- It’s plasticated: It won’t be easy to dislodge the micron monster now coiled into our DNA
Columnist Bachi Karkaria writes for The Times of India that Mumbai’s week began with too much rain and too little plastic. The monsoon will go away at its own whim. Can those bags, containers, disposable spoons go away at official ditto?
Is the ban like demonetisation? No, this ban didn’t take us by surprise. Yes, it too came into force without alternatives coming into the market. It’s actually worse, because, unlike those 500 and 1,000-rupee notes, we still don’t know exactly what’s banned and what’s exempt. There’s so much yes/ no/ maybe ambiguity over what’s actually biodegrading. No one agrees either on what’s truly ‘compostable’. Nitrogen-ninjas wash up like old plastic on our screens every day.
They say ‘Turn the clock back and return to the cloth bag.’ Huh? What about saalan and saambar? In our dada-nani’s allegedly golden age, time and traffic hadn’t spawned the take-away and then the online. Will food-delivery apps face the prospect of jumping off the gravy train since their indispensable (and seldom disposed of) containers are banned? Will these million-dollar start-ups become as mythical as unicorns?
- Blame it on the liberals
In his column for The Indian Express today, Pratap Bhanu Mehta says this is an age of blaming liberals for every ill. Who exactly a liberal is, you would think, is not a straightforward question. But no more. The answer is simple. If you want to blame someone, call them a liberal.
The rise of the liberal is the downfall of India. If only liberals would disappear, India’s history would go better, all its economic problems would be solved, China would quake in its boots, rule of law would be restored, and no ethnic or religious divisions would divide India. The fundamentalists of all stripes, green or saffron, are custodians of divine purpose, where evil cannot even exist. Other assorted ideologues, whose single-point agenda is to be a custodian of some collective identity, caste, religion, or region, cannot even be wrong. If you have merged yourself into a larger collectivity, fused your identity with it, how can individual vice even arise?
But capitalists are defined by the efficient allocation of capitalism. Where is the room for vice or failing there? So now you know why liberals are dangerous. Their fault is not that they have vices. Their fault is more serious: They seem to be the only ones capable of vice. Then there are these other things liberals do when it comes to toleration. They believe in diversity. But they refuse to acknowledge that it follows that the proposition two plus two equals seven should be of the same epistemic standing as the proposition two plus two equals four.
Liberal bashing is so much fun: You can say both that liberals are not really liberal and bash them for being liberal if they actually are. With this strategy, both left and right will join in. Even some liberals will join in. You see, if they don’t join in this liberal bashing, we can say liberals are dogmatic and the last thing a liberal wants to be accused of is dogmatism. So you know you have got them by their own tails. It is as easy as that: Liberals can be made extinct, the world will be cured of all its resentments and insecurities.
- Modi criticises Emergency, but his party happily did business with those responsible for it
Maneesh Chhibber, in his column for The Print, says Narendra Modi lambasted the Congress, but chose not to speak on those who implemented the Gandhi family’s diktats during Emergency. Why the Prime Minister and most of his ministers didn’t find them worth mentioning? Most of these leaders found a negative mention in the Justice J.C. Shah Commission report on excesses committed during Emergency.
One reason for their omission from all speeches could be that while the BJP continues to bring up Emergency and the horrors associated with it, it had deemed it fit to do business with the same leaders in the past. If there was one Congress politician who drew the most flak for, among other things, forced sterilisation and using brute state power against his opponents and the media, it was Bansi Lal – helped by his son Surender Singh, then with the youth Congress. When Bansi Lal left the Congress in 1996 and formed the Haryana Vikas Party (HVP), guess which party formed the next government in Haryana along with the HVP? The BJP. The alliance ended in 1999 when the BJP pulled out of the government.
Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee (he later became President of India and has a very good equation with Modi) was minister of state for revenue during Emergency. His role also came under the scanner of the Shah Commission. A few years ago, Mukherjee wrote a book on Indira Gandhi’s tenure as the Prime Minister through which, many feel, he tried to give a clean-chit to Gandhi for Emergency. Most recently, Mukherjee was the guest of honour at the closing ceremony of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) event.
- The relevance of remembering the Emergency
Whether India is living through such a period now, as some critics argue, is a rhetorical point. Salil Tripathi argues in his column for The Mint that history doesn’t repeat itself by recreating each moment from the past. It takes newer forms.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is smart enough to know the audience it has to reach—those too young to remember, those not even born at that time. Note, we are at a moment where those who fought the Emergency are touching 60 or are much older. Now note the BJP’s game: to seize the honours for having fought the Emergency by pitting the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP (then known as the Jana Sangh) against the Congress. Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, who was jailed during the Emergency, has compared Indira Gandhi with Hitler.
What BJP leaders don’t dwell upon is what Subramanian Swamy has alleged—that the RSS leader of that time, Madhukar Deoras, and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, wrote apology letters to Indira Gandhi, with Deoras seeking a meeting with her, offering to promote her 20-point economic programme, and pleading that the ban on RSS be revoked. She didn’t reply. The BJP won’t mention that because it wants a neat little halo around itself while criticizing the Congress, some of whose leaders are foolish enough to walk into the trap by attempting to defend the Emergency.
What’s new? A few dominant and vociferous networks long on opinion and short on facts; the alarming drop incivility in public discourse, particularly on the internet; and the virulent spread of videos documenting lynching, not surreptitiously recorded by investigative reporters, but proudly filmed by those participating in the lynching. Which party’s supporters openly defend these practices? That’s new.
- The skew in education
In her article for The Indian Express today, Shivani Nag opposes the views expressed by Surjit Bhalla about the inability of “children of the poorest of the poor” to receive basic quality education and hence they cannot compete with children of the rich.” She says Bhalla refuses to question the existence of an unequal schooling system.
Why does the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act 2009 not guarantee equal “quality” education to all? Why does it allow private schools to put a price tag on quality education? Why does it allow only restricted access to quality government schools like the Kendriya Vidyalayas? Bhalla informs that in India, “the average good quality high school education costs more than five times the average good quality college education. In most civilised economies, the ratio is the opposite”. But this is precisely because, in these countries, the state takes responsibility for school education.
Also, what makes IITs “premier institutes” if they cannot be entrusted to instill any further skill in the students? As a teacher, I refuse to accept the idea of education as one that promises nothing and refuses to engage with students, does not empower them or challenge the inequalities in society.
The phrase, “let the elite pay” refuses to acknowledge that if the government schools continue to be of poor quality, the non-elite will always find it difficult to reach higher education. Instead, public-funded higher education institutions, already being pushed to generate their own income, will be encouraged to prefer those who can pay.