Here to stay!

Today's newspaper reports that the Mayor of Calcutta, Sovan Chatterjee announced yesterday that fresh licences would be issued to hand-pulled rickshaws.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation had stopped issuing licences in 2009 - following upon the former chief minister's announcement, in 2005, that the hand-rickshaw would be banned.

I hope this brings to an end the travails of the rickshaw pullers, in regard to the uncertainty surrounding their livelihood. Now it is time to empower the rickshaw pullers and improve their working and living conditions.

Some things never change ...

Concerned New Yorkers protest against slums at
the city's May Day Parade in 1936.

See more pictures from New York city in the 1940s here.

Gender inequity in West Bengal

by Supriya Chaudhuri
from The Telegraph

The Second Sex: Certain things could remain unchanged in Bengal

West Bengal today has a woman chief minister, and Presidency University a woman vice-chancellor. One would not think so, however, going by the composition of the newly-constituted advisory committee for higher education, or by the media debates on the future of the new university. These are exclusively populated by men, indeed by high-caste Hindu men, if their names are any guide. While one could argue that this dominance is simply accidental, at an early stage of planning, or — more alarmingly — that it reflects the superior achievements of high-caste Hindu men in all spheres relating to education and administration, I would suggest that both arguments are untenable. The preponderance of men in these bodies is not accidental, but it is also not a measure of their real distinction. Rather, it indicates a social bias that has persisted so insidiously and universally that we are deluded into believing that it does not exist.

The Bengali middle class prides itself on its liberal and enlightened attitudes towards women’s education and their entry into professions. Certainly, there is a history of early activism in these matters, necessitated by its converse in cruelty and oppression. Before and after Independence, women played active roles in school and college education, in politics, in social work, and in some professions such as nursing and medicine. The children of the urban elite today believe that most doors are open to them, irrespective of gender. School and university examination results confirm that girls are doing well, and middle class families encourage their daughters to aim as high as their sons. Women are visible in most social spheres, especially in education and in the medical profession, but also in the corporate world. Some hold important administrative posts. This phenomenon leads many to claim, quite sincerely, that there is no gender bias against women in Bengal, that they are involved in all stages and spheres of public life, and that they are free to participate in public policy-making. In fact, this is very far from the case.

All available evidence shows that West Bengal is ranked appallingly low in terms of human development and gender disparity indices, and that women’s economic participation and their access to education and health services are meagre to say the least. The West Bengal Human Development Report, 2004, and later studies, indicate “a major undercurrent of gender discrimination” reflected in reduced economic agency and poor recognition of women’s unpaid work, a female literacy rate just above the national average but far below that in Kerala, Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu, and high rates of underage marriage, school dropout, poverty and domestic violence. Eighty-four out of a hundred girls do not complete their secondary education; 50 per cent of girls receive less food than their brothers; and the state ranks 19th in India in respect of married women with iron-deficiency anaemia. Unsurprisingly, its HDI scores placed it 22nd, and its GDI scores 24th, out of 35 states and Union territories in 2006. It is unlikely that there has been substantial improvement in the past five years.

What is baffling about this reality, however, is the persistent failure of the educated middle class to recognize it. Whatever the statistics regularly publicized by development agencies, whatever the evidence of female illiteracy, impoverishment, ill health and ill-treatment by which it is surrounded, this class would prefer to think itself representative of a community striving for gender equity and social justice. If there are failures and inadequacies in our record they are, so we would prefer to believe, caused by economic underdevelopment and inherited imbalances: they do not reflect a general attitude. A long period of leftist rule has produced, if nothing else, some complacency about the state’s secular credentials and its recognition of women and minorities. Yet if one looks at the actual facts, there is very little reason for self-congratulation — apart from one notable statistic, the decline in communal violence over the past 30 years.

The Right to Education Act is probably the most important single piece of legislation India has effected since Independence. It is particularly relevant for a state like West Bengal, where in 2004 there were only 59 primary schools for each lakh of population, many without a schoolroom and with teachers who remain absent most of the year. The introduction of the district primary education programme in 1997 and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in 2000 improved the situation to some extent, especially through the provision of Shishu Shiksha Kendras and anganwadi schools. But we are still very far from a teacher-student ratio of 1:40, a school within one kilometre of every habitation, and universal elementary schooling. The dispiriting reality is one of absent-teacher or one-teacher schools without classrooms or toilets, and of school buildings converted to grain-sheds or used for other purposes. Very few rural schools are able to implement the cooked mid-day meal scheme, although it shows immediate results in bringing children, especially girls, to school. Over 40,000 teachers’ posts remain unfilled in primary schools across the state, a situation exacerbated by the Primary Teachers’ Training Institute deadlock. The new government has announced that it will fill 46,000 vacancies, reserving 10 per cent of posts for PTTI candidates, but no one can say how this promise will be fulfilled. There is no clarity as to how the general provisions of the RTE Act, including the reservation of 25 per cent of seats in private schools for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, might be implemented. Despite NGO activism, half of Calcutta’s children do not go to school.

Within this dismal scene, girls are more likely than boys not to complete their schooling and to drop out in middle school. Poor recognition of the worth of education for girls, the pressures of household work and underage marriage are obviously responsible for this, but so too are systemic defects such as the absence of girls’ toilets and lack of protection for girls in and outside the school. Despite this, for the first time this year there were more girls than boys appearing for the Madhyamik and Madrasah examinations, though considerably fewer at the higher secondary level. But this fact, combined with stray evidence of individual women seeking education (such as the case of Asiya Bibi reported on June 13, 2011) and girls resisting forced marriages, should not lead us to conclude that all is well with the education of girls in this state. Female illiteracy continues to be high, with some districts such as rural Purulia performing far more poorly than others, with correspondingly low figures for school enrolment and attendance.

But education is viewed as a lifeline by girls themselves, and where the opportunity is provided, there is a high degree of commitment to learning and acquiring the means of livelihood. Women figure at all levels within the formal and non-formal education system, as learners and as teachers, often working for low wages in non-unionized and ‘non-official’ posts as temporary or contracted staff in schools. There are large numbers in colleges and universities, especially in the less valued humanities departments, while the science and engineering faculties are dominated by men. Without women’s work, it would have been impossible to sustain the state education system or the network of private schools: nor, for that matter, the healthcare systems, state and private. Their presence creates the illusion that women are free to choose professions and are involved in decision-making in at least two critical areas, education and healthcare.

This is regrettably not the case. While some individual women hold high administrative posts, Bengal is in fact run by a largely male bureaucracy and political class which appears to think that the struggle for women’s rights is over and that no further concessions need to be made to inclusive action. I use the word “concession” advisedly. A recent report on school textbook content in Bengal notes that apart from the token inclusion of Rokeya Hussain and Mahasweta Devi, no other woman writer is featured, women’s work continues to be relegated to the household, the student-addressee appears to be Hindu, male, able-bodied and urban, and girls are represented as caring for younger siblings while boys take part in sport and study science or medicine. Most women who pursue professions speak of a constant, unacknowledged denial of the practical difficulties they face in the public sphere. There was no toilet for women teachers at Presidency College before and during the ten years I taught there: our representations to the college and education department authorities went unheard. Many women doctors speak of impossible physical conditions in hospitals and no security when they are on call at night. Development funds are largely controlled by a male bureaucracy.

Given the magnitude of our economic and social problems, it is easy for Bengal’s ruling class to forget these imbalances, regard the struggles of women, minorities and subaltern groups as past, and concentrate on the road-map for the future. The media has played their part in producing the impression that Presidency University is vital to this future, though its contribution will be infinitesimal given the huge tasks thrown up by the RTE Act. The committee to advise on higher education has a wider remit. It is symptomatic that not even a token woman or member of a minority community has been included in that committee, just as none has been named as part of the mentor group for Presidency University. Media debates on this institution appear to draw on an old boys’ club. There was something faintly comic in the televised spectacle of ten men lined up on a stage by the college’s alumni association to advise a single woman vice-chancellor, who, from her own speech, appeared fully capable of taking her own counsel. Despite a change of regime, nothing will change in Bengal unless we wake up from the complacent dream that all is well with us in respect of gender and social justice. Very little is.

Neglected Indians & Public Policy in India

by Amartya Sen

A fuller understanding of the real conditions of the mass of neglected Indians and what can be done to improve their lives through public policy should be a central issue in the politics of India.


The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed about India’s overtaking China in the rate of growth of GNP, while not comparing India with China in other respects, like education, basic health, or life expectancy. Economic growth can, of course, be enormously helpful in advancing living standards and in battling poverty. But there is little cause for taking the growth of GNP to be an end in itself, rather than seeing it as an important means for achieving things we value.

It could, however, be asked why this distinction should make much difference, since economic growth does enhance our ability to improve living standards. The central point to appreciate here is that while economic growth is important for enhancing living conditions, its reach and impact depend greatly on what we do with the increased income. The relation between economic growth and the advancement of living standards depends on many factors, including economic and social inequality and, no less importantly, on what the government does with the public revenue that is generated by economic growth.

Some statistics about China and India, drawn mainly from the World Bank and the United Nations, are relevant here. Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census.

As a result of India’s effort to improve the schooling of girls, its literacy rate for women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four has clearly risen; but that rate is still not much above 80 percent, whereas in China it is 99 percent. One of the serious failures of India is that a very substantial proportion of Indian children are, to varying degrees, undernourished (depending on the criteria used, the proportion can come close to half of all children), compared with a very small proportion in China. Only 66 percent of Indian children are immunized with triple vaccine (diphtheria/ pertussis/tetanus), as opposed to 97 percent in China.

