The Recent General V.K. Singh Episode

Friends, The controversy generated by the Indian Express report (20th September 2013) on Gen. V. K. Singh has created quite a storm. The report said to be based on govt.sources highlights a covert unit set up by General V.K. Singh during his tenure as the army chief.It alleges that secret funds were used by this unit to carry on quite a few covert operations including payments to ministers in the Jammu and Kashmir government and an attempt to destabilise the elected government of the current chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir.This last has raised quite a furore as this was seen as an attempt to subverting the basic democratic principle of the military being subordinate to democratic civilian rule in a democracy. In a mail to the audience cell of the news channel NDTV we had highlighted how this was reminiscent of the operations of the military- industrial complexes of the 20th century. We had also highlighted in the mail how peace movements since then had consistently struggled against such legacies of this period. Gen. V.K. Singh since has refuted the allegations in an interview with an NDTV correspondent and in statements to other sections of the media saying that his association with the opposition parties including his presence at a recent pre- election rally in Rewari had raised this campaign against him.
            Subsequently in a programme " The Big Fight" broadcast by NDTV last Saturday (28th September 2013 and recorded earlier) the issue came up in a  debate.Some of us who attended this debate as audience in the studios were struck by the heat and the animation the issue generated.The panel was composed of  distinguished politicians and equally distinguished retired senior officers of the armed forces along with a young journalist who tried to put across their perspectives on the issue. General Raj Kadyan was of the opinion that revelations had certainly damaged the reputation of the army but this should be seen as an aberrant episode.Another member of the panel, Mr. Tarun Vijay, was of the opinion that infact the government source who revealed the ministry report should be seen as a 'traitor'.Brig. Mahalingam and Gen. Arora were more sombre in their assessments.Mr.Surjewala(Congress) and the spokesman of National Conference too put forward sober assessments. However the dominant feeling was the wish that this episode should not have happened.
     How do we see this debate? As the NDTV website put it that it is for the first time since the independence that such a high level security officer(rank of a general) of the country has been involved in a fracas with the government in an episode widely seen to be hurting India's security.Recent portrayals of India as modernising in the global and indeed post- industrial context has brought forward the concept of security.Indeed since the time of French Revolution as societies went through modernisation in different contexts the issue of security has been centre-stage.For modernisation is marked by emergence of civil society in separation from the political state.The enlightenment thinkers including Karl Marx had argued in the 19th century that security is the highest social concept of civil society.This expressed the fact that the whole of society exists in order to 'guarantee to each of its members the preservation of of his person,his rights and his property'.Article 8 of the Constitution of 1793 after the French Revolution put it explicitly even then:"Security consists in the protection afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person,his rights and his property'.Hegel later on in the early 19th century saw the civil society as the 'state of need and reason' However by the end of the 19th century certain trends became clear as to why the early optimism surrounding the emergence of civil society did not translate in to an effective modernisation.It was becoming evident that within the organisation of national life and perhaps chauvinist nationalism was not enabling a transition of individual citizens and their labour and work to the 'level of social elements'.Further chauvinist politics separated the individual from the state as a whole and civil society was constituted as discrete societies within society based on narrow corporate criteria of ethnicity, caste etc.These narrow corporations then determined the individual's relation to the state.While the political process did try to overcome these odds within the context of industrialisation and rising capitalism in Europe and elsewhere, the situation became complicated with militarism and colonialism which promoted and used narrow identities.Consequently we see the process of misanthropic(human hating) materialism emerging within the civil society.It is to combat such trends that we see the emergence of genuine international movements for peace and cosmopolitanism in Europe and America.It is with these movements India's early patriots including the Ghadar activists allied to promote a genuinely internationalist anti colonial struggle.
   The issue of security then acquired a broadbased dimension as well.Though the coming of the post- industrial societies gave a new dynamic to identity politics,today we see the legacy of broad based concept of security in international civil society and global citizenship movements.The attempt is to make the political process responsive to individual rights,life and liberty the cornerstones of  the concept of security since the French revolution.With emphasis on freedom of speech, expression and press today's movements have taken a step forward from certain practises of the French Revolution where press freedom did come under attack.
      It is in this context that the General V. K. Singh episode which blew up in the context of current pre-election campaigns in India assumes significance.There has been a tendency by some political and other forces to play politics with the issue.We argue that the issue of security is too important for it to be politicised in this manner.It is important here that modernisation of security forces be carried out. It is equally important that the military should be made subordinate to democratically formed civilian government.To take the concept of security forward moreover it is important that the current election campaigns of all political parties be responsible, healthier, democratic and free from violence. The recent communal violence and killings in Muzaffarnagar in the wake of the coming elections and other such violence only tends to undermine what the concept of security stands for. Strengthening democracy and democratic processes is the way forward from the Gen. V.K. Singh episode and perhaps to overcome the damage caused by it.(SFC, PG IGNOU, with the help of Mr. Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew).
      

