Surjya Sen in 2010

This weekend, I watched Bollywood's tribute to Surjya Sen, teacher and revolutionary leader in eastern Bengal during the 1920s. Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se notes at the start that it is "a true story." By this, the viewer is expected to know that Surjya Sen was indeed a local schoolteacher in Chandanpura who was revered as Master-da; that he organized a revolutionary youth group in his locality; that he and his young followers entered the annals of Indian history with the Chittagong Armoury Raid on April 18, 1930; that he and his comrades were eventually caught by the British in the Jalalabad Hills and then sentenced to death or life imprisonment.

But why are we being told about Surjya Sen today? If we must pick some Bengali revolutionary leader outside the mainstream Congress ranks, then why not go for, say, Khudiram Bose or any of the followers of Anushilan? After all, Anushilan and Bose resonate more to Bengali Hindus today than Surjya Sen in distant Chittagong. But this is as much a film about Chandanpura as Lagaan was about Champaner. It's an all-India film in which geography and language are necessarily subordinated to the meta-narrative of the nation. But still, is it not curious that Ashutosh Gowarikar chose Surjya Sen, Congress district committee president of Chittangong and founder of the Jugantar unit there? On purely historical grounds, I admit, it is exceedingly difficult to find a satisfactory answer to that question.

But that question has a very contemporary answer. Here is what Gowarikar says about the film: "It's about the zeal of patriotism…the desperation to throw away the oppressor- the British Raj. The oppressor is there in present times as well…it may be the socio-economic factor, or it can be moral issues…there are several oppressors today. Even today we need to address all of that and different kinds of revolution do need to come in to fight the social evils we are facing at the moment." The socio-economic factor, moral issues, several oppressors, different revolutions. What is he talking about? Why is he being so vague?

What the film effectively does is to present a historical narrative that pits an oppressive state against a bunch of young, idealistic revolutionaries. For those who have seen Gowarikar's Lagaan, the narrative clearly builds on an earlier precedent. This is his Rang De Basanti, a film directed at metropolitan Indian youth to recognize an obscure patriot outside the Congress pantheon of nationalist historiography. The "moral issues" Gowarikar speaks of in today's India are linked to state oppression. The "social-economic factor," as he puts it cryptically, is a consequence of that state-directed oppression of Indian society. And the solution, he secretly suggests, is violence as an expression of idealistic revolutionary politics to overthrow the oppressive regime.

Reading between the lines in this way, one can appreciate why Surjya Sen is meant to matter in 2010. Consider the scene in which the enthusiastic young revolutionaries speak of their love for the motherland. When these boys then speak of their hatred for the government, Sen (the portly Abhishek Bachchan) chides them by saying that he merely opposes its unjust domination of ordinary people. Next, consider the scene in which the young men (and women) plot to seize the armoury and acquire enough weapons to cut off supply lines to Chittangong from Calcutta. Anyone today should be reminded of the parallel with guerrilla strategies being employed today in Dandakaranya or the Jangal Mahals. Lastly, consider the visuals of the revolutionaries on the run in the Jalalabad Hills even as they lose their comrades one by one. This is a tragedy, we know already, but the idea of revolutionary violence is meant to matter to viewers because it signifies sacrifices towards a better tomorrow. That tomorrow ought to be not only free from state oppression, but also one characterized by communal amity and gender equity. In this context, recall how Tarakeshwar Dastidar is nursed back to good health by a Muslim couple and the overall significance of Kalpana Dutta (the de-glamorized Deepika Padukone) in the film. These are the multiple revolutionaries Gowarikar hopes to ignite.

Sadly, much like his protagonists, the filmmaker too fails in his mission. Abhishek Bachchan is appallingly bad as Surjya Sen. The younger Bachchan resembles, as in many of his recent films, an overfed cow that has been disturbed from its regular chewing habits. While his comrades follow Anushilan-style military training, Bachchan is conspicuously absent. Chewing, presumably. His dialogues lack conviction and inspire no one. The enthusiastic boys outdo him by some distance. The other big star in the film, Deepika Padukone, is happiest playing badminton with her friend. For much of the film, however, she is drawn away from the court to sleepwalk through the revolutionary plot. It does not help that she mouths insipid dialogues, but even then, Padukone is hopelessly miscast. Imagine Ajay Devgan in place of Bachchan and Vidya Balan instead of Padukone. A far better film would have resulted. As it stands, however, Gowarikar flatters to deceive. A golden opportunity to reinterpret the past in the service of contemporary politics has been squandered. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the film has opened poorly throughout the country this weekend. What a waste of a storyline!

The Spirit of Guy Fawkes This November

Did the spirit of Guy Fawkes visit us this November? WikiLeaks and the Radia Tapes in India have exposed the hollowness of our rulers and their cronies in the media, in big business, and the army. Some of us distrusted them anyway, but now, the evidence is before everyone. Suddenly, it's not the Maoists or Al-Qaeda or some such phantom in the news. It's the state and its allies.

The emptiness of neoliberal "governance" also now stands exposed. We were told that smaller government would mean a more vibrant civil society. The media appeared to be a symbol of that vibrant civil society. Ordinary people can only express shock and dismay at events well beyond their control. Now alas, the grand strategy of neoliberalism has been exposed now as rotten to its core.

Nearly four hundred years after his public execution, Guy Fawkes remains significant for us. What we call freedom might be simply servitude. What we call rights might be merely legal fictions. What we call civil society might be simply a chicken coop belonging to our masters. John Locke, often considered to be the bourgeois philosopher par excellence, had a simple solution to this problem: dissolve an unresponsive, unaccountable government by exercising one's right to rebel. It is unclear what Locke thought of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but it is quite apparent that the audacious radicalism of Fawkes' actions reverberated down to Locke's age. The Second Treatise of Government opens with an assault on the divine rights of rulers and ends with the conditions under which governments no longer deserve our allegiance. This is the essence of modern democracy. It is nothing without its radical edge. If we ever needed a reminder, this November has given us two.

This Thing Called Neoliberalism

I began studying economics seriously in 11th grade. Mrs. Bindra, who taught us so patiently and enthusiastically, taught us all we needed to know about the historical evolution of the Indian economy over the past century and a half, the basic techniques of statistics, the system of national income accounting, and of course, microeconomic and macroeconomic theory. As I sat with rapt attention and imbibed a fascinating mix of concepts and methods, I marveled at the new intellectual universe it opened up for me. It is possible today to sum up what I learned in four simple statements. Firstly, the Indian economy had been stagnant for most of modern history, first due to colonial exploitation and then due to socialist governmental policies. Secondly, free markets held the key to economic growth and development, because they permitted societies to allocate human and non-human resources most efficiently and profitably. Thirdly, liberal trade policies complemented domestic free markets by expanding consumers' options and producers' markets, and globalization offered developing countries the best way to get out of the poverty trap. Fourthly, the government ought to cut taxes, duties, spending, and regulation, and adopt the role of an umpire who ensures that individuals and corporations acted lawfully, traditional drawbacks such as gender and caste discrimination were eliminated, and markets functioned smoothly.

Today, I know these four propositions form an ideology called neoliberalism. Proponents of neoliberalism argue that these propositions reinforce each other such that free markets, political liberty, and limited government are our best hope for progress and freedom in the 21st century. Critics, however, argue that these interlinked elements of neoliberalism rest on utter lies and deception such that they exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities, increase poverty, and heighten political tensions within countries. Since both sides rely on unshakable ideological convictions to argue their points, we invariably enter an intellectual stalemate. Of course, politically, the proponents of neoliberalism have won in most parts of the world, whether in South Asia, Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia or Latin America.

