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TheIndian EXPRESS
www.indianexpress.com

NEW DELHI l FRIDAY l JULY 13 l 2012

The Indian EXPRESS

BECAUSE THE TRUTH INVOLVES US ALL

Going back on growth

HE latest IIP data confirms that industrial growth on a year-on-year basis hovered at near-zero levels in April and May. This is worse than the muchdisdained Hindu rate of growth of 3.5 per cent per year that prevailed in the days of socialism. It is a striking indictment of the UPA that it now presides over conditions akin to the 1960s and 1970s, when leftist policies had seriously imperilled Indias growth. Ever since Pranab Mukherjee stepped out of the ministry of finance, some space appears to have opened up for a restarting of the economic policy process. But weeks have already gone by without any visible new action. The key priorities must be to, first of all, rebuild a high-capability team, and not just at the finance ministry. Then, attention must be focused on reviving the rupee, which has collapsed because foreign investors are jittery. Taxation of international finance must be put on a new level of clarity and good sense much like the OECD countries have done in order to calm the fears of foreign investors. While a reversal of the Vodafone tax proposal will require a herculean effort, given that the tax department has once again rejected Vodafones petition, the

IIP data confirms the bad news. Finance ministry must show urgency to revamp and reform

prime ministers best bet is to clear the air on GAAR, if not put it in abeyance for some more time. Alongside this, replicating the rules for FIIs on equity for rupeedenominated bonds will open up a second highway for foreign capital inflows. Pulling back on subsidies will help in reducing the current account deficit, which hasnt been as bad in decades thanks to unrestricted government spending that saw public sector savings collapse from 5 per cent of the GDP in 2007-08 to 1.7 per cent in 2010-11. Lower funds availability, and a dramatic slowing of clearances for India Incs projects led to a collapse in investments the capital goods sub-index in the IIP has contracted by 14 per cent in April and May. A focused and concerted move involving the PMO, the ministry of finance and the Planning Commission is required to get government infrastructure projects off the ground again. There are many who believe that moving slowly and doing no harm until a new finance minister comes in is good enough. But that may be a luxury India cannot afford. Once the economy slips further, it will become even more difficult to pull it out of the recession. There is no alternative to urgent action.

HE death of 17-year-old Sushma Pandey, an underage egg donor in Mumbai, has drawn attention to assisted reproduction, which has grown to the proportions of an industry but is not regulated by a legislative framework or competent institutions. While her death cannot be immediately linked to the fact that she was a donor, it must underline the urgency for passing the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill, 2010. The draft bill covers all bases and addresses assisted reproduction clinics, gamete banks and surrogacy as separate sectors. It details the rights and duties of all the parties involved and prescribes advisory and regulatory bodies at central and state levels. Regulators will be able to receive and evaluate complaints and pass them on to a magistrate for trial, if necessary. Assisted reproduction has ballooned into an industry with transnational reach over the last decade precisely because of the absence of oversight. The requirement of registration and the right of regulators to inspect premises and records, which the draft bill

Enact a law to regulate assisted reproduction industry, protect donors and recipients
specifies, would bring this industry out of the shadows. It now operates in a grey area, having only to comply with guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, and adherence is not subjected to routine scrutiny. In the matter of the donors death in Mumbai, it appears that she used a fake proof of age without fear of discovery. And the police are still waiting to learn from a team of doctors at J.J. Hospital if they can launch proceedings against the clinic she attended. Fertility rates are falling globally and 15 per cent of the population cannot have children on their own. This has made assisted reproduction an important medical area, especially so in India. The draft bill notes that here, childlessness is socially stigmatised and children are regarded as an insurance policy against old age. It is time to acknowledge these realities, and to accept that a policy vacuum exists. The government should enact the long-pending legislation to regulate the industry and bring it into mainstream medical practice, with adequate protection for donors, recipients and specialists.

Shadow lines

HE way a nation takes its own measure reveals a lot about its insecurities. Recently, an article in Time magazine described Manmohan Singh as an underachiever. It should have warranted Sherlock Holmess famous response, Now we have a firm grasp of the obvious. But there was something odd about the way in which the article itself became news: it made frontpage headlines in several English and vernacular papers; the PMO felt compelled to respond to it. It was denounced, in some quarters, as a foreign conspiracy to malign India. Instead of being treated as an ordinary article, telling us something we have been debating for a few years, it was converted into an authoritative measure of the prime ministers performance. The true scandal was not what it said; the true scandal was that we took it so seriously simply because it was Time magazine. In a small way, this episode highlights several crises we are facing. It is symptomatic of our lack of intellectual self-confidence that we constantly take our measure from what is written about us abroad. Some of this is to the good: an outside perspective can be an aid to greater self-awareness. But our relationship with outside perspectives is not in the service of greater self-reflection. It has, rather, become the yardstick by which we measure ourselves, the basis of judgement and the mechanism by which our pride is inflated or deflated. We are overjoyed at vindication and hurt at denunciation, but we never take the argument on its own terms. It is almost as if a public culture has lost all sense of self-possession. There are several reasons for this. There is a serious crisis of credibility across all knowledgeproducing institutions. The Indian media is in a bizarrely paradoxical position. On one hand, it is free, contentious and still has considerable reservoirs of talent. On the other hand, its credibility is always in doubt: it is associated with too

