The Hindu : Opinion / Open Page : Did society make Kasab a criminal?

The Hindu : Opinion / Open Page : Did society make Kasab a criminal?

The importance of having people’s histories

Sukumaran C. V.
 
“There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”                — Howard Zinn.     

Never have I read a book which tells the history from the viewpoint of the victims till I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn shows us history from the viewpoint of the Native Americans, from the standpoint of the African American slaves, from the perspective of the workers and he helps us to see history through women who are always ‘intimately oppressed’ and conspicuous in all history by their absence. Never have I read a book which has made me sleepless as Zinn's People's History has.

“Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. Las Casas tells how two of these so called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.” 
Can you sleep peacefully after reading such passages of cruelty committed upon a people “who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing.”? 

Can anybody of us continue to be unperturbed after reading passages like the following?

“(The Africans) were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs… one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…”

But all histories we read claim that the Europeans were a civilized lot and the Africans and the Native Indians were savages! All histories speak about the 'Whiteman’s burden', about their ‘civilizing mission’. Even we the Indians were ‘civilized’, we were ‘modernized’, and we do have ‘democracy’, only because we have been 'fortunate' enough to have British Colonialism, we are told both by the European historians and by our own historians! 

In an article titled The British Rule in India, written in 1853, Karl Marx says: "England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?"


But, as Howard Zinn tells, ‘it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.’ And Zinn continues:
“So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. …Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property.”

In India we are in dire need of writers like Howard Zinn to search and find the people who are not seen in our histories—the Adivasis who were displaced and annihilated by our ‘machine of progress’ (which we borrowed from the West), the people of Niyamgiri Hills, of the Narmada Valley, of the Dhandakaranya. We want histories written from the standpoint of manual scavengers, from the viewpoint of untouchables, from the perspective of the farmers, Dalits, children (especially girls) and women. 

And we also want histories from the viewpoint of the Environment, the flora and fauna. Zinn is too much preoccupied with the cruelty of the so called civilized race against the fellow beings to give attention to their cruelty against the environment and other animals. Look at a mild sample of the savagery of the ‘civilized’: “Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, …About twenty-five blacks and two Indians set fire to a building, then killed nine whites who came on the scene. …(all the twenty-seven) were captured by soldiers, some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town…one had been burned over a slow fire for eight to ten hours.”

Can the Environment expect a better deal from such a ‘civilized’ lot?
Once in the North America, the passenger pigeons were greater in number than all other birds. They lived together, nested together, and flew together in large numbers. In summer these birds nested in the vast forests of the northern frontier regions of the continent and in winter they migrated into the comparatively warmer forests in the south. In the breeding time, flocks of these birds would land on the trees and would make hundreds of nests even on a single tree. Each flock consisted of at least a minimum of 300,000 birds!

When the white men reached North America, they started hunting the pigeons for their meat and feather. Even after these birds have been continuously hunted for five decades, a flock that flew over the Cincinnati town in 1870 consisted of 20,000 lakh pigeons! The flock had been 510 kilometer long and 1.6 kilometer wide!! In 1878, from the 64 kilometer long and 16 kilometer wide nesting area of the passenger pigeons in the Michigan state, the hunters killed 10,000 lakh of the defenseless birds. 

Today there is no passenger pigeon to fly in the skies.  If the fate of the passenger pigeon, that could fly, was to disappear within decades of contact with the white man, what could have been that of the poor Giant Moa that couldn’t fly? Somewhere in the time of evolution, the Moas lost their wings. They grew up to four meter in height and weighed more than 275 kilograms. These wingless birds lived 1000 lakh years in New Zealand, till the 12^th century when the humans entered the Pacific island. Hunting started for the bird's meat and eggs,  yet the Giants survived till the Europeans arrived and in the 1850s, they were wiped out.

Let me once more quote Howard Zinn: “John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: “Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.””

Always at the receiving end

Sukumaran C. V.
 