I am afraid I have never been an ideological partisan for either side in this debate. As a skeptic, I tend to focus more on contextual social-fact considerations rather than purely ideological ones. Facts are messy, and ultimately, I think, they undermine the neatness of ideological worldviews on both the left and the right. Three factors stand out for me in assessing neoliberalism and its critics worldwide. Firstly, contrary to what both sides believe, the four propositions I discussed earlier are NOT, in fact, consistent with each other. It is quite possible, as in China, to deny civil liberties and maintain a vast state presence yet exchange socialism for trade liberalization and globalization. Likewise, it is also possible, as in India as in Africa or Eastern Europe or Latin America, to roll back the state and embrace free markets without liberal political consequences. Lastly, it is perfectly possible, as in the United States and Britain, to resist trade liberalization but prioritize limited government and political freedoms. The defenders and opponents of neoliberalism rarely possess the pragmatism to open their eyes wide enough to acknowledge what seems absolutely obvious to laypeople. This is what ideological dogmas do. We should be wary.

Secondly, if neoliberal ideologues and their cheerleaders are correct, then we should observe progress in economic and political terms in our age of globalization. Yet the picture is not so rosy. In the North Atlantic world, socioeconomic inequalities have risen alarmingly over the past three decades, and these account partly for the growth of racism, xenophobia, and other aggressive forms of reactionary politics in recent years. In the Global South, neoliberalism can hardly be called a success. As states have cut spending and privatized public services, we find new oligarchic forms of crony capitalism and violent appropriation and control of resources by private corporations, strongmen and militias/gangs. Consider the kinds of cronyism exposed during the East Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 or in the United States in 2008 or the slew of corporate scams this decade in India. Also consider how neoliberal state reforms have paved the way for lucrative monopolies of armed groups and corporations in West Africa, Latin America, and Afghanistan. This is not progress by any standards.

Thirdly, if neoliberal critics are correct, then we should find doom and gloom everywhere. But we find new social and political formations arising out of the challenges and opportunities created by neoliberal policies. The massive increase in capital flows domestically and internationally means higher incomes and living standards for more people than anytime in human history. While it is true that things are getting better for people at the top and middle rather than at the bottom, it is important not to forget how economic liberalization is creating new entrepreneurial opportunities for rural and semi-urban residents as well as women and minorities in countries such as India. Additionally, where economic and political liberalization actually coincide, political opportunities for citizens also increase. New expressions of Dalit and adivasi politics in India, for example, are as much responses to liberalization as they are expressions of it. People can now vote with their feet to kick out unresponsive politicians and they can even find radical democratic solutions to their problems outside the party system. However, where we do not find liberalization, as is the case ironically in the North Atlantic world, we find economic stagnation and political resignation. Much as critics on the left complain on growing inequality, the problem lies less in markets as in corporate governance and effective state policies. Those were problems well before "neoliberalism" entered our lexicon.

Fine, you might say, both sides are partially correct or partially wrong, but the basic ideological premise in either case is nonetheless defensible. No, I'd respond, because neither side has an adequate theory of political economy to claim any empirical successes. Textbook-style free markets are not necessarily the most efficient way to allocate resources in an economy for two reasons. Firstly, there are social, political, and environmental costs that do not show up in a simple supply-demand diagram. When we factor those into our equations, it will be evident that healthy regulation and policing of markets are optimal: no private actor will be willing to absorb the costs of monitoring and managing markets to ensure their smooth functioning. Secondly, as left critics have argued for a century and a half, free-market economics assumes that everyone has equal access to resources and everyone starts from the same level. This is, of course, patently false, so those who are richer, better educated and with the right family connections are better positioned to profit from markets than the rest of society. As even Adam Smith accepted, education and healthcare cannot be privately organized in a healthy society, so the state needs to assume a pretty large role to ensure everyone has access to schooling and medical facilities. Otherwise, citizenship is rendered meaningless.

But this conclusion should not lead us into stock criticisms of markets that focus on inequality. Yes, the state needs to play a bigger role than neoliberals allow, but when markets are stifled or managed oligarchically, wealth-generation is affected adversely. There is no prospect of pulling millions out of poverty by state policies alone; markets must generate enough wealth and employment opportunities for everyone to be free from scarcity and want. Those on the left need to know that attacking corporations and their defenders in thinktanks and governments is NOT the same thing as attacking free markets. If markets were truly free and open, effective state policies in health and education will lead to a progressive society. Corporate landgrabs, crony capitalism, and warlordism cannot be permitted in such a society. Ultimately, strong welfare states that rule lightly must coexist with an healthy market economy. What is true domestically is also true internationally. If future financial meltdowns and global warming are to be countered effectively, there is no alternative to global state regulation and a global market economy. Despite the vociferous criticism of markets in toto, there are no realistic leftist alternatives to build a different kind of political economy. Neoliberalism as an ideology may be rotten to the core, but without thriving markets, there is no hope for progress whatsoever.

Bring on the Ashes!

If you're waiting as eagerly as me for the Ashes to begin, read on. The English media is understandably buoyant about their team's chances. The Aussies are under massive pressure, especially after failures against India and Sri Lanka. Yet pundits are split on who'll win: Ian Chappell reckons Australia should scrape through with a 2-1 win, while Shane Warne leads the pack of trojan horses within the Australian camp; of course, the English are cautiously optimistic about their chances.

As a neutral in this mouth-watering contest, I wondered whether one could pen down some definite indicators of what lies in store for us this winter:

1) Over 80% of Tests in Australia yield results, so the odds of a 2-1 win are rather improbable. Let's say at least four of the five Tests will end in a result.

2) Australia's batting is roughly as strong as England's. The only problem is that Ponting and Hussey are in decline, and Clarke and North have underperformed massively over the past year or so. Watch out though for the opening duo of Katich and Watson as well as the lower middle order batting of Brad Haddin. If either Usman Khawaja or Callum Ferguson plays later in the series, I think they'll do better than North in the No. 6 position. It is possible that the Aussie middle order will crumble now and then, but expect them to pile on over 400 on good batting pitches such as Adelaide and Sydney.

3) England's batsmen have been in good form this month. The media keeps asking questions of Cook and Pietersen, but I doubt if either of them will score less than their career averages in this series. For me, however, Strauss, Trott, and Collingwood hold the key to England's batting hopes. They are solid in defense yet refuse to get intimidated by good fast bowling. The lower order of Prior, Broad, and Swann looks good for at least 100 runs in each innings. Think of what happened at Lord's earlier this year. In my view at least, lower-order batting gives England a slight edge: faced with a total of 300-350, they can reasonably aim for 400-450 in their first innings.

4) Australia's bowlers seem eager to take on the Poms. A juicy pitch under overcast skies at the Gabba will be to their liking, so the toss will be crucial on Thursday. I expect Siddle and Johnson to do better than they did last year in England. Hilfenhaus and Bollinger are, however, the bowlers to watch out for. Both have been Australia's best and most consistent bowlers over the past year and a half. I am not too sure about Xavier Doherty, Steve Smith or even the beleaguered Nathan Hauritz. I expect the spinners to concede over a hundred runs in the first innings of each Test. Honestly, I don't expect the Australians to bowl out England for under 200 in any innings, and I do think we've seen how hard it is in recent times for the Aussies to pick up 20 wickets. Unless something change dramatically, I see good honest performances on the cards with the occasional burst, but no consistently series-altering spells from this attack.

5) England's bowlers, much like Australia's, will relish the pace and bounce at the Gabba and the MCG. For flatter tracks such as those in Sydney and Adelaide, Swann and Broad will hold the key to England's chances, especially when it comes to slicing through the middle order or polishing off the tailenders. Anderson is a fair-weather bowler, to my mind, and Steve Finn is an untested proposition. I worry that there isn't much back-up for these four in the post-Flintoff era. England's prospects of taking 20 Aussie wickets will depend as much on their matchwinners as their support bowlers. On livelier pitches, this won't be a problem, but I imagine tough passages of play in warmer, drier conditions when Ponting & Co. manage to get going. But all said and done, Swann's presence makes me favor England over Australia in terms of bowling.