Gurgaons of the mind

As India has grown in power, there is a curious lack of intellectual self-confidence
PRATAP BHANU MEHTA
many subtexts, too much theatre over substance, and even the good in it gets drowned in excessive noise. The result is that it is no longer seen as a credible, authoritative interlocutor in public argument. It has become too easy to dismiss it. Its judgements, therefore, can be brushed off. There is always an intimate relationship between knowledge and trust. Since we dont trust our institutions, the knowledge they produce is, by definition, less authoritative. The same applies to Indian academia. There is absolutely no question that the Indian university system is still in serious crisis. Trying to get a sensible discussion on this crisis is like banging ones from abroad and unthinkingly converting their experiences and models into the sole measure of achievement. We measure institutional reform simply by the fact that we have ticked off all the boxes to look like them rather than thoughtfully grasped our own conditions. With the crisis in undergraduate education deepening, and the forced secession of Indias middle classes from the domestic education system, the measures of who we are may get even more warped in the years to come. Knowledge is knowledge, wherever it comes from. And we have to be mindful of the fact that part of the destruction of Indian intellectual life, particu-

LETTER OF THE WEEK AWARD

To encourage quality reader intervention The Indian Express offers the Letter of the Week Award. The letter adjudged the best for the week is published every Saturday. Letters may be e-mailed to editpage @expressindia.com or sent to The Indian Express, 9&10, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi -110002. Letter writers should mention their postal address and phone number. The winner receives books worth Rs 1,000.

Quality is signalled by an indiscriminate foreign branding: so long as you can give a building a foreign-sounding name, from Princeton to Beverly, you have signalled quality.
head on a brick wall. As with the media, the core of the crisis is one of credibility. There is a lot of talent, but because you do not know whom to trust, it is easier to defer to the authority of institutions abroad. All of us have been candid about baring the warts of the Indian research environment. We ought not to be defensive about India. However, even when excellent thinking happens in India, it gets short shrift and is shortchanged, simply because it has a made-in-India tag on it. In fact, our response to this crisis of credibility is not to address it, but to create conditions where we outsource practically all our thinking. We have an incredible amount to learn from abroad. Yet, there is a distinction between genuine learning larly in the 1970s and 1980s, was due to a misguided nationalist search for something called indigenous, where we went about parroting calls for an Indian social science, which was neither particularly Indian nor social science. Identity epithets before knowledge claims are often signs of vacuity. But there is also no denying the fact that you cannot do much creative work if you dont have confidence in the signalling quality of your own institutions. What the Time episode unwittingly revealed was this crisis of credibility in our knowledge producing institutions. In a way the paradox of India is this. Around the time of Independence, we were broke, poor, had no power

and not given much of a chance. But what saved India from becoming a banana republic was the intellectual ambition of its elites. They were sometimes haughty, sometimes got things badly wrong. They were openminded, not foreign-minded. Now we are foreign-minded, but not open-minded. In the realm of thought, they never gave up on the idea that we have to do our own thinking and take our own measure in some respects. The failure of our education is that it has depleted that confidence. Ironically, as India has grown in power, there is a curious lack of intellectual self-confidence. Benchmarking to global standards can be a spur to excellence and innovation, but what is happening is something more psychologically insidious. It is a kind of Gurgaonisation of the mind. Quality is signalled by an indiscriminate foreign branding: so long as you can give a building a foreign-sounding name, from Princeton to Beverly, you have signalled quality. What its real substance is, whether it is an appropriate fit for our circumstances, is beside the point. This intellectual defeatism has come at a price. It has created excessively fragile selves, demanding attention, or unable to take criticism in their stride. Indian higher education is waiting to be liberated from its stupor, as the clamour for foreign institutions continues. There are some exceptions in IT. But most Indian professional firms, rather than becoming global benchmarks, just want to reach a critical point where they can be swallowed up by a foreign brand. Given Indias advantages, there is no reason why Indian media should not be a global benchmark rather than a floundering player. It is hard to imagine a country achieving any measure of greatness, if it cannot take its own measure. The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
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EDITOR
UNDER pressure from B.S Yeddyurappa, the BJP has finally replaced former Karnataka chief minister Sadananda Gowda with Jagadish Shettar (BJP latest: Gowda out, Shettar in Karnataka, IE, July 8). This indicates that party discipline within the BJP is in a shambles. The party has shown itself to be weak. It has no qualms in reversing its decisions and promoting the political interests of strong regional leaders. This has led to a game of oneupmanship among party leaders. The political vacuum at the top has led to a free-for-all among party leaders scrambling for power. Hema Langeri