Doesn't Savita Halappanavar's death point to the overwhelmingly patriarchal nature of the laws, religions and customs all over the world? The young woman was stricken with septicaemia and her life would have been saved had the foetus been aborted, but Ireland 'saved' its Catholic belief at the cost of the 31 year old lady-dentist's life. In India abortion is rampant to kill the girl child. In Ireland abortion is denied even to save a woman’s life! In different ways, the female is sacrificed at the altar of patriarchy! When I heard the news of Savita's death, two recent incidents in which also patriarchy is the villain, rushed to my mind.

                                               Savita Halappanavar
 

In December 2011, a marriage was registered in the gram panchayat where I work. The bride’s guardian has come three or four times to the office to correct the mistakes in the marriage certificate. They have made some mistakes while filling the registration forms. The certificate was  prepared accordingly. 

Days after receiving the certificate, they applied to correct the mistakes. I have made the changes. But when I effected the changes, inadvertently some other mistakes occurred. Nobody noticed, and some days after the guardian came again and the clerical mistakes were rectified in the saved data and new certificate issued. 


In the first week of November 2012, the same guardian came to see me and as soon as I saw him I asked, “Is there another mistake?”


“No, Sir,” He replied gloomily, “There is no mistake in the certificate, but the marriage itself was a great mistake. The mistakes you inadvertently made were an omen, Sir. He is having another wife (illegal). When we knew the fact, he is willing to part with his legal wife! Therefore, now I want three certified copies of the certificate to be produced in the court for divorce (with mutual consent).”


Even though I don’t believe in omens, I was stunned. It is hardly one year after the marriage!

Recently, two of our dearest family friends, a couple whom our two daughters affectionately call uncle and aunty, separated legally. They were married even before we were, but they have no children yet. The wife can’t beget. The husband is the only child of his widowed mother and she wants to have a grandchild and has been forcing her son long since to discard his sterile wife and remarry. 

Both our daughters are so fond of this unfortunate woman and I don’t know what to tell them when they ask the reason for the permanent absence of their affectionate aunty. She went to her home and will never return to this place where she has lived for ten years. Even if she married against the will of her parents (it was a love marriage), they accepted her.

I am not blaming my friend the man, and I can’t blame the lady who can’t beget. I can’t but think the other way round. Suppose the sterility is in the man, what will happen then? Will the wife be advised by her parents or her mother-in-law to desert her husband and find a fertile man? And will the woman do it? No. She won’t discard her husband, instead she will discard her longing for a child; and if her parents continue to advise her to divorce and remarry, most probably she will snap the relationship with them forever.

In both the cases, the hardly one year old case and the ten year old case, men have nothing to loose; but the women loose everything. They face an infinite vacuum, experience trauma and know not what to do. They have no financial independence. What will they do? Nobody knows and nobody cares. In our society women are always at the receiving end, the girl child and the female foetus are at the receiving end and the Environment is also at the receiving end. Can a society remain healthy by putting the woman, the girl child and the environment permanently at the receiving end? Certainly it will rot and ruin itself, if not reformed.

The increasing insecurity of women and sexual harassment on them tell us that something is terribly wrong with our system. When a girl is raped, instead of finding fault with the propagated notion of seeing girls and women as mere sexual objects to satisfy man’s lust, and strictly punish the culprit, and trying to change the misogynistic social milieu; we are eager to put the blame on the girl’s behaviour, on her lack of modesty, on her ‘revealing’ dress and thus we abet the crime and the culprit. 

Patriarchal culture and morality don't teach the males not to rape; instead, the females are taught not to get raped! As far as the victim is concerned, insult is added to the injury. Our society successfully makes her believe that it is her fault, and psychologically she is crushed to death.

In the wake of the Hryana gang rapes, a nineteen year old girl, who is an engineering student, told me that "rape is so negatively powerful that even the very threat or possibility of it occurring has cut short the freedom and independence in so many girls' lives.”
A nation or a people can never be a great one as long as it sustains myriad forms of oppression to ‘cut short the freedom and independence’ of more than half of its citizens.

Our little winged guests

SUKUMARAN C.V.

