted in official policy-making as a prerequisite for overcoming bottlenecks to higher production and productivity in agriculture. Business corporations are taking over tracts of agricultural land under contract farming. The rich gentlemen-farmers have built large landholdings for “modern farming” on lease from small farmers in Green Revolution areas. Having grown economically powerful and socially influential, they are now asserting their claims in the political arena and official policy-making. They are emerging, together with the urban big business and speculative traders, as pillars of the market-friendly economic policy. It is not surprising that the timid suggestion by a BJP leader for levying tax on farm incomes has been sharply rebuffed and quickly withdrawn.

A cat called Ginger
by O. P. Bhagat

THERE were many trees near my daughter,s apartment. So the first animals I expected to see in Brookline were squirrels.

In one or two of her letters she had written about them. Those American squirrels were larger, much larger, than their Indian cousins, she said. I was curious to see them soon after my arrival.

But for two or three days I did not spot any. Perhaps they were too shy to crawl around. Or maybe the July heat was keeping them up in the cool green of the trees.

“Look behind you, Daddy,” said my daughter as I was coming one morning up the passage that led to the side entrance of the apartment house.

Hoping to see a squirrel, I stopped. But what I saw was a cat — a brown cat. Its colour was very much like that of the cat which once used to visit our flat in Delhi. But this one, though rather lean, was bigger and taller. Its hair was thicker too.

While I stared at it, the cat stood almost still. It betrayed no fear of a stranger and made no effort to slink away.

“Its name is Ginger...” This was from our neighbour Larry. He showed himself in the entrance like a compere at a stage or in a television show. “And it is 17 years old.”

From its slow movements the cat did look old. But the confident tone in which he pronounced its exact years made me wonder if Larry was its godfather or had issued its birth certificate.

“How do you know? I asked, trying to sound curious rather than questioning his knowledge.

“It belonged to a couple who lived around here,” answered Larry. “When they left, they left it behind.”

He added that some of the neighbours now took care of the cat. It often came to his apartment, and he gave it something to eat.

Meanwhile, the cat had gone away. But after a day or two it came again. Our apartment door was open at the time. Like an old acquaintance it walked in.

It moved slowly about on the floor. All its cat-like quickness or agility seemed to have ebbed away with age. I doubted if it would jump at or run after a mouse if one came there.

But it had a certain beauty and grace in the way it moved. As I watched it, I was reminded of the charming slow-motion shots of humans and animals in some movies.

I showed the cat a cookie and placed it out at the door. I thought that it would go there to eat. But it kept pacing slowly and gracefully about in the room.

In a hurry to go somewhere as I was, I picked up the cat — it was so light for its size — set it gently near the cookie and locked the door.

I saw the cat quite a few times again. I watched its slow movements almost like a child. It seemed to have accepted or got used to my gazing at it for as long as it was there.

One evening my daughter was going for laundry in a nearby building. She put out a chair for me on the lawn on one side of the apartment house.

I sat there looking at the trees in a corner and listening to the bird sounds that came from among the leaves. Then I noticed that the cat was also relaxing under the trees.

It reclined on the grass quietly. It showed no interest in the bird sounds or the sounds that came now and then from around. Perhaps it was thinking of the things past as old people sitting alone often do.

Soon the cat also noticed me. It got up and came up to my chair and settled near there. Quiet as before, it turned and lay on its back.

While it lay, it moved its forelegs in the air, slowly but almost playfully as a kitten does when in a playful mood. It went on doing so for some time.

Was it glad to be with one who, like it, was old? Or did it mean to tell me that at heart one is not as old as one looks?

SC banishes refugees of poverty
by Anupam Gupta

IT is without doubt one of the most astonishing judicial decisions of the new millennium. A decision which, though a dramatic benchmark in the jurisprudence of poverty, actually reflects the poverty of jurisprudence. Overturning without discussion one of the finest judgements of the Supreme Court of India, and taking upon itself a burden that no court in the world has ever presumed to discharge, a three-member Bench of the Supreme Court speaking last Thursday banished all slums from the nation’s Capital, purportedly for ever.

“There is no short term or marginal solution to the question of squatter colonies,” the same court, assembled in a larger, Constitution Bench, had said in 1986, “nor are such colonies unique to the cities of India. Every country during its historical evolution has faced the problem of squatter settlements, and most countries of the underdeveloped world face this problem today.”

What is of crucial importance to the question of “thinning out the squatter colonies in metropolitan cities (continued the Constitution Bench in Olga Tellis’ case) is to create new opportunities for employment in the rural sector, and to spread out the existing job opportunities evenly in urban areas. Apart from the further misery and degradation which it involves, eviction of slum and pavement dwellers is an ineffective remedy for decongesting the cities.”

So long as thoroughgoing land reforms, regrouping and (re)distribution of resources does not take place, the Bench continued, Third World countries can go on increasing their production till hell freezes but hunger and poverty will remain. “Malnourished babies, wasted mothers, emaciated corpses in the streets of Asia (it said) have definite and definable reasons for existing.”

Neither the prose nor the logic touched the court last week as it peremptorily ordered central, state and municipal authorities to clear out all slums from Delhi within eight weeks on pain of contempt. And in a near-Malthusian strain, whipped them for condoning “slum creation” rather than performing their obligation of “slum clearance”.

The density of population per square kilometre (said the Bench) cannot be allowed to increase beyond the sustainable limit. “Creation of slums resulting in an increase in density has to be prevented.” Rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternative site is “like giving a reward to a pickpocket.”

The poor as thieves or pickpockets! But that is not all. The poor as landgrabbers as well. The “promise of free land, at the taxpayers’ cost, in place of a jhuggi (said the Bench last week) is a proposal which attracts many land grabbers.” Large areas of public land, in this way, are “usurped for private use free of cost.”