Comparing India with China according to such standards can be more useful for policy discussions in India than confining the comparison to GNP growth rates only. Those who are fearful that India’s growth performance would suffer if it paid more attention to “social objectives” such as education and health care should seriously consider that notwithstanding these “social” activities and achievements, China’s rate of GNP growth is still clearly higher than India’s.

2

Higher GNP has certainly helped China to reduce various indicators of poverty and deprivation, and to expand different features of the quality of life. There is every reason to want to encourage sustainable economic growth in India in order to improve living standards today and in the future (including taking care of the environment in which we live). Sustainable economic growth is a very good thing in a way that “growth mania” is not.

GNP per capita is, however, not invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for those features depend also on other things that we do — or fail to do. Compare India with Bangladesh. In income, India has a huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of $1,170, compared with $590 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power. This difference has expanded rapidly because of India’s faster rate of recent economic growth, and that, of course, is a point in India’s favour. India’s substantially higher rank than Bangladesh in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) is largely due to this particular achievement. But we must ask how well India’s income advantage is reflected in other things that also matter. I fear the answer is: not well at all.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas young women still have substantially lower rates than young males in India. There is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh’s current progress has a great deal to do with the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the country.

What about health? The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPT vaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite having only half of India’s per capita income.

Of course, Bangladesh’s living conditions will benefit greatly from higher economic growth, particularly if the country uses it as a means of doing good things, rather than treating economic growth and high per capita income as ends in themselves. It is to the huge credit of Bangladesh that despite the adversity of low income it has been able to do so much so quickly; the imaginative activism of Bangladeshi NGOs (such as the Grameen Bank, the pioneering microcredit institution, and BRAC, a large-scale initiative aimed at removing poverty) as well as the committed public policies of the government have both contributed to the results. But higher income, including larger public resources, will obviously enhance Bangladesh’s ability to achieve better lives for its people.

3

One of the positive things about economic growth is that it generates public resources that the government can devote to its priorities. In fact, public resources very often grow faster than the GNP. The gross tax revenue, for example, of the government of India (corrected for price rise) is now more than four times what it was just twenty years ago, in 1990-1991. This is a substantially bigger jump than the price-corrected GNP.

Expenditure on what is somewhat misleadingly called the “social sector”— health, education, nutrition, etc. — has certainly gone up in India. And yet India is still well behind China in many of these fields. For example, government expenditure on health care in China is nearly five times that in India. China does, of course, have a larger population and a higher per capita income than India, but even in relative terms, while the Chinese government spends nearly 2 percent of GDP (1.9 percent) on health care, the proportion is only a little above one percent (1.1 percent) in India.

One result of the relatively low allocation of funds to public health care in India is that large numbers of poor people across the country rely on private doctors, many of whom have little medical training. Since health is also a typical example of “asymmetric information,” in which the patients may know very little about what the doctors (or “supposed doctors”) are giving them, even the possibility of fraud and deceit is very large. In a study conducted by the Pratichi Trust — a public interest trust I set up in 1999 — we found cases in which the ignorance of poor patients about their condition was exploited so as to make them pay for treatment they didn’t get. This is the result not only of shameful exploitation, but ultimately of the sheer unavailability of public health care in many parts of India. The benefit that we can expect to get from economic growth depends very much on how the public revenue generated by economic growth is expended.

4

When we consider the impact of economic growth on people’s lives, comparisons favour China over India. However, there are many fields in which a comparison between China and India is not related to economic growth in any obvious way. Most Indians are strongly appreciative of the democratic structure of the country, including its many political parties, systematic free elections, uncensored media, free speech, and the independent standing of the judiciary, among other characteristics of a lively democracy. Those Indians who are critical of serious flaws in these arrangements (and I am certainly one of them) can also take account of what India has already achieved in sustaining democracy, in contrast to many other countries, including China.

Not only is access to the Internet and world opinion uncensored and unrestricted in India, a multitude of media present widely different points of view, often very critical of the government in office. India has a larger circulation of newspapers each day than any other country in the world. And the newspapers reflect contrasting political perspectives. Economic growth has helped — and this has certainly been a substantial gain — to expand the availability of radios and televisions across the country, including in rural areas, which very often are shared among many users. There are at least 360 independent television stations (and many are being established right now, judging from the licences already issued) and their broadcasts reflect a remarkable variety of points of view. More than two hundred of these TV stations concentrate substantially or mainly on news, many of them around the clock. There is a sharp contrast here with the monolithic system of newscasting permitted by the state in China, with little variation of political perspectives on different channels.

Freedom of expression has its own value as a potentially important instrument for democratic politics, but also as something that people enjoy and treasure. Even the poorest parts of the population want to participate in social and political life, and in India they can do so. There is a contrast as well in the use of trial and punishment, including capital punishment. China often executes more people in a week than India has executed since independence in 1947. If our focus is on a comprehensive comparison of the quality of life in India and China, we have to look well beyond the traditional social indicators, and many of these comparisons are not to China’s advantage.

Could it be that India’s democratic system is somehow a barrier to using the benefits of economic growth in order to enhance health, education, and other social conditions? Clearly not, as I shall presently discuss. It is worth recalling that when India had a very low rate of economic growth, as was the case until the 1980s, a common argument was that democracy was hostile to fast economic growth. It was hard to convince those opposed to democracy that fast economic growth depends on an economic climate congenial to development rather than on fierce political control, and that a political system that protects democratic rights need not impede economic growth. That debate has now ended, not least because of the high economic growth rates of democratic India. We can now ask: How should we assess the alleged conflict between democracy and the use of the fruits of economic growth for social advancement?

5

What a democratic system achieves depends greatly on which social conditions become political issues. Some conditions become politically important issues quickly, such as the calamity of a famine (thus famines tend not to occur at all when there is a functioning democracy), while other problems — less spectacular and less immediate — provide a much harder challenge. It is much more difficult to use democratic politics to remedy undernourishment that is not extreme, or persistent gender inequality, or the absence of regular medical care for all. Success or failure here depends on the range and vigour of democratic practice. In recent years Indian democracy has made considerable progress in dealing with some of these conditions, such as gender inequality, lack of schools, and widespread undernourishment. Public protests, court decisions, and the use of the recently passed “Right to Information” Act have had telling effects. But India still has a long way to go in remedying these conditions.

In China, by contrast, the process of decision-making depends largely on decisions made by the top Party leaders, with relatively little democratic pressure from below. The Chinese leaders, despite their scepticism about the values of multiparty democracy and personal and political liberty, are strongly committed to eliminating poverty, undernourishment, illiteracy, and lack of health care; and this has greatly helped in China’s advancement. There is, however, a serious fragility in any authoritarian system of governance, since there is little recourse or remedy when the government leaders alter their goals or suppress their failures.

The reality of that danger revealed itself in a catastrophic form in the Chinese famine of 1959-1962, which killed more than 30 million people, when there was no public pressure against the regime’s policies, as would have arisen in a functioning democracy. Mistakes in policy continued for three years while tens of millions died. To take another example, the economic reforms of 1979 greatly improved the working and efficiency of Chinese agriculture and industry; but the Chinese government also eliminated, at the same time, the entitlement of all to public medical care (which was often administered through the communes). Most people were then required to buy their own health insurance, drastically reducing the proportion of the population with guaranteed health care.

In a functioning democracy an established right to social assistance could not have been so easily — and so swiftly — dropped. The change sharply reduced the progress of longevity in China. Its large lead over India in life expectancy dwindled during the following two decades — falling from a fourteen-year lead to one of just seven years.

The Chinese authorities, however, eventually realized what had been lost, and from 2004 they rapidly started reintroducing the right to medical care. China now has a considerably higher proportion of people with guaranteed health care than does India. The gap in life expectancy in China’s favour has been rising again, and it is now around nine years; and the degree of coverage is clearly central to the difference.Whether India’s democratic political system can effectively remedy neglected public services such as health care is one of the most urgent questions facing the country.

6

For a minority of the Indian population — but still very large in actual numbers — economic growth alone has been very advantageous, since they are already comparatively privileged and need no social assistance to benefit from economic growth. The limited prosperity of recent years has helped to support a remarkable variety of lifestyles as well as globally acclaimed developments of Indian literature, music, cinema, theatre, painting, and the culinary arts, among other cultural activities.

Yet an exaggerated concentration on the lives of the relatively prosperous, exacerbated by the Indian media, gives an unrealistically rosy picture of the lives of Indians in general. Since the fortunate group includes not only business leaders and the professional classes but also many of the country’s intellectuals, the story of unusual national advancement is widely and persistently heard. More worryingly, relatively privileged Indians can easily fall for the temptation to focus just on economic growth as a grand social benefactor for all.

Some critics of the huge social inequalities in India find something callous and uncouth in the self- centred lives and inward-looking preoccupations of a relatively prosperous minority. My primary concern, however, is that the illusions generated by those distorted perceptions of prosperity may prevent India from bringing social deprivations into political focus, which is essential for achieving what needs to be done for Indians at large through its democratic system. A fuller understanding of the real conditions of the mass of neglected Indians and what can be done to improve their lives through public policy should be a central issue in the politics of India.

