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The Old Deal: BJP’s Answer to COVID-19 Is More Privatisation
The irony is that at a time when globalisation is dying, the emphasis is not on statisation.
The idea behind the stimulus package is to shore up the time-honoured parampara of varnadharma economy and also wealth distribution. Photo: Arun Geetha Viswanathan/Unsplash, (CC BY-SA)
Kancha Ilaiah ShepherdPolitical EconomyPolitics16 hours ago
The programmes initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US, between 1933-39, during the Great Depression, enabled the US to recover.
The New Deal programmes brought a statisation of institutions. The aim was to rebuild people’s lives by providing them with jobs and putting money into their hands, through public work programmes as well as financial reform.
The theme was ‘relief, reform and recovery’.
Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian economy is in a situation similar to the US during the Great Depression. However, what the Narendra Modi government-RSS combine has initiated as a reform to tackle the staggering economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis can be called the Old Deal at best. It is the complete opposite of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
This deal seems to have been written at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. The idea seems to be to create a grandiose model of an empire (based on the so-called golden age of the Guptas).
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman is being asked to play the role of Goddess Lakshmi, who is expected to put more and more money into the private sector, led by heavyweights like the Ambanis and Adanis. The way the Rs 20 lakh crore economic stimulus was announced by her, signalling the de-statisation of defence and other key sectors, tells the real story of the COVID-19 stimulus package.
The finance minister seems to be asking the tillers of land, harvesters, cattle-rearers, artisans and millions of migrant workers who walked hundreds of kilometres to reach their villages, to serve the new industrial lords. The idea behind the stimulus package is to shore up the time-honoured parampara (tradition) of varnadharma economy and also wealth distribution – those who toil with their hands should serve the varnadharma samaj as their duty; they are not to look at the work they do as a job with a dignified wage. Those who walked, starved, and died in lockdown did so in the service of the nation. This is part of the parampara.
A present-day ‘golden age’ is being sought to be established by shifting state properties to the private realm – just as the ‘golden age’ of the Guptas in ancient India heralded the decline of the productive society of the Indian shudra. In the Gupta’s ‘golden age’ the shudra was pushed back to the iron age. That is the scenario which is going to be replicated in post-COVID-19 India as ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat‘.
Why did Modi give just a four-hour notice for the lockdown to a nation of 1.3 billion people, of which at least 200-250 million people are migrant workers from remote corners of India working, not living, in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Surat, and so on? If an advance notice of four or five days had been given to the nation, employers and employees could have come to an agreement and the workers would have reached their remote villages with some food in their stomach and without the coronavirus in their lungs.
Trains, buses and taxis were still in operation. The way the prime minister announced the lockdown on May 24 struck fear among the people that death by the coronavirus would visit the people much like an earthquake. There was no employer-employee relationship after March 24 because that bond was snapped at midnight. Construction workers could not speak to their contractors; workers in small factories or grocery and cloth shops had no way of meeting their employers and asking for their wages for the days they had worked until then.
Millions of migrant workers did not know where to stay, how to live and what to eat. They came out on to the roads – men, women and children – and started walking on the national highways hoping to reach their villages, without water, food and sometimes even footwear. By the evening of March 25, there were incidents of workers falling unconscious on the roads. Children dying of starvation, of heat and of exhaustion became the ‘new normal’.
There was no sign that members of the Modi government were getting disturbed by these heart-rending scenes and tragedies. Media networks fell over themselves to praise Modi’s announcement of a nationwide lockdown as a ‘bold’ decision, declaring to the world that independent India had a strong leader like at no other time in 70-odd years.
What a bold decision by a bold leader – to make millions walk in the burning sun, starve, parents pulling suitcases on which children had laid down their heads to sleep. It is this labour that is expected to take on China under the Old Deal Programme.
Why was such a decision taken in such a manner, using the pandemic crisis? It is a fact that the struggles, sorrows and deaths of labourers have never pained the BJP government and RSS combine, industrialists and rich sections that support them. They are the other – the Dalit/Shudra/OBC/Adivasi. Their life is not valuable; only their labour is valuable, and it should be available either cheap or for free.
Why is it that the Centre has not put money in their hands? One view is that after reaching their villages in a half-dead state, they should face enough starvation to be propelled back to the urban centres to sell their labour cheaper than before. Indian industrialists seem to have dictated this agenda to the BJP government – there’s the financing of the 2024 elections to think of, after all.
If money is put in the hands of labourers to live in the village, they will not go back to cities, which are seen by the labour forces as estranged places. That is the reason why every minister is worried about workers going back to cities from their villages. Had the workers been given five days’ notice to reach their villages, they would not have carried the virus with them as it spread in cities like Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Hyderabad only later. But now many of them have carried the virus to their homes and villages – the chain has not been broken; it has connected with the human chain of labourers.
The RSS and the BJP have a dream that it is this unorganised, cheap migrant labour, which will compete with China and take over their share of the global market, a dream peddled by ‘nationalist’ media networks. It’s a joke, to say the least. But the mainstream media does not think so. It believes that once the lockdown is lifted Indian goods will flood the global market, the Chinese dragon will slink away only to see the lotus bloom in foreign markets.
The mainstream media is all too ready to believe that with the announcement of the Old Deal, the arrival of a golden age, anchored by monopoly capitalists, is inevitable.
A fundamental question is could the Chinese government, with one-party rule under the leadership of a man like Xi Jinping, have declared a nationwide lockdown at a four hours’ notice? Their labour is not in miserable bondage to contractors as ours, and they would not have needed to starve and walk home even if a lockdown had been imposed at such short notice. Even then if Xi had tried it, that would have been the end of him. But look at the way the Indian media protected the BJP government, with the opposition reduced to the status of mere spectators.
