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Good growth pick-up Silencing guns & rockets |
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Islamic State spreads confusion
Do we deserve the City Beautiful?
Writer who was a conscience keeper
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Good growth pick-up The
news of the economy growing fastest in two years comes as the Modi government completes 100 days in office. The positive economic data will add to the euphoria seen in the stock markets. Foreign investment inflows have continued even though there are serious challenges ahead. The foremost is to keep up the growth momentum. The healthy growth in the agriculture sector, witnessed in the last quarter, is likely to take a hit with the monsoon playing truant, particularly in north-western India. Even if food production causes no worry, high input costs will weigh on farmers’ income and spending. The relentless price rise has made a mockery of Modi’s claims of “achhe din”. Interest rates will not fall as long as inflation remains high. High expectations raised by Modi’s pre-poll promises cannot be kept up merely by talking big. The budget has rightly focused on manufacturing, housing and tourism, but nothing concrete has happened on the ground yet. The government’s financial constraints may not ease if it continues with the UPA’s populist policies. Although the government has pleased foreign investors by opening up insurance, defence and railways, the retrospective tax remains an irritant. By scuttling the WTO talks, the Modi government has hurt its pro-trade, pro-reform and pro-growth image in the eyes of Western leaders. The cancellation of the Commerce Minister’s trip to Myanmar, where India was to sign an investment and services trade pact with ASEAN members, has sent a wrong signal in the neighbourhood. The domestic situation is far from encouraging. With the recent clashes in UP, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the peace is under threat. Power plants are not getting adequate coal supplies. The threat of cancellation of 218 coal block allocations since 1993 looms as industries and banks anxiously wait for the Supreme Court judgment. Too much should not be read into the surge in the GDP numbers as it is due to the base effect. While one can feel satisfied at the latest economic data, the economic cost of a poor monsoon at the individual, society and government levels should be kept in mind.
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Silencing guns & rockets Now
that a long-term ceasefire has come into effect in Gaza, and both Palestinians and Israelis are doing stock-taking at the end of a seven-week war of attrition. Operation Protective Edge began on July 8. It became the longest battle between the two sides in a decade. It left behind over 2,000 dead — primarily civilians, mostly Palestinians; destroyed properties and infrastructure that may take a decade or longer to rebuild; and above all, shattered lives of thousands more who became collateral damage. There were no clear winners in this battle. The ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, is open-ended on contentious issues like opening the land border with Israel, and freeing Palestinian prisoners. Israel will have to continue to contend with
Hamas, albeit a weakened force, controlling Palestine. While people may well wonder why their leaders are declaring a victory, they will, no doubt, be glad that they can now live normal lives. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been blowing hot and cold. He declared that he would, “not tolerate a sprinkle of shooting at any part of Israel”. On its part, Hamas leaders face the challenging task of rebuilding an area devastated by what became a war. For this they need the cooperation of Israel in allowing the shipment of foodstuff and goods into Gaza Strip. Aid donors and the UN agencies are pushing for greater and faster access of all kinds of goods needed to rebuild Gaza. The leaders on both sides played a costly game to see who would blink first. In the process, tens of thousands were displaced from their homes, buildings were reduced to rubble and there was an unacceptable number of civilian deaths. Now even as the two sides prepare for the peace talks scheduled in Cairo a month later, they will have to face the uncomfortable truth that not much was gained and too much was lost in the operation whose stated aim was to end rocket fire on Israel. What couldn’t be done militarily has now come about as a result of the peace deal. Now everyone will hope that peace prevails.
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A friend to all is a friend to none. —Aristotle
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War and the paper trade IT is worth ascertaining what is the position of printing paper in India during the war and how far the Indian paper mills are able to supply the paper that cannot be imported from foreign countries during the war. According to the statistics for 1911, we find there were in all 8 paper mills in India which produced about 60,000,000 lbs. of paper and employed 4,600 persons. This is about 28,464 tons. But India imported from the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Belgium and other countries paper and pasteboard worth over Rs. 118 lakhs of which 68 lakhs were from the United Kingdom, Rs. 20 lakhs approximately from Germany, Rs. 10 lakhs from Austria, Rs. 5 lakhs from Belgium and so on. Admitting that the supply from the United Kingdom will remain unaltered, will India be able to produce the remaining quantity? Unless more paper mills are established and more capital is employed, we can hardly anticipate any great output from Indian mills. There is a paper mill in Bombay which the local paper says is capable of producing paper as good as any imported.