This is exactly where the exclusive concentration on the rate of GNP growth has the most damaging effect. Economic growth can make a very large contribution to improving people’s lives; but single-minded emphasis on growth has limitations that need to be clearly understood.

Courtesy of The New York Review of Books.

Cycling

London World Naked Bike Ride event, in London,
on 12 June 2010. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

D: This is really lovely!

R: India te-o erom jodi hoto - taley activism e onek lok ashto!

D: Shudhu cheshta korar dorkar - lok aashbe. kintu amader 'activist-neta' praani eto bheetu ki shob kothay boley "lok toiri noy", jokhon ki sotyo kotha to ei ki ora neejerai toiri noy...

R: Kichu ta hochhey o, recently, Bombay te ekta cycle rally holo, young people der, shobai super-hero costume porey cycle korchhilo. Mojaar ghotona, with a message. Amaar ek chaatri, o passionate "active transport" and cycle-related public policy niye lorey jachhey, and besh kichu accomplish korey jachhey. Ekebare "non-political" meye ta, tobu o...

Neta-netri ... joto kom bola jaay, toto bhaalo!

D: Kolkatar ghotonar opor jodi kono report achhe to pathiye dao. Kaaje aashbe. Ekhaneo lokera cycle rally korechhe. BRT niye lorai cholechhe.

R: Kolkatay cyclists der obosthya ekhon bhishon jotil. Onek jaygay cycling banned, dhorey niye jaay. Ami kono din gaari chaalai ni, onek bochor cycle e ghora-phera kortam. Ekhon sheyta korte partam na, raastay jayga nei, gaari eto beshi, jiboner risk prochur. Dekhi, didimoni-ra ashaar por, ebong ekhon thekei, notun mayor ke diye, ki kora jaay.

Roots of Muslim backwardness

by Sk Sadar Nayeem

The Statesman, 9 April 2010

The socio economic backwardness of the Muslim community in India was underlined by the Justice Sachar Committee report. Then came the Ranganathan Mishra Commission report which recommended 10 per cent job reservation for Muslims because the community occupied the lowest rung in the human development index. Now, on the heels of these two reports, the National Council for Applied Economic Research has come out with data about the economic status of Muslims in the country that makes dismal reading. The NCAER report says that one-third of Muslims in India survive on less than Rs 550 a month. In other words, three out of 10 of them lived below the poverty line in 2004-05. Even among the poor, urban Muslims were slightly better off compared to Muslims living in the villages who survived on Rs 338 a month during the year under review.

The three reports obviously belied the allegation of certain political parties and groups that Muslims are being appeased. It is, however, true, that 63 years after Independence, Muslims were being used merely as a vote bank by all the political parties and no worthwhile administrative action to improve their socio-economic condition was taken by any government.

The important thing is that if the condition of Muslims is to be improved, the masses themselves must be awakened. Behind their backwardness lies some historical reasons, besides government apathy. Muslims did not occupy an important position in the 19th century because modernisation resulted in the growth of a middle class that was monopolised by Hindus who succeeded because of their wealth and their positive attitude to education. The change in the language (from Persian of the Muslim era to English of the British period) of administration was also an important factor.

The beginning of the 19th century saw the British East India Company firmly entrenched in eastern India. Soon the British started introducing laws to govern the region. One such law was “Permanent Settlement”. After the introduction of this law, the former land revenue collectors of the Mughal Empire were transformed into the landholders with permanent tenure with the government. With this emerged a new class called zamindars. These feudal lords became allies of the new English rule obviously because this new class of vested interests was primarily created by the British for their political convenience. At the same time, the English merchants began to trade through Indian intermediaries which helped in the rise of a rich Indian trading class. Their business transactions brought this class in close contact with the English and their world view.

Further, the base of the bourgeois class began to broaden when the spread of British rule made it necessary for Indians, who had even meagre knowledge of English, to be appointed to the services. As a result, the educated middle class grew rapidly in number. But this middle class was monopolised by Hindus. Muslims, who had lost land and position disproportionately, did not occupy any important role during the period whereas the English-educated Hindu middle class, especially in Bengal, called “bhadralok”, provided the necessary leadership to the Hindu community.

On the other hand, the ashraf or respectable people (mansabdars and jaigirdars during the Mughal period) among the Muslims were on the decline. They were adversely affected from 1830 when Permanent Settlement and resumption proceedings came into force and Persian was replaced by English as the official language. the ashraf response to the change was not positive. They thought that it was enough for them to learn Arabic and Persian through which they could study the Koran and get the religious education like what they had been doing during Mughal rule. Thus, they failed to recover from the stupor, thereby lagging behind Hindus who, by then, had adopted an English education with zeal through which the modernisation of their society began. As a result, Muslims did not get employment in government offices. After the death or dismissal of old Muslim incumbents, their places were in all cases filled by Hindus. Opportunities in government services apart, ashrafs also lost both social prestige and economic opportunities by ignoring Western education. This left no Muslims in higher places.

It is true that “Indian Muslims became a minority when they began to be afraid” and some writers traced this “to the time when the Muslim elite in India began to be apprehensive about its future after the failure of the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 which meant the final eclipse of Muslim political power”. This fear was not unjustified but that was not the reason for the “final eclipse of Muslim political power”. An important element in the revolt of 1857 was Hindu-Muslim unity. The events of 1857 revealed that the people and politics of India were not basically communal.

After 1857, the British tried to maintain their hold over the country by setting into motion the divisive forces of communalism and began to ally themselves with the most backward, obscurantist, religious and social forces. Therefore, the failure of the Sepoy Mutiny did not make Muslims apprehensive because it meant the final eclipse of Muslim political power. The fact is that there was no such political power in India called “Muslim power”. It was “Muslim” only in the sense that the ruler happened to be Muslim. The large Muslim populace had nothing to do with it. After 1857, the communal violence had scared Indian Muslims since they had been simply looking for personal security in a country where they were numerically in a minority.

India was divided in 1947. The creation of Pakistan was the result of a fear psychosis of losing Muslim identity in India with an 80 per cent Hindu population. This fear was generated by the British and, later, by a section of the Muslim elite in India. After partition, political leaders never allowed the community to think of their socio-economic problems and backwardness in education. The net result was that being 14 per cent of the Indian population, Muslims did not constitute even one per cent in civil services and the community’s per capita income remained five per cent below the national average. The only problem being highlighted was that of Muslim security. But without the root of communal divide being eradicated, Muslims were given hollow promises of their lives and property being safeguarded in order to make sure of their votes.

Despite the earnest efforts of Indian Muslims to look for that elusive political protector who would deliver them from communal violence, riots broke the back of the community in independent India. Naturally, the ghetto became common. Neither any government nor any political party nor the Muslim leadership did anything to help the community adapt to the socio-economic demands of the age. In fact, Muslims were not in a position after partition to evolve a new social leadership to both contribute to and benefit from a sustained socio-economic development. As a result, Muslims are largely illiterate and mired in grinding poverty. Modern education, trade and industry has not made much headway among Muslims. Muslim job seekers are being subjected to unfortunate discrimination both in the public and private sector. Such discriminations created a shortage, especially after partition, of a modern intelligentsia, modern middle classes and modern bourgeoisie — in short, of modern civilisation among Indian Muslims.

Under the circumstances, it is imperative for the government to come out with a comprehensive plan to improve the condition of Muslims. But it is equally necessary for Muslims themselves to come out of the quagmire and achieve their own empowerment. Like Urdu poet Iqbal says, “Allah does not change the condition of the people unless they strive to change themselves”.

Image: AFP

Some truths about Muslims

by MKA Siddiqui

Constituting over 10.6 million persons, or 25.2 per cent of the total population of West Bengal, 84.26 per cent of the Muslims are rural-based, while 15.74 per cent live in urban areas. Those in the rural areas are predominantly peasants and agricultural labour. In the city they are mainly artisans and handicraftsmen, as well as small traders.

Muslims constitute about 21 percent of Calcutta’s total population. Over 75 per cent of them live in slums or bastis around the Central Business District, in unimaginably bad housing condition, while a substantial number of the rest inhabit the older areas which do not differ from the slums.

A sample survey of the slum-dwelling Muslims showed that:

64.92 % are born in the slum, 12.58 % are born in the city (Calcutta), 3.90 % are born in West Bengal and 18.58 % are from the neighbouring states.

Male / Female Ratio among Muslims is 1000: 841, compared to the total population ratio of 1000:799.

The data discounts the idea that Muslim population in the slums is a "floating" population. Rather it is rooted in the city.

The living condition of the vast bulk of the Muslims can be judged from the fact over 65 per cent of the Muslim families, of the average size of 6.65 members, occupy from 67-160 sq.ft. of space, in which they live and work, engaging themselves in various crafts. The details are as follows:

2.31% occupied up to 66 sq.ft., 19.61% occupied 66-86 sq.ft., 17.12% occupied 81-100 sq.ft., 15.96% occupied 101-120 sq.ft., 2.12% occupied 121-140 sq.ft., 8.27% occupied 141-160 sq.ft., 5.00% occupied 161-180 sq.ft., 3.46% occupied 181-200 sq.ft. and 5.00% occupied 350 sq.ft. and above.

The occupational structure of the Muslims in the city differs sharply from that of the non-Muslims, in so far as Muslims are not only left to themselves for their own support but quite often face challenges from the socio-political system and often get dislodged from some of the comparatively more comfortable niches they carve out for themselves.