This Old Deal is going to destroy India’s entire rural economy. Post-coronavirus India will face conditions worse than the Great Depression. The only way to get out of that economic crisis would have been by statising many institutions and sectors that were de-statised post-1991, in the flush of globalisation and liberalisation.
The irony is that at a time when globalisation is dying, the emphasis is not on statisation. Quite the contrary – the Old Deal is going ahead with more privatisation. It will not bring about relief, reform and recovery for those who are most affected by the COVID-19 crisis. It will destroy them.
The regional political parties, apart from farmers and labour, must understand that once everything is privatised, India will go back to the golden age of the Guptas. There will be no place for them in that empire. The Old Deal is the whole deal.
Kancha Ilaih Shepherd is political theorist, social activist and author.
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Post-Covid Privatisation Will Push Labour Into a Deathtrap
KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD | 27 MAY, 2020
Post-Covid Privatisation Will Push Labour Into a Deathtrap
Craving for more money at the expense of dying labour
Metaphorically the heart (hruday) represents human goodwill and helping nature toward the helpless and needy, whereas atma (soul) represents the non physical self which is disconnected from physical suffering. One can only take care of one’s own atma and never the atma of others.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared in midst of the coronavirus crisis an economic agenda called Atmanirbhar Bharat: Self Reliant India. He linked his Atmanirbhar agenda to a 20 lakh crore stimulus package so called. Subsequently Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in five consecutive press conferences how the Centre will implement this package.
The whole exercise of the RSS/BJP government’s Atmanirbhar programme turns out to be privatising the economy more and more. The private sector — the rich industrialists and big business owners of India and other countries, who either have a share in ownership or run companies of their own — do so with the motive of profit, not of the nation’s welfare or people’s well being.
The major question is: how does Indian monopoly capital save the lives of massive numbers of the labour force who walked thousands of miles fearing that life management was impossible in the urban centres?
When at 8 pm on March 24 Modi declared a lockdown of the country without thinking about the 200 million labourers — who are mostly from SC/ST/OBC families — left without a house, water or food once the worksites were closed down from midnight.
Just four-five days’ warning from the Centre before the lockdown would have saved more people than the lockdown has saved from coronavirus.
The labour misery has shown the rulers’ heartlessness rather than a genuine concern and love for all people, including those most at risk of dying from the infection. The starved and walking children and women died on the roads, in the forests, on railway tracks on street corners and in shelters. Children’s faces wrenched the hearts, of those who have human hearts, not just atma.
The world’s biggest organisation, the RSS and the biggest political party the BJP, were completely busy saving their own lives in securely locked up homes. Other political parties, including Congress and the Communists, did not deploy their leaders and cadres to save people from walking, starving and dying.
The whole world was locked down during the same period but no other country’s roads were bleeding as India’s roads when the most self-righteous nationalist party is ruling India.
The workers thought that villages would have some human environment unlike the jobless and heartless urban centres. The urban centres would kill them morally and physically in lockdown. If there was Any hope of living safe in the cities they would have not pushed themselves on to the national high ways in such a hot sun, walking with children and old and pregnant women.
The political system has shown its heartlessness to food producers, mansion builders across the country. Its nationalism left them to be victims of corona on the way. Now many of them are also dying of the cruel virus. Neither Gods nor ‘nationalists’ were kind to them.
In 95 years of existence the RSS/BJP (earlier Jan Sangh) networks in India, ideologically and practically, never were trained to think about improving the lives of India’s labour forces. Their main discourse — in organising people, writing programmatic resolutions, and speaking in the process of propaganda — was about religious nationalism.
The centrality of that nationalism was opposition to Muslims and Christians. Even their much debated cultural nationalism was to weaken the Muslim and Christian presence in India. But never to strengthen the poor producers of food and builders of the nation.
Why? They all belong to Dalit/Shudra/OBC/Adivasi families. They do not figure in the nationalism as equals with industrialists or pompous religious gurus.
They never developed a concrete economic nationalist agenda. In the early 20th century when the RSS was started, economic nationalism would have meant mainly agriculture, the land question, the artisanal economy and also the tackling of caste divisions. The Indian National Congress and the Communist Party of India were discussing many of these questions, though with their weaknesses. Ambedkar and Periyar Ramasamy Nayakar and their associates raised the abolition of the caste question along with reducing human inequalities. But the RSS nationalists treated them as enemies.
The RSS ideologues never wrote anything against landlordism or against the usury capital that was in the hands of Indian Bania capitalists. Muslims and Christians never controlled business or big landed estates. For example, the Desai and Sirdesai landlords in Maharashtra were Brahmins and they controlled a lot of land before the Shudra Marathas became landlords.
But the whole labour of India was constituted by Shudra and Dalit masses. Brahmins and Banias were never in the labour market of India. Only Shudra/Dalits were. Their problems were never seen as national problems. The government’s indifference to millions of migrant labourers walking, starving and dying on the way to their home villages is part of this anti-labour nationalism, their historical baggage.
Does Modi, who is an OBC prime minister, have the goodwill to help the labour force that has suffered more from the lockdown than corona, more in India than in any other country?
We have not seen a tortuously walking labour force because of lockdown in China or Indonesia or other countries so impacted by the virus.
This nation is what it is because of their labour power. They never said they were not Hindu. They are not religion conscious; they are conscious of their children and old parents and how to feed food to them every day. They are as much voters as the Ambani, Adani families are. They are Indian citizens as much as Sri Sri Ravisankar or Jaggi Vasudev or any other sadhu or sanyasi the leaders revere so much every day.