Employment of Indian troops against Germans BOTH Lord Kithchener and Lord Crewe have spoken in the House of Lords in enthusiastic terms of the employment of Indian troops in the European war. The English army in France is to be reinforced by two divisions and a Cavalry division from India. Lord Crewe referred to the wonderful wave of enthusiasm and loyalty that has passed throughout India and justified the employment of the Indian soldiers against Germans, especially as France employed its Algerian soldiers. He further said there would be no possibility of external aggression and internal trouble in India.
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Islamic State spreads confusion Of greater concern today is the rise of the terrorist organisation ISIS which now goes by the name of the Islamic State, a caliphate to boot. Unlike its many previous allies and predecessors, the IS is a different kettle of fish, having captured roughly one-third of Syria and Iraq, which it rules. The IS is buttressed by an estimated army of 10,000 trained men and is buttressed by the American arms it has looted in Iraq and Syria and is well funded, thanks to the oil it controls and sells and the banks it has emptied in captured Iraqi territory, in particular in the country’s second largest city of Mosul. The IS has the ambition of being the ruler of an expanding caliphate with its strict adherence to the Sharia in its most extreme form, executing ‘infidels’ who do not convert and meting out quick executions of those who dare oppose it. It is no secret that circumstances were propitious for the advent of the IS in both Syria and Iraq. In the former, a three-year-long civil war has been raging between the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and his opponent Sunnis of various shades supported on each side by outside powers. President Barack Obama's approach in supporting the moderate opposition has been hesitant and even after the regime crossed his declared red line by using chemical weapons, Washington did not act. In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki believed that his main task was to promote the cause of his Shia majority, apart from centralising power, at the expense of the dispossessed Sunni and the Kurds living in the semi-autonomous province of their own. The disaffected Sunni therefore sided with the ISIS, the lesser of the two evils. After intense American pressure, Mr Maliki has decided to step aside in favour of a more accommodating Shia. Thanks to the vacuum created by lack of a firm US policy — after all, President Obama was elected and re-elected on a platform of ending the America-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — other actors were ready to fill the breach. Among them were the regional actors such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. The first two supported the Sunni opponents in Syria in their different ways on the strength of the American declaration to see the back of President Assad. In the case of Iran, it was supporting the Shia-variant Allawi regime — a minority — of President Assad against the onslaught of a variety of Sunni opponents. And Russia, the main arms supplier to Syria, was there to support the Syrian regime in crucial United Nations Security Council debates. There arrived a point when even the risk-averse President Obama could not turn his gaze away from what was happening in the Middle East. Seeing the extent of IS advances in Syria and Iraq, he was constrained to order air strikes on IS formations threatening the Iraqi capital Baghdad and the Kurdish capital Erbil, with the peshmerga fighters remaining the only effective force against the advancing IS fighters. President Obama is very conscious of its air intervention being the thin end of the wedge. But given the scale of the IS threat, he had few options. In a larger sense, the IS is threatening not merely the peoples of these countries but also essential American interests regionally. And the obvious question that is being mulled in Washington and the chancelleries of other powers is: when will the US be forced to enlarge its air operations to include Syrian air space. In a sense, the IS has succeeded in erasing the borders between Syria and Iraq and has been using the former as its base to store military supplies and men to expand its territory in Iraq. In military terms, it makes sense to attack IS formations in Syria to neutralise the advancing militants. Thus far, President Obama has authorised surveillance flights over Syria to assess IS formations. These developments leave the regional alliances in total confusion. The US and Iran, for instance, are on the same side in fighting off the IS in Iraq. The Kurds have acknowledged that Iran was the first state to send them arms although the US and European powers have also promised them military supplies. On the other hand, the two outside powers are on opposite sides in opposing and supporting President Assad. There are no easy answers either for the United States or the regional powers. The threat of the IS was greatly underestimated and even as the nature of the menace has struck the international community as a bolt from the blue, the world is scrambling for mending a broken Middle East. It seems inevitable that the US will have to expand its air strikes against the IS in Syria. The irony is that President Assad is relishing his moment in the sun and had his Foreign Minister spread out the welcome mat for outside powers to undertake action against the IS as long as it was co-ordinated with Damascus. In other words, he is seeking new legitimacy from the very powers seeking his ouster for the past three years. Circumstances make strange bedfellows, but the future prospect is full of uncertainties and complexities. To complicate the picture further, events in Libya have taken a turn for the worse, with rival militias fighting each other and claiming new territory, including the international airport. The US has accused Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates fighter planes of attacking specific militias in Libya, the kind of outside intervention that cannot be helpful. The United States and the world, it seems, are living by the day in deciding each move. The greatest irony is that a US President who has done everything to resist being drawn anew into a military intervention is being forced to retrace his steps. His new motto is: no US boots on the ground.