When we constructed our own home adjacent to the temple pond, my wife and I took special care to have a spacious verandah to make the house as open as we can and for our two daughters to play. We took extra care not to fell the trees in the compound and to compensate the felling of a few, we planted many saplings of different trees (mango, jack-fruit, tamarind) even on the courtyard in front of the house, and we planted many flower plants too. The result is that we are always having plenty of butterflies and different kinds of birds and their music in and around our home. (The jungle babblers sometimes even come into our drawing room.)

As both my wife and I are government employees, we have a division of labour in the household chores. Sweeping and cleaning the home is my duty apart from cutting the vegetables and scraping the coconut in the kitchen. (However hard I try to learn cooking, I can only be an auxiliary in the kitchen chores.) 

On the last Sunday of July 2012, when I was sweeping, I noticed some coarse materials on the floor of the verandah. My daughters, especially the little one, generously contribute to litter the floor with different materials. But if it were they, the materials would only be leaves of grass and tulsi and the petals of hibiscus and thechi and of other flowers. While I was pondering over the source of the scattered dry fibers of plantain trunks and other objects, my elder daughter informed me that she had seen a sunbird trying to construct its nest in the ceiling of the verandah. I looked up and saw the weaving work on one of the hooks in the ceiling. The initial stage of the construction was already over. 

The fibres were strongly draped on the hook and a bare structure of the nest was dangling.  Some materials fell down only at the initial stage of the construction. I started observing the work closely. The bird took exactly 9 days to complete the work. How patiently and how diligently it worked from dawn to dusk! There were two birds, of course the male and the female. I thought that the nest was being built by both the birds. But, no. The female bird is the architect, the worker and the material collector too.  The male always accompanies her, but there is no interference, no violence, no attempt to dominate.

The outer layer of the nest is constructed with coarser materials. The dry thin barks of some woods are used. (The bird has used even the worn-out pieces of plastic bags). Inside that layer, rough fibers are sewn or woven together. Then soft materials are brought and put inside. The intervals between bringing the materials range from two to twenty minutes. It depends on the availability of the materials. Sometimes she took hours to collect.

Even if I have said that the bird works on the nest from dawn to dusk, in the morning it starts work only after 9 o'clock. Till then it hunts spiders and drinks nectar from the fresh flowers. (As there are many plants and trees in our compound, these birds can have enough spiders to hunt and many flowers to drink nectar.)  Of course the male is also with her. You can differentiate the male by its iridescent colour. (Wikipedia says that these little birds called sunbirds or sugarbirds or spider-hunters belong to the family of the tiny passerine birds—Nectariniidae and there are 132 species in 15 genera and most sunbirds feed largely on nectar, but also take insects and spiders, especially when feeding the young.)

At the final stage of the construction, each time after putting the collected materials to make the nest cosier, the bird would go inside and only its thin and long beak could be seen projected through the entrance hole. And the entire little nest could be seen vibrating. The bird was making the nest wide enough by spreading the soft material with its legs. Whenever she was inside the nest, the male bird came flying and hovered over the entrance as if to make sure if his wife was safe and secure in the new abode. Then he will perch on the hibiscus plant adjacent to the verandah waiting for his beloved, chirping intermittently.

Even when the nest was quite ready to be lived in, the bird was not seen lodging in it at night. On the eighth day, at night, putting a ladder on the wall, I climbed close to the nest and was wonder-struck at the craftsmanship of the bird. The little bird had made the inner bottom of the nest incredibly feathery as velvet! It means that the bird knows that when her eggs hatch, the chicks will be featherless and their delicate bodies need the softest place to lie on. I looked closely to know how the bird dexterously suspended the nest from the hook and was awestruck at the intelligence of the bird. It has collected and used spider-web extensively to drape the nest on to the hook and put together the coarser outer layer intact!