Letters to the

Party time

RUPA VISWANATH
COMMISSION led by S.K. Thorat, and charged with reviewing NCERT political science textbooks in the wake of the cartoon controversy, has singled out a specific word in the text for removal. All instances of the word Dalit, it is recommended, should be replaced with Scheduled Caste (SC). The blogosphere is rife with speculation on the motivation for this move, and with heated debate on the politics of naming that attend the terms to identify these members of Indian society: from untouchable to Harijan to Dalit. But there is a more prosaic matter that should first concern us here: accuracy. SC and Dalit simply refer to different sets of people. Where Dalit refers to all those Indians, past and present, traditionally regarded as outcasts and untouchable, SC is a modern governmental category that explicitly excludes Christian and Muslim Dalits. For the current version of the Presidents Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, which tells us who will count as SC for the purposes of constitutional and legal protections, is entirely unambiguous: no person who professes a religion different from the Hindu, the Sikh or the Buddhist religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste. This was not always the case. The SC category was first created in 1931 to specify a subcategory of the depressed classes a portmanteau term that referred

A textbook case of exclusion

To replace Dalit with SC, as the Thorat panel recommends, is to be inaccurate
its Hindu identity even as Dalits from across the country denied just that. The adoption of the term Harijan epitomises this political move by seeking to represent Dalits as a disadvantaged population within the Hindu fold, and not the victims of systematic and society-wide discrimination. The Presidents Order of 1950 completes this political project administratively by limiting welfare and reservations programmes to those who have remained faithful to what Indian personal law defines as their default religion, Hinduism. After half a century of struggle against this injustice, a major moral victory was achieved by to untouchables most often, but in British colonial usage also included those who were then called hill tribes and criminal tribes who were to be listed, or scheduled as the beneficiaries of more comprehensive state provisions. The British made welfare provisions for all castes traditionally treated as untouchable, irrespective of whether those castes chose to call themselves Hindu or to follow Buddhism, Christianity or Islam. It was only under Congress rule, in 1950, that the Presidents Order redefined SC on the basis of religious criteria. From that point onwards, Dalits who had converted out of Hinduism lost not tion continues to be ignored by the Congress leadership, and by politicians across the spectrum. Until the Mishra Commission is implemented, the equation of Dalit and SC is false. In the Class X textbook, students are informed that In our country Dalits tend to be poor and landless. Rewriting Dalit as SC in this case, as the Thorat committee recommends, would imply that Dalit converts have escaped deprivation, and literally erases Christian and Muslim Dalits from the pages of history. Of course, it matters that some prefer the connotations of Dalit to SC, that Dalit is the only name to have originated from members of these groups, and so on. And yet Dalits can be found who will agree or disagree with any term one can think of, including Dalit. The fact remains, however, that Dalit is the only term currently available that can refer accurately to what the textbook itself defines as those that were previously regarded as outcaste and subjected to exclusion and untouchability. Discrimination against Dalits spans all religious communities. It is not a Hindu problem, it is an Indian problem. By adopting language that excludes Christian and Muslim Dalits, the proposed textbook whitewashes this reality. The writer is director, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany
[email protected]

IN Succession Rites (IE, July 8), Meghnad Desai makes a case for laying down rules on succession to the post of prime minister, in case a vacancy arises between elections. In India, such rules are not clear. Desai mentions an inexperienced Rajiv Gandhi becoming prime minister after Indira Gandhi was assassinated and suggests it is the first instance of dynasty politics in India. India has a long way to go before it can be called a mature democracy. M.C. Joshi Lucknow

Law of succession

TALKS between India and Pakistan seem to be an exercise in futility (Indo-Pak talks: Secretaries discuss terrorism, Abu Jundal, J-K, IE, July 4). Despite the recent talk of a joint initiative on the matter, India seems to demand the impossible when it asks Pakistan to help nab terrorists responsible for 26/11. If this is a precondition for better relations, they will be hard to achieve. A. Rufus DSouza Pune