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Do we deserve the City Beautiful? During its early days Chandigarh presented an island, worthy of its name, the City Beautiful, amid the haphazard sprawl that constituted urban India. Adequate and dedicated funds flow directly from the Government of India to maintain the showpiece. The residents were spoiled; there were no charges, such as house tax, for the fine facilities that they enjoyed. The quality of life was second to none. Somewhere down the line, the idyllic world of India’s model city has begun to crumble. Realising the commercial potential of their property, house owners demanded that they be allowed to construct over a larger portion of the plot area, and also to expand vertically. Some owners of plots in industrial zones sought permission to carry out commercial activity, implying a change in land use, which Corbusier’s plan prohibited. Conceding some of the demands, the administration opened the floodgates for airy courtyards to be converted into cooped little rooms for tenants, and also for malls to enter industrial belts. The soft approach proved lucrative for the landlords, undoubtedly, but highly vexatious for the silent majority of the population, on account of the resultant traffic congestion. The biggest change in the look of the city came about on account of “a middle class explosion”. The founding architects had planned for bicycle lanes, and provided cycle sheds in institutions such as colleges and government offices. The newly rich society sees no use for the humble bicycle, so the cycle sheds are empty, and the lanes have been taken over by motorists. A sea of automobiles, including the fanciest and the swankiest, now swamps commercial as well as residential Chandigarh, creating massive traffic congestion, and provoking frequent instances of road rage. The city is an example of what the famous economist JK Galbraith termed as “private affluence and public squalor”. Sanitation, which should be the responsibility of the municipal body, is left in the hands of individual residents. In the most posh sectors, residents freely dump household garbage on to the designated green belts. Dumps of decomposing waste pile up into little hillocks, right next to some educational institutions. Stray cattle and dogs now belong to the sectors where they roam. Amid all this, the parks receive manicure, and the roads the tar they need, to maintain the city’s lovely face. Whom can we blame, “us”, the residents, or “them”, the administration? The City Beautiful might revive, provided “we” and “they” act together.
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Writer who was a conscience keeper
Udupi Rajagaopalacharya Ananthamurthy or URA is being missed deeply. He was a force. It is difficult to describe him any other way. As a writer, he had found admirers everywhere. As a teacher, he had an ardent student following throughout his university career. The strength of his political convictions endeared him to leading activists from the farmers’ and Dalit movements and important politicians in the state. He addressed a variety of audiences on hundreds of occasions: book releases, college events, school functions, academic seminars, political rallies, activist gatherings. He unfailingly took public positions on matters of social and political importance. Questioning tradition URA was born to a Madhva Brahmin family in Thirthahalli in 1932. His father, Rajagopalacharya, was questioning of tradition, and the socialist leader, Shantaveri Gopala Gowda, his mentor and friend, were early influences. He completed his BA and MA in English literature at Mysore Univeristy. He later went to the University of Birmingham — on a Commonwealth Fellowship — for his PhD work on the fiction of the 1930s, a period that saw the rise of fascism in Europe. He was at Birmingham at a time when Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, the founding figures of cultural studies, were active in their work. URA had interacted with them and even assisted in their educational work among the working class children. After finishing his PhD in 1966, URA returned to teach in Mysore. He wrote his first novel, Samskara, in 1965 while he was a student in England. The novel met with widespread critical acclaim for its daring expose of the degenerate aspects of Brahminical orthodoxy and for pointing at the value of individual creativity and freedom. The novel, which bears traces of French existentialist thinkers like Camus and Satre, is an exemplar of literary modernism in Kannada, which departed from the romanticism of the earlier Navodaya (New Dawn) school of writing. Released in 1970, Samskara, the film adaptation of the novel, which pioneered new-wave cinema in Kannada, was banned initially. URA’s subsequent literary and political concerns reveal a shift: They engage the philosophical problems of liberal social reform and also begin to explore resources within tradition to engage with modern questions. URA often called himself a “critical insider.” Chroniclers of progressive thought in Karnataka will recognise the hugely important contribution of URA’s writing and social activism. Ram Manohar Lohia, the