        Making the nest as feathery as velvet

On the ninth night (August 7, 2012) the bird slept in the nest.   The next day morning I waited to see when it leaves the nest. It flew out at 6.15 a.m. (It seems that the sunbirds are not early risers as the other birds are.)  Immediately after it went out, I put the ladder and checked whether there was any egg. No.  In the evening, after reaching home from office, I checked the nest again and still there was no egg. The bird came ‘home’ at 6 p.m. In the morning of August 9, there was an egg in the nest. It was laid the previous night. The egg is a tiny one with whitish grey colour and little wheatish dots. When I checked in the evening, there was another one too! In the next morning, the bird didn't go out and I could not check the nest. It means that the bird started incubating the eggs. 

                       Incubating the eggs

The brooding lasted 15 days. During the incubation period, the bird used to go out often and again, but would return immediately. On the fifteenth day the eggs hatched. In the morning of August 25, when I checked the nest, there were two tiny chicks. Eyes are not opened and there were no feathers. When I touched the nest, one of them opened its mouth thinking that its father or mother has come to feed it. 

The bird goes out at 6. 30 a.m. and the feeding starts from 6.45. The first one who brings food is the father bird! Then comes the mother, then again the father. Sometimes, after putting the caught and killed spiders in the open mouths of the chicks, the birds picked something from the inner side of the nest and flew away. They were removing the excrement of the chicks! Both the birds took extra care to clean the nest.  And they are not picking the waste and dropping it down on the veranda! (Let's compare this civilized behaviour of the birds with that of the humans—putting the domestic wastes in plastic bags and throwing them on the roadside, out of their compound.)

                         Mother bird feeds

Day after day the feeding continued. As the chicks are growing day by day, they were always hungry and demanding more and more and the parent birds fed them continuously. (When I have seen the male bird's care and concern, I thought about the many unwed mothers among the poor and vulnerable Adivasi girls of Attappady and Wayanad in Kerala. These hapless women don't have the assistance of those people whose lust presented them with their children! These mothers and their children are destitute)

                         Father bird feeds

When I checked the nest on Sept. 1, feather roots appeared only on their wings and by Sept.7, feathers covered everywhere and they have grown into cute little sunbirds. Now they are vociferous when the parents bring food. 

On Sept. 8, I noticed a wonderful behaviour of the birds. After putting the caught spider or insect in the mouth of one of the nestlings, the mother bird waited for some seconds and the little fellow turned around in the nest and put his back against his mother's beak and ejected excrement and the mother directly caught it in her beak and flew away!  When the father bird came, the other nestling did the same thing. Within fourteen days, they have learnt that they should help the parents to keep their nest clean and tidy! Another wonderful fact is that the male bird never slept in the nest and yet he helps to clean it. (Among us the humans, cleaning is still a compulsory duty of the females even if both the male and the female use the home. And have you ever seen a human father removing the faeces of his child? Whenever the child shits or pisses, he summons the mother to clean the place and the child.) 

In the morning of Sept.10, immediately after the mother flew out; one by one, the little ones flew after her. No training was needed! In the evening none of the birds returned to the nest! Nearly for a month, under our roof, apart from my wife and two daughters and I, there have been three winged souls and when they left, I felt a kind of emptiness.

If we can witness such activities of Life around a human habitat where there are some plants and trees, it is easy to guess what wonderful activities are going on in a forest or on a village hillock which is covered with trees and thickets. When we fell a tree, bulldoze a hillock, devastate a forest; we are eliminating Life and its innumerable manifestations irrecoverably. When we dam a mighty river, when we dig out the coal and the bauxite by devastating the forest cover, when we desertise the fertile countryside by filling the ponds and paddy fields; we are digging the grave for the myriad forms of Life as if we the humans are mere grave diggers. 

The Hindu : Opinion / Open Page : Vanishing birds and silenced countryside

The Hindu : Opinion / Open Page : Vanishing birds and silenced countryside

Emerging Kerala or the Kingdom in the Sky

                                   Sukumaran C. V.