Recent Students Protest at the IGNOU Campus

Friends, In the second half of April 2012 and till the 1st May 2012, the IGNOU students protested at the prospects of closure of the face to face programmes of the university.Starting with two massive demonstrations going on to  an indefinite hunger strike which was called off and converted in to a relay hunger strike, the protest ended with a peaceful court arrest.The face to face programmes on campus had been started by the previous vice chancellor but the current acting vice chancellor had told the students and the press that  these face to face programmes were unconstitutional and would be closed.The vice chancellor had also set up a 'high power committee to review IGNOU's mandate' whose interim report recommending the suspension of these programmes had been deferred by the academic council.These events started a lively debate on the  question of face to face programmes on an Open and Distance learning university campus.The more orthodox opinion in the university rejected the idea of a face to face programme in the university saying that it was not was not within IGNOU's 'mandate' to launch such programmes.Indeed the term 'mandate' was also used to designate the brief of the 'high power' committee set up by the vice chancellor.However even amongst the orthodox practitioners and scholars of  Open and Distance learning, opinions are divided. Hilary Perraton, an eminent practitioner of Open and Distance learning argued recently in a book that part of the revenues earned in the fees of distance teaching universities can be ploughed back in to face to face teaching.Graville Rumble (an old distance education hand) argued in the U. K. Open University journal 'Open Learning'(1992,7,2) that dual mode universities( offering both face to face and distance education programmes) tend to be more flexible and cost effective.The main concern here was the rigidities of outlook and functioning which had come in to the Open and Distance teaching universities which some of the scholars argued were tending towards 'closure' rather than openness.(These included the first open University that is the United Kingdom Open University).The debate in IGNOU at the same time also focused on off campus face to face programmes offered in institutions under the public private scheme of IGNOU to highlight whether these were 'teaching shops' and whether they would contribute to the rigidities of the University.
    The arguments also turned towards the Indian Parliament Act of 1985 which had established the IGNOU.It was argued that this Act of 1985 would have to be amended for IGNOU to offer face to face programmes and that IGNOU did not have the 'mandate' to launch such programmes. However we did point out that the IGNOU Act of 1985 does not use the term 'mandate' to describe the objectives of IGNOU. Rather it used the terms 'encouragement and promotion of Open and Distance learning within the educational pattern of the country'(See the opening statement of the Act). For this the clause 4 of the Act advocates 'a diversity of means including the use of any communication technology'.We had recently argued this point in a paper to the Search Committee headed by the eminent scientist Kasturirangan constituted to search for a new V.C. of the university.We also argued here that scholars and practitioners like Terry Evans and Daryl Nation while researching in to Open and Distance learning systems and Universities have been arguing for developing forms of synergy between face to face and distance teaching/learning practices in the context of late modernity (with which we seem to be integrating under the current phase of globalisation).This does not take us back in to the rigidities of the Conventional  education systems but takes us towards building new relationships and forms of Open learning.For this we argued there was no need to change the Act of 1985 but there was a need to recognize the changing times we live in. The Act itself provides for sufficient diversity of practices.Recently talking to Prof. Santosh Panda, a member of this 'high power mandate' committee and an eminent educationist, we found that even he holds that under the Act of 1985 the IGNOU teachers reserve the option of teaching face to face programmes.Addressing the question of rigidity also becomes important in the context of the fact that the use of the term 'mandate' of the university comes from the way old universities of France and Germany were established in the medieval times by the then Popes.Indeed 'mandate' of the Pope was given to prescribe which subjects could be taught or could not be taught in these universities and the way these could be taught.Indeed George Brodrick in his histories of Cambridge and Oxford Universities(1894) brings out some of these themes.(Moreover even here at the highest level there was a concept of a dialogue between the King and the Pope before establishment of these universities as some scholars bring out.).The IGNOU Act on the other hand has come from a parliamentary process of debate and dialogue.Importantly the Indian Parliament itself is the outcome of a modern and broad based freedom struggle, indeed one of the greatest democratic and non violent movements of the 20th century.It is in this movement there were struggles for freedom of speech and expression which later on became a part of our constitution.It is this background we must keep in mind while looking at IGNOU Act which in any case does not even mention the concept of 'mandate'. Indeed the IGNOU Act in its clause 7 does away with any imposition of religion(implied in the term mandate used in the context of universities, esp. European Universities) on its students,teachers, academic staff or other staff while making a positive provision for women and weaker sections of the society. This is far removed from the patriarchal and religious concerns of heretical subjects being taught at the European Universities established by the religious concerns of the mandate or fiat of the Popes in medieval times.
           Indeed in the light of freedom of speech and expression upheld by our constitution,parliament and our freedom struggle and such struggles since then enable us to understand the diversity of teaching learning processes which the IGNOU Act of 1985 upholds.That  concept of diversity is extended also to teaching/learning in technology.(This is an important area since it is here that philosophers like Sartre pointed out that in technological work even during the period of semi-automatic machines men and women responded differently while being placed in analogous technological work.[see his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol.1] It is here that we need to take care that the technologically mediated teaching/learning does not succumb to viciousness of identity politics which dominates today and due regard is given to freedoms of speech and expression and other fundamental freedoms.We are referring here to the what Herbert Marcuse points out as  'struggles of existence' which break out in the context of a technology driven post industrial society of late modernity.In his book the 'One Dimensional Man' he points out how 'competing or differing needs,aspirations and desires are organised by vested interests in domination and scarcity' which moves this society towards violence and war. This is achieved by a fierce identity politics which imposes stereotypes of men, women,communities, race, creed etc.(We saw one example in the racist attacks on Indian students in Australia).
     It is here the struggle for openness away from rigidity in the open and distance education becomes important.Desmond Keegan has pointed out how important it was for Open and Distance learning to get out of stereotypes of race, caste, gender, religion etc.(See his Foundations of Distance Education). It was precisely for this purpose that a critique of the conventional classroom teaching was developed by early open and distance educators.It is precisely here the debates on synergy between classroom and distance teaching become important to combat the radical stereotyping of gender, creed, caste etc. imposed on us in the post industrial/late modernity context.
      We feel that the IGNOU students protest highlighted a struggle and search for openness in a context where a radical stereotyping of distance education was going on through high power committee etc.That they were joined by students of Jamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University and other students through social media perhaps highlights this search for openness in education. Of course they have to take care that in the process they do not promote further rigidities through what are being called 'teaching shops' The protest was peaceful and the VC to his credit did constitute a teachers committee to dialogue with the students which also brought a split teachers association representatives for the purpose of talks. We hope this will continue.The sound and fury of the last day of the protest when the police was called in because the students were blocking passage however masked a desire for a non violent expansion of democratic space in the university. A few strident notes were struck but the students realised that no student movement can succeed by turning anti-teacher or indeed anti other constituents of the university. They were back on dialogue table after a peaceful court arrest and the VC gave them the assurance that he would do his best to look after their interest, the ongoing dharna and relay hunger strike was called off on the 1st May 2012. We hope that this search for openness along with massive participation of our distance education students in the recent 'Save the Forests' campaign with the Greenpeace (where on campus students too participated) will move towards what Herbert Macuse called an alternative of 'pacification of existence' in the wake of fierce identity politics and violence in the context of late modernity.We then could really move towards new forms of open learning.(SFC, PG IGNOU with the help of Mr. Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)
              