socialist thinker, whom he had met in the early 1950s, was a formative influence on him. He noted on many occasions that Lohia mattered to him more than anyone else. This acknowledgement becomes manifest in URA’s steadfast commitment to caste equality, to the primacy of Indian bhashas for intellectual work, to the necessity of a decentralised polity. Of late, he strove to demystify the monstrous appeal of “development” and alert us to the enormous sacrifices that it demanded from the tribal and socially disadvantaged communities. Gandhi’s ideals of sarvodaya (welfare of all) and small technology continued to be relevant. Discussions of religions excited URA. He often complained about the poverty of Indian social science: “How can you say you understand Indian society without engaging the religious imagination?” Like Gandhi and Tagore, he refused to view India as a nation, and wished to see it as a civilisation instead, as the latter view allowed for a plurality of faiths to live with each other. By extension, a secular politics would fail to adequately engage such a multi-faith society. While he always stood by our secular Constitution, he did not hesitate to embrace ambivalence. In the mid-1980s, the Karnataka Government decided to ban the practice of nude temple worship by Dalit women in Chandragutti, Shimoga district, as it was seen as an exploitative practice. URA was alone in asking that the devotees be allowed to practise their religious faith even when it seemed offensive to modern sensibilities. The state was only obliged to ensure that commercial exploitation and violation of the devotees’ privacy did not occur. Another instance of the ambivalence of his thought: URA was consistent in his support for affirmative action for Dalits, lower castes and tribals and for their freedom to choose professions. At the same time, he did not hesitate to say that belonging to a caste meant inheriting unique skills and knowledge whose disappearance in modern times must be seen as loss. Again: he saw formal literacy as necessary for work and life in contemporary times but felt that the so-called illiterates were also the repository of valuable knowledges, which would be lost with formal education. Many have noted their exasperation at such ambivalent positions: Tell us what you want – this or that?! I have never been able to tell if his ambivalence troubled him. But it did allow him to keep public discussions charged and vibrant. URA was a tireless advocate of the importance of Indian bhashas for creative thought and effective politics. He and many of his writer colleagues outside Karnataka like Nirmal Verma, Dilip Chitre, MT Vasudevan Nair, to name a few, did much to foreground the literary and political importance of bhashas at a time of increasing dominance of the English language in India’s intellectual life. I have heard former students of URA use the metaphors of “sweeping brilliance” and “firebrand” to describe his lectures at the English Department in Mysore University, where he taught till his retirement in 1992. I grew up listening to stories about the many virtues of URA from my father, who had been his student in Mysore in the early 1960s. During URA’s visits to our home when I was a school boy, my sister and I would be packed off upstairs, as no interruption was welcome during a serious conversation. My rights of being part of the company came in much later when I was in college. From then on, I was fortunate to get to know him closely. Generous presence Krishna Masadi, who had made URA’s third novel, Avasthe, into a film in the mid-1980s, adapted his second novel, Bharathipura, into a television serial in 2003. He had been adventurous in casting me, a complete novice at acting, in the lead role of Jagannatha, a modern-day iconoclast who takes on untouchability and religious superstition and comes to later doubt if he had understood those problems correctly. While I was feeling unsure about my acting talent, URA had said: “You look like Jagannatha.” He had been generous in his reassurance. With the support of my university, I designed and co-ordinated an extensive visual documentation of URA at his home in Bengaluru over 10 days between April 2012 and May 2013. In the mornings, he shared his views (in Kannada) on great Kannada writers in the 20th century such as Kuvempu, Bendre, Shivarama Karanth, Masti Venkatesh Iyengar, P Lankesh and Poornachandra Tejasvi. In the evenings, I interviewed him in English on his experiences of childhood days and adulthood and his views on Indian politics, language, and modern Karnataka. He had just started on dialysis at his home at the time our recording sessions began. The dialysis breaks during the recordings might as well have been coffee breaks. Not once did he show fatigue or make me feel that I was disturbing him. His talks on the writers from Karnataka moved seamlessly between personal reminiscences, critical comments and literary evaluation. They also show his enchanting speaking style and the broad canvas of his thought. I cannot remember ever being bored in URA’s company. His being fully present whenever he spoke, he could hold listeners spellbound. At the annual Kannada Sahitya Sammelana in 2002, attended by thousands of people, he gave a captivating presidential address where he argued that modern India had wished to satisfy three kinds of hunger: hunger for equality, hunger for spirituality and hunger for modernity. URA’s talks on the Kannada writers were telecast as eight one-hour weekly episodes on Bangalore Doordarshan between June and July this year. He was pleased about the telecast and wished that literary critics reviewed the episodes. He had also felt happy that many could now imagine what his classroom lectures were like. Select facts about the writer, poet and “critical insider” UR Ananthamurthy (1932-2014)