6) Australia's performances at home since 2007 have been iffy. They won narrowly against India partly due to umpiring howlers from Steve Bucknor and chums. Then they trounced the Kiwis but lost to South Africa comprehensively. Last year, Chris Gayle nearly pulled off a drawn series for the lowly West Indies. And who knows what went wrong with Pakistan at Sydney this January? In the interim, Australia are no longer world conquerors abroad, but merely honest triers. On the surface, the record since 2007 at home reads: W 10 L 3 D 2. But no one is deceived by the string of victories against lesser teams. The Aussies are no pushovers, but they are definitely vulnerable.

7) England's away record has been pretty impressive recently. They won against South Africa and could so easily have beaten India at Chennai in 2008. The mini-setback against the West Indies is more than amply offset by strong performances against Bangladesh earlier this year. I'd take a close look at the South Africa series last winter for clues on how England play on hard, bouncy pitches. I wouldn't rule out stage fright for Anderson & Co., but this is certainly the best English team to arrive on Australian shores for a long time. Of course, they'd have lost to Australia in their prime under Waugh and Ponting, but this is a different challenge.

8) So, what's my prediction? Since I expect at least four results and a close series, I'd shortlist possible three results: 2-2 (if things get really close); 3-2 (if England manage to pip the Aussies at the post in a close series); 3-1 (if England romp home in Brisbane and beyond). Honestly, can Australia win two Test matches this summer? I'm not so sure unless something miraculous happens. Can England win three Tests? Yes, I'd say, watch out for Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. So, I really doubt Ian Chappell's prediction of 2-1 in favor of Australia. There'll be more results for sure, and I don't think the Aussie bowlers are good enough to take 20 wickets for cheap on two occasions against a long, strong batting lineup.

In short, I'm sticking my neck out and predicting a 3-1 victory for the Poms!

What's Wrong With My Generation?

In the fall of 2002, I started college in Grinnell, Iowa. I opted for a liberal arts education over a specialized degree in economics at St. Stephens', Delhi, because it promised to open up an intellectual universe that encouraged learning for learning's sake. Over the past eight years, however, I have tended to harbor mixed feelings on what I see and experience on campuses. As I have enjoyed and profited from the company of outstanding teachers and peers, I've nonetheless found myself at odds with so many others. My generation invented Facebook and made it a runaway success, but it lost something along the way. We can stay in touch online with friends and family, but we have lost the art of conversation. We can write computer code or blogs, but we have lost the pleasures of penning a persuasive argument. We read emails and news articles all day, but we have lost the joys of reading books that open our minds to hitherto unknown worlds. We seek power and profit or pleasure and expressiveness in all we do, but we lack a sense of purpose. So what's wrong with my generation?

Perhaps it's wisest to begin with introspection. How many of you write every day? No, I don't mean emails or post-its! I mean writing to yourself, your friends or anyone else who cares to read. By writing, I mean expressing oneself in a creative yet disciplined way on a subject that matters to you. That takes out most blogs, twitter and Facebook updates, essay assignments, and grant applications. And when you do write, do you reflect long on a word or strive for succinctness? Or has writing (or typing) merely becoming a kind of expressive act on the one hand and a chore on the other? Most importantly, do you enjoy writing? Do you usually complain of writer's block or do you get thrilled at the prospect of penning down your thoughts in a structured way? If we consider the average person born between 1980 and 1995, I think, the answers are pretty straightforward: either writing is a necessary evil required in college and beyond or it is a purely expressive act in which anything goes. Of course, there's no "right" response here, but isn't it worth pondering what our responses today might reveal?

In the spirit of that question, let's consider reading. What do you read? Emails? Newspapers and magazines? Harry Potter? Dan Brown? Jared Diamond? And why do you read? Simply because you need to check the news and your inbox? Or because fantasy worlds appeal to you? You might say it's impossible to find time to read for pleasure nowadays; there's just so much work to do at home and at work. Fair enough, I'd say, but you do watch TV, surf the Net, spend hours on Facebook, and so forth. Surely, you could read for pleasure now and then when you get the time. And when you do read, would you read slowly like we sip wine? Or would you skim through the pages of a novel much like you'd down a beer in a jiffy? Lastly, if one were to ask you to recall what you read, what would you remember? The plot, the characters, and the author's turn of phrase? Or merely that it's something about the world of wizards or the mischief of the Catholic Church? Again, for those of you born between 1980 and 1995, I am not so interested in what your specific answer might be, but in the overall patterns we can start to discern here.

Broadly speaking, I find there are two sets of responses: Utilitarian and Sentimentalist. The Utilitarian sees reading and writing as means to some worldly end. It might be grades, jobs, grants, or just name-dropping at a social gathering. Formal education in schools and colleges is, as economists say, an "input" that serves to produce the finished product: an industrious, rational self-interested calculator who minimizes risks and maximizes benefits. To speak of learning for the sake of learning before such a person is to invite ridicule and scorn. Wake up to the 21st century, they yell, and get yourself a Master's in some technical subject so that you can earn a six-figure salary within the next five years!

On the contrary, the Sentimentalist sees no pleasures in industry, rationality or calculation. These are far too bourgeois-rational for, say, someone deep into Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. They say: let's save the planet, stop making war, organize concerts for starving Third Worlders, and lead authentic lives. The world is bereft of goodness and kindness, they argue further, so we must dream and express ourselves online and offline to our friends. Art is expression; words are expression. Academia attracts such people en masse because it offers healthcare benefits and a stable middle-class life without hard work. Joblessness also attracts such people en masse because it is the lot of artists and hippies to revel in the slings and arrows of bourgeois society. But if one suddenly stop a sentimentalist to ask about reading and writing, one should expect mumbles and incoherent phrases. Conversation, after all, is not to be expected of someone who knows that anti-war protests and Habitat for Humanity are the hallmarks of the authentic life.

College and graduate students overwhelmingly fall into one of these two categories. Or sometimes even in both? Arguably, the finest example of my generation is Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. If you know anything about him or saw the fictionalized account of his life in The Social Network, you'll know what I'm talking about. Here is a person who is exceedingly smart and ambitious, much like our Utilitarians on campus, but his relationships with his friends are notably shallow and his speech resembles monologues rather than conversation. But he is also a creator, an entrepreneur, someone who avidly reads ancient Greek philosophy and advocates Stoicism in a money-obsessed age. He could be any of your restive nerdy/geeky friends from college, except that he's the world's youngest billionaire. But he doesn't converse, read or write much beyond what's minimally required of him. And it doesn't prevent him from doing well for himself!

If you've read until this point, you might have guessed what I'm talking about. It is not that my generation has mastered non-verbal communication or their auditory skills as substitutes for reading and writing. They have instead opted for shallowness and superficiality. What is true of your peer in the comparative literature doctoral program is also quite true of your banker friend on Wall Street. Education is a means to an end. In other words, the Utilitarian must try to maximize his job prospects by writing and reading minimally, and the Sentimentalist must simply re-affirm her naive moral convictions in what she reads and finds. Vast worlds are shut off for these blinkered individuals. It is not merely the pleasures of the mind that are out of vogue, but an experiential understanding of the world around us. It is now possible to study economics or politics without paying attention to the homeless people on the streets. It is now possible to protest against the US war on terror while retaining Bush-like stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant, irrational, pre-modern bigots. It is now possible to earn a lot of money or hold many degrees without a clear sense of purpose in life. It is now possible to socialize without listening to others. It is now possible to love without affection, live without values, and learn without passion.

Something is very nearly lost forever in our world: intellectual depth and moral seriousness. You cannot expect someone who drinks fair-trade coffee at Starbucks to earn "good karma" to be anything but shallow and superficial. Everything is a means to an end: relationships, knowledge, clothes, speech, food. But what good is such instrumentalism, whether it is Utilitarian or Sentimentalist? Can it help us understand the world and ourselves better? Can it help us change our world ever so slightly by our actions? Can it make us better human beings? None of these ends require a higher education degree. Indeed, there might be much to learn from those who are less fortunate than us economically and educationally. But how can a well-schooled upper-middle class teenager today take someone less privileged seriously? Our social inferiors are either to be despised or pitied, depending on your ideological convictions. The world is, as VS Naipaul wrote famously, what it is, so my generation simply choose to extend their middle-class privileges in corporate, government or academic spheres. Restive yet unmindful of what is missing, they affirm their commitment to cynicism and moral flippancy. Now where do we go from here?