The legend about the origin of Kerala says that the sixth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, Parusuram, threw his axe across the ocean to the north from Kanyakumari and the sea in between Kanyakumari and where the axe landed retreated and thus emerged Kerala. It happened aeons ago.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries Kerala gave birth to its eminent social reformers—Chattampi Swamikal, Sree Narayana Guru, Ayyankali and V. T. Battathirippad. The Swamikal and Guru decried caste system, Ayyankali defied it and Battathirippad tried to eliminate it. He asked the people of his caste to snap their sacred thread by doing it himself. As a cumulative result of these manifold thoughts and acts, Kerala emerged as a land of a more or less egalitarian society.

The class and caste demarcation in Kerala has not been as glaring as it is today. The presence of religion also was not so visible. People didn’t cry for each other’s head or hand on trivial issues relating to religious matters. People were humane and humanity was the only thing that mattered.  

Suddenly the Free Market arrived as a flash flood and it washed away all the human values and ushered in the era of cut-throat-competition. Money has been deified and all the negative aspects against which the social reformers waged relentless war and defeated have begun to emerge in full force. Now caste is important, class is important, religion is important and Money is all important. Values are not important, environment is not important, agriculture is not important.

Today, if we want to make Kerala emerge from the abyss to which it has been pushed by the Market oriented policies of the Servants of the Corporate Elites, who have been ruling the country ever since 1991, we should rejuvenate agriculture, we should stop acquiring agriculture land for providing infrastructure to the corporate business, we should strengthen the public distribution system, we should not allow PPP in any field, let alone in education. We should exorcise the fields of education and healthcare of the money spinning elements. We should not allow the first private international airport in India to be built in Aranmula on acres of paddy fields. A government which is committed to the people of the land and its environment should initiate such creative efforts to make the people prosper and self-reliant.

But in the Carnival named Emerging Kerala, we have seen that the God’s Own country being put on a platter in front of the Corporate Elites by the apostles of Free Market. One of the apostles is reported to have said that “food security can be assured by bringing in food from other parts of the country”! Won't he utter these same words when he goes to the other parts of the country to welcome the Free Market?!

The hype on ‘Emerging Kerala 2012 Global Connect’ reminded me of what Arundhati Roy says about the 'Kingdom in the Sky' in her article Listening to Grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial and Celebration. Ms. Roy writes:

                              

“Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up on the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programs, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. …But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum—living space. A kingdom needs its lebensraum. The Sky Citizens look toward the Old Nation. They see thousands of acres of farmland, and think: These really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our industries. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains…They think: That is our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are these people doing on our land? What is our water doing in their rivers? What is our timber doing in their trees?”

It is natural that the Sky Citizens will certainly try to deprive the people of their land, rivers and even their right to live. Who will protect the people in a democracy if those who are elected by the people become the servants of the Sky Citizens? Emerging Kerala is the beginning of the submersion of the people for the sake of the Sky Citizens. Who will reclaim Kerala from the Sky Citizens and their apostles? If the people are waiting for an axe-wielding Parasuram; it will certainly be a Waiting for Godot.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article3821649.ece

In the name of the aam admi

Sukumaran C. V.

To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self respect and oneness, and should insist upon choosing as their representatives only such persons as are good and true. 

                         —M. K. Gandhi. (The Story of My Experiments with Truth)

In his keynote address at the opening of the Edinburgh Commonwealth Summit on October 24, 1997 the then Prime Minister of India, I. K. Gujral, said: “Equal opportunity and democracy are often absent in the restricted chambers of the international economic system. And yet, I have little doubt that, in the long run, globalization will succeed only if it is equitable and just. The institutional systems that oversee the globalised economy must reflect an enlightened balance of interests.”

Nearly fifteen years after, the globalised economy in India not only reflects a balance of interests but also widened the imbalance between the rich and the poor and as a result it has wiped out the lives of nearly three lakh farmers between 1995 and 2011. According to the NCRB (National Crime Record Bureau) data; 2, 90, 740 farmers committed suicide during 1995-2011—an average 18,171 farm suicides each year!