How can political parties or organisations that do not love labour, love a nation?
A nation as land is important, but without people to work on it what does that land give?
Any spiritual culture should first love labour and see God in the labour of masses. God would not represent wars, or lynching somebody, but would represent labour. This God’s essence lies killed on the roads during the lockdown but we have not killed the virus.
A number of media reports have suggested that this Atmanirbhar programme is a Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh swadeshi agenda put forth by its so-called economic theoretician Dattopant Thengadi (of the Swadeshi Jagaran Munch) and the Hindu economist Dr M.G.Bokare who wrote the book Hindu Economics: Eternal Economic Order, published in 1993.
A very fundamental question is: Do the RSS and BJP have their theory of production and distribution in different sectors in the Indian economy over a period of time? The organisation that worked for 95 years in India and the political party that has been in existence in two avatars as Jan Sangh and BJP have no record of having a positive theory of production and distribution. Any serious survey of their literature shows they have hardly evolved a theory of their own grounded in an Indian economic thought.
The post-Covid privatisation will push more labour force into a deathtrap.
Their public discourse always has been around religion and culture but not the economy. They vaguely talk of Swadeshi, a concept Mahatma Gandhi used in his Hind Swaraj (with a sense of the freedom of India). Gandhi was opposed to industrialising India and was for cottage industries in a decentralised village economic model. His Charka was a symbol of that economic model. The Nehruvians and Communists were for industrialisation and urbanisation.
But Dattopant’s ‘Third Way’ does not seem to be a way at all.
Thus in the absence of the RSS/BJP’s long drawn out ‘Economic Way’, what does it seem the RSS/BJP’s self-reliant India would be? So far their rule of eleven years has followed the Congress model of development. The Congress has a history of anti-feudal land reform agenda; the RSS/BJP were opposed to any discourse on land reform. Now feudalism is dead.
The RSS/BJP has favoured urban capitalism in control of the Indian economy. Now Indian monopoly capital is in league with North American-European capital and the present BJP government is completely pro-American.. What self reliance is possible in that Big Brother–small brother relationship?
The nation is saved by agrarian production and agrarian labour in the lockdown crisis. The public sector health system is weak and the private sector health system is more or less shut down. India’s labour force can access only government hospitals. But no meaningful share of the 20 lakh stimulus money has been allocated to the government health sector.
All this only shows Hindutva’s heartless atma craving for more money at the expense of dying labour.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author -
Why India Won’t Be Able to Compete With China in the Post-COVID-19 World
Why India Won’t Be Able to Compete With China in the Post-COVID-19 World
The RSS/BJP ideologues must unlearn their ‘cultural nationalism’ and re-learn ‘productive nationalism’ with a massive focus on the dignity of labour.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
COVID-19 has created a cold war kind of situation between the United States and China. India is siding with the US, and adding to the tension. As of now, America and China have competing economic and military power. The US is a democracy seeking to exercise global imperial control even though China and Russia keep it in check with their military and economic strength. By the time the coronavirus crisis shook the world, China was trying to catch up with the US on many fronts, particularly with the massive skilled labour power at its command. With its deft handling of the globalisation process, China out played the US in reaching out to global markets and engulfed even America’s home markets with its goods and commodities. China has practiced ‘labour power socialism’ which the former Soviet Union could not do.
China has become the most powerful market controller in Asia. In certain sectors, it has penetrated deep in to Euro-American markets by creating its own brand of consumerism in those countries. Perhaps Marx may think otherwise but China has made his dream of combining labour, skill and science and created a new world order which has made better human life possible.
The capitalist West started consuming more than it required, creating a natural imbalance. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has created a new crisis in its consumerism. Though its contours are still not clear, a post-corona world order is likely to emerge.
Despite their strong anti-China sentiment, successive Indian governments could not stop the expansion of Chinese market influence with its cheap goods. As democracy with a population of 1.3 billion consumers, India was compelled to set aside its fears about Chinese territorial expansion after the 1962 war. The country could not afford to keep China out of its markets as Chinese products helped low income groups improve their standard of living. China bazars are available in every Indian city and people, particularly those on low incomes, throng these to buy cheap goods.
The Bharatiya Janata Party governments of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1999-2004) and Narendra Modi from 2014 onwards may have treated communism-Maoism-China as Enemy Number One but dared not stop Chinese goods from flooding Indian markets. The reason is that Chinese labour knows how to produce goods that are not just cheap and durable but are well aligned with each country’s needs and tastes. This formula of Chinese production experts has taken over even the Euro-American markets. With a careful study of global society’s multi-cultural needs – some of the cheapest saris, Diwali firecrackers and god idols in India come from China – the Chinese have made inroads everywhere. Along with many affordable items of consumption, China has now become the birth place of the coronavirus, which is uniting its enemies like the US, Japan, India and Australia. But can they stop Chinese goods going all over the world, including their own countries, in the post-corona world?
The cold war between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will not resemble the cold war between the US and the erstwhile USSR in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The USSR had no household and kitchen market control over any nation of that time. The only market it excelled in was that for weapons. The Soviet Union never acquired labour skills of mass consumption productivity. In contrast, China has used ‘socialist’ organisational skills to harness the quantity and quality of its labour power – 1.4 billion hard working people, with a good agricultural base and skills. As a result, it has improved the life of people all over the world, particularly in Asian and African countries Affordable Chinese products have changed the lifestyle of vast masses.
BJP ideologues are now saying that in post-COVID times, the India of their Hindutva will take the place of China in global markets. But has India prepared its labour force to challenge the Chinese skilled labour force? Can India produce goods and commodities as cheap and durable as they do?