Three Modes of Graduate Student Being

1) Graduate school is a perpetual struggle in a Hobbesian state of nature. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Course readings overwhelm; professors intimidate; funding runs low; research topics run dry; job prospects look bleak. Life is real, life is earnest (except that this is the ivory tower!). Perhaps it's pointless anyway. Sigh! Life, research, struggle, graduate school...

End state: Professor at Alaskan community college with more or less the same complaints.

2) Graduate school is meant for those who got good grades in high school and college because they were teacher's pets. It's a safe job for those of us who never want to leave school and enter the "real world." What's all this intellectual talk about? At seminars and elsewhere, learn to drop names: Foucault, Bourdieu, Agamben, and, er, your advisor. Read the "literature" on whatever your advisor does, and then suck up, copy his methods, and extend his argument by a thousandth of a decimal point. Academic research is incremental. Science proceeds this way. Heck, that's what the journals are about!

End state: Tenured professor at old graduate school with a chair named after advisor.

3) Graduate school is inspiring and rewarding as long as one is willing to work hard. Serious intellectual effort is valuable for its own sake. Advisors are role models, even heroes, but not gods. Publishing journal articles and presenting papers at conferences are fine, but the key is to enjoy debate and discussion, learning and teaching. Academia is itself part of the real world, embodying every form of hierarchy and discrimination outside it. Studying important issues in society and teaching college students are important ways to set things right just a wee bit.

End state: Unemployed writer or activist.

The Pleasures of the Intellect

This post takes its inspiration from Robert Pippin's recent essay in the NY Times. Pippin calls for a renewed focus on the intellectual pleasures of reading, research, and writing beyond the many kinds of THEORY that the knowledge factory churns out regularly. He calls these pleasures "naive," ostensibly because they are innocent of theoretical pretensions. But they are, if you reflect for a moment, rather sophisticated. In a way, everything we learned in kindergarten is still relevant for us today: the joy of learning new things after protracted struggles; discovering new ideas that challenge our inherited conceptions of the world; experiencing the aesthetic pleasures of reading; creating our own forms of intellectual and artistic expression; basking in our realization of the inexorable complexity of our lives and our world, and thus discovering the limits of our mortality. I find little, if anything, that is naive here.

My teaching experience this semester reminds me unambiguously of the joys of intellectual cultivation, even in an age of social networking sites, PlayStation, and IPhones. It helps that I teach political philosophy to thirty-five bright kids at a leading US university. We read a pretty standard canonical selection of political philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Some might find it odd and complain that I have succumbed to academic conservatism. Indeed, from a certain position in the "cultural wars" of the past, this is correct. But I think we are smarter now. The canonical writers, we appreciate, speak to us in different voices rather than offer us a coherent sermon, and it is for us to pose challenging questions to them and find our own answers. This is anything but easy. Political philosophers are distant historically and culturally, and difficult to read and comprehend. Only in our minds, however, can the texts and their authors come alive and speak to our deepest concerns and anxieties. This, however, involves the time-honored virtues of close reading, critical thinking, analytical writing, and intelligent discourse/debate.

The idea is not to simply accept what an author or professor says, but to question, to think, and grapple with the texts as much as our own inchoate notions about politics and society. Consider Plato. Everyone sympathizes with Socrates on their first reading of the Apology. That's what Plato intended. And he was a bloody good writer! But there is something more to it. Socrates wishes to lead only the examined life or perish. Yet his pursuit of the examined life is seen by many of his fellow Athenians as impious and corrupting. The innocent reader is led to believe Socrates' defense in the trial. The Delphic Oracle told him to question others and think for himself, so he can't be impious, he says. How could one man, he asks further, corrupt his fellow citizens in a democracy? The innocent are persuaded again by Socrates' personification of the Laws of Athens in the Crito. Surely, one might conclude, Socrates regards himself to be a good citizen, albeit one who stood for free speech and other civil liberties before his time. "He'd be fine today" is the verdict of many first-time readers. But if this is so, there's no point reading Plato except as a historical curiosity from an illiberal era. Let's read instead, some might say, the classics of postmodern thought in our day and satisfy ourselves with the extreme skepticism, uncertainty, and despondence that characterizes so-called late modernity.

However commonplace these views might be in certain academic circles, especially in many humanistic disciplines, it is ultimately nihilistic. That's a problem not for some deep philosophical reason but because it denies the intrinsic, non-instrumental value of reading canonical texts and reflecting on them and one's own political dilemmas. It won't lead to a job, more money, a higher IQ, or sometimes even a higher grade. But Plato still has something valuable to teach us. That teaching lies in Socrates' evasive defense at his public trial and his ironic speech as the Laws. What we find here is exactly the opposite of free speech and other contemporary liberal values: a certain kind of evasiveness or deception alongside a defiant defense of self-knowledge as the highest good. Thinking for oneself and questioning what we are told by others, Plato wishes to tell us, are dangerous activities, especially for the young, ambitious people whom Socrates often encountered as his critics as well as disciples. The truth is that Socrates did indeed reject the authority of the gods of Athens and did corrupt the youth with his irreverent philosophy of life. And he was entirely aware of his "guilt." In this sense, Plato offers a fairly radical critique of the inexorable tension between the self-examining individual and society at large. This is, of course, not a critique lost upon college students, who realize that immersing themselves in textual or empirical studies radically alters their worldview and estranges them from their friends and family.

Is this the only possible interpretation of Plato's portrayal of Socrates? Certainly not. But it is nonetheless an interpretation worth considering alongside many others. Indeed, reading texts with multiple interpretations in mind -- yours and your peers' -- is a valuable intellectual goal in itself. This fits well with what some call the "surplus meaning" of texts. Reading collectively with multiple interpretations in mind, we can learn to discriminate between better and worse interpretations, and to confirm that even the best interpretations might not explain everything. Not everyone will agree, but that simply affirms another basic intellectual truth, the difficulty of agreeing on what is good. Conservatives do not appreciate these finer points. For them, it's merely a matter of studying the so-called classics of Western civilization. That's odd not only on account of Gandhi's statement that "Western civilization would be a good idea," but also because supposedly Western canonical philosophers such as Aristotle were lost for over a millennium and only return to European soil with the great Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages. And what is so "Western" anyway about the polytheistic Greeks and Romans anyway? Whichever way you look at it, if you want to engage seriously with canonical texts, social conservatism is not an option. The texts are inherently radical insofar as they explode our lazy assumptions about ourselves and our world; they excite and shape our intellectual faculties; and, they predispose us towards not just political ideas but political action. If you had any doubt, consider Socrates' martyrdom, Machiavelli's call to liberate Italy from the oppression of secular and ecclesiastical rulers, or Tocqueville's insistence that social equality rather than political liberty makes for a genuinely democratic age.

My purpose here is twofold: firstly, an emphasis on teaching and studying competing theories cannot accomplish what "naive" reading can; secondly, these "naive" pleasures are actually rather sophisticated. When we focus on different theories of textual criticism or social science, we merely reproduce stale structures of thought, and therefore, unleash tedium and thoughtlessness rather than vibrant intellectual energy and passion. If you ever have doubts on this point, compare the graduate students of your university with the undergraduates. You'll know the difference because college kids don't do literature reviews day in and day out. Likewise, if you reflect on what I've said so far, you might find that "naive" intellectual pleasures are what caused at least some of us to take up the life of the mind as a vocation. But you don't have to be an academic to understand my point here. If you're into business or art or soccer, you might actually understand better what I mean. The pleasures of the self-examined life are remarkably democratic: I have learned my most valuable lessons outside classrooms, from the poorest and most marginalized members of my society, who lack the luxuries of time and luck to read closely and write critically as part of their intellectual training. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) their rigorous daily labors and numerous social constraints, they speak "naively" but enthusiastically of new modes of intellectual discovery and political expression in a hostile world. Socrates, who never read closely or wrote critically, would have understood, even if most of our university professors cannot.