           
               

Congratulations

We congratulate the students of IGNOU who participated in large numbers last week in the Greenpeace campaign 'Save the Forests'. After an SMS campaign which reached about a lakh students we were told by the Greenpeace India that about 10,ooo students registered to express their support. The activity involved giving a simple missed call to the number given in the campaign message to register support.This campaign is a part of the larger movement of the Greenpeace where issues of climate change, marine biodiversity and related concerns have been highlighted.In a subsequent meeting with the activists of the Greenpeace India we were told that they intend to take up their campaigns through talks, plays, posters etc. to different localities in India with the help of volunteers drawn from all sections of the society including students.IGNOU students who are located in different parts of the country could come forward here. We in IGNOU have been interacting with the Greenpeace India for the past one year.We organised(thanks to SOSS) an interaction of the students,academics,teachers and the staff with Greenpeace India at the Convention Centre at the Maidangarhi campus last year in March.Subsequently we went to their actions at the India Gate, Delhi Haat and at the Jantar Mantar.The interaction at the Convention Centre has now been made in to a documentary "Going Green: An Interaction with Greenpeace" and has been telecast on the IGNOU's Gyan Darshan. The IGNOU teachers association blog too expressed its support to the Greenpeace ship 'Hope'(working on the question of marine biodiversity) recently when it discussed IGNOU's thrust towards a green curriculum. On our blog too we had posted a letter of support from the Australian Green Party when we were campaigning against the racist attacks on the Indian students in Australia.The massive support which we have received on the IGNOU-Greenpeace 'Save the Forests' campaign is also a support for non violent campaigns for the expansion of democratic environmental space. It is in this context we view the recent violent clashes in Senegal in Africa with concern. It is here in the city of Dakar that one of the largest gathering of the Global Greens(a network of Green parties from all over the world) will be taking place at the end of March this year.They will be addressing the complex task of democratisation in North Africa.They are hoping that with this attempt they can move towards a new green deal and a politics for the new millennium.It is for this reason that they are supporting the greens FEDES which is opposing the ruling party's unconstitutional moves.However violence has broken out with the incumbent President announcing his candidacy for a third term deemed unconstitutional by many.Greenpeace Africa has already issued a statement condemning the violence in which even some young people participated.We too wish to reiterate that violence will only take us back to regressive political structures and ideologies and defeat any attempts towards building a peaceful,tolerant and an environment friendly world. (SFC, PG IGNOU with the help of Mr. Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)

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)