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh survived for 95 years with a cultural nationalism fuelled by its anti-Muslim agenda. The RSS-BJP never thought of improving the skills of India’s labour force as they come from the so-called lower castes. While Chinese Confucianism, Buddhism and Marxism believe in human equality and dignity of labour, the RSS’s ideology is rooted in Kautilya, Manu and Golwalkar’s thought and it never campaigned for human equality and dignity of labour. How can it challenge the Chinese labour force, which lives labour as life? Can the slogan of “Jai Sri Ram” challenge the Chinese slogan, “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand schools of thought contend”? This slogan may never have been implemented in the political sphere but who can deny the phenomenal growth of China’s economy is the result of a thousand natural science and social science thoughts expanding and contending?
The RSS/BJP ideologues must unlearn their ‘cultural nationalism’ which thinks nothing of exploiting and humiliating labour and re-learn ‘productive nationalism’ with a massive focus on the dignity of labour. They must learn how to de-casteise the labour market.
China and India shared borders but they never shared cultures. They live in distinctly different cultures. China’s rural industry is capable of producing goods for all sorts of cultural and commercial markets. Where is the rural industry in India? While announcing his stimulus for post-corona economic activity, Narendra Modi talked about establishing cottage industries. But where is the skilled labour in rural India to produce goods and commodities for the global market’s tastes? Modi wants our local products to become global brands. How?
What the BJP, like the Congress in the past, does not realise is that China’s school education from 1970 onwards taught theory and practice as a combined curricula. What is BJP government’s education agenda? Mythology is taught as as modern science but taking students to the countryside to learn and apply their knowledge is not seen as part of the Indian ethos. The Chinese have no such hesitation, and have benefited as a result.
Challenging China means unlearning many things and re-learning many new things which are not seen as nationalist now. Conducting a cold war with China with an ideology of ‘Namaste Trump’ will not help India develop its rural industry. Trump is a businessman with an election at hand. If he gets re-elected, he is likely to share steak with Xi, not dal-roti with Modi.
https://m.thewire.in/article/trade/can-india-compete-with-china-in-the-post-covid-19-world
https://m.thewire.in/article/trade/can-india-compete-with-china-in-the-post-covid-19-world
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Shall We Change The Status Of Safai Sainiks Now?
in Annihilate Caste — by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd— April 29, 2020
Corona attack on India seems to have suddenly changed our understanding of Safai karmacharis of India. They are now seen as desh bhakts even by those who never recognized their desh bhakti. When the life of rich who treated them lowly and unworthy of respect and dignity are in danger as never before, they are recognizing what I call the Safai Soldiers along with doctors, nurses as praise worthy. Doctors always have been respected in modern times. Nurses too have status even earlier, though basically seen as female profession.
But the recognition of safai soldiers is the first ever in Indian history. This is a contribution of corona mahammari. Their work of cleaning and bleaching the roads that are seen as harbours of deadly virus day and night with hardly any protective gears, unlike doctors and nurses, is a valueless work.
Now the nation knows that theirs is a work of courage and sacrifice like the soldiers on the borders. But what is their life at home when life after work needs to be at least comfortable?. Did our nationalism recognize them as the saviors of nation like soldiers, politicians, teachers and saints and provide them a good life?
What is their place in our written texts of social, spiritual, political and economic life? Did any religious text give them at least ‘half status’ that the priests, mullahs and bishops and monks got?
How many divine men are on the roads to save the life of the nation at a time when the Satanic (in Christin and Muslim language) or rakshas (in Hindu language) corona is taking the life of rich and poor without discrimination quite brutally? With whom is Easwar, God, Allah live now? The priests, saints, bishops, mullahs, monks all are home ridden as all laymen, and the temples, churches and masjids, viharas are locked down. Easwar, God, Allah are virtually with the safai sainiks. Is that realization on us now in the world and in our nation?
No doubt religion will not die after corona, but if the worker on the roads are seen as more godly than the priests, bishops, Mullahs and monks and that will be a miraculous change.
They are the cleanest and neatest people ( particularly Indians) now because of which corona is afraid of them. Hereafter in the post corona world they should be most respected, having come from the former untouchable background (most of them in India).
In times of social isolation maintaining disease distance even from wife and children why and how these safai sainiks are working to save life? What value the nation should give them in the post-corona nation of nationalism?
Prime Minster, Narendra Modi, along with lock down of the nation announced that all top bracketed salaried people’s salaries from President of India downwards are reduced 30 percent. The State Governments have introduced their own salary cuts. But is it not nationalistic step to increase 30 per cent of salaries of all safai soldiers? Why does not PM think of such a positive nationalist step?
For years Bejawada Wilson was fighting for changing the status and life of the nation’s safai sainiks. PM has done a tokenist job by washing four -five safai kamacharis’ feet at Kumbhamela some time back, but never thought of changing their real living conditions.
A real nationalist idea is that the most basic servants of nation should get a salary by which their children should be able to study in the same schools that the children of top politicians, bureaucrats, doctors, engineers and teachers of universities could study and change their occupation easily. Should not the rich of the nation psychologically prepare that their own children also be ready to do the sacred job of safai soldier in future?
It is not just enough to praise that they are doing great nationalist work with courage and commitment. It is not morally right to decorate them with a ten rupee note garland by the rich when they themselves are dead scared of life with a devilish virus. How many of them are ready to say ‘cut our salaries, tax us more and pay them much better salaries’ across the nation? Where are the lovers of matrubhoomi to ask for equal status to them with saints and sadhus as they are giving this matrubhoomi life in the face of major threat to life ?
The nation and nationalists know that their salaries always have been meager. Their earnings as of now do not allow them to eat well, shelter well and educate their children to change their parental occupation, which in normal times is disrespected and maltreated.