Why Poverty and Underdevelopment Cannot Explain Maoism

Every now and then, someone comes up to me and explains why poverty and underdevelopment are the "real" causes of the Maoist rebellions in India today. Usually, I listen patiently, trying hard to contain my annoyance at the crude materialist suggestion, and then pose a simple question to my interlocutor: "Well, what causes poverty and underdevelopment then?" At this point, there is occasionally a reference to development as an onward march to economic and social progress, which implies that some folks are condemned to play catch up in the grand parlor game of modernity. More often, however, there is silence.

Let's start at the beginning though. Assume that poverty and underdevelopment do, in fact, cause agrarian rebellions. It follows then that, in income terms, poorer areas and peoples are more likely to rebel than richer ones. Development data would predict the BIMARU states as the loci of rebellion since 1947. But Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh are not part of the so-called Red Corridor, whereas West Bengal, Chhatisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Orissa are. Now the wily materialist might urge me to look at district-level data to check whether poverty and rebellion are correlated. Again, income falls short as an explanation. The poorest districts are spread far and wide, from Kalahandi in Orissa to Dangs in Gujarat. Most of these districts are not under the Home Ministry's scanner. Of course, we could go even deeper at sub-district or block level or at the village or household levels. Are the poorest blocks, villages, and households the prime movers of anti-state activities? Field research by many, including myself, suggests not. At every level of analysis, therefore, the materialist thesis fails.

Yet materialism is popular among the chatteratti in Delhi and elsewhere. Somehow, in a neoliberal age, everyone seems to have morphed into vulgar Marxists. A number of well-known academics and activists lead the chorus; journalists and their readers follow. Not a single media report has contested a flimsy, even false, argument. Why? I want to suggest a hypothesis here: this is the most convenient apolitical response by so-called civil society in India that effectively denies the link between elite consumption in urban India and the exploitation of resources and peoples located in the Maoist areas. The Delhi chatteratti cannot survive without the ubiquitous adivasi maid from Jharkhand or raise questions regarding the kind of "development" pursued by the modern state in India since 1947. It must come up with an apolitical alternative that protects its narrow interests. Materialism is a convenient myth that puts the blame entirely on the state. Even Chidambaram and his cronies accept it. It's their predecessors who went wrong, they say. Jean Dreze and his accomplices then lend legitimacy to this neoliberal myth, and foolishly sign on to the state's sinister designs to "develop" certain areas. Development here means not freedom from disease, illiteracy, and oppression, as Amatya Sen tells us, but state contracts to multinational corporations to carve out spheres of influence wherever they are resources to be exploited. It's the last great enclosure of the modern age, and there's a fortune to be made for the state and its corporate cronies. Some people, we're told, need to catch up with the times. Or else...

Next, consider the other modern myth, that of the Malevolent Maoist. He is a gun-toting maniac who spews a rotten ideology that preaches revolution and regards 1947 as the start of a second colonial age. They pilfer state development funds and weapons depots, and then lead luxurious lives and rape local women, including those within their cadres. Malevolent Maoists, we are told to believe, spread their tentacles among the poor, who are presumably foolish enough to fall for any trick. They're illiterate, naked, and starving after all. Unlike we who sit in seminar rooms and airconditioned cafes to pronounce judgments on the rest of the planet. We, especially academics and activists, must indulge in state-directed development to redeem these poor, foolish rural folks that are falling prey to the Malevolent Maoist. Although I feel like puking on some of those who tell me such stories, the intellectual in me pushes me towards a calm response. The real problem here is the political impotence of the Indian leftist, whether as academic or as activist. They can no longer pretend to be part of some revolutionary vanguard, representing subaltern struggles in word and action. They are hostage to their professionalism, which necessarily prevents meaningful political engagements with the messy, illiberal world of subaltern politics. History and literature appeals most to our leftist academics: there is simply no need to engage with the present or the real. For our middle-class urban activists, it is usually a simple canned ideology that must be imposed on the hapless sods out there. Doing something is better than nothing, I am often told. But doing something harmful is worse than doing nothing.

And that brings me to how urban academics and activists have been superseded by a class of rural intellectuals who have a deeper understanding of popular grievances and struggles in the Indian countryside and can better represent subaltern claims within a democratic setup. These subaltern leaders speak the languages of their communities as well as the modern state. It is easy to dismiss them as brokers or go-betweens. But they are leaders in their own right. How else can one understand why these so-called Maoist leaders carry out social audits of public works programs such as NREGA or cooperate with honest NGOs? And still, they wield their guns to extract "taxes" from local businesses and to target scoundrels in and outside the state on a case-by-case basis. Violence is selective, a form of subaltern claim-making articulated in ways are justified usually in moral terms. Although active participants in rebel ranks are limited, support for the rebels is widespread. Some people feed and house them; others help organize public meetings to discuss local problems and potential solutions; and yet others build houses for poorer members of a village community or wells and watersheds for the entire village, often with government or NGO assistance. It is hardly surprising that villagers will support young men from their communities who will benefit them materially and politically further their aims.

Is it rebellion at all then? Well, yes, but not a revolutionary one. Scholars and laypersons tend to equate rebellions and revolutions as popular anti-state actions that seek regime change. We do not have a vocabulary or theory to explain rebellions that do not seek to turn the world upside down or overthrow the state. But for better or worse, this is what we must do in the present context. We need to understand how violence, used selectively, can become an effective weapon of the weak under certain conditions to force social change from above. Those conditions refer to a kind of political domination that is not so totalizing that it can be softened up by collective action from below. In other words, these conditions are not found in fascist and other authoritarian regimes. Many electoral democracies, however, do insofar as they are necessarily incomplete democracies and imperfect states. The Zapatista rebellion in Mexico and the '60s race riots spurred on by Black radicals in the US are two obvious examples of violence used effectively as a weapon of the weak to force states to yield to subaltern demands. States and nations, we appreciate, are made from both above and below, and the constant conjunction of domination and resistance is a critical path towards genuine democratization. There is no formula for success, of course, and the path to genuine democracy is crooked.

But it is time to appreciate that non-violence does not always pay. Violence matters under certain conditions where it acquires a moral-cum-strategic relevance. These conditions are not economic, but irreducibly political. They point to essential conflicts of interest such as those between metropolitan Indian elites and rural subalterns. No amount of NREGA social audits and famine inquiry commissions can achieve what the Maoists have since 2004. Jagdalpur and Ranchi now appear clearly in everyone's radar, be it the state or civil society. All sorts of development programs and schemes are being enacted or planned, usually with considerable local input. Livelihoods are becoming more secure and sustainable. Popular mobilization is creating a shared political awareness of the rights of ordinary men and women as citizens of a democratic country, not subjects to be sacrificed at the altar of national development. Women are at the forefront of subaltern struggles to carve out a better future. Ideally, all of this could have occurred in a neat, peaceful way. But ideally, we would all be reasonable people who understood and respected each other. In that case, politics itself would not have existed since everyone would have agreed on everything. Sadly, we live in an imperfect world, so politics is inevitable and violent politics will remain an effective means to secure worthy ends.

The Return of Match-Fixing and Pakistan

Over the past week or so, I've been following, with much dismay, the slings and arrows directed at three young Pakistani cricketers, and by implication, the entire Pakistani cricket team and indeed, the entire Pakistani nation. The past few weeks have featured former cricketers, cricket officials, and fans making insinuations of the worst kind not just at the accused trio but at Pakistan as a whole. Michael Atherton opened proceedings by recommending an end to Pakistan's tour of England, and immediate punishment for the accused cricketers. He then went on to prescribe leniency for the 18-year old rookie paceman Mohammed Aamer on the condition that he was put on a rehab program. In other words, he prejudged, like many around the world, the guilt of the accused. Indian cricketers such as Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar sounded more diplomatic when they said that the guilty should be punished, but they seemed to imply that at least some cricketers were guilty of spot-fixing in the Lord's Test. The ICC President Haroon Lorgat made similar remarks when he banned Salman Butt, Mohammad Aamer, and Mohammed Asif from further cricket until they were proven innocent of the charges against them. Apparently, there was adequate evidence to justify such a ban, despite the repeated official statements to the contrary.

