- Kejriwal’s Next Steps After Huge Victory Over Modi
Swati Chaturvedi writes in her column for NDTV today that AAP as usual was belligerent in victory today. But it has reasons for this. An unprecedented vendetta had been unleashed against the Delhi government. It was an all out “jung” (battle) under LG Najeeb Jung and, then after he quit, his successor Baijal.
The centre tried every trick in the book. The Modi-appointed Chief Election Commissioner AK Joti, disqualified 21 AAP law-makers which provoked a rare and serious rebuke from the High Court as it cancelled the Election Commission’s order. Then, more than a dozen AAP MLAs were arrested by the Delhi Police, which reports to the LG, for trivial reasons. One was picked up while he was addressing a press conference. They have all got relief from the courts.
So what does the Supreme Court order mean? The essence of it is that real power has been restored to the elected government and expect for three areas – land, police and public order – the Lieutenant Governor has no decision-making powers. Kejriwal’s big win will also add to his stature in Mamata Banerjee’s plans for a Federal Front for the 2019 election. Banerjee has a soft corner for her fellow agitator-activist and supported him during the sofa dharna along with four other Chief Ministers she wants as part of her non-BJP front in which she envisages the Congress relegated to a bit player.
- Returning to Hapur
Commenting on the rising cases of lynching in India, Harsh Mander writes in his article for The Indian Express that hatred against minorities is rising across the world. But India offers an exceptional impunity for bigotry.
What kind of country have we allowed ourselves to become? Many countries display trends similar to India, of rising hatred and bigotry cloaked in aggressive, militant nationalism, spurred by popular authoritarian leaders. Yet, India is singular for its mounting wave of public lynching. In a great many countries, governments and dominating majority populations have become openly hostile to minorities. But nowhere except in India has this resulted in mobs feeling encouraged and empowered to regularly lynch people of minority identities, and further to film these and proudly post the videos on social media.
India has transmuted into a country where we elect leaders who display no compassion, and even less remorse for each hate crime, where leaders and officials side with the killers against the victims.
Yet, among the rest of us, there is a wearying even of outrage, the sapping of empathy. Lynching is now a normal, even essential, emblem of our public life. It is the way we have taught our young people to discipline and subjugate the hated other in our midst. Is this what we choose to become — a republic of hate?
- Shadowy victimhood
Sankarshan Thakur, in his column for The Telegraph says that perhaps only a war could do what the Emergency also did – put together a coalition of diverse and disparate sets – socialists and communists, republicans and conservatives, writers, painters, journalists, students, teachers, rights activists, minorities and majoritarians – a multitude of the ordinary Indian who rallied in unprecedented ways and, when the opportunity arrived, effected a popular and peaceful putsch against the spell of dictatorship; only a few of them were votaries of the sangh or the Jana Sangh as the predecessor entity of the BJP was known.
But then, the sangh’s appropriations committee is a hungry, though unthinking, beast; it will grab at anything within sight to feed its appetite for grandeur that it has never deserved with astounding far-fetchedness. It has tried, for instance, copy-pasting Bhagat Singh to its rather poorly gallery of icons – a professed left-wing atheist snatched away and planted as motif of the sectarian, majoritarian, exclusionist Right. Not very dissimilar is the sangh’s effort to appropriate Emergency victimhood.
In the BJP. A case can fairly be made that with all its reputed Hitler-love, the sangh would have been rather enamoured of the Emergency Indira – authoritarian, cultish, absolute, demanding deference to outlined purposes of the nation which were actually the purposes of her own hold over power – Indira is India, India is Indira. That, in fact, is a power profile that sits remarkably, and alarmingly, well on the Narendra Modi scheme. Each of the attributes of the Emergency Indira finds reflection in Modi whose essential manner is of a hectoring command creature that would brook nothing less than compliance, not merely from his party and government but at large.
- Political meddling is to blame for bad deal suspended Uttarakhand teacher and her students have got
In her article for Scroll.in, Anjali Mody writes that it was like a durbar scene from the middle ages. A woman, advanced in years, pleads with the all-powerful ruler sitting on a raised platform meters away to help her. The ruler incensed that she has the temerity to raise her voice in front of him decrees: “Suspend her! Take her into custody, now!”
Undesirable postings are usually to those parts of the country that are in most need of attention. Their inaccessibility is often the major reason for their underdevelopment, and their underdevelopment is the major reason most people who choose to work in government do not want to work there. This is as true for teachers – some of who turn down promotions for fear of an undesirable posting – as it is for doctors and administrators.
Governments in India have not found a workable solution to ensure that the remote, underdeveloped, undesirable corners of India are properly served. Political interference is at the root of the problem. State governments have rules, laws and now computer-aided systems to try and make transfers and postings transparent. But all their systems are all too easily subverted by politicians for whom postings and transfers are a source of enormous power.
Those who are politically well-connected can expect to receive a transfer or posting request as a favour. The rest may have to pay.
- Worse than UGC
Satish Deshpande writes for The Indian Express today that the proposal to abolish the University Grants Commission (UGC) may be more mercy killing than murder. But this is no consolation for those who care about Indian higher education — which should mean all of us. This is because the proposal not only fails to address the reasons for the UGC’s proven ineffectiveness but also reinforces its most toxic traits.
It is no secret that our own UGC has become incapable of such principled mediation. Its complete subservience to the state was undeniably demonstrated in the case of the ill-fated Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) of the University of Delhi. When the government of the day strongly backed the FYUP, the UGC allowed it to be pushed through despite being in violation of its own norms. And when a different government opposed the programme in 2014, the UGC suddenly began to aggressively enforce the very norms that it had earlier ignored.
Healing must begin by acknowledging that to be successful, HEIs have to be self-governing communities. Although full autonomy may be a mirage, degrees of autonomy are crucial. This autonomy must be vested in the scholarly community, not hijacked to protect academic autocrats, nor made into a euphemism for marketisation.
Such a beginning seems far-fetched today, because the exact opposite is happening. The UPA government was responsible for inaugurating the administrative assault on HEIs, and the Narendra Modi government has added a political dimension to this assault.