It needed a modern globalized virus which made the rich and arrogant humble. Till Covid-19 convinced that the more you air travel, the more you are vulnerable for attack of this satan. The best of the world hospitals cannot cure you. The safai sainiks working in airports could never think of traveling in those flights. Now all the flying rich are afraid of flights because of corona rakshasi.
Why are the safai soldiers not so afraid of this mahammari? They are born out of soil, live on soil and eat food the rich despised (including beef) and yet they are facing devil on the roads even without masks on the face. How?
The more you are on the soil, soiling your hands the more courage, confidence and immunity you have to fight this mahammari. Where from the courage, confidence and immunity came for this poor, despised mass, who live in slums, not in spacious bungalows? It comes from the poor’s common sense that they came from the soil and go to the soil if this mahammari attacks them. They know that it cannot kill all of them. They have lived through many such mahammaris, which did not touch the rich travelling in air conditioned plane or train or bus, lived in air conditioned houses. But corona told them that they are less safe if they live unequal life like this. It told them that not hospitals would save them but the very poor whom they hated can save them.
Safai soldiers are doing that with equal commitment that the soldiers stand on our borders.
Imagine if the safai sainiks go on strike for one day asking for good pay and equal respect as human beings in these times of corona crisis. We all would die out of fear of corona everywhere on the roads. If we are nationalists let us resolve that we shall start reducing inequalities by upgrading the soldiers that are saving us in every street, all over the country, from this deadly virus.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is Political Theorist, Social Activist and Author
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Making Money Out of Money: The World After Corona
KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD | 21 APRIL, 2020
Making Money Out of Money: The World After Corona
Whatever it is, you are born from my stomach
In the Telugu film ‘George Reddy’ the hero’s mother sings:
Ninnaite Kanna nenu
Neeratalu Kanugonalenu
Ye theeram nee katha cherenu
Garvanga unna gani
Kanna naa bhayam naadi
Yentaina kanna kadupu idi
(I gave birth to you. But I cannot foresee your future. I do not know which shore your story would reach. Though I am proud of you, as a mother my fear is mine. Whatever it is, you are born from my stomach)
There are many mothers whose daughters and sons are living in America and Europe. Their agony is that of George Reddy’s mother just before his fateful death in an attack by his enemies. To them coronavirus appears likewise to be a deadly enemy of their children living in those countries.
Theirs is kanna kadupu, the stomach of their children’s birth, hence every minute’s agony for their safety haunts them.
In one family I know very well, a mother’s daughter with her two children and husband lives in America, and her two sons and their families live in England. She lives with same fears. She is in her sixties, living with her 70 plus year old chronic heart ailment ridden husband in Hyderabad.
She glues herself to Telugu TV channels when news of America and England keeps flashing. She is more scared of the American situation than of England. Whenever Trump is seen on TV she shouts, ‘This fellow cannot save people, he only knows how to make dabbu nunchi dabbu (money out of money)! People would have been safer if Obama were president.’
Her statement, that he ‘who makes money out of money’cannot save people from coronavirus, is a statement about the Trump type of capitalists and businessmen and their intention and capacity to fight Covid-19.
It is not the America of Trump but the whole capitalist healthcare system which is facing the crisis of a lifetime.
Corona is a virus born in a capitalist wet animal market inside semi-socialist China. But it was carried to every part of the world by capitalists travelling in aircrafts within a very short time. Although socialist countries have fought the virus with an organised state and socialised health and medical care, the most privatised capitalist countries are collapsing in the face of this invisible enemy’s attack.
America, Italy and Spain have the most privatised healthcare systems in the world and they are suffering the most.
Trump tore down ‘Obamacare’ which itself lacked public provision, and he pushed the insurance market into the hands of private companies that do not cover the corona type of disease.
Private hospitals the world over ran out of individual patient demand as this mass murderous corona landed in the world.
Only Britain seems to have a better public healthcare system, and its government has promised 80 per cent of the salaries to those who were dismissed from their jobs because of the lockdown. No other capitalist country did that.
But the British prime minister Boris Johnson, who himself contracted the virus, seems to have mismanaged his corona containment policy.
India which has a big chain of private hospitals, with a very weak public health system, is struggling with the pandemic. India now needs to think about nationalising all private hospitals like Spain did.
Capitalist medical care survives on profits from individual patients’ money, by treating those who suffer from slow killer diseases. They are not welfarists, but cure-and-profit healthcare capitalists.
Their expertise and technological abilities are doubtless. They are mostly out of business now as corona shakes up the health system of all countries.
All states, whether capitalist or socialist or dictatorial, must take up the responsibility of testing, and treating the victims of corona. But barring a few countries the state system of healthcare is either weak or does not exist at all.
In India except in Kerala government provided healthcare is very weak. They are not in a position to keep corona patients, at least not in neatly maintained rooms.
For the first time the Indian rich, who otherwise get treated in well maintained private hospitals, are forced to live in the government’s not so well maintained hospitals as corona patients, and some of them are, it is reported, running away.
Corona made them taste what a government hospital is, like the poorest of the poor. Corona has come as a leveller in a highly unequal world, more so in India.
In a country like the US where the best medical equipment and good doctors are available they are all in the private sector. Obamacare was an effort to make a healthcare system available to the poor, also in this private sector, at the expense of the state. But Trump dismantled it, the largest state insurance programme in the world.
India with 1.3 billion people is going through a trauma. Its Nehruvian state health system was slowly allowed to shift into private hands.