What is, after all, the evidence? A sting operation that caught a sports agent caught taking money on camera, and some no-balls balled during a Test match. We, therefore, need to ascertain that (1) the News of the World journalist has not doctored tapes, and (2) there is a watertight argument linking the transaction caught on camera and events on the field. As experts and fans alike will recognize, even if (1) can be somehow proven, (2) is rather difficult to prove with the available evidence. To put it rather bluntly, the evidence is flimsy and the case is weak. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd put my money on the trio playing cricket again pretty soon.

Now back to the allegations. I found them actually more revealing than the video evidence of spot-fixing. When Ian Healy, for instance, talked about the 1994 Rawalpindi Test and how Salim Malik might have been fixing it, he conveniently ignored the fact that his former Aussie teammates Shane Warne, Tim May, and Mark Waugh were co-implicated in that scandal. Moreover, amusingly, it is Healy's missed stumping of Inzamam that attracted the most suspicion on the final day of that Test match. So before one gets sanctimonious about Pakistan's cricketers and its incompetent board, why not take a closer look at the Australian cricket fraternity and its role in protecting Warne, May, and Waugh from scandal? Closer home in India, expectedly, morons are having a field day. Fan comments on cricket websites are a good indicator of the bigotry that blends brilliantly with sanctimonious sentiments. We are told that Indian cricketers are not like that. Yet almost every bookie accused until date has been an Indian; a former captain and many star players ended their careers after Justice Chandrachud found them guilty after extensive investigations; the most expensive tamasha in cricket, the IPL, may well be the most corrupt in the history of the sport. The subcontinent, with its massive market for cricket coverage, is thus, unsurprisingly, the hub of corruption in cricket. In a global age, of course, the corrupt spread their tentacles worldwide, but the creature itself lives and thrives in South Asia. In sum, those pointing a finger of suspicion at Pakistan alone should realize that there are three pointing back towards them.

A final comment must be reserved for the serial Pakistan baiters in public life. Former ICC President Malcolm Speed, whose chief claim to fame is the horribly organized 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean, urged the authorities to oust Pakistan from the cricketing fraternity. Now, Speed has a long history of run-ins with Asian cricketers and officials. But his opinion here resonates nicely with that of many elsewhere. Australian and Indian newspapers are full of similar remarks. The English, though more restrained, are pondering the deeper structural problems in Pakistani society that have caused the current debacle. Some editorial writers have even taken the liberty to connect the latest episode in the match-fixing saga with support for the Taliban, military dictatorship, Punjabi dominance within Pakistan, and Third World poverty in general. Presumably, the argument here is that poor Pakistanis, oppressed by Punjabi elites and military dictators in power, are turning to terrorism and corruption for succor. This is a patently absurd line of reasoning. If true, one would need to explain why the current recession in the North Atlantic world is not causing the poor and unemployed, oppressed by Washington and Wall Street, to turn to terrorism and corruption. But the analogy would be immediately deemed invalid, because Pakistan, in the eyes of the West and its lackeys in India and elsewhere, is in a category of its own. It is a pathology, an anathema to the civilized, and an ode to evil itself. Hence, every accusation and every allegation can be justified without evidence, and individuals are seen invariably as symptoms of a national malaise. Almost everyone and their grandmothers are now self-proclaimed experts on Pakistan, including some ignoramuses in my department. And woe betide the rest of us...

Arundhati Roy, the Maoists, and the India Shining Public

As the dust settles after Arundhati Roy's recent dispatch from Dandakaranya, I want to ask what we have learned from this episode by contextualizing the social drama enacted last week. I do not want to simply determine who gained and who lost in this latest round of political contestation over this imaginary entity named Maoism. There is the larger question of why the various actors in this dramatic contest acted the way they did.

Let's start with Ms. Roy herself who is at the center of the storm, much to her delight, I should add. Her political engagements until now have been more like flings than relationships. Her initial foray into the messy world of everyday politics took place nearly a decade ago even as the ill-fated Narmada Bachao Andolan petered off to its inevitable demise. Her primary contribution to the NBA-led movement happened to be a profoundly moving essay on the debilitating social consequences of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on adivasis displaced by it. The essay made little impact in metropolitan India, except to attract the ire of bourgeois intellectuals such as Ramachandra Guha, but it raised awareness in the North Atlantic world on the dark side of India's development surge. As an undergraduate in far-away Iowa in 2002, some years after the essay appeared, I was questioned by more than one concerned professor about the state of affairs in the Narmada valley. They cited Roy's essay and admired her courage to use her celebrity status to canvass for "good causes." What struck me then was the affective or emotive quality of her writing, her ability to represent subaltern voices without being patronizing in the typical colonial-liberal manner. She was someone who had obviously read her Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, but more importantly, Edward Said and James Clifford. The challenge of representing accurately yet evocatively seemed insignificant for someone whose Booker-winning novel portrayed poignantly the social and emotional dimensions of her early years in the paradoxically caste-ridden communist milieu of Kerala. Yet her way with words did not obscure her utter inability to comprehend, like most Westernized Indians, the mechanics of power and contestation in contemporary India. When a reactionary, activist judiciary sentenced her, Medha Patkar and their comrades to a brief jail term, she did not follow Patkar's "Gandhian" advice to serve her time in jail, but decided to raise a thousand rupees in the form of one-rupee contributions from her metropolitan supporters. It did not go down well with her comrades, most of whom saw her as hungry for publicity and superficial in her political activism.

For some years thereafter, Roy kept a low profile, restricting herself to her friends and associates in New Delhi. She clearly realized she had burnt her fingers in her first foray into the cauldron of Indian politics. During this time, however, she wrote essays on the state of India and the world, condemning multinational corporations for their ecological impact, the anti-people policies of neoliberal India, Narendra Modi's pogroms in Gujarat, and the new imperialist wars of George W. Bush. A seething rage expressed itself eloquently in these pages even though it seemed little more than an impotent rage against the state of the world at large. An essay in The Guardian on the AFSPA in Kashmir and its impact on subjugated populations in that region of South Asia caused a slight stir among her readership in London and New York though, predictably, it found few takers among the India Shining Public that had been evolving over the past decade or so. Buoyed by her marginal success, she consciously assumed a more public role by taking up, in particular, the proposed acquisition of adivasi lands in the Niyamgiri Hills of southeastern Orissa. Her conspicuous silence on parallel proceedings in neighboring West Bengal ought not to go unnoticed. It seemed messier than Orissa, where MNCs and adivasis could be cast clearly as villains and heroes. And as she visited these areas, she found nodes of subaltern agency that she could have barely imagined. Adivasis were organizing effectively to respond to the twin threats of MNC land-grabs and upper-caste Hindutvaization. Violent and non-violent tactics formed elements in a comprehensive strategy of resistance from below. The uniqueness of the new wave of adivasi resistance lay in its deep understanding of the weak spots of its opponents, the state, the MNCs, and right-wing Hindu groups led by the Bajrang Dal. They employed limited forms of violence to intimidate these opponents and stake claims to particular territories as theirs. Appeals to state-produced memories of adivasi wildness, primitiveness, and autochthony checkmated the state at its own game; a few kidnappings and extortion threats took care of the MNCs; and, a few strategically-targeted assassinations of Hindutva leaders took care of the their followers.

