Share this:

When the newspapers carried the headlines that Indian Prime Minister has been concerned about 42% malnourishment, I did not think so much about the nutritional condition of Indian children but more about the game called statistics. It is interesting how we get different figures from different sources about the same issues. If it is about the below poverty line figures different government appointed committees have given us different estimates of poverty. I wonder how come the malnourishment figures stand at only 42% if the most conservative estimates about the below poverty level population is somewhere around 48-50%.

It will be interesting to see how and why different statisticians give us different pictures for the same thing. Ya, I know it is about difference in data source, methodology, etc., but if science and statistics (the precise figures) are supposed to be objective and less biased then the result should have been same. How can there be any scope of subjectivity in calculating figures by people and disciplines whose claim to fame is objectivity and precision !!!!. It seems all the objective people are in service of the state (read capital in contemporary times) – from deciding who should head what educational institutions to themselves heading institutions and militarizing them.

Share this:

Some have already started pondering whether Anna Hazare himself or an agitation on his lines could be used to highlight the issue of establishing a Common School System or for some other welfare measures that concern the downtrodden. My conviction that it is impossible emanates primarily from the analysis of the so-called amorphous ‘civil society’ which is essentially liberal bourgeois in character. What would one expect from a ‘movement’ (??) which relies heavily on the corporate sector – from a doctor who would love to deprive millions of Indians of primary healthcare and promote privatization of health facilities to collecting enormous amount from them as donations?

Read more at Radical Notes

Share this:

The recent hue and cry raised about the “foreign hand” in the Anna Hazare-led ‘mass’ movement seems to have got answers in reply to a query filed by BeyondHeadlines under the Right to Information (RTI) to Manish Sisodia’s brainchild Kabir. Kabir had revealed that it had received funding from various sources, including the controversial Michigan (United States)-based Ford Foundation.

Read more…

Share this:

Yesterday one could see in Delhi University a rally: youths on motorcycles and open jeeps, vidographying themselves, dancing like mad and bringing back memories of those days when the ABVP members would boisterously march on streets after election victories threatening to ride over you if you do not go with them. They were wearing white ‘gandhi’ caps, now available in market, and holding the ‘holy’ national flag.

Roads in Delhi will tell you the kind of support that Hazare is getting – youth enjoying the few days of free license for lupenism wrapped in tricolour. Hoards of school children in buses and trucks pouring in. I only hope they have at least some inkling of what they are there for, apart from some freedom from the oppressive school.

Share this:

There has been a ministry reshuffle in India. Some ministers have been dropped and some have changed chairs. The media, as it is destined to do, has been uselessly debating its repercussions, as if corruption will go away or if POSCO will be asked to leave because the tribals have been opposing it. Or, furthermore, the TV glued consumers are being told as if cabinet reshuffles undo fundamental laws of capitalism that thrives on the idea of exploitation and expansion of capital at human cost. The prices of petrol will no doubt soar high, inflation will be staggering and the price of survival will continue to spiral. There will be no respite from the demonic claws of private capital. We all will increasingly continue to be subjected to its ruthless repression.

The cabinet reshuffles have one and only one purpose – to hide the ugliness of the system, to tell us, once again, in a much more beautifully fabricated idiom that the state cares for its people. We are supposed to be bought by it as much as by the bogus activism of a minister who tried telling us he can set things right by ordering some enquiries, protecting environment and then conditionally allow exploitation of natural resources by private capital.

It is a bubble that needs to be bursted. But who will burst it and how is the question. The bubble that ‘Indians have prospered’, the bubble that ‘state is more and more committed to the development of its people’. All are bubbles as much as the 100 days agenda of the UPA regime. The energetic Ministers could do nothing more than creating a evanescent halo that has allowed the deeply ingrained anti-people state-market collusion to work freely. The bubbles must burst because only then would it reveal the underbelly of the capital’s machinations and its inhuman world – the ugly world of hunger and deprivation, and the witch-craft of hypnotizing and enticing market.

Share this:

Standing on the bridge over river Sabarmati in Ahmedabad today gives a completely different feeling than what Gandhi would have felt while living in his Ashram during those days. The river is being tamed by the faithful guards of capital. A seasonal river has been made into a perennial one through diversion of water from Narmada. Why not, a beautiful river bank will always get more buyers, better real estate developers, and in effect an additional space for odyssey of market. As construction continues with the riverbed being transformed into a gigantic concrete slab, one could hardly see any water in the river as the two sides of it resemble an upcoming giant concrete demon that would gobble up the wild, free and liberated of a river. Yes, it symbolises what capital, in its insatiable frenzy of transforming every possible space into a commodity, can do.

But why should one be perturbed by it? There is hardly any resistance to what is being done. And one day one would jump in ecstasy standing on the banks looking at the reflection of huge billboards in water of Sabarmati inviting us to be drenched in the frenzy of market. We would narrate to everybody how beautiful the city of Ahmedabad has become, willfully ignorant of the deep seated religious polarisation in terms of spaces in the city or unaware of ghettoisation of the city along class lines.

After all, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Corporation is claiming to usher in a new phase in the life of the city. It says that “The riverfront project creates intrinsic value for all residents of Ahmedabad by making the banks of the Sabarmati free and accessible to the public. The river banks will evolve continually, adapting to the diverse interests of a rapidly transforming city”. Think for yourself, how lost we are in the frenzy of market, self absorbed, self-besotted, forgetting what is actually happening in the name of ‘public access’ and ‘public space’.

Share this:

Iraq about to join the Arab revolution?

What is happening in Libya?

The Middle East is Revolting. We need to hear the voices of that Revolt.

‘If power is not seized, counter-revolution will rise’

 

Share this:

THE HEART OF THE MATTER – Development, Identity and Violence: Reconfiguring the Debate Edited by Ravi Kumar (Aakar Books, Delhi, 2010)

Contents

1. Acknowledgement
2. Introduction – Ravi Kumar
3. Thinking through Urban Debris: Violence, Terror and the State    – Nandita Badami and Anirban Nigam
4. Through and Beyond: Identities and Class Struggle – Paresh Chandra
5. “No Rehabilitation” is ecocide and genocide: Is there possibility of Hope? – Savyasaachi
6. Ventilating Predicament of Development: New Economic Enclaves and Structural Violence in India – Manisha Tripathy Pandey
7. The Artifice of Modernity in Nation-building: Analyzing the Case of “Postcolonial” Northeast India – Neikolie Kuotsu
8. Developing Bastar: The Dandakaranya Project – Saagar Tiwari

 

Excerpts

Introduction
Ravi Kumar
Glancing at the plethora of works produced in this direction over the last decade, displacement and violence seem the most popular characters of a much-debated, possibly over-debated area. Displacement has existed for centuries – for instance, kings would displace people from forests to convert the forests into hunting-grounds. But something about displacement today, makes it starkly different from the kinds that have existed so far. Perhaps, this difference can be understood keeping in mind the nature of modern nations which have emerged from the ashes of colonial empires, and have tried to ground themselves in the legacy of liberal democracy and the various other state-centric (people friendly?) paradigms of governance. The displacement of peoples from their areas of habitation under the garb of “development” can be seen across the history of Independent India; hopes of the people have been buried under the foundations of the “Temples of Modern India” which have been “constructed” one after the other, even as the state has continuously claimed to represent the interests of these very people. Of course, the nature and the degree of pretensions have changed, from the welfarist state to the neoliberal state…

 

Share this:

Ghetto and Within: Class, Identity, State and Politics of Mobilisation by Ravi Kumar (Aakar Books, Delhi, 2010)

http://www.aakarbooks.com/

Contents

1. Acknowledgement
2. Context of the Study
3. Secularism, Nationalism and the Problematic of Religious Identity Formation
4. Identity Formation and the Class Question
5. Identity Politics and Ghettoisation
6. Why Study the Ghettos: Some Methodological Considerations
7. Identity Formation and the Ghetto: Reflections from the Field

Class and the Everyday life State
Control and Identity

8. Collective Identity and the Class Politics – Beyond the Appearances in a Ghetto

Excerpts:

Chapter 1
Context of the Study
A study of the process of ghettoisation acquires relevance when the polity is being defined by identity politics and the politics of class is waning. The primacy of collective identity formation in politics has gained ground with the onslaught of neoliberal politics, laced with the ideas of localisation, difference and autonomy of subjects. Class as a category of analysis has been relegated to the background with a clear intent of marginalising possibilities of resistance to the system. A tendency, which is neither new nor surprising, to sustain the status quo has rejected dialectics as a method and class as the defining category of analysis. This is not to deny the conjunctural significance of identity politics insofar as it rips open subterranean repressions and resists the hegemonic powers and discourses. However, an identity politics, which fails to take cognizance of the balance of forces in class terms fails to transcend the systemic logic of repression and gets accommodated in the system…

The study of the ghetto explicated here makes an attempt to understand how certain physical and socio-economic zones within the city space remain outside the purview of contests to transform the essentially unequal social order. In fact, discourses within ghettos, which are defined by the sharing of a common religious identity and which see subjects as victims of an agenda furthered by the state or other segments of society, do not address inequities of various kinds and fail to locate inequality within the production relations that characterise it. Class is never a part of such discourses. These address extends only religion and caste based inequality (see Appendix I) and base themselves in the context of secularism and communalism, which in turn are analysed mostly in terms of their appearances, divorced from political economy. In the following pages an effort is made to understand how the idea of a collective develops from within the community as well as in relation to the outside world. It is a complex set which comprises of state, people and politics and which is explored to understand this dynamics which cannot be defined or understood without a context…

Share this:

Publication Announcement

The Crisis of Elementary Education in India (Sage: New Delhi, 2006)

http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book230629

Contents

• Introduction
 – RAVI KUMAR
• Equality, Quality and Quantity – The Challenges of Education in India Dilution, Distortion and Diversion
 – ANIL SADGOPAL
• A Post-Jomtien Reflection on Education Policy: Child Rights to Elementary Education – 
VASUDHA DHAGMWAR
• National and International Provisions: Operationalizing the Constitutional Guarantee of Right to Education – 
AMARJEET SINHA
• Issues of Resource Crunch and State Commitment: Marginalization of the Equity Agenda
 – SADHNA SAXENA
• Educate Girls, Prepare Them for Life?
 – KARUNA CHANANA
• Inclusive Education in the Context of Common Schools – 
MADAN M JHA
• A Question of Equity, Social Justice and School Reforms: Terms of Inclusion – 
GEETHA B NAMBISSAN
• Dalits and the Right to Education Educational Deprivation of the Marginalized: A Village Study of the Mushar Community in Bihar – RAVI KUMAR