The post-1990 drive of disinvestment in every sector, and the rise of private hospitals with a dream of the Euro-American model of private healthcare, in an India of 55 per cent poor and unorganised labouring masses, finds itself oxygenless now. What is needed now in the times of corona is oxygen to every Indian, poor or rich.
Though the very poorly maintained state system with a net of All India Medical Institutes is struggling to cope with the present crisis, almost all commercial hospitals remain shut during the lockdown.
This should not have been allowed.
Except in Kerala, which has its own model of a democratic socialist state-run health care system connecting villages to towns to cities, nowhere is a proper chain available.
Doctors are like soldiers in wartime, in times of a pandemic like corona. But the private-sector doctors and nurses became like ordinary citizens sitting at home, having made their money during normal times.
The need for declaring doctors’ work as a national essential service by calling all of them into this emergency duty is a must. They did not become doctors only for themselves, while the poorly paid state doctors and nurses are struggling.
When the nation claps for doctors it claps for those who are serving their patients, not for those sitting at home.
Like the Indian army and police, no doctor can say I am not bound by national duty. Capitalist medicare, at least, has to become nationalist medicare in such times, leave alone socialist medicare of the Cuba type.
Capitalism gives profit and riches to rich. Money makes money in capitalism. If hospitals which save life become money-makers, a corona (crown) comes along to teach a different lesson.
For many parents whose children were sent to America for studies, jobs and settlement, corona told them that dream is now dreadful. And if it strikes in such homes, though one hopes it will not, on both sides the death becomes horrible. They cannot even cry around each other.
It is now global wartime. The Second World War was no match for this one.
In the post-corona world, many will have to think that the whole vision of life on this planet must change.
Consume in a socialist way, like Karl Marx told us, and live together without dividing rich and poor.
Every country has to rethink about life in the future, starting with common health care, where every human being can get oxygen when they need it. -
“State Is The March Of God On Earth”: Re-examining Hegel In Times Of Corona Crisis
Famous German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel was the first philosopher who linked social science and natural science by applying the principle of Thesis, Anti-Thesis and Synthesis. He effectively separated State and Religion while allowing them to function in their separate spheres and advanced the scientific thinking of modern world. In these times of coronavirus war on humanity we must understand his game changing statement that “State is the March of God on Earth”. Three major religions of the world–Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, are still struggling to accept State, Science and Medicine as the saviors of the humanity and religion should move into the private sphere. Religions must leave the public domain to the State in a situation when a pandemic like corona erupted and shaken the foundations of human life. State, according Hegel, is a rational institution as an agent of rational God. He transformed God from a superstitious element into a rational element and from subjective being to objective reality.
Modern state is much more developed than what it was during Hegel’s time in early nineteenth century. In India, for example, with the Bharatiya Janatha Party coming to power in 1999 and 2014, state is seen as an irrational faith based institution. Yogi Adityanath, who was supposed to be a non-political sanyasi, became the Chief Minister of biggest state in India and is handling it as if it is a Mutt like religious institution, risking the nation itself. A global Islamic body, Tablighi Jamaat, by organizing an international conference at Delhi at a time when corona was attacking the world put whole of India in great risk. In America a pastor of major church in Florida was arrested for refusing to lock down a church and still holding mass services 1
Hegel died of Cholera in 1831 at the age of 61. Religion in those days was very dominant and conflict between medical science and faith based religion was very intense. Cholera was not a pandemic like Corona which we are struggling with. But it was a major epidemic in Germany of his time. Large number of people were dying in Germany as they were dying world over in 2020. Hegel went out of Berlin for fear of cholera but after his university was re-opened he came back and was said to have died having contracted cholera.
Hegel was an intense reader of Bible and a serious follower of Jesus Christ and wrote a book on Him– Life of Jesus. In fact Hegel was trained to be a pastor but he left that course and became a philosopher.
At that time also the religious masses perhaps were not caring the state controls to save themselves. In those trying times Hegel declared that ‘State Is the March of God on Earth’. He conjoined State with God which no religious person or preacher would accept. It was a blasphemic statement. But Hegel wanted them to understand the role of strong state in difficult situations. He thought that his German rulers were not strong enough hence he wanted Napoleon to take over Germany.
But we are living in times that democracy is a dominant political system where discussion, consultation and policy formulation even to tackle pandemic situations would play a better role than dictatorship. People must be sensitive enough to understand the importance of public health than that of individual pleasure or right in times of pandemics. Very organised religion is far more well spread now than in Hegel’s times. Hegel’s was post crusades and post Martin Luther period and the Islamic and the Hindu religions were not so well organised at that time. Buddhism always remained a different entity without pushing itself into fundamentalism at any time in its existential history. Its only fundamentalist tendency was maintaining all male Sangha system in the modern times. But by and large the states where Buddhism is dominant religion, there the religion functions under the guidance of state laws as religious congregations were never critical to that religion. Socialism and semi-socialism are the main socio-political structure in these Far Eastern Buddhist nations, except Japan. The notion of God in those countries is focused in the image of Buddha or on their ancestors.
At a time when Coronavirus is waging a war on global humanity, there are billions who still believe that God, Allah or Eswar will save people from coronavirus in Hindu, Muslims and Christian religious nations and they do not have to care for the state, doctors and medicine. Many of them do not want to practice Disease Distancing ( I am against using the phrase Social Distancing) in the markets and at home. Particularly some religious communities like Muslims believe in herded prayer life. They normally organize religious congregations with huge number of people at the religious spaces. Many Muslim countries have not adopted democracy where debate and expert opinion does not play any role in decision making on health issues. They use Quoranic injunctions to pass decrees. In many Muslim countries monarchies or dictatorships are handling power at the time of coronoa pandemic attack. Social science and medical science discourses have not acquired much place in those countries. India which was a secular democracy from 1947 began to change the course after the Bharatiya Janatha Party/Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh came to power in 1999 and 2014. The social science, natural science and medical science developmental discourse in the country came under cloud. Investment in the sciences–social, natural and medical–got reduced drastically. The State is not seen as the ‘March of God on the Earth’but began to be seen ‘Mythology is the State’. The RSS/BJP forces have no understanding of European thought of materialism and science and religion negotiated with each other. They started treating the ancient texts as ready made answer books like the Quoran in the Muslim world even on medical issues.