According to a survey of age grades in the Muslim population, numbering 926,769 in the city, those from 6-18 years, constituting about 40 %, or numbering 307,000, are supposed to be normally in educational institutions, but their enrollment figure did not exceed 15,000, or 4%. If we take into account all sorts of maktabs, madrasas, private schools, the enrollment figure does not exceed 9% of the total. Thus 91% of the boys and girls have no chance of going to school because they have no schools to go to, nor their socio-economic condition allows them to do so.

A large proportion of the lucky 4% or 15,000 who have the good fortune of getting admission in affiliated schools, drop out before reaching school final stage. The drop-outs have been estimated to be 80% of the total number enrolled. It is tragic that not less than 75% of the total number of Muslim children of school going age serve as child labour, absolutely unhindered by the administration.

Out of total number of over 600 schools in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation area, there are only 43 Urdu medium schools, and actually only 27 of these are recognized and the rest remain unrecognized.

Consequently the educational attainment of the Muslims in Calcutta was found to be as follows:

16.95% can only sign, 14.19% have studied up to primary level, 6.23% have studied up to secondary level, 2.75% have studied up to higher secondary level and 0.17% have studied up to graduate level or above.

But what is cause for a greater worry is the fact that the rate of literacy of Muslims in Calcutta is much lower today than what it was on the eve of Independence in 1947.

This is not the occasion to go back to the historical developments leading to a systematic downward mobility of the Muslims in the city and recession of their ‘social expectation’ that adversely affected their educational achievement. How they were simply made a tool in the hands of the dominant, to be utilized in their socio-economic endeavour. Muslims had taken this trend as their destiny until the very recent past.

Today they are gaining a vague consciousness of the gigantic problems that confront them, which are larger in proportion to the resources at their disposal. They are also not aware of the path that can lead them to achieve the goal, avoiding complications.

The plight of the people of this region is not only reflected in extremely bad living condition, political disempowerment, negligible employment in the organized sector, low level of literacy and education, marginality of their occupational pursuit and incredibly bad housing condition, but also the fact that they are the victims of the most sophisticated form of parochialism that shelters behind modernity and secularism. This has resulted in a low level of ‘social expectation’ and consequently retarded development.

The key to the solution lies in correct understanding, through hard and irrefutable facts, and through motivating and enabling the members of the community to take appropriate action for their solution.

Cynical?

I am often accused of being cynical. But I think I am critical, and discern things that most people are either insensitive to or disregard. In the last 2-3 years, whatever is happening around me, here, in the city of Calcutta, is impossible to bear. I have expressed my sense of depair in earlier posts (see here or here). It is driving me insane. For instance, the air pollution - thanks to polluting buses and auto-rickshaws whose owners have the patronage of the ruling party to remain above the law - is such that people are beginning to drop dead like flies. Or take the testimony of my colleague Amina, whose mother was recently admitted to Calcutta's leading govt hospital; she said its not a hospital but a slaughter-house, run by a mafia of looters. Or consider what one Mr Sourav Sengupta writes in a letter to The Telegraph: "...the culture of unbridled hooliganism that prevails in Calcutta and the rest of Bengal, which have been nurtured by decades of misrule and political nepotism, which in turn have given birth to roughnecks who treat state property as their own. ... Our so-called bhadralok culture is but a thin veneer concealing a rot consuming both Bengal and Bengalis."

So I was glad to re-read a talk by Robert Jensen (2001), which too begins by making the distinction between "cynical" and "critical". He goes on to say: "every great struggle for justice in human history began as a lost cause", and "the joy is in the struggle". I reproduce Jensen's talk below.

Critical Hope: Radical Citizenship in Reactionary Times

After a recent antiwar talk in which I sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy, a student asked me, "Don't you find it hard to live being so cynical?" When I responded that I thought my comments were critical but not cynical, he looked at me funny and said, "But how can being so critical not make you cynical?"

The student was equating any critique of injustice produced by institutions and systems of power with cynicism about people. His question made me realize how easy is cynicism and how difficult is sustained critique in this culture, which shouldn't surprise us. People with power are perfectly happy for the population to be cynical, because that tends to paralyze people and leads to passivity. Those same powerful people also do their best to derail critique -- the process of working to understand the nature of things around us and offering judgments about them -- because that tends to energize people and leads to resistance.

Understanding the difference between critique and cynicism -- and the difference between hope and optimism -- is crucial to the future of any struggle against injustice. At this moment in history, those struggles must not only be about trying to win changes in policies but also about the reinvigoration of public life -- a call for participation, for politics, for radical citizenship in reactionary
times.

I don't use radical and reactionary in this case to describe specific political positions, left versus right. I am talking instead about an approach not just to politics, narrowly defined, but to the central questions of what it means to be a human being in connection with others. I think the world we live in is reactionary because it is trying to squeeze those important human dimensions out of us in the political sphere and constrict the range of discussion so much that politics does seem to many to be useless. I want to argue that our only hope is to be radical, to be political, and to be radical in public politically.

To do that, I will talk about my own journey from cynicism to hope, my own struggle both for greater understanding of my self and an understanding of something greater than me. I am going to talk about love and justice. I am going to risk being seen as naive or self-indulgent or just plain silly. That's OK; I'm just a good-natured hick from North Dakota. We're generally plodding and slow and often don't realize we're being naive, or when people are making fun of us for it.

Let me start the story when I was younger, in my teens and 20s. I saw that the world was in pretty awful shape. When I looked around at the world, I saw a whole lot of pain. The United States had just ended its terrorist campaign in Southeast Asia -- what we commonly call the Vietnam War -- and was pursuing another by proxy in Central America; rich people seemed unconcerned that their luxury was built on the backs of the suffering of literally billions of poor people around the world; people all over the place were still getting kicked around simply because they were women or non white or gay or different in some fashion; and many people seemed not to care that the ecosystem that sustained our lives was in collapse.

I looked around at all this, and I got cynical. Human beings, it seemed to me, were pretty unpleasant creatures. Human nature, I assumed, had to be pretty rotten for all this suffering to go on and on, generation after generation. Even with the advances in social justice -- and there have been advances, such as the end of slavery, greater recognition of the basic rights of women, etc. -- it is hard to be upbeat moving out of the 20th century, one of the most brutal and bloody in human history, into the 21st century, which promises to be just as, if not more, brutal.

Being cynical appeared to have some advantages. I could step back from all the chaos and be hip. I could make jokes about how stupid people were. I could pretend not to care. I could turn away from the suffering of others because I, one of the hip and cynical, understood just how pathetic a species we were. I thought I was the one who saw it all so clearly.

I stayed cynical, and disengaged, for some time. The fact that I was working at newspapers didn't help; for journalists, cynicism is an occupational hazard that takes great intelligence and maturity to resist, and I didn't possess either quality in adequate amounts. So cynical I stayed, until I went to graduate school and was given the luxury of time to read, think, and study. Lots of people go to graduate school and become cynics, or their cynicism deepens; universities can do that to people. But I got lucky and met some exceptional people -- many of them outside the university -- who helped me see another way.

For me, that way began with feminism. I read a lot and listened to women. I started to not only learn about gender and sexism, but I also picked up a new way to understand the world, a new method of inquiry for examining the ideas and institutions that shape our world. I learned to look at how systems and structures of power operate. I learned to see past the surface to the core elements of those systems and structures. When I did that, I realized that things were far worse than I had thought -- the world was in more trouble than I had ever imagined. I learned about new levels of suffering and oppression.

That's when I stopped being cynical and began to feel full of hope.

That may seem counterintuitive. How did a deepening sense of the scale and scope of injustice and suffering make me hopeful? The answer is simple. For all those years, I was cynical for two basic reasons: I had the wrong view of human nature, and I didn't understand how the world worked. I thought the evil and stupidity all around me were the product of an inherently evil and stupid human nature, and therefore I didn't see any way to fight against injustice. It all seemed beyond our control.

Once I started to understand the nature of illegitimate structures of authority, I realized that in fact people (including me) were not inherently evil or stupid, and that human nature (including mine) was complex and sometimes maddening, but not inherently aimed at the destruction of the world. I came to realize that the authority structures that so bent our lives were powerful and deeply entrenched.

I also realized that most of the channels that the dominant culture offered us for working to make the world a better place were themselves deeply embedded in those authority structures, so that often the solutions were part of the problem. I realized that the analysis and action that could save us had to be more radical than I ever could have imagined. I also realized that at the moment in history in which I lived, there were relatively few people who wouldagree with any of this: People had begun to talk about a "postfeminist" age; the attacks on affirmative action and ethnic studies were emerging; the fall of the Berlin Wall "proved" that capitalism was the only possible economic system; and the United States was celebrating the slaughter of the Gulf War.

So, at the moment I realized the depth of the problem and the forces stacked against justice, I got hopeful. The hope comes not from some delusional state, but from what I would argue is a sensible assessment of the situation. Cynicism might be an appropriate reaction to injustice that can't be changed. Hope is an appropriate response to a task that, while difficult, is imaginable. And once I could understand the structural forces that produced injustice, I could imagine what a world without those forces -- and hence without the injustice -- might look like. And I could imagine what activities and actions and ideas it would take to get us there. And I could look around, and look back into history, and realize that lots of people have understood this and that I hadn't stumbled onto a new idea.

In other words, I finally figured out that I should get to work.