When Mr. Manmohan Singh ushered in the liberalized economic policies in 1991, it paved the way for the corporate sector to be a Shylock with the unconditional help of the State. And in the 2001-02 Union Budget, the then Finance Minister Yaswant Sinha introduced a major policy decision (in favour of the big business) to reduce the role of the FCI to maintaining only minimum buffer stocks. This policy shift was a lethal blow to our PDS and led to the dismantling of the Minimum Support Price scheme which was a solace to the farmers.

The Union governments since 1991have confined themselves to creating conditions for private enterprise to flourish. While the successive Union Budgets in the liberalization era have inflicted severe cuts in agriculture subsidies, the revenue forgone under corporate income tax, excise and customs duties during the period 2005 - 2011 is Rs. 21, 25, 023 crores. (P. Sainath, “Corporate socialism’s 2G orgy”, The Hindu, March 7, 2011)

In this abysmal socio-economic background,   Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, on June 29, 2011, in his opening remarks at the interaction with newspaper editors, told: “We must not bring back the license permit raj which we sought to abolish in 1991. I think our nation has prospered as a result of that. If you look at the list of top 100 firms today you will find a sea change in that list. New entrepreneurs have come into the list. These are some of the gains of liberalization which we must cherish, nurse and develop.”

                   Gains of liberalization which we must cherish, nurse and develop!

To understand this ‘gains’ we have to compare the data on unemployment from the Government of India’s Economic Census of 1990 with that of 1998. The annual average growth rate percentage of employment in the two Censuses (shown in the table below) speaks volumes on the gains of liberalization.

	Year	Agricultural sector	Non-Agricultural sector	Total
Rural	1980-1990	+5.62 %	+2.81 %	+3.13 %
	1990-1998	+1.80 %	-2.15 %	-1.58 %
Urban	1980-1990	+2.93 %	+2.88 %	+2.88 %
	1990-1998	+3.15 %	-1.08 %	-1.01 %

And yet our Prime Minister speaks of the gains of liberalization!

In the wake of the different multi-crore scams and scandals, Mr. Singh warns the media that if an atmosphere of cynicism is created, the growth and the entrepreneurial impulses of the big business will not flourish. Then he tells the editors that “we must do all that we can to revive the animal spirits of our businesses.”

Fifteen years ago, when the lethal aftereffects of the liberalization were not so visible as today, we had a Prime Minister who was at least bothered about the ideal of equal opportunity. Today when the structural inequalities and violence stand more entrenched and imbalanced than ever before as the result of the free play of market forces; our Prime Minister is bothered not about the pathetic condition of the farmers and the poor, but about the nervousness  the corporate sector feels if its wayward activities being monitored.   In his inaugural address at the India corporate Week 2010, he said that the government was committed to providing an enabling environment conducive to the growth of the corporate sector.

What about providing an environment conducive to a decent living to the 830 million people who live on Rs. 20 a day?  What about providing an environment which is not conducive to eliminating the lives of more than 18,171farmers every year? What about the villagers being displaced by the multinational giants like the Vedanta and the Posco? 

                                     In an environment conducive to growth!

And on Sept. 21, 2012 in his address to the Nation, the Prime Minister, by calling us brothers and sisters again and again, told us:

“In 1991, when we opened India to foreign investment in manufacturing, many were worried. But today, Indian companies are competing effectively both at home and abroad and they are investing around the world. More importantly, foreign companies are creating jobs for our youth—in IT, in steel, and in the auto industry. I am sure this will happen in retail trade as well.” 

Can there be a greater irony than this? Can anybody, who is face to face with the lives of the millions of ordinary people in this vast country, speak like this? And the way he started his address is really the joke of the year: “No government likes to impose burdens on the common man. Our Government has been voted to office twice to protect the interests of the aam admi.”

P.S: In her Broken Republic, Arundhati Roy writes: “In his autobiography, A Prattler’s Tale, Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, tells his story of how Manmohan Singh rose to power. In 1991, when India’s foreign exchange reserves were dangerously low, the P.V. Narasimha Rao government approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for an emergency loan. The IMF agreed on two conditions. The first was structural adjustment and economic reform. The second was the appointment of a finance minister of its choice. That man, says Mitra, was Manmohan Singh.”