Too optimistic

Paying the price

ABRIEL Garcia Marquez will no longer tell the tale. Once his younger brother, Jaime, admitted that the 1982 Nobel laureate is suffering from senile dementia and has stopped writing, the reading world assumed there would be no Part 2 to Living to Tell the Tale, the Colombian writers memoir. As it happens, he hasnt published a novel since Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004, English translation 2005). A writer fears nothing more than losing his mind, and to recall Gabos own words, Death does not come with old age, it comes with oblivion. Although the medical diagnosis hasnt been pronounced yet, for disbelieving friends and fans it would be prudent to return to The General in His Labyrinth and Gabos defence of his portrait of a broken and delirious Simon Bolivar. He had demonstrated through that book that showing the vulner-

Garcia Marquez may not write any more. His writing endures
able human being behind the glory doesnt take away from the myth of Bolivar. If Garcia Marquez no longer writes, all that will be left is the man. But that will not dent his stature as the tallest pillar of the Latin American Boom, which, three-plus decades since its end, continues to define writers by attraction or repulsion, largely because of him. Gabos literary generation has the distinction of not only projecting its legacy into the future and leaving behind two generations of disciples, but also retrospectively popularising still senior writers such as Jorge Luis Borges beyond a Spanish-speaking readership. His singular achievement despite the inability to re-invent himself after the Boom, unlike his friend-turned-foe and fellow Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa will save his books from solitude. Gabo would rather we kept talking about his words, not his neurons.

His labyrinths

Dalit refers to all Indians traditionally regarded as untouchable. SC is a modern governmental category that explicitly excludes Christian and Muslim Dalits.
only reservations, but also, after 1989, protection under the Prevention of Atrocities Act. Later, SC was expanded to include Sikh and Buddhist Dalits, but official discrimination against Muslim and Christian Dalits remains. As students of colonial history know, Dalit mobilisation in the pre-Independence decades caused considerable anxiety among Indias upper-caste nationalist establishment. Were Dalits a distinct group? Were caste Hindus their natural leaders? The response to these questions, embraced by elites of every political stripe, and best exemplified by the Gandhian programme, was to insist on the DalDalit activists when the Ranganath Mishra Commission Report (2007) officially admitted in light of overwhelming social scientific evidence and testimony that Christian and Muslim Dalits suffer the same forms of discrimination as their Hindu counterparts. Recognising that Dalits do not cease to be Dalits when they convert to another religion, the committee recommended that the official discrimination against Christian and Muslims Dalits be ended by restoring to them, without delay, their SC status. However, this moral victory remains a dead letter. Half a decade has passed and the commissions recommenda-

dambaram seems to be trying to excuse the governments flawed policies (Chidambaram in middle class row, IE, July 10). The rise in the price of foodgrains, apparently, is for the benefit of poor farmers. However, price rise does not benefit anybody. It sets in motion a vicious spiral that lowers economic growth and the standard of living. An investment-friendly environment, committed execution of projects and legislation to eliminate corruption are essential to bring the economy back on track. Venugopal Pisharody Ahmedabad

UNION Home Minister P Chi.

Crime and punishment

IT WAS shocking to hear

New Spanish PM has changed tune, introducing massive cuts and tax increases

The summer song ends

WORDLY WISE
Salman Rushdie

Realism can break a writers heart.

LL summer, Spains prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, and his zone finance ministers and Spain revealed strict conditions for the bankministers had been vowing not to raise sales tax, on the grounds ing bailout of up to 100 billion euros... Trouble is brewing on the home that it would damage consumer spending, push the front. Thousands of savers were hit by one condition of the economy further into recession and punish the poor. In Rajoys leaked MoU, which forces any bank seeking aid to write off its own words he would not stop small children buying sweeties. preferred shares and subordinated bonds, much of which, unusuOn Wednesday, he did exactly that in a 65 billion euro package of ally, were sold to retail investors in Spain as savings products. The PRINTLINE people who bought them, lured by 7 per cent interest rates, are cuts and tax increases. Rajoy is not master of his own parish. His measures, which going to be clobbered. include cuts to unemployment payments and civil service pay, come one day after a leaked memorandum of understanding between the euroFrom a leader in The Guardian, London

about the incident where Uma Poddar, a hostel warden in Visva-Bharatis Patha Bhavan school, allegedly forced a 10-year-old student to lick her own urine as punishment for bedwetting (Bengal Governor seeks report on girl student being forced to drink urine, IE, July 10). Although the West Bengal governor has sought a report on the matter, the response of the state government has been inadequate and disheartening on the whole. Bidyut K. Chatterjee Faridabad