So hope emerged out of cynicism. I began to see the power of radical analysis and the importance of collective action. I began to take the long view, to see that we face a struggle, but that it is not a pointless struggle. The exact choices we should make as we struggle are not always clear, but the framework for making choices is there.

Hope and optimism

I have hope, but that does not mean I am optimistic.

Just as we have to distinguish between critique and cynicism, we have to realize that hope is not synonymous with optimism. I am hopeful, but I am not necessarily always optimistic, at least not about the short-term possibilities. These systems and structures of power, these illegitimate structures of authority, are deeply entrenched. They will not be dislodged easily or quickly. Optimism and pessimism should hang on questions of fact -- we should be optimistic when the facts argue for optimism.

For example, I am against the illegitimate structure of authority called the corporation. I want to see different forms of economic organization emerge. I am hopeful about the possibilities but not optimistic that in my lifetime I will see the demise of capitalism, corporations, and wage slavery. Still, I will do certain things to work toward that.

The same can be said of the problem of U.S. aggression against innocent people in the rest of the world, particularly these days in Afghanistan, where the aggression is most intense. Given the bloody record of the United States in the past 50 years and the seemingly limitless capacity of U.S. officials to kill without conscience, I must confess I am not optimistic that such aggression will stop anytime soon, in large part because those corporate structures that drive the killing are still around. But I will do certain things to work against it.

Or take the large state research university. I am concerned about how the needs of students are systematically ignored and the needs of corporate funders are privileged, how critical thinking is squashed not by accident but by design. I am concerned about the illegitimate structures of authority that I work in and that compel me to act in ways against the interests of students. I am not optimistic that the structure of big research universities is going to change anytime soon. But I will do certain things to work against the structures.

So, why would I do any of those things if my expectations of short-term success are so low? One reason is that I could be wrong about my assessment of the likelihood of change. I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life; the list grows every day. For all I know, corporate capitalism is on the verge of collapse, and if we just keep the pressure on it will start to unravel tomorrow. Or perhaps public discontent with murderous U.S. foreign policy is just about ready to crystallize and mobilize people. Or perhaps the contradictions of these behemoth universities are becoming so apparent that the illegitimate structures of authority are about to give way to something that deserves the label "higher education."

History is too complex and contingent for any of us to make predictions. We simply don't have the intellectual tools to understand with much precision how and why people and societies change. History is a rough guide, but it offers no social-change equation. Still, there's really no reasonable alternative except to keep plugging away.

Basically, there are two choices, which are common sense but that I didn't figure out until I heard them articulated by Noam Chomsky: We can either predict the worst -- that no change is possible -- and not act, in which case we guarantee there will be no change. Or we can understand that change always is possible, even in the face of great odds, and act on that assumption, which creates the possibility of progress. (See Chomsky's interview with Michael Albert.)

Every great struggle for justice in human history began as a lost cause. When Gabriel Prosser made plans to take Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, the first large-scale organized slave revolt, he was fighting a lost cause, for which he was hanged. When eight Quakers got together in 1814 in Jonesboro, Tennessee, to form the first white anti-slavery society in the United States (the Tennessee Society for the Manumission of Slaves) they were fighting a lost cause. A lost cause that eventually won.

But that can't be the only answer to the question "why should I be politically active." We are human beings, not machines, and we all have needs. It is hard to sustain yourself in difficult work if the only reward is the possibility that somewhere down the line your work may have some positive effect, though you may be long dead. That's a lot to ask of people. We all want more than that out of life. We want joy and love. At least every now and then, we want to have a good time, including a good time while engaged in our work. No political movement can sustain itself indefinitely without understanding that, not just because people need -- and have a right -- to be happy, but because if there is no joy in it, then movements are more likely to be dangerous. The joy -- the celebration of being human and being alive in connection with others -- is what must fuel the drive for change.

People find joy in many different ways. As many people over the years have pointed out, one source of joy is in the struggle. I have spent a lot of time in the past few years doing political work, and some of that work isn't terribly fun. Collating photocopies for a meeting for a progressive political cause isn't any more fun than collating photocopies for a meeting at a marketing company. But it is different in some ways: It puts you in contact with like-minded people. It sparks conversation. It creates space in which you can think and feel your way through difficult questions. It's a great place to laugh as you staple. It provides the context for connections that go beyond superficial acquaintanceships.

The joy is in the struggle, but not just because in struggle one connects to decent people. The joy is also in the pain of struggle. Joy is multilayered -- one key aspect of it is discovery, and one way we discover things about ourselves and others is through pain.

Struggle confronts pain, and confronting pain is part of joy. The pain is there, in all our lives; there is no human life without pain. Pain can become part of joy when it is confronted. Struggle confronts pain. Struggle produces joy.

The joy is in the struggle. The struggle is not just the struggle against illegitimate structures of authority in the abstract. The struggles are in each of us -- struggles to find the facts, to analyze clearly, to imagine solutions, to join with others in collective action for justice, and struggles to understand ourselves in relation to each other and ourselves as we engage in all these activities.

I realize that this struggle doesn't seem appealing to many. I have heard lots of people lately say that they can't cope with the complexity of politics. It seems too much, too big, too confusing. All they can handle, they say, is to focus on their individual lives and do the best to fix their lives. I think these folks misunderstand not just their moral obligation but the nature of progress, individual and collective. We don't fix ourselves in isolation. We don't build decent lives by cutting ourselves off from problems just because they are complex. Yes, there are times when difficult situations force us to turn inward and deal with pressing problems in our lives. I have done that, and I see no need to apologize for it. But I am arguing against the permanent division of our lives into these artificial categories.

Our problems are never wholly individual, and hence they can't be fixed in individual ways. Part of the solution is always to be found in the bigger struggle, in which we all have a part.

I have learned that there is great joy in that bigger struggle. And that leads us back to the abandonment of cynicism and the embrace of hope. Cynicism is a sophomoric and self-indulgent retreat from the world and all its problems. Hope is a mature and loving embrace of the world and all its promise. That does not mean one should have unfounded or naive hope. Wendell Berry reminds us that history shows that "massive human failure" is possible, but:

"[H]ope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found." [Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 11.]

Hope is one of our duties. But that does not mean it is always easy. There are many times, especially since September 11, that I have had to struggle to hold onto hope. The combination of seeing the World Trade Center towers fall in an instance and then watching the unfolding of an illegal and immoral war on Afghanistan has tested my own sense of hope. I managed to hold on for a couple of months, but in the few days before I sat down to write this I could feel my sense of hope fading. At the same time that I have been writing and thinking about the war, I also have been continuing my work on sexual violence and pornography. Both spark the same feeling in my gut -- despair over how cruel people, especially men, can be. When I have to face humans' willingness to inflict pain -- and ability to find pleasure in inflicting pain -- whether in the realm of the global or the intimate, some part of me wants to die; I can't bear it. Maybe some part of me does die.

In the few days before I wrote this, I especially was having trouble in the mornings; lying awake in bed in the dark; trying to reclaim that sense of hope so that getting out of bed would make sense; trying not to think about the war but realizing that not thinking about it would be even worse; dying a little bit inside every morning, in the dark.

But those authentic underpinnings of hope remain. On the day I wrote this, I had a meeting with a student on my campus who had read something I had written about the war and wanted to talk. She said she didn't have anything in particular to ask me. She just wanted to talk to someone who didn't think she was crazy. All around her at work and school, people -- pro, con or neutral -- were refusing to talk about the war, she said. So we talked for a bit. We did politics, in a small way, the way politics is most often done. We talked about how she might organize a political group on campus. But maybe more important, we shored up each other's sense of hope. We could talk about the pain and craziness of the war without turning away.

Real hope -- the belief in the authentic underpinnings of hope -- is radical. A belief that people are not evil and stupid, not consigned merely to live out pre-determined roles in illegitimate structures of authority, is radical. The willingness to act publicly on that hope and that belief is radical.

We all live in a society that would prefer that we not be radical, that we not understand any of this. We live in a society that prefers productive but passive people. I work at a university that is part of that society, and has many of the same problems. Many classes at the university are either explicitly or implicitly designed to convince students that everything I have argued here is fundamentally loony. The same goes for much of what comes to us through the commercial mass media. Some of what I say indeed may be misguided; as I said, I understand that I could be, and often am, wrong.

But, even if I'm wrong in some ways, I'd rather be wrong with hope than cynicism. I'd rather be naive than hip. I'd rather work for a just and sustainable world and fail than abandon the hope. I understand that this position is not wholly logical; it is based on a sense of how we can best make good on the gifts that come with being part of the human community. It is based on a faith in something common to us all, a capacity that is difficult to name, but which is perhaps best summed up by a phrase once used by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Our task simply put, Freire said, is "to change some conditions that appear to me as obviously against the beauty of being human." [Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 131.]

In the end, that is the central hope: We can join together to help build not a utopia but a world in which we can struggle -- individually and collectively, through the pain and with joy -- to get as close as we can to the beauty of being human.


Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream. He can be reached at www.rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Other writings are available online here.

