Weekend Reading: Pakistan, Jharkhand and Liberals vs. Conservatives

Start the weekend with this Tehelka story that tries to explain why the British thought Pakistan would be a more robust democracy than India (the article was written before the results were announced).

Next, a first-hand account of a visit to a part of India where Mao-spouting armed rebels are the law…(Sudip Mazumdar – who wrote this – is also the author of the article mentioned in comment #72 here)

A thought-provoking Op-Ed piece from the New York Times on how your willingness (or not) to slap your father in the face might reveal your ideological leanings…

…and finally a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times on the recently concluded elections in India:

It is truly the greatest show on Earth, an ode to a diverse and democratic ethos, where 700 million + of humanity vote, providing their small part in directing their ancient civilization into the future. It is no less impressive when done in a neighborhood which includes de-stabilizing and violent Pakistan, China, and Burma.

Its challenges are immense, more so probably than anywhere else, particularly in development and fending off terrorism — but considering these challenges and its neighbors, it is even more astounding that the most diverse nation on Earth, with hundreds of languages, all religions and cultures, is not only surviving, but thriving.

The nation where Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism were born, which is the second largest Muslim nation on Earth; where Christianity has existed for 2000 years; where the oldest Jewish synagogues and Jewish communities have resided since the Romans burnt their 2nd temple; where the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile reside; where the Zorostrians from Persia have thrived since being thrown out of their ancient homeland; where Armenians and Syrians and many others have to come live; where the Paris-based OECD said was the largest economy on Earth 1500 of the last 2000 years, including the 2nd largest only 200 years ago; where 3 Muslim Presidents have been elected, where a Sikh is Prime Minister and the head of the ruling party a Catholic Italian woman, where the President is also a women, succeeding a Muslim President who as a rocket scientist was a hero in the nation; where a booming economy is lifting 40 million out of poverty each year and is expected to have the majority of its population in the middle class, already equal to the entire US population, by 2025; where its optimism and vibrancy is manifested in its movies, arts, economic growth, and voting, despite all the incredible challenges and hardships; where all the great powers are vying for influence, as it itself finds its place in the world.

Where all of this is happening, is India, and as greater than 1/10 of humanity gets ready to vote, it is an inspiration to all the World.

Letter by V Mitchell, New York, NY

Excerpts from all the above articles below.

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*** Excerpts from The Brown Stepson They Left Behind by Mihir Bose ***

(emphasis mine)…MODERN INDIA sees itself as a great success story.

…Not only does India not look for hand-outs from the West, even the global downturn has not stopped growth, it has slowed it down. Indians are quick to point out that no Indian bank has been bailed out by the government; many of them are offering interest rates of over 10 percent to depositors.

But all this cannot hide a profound and very worrying problem for India. The world’s largest democracy has a dreadfully fractured polity which is not going to improve after the elections. The democracy show is brilliant: 700 million people go to the polls for the country’s 15th general election since independence in 1947, but the Indian political class cannot construct a narrative that blends in with the rest of the world’s democracies, particularly on issues such as terrorism. For all its aspirations to world power status, and a permanent seat on the Security Council, politically it remains locked in the most curious of oddcouple relationships with its troubled neighbour, Pakistan.

…So why does an India, increasingly confident on the world’s cultural stage, have a political class so inept? One answer is that the Indian cultural renaissance has been the work of individual Indians, a reflection of the rise of the Indian middle classes, while the political failure reflects the inadequacies of India’s grossly underachieving politicians: Indians are attaining success despite the government, not because of it.

…TO BE fair, the Indian political class has not been helped by the convoluted historical inheritance the new state received at birth. Hard as it is to believe, back in the 1940s the prospects of India’s survival were not rated high. The Raj’s experts confidently predicted that while Pakistan would not only survive and prosper, India would soon be balkanised. The main problem was felt to be the Hindu religion.

In contrast, Pakistan’s Islamic theology was seen as such an advantage that it was forecast to become a vibrant Muslim state that would form a bulwark against Russian communism, its virile Muslim culture necessary to protect the weak Hindus and their horrid caste system from falling prey to the communists.

Nobody expressed this view more forcefully than Lt Gen Sir Francis Tucker, who as GOC Eastern Command was in charge of large parts of the country and was an old Indi hand. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, published in 1950, the year India became a republic, reflected the view of many of the departing British that the creation of Pakistan was desirable…

…it was almost a Raj orthodoxy to believe that Hinduism, if not an evil force, was a spent, worthless one. Islam on the other hand was a religion the west could understand and with whose political leaders it could do business.

Rudyard Kipling, the great intellectual guru of the Raj, had long made clear his fondness for Muslims and his distrust of Hindus. He considered the Muslim more trustworthy and Islam’s monotheistic religion easier to understand. He was appalled by the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the two great Hindu classics, and repulsed by the jumble of Hindu beliefs. Kipling went on to claim that he had never met an Englishman who hated Islam and its people, adding, “where there are Muslims there is a comprehensive civilisation”.

…FOR ALL the efforts of the Congress to promote its secular credentials and advertise its Muslim leaders, the Raj always portrayed the Congress as a Hindu party. True, the Congress was mostly made up of Hindus but since India was overwhelmingly Hindu this was hardly surprising. The Raj just could not believe that a party that was largely Hindus could be truly secular. Such was the hatred for the Hindus, particularly Brahmins, that the Raj could not be shaken from this fixation even when the Congress party fashioned political victories in diehard Muslim provinces, the most remarkable of which was in the North-West Frontier Province. Today, this area is such a battleground between the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the west that Sharia law is being adopted in parts of the province.

…The Raj pictured these secular Muslims (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his men) as dupes of the wily Hindus. The only consolation for Sir Olaf Caroe, considered the supreme Raj expert on the Pasthuns, was that they would soon come to their senses, “It is hard to see how the Pathan [Pasthun] tradition could reconcile itself for long to Hindu leadership, by so many regarded as smooth-faced, pharisaical and doubledealing… How then could he [the Pathan] have associated himself with a party under Indian, even Brahmin, inspiration?”

What would the West now not give for such secular Muslims holding power in the North West Frontier, even if under the spell of smooth-faced double-dealing pharisaical Brahmins? Then such caricature of Hindus was not uncommon, and often a part of English novels like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop for instance, but it was major politicians like Churchill who added the deadly political twist. While in his speeches in the 1930s Churchill argued vehemently against Indian independence, his fire was directed mainly at the Hindus. He praised the Muslims, whose valour and virility he much admired.

By the time the war was coming to an end, Churchill had such hatred for the Hindus that he told his private secretary John Colville that he wanted the entire Hindu race exterminated. Colville’s The Fringes of Power records the chilling words uttered by Churchill in February 1945, just after his return from his fateful conference with Stalin in Yalta, “The PM said the Hindus were a foul race ‘protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is due’ and he wished Bert Harris (Bomber Harris) could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.”

…But if domestically Nehru constructed an Indian nation from the patchwork quilt the British had left, and which they were convinced would prove beyond the Indians, it is his foreign policy legacy that is proving a heavy burden for the Indian state.

…The problem for the Indians now is that 45 years after Nehru’s death they cannot untangle the web Nehru spun, nor have they made much of an attempt to do so. Indian politicians still articulate the holier than thou “we are non-aligned, we work for peace” words of Nehru. In her Republic Day speech this year, the Indian President felt it necessary to remind the world that India’s foreign policy was an unbroken chain back to Nehru: “The conduct of our foreign policy since Independence has been to promote peace and development.”

The result has been that India has failed to react to changing situations, let alone build on the limited foreign successes it has had, most notably the one won by Indian armed forces in 1971. Then the Indian military inflicted a crushing defeat on Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh. The victory should have ended the idea of Pakistan as it proved that, contrary to the myth spun during the creation of Pakistan, religion by itself could not paper over divisions based on culture, race and language.

…But the Indians failed to use this victory to stamp themselves as the regional superpower. The result is that India now finds itself surrounded by hostile nations.

Pakistan recovered from being broken in half, matched India’s nuclear ambitions, revived the Kashmir issue and, despite long periods of military rule, got even closer to America. Meanwhile, Bangladesh is far from a grateful ally and illegal immigrants from that country are changing the demographics of India’s north east. Bangladesh has also spawned anti-Indian terrorist groups.

Nepal, the only official Hindu state in the world which Nehru did much to open up, is now controlled by Maoists who look to China and have little love for India. Indian prestige in Sri Lanka has never really recovered from the time Nehru’s grandson Rajiv Gandhi, then India’s Prime Minister, was slapped by a Sri Lankan soldier as he examined a guard of honour at Colombo airport.

…This election, coming so soon after the Mumbai attacks, should have been occasion for India’s politicians to debate how the country interacts with the world Obama is shaping. But there seems to be no desire to debate such issues. The dispiriting conclusion must be that whatever the outcome of the elections, India will continue to be a country where its individual citizens may win glory but the failure of its politicians means the nation state will struggle to have a walk-on part in world affairs.

*** End ***

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*** Excerpts from Captors of the Liberated Zone by Sudip Mazumdar ***

Late one night recently, my phone rang. It was my sister, and her voice was trembling. A member of India’s nominally Maoist insurgency had just called her husband, demanding a protection payment of more than $1,000. …Don’t call the police, the caller warned. There was no danger of that. For years the Maoists have practically owned the impoverished eastern state of Jharkhand, where my sister and her husband live in a rented house on the outskirts of a small, dusty town.

My sister didn’t know what to do. The extortionists wanted roughly five full months’ pay from my brother-in-law’s midlevel government job. Even if the two could scrape up so much money, they didn’t expect it to solve anything. When a protection victim pays off, the Maoists come back for more. But refusing is no option. My sister’s husband, a soft-spoken, bighearted man, has traveled around the state as a literacy worker. In remote villages he’s seen men who defaulted on small payments to the Maoists. Some were missing an arm. Others had their ears or their nose cut off. Running away wouldn’t help, either. How would the family live if my brother-in-law left his job?

After a sleepless night I boarded a long-distance train from New Delhi. I wanted to see my sister and her husband, and I hoped to find someone who could help them.

…Of India’s estimated 1.1 billion people, 836 million live on less than 45 cents a day, according to the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector. The states where self-described Maoists operate are home to nearly 80 percent of those 836 million. In Jharkhand, one of the worst-affected states, guerrillas routinely attack police stations, assassinate “class enemies,” blow up government buildings and laugh at state authorities.

…While I waited, I set out to find an extortion victim who could tell me about dealing with the Maoists. Jharkhand is full of businessmen, private doctors and shopkeepers who pay “taxes” to the shakedown artists, but most of them prefer not to talk about it. Finally, Sanjiv, a construction man in his early 40s, agreed to talk if I didn’t mention his full name and location. Last year he had a government contract to build a stretch of road, and the Maoists heard about it. They sent a man to tell him they wanted a 30 percent share of his total contract in cash before they would let him start work. Sanjiv showed up the next day with the money. He was blindfolded and escorted deep into the forest, where a man counted it as masked gunmen stood by. Since then the Maoists have come back twice for more money. Another local contractor took too long paying. He arrived at the site one morning and found his road roller destroyed by fire, Sanjiv says.

I got further background on the Maoists from a local journalist. Deepak Ambastha is the editor of Prabhat Khabar, a Hindi daily newspaper. “There is no trace of ideological purity among the Maoists these days,” he told me at his office on the outskirts of Dhanbad. “They are into extortion, kidnapping and even commit rape. The state’s writ runs only within city limits.” When the Maoists call a general strike, railways cancel trains, truckers get off the streets and people in many parts of the state stay indoors. Ambastha and a group of fellow journalists were robbed on a highway once by a gang of armed Maoists. He and his friends fled the scene and begged for help at a local police station, he says. The cops refused to open their gate. Ambastha warned me not to leave town after dark.

Still, I hadn’t seen the Jharkhand countryside in years, so I hired a car. The driver agreed to take me out of town on one condition: he had to be home before sunset. We headed out into the countryside, where the Maoists rule. Many villages are miles off the narrow, potholed main road, accessible only by dirt trails. We stopped at Muraldih, a village of 500. About 100 young men and women live there, but only one has a permanent job in town. Others make money any way they can—pick-and-shovel work, subsistence farming, selling wood and fruits from the forest. They have no electricity, no health care and only one well for drinking water. I wanted to check out a rural police station, but my driver kept reminding me of my promise. We didn’t see one police patrol all day.

…The more horror stories I heard, the harder it was to understand how any government could tolerate such atrocities against its people. I decided to call on the deputy commissioner of Dhanbad district. A computer-science graduate from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Ajay Kumar Singh is the man in charge of both district development and law and order in Dhanbad. He’s an earnest young man who lives in a well-guarded bungalow with a manicured lawn in the heart of the city. Singh blames the state’s crushing poverty for the Maoists’ influence. “It is a Catch-22 situation,” he says. “There are no roads, so there is hardly any development. And when we go to build roads, the Maoists attack and destroy all efforts, because roads will expose their hideouts.” Besides, he says, the state’s officials don’t live in the impoverished villages and therefore they have no stake in developing the backcountry areas.

For a senior government functionary, Singh is unusually candid. He’s convinced that the Maoists couldn’t prevent development if the politicians considered it important. “Human beings have built tunnels under the sea,” he says. “Obviously we can build roads into remote villages.” It’s not as if the Maoist leaders were committed revolutionaries, he says; many of them are only hoodlums who use villagers as hostages and human shields. They keep the ill-paid local cops terrorized by attacking them with overwhelming force and no warning.

I asked Singh what happens when people get extortion threats. Most pay up, he said. The state can’t provide armed guards for everyone who needs one. I didn’t have the stomach to ask about people who don’t pay. It was getting dark outside the bungalow. I asked Singh if I’d be OK driving to Giridih, about 40 miles away through some desolate stretches of forest. Wait until morning, he said. I walked out of Singh’s bungalow into the dark streets. Until India’s government gets serious about stopping the Maoists, I have no answer for my sister and her husband.

*** End ***

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*** Excerpts from “Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal” by Nicholas D. Kristof ***

If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue?

How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?

And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

…The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you’ll have trouble harrumphing.

One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.

…Psychologists have developed a “disgust scale” based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals. (To see how you weigh factors in moral decisions, take the tests at www.yourmorals.org.)

…So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side’s morality, even if it’s not our morality.

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions. Gay rights were probably advanced largely by the public’s growing awareness of friends and family members who were gay.

A corollary is that the most potent way to win over opponents is to accept that they have legitimate concerns, for that triggers an instinct to reciprocate. As it happens, we have a brilliant exemplar of this style of rhetoric in politics right now — Barack Obama.

*** End ***

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All the past weekend readings are here.