Padmabhushan (1998) Jnanapith (1994) Positions Vice-Chancellor, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam (1987-1991) President, Sahitya Akademi (1993-1998) Publications Fiction Novels Samskara (The Last Rites, 1965; Translated by AK Ramanujan, 1978) Bharathipura (1974; Translated by P Srinivasa Rao, 1996) Avasthe (The Predicament, 1978) Bhava (Being/Becoming, 1994; Translated by URA and Judith Kroll, 1998) Divya (2001) Collections of short stories (Six volumes) Yendendu Mugiyada Kathe (The Never-Ending Tale, 1955) Prashne (The Question, 1963) Mouni (The Silent One, 1972) Akasha Mattu Bekku (The Sky and the Cat, 1981) Suryana Kudure (Stallion of the Sun 1995; Translated by Narayan Hegde (1999)) Pacche Resort (2011) Poetry (4 volumes) Mithuna (1972) Ajjana Hegalina Suttugalu (1989) Translations into Kannada Lao Tse’s Tao Te Ching (1994) Selected Poems of WB Yeats (2008) Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (2009) Selected Poems of Wordsworth (2009) Selected Poems of Brecht (2009) Plays Avahane (1968) Non-fiction (11 volumes) Prajne Mattu Parisara (Consciousness and Milieu, 1974) Bettale Seve Yaake Kudadu? (Why not Worship in the Nude? 1996) Films based on URA’s fiction Samskara (The Last Rites, Dir. Pattabhi Ram Reddy, 1970) Ghatashradda (The Ritual, Dir. Girish Kasaravalli, 1977) Bara (Kannada)/Sookha (Hindi) (Drought, Dir. MS Sathyu, 1982) Avasthe (The Predicament, Dir. Krishna Masadi, 1987) Diksha (Hindi) (The Initiation, Dir. Arun Kaul, 1991) Mouni (The Silent One, Dir. B.S. Lingadevaru, 2003) Prakruthi (Nature, Dir. Panchakshari, 2014) Questioning spirit The writer is professor of social science, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He has translated URA’s short story, Bara (Drought). He is presently at work on two books: A book of autobiographical interviews that he did with URA and a book on the cultural politics of development in old Mysore state.
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‘Lawrence is one of the greatest minds of England’ Why did you choose to study English literature? What was your PhD research on? That is in itself a story. First, I wanted to work on DH Lawrence. But the novelist, Malcolm Bradbury, who was initially my PhD guide, said that a lot had already been written on him, and suggested I find a subject on which nobody had worked. Your research was on the literature of the 1930s. Why the 1930s? Because it was the most enigmatic period in European history, Hitler was rising to power, Mussolini was rising to power. Democracy seemed to be not working. . . My dissertation was titled, Politics and Fiction in the 1930s: Studies in Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood. I chose these two writers because they were friends, they were together in Cambridge. They went to the same public school, and they began to write together. And Upward had influenced Isherwood in the early days. The theoretical question for me was: How a certain kind of feeling of frustration with Marxism, with the Communist Party, led Christopher Isherwood into Vedanta, into Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, whereas Upward remained a Marxist, but gave up the Communist Party. What did DH Lawrence mean to you? Lawrence is one of the greatest minds of England. It was he who discovered the American genius, not anyone else. And he was ruthless. He made many enemies. He was a very quarrelsome man. And he made Bertrand Russell want to commit suicide. He criticised Russell in such terms. Lawrence has been accused of having a fascist streak. That’s not true. He was a much bigger man than that. The greatest fiction of the 20th century is still Lawrence’s: Women in Love. The Rainbow. My admiration for him is still intact. He influenced me as a writer. Did you like living in Birmingham? Oh yes. I don’t know about the present situation but I liked that country. It had a certain sense of fairness. I liked going to pubs, talking to the working-class people, and they would wonder at me, because here was a Black man, a coloured man who knew Shakespeare. Chandan Gowda interviewed URA at his home in Bengaluru
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A simple answer is, because I failed in chemistry. And my father's dream of making me a mathematician did not succeed. I failed also because I had got involved in politics. That was a turning point for me. In one year, after my intermediate school, I read many of the world's classics, like Tolstoy, Gorky, Shelley, and a lot of progressive literature. I then decided to do English literature.