Locked Out and Locked Up

by Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
17 February 2009

Youth Missing in Action from Obama's Stimulus Plan

Already imperiled before the recent economic meltdown, the quality of life for many young people appears even more fragile in the United States in this time of political, economic and social crisis. A great deal has been written critically about both the conditions that enabled the free market to operate without accountability in the interests of the rich and how it has produced a theater of cruelty that has created enormous suffering for millions of hard-working, decent human beings. Yet, at the same time, there is a thunderous silence on the part of many critics and academics regarding the ongoing insecurity and injustice experienced by young people in this country, which is now being intensified as a result of the state's increasing resort to repression and punitive social policies. The current concerns about the effects of poverty, homelessness, economic injustice and galloping unemployment rates and Obama's plans to rectify them almost completely ignore the effects of these problems on young people in the United States, especially poor whites and youth of color.

Increasingly, children seem to have no standing in the public sphere as citizens and as such are denied any sense of entitlement and agency. Children have fewer rights than almost any other group, and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs. This is not to suggest that adults do not care about youth, but most of those concerns are framed within the realm of the private sphere of the family and can be seen most clearly in the moral panics mobilized around drugs, truancy and kids killing each other. The response to such events, tellingly, is more "get tough on crime policy," never an analysis of the systemic failure to provide safety and security for children through improved social provisions. In public life, however, children seem absent from any discourse about the future and the responsibilities this implies for adult society. Rather, children appear as objects, defined through the debasing language of advertising and consumerism. If not being represented as a symbol of fashion or hailed as a hot niche, youth are often portrayed as a problem, a danger to adult society or, even worse, irrelevant to the future.

This merging of the neoliberal state in which kids appear as commodities or a source of profits and the punishing state, which harkens back to the old days of racial apartheid in its ongoing race to incarcerate, was made quite visible in a recent shocking account of two judges in Pennsylvania who took bribes as part of a scheme to fill up privately run juvenile detention centers with as many youths as possible, regardless of how minor the infraction they committed. One victim, Hillary Transue, appeared before one of the "kickback" judges for "building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school."[1] A top student who had never been in trouble, she anticipated a stern lecture from the judge for her impropriety. Instead, he sentenced her "to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment." It has been estimated that the two judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, "made more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers" and that over 5,000 juveniles have gone to jail since the "scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention." While this incident received some mainstream news coverage, most of the response focused less on the suffering endured by the young victims than on the breach of professional ethics by the two judges. None of the coverage treated the incident as either symptomatic of the war being waged against youth marginalized by class and race or as an issue that the Obama administration should give priority to in reversing. In fact, just as there was almost no public outcry over a market-driven scheme to incarcerate youth to fill the pockets of corrupt judges, there was very little public anger over the millions slashed from the stimulus bill that would have directly benefited kids by investing in schools, Head Start and other youth-oriented programs. It seems that the real failure of post-partisan politics is its willingness to sacrifice young people in the interests of winning political votes.

Rendering poor minority youth as dangerous and a threat to society no longer requires allusions to biological inferiority; the invocation of cultural difference is enough to both racialize and demonize "difference without explicitly marking it,"[2] in the post-racial Obama era. This disparaging view of young people has promulgated the rise of a punishing and (in)security industry whose discourses, technologies and practices have become visible across a wide range of spaces and institutions, extending from schools to shopping malls to the juvenile criminal justice system.[3] As the protocols of governance become indistinguishable from military operations and crime-control missions, youth are more and more losing the protections, rights, security or compassion they deserve in a viable democracy. The model of policing that now governs all kinds of social behaviors constructs a narrow range of meaning through which young people define themselves. Moreover, the rhetoric and practice of policing, surveillance and punishment have little to do with the project of social investment and a great deal to do with increasing powerful modes of regulation, pacification and control - together comprising a "youth control complex" whose prominence in American society points to a state of affairs in which democracy has lost its claim and the claiming of democracy goes unheard. Rather than dreaming of a future bright with visions of possibility, young people, especially youth marginalized by race and color, face a coming-of-age crisis marked by mass incarceration and criminalization, one that is likely to be intensified in the midst of the global financial, housing and credit crisis spawned by neoliberal capitalism.

As Alex Koroknay-Palicz argues, "Powerful national forces such as the media, politicians and the medical community perpetuate the idea of youth as an inferior class of people responsible for society's ills and deserving of harsh penalties."[4] While such negative and demeaning views have had disastrous consequences for young people, under the reign of a punishing society and the deep structural racism of the criminal justice system, the situation for a growing number of young people and youth of color is getting much worse. The suffering and deprivation experienced by millions of children in the United States in 2008 - and bound to become worse in the midst of the current economic meltdown - not only testifies to a state of emergency and a burgeoning crisis regarding the health and welfare of many children, but also bears witness to - and indeed indicts - a model of market sovereignty and a mode of punitive governance that have failed both children and the promise of a substantive democracy. The Children's Defense Fund in its 2007 annual report offers a range of statistics that provide a despairing glimpse of the current crisis facing too many children in America. What is one to make of a society marked by the following conditions:

· Almost 13 million children in America live in poverty - 5.5 million in extreme poverty.

· 4.2 million children under the age of five live in poverty.

· 35.3 percent of black children, 28.0 percent of Latino children and 10.8 percent of white, non-Latino children live in poverty.

· There are 9.4 million uninsured children in America.

· Latino children are three times as likely, and black children are 70 percent more likely, to be uninsured than white children.

· Only 11 percent of black, 15 percent of Latino and 41 percent of white eighth graders perform at grade level in math.

· Each year 800,000 children spend time in foster care.

· On any given night, 200,000 children are homeless - one out every four of the homeless population.

· Every 36 seconds a child is abused or neglected - almost 900,000 children each year.

· Black males ages 15-19 are about eight times as likely as white males to be gun homicide victims.

· Although they represent 39 percent of the US juvenile population, minority youth represent 60 percent of committed juveniles.

· A black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy has a 1 in 6 chance.

· Black juveniles are about four times as likely as their white peers to be incarcerated. Black youths are almost five times as likely and Latino youths about twice as likely to be incarcerated as white youths of drug offenses.[5]

As these figures suggest, the notion that children should be treated as a crucial social resource and represent for any healthy society important ethical and political considerations about the quality of public life, the allocation of social provisions and the role of the state as a guardian of public interests appears to be lost. Under the reign of the market-driven punishing state, a racialized criminal justice system, and a "financial Katrina" that is crippling the nation, the economic, political and educational situation for a growing number of poor young people and youth of color has gone from bad to worse. As families are being forced out of their homes because of record-high mortgage foreclosures and many businesses declare bankruptcy, tax revenues are declining and effecting cutbacks in state budgets, further weakening public schools and social services. The results in human suffering are tragic and can be measured in the growing ranks of poor and homeless students, the gutting of state social services, and the sharp drop in employment opportunities for teens and young people in their twenties.[6] Within these grave economic conditions, children disappear, often into bad schools, prisons, foster care and even into their graves. Under the rule of an unchecked market-driven society, the punishing state has no vocabulary or stake in the future of poor minority youth, and increasingly in youth in general. Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of recognizing that many poor minority youth are badly served by failing schools, they are labeled as uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of providing minority youth with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless. Instead of addressing the very real dangers that young people face, the punishing society treats them as suspects and disposable populations, subjecting them to disciplinary practices that close down any hope they might have for a decent future.

All of the talk about a post-racial society in light of Obama's election is meaningless as long as young people of color are disproportionally criminalized at younger and younger ages, allowed to disappear into the growing ranks of the criminal justice system and increasingly viewed as a racial threat to society rather than as a crucial social, political and economic investment. Obama's message of hope and responsibility seems empty unless he addresses the plight of poor white youth and youth of color and the growing youth-control complex. The race to incarcerate - especially youth of color - is a holdover and reminder that the legacy of apartheid is still with us and can be found in a society that now puts almost as many police in its schools as it does teachers, views the juvenile justice system as a crucial element in shaping the future of young people, and supports a crime complex that models schools for poor kids after prisons.

[1] Ian Urbina and Sean D. Hamill, "Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit," New York Times (February 13, 2009), p. A1, A20.

[2] Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Reflections of Youth, From the Past to the Postcolony," Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on The New Economy," ed. Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 267.

[3] Garland, "The Culture of Control;" and Jonathan Simon, "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Phil Scranton, "Power, Conflict and Criminalisation" (New York: Routledge, 2007).

[4] Alex Koroknay-Palicz, "Scapegoating of Youth," National Youth Rights Association (December 2001). Online: www.youthrights.org/scapegoat.php.

[5] Children's Defense Fund, 2007 Annual Report (Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund, 2008). Online: www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/CDF_annual_report_07.pdf?docID=8421.

[6] See Bob Herbert, "Head for the High Road," New York Times, (September 2, 2008), p. A25; Sam Dillon, "Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools," New York Times (September 1, 2008), p. A1, A9; and Erik Eckholm, "Working Poor and Young Hit Hard in Downturn," New York Times (November 9, 2008), p. A23.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: Take Back Higher Education (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007) and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008). His newest book, Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability, will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.

Mr Tata's unpaid bills

Ratan Tata, his puppy Buddhadev
Bhattacharjee on a leash, wonders,
"What happens to it nowadays when it
sees poor people?"

Please Pay Your Bill Before You Leave, Mr Tata!

by D. Bandyopadhyay

Published in Mainstream, Vol XLVI, No 51, 12 December 2008

I

On October 3, 2008, at a press conference at Kolkata, Ratan Tata formally announced his decision to move out the Nano Project from West Bengal squarely blaming the agitation led by the Trinamul Congress for his decision to relocate the plant. This statement clearly reflected some of the discussions that he had with the Chief Minister of West Bengal with whom he was closeted for two hours before the press conference. He spoke persuasively with unwarranted venom.

One cannot blame Tata for his lack of knowledge of the character, trait and heritage of the popular upsurges in West Bengal. Singur was one of the epicentres of the Tebhaga movement in the late forties of the last century led by the old and unsullied Communist Party of India. There is a famous story by Manik Bandyopadhyay called "Chhoto Bakul Purer Yatri" on that episode. Its locale was Bara-Kamalapur in Singur. A blue-blooded bourgeois totally alienated from the common people cannot have any perception about any popular movement against gross violation of their basic right to life and livelihood. He cannot be faulted for it.

After all, the Tatas made their primary accumulation of capital through opium trade in China in the nineteenth century. Use of opium was prohibited under law in China. The East India Company and its minor trading partners, among which the Tatas were one, started illegal importation of opium into China from India. The Chinese
Government strongly objected to this. The British waged the first Opium War (1839-42) in which China lost resulting in the Treaty of Nanjing, 1842. It imposed insulting and highly unfavourable conditions against China and in favour of the British. Then there was a second Opium War in 1856-60 wherein the British triumphed again and forcibly legalised contraband trade in opium in China. The Tatas and a few other Indian traders made enormous profit from this trade in a contraband commodity in China. Wealth creates hauteur. Hence we may excuse Tata for his slightly less than civilised behaviour in slandering Ms Mamata Banerjee at the press conference. He did not show any concern for or kindness to the land losers of Singur but it is reported that he donated US$ 50 million to Cornell University only recently.

But what about the Communist Party of India-Marxist? Did it not take a Royal Charter of monopoly for representing the "oppressed" who stood in constant opposition to the "oppressor" and who are in a constant fight, "a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes"? The Chief Minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, while opening a SEZ project at the New Town Rajarhat on October 5, 2008, declared that he had "lost a battle, but not the war". A question naturally arises: for whom is he waging this war? While commenting on the adverse economic effects of SEZs, Professor Amit Bhaduri observed: "The devil in angel's guise would soon appear when large populations in rural areas would be rendered landless, jobless, homeless, incomeless, rootless and displaced making way for SEZs, the so-called epitomes of economic development." Bravo Mr Chief Minister, for so transparently exposing the class affiliation of yourself and your party! You have openly promised to wage a war in favour of the oppressors and against the oppressed. It is only to be hoped that it ends in the reconstitution of the society in favour of monopoly capital. In ensuring this objective, the CPI-M would fulfil its historic mission of total subjugation and annihilation of workers and peasants making the world safe for the bourgeoisie. It perhaps validates the saying "Money Speaks"!

The Government of West Bengal (GOWB) published 13 notifications under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act 1894 in July 2006 declaring its intentions to acquire roughly 1000 acres of land in five mauzas of Singur abutting the Durgapur Express Highway. All the 13 notifications had the same common clause. It stated that land mentioned in the Schedule below is likely to be needed to be taken by Government/Government Undertaking/Development Authorities, at public expense for a public purpose (emphasis ours), viz., employment generation and socio-economic development of the area by setting up of Tata Small Car Project, etc., etc.

Since the government cannot acquire any land for a private company except through the procedure laid down in the Chapter-VII of the Land Acquisition Act, the GOWB openly committed a fraud on the law and on the public by acquiring the land in the name of the West Bengal Industries Development Corporation (WBIDC-a government company) for leasing out the land to Tata Motors Ltd (TML). This chicanery on the part of the GOWB enabled the Tatas to get hold of 643 acres of land on lease without paying a paisa. But under this procedure land could be acquired only for a "public purpose". Section 3(f) of the LA Act defines "public purpose". There are eight items under it. But the caveat to this definition is very significant. It says "but does not include acquisition of land for companies". Thus the acquisition of land for the TML was totally illegal. The issue is now pending before the Apex Court. For the exercise of the doctrine of eminent domain a "public purpose" is essential. Hence the GOWB deceitfully tried to make out a case by stating that the small car factory would generate employment and result in socio-economic development in the area. There is no basis for this assertion. Firstly, it did not disclose how many direct jobs would be created in the factory. Secondly, it did not specify how many land losers would get direct employment. Thirdly, the promise of the process of economic development and the resultant prosperity was a rehash of the discredited and discarded "trickle-down theory". Hence it was an exercise in falsehood. Though not conceding the point, let us accept these contentions for the sake of argument. The whole thesis is predicated by the fact that the TML would set up a small car factory. Now that they have decided to move out and are relocating the factory outside West Bengal, the whole thesis vanishes into thin air. There is no small car factory. There would be no employment generation. There would be no socio-economic development of the area. Therefore, there would be no "public purpose". Thus the expenditure of public funds for this non-existing project was a total waste and, therefore, fully unjustified. It calls for criminal action.

This has very grave and serious consequences. The whole exercise of acquisition of 1000 acres of land through the use of force, building up of infrastructure for the project which does not exist, supply of free electricity and water, round the clock police protection for two years, construction of an 18.75 km of eight feet high boundary wall with watch tower at regular intervals, were done for nothing. Who would bear this cost? Even with a contrived and convoluted argument of "public purpose", there could have been a fig-leaf of justification of such enormous public expenditure. With the withdrawal of the Tatas all these expenses lose all validity. Some heads should roll.

The Tatas withdrew from Singur on their own volition. Therefore, they would have to pay for the cost. That is the logic. That is also the ethics. In fact, the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) of India should conduct a due diligence audit of the WBIDC, Commerce and Industries Department, West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO), Bhangore-Rajarhat Area Development Authority (BRADA) and the Police Directorate to compute exactly the loss to the public exchequer due to this abrupt decision of the Tatas to move out from Singur. The CAG should also fix responsibility for this wanton waste of public funds. It would be a slightly time-consuming process but it has to be done for the sake of public accountability, transparency and good governance.

Meanwhile to present a provisional bill to the Tatas an attempt is being made here to compute a figure based on the facts and figures as published in the print media about this issue. The Tatas caused enormous loss of public funds for their misadventure in Singur. This provisional figure would be altered once the CAG's report is made available. But it is fair that the Tatas should have an indication of how much they would have to pay back.

In the first place, but for the fraud perpetuated by the GOWB the Tatas would have to pay upfront the estimated cost of land acquisition under Chapter VII of the LA Act 1894. Now that there is not even a fig-leaf of public purpose, they would have to reimburse to the State Government a sum of Rs 200 crores, the paid out cost of compensation for the acquisition with some visible overheads.

Secondly, the WBIDC or some other State agency constructed an 18.75 km long boundary wall along the outer periphery of the acquired property. We do not know its specifications. It is locally said that the wall is eight feet high with a two-feet foundation underground. Estimates made by a couple of A-class CPWD contractors indicated that it would cost Rs 275 per running metre for a wall of this type with supporting pillars at regular intervals. Thus the estimated cost of construction of this wall would not be less than Rs 51,56,250, that is, roughly Rs 51.56 lakhs. With this one has to add the cost of five big gates. At a conservative estimate that would cost not less than Rs 25 lakhs. Thus the wall with gates would cost not less than 76.56 lakhs.

Thirdly, the government provided round-the-clock police protection both during the process of acquisition and after the land was leased out to Tatas. Newspaper reports indicate that approximately 2000 policemen were deployed day and night for the last two years and several months for the protection of the property of the TML. The government did not come out with any fact about it. But the Police Directorate of West Bengal has a standard formula of cost for deployment of 1000 policemen (one battalion strength) including ASI and SI but excluding the salaries of officers of the ranks of Inspector and above. The salary cost per month comes to Rs 80,70,000 which is 83.01 per cent of the actual cost. To this one has to add the cost of uniform, boots and some other basic equipments which would come to Rs 16,51,100 constituting 16.99 per cent of the total monthly cost. Thus the total comes to Rs 97,21,800 per month. This figure does not include the expenses of vehicles, POL, and other heavy equipments without which a police force cannot function. Excluding these items the annual cost of deployment of a battalion of police men comes to Rs 11.67 crores. For two battalions deployed to protect the Tata property the cost would be Rs 23.33 crores. For two years it would be Rs 46.66 crores. This is basically the salary component. The actual cost is much higher.

Fourthly, the GOWB committed another act of deception to give financial benefit to the Tatas. The Principal Secretary, Commerce and Industry Department of the GOWB wrote a letter on 12.10.2006 to the Managing Director of the WB Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO) in which, inter alia, he mentioned:

"In order to bring investment (obviously NANO Unit) in West Bengal, we had to face competition from other States, in particular, Uttaranchal which enjoys zero excise duty benefit in a car proposed to be priced at Rs 1 lakh, the exemption of 16 per cent excise duty makes a major difference. Therefore, in order to make the investment attractive to the TML, the State Government has to offer significant support in the form of upfront infrastructured assistance."

So the Tata Housing Development (THDC) would enter into an agreement with the WBIDC to form a joint venture company. Five hundred acres of land belonging to Bhangore Rajarhat Development Authority (BRADA)would be given at a concessional rate to the THDC+WBIDC combine. And 50 acres of high-value land of New Town Rajarhat should also be given to that combine. The letter clearly mentioned 20 acres should be given for commercial purpose and 30 acres for residential purpose at rates which were half the prevailing rates. The letter went on to state that the profit generated by the WBIDC would be used by it "to meet its commitment of infrastructure assistance to the TML project without having resort to budgetary support". The term "infrastructural support" was deliberately used to hide the real intention of giving subsidy to the TML. This directive of the C and I Department violated several laws apart from being ethically unsupportable. But we are not going into it here.