Roy surveyed from above this new wave of adivasi resistance with amazement and approval. Subaltern rhetoric drew on long histories of primitiveness produced by the state to make particular claims against the violence of corporate land-grabs aided and abetted by the state. Subaltern politics did not refer either to actual positivist-type histories of their region or the memories produced over time within their communities. They knew the state well, and hoped to bamboozle it at its own game. Roy simply followed suit. She projected the Niyamgiri bauxite-mining project as a shameless USD 3 trillion land-grab by the neoliberal state-corporate nexus (three times the current value of the Indian GDP), and characterized the local adivasis in the uplands of eastern Orissa in familiar colonial terms as primitive, peace-loving people who worshipped these hills as deities. In doing so, she pitted the cold economic rationality of the state-corporate nexus against a timeless adivasi consciousness rooted in nature. By subtly adapting her own grievances against neoliberal India in the light of the new subaltern rhetoric, Roy began a new engagement with everyday politics, one she hoped would end differently from her NBA involvement. It worked! Pressure grew in the UK, especially from human rights groups and the Church of England, and eventually, Vedanta was compelled to pack up and leave from Orissa. In her new role as champion of adivasi politics, Roy continued to visit Orissa and neighboring Bastar to make herself known in the region. Her typical trip, lasting no more than a couple of days, involves hectic travel and frenetic discussions with a range of social actors. Information gathering and social networking make it possible to write on these regions without always being there. It is a process familiar to academics and journalists, of course, in a postmodern age of global communication systems. How else, after all, could the South Asian academic perched atop his professorial chair position himself as an expert on matters several oceans away?

Next we come to the Maoists, a construct of the metropolitan mind much like thuggee in another era. The idea, then as now, is to criminalize certain sections of society in order to exclude or marginalize them. There are, of course, good reasons for the state to attempt to exclude and marginalize adivasi populations living in eastern Orissa, the Dandakaranya forests, or the Chotanagpur plateau. State formation depends, in the final analysis, on violent appropriation of common natural resources, or "primitive accumulation" in Marx's words; such resources are highly concentrated in these three regions. For this reason, all three regions share a common history of marginalization over the past century and a half, the continuities from the colonial to the postcolonial era being clearer than elsewhere in modern India. These "tribal" regions have been cast rather conveniently as exceptions to the mainstream of Hindu India, a notion spawned and promoted enthusiastically by colonial anthropology and governmental practice alike. Anti-state rebellions, signifying disorder, define these "tribal places" in the official view from above. In the language of the postcolonial state, they are incorrigibly backward, primitive, and thus resistant to modern industry and commerce, though the historical record tells us of the very modern production of tribal places and their impoverishment, immiserization, and marginalization in the subcontinent. The terms of trade and politics have been systematically stacked against them. It is as if someone is gagged by a bunch of goons, who then joke that the victim cannot speak. Yet even those who are gagged can kick, and that is precisely what we see today as before. The current ruling class has certainly outdone its equally exploitative predecessors: it's found a convenient outlet for its Sinophobia in an age where it has been outdone by China on the macroeconomic indicators it so values. Maoism is the new demon that must be exorcised, being as it is a "greater threat than even Pakistan" in Home Minister Chidambaram's words. The specter of the vanguardist Naxalite movement looms large in the metropolitan Indian imagination, conjuring up images of the enemy within and striking fear of total revolution that the "spring thunder" of '68 promised.

But alas, this phantom exists in the minds of metropolitan Indians who constitute the ruling class. Ask them who is a Maoist and they will talk of disillusioned intellectuals in universities and gun-toting soldiers following their bidding. Nothing could be further from the truth. And that is exactly why Arundhati Roy's Outlook essay has ruffled so many feathers. She is one of "us," they say, someone who won the Booker prize and brought recognition to a country starved of heroes. How could she write such anti-establishment essays, biting the very hand that feeds her? And how could she possibly say that Maoists are ordinary men and women with real dreams and ambitions that are being denied to them by those who sit on the high table of metropolitan India? How could she decry "development," their get-rich-quick ideology, to defend these poor, dirty scoundrels in the jungles? And last but not least, how could she possibly attribute agency to these wretched of the earth when they are meant to be mere victims, upon whose carcasses academics and journalists can build dazzling careers? That the pseudo-intellectual chattering classes are asking these questions in response to Roy's essay is telling. Hardly anyone in this milieu has experience of these areas, yet they feel competent to challenge Roy's descriptions. Hardly anyone even knows the histories of these regions, yet they have the temerity to defend the status quo. That they are complicit in producing these areas as backward and marginal to the postcolonial polity is conveniently ignored by these mall-going, IPL-watching classes.

The most disingenuous critics of Roy are, however, located in academia, especially on the Indian Left. These are men and women who claim no affinity with mass politics: how could they anyway, after transforming from Maruti Marxists to Mercedes Marxists over the past generation? After all, these are Leninists and Stalinists who repose their faith in The Party, elitist, corrupt, violent and oppressive though it may be, and woe betide those subalterns who have dared to lead their own movement against the state. These "adventurers," as the Leninists traditionally label such people, are actually somehow against popular interests, which of course only the Left aristocracy in India is privy to. Arundhati Roy is a soft target; the real issue is the failure of the Indian Left to mature into a party that represents anyone but itself, let alone the popular classes. They sit on academic chairs, debating fashionable texts and feigning radicalism, but make no mistake, this is the most reactionary class in South Asia today. In familiar brahminical positions atop the postcolonial social order, they disdain any attempt to disturb that settled order. They know that a handful of intellectuals in JNU and Jadavpur are not masterminding the movement, as the state-media nexus suggests. The various rebel groups labelled "Maoist" do not draw their leadership from the metropolitan elite in India. The PWG in Telengana-Bastar and the MCC in Bihar-Jharkhand have plied their trade for over three decades against the oppression of the state and its landed upper-caste allies in society. Seemingly countless smaller groups with vaguely leftist aims are better seen as Birsaite than Maoist anyway: their politics seeks not a Maoist-style encircling of the capital city, but adivasi control and ownership of jal, jangal, jameen (water, forests, and land) in a neoliberal era of state-sponsored land-grabs and violent repression. These rebellions against the state, say our leftist academics, are meant to fail so that they can be commemorated by later historians seeking to move up the academic hierarchy, preferably in the North Atlantic world. Disappointingly, however, the new wave of adivasi politics seems to be more than holding its own against the state and its allies. For the intellectual cream of metropolitan India, this is the greatest possible challenge to the phony radicalism that allows it to speak for the subaltern classes.

Against this context, we can easily see why Arundhati Roy's essay has met with the disapproval of the Indian Shining public, especially among pseudo-radical academics. Hers is a shameless attempt to repay the state's propaganda against "Maoists" in its own coin. Moreover, by laying open the emotional and affective registers of anti-state violence in Middle India, Roy has put the gauntlet, as it were, on the table, challenging the Indian state's right to rule in these areas. The creation of non-state spaces in eastern and central India are significant victories for popular sovereignty, fragile achievements though they may be. The state no longer has a monopoly in terms of control and sovereignty in these spaces. It exists and acts increasingly through non-governmental organizations, but its favored mining projects in Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa have all failed to materialize. Civil society and the state are in retreat; political society and those operating at the civil-political society interface are on the ascendancy. A plethora of political possibilities are possible. It is not at all clear what the future holds for these regions. What is clear, however, is that state's final bid for primitive accumulation in Middle India has led to a spectacular defeat at the hands of ordinary men and women who may pose with bows and arrows but in fact wield guns and words that can no longer be ignored.

P.S. Since, as many of you know, I am neither Marxist nor Maoist by way of ideological persuasion, I defend the right to rebel in purely liberal terms. We are not, as Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj, obliged to obey a government that consistently acts against our interests. I should add, with much amusement, that the Hobbesian justification for renegotiating the social contract when faced with a despotic sovereign shares considerable similarities with the radical anti-state positions taken by anarchists since time immemorial.