Corona pandemic suddenly intervened into this process of change from democratic to theocratic state in India. Science, particularly medical science had to come to central stage as the corona pandemic threatened everybody’s life like a nuclear war on a particular zone. No nuclear war can shake the whole world at once like the coronavirus could do.
Globally the contemporary state–whether of democratic or of one party or of one man dictatorship–is far more powerful and organized than what it was in Hegel’s time. The virus has attacked the word in the thick of the right wing spiritual forces took control of many nation states. Hence there is a confused handling of virus.
The Muslim world has been depending more on Allah than on state, doctor and medicine even in times of corona attack. Many Muslim countries have not focused on medical infrastructure at all. The Hindutva forces in India are spreading superstition and myth as source of state power and kept the morale of Indian scientists and doctors at low by the time the virus attacked in March 2020. Babas and yogis became Chief Ministers and most Hindutvawadis are more baba worshipers than God worshipers. The Indian secular State was transformed into baba state and the Prime Minister Narendra Modi is hanging between astrology and science. He declares at 9 AM on 3rd March that people should lit lamps on 5th March at 9 PM for 9 Minutes. Some astrologer must have told him that number 9 works like an anti-corona vaccine. The Indian PM while ruling 1.3 billion people believed in that kind of astrology. He is known as more sensible among the BJP/RSS leaders who are ruling the nation yet his regime never gave reason, science and medicine priority over belief and faith. An individual can rely on belief and faith and face the consequence as an individual but the state must be a an embodiment of Reason as Hegel wanted it to be.
Modi and his team have been attacking Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, who believed in reason and science as the foundation of modern Indian democratic secular state. If only that beginning was not made in the 1940s India would have been a hot bed of superstition and ignorance. Though BJP/RSS combine praises Dr..B.R.Ambedkar it does not believe in the rational state that he advocated for.
Even the Christian world where secularism and rationality gained ground over a period of time went back into more fundamentalist beliefs where Pentecostal spirits not Jesus started dominating by the time corona landed in the West from China. America had to arrest pastors who refused to lock down churches. The case of a Muslim Mullah international conference organized at Delhi from 13 January to 16, which spread the virus across India that was contracted by the native Muslims from the air traveled foreign Mullahs is case in point. At Ayodhya on Sriramnavami (marriage celebration Sriram with Sita) massive gathering on 2nd April was planned by Yogi Adityanath but that had to be forcefully stopped by Modi Government.
There is an international guiding body called the United Nations Organization and its health wing, World Health Organization, to guide people on protection of health through modern medical science practices now. The guide lines are coming from there. But each state has to implement those guidelines with a scientific temper. Religious fundamentalists do not bother about the medical science and many of them are ready to die in the name of God, Allah or Eswar. But a virus like corona does not kill just one individual even s/he wants to die for the sake of their belief. It kills many people who want to live and depend on reason and medicine. The modern state has to ensure the life of those who want live more seriously than those who want to die without any concern for others. Death in a pandemic situation does not remain and individual affair. An individual death becomes a community or nation’s death.
Like the Chinese doctor Li Weliang who warned the Chinese state about the deadly virus and became victim of that virus but saved millions from the virus the modern state must save every life with the help of science, medicine and doctors . There are many science believers who would want to live long and preserve many lives would die if the state does not take timely steps. The solution to the problem of contradiction between science and faith lies in Hegelian formulation that ‘State is the March of God on Earth’.
India is a country of 1.3 billion people. If the pandemic is not handled by the Indian state based on science, medicine and doctor and para medical strength , the nation will stand to lose millions of people.
Hegelian state was an embodiment of Reason and God but not of superstitious faith. In a crisis like this that state needs to operate on rational grounds. Any rational state deploys science as the driving force of disease cure. Doctor and nurse with the help of medicine and technology play a key role in saving human beings but not superstition or astrology or prayer. Every religious institution has to surrender to modern rational state so that human life could be saved first. Hegel understood the relationship between God, State and Science. His famous statement that State is the March of God on Earth is more relevant now than any other time before. Let that God function with full powers but not as dictator but as democracy.
Hegel was not a socialist like Marx. But he laid the foundation for socialist thought, state and society. The socialist state emerged and has undergone ups and downs. But during coronacrisis of the world it seems to re-emerge as the best alternative for human survival. Hence Hegel becomes more relevant now than ever before.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is Political Theorist, Social Activist and Author
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“State Is The March Of God On Earth”: Re-examining Hegel In Times Of Corona Crisis – Countercurrents
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BJP Is Pretending To Respect Ambedkar But Is Disrespectful Of His Idea Of India
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
The year 2020 is proving to be a strange one for the whole world. The coronavirus born in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019 had spread the whole world by mid-March. Many countries have imposed a lockdown of entire national economies and human activity in collective public places. But this strange virus seems to be eating human brains more than our lungs.