The remedy (decreed, not merely proposed): forcible vacation of existing slums, regardless of the social costs, and no more of those ugly spots.

From Olga Tellis in 1986 to the slums of Delhi last Thursday, the reversal, nay inversion, of judicial priorities is too glaring not to be noticed. And too fundamental to escape the criticism of history and social science.

It would be natural, says Prof Amartya Sen in his “Poverty and Famines”, published in 1981 and reprinted last year, to be impatient with long-winded academic studies on ‘poor naked wretches’ with ‘houseless heads and unfed sides’, to use King Lear’s graphic description. And it may also be the case, as Lear told the blind Gloucester, that a ‘man may see how this world goes with no eyes’. There is indeed much that is transparent about poverty and misery.

But not everything about poverty, he adds, is quite so simple. The causation of poverty raises questions that are not easily answered. While the ‘immediate’ antecedents of poverty may be obvious, the ‘ultimate’ causation is too vague and open-ended a question to be settled fully, though there are various intermediate levels of useful answers that are worth exploring.

Unperturbed in its own wisdom, last week’s Supreme Court order raises no questions about how slums, like poverty, come into being and explores no answer at any level. Nor does it show any impatience with long-winded academic studies for it takes note of none.

Responding to an environmental public interest litigation touching five major metropolises, it betrays rather and almost unwittingly an approach akin to what Michael Jacobs, in the latest Oxford publication on “Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice,” would call “environmental imperialism”. The approach or view that sustainable development is not simply an environmental concept but a general one, describing a new goal of economic and social (and, by implication, political) life.

Anticipating, as it were, this kind of approach, leading Indian scholar and eco-activist Anil Agarwal regretted, more than a decade back, that “there is too much of a policeman’s attitude” in our understanding of the relationship between environment and the development process.

Many people, he said, prefer to call the urban migrants (or slum dwellers) economic refugees from the countryside. “But to my mind, many of them are really ecological refugees, displaced by dams, by mines, by deforestation, by destruction of grazing lands, by floods, by droughts, by urban expansion, and what not.”

Economic or ecological, it is these very refugees whose eviction, in their lakhs, the Supreme Court of India ordered last week.

“Towards Freedom” under scrutiny
by Humra Quraishi

NEEDLESS to state that when there is little trust in the very men who are governing the country, every move or action undertaken by them is bound to be held in suspicion, as though something is getting pulled out from that “agenda bag”. Yes, I am referring to the latest move of the Indian Council of Historical Research to suspend publication of two volumes on the freedom struggle, written by historians Sumit Sarkar and K.N. Panikkar. These volumes were part of ICHR’s ongoing project “Towards Freedom” but earlier this month their publication stood suspended on the ground that they were being scrutinised “in the routine course”. But there are not many who can sit reassured with this theory and view it as another of M.M. Joshi’s moves to bring about a complete saffronisation in these very bodies and also the so-called sidelining of the “Leftist scholars”.

And though the Chairman of ICHR, Mr B.R. Grover, issued a statement, clarifying ICHR’s stand but the issue stands out, especially in view of the fact that eversince M.M. Joshi got saddled in the HRD Ministry his one point programme has been the appointment of men who belong to his ideology and to Right wing political thought.

I really don’t know where will we reach with this ongoing communal stress. In fact, whilst going through Sudhamahi Regunathan’s just released book — “Faith and Conversion: Donyipolo Movement in Arunachal Pradesh” (Har Anand) one is almost shocked to read that the particular state is turning into a battlefield — what with Muslim, Christian and RSS men trying to outdo each other and yet smugly we sit here, distracted by the political moves of the men in the Capital. In fact, this book emphasises and highlights the manner in which the state and its people are being pulled apart by religious groups and yet our priorities are such that right now we have on our agenda whether a particular film is going to be shot and on which particular ghat.

Books on Bhagat Singh

Before moving ahead I must mention that another book gets released here, on February 25. And this is Kuldip Nayar’s book — “The Martyr: Bhagat Singh — Experiments in Revolution”, to be released by the Prime Minister. Remarkable is the way ironies ruled Bhagat Singh’s life — though he did not believe in the cult of the bomb and pistol yet he was arrested for throwing a bomb in the Central Legislature Assembly and later he was hanged, in 1931, for killing a police officer. In fact he was only 23 years old when he was hanged but lived and died like a man — a real man, that is. As he himself said, he was “ trying to stand like a man with an erect head to the last, even on the gallows”.

Another book on another freedom struggle hero — Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is also all set to hit the stands. Titled “Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: Relevance to Contemporary World,” edited by S.R. Chakravarty and Madan C. Paul, it will be released here on February 22.

The cultural scene and more

On Friday evening The Crafts Museum came alive with a remarkable photo exhibition by Stephen Huyler. Its very title — “Meeting God: Elements of Devotion in India” is enough to signify that Huyler has captured the very ethos and the sacred rituals of Hindus, Sikhs and Jains. “Prayers are pervasive in India, influencing every moment of the day — from rising early to acknowledging the sacred elements at dawn, to honouring the spirits within the tools with which one works, to praying to the deities that protect the home from harm at night.

The photographs convey the breadth and vitality of the reverential experience in India: within the house, on the roadside, in temples, and at festivals. They enable us to see directly into the heart of belief: that essential moment of worship known as darshan, literally translated as ‘seeing and being seen by God’”. The US ambassador to India, Mr Richard Celeste, who was also present on the occasion, took on where Huyler had ended. Emphasised that values were greatly present in American homes too, yet few were aware of it.

And the good thing about the exhibition is its very outreach “to engender in these people of South Asian descent a sense of pride in their own heritage”.

Ironical isn’t it that it has taken an American photographer to point that out to us. At this crucial point when we are all busy attacking each other, in the name of religion.