In one stroke, HIDCO suffered a loss of Rs 60 crores for 20 acres of commercial land and a loss of Rs 75 crores for the residential land making a total loss of Rs 135 crores.

On the 500 acres of BRADA land, one could make some conjecture in the absence of hard facts. Assuming that price of land per cottah was Rs 1 lakh and that BRADA had to sell it at Rs 50,000 to ensure the profitability of the TML, BRADA lost Rs 150 crores straightway. (1 standard acre = 60 Cottah)

Two separate companies/authorities had been ordered to suffer loss to ensure profitability of the TML. The whole idea is preposterous apart from being totally illegal and unethical. A future Commission of Inquiry on "La Affaire Nano" would have to untangle the knots within knots of these totally unwholesome and messy transactions to assess the damage and fix responsibility. It was as well that the Tatas have left, otherwise most of these worthy gentlemen would have got themselves further entangled in illegality verging on corruption that they might have resulted in spending their residual tenure of life in some State Correctional Homes. Incidentally, with due diligence audit followed by a Commission of Inquiry, the possibility of their short-term stay in these Homes is not beyond the realm of possibility. It would be good if they improved the living conditions of these Homes when they were still in service. Now let us get back to the point.

The provisional exit bill of Tatas would be: (i) Rs 200 crores (LA cost) + (ii) Rs 76.56 lakhs (cost of wall) + (iii) Rs 46.66 crores(police protection) + (iv) Rs 135 + Rs 150 = Rs 285 crores (subsidised land transferred from HIDCO + BRADA) = Rs 532.18 crores (excluding all indirect and invisible costs) = Rs 532.18 crores (excluding all
indirect and invisible costs). The final bill would be computed only after the CAG's audit.

II

This episode cannot be ended unless some tit-bits of the parleys that took place on September 5-6, 2008 at the Council Chamber of Raj Bhavan, Kolkata, are recorded and made public. Since the GOWB unilaterally and unethically repudiated the agreement it entered into with the Opposition, the writer has no moral compunction now to mention some of the inner stories.

In the beginning the Facilitator set the ground rules. There should be no personal attacks. The attempt should be to find an amicable solution of the Singur impasse for the benefit of the "unwilling farmers", agriculture, industry and the general well-being of the people of West Bengal. It must be admitted that both sides adhered to the ground rules and carried on the discussions in a civilised and polite manner.

The discussion centred on the amount of land that could be made available within the project area for resettlement of the "unwilling land losers" on a land-for-land basis. Incidentally the "land-for-land" principle of R&R has been recognised in the National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy, October 2007. The Leader of the Opposition made it clear initially that, though debatable, his side would not discuss the merit or otherwise of letting out of 643 acres (approx.) for the mother plant of the TML. It was a major concession and it created immediately an amicable ambience for negotiations. Thus discussions centred on the residual 350 acres (approx.).

The government side pointed out that this area 294 acres has been set apart for ancillary units. After an hour of discussions it was found that the matter was not progressing. It was going round and round.

At this stage the Commerce and Industries Minister suddenly offered 40 acres of land in the project area for non-agricultural avocations on the basis of five per cent of the land cost per land losers. He also introduced the concept of R&R "in and around" the project area. With 40 acres already declared in favour of the land losers, there was an attempt to find out how much more land could be made available from the vacant but not yet utilised land in the project area, particularly, from the land earmarked for the ancillary units. Whatever proposal came from anywhere the stock reply of the Commerce and Industries Minister was: "The Tatas will not agree." It was like the repetitive refrain of a song in a cracked voice of a scratched HMV 78 RPM paraffin record. I counted this phrase 11 times before I gave up in disgust.

The Facilitator, a suave, charming and elegant gentleman, did not show any sign of displeasure, but very sweetly he asked the Commerce and Industries Minister "who had acquired the land". The reply was: it was the government. Then there was a further query that if the GOWB had acquired land under the LA Act forcibly, should not it have some view as to how the land should be utilised by the ancillary units? Did anyone ascertain the real requirement of each unit? To that the scratched record croaked: "The Tatas will not agree."

Then the Facilitator sought the permission of the Commerce and Industries Minister to ask a few questions to the MD of the WBIDC. The Minister promptly agreed. The Facilitator then asked the MD who had selected the ancillary units. The reply was -the Tatas. Then he enquired as to who had decided how much land one unit would require. The reply was - the Tatas. Thereafter, he wanted to know who decided where would that parcel of land be located. The answer was-the Tatas. Getting, perhaps, a bit perplexed, though not showing any sign of it, he politely asked to whom did the land belong. The reply was - the WBIDC. To this he further queried: "In that case should not the WBIDC have some say regarding areas to be allotted and their location" This time the Minister replied: "The Tatas will not agree." The MD supplemented the answer by adding that the WBIDC did not have the technical competence to assess the requirement and, therefore, it depended entirely on the Tatas.

Never in my service career of more than three-and-a-half decades both in the State and at the Centre had I seen such shameful subservience of a government to a business house. One felt ashamed to be in the same company.

It is time to relate an anecdote about Dr B.C. Roy. In 1951 he received a proposal from Morris Motor Co. of England for technical collaboration with an Indian entrepreneur for the manufacture of Morris cars in India. After studying the proposal, one day he told his personal staff: "Call him (Oke dako)." Totally confused his personal staff left his chamber not knowing whom to call. Then it occurred to someone that it could be G.D.Birla who had sought an appointment earlier. So they rang up Birla and fixed the appointment at 3 pm on the same day. Birla arrived at the appointed hour. Dr Roy was informed. He told his staff "Request him wait for a while (Oke boshte balo)." After a while Birla went in and stayed with Dr Roy for almost an hour. That was the beginning of the Hindustan Motors at Konnagar, the first motor car factory in Asia after the WW-II. The Chief Minister of Bengal did not kow-tow to any business tycoon to locate an industrial unit in the State.

III

Now what happens after the exit of Ratan Tata from West Bengal? Firstly, to the best of our knowledge on October 4, 2008, the earth went round its own axis at its usual speed of 24 hours per round. Further, the sun rose on that day in East and went down in the west as usual. There was no media report of heaven having fallen or the earth cracking up. The general populace went on their business in the usual manner, so much so that the "bandh" called by the CPI-M collapsed much before time. Life continues in West Bengal in its normal pace and stride since October 03, 2008.

Second, since an area of more or less 643 acres was let out to the TML for setting up a car factory, now that they have decided to go, a notice has to be given for the cancellation of the lease. Similar notices have to be given to all the ancillary units because they were captive to the TML

Third, it appeared from the media reports that about 200 to 250 acres of land where heavy construction had already taken place, agriculture would not be possible without enormous capital cost to restore its original fertility. Hence that area could be kept reserved for a future motor car factory. In fact advice of a reputed consultant should be obtained to ascertain how much land would be required to set up a manufacturing facility of 500,000 small and medium cars per year. On the basis of his assessment an area of, say, 350 or 400 or 450 acres of land could be set apart for the future factory. This should include the built up area of the TML.

Fourth, instead of any sweet-heart agreement with any crony capitalist there should be world-wide advertisement for Global Expression of Interest for setting up of small/medium car factory in Singur. The government should openly advertise what benefits and/or facilities it would offer. Respondents should be requested to indicate what terms and conditions they would offer for the well being of the land losers and for the State in general. After appropriate technical and financial assessement the party whose offer would be best should be selected to set up the manufacturing unit. The agreement should be open and transparent and there should be no secret annexures as in the case with the TML.

Fifth, the rest of land should be returned to the land losers. The Commerce and Industries Minister had been repeating like an untrained parrot that land once acquired cannot be returned. This is not correct. There are various processes of restoring the land. There is Section 21 of the General Clauses Act 1897. Its heading reads as follows: "Power to issue includes power to add, to amend, vary, or rescind notification, order, rules or bye-laws." Under this section lands to be returned could be denotified.

If one wanted to stay within the four corners of the Supreme Court judgement in the Bhaskaran Pillai case (1997- 5 SCC.432), the surplus land should be handed over to the Singur Panchayat Samity for "planned development or improvement of existing village sites". Five mauzas have been devastated by reckless land acquisition proceedings. These villages should be developed in a planned manner as provided for under section 3(f)(I) and (v) of the LA Act, 1894. Land losers should be initially given a 999-year lease.

In due course, a local amendment should be made in the LA Act, on the lines of the Tamil Nadu Amendment to return land to the original owners. It may have to wait for the change of government.

The CPI-M requires to be cautioned that it would be totally illegal to go on a fishing expedition to find out a project which could fit into the definition of "public purpose" to utilise this land. The acquired land has to be used primarily for the purpose for which it was initially acquired.

It is said that "there comes a time in the history of any State when its hypocrisy must be exposed and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced". It was time we did it in West Bengal.

IV

It is a polite submission to Mr Tata. Please do not misunderstand us. We are not begging you to foot the bill. We are not putting pressure on you to pay the bill either. We would only like to remind you of a common saying: "A gentleman always settles his bill before he leaves."

......

The author was the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministries
of Finance (Revenue) and Rural Development, and the Executive
Director, Asian Development Bank, Manila.