The virus had reached India—via Kerala—by January 30 but the Indian Government took cognisance of it only much, much later. Even a month afterwards, it seemed very much like business as usual. There were important ‘events’ to fuss over, like Donald Trump’s India visit around February 24. This was accompanied by massive communal riots in Delhi; also, a leisurely Parliament session. The BJP-friendly Muslim organisation called Tablighi Jamaat was also duly given permission (and visas) for its massive international conference in Delhi in mid-March. Many worried state governments had already started imposing their own local lockdowns by now. Then, suddenly, at 8 pm on March 24 evening, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation, imposing a national lockdown from that midnight.
Millions of migrant labourers in all of India’s cities, living under temporary tents and without a house of their own, did not know where to live or how to live from March 25 morning onwards. Tens of thousands of them started walking back to their native villages hundreds of miles away. They found themselves unwanted on the roads; they had no food to eat, no water to drink. Children, pregnant mothers were among those walking caravans who will figure in future histories of India. We know that most of them would be Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis; along with a few poor from otherwise privileged castes. The first phase of the lockdown ended, ironically, on April 14—the 129th birth anniversary of Ambedkar. And Prime Minister Modi was addressing the nation again, at 10 am, as I was writing this article.
Modi invoked Ambedkar’s Preamble to the Constitution of India, and mentioned ‘We the People of India’, as he announced an extension of the lockdown till May 3. He praised Ambedkar’s services to the nation to the sky and said his party was also celebrating Ambedkar Jayanti across the country.
But quite shockingly, on the very same day, Anand Teltumbde was being arrested in Mumbai. The 68-year-old scholar, public intellectual and husband of Ambedkar’s grand-daughter, Rama Ambedkar, had written an open letter to the people of India just before his arrest under the draconian UAPA. He wrote:
“I have been a simple person who has been earning his bread honestly and helping people to the extent possible with my knowledge through writings. I have an unblemished record of service for nearly five decades to this country in various roles in the corporate world, as a teacher, as a civil rights activist and a public intellectual. In my voluminous writings comprising over 30 books, and numerous papers, articles, comments, columns and interviews, published internationally, not an insinuation of support to violence or any subversive movement could be found. But at the fag end of my life, I am being charged with heinous crimes under the draconian UAPA.”
Would any other government in Delhi—headed by the Congress or any other party—have arrested a public intellectual of Anand Teltumbde’s stature under the draconian UAPA? It’s a moot question. Human rights-based activism by intellectuals is a legacy of Ambedkar, Nehru and Rammohar Lohia and dates back to the freedom struggle. The dubbing of professors or lawyers as ‘Urban Naxals’ is a strange phenomenon that arose after the BJP/RSS came to power at Delhi in 2014.
Yes, some lawyers may choose to defend—on sound legal principles—the human rights of people who work with different organisations, including those of Maoist persuasion. Those who target them forget one fact: activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh arrested during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency were also defended by human rights activists, though they did not agree with their ideology hundred per cent.
That distinction is absolutely crucial. Anand Teltumbde’s human rights-based support to Maoist activists cannot be construed to mean that he himself is an ‘Urban Maoist’. Even the fact that his own brother is a Maoist leader cannot be cited as a reason for implicating him under such a draconian law and putting him in jail for years without a scope to get bail. Which law in the world allows that?
The BJP/RSS pretends to respect Ambedkar but does not respect his idea of India, which is based around free speech. That someone like Anand Teltumbde, who cultivates his sympathies for India’s productive masses while teaching at an IIT or IIM, could end up being targeted under the UAPA is an extremely ironic aspect of BJP/RSS style democracy. A serious belief in democracy needs a firm belief in human rights. So far, the ruling BJP has not shown any deep respect for human rights, which is an integral part of constitutionalism.
The Maoist belief in revolution—inherently a violent process—is not a supportable ideology either. It is not compatible with a democracy built around Ambedkar’s core ideas of a constitutional republic. Many of us have been asking them to give up that ideology of armed struggle and adopt electoral methods of politics—even of Marxist colours—to advance Ambedkar’s idea of India, within the framework of his Constitution. They can work for socialist welfarism after having come into the democratic process.
The RSS advocates its own ideology of violent nationalism vis-a-vis Muslim minorities and other ‘others’. Except in the context of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by Godse, the RSS has never faced the wrath of the Indian state in such a harsh manner, even though it too believes in violence of its own mode. They never believed in the non-violence of Ambedkar or Gandhi, and yet their activities have never been brought under a UAPA-style Act. Why are they doing this—championing its use against public intellectuals who defend civil rights? This anti-human rights stance of the Centre causes grievous injury to the Constitution that Ambedkar put in place.
The Supreme Court should have taken a lenient view of Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha’s case. The whole nation is in great psychological stress as it is, sitting at home and contemplating its future. The spectacle of respectable public intellectuals being sent to jail for no established crime of theirs will only add to that feeling of great abnormality—by bringing up visions of a serious constitutional crisis.
The world over, hundreds of people charged with serious crimes are getting released from jail as a humanitarian gesture, to be with their families in these dark times. Teltumbde’s two daughters also wrote an open letter saying their father should not be sent to jail amid such a global pandemic, as that would put their mother in great psychological stress and loneliness.
Prime Minister Modi, who invoked Ambedkar in such glorious words, must intervene and see that the case against Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha is dropped. In this case, there is also an angle being offered by the prosecution that, at the Bhima Koregaon gathering, a conspiracy was hatched to kill the Prime Minister. It is just unbelievable that public intellectuals like Teltumbde and Navlakha would be part of such outlandish conspiracies! One hopes the PM dismisses such childish theories and advises the NIA, in whose custody Anand Teltumbde would be, to drop the case.
(Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. The views expressed are personal.)
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Disease Distancing, Not “Social Distancing” | Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd – Countercurrents
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How To Save The Nation Sitting At Home | Kancha Ilaiah Shepehrd – Countercurrents
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd 