Last One Week or So

Friends, Last week we saw the return of shocking and horrifying violence of terror in Delhi. With 13 dead and many more injured we will be living with one more trauma to cope with. We hope the affected families and their friends find the strength to carry on as they must.The perpetrators of this ghastly act are yet to be caught. Meanwhile the focus has shifted to political blame games and complex penologies to deal with terror. We have been discussing(from 2nd September 2011 onwards) the issues of effectiveness of capital punishment in our discussions/groups of the university and have had heated exchange of views. Interesting also was an NDTV discussion on 4th of September 2011(We the People episode) which we attended.(This you can look up on the website of www.ndtv.com) The discussion was in the context of rejection of mercy pleas of Rajiv Gandhi assasins(who had been sentenced to death) by the Supreme Court and the President of India .(Subsequently the Tamil Nadu assembly passed a resolution asking for a review).Mr. S. Chaturvedi of the Congress said that it was glaringly clear that the law should take its course and after the rejection of the petition the discussion(ie. this programme) should not have taken place at all.Mr. Chandan Mitra of the BJP tended to agree with him. We feel that here it is important to take in to account the insight of Plato that law has to be onesided and it makes an abstraction of the individual criminal.It is this insight which was taken up by the modern legal systems.This enabled an attempt to create human conditions for the reform of the criminal(in which he himself participated) under modern law.Capital punishment however is a finality which does away with the need to address the creation of this human condition itself. The complex penologies which are under debate today will perhaps need to take this in to account.(SFC,PG IGNOU,with the help of Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)

India's Growth Story

Friends, Participating in the NDTV programme on the India Growth story killed by corruption? in its We the People episode of 31st July2011, certain points arose which we would like to share with you. The India Growth Story is about India's engagement with modernity. Disputes can be there about how India has gone about this engagement on which the participants in the programme expressed their views. Here inevitably the civil society led anti corruption campaign came in to discussion. Ashutosh Varshney, an eminent scholar on the panel, was of of the view that corruption accompanied most societies(including U.S.) which made a transition from the agrarian stage to the industrial stage. Here he looked at the anti corruption campaign more as a middle class angst which should find a reflection in the political parties' concerns.Mr. Manish Tewary the Hon. MP from the Congress on the panel expressed concerns about how the anti corruption campaign was threatening the legislature and its law making concerns.It is for this reason perhaps the Congress has branded the anti corruption campaign sectarian. To us it is important in this context of debates on India's engagement with modernity that certain questions are not missed out. Importantly the passage to modernity involves a move towards the separation of political state and civil society.It is here Karl Marx an eminent thinker of the 19th century pointed out in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law that 'the question whether all should individually participate in deliberating and deciding on the general affairs of the state is a question which arises from the separation of the political state and civil society'. In a situation where this separation is in the process of happening within the precincts of the older political state where the political state and civil society are one there arise mass aspirations for as general a participation as possible in the legislative power(like the debates we witnessing on the Jan Lokpal Bill).This is what emerges as a striving for as general as possible a participation in the legislation making. It is here it is most important that the anti corruption campaign of the civil society be understood as a movement which is not sectarian or reduced to one estate or the other as both the scholar Ashutosh Varshney or the mainstream political parties tend to do.The mass support to the civil society's anti corruption campaign is significant in this regard. The recognition of this as a nonsectarian movement perhaps can help us in coming to grips with the India story.(SFC, PG IGNOU,with the help of Mr.Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)

Horror In Norway

Friends, Close on the heels of the terror attack in Mumbai(13/7) in India, we see the reports of the horrifying blast and killing of the eighty six young students at a youth camp near Oslo last week.While the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror are yet to be identified, the Norway police have arrested Anders Breivik ,a Norwegian, for the attacks and killings. The attacker has been identified as a right wing Christian fundamentalist whose manifesto was anti immigrant, anti Muslim,anti multiculturalism and anti cultural Marxist.Breivik was also courting revenge for the betrayal of the their heritage by the 'indigenous Europeans'.Praveen Swami writing in the Hindu newspaper on 25th July'11 described this as a 'mode of praxis consistent with the periodic acts of mass violence European fascists have been carrying out since World War II'. Mr. Swami, drawing parallels with India, argued that these ideas were firmly rooted in the mainstream right wing discourse. It is in this context that the response of the Norwegian people and the young students who survived the massacre have been noteworthy.The Norwegian PM was emphatic that this tragedy will not take Norway away from the democratic and pluralistic principles for which Norway stands.Speaking on the BBC, a youth leader from the camp affirmed that the youth will move towards more democracy in the face of such an attack. In India too we need to find such ways to affirm our pluralistic and democratic traditions and processes in the wake of these dangers. Jean Paul Sartre the French intellectual had been highlighting such dangers in his writings in the post world War II period. He located the origins of Terror in the static totalizing and schematizing tendencies of ideologies and their practioners in Europe
where whatever was not understood was simply eliminated. It was this according to him which gave rise to extremist trends in Europe. Accompanying this in European history were attempts to reduce as quickly as possible the political to social. As in the case of Praveen Swami's right wing political extremist in India, who wanted to set fire to the society to awaken people, this led to a great deal of violence in Europe. The move towards further exploring democratic options and processes(as in Norway) today will perhaps take us away from static schematisms and quick fix solutions to a more peaceful world.(SFC,PG IGNOU,with the help of Mr.Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)

The Hazare Effect

Some IGNOU students marked the Anna Hazare(the ex- armyman who turned Gandhian) campaign against corruption in a small way by holding a march and screening of an anti-war film 'Turtles Can Fly' by Bahman Ghobadi. The march and the film were basically held to demonstrate how political power, in the words of the eminent thinker of the 19th century Frederick Engels ,'can do great damage to the economic development and result in the squandering of great masses of energy and material' when it tries to cut off economic development from certain paths and prescribe certain others.The massive corruption of the recent scams is surely a squandering of great masses of energy and material which could have been put to an all around development purposes. Ghobadi's film brought out how even in the context of war, the young ( in this case children) try to organise themselves in a situation where odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them. Perhaps in the Hazare campaign the youth were similarly taking on the state and political power in an issue whose dimensions are mind boggling. Social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan (April 11,HT) confesses to be puzzled by the movement. He agrees with the issue, 'our democracy seems to be emptying out in our ability to handle corruption'.Yet he feels that the participants in the movement are like the millenialists who felt that the bullets could not harm them and likewise they (Hazare activists) feel that authority cannot touch them. He sums up,'they feel that they are at the roots of law, creating law for a new era'. Perhaps it was Fredrick Engels who put the matter in perspective when he argued in the context of relations between money markets, trade and production that 'the reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily also a topsy-turvy one: it happens without the person who is acting being conscious of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a priori principles, whereas they are only economic reflexes; so everything is turned upside down'. Perhaps this accounts for the sense of surreal which Shiv Vishwanathan feels in watching the Hazare protest?(SFC, PG IGNOU with the help of Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)