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Creating wealth without Justice

India has been in the news for its robust economic performance and for growth despite the recent global recession. The recent Indian Premier League suggests unbelievable investor confidence and provides great advertising opportunities, fantastic revenue, world-class sport, extraordinary entertainment, phenomenal television ratings and immense customer satisfaction. Yet, the incredible indices of development in India mask the inequity in the country and the human cost of the nation's progress. For millions of Indians hunger is routine, malnutrition rife, employment insecure, social security non-existent, health care expensive, and livelihoods under threat. The vibrant economy, “the shining India,” is restricted to the upper classes, while the majority in Bharat eke out a meagre existence on the margins.Read more on The Hindu National Daily Creating wealth without Justice 
 

Walking With The Comrades

Across the Indravati river, in the area controlled by the Maoists, is the place the police call ‘Pakistan’. There the villages are empty, but the forest is full of people. Children who ought to be in school run wild. In the lovely forest villages, the concrete school buildings have either been blown up and lie in a heap, or they are full of policemen. The deadly war that is unfolding in the jungle is a war that the Government of India is both proud and shy of. Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well as denied. P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister (and CEO of the war), says it does not exist, that it’s a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised for it. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.
and read more...  Walking With The Comrades


Maoists as part of the solution

The Maoists are trying their level best to prove right Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's assertion that they represent India's biggest internal  security threat, blowing up rail tracks, killing policemen and eliminating class enemies in the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Precisely because they have escalated matters to the level of an internal security threat, there is hope that this will lead the polity to address the gaping deficit of democracy and development in large swathes of rural India , in whose mulch of misery and oppression the seeds of Maoism germinate. In this sense, the Maoists are an instrumentality of India's development, political and economic, albeit a self-destructing one.
The suicide earlier this week of Kanu Sanyal , a founding leader of India's Naxalite movement, chronicles the foretold death of Maoism in this country. The violent uprising in Naxalbari in 1967, led by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, taking inspiration from Mao's ideas, led on to the formation, in 1969, of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist ). The party splintered, over time, into a number of groups and factions, some of whom realised the futility of relying solely on violence and left the underground to take part in mainstream politics. Kanu Sanyal, at the time of his death, led one such group. Some factions that continued to believe in the armed overthrow of the state as the only solution to poverty and underdevelopment formed the Communist Party of India (Maoist). They have been mobilizing and arming marginalized communities, exploited and oppressed by sections of mainstream India, to wage war against the Indian state

This is sufficient for one stream of liberal opinion to lionise them as the only true champions of the oppressed in the country. They are willing to overlook the violence carried out by the Maoists, against sundry policemen, villagers whom they believe to be police informers, members of other political parties, chiefly other communist parties the Maoists disagree with.
Now, the point must be conceded that violence by itself makes a movement neither good nor bad. We have all been led to hail some very violent acts as great, in a historical sense. Alexander's conquest of the known world, the American revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution , the Allies' defeat of Hitler, the Vietnamese defeat first of the French and then of the Americans, various episodes in India's own resistance to British rule, ranging from the 1857 revolt to the Quit India movement of 1942. India's most popular philosophical tract, the Bhagavad Gita, urges violence. Krishna urges a reluctant Arjuna to overcome his revulsion at the thought of turning his destructive prowess on his own cousins, guru, uncles and sundry other relatives. The point is not violence, per se, but to what end that violence is practiced.
Violence suffuses life in rural India, some latent, a lot of it structural and quite a lot more, murderously bloody. When the forest department declares an entire village as illegal, because it allegedly stands on forest land, evicts the inhabitants, and then, a year later, refortifies the land as revenue land, fit for habitation, and proceeds to parcel out the land to cronies of the local political and bureaucratic elite, how do we describe the treatment meted out to the original inhabitants of the village, dispossessed by the state in the name of the law? Tender loving care? If these villagers resort to violence, they will become law-breakers, and put behind bars. If they petition the higher authorities, these higher authorities will ask for a hefty bribe and do little. If they go to court, the case will come up for hearing after most of the petitioners have lived out their lifespan. Into this vacuum of viable choices, the Maoists saunter in. Every Maoist advance is a tombstone over a fatal failing of democracy.

Why should the Maoists become a self destructing force? This is because the Maoists see no value in the institution of constitutional democracy and see violence and overthrow of the state as strategic goals. This is different from the use of violence as a contingent necessity in situations where the promise of liberal democracy stands dishonored, to be discarded as and when the promise is kept. Ultimately, democracy has great value and those who refuse to see it, are abandoned by the people.

The YSR regime of Andhra Pradesh beat the Maoists back, with a combination of efficient policing, functional governance and massive investment in rural development. This is a potent mix.

The Center’s Operation Green Hunt brings in the policing. But where is the effort to bring in the missing ingredients of democracy and development? For this, non-Maoist political parties have to take the initiative, and champion the cause of the rural poor. If they do, suicidal depressed Kanu Sanyal would still remain an epitaph for Maoism, but would not have struggled and died in vain. 

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The Wealth in the name of Dalits

Kakkadan Nandanath Raj

Eminent economist Kakkadan Nandanath Raj, who had made significant contribution in preparing India’s first Five Year Plan, died on Wednesday,he was 85.

A London School of Economics (LSE) alumnus, Raj served as economic adviser to Prime Ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru to P.V. Narasimha Rao. He had significant contribution in preparing the first Five Year Plan as an expert member in the Planning Commission. Then he was only 26 years old. A distinguished academician, he also headed the Economics Department of Delhi University and later served as its Vice-Chancellor.

He was one of those instrumental in setting up the Delhi School of Economics and also taught there around the same time when incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen was in its faculty.

In the 1970s, he returned to his home State Kerala and founded the Centre for Development Studies, an institution for applied economics and social science research.The work that Raj and his colleagues did for the United Nations in the early days of the CDS, and published in 1976, helped shape the contours of what later came to be called the "Kerala model" of development - the co-existence of low per capita income and very high physical quality of life indicators.

The Term Hindu rate of growth was coined by K. N. Raj, is a controversial and derogatory expression used to refer to the low annual growth rate of the economy of India before 1991, which stagnated around 3.5% from 1950s to 1980s, while per capita income averaged 1.3