Much Ado About Nothing: The New Tradition Wars in Cricket

As the cricket season winds down in the Southern Hemisphere, two highly-charged issues have made the headlines for all the wrong reasons: umpiring and ball-tampering. The former is a long-running grumble among players and spectators alike, who are apparently torn between preserving "tradition" and getting more accurate umpiring decisions in matches. The latter is also a long-standing grumble, or perhaps a whine, made primarily by batsmen and batsmen-turned-administrators who invariably position themselves against bowling "cheats" as custodians of the game's hallowed traditions and morals. Whereas the indiscretions of umpires such as Mark Benson and Daryl Harper have brought the UDRS under the traditionalists' scanner, Shahid Afridi's recent ball-biting frenzy has outraged the holy cows pasturing on cricket fields or in living rooms. Nevertheless, I want to argue here that both issues are, overtly or covertly, the handiwork of cricket's conservatives, who use "tradition" as a red herring to somehow preserve a dysfunctional set-up that is nonetheless favorable to them.

Let's begin with the butt of many new cricketing jokes, the Umpiring Decision Review System (UDRS), which is supposed to have been available at all Test matches since 1 October 2009. (That this is not the case is basically due to the bullying tactics of the cash-rich Board for Cricket Control in India, who don't care much for the system.) The new system allows batsmen and bowlers to ask umpires to review their decisions if they believe they've gotten a raw deal. In order to prevent abuse and save time, every team is allowed at most two unsuccessful reviews per innings or four per Test match. So far, so good. The empirical argument favoring the new system is pretty clear now: the accuracy of decisions during the trial period in 2008-09 rose from 95-97% earlier to around 99%. What does that mean in real terms? Consider that there are 40 wickets in each Test, so if we reasonably suppose 2.5 appeals per wicket based on past experience, we have roughly 100 appeals per match. What the ICC is saying here is that the new system has reduced the average number of errors per game from 3-5 to 1. This is, I think, a pretty big deal. We are still not error-free, but we are getting closer to that elusive ideal using better and newer technologies as they now become available.

So what's the problem according to the defenders of "tradition"? For starters, some people in bowler hats and tweed suits are lamenting the good ol' days when the umpires, like schoolmasters, commanded real respect. The new generation, they and their colonial cousins say, are just going completely astray. I hardly need to point out that those who make such specious arguments invoking "tradition" are also pretty likely to look back fondly at the good ol' days of empire and white hegemony worldwide. I frankly don't feel the need to listen to such "people" (if that's what they are) seriously. But I do take seriously the argument that the game may lose a source of human touch. This is deceptively true insofar as it invokes Dickie Bird, Dave Shepherd, Venkat, etc, as wonderful characters that graced the game with their presence. But let's be clear here: people don't watch cricket to watch umpires! Let's also not forget that the actions of a "good" umpire named Steve Bucknor set in motion the UDRS trials in the first place. There is, however, a final and cleverer argument, that the UDRS is no more fair than the "traditional" set-up. Ian Chappell has made this argument most forcefully in recent times: unless, he says, there is justice for all under some new system, we should not be satisfied by justice for some. I disagree. Any new arrangement that reduces umpiring errors by 2-4% is a bloody more fair system than anything preceding it. I'm afraid my beloved Chappelli has it wrong here. His is sadly no more than an old-timer's rant against the ravages of time. We ought to listen respectfully from one ear and cast it out quickly from the other. "Tradition" is simply a red herring here for a range of people who, for varied reasons, do not want to accept with Tennyson that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new." Well, tough luck, chums! And goodbye...

Now let's turn to the global hullabaloo over Shahid Afridi's ball-tampering in Australia. The English and Australians are now grinning and saying "we always told you the Pakis are cheats." Indian fans, especially after the unfairness meted out to Pakistani players by Lalit Modi & Co., have found much to cheer with their usual mix of jingoism and sadism. The Pakistani public and media are, on the contrary, profusely apologetic in deference to good colonial custom: "Yes, sahib, we did big wrong. Please punish." Inzamam-ul-Haq was so shocked that he rushed out of the oblivion of his local sweetshop in Multan to denounce Afridi's "disgraceful" behavior, hoping no doubt that his captaincy at The Oval in 2005 will not be associated with the recent Perth incident. as part of a seamless narrative of dubious Pakistani morals. Yet there are the inevitable murmurs going back to Wasim and Waqar in 1993 or even to Imran and Sarfraz in the late '70s. Somehow, those who couch their arguments in terms of "tradition" have now rediscovered their voices to condemn Afridi, and by implication, Pakistani cricket.

Well, here's my honest response: bollocks! The defenders of "tradition" are almost all batsmen or former batsmen, who have been the old aristocracy of this sport since the days of W.G. Grace. The good doctor is rumored to have told an uppity opponent: "They've come to watch me bat, son, not to see you bowl." Bowlers are, not just figuratively, the working class yeomen of the game since the late 19th century. Pacemen like Fred Truman and Alec Bedser actually came from the coal-mining towns in the industrial north of England, so their talents were always offset by class prejudice in English dressing rooms by the snotty Oxbridge batsmen in their striped MCC ties. The class prejudice may have ended formally in English teams, but it lingers on worldwide. The balance between bat and ball has tilted to such an extent that a recent one-day match was called off after nearly half an innings simply because a couple of balls (out of nearly 150) threatened the Sri Lankan sissies at the crease. Pancake-flat pitches are, of course, very much the norm nowadays everywhere, though the complaints are muted because India's winning record abroad has improved in the flat-pitch era. The IPL is a ziggurat-like monument to this very prejudice in favor of the bat: sixes, not wickets, is what the public want to see. Oh really? Did Indian fanatics enjoy the thumping their team received from the bats of Hayden and Ponting in key tournament finals? Do the TRP ratings rise whenever the team batting first had piled up a billion-odd runs? Or do they actually plummet because the contest is effectively killed halfway through the game?

What we're dealing with here is blatant prejudice against bowlers. Declaring ball-tampering as an illegal activity reflects that ancient prejudice in a modern garb. Long before Imran Khan taught his proteges to "make" a ball, county cricketers knew and applied these workaday skills. Yet no one said much; it was simply assumed as part and parcel of the game. A year before he died, the wise Bob Woolmer wrote an earnest plea to bring these "dark arts to light" for two reasons: firstly, there is nothing inherently wrong in using naturally-available materials on a cricket field such as nails, sweat, lozenges, saliva, or even teeth to "work" on the ball; secondly, any activity under the present circumstances that evens out the balance between the bat and ball ought to be welcomed anyway. I quite agree. This is obviously not a "cultural" argument about Pakistani cricket, as Ramiz Raja has foolishly argued today, but a global one. The law ought to apply to everyone or none at all. Yet there is an addendum here about Pakistan. They are the perennial "bad boys" of the game, partly because Big Brother next door envies their cricketing skills and hates their guts, and partly because the former white custodians of the game find them to be easy target for their racism in a politically-correct age. Just like Pakistan has come to be associated with "terrorism" in the North Atlantic world, it has become associated with the sin of "ball-tampering" in the cricketing commonwealth. That this is unfair and discriminatory hardly takes a genius to realize. Yet surprisingly few people state the bleeding obvious (though there seems to be no scarcity of Modi-lovers among the cricketing fraternity or in corporate boardrooms).

To cut a long story short, we find here yet another attempt to re-define "tradition" to suit conservative interests in the game. In one case, it's the no-changers up to no good. In the other, it's the old batting aristocracy at it again! To both sets of conservatives, I offer a one-way discounted trip to Pluto. Until that happens, however, there are some serious wars to be fought over tradition in order to revitalize the radical currents that have always animated the game at its finest. Let's start by asking a couple of tough questions of the conservative defenders of "tradition." Do Lalit Modi's IPL and CL ventures, and the umpteen T20 leagues spawned by these initiatives, constitute "tradition"? Likewise, does the monopoly exercised by the Indian cricket board over the game's finances and administration constitute "tradition"? You can't play the "tradition" card only when it suits you. So next time you hear Ian Healy and his Channel Nine mates poke fun at Afridi and the Pakistan cricket team or lament the good ol' days of umpires, throw them some history books, or better still, some old videos of their own spotless conduct on the field, including respect for umpires. As for the fans, well, they're a bit like New Zealand or an old flaccid penis (both shaped similarly anyway): everyone knows they're down there, but no one gives a damn!