Turmoil from India to Israel. Will there be peace in 2012?

The New York Review of Books and Pankaj Mishra together add up to a delightful combination for essays.  In his latest one, Mishra writes about Anna Hazare's protest movement by presenting it against the backdrop of the economic reality that has severely disappointed India's majority:

[Under Manmohan Singh] growth in India has remained wildly uneven—and deeply compromised by corporate influence on political processes. A U.S. diplomatic cable released this year by Wikileaks shows a senior Hindu nationalist politician admitting that virtually all economic growth of recent years has been concentrated in the four southern states, two western states (Gujarat and Maharashtra) and “within 100km of Delhi.” In another cable about Pranab Mukherjee, the finance minister being groomed to be India’s next PM, Hillary Clinton is revealingly blunt: “To which industrial or business groups is Mukherjee beholden?”
During Singh’s reign as prime minister, India has also witnessed a strong backlash against globalization among the poor. The most striking instance is the militant Communist movement representing landless peasants and indigenous forest peoples in Central India—these are Indians fighting their dispossession by mining companies that are backed by the Indian government. Early last year, India’s Supreme Court censured the government for creating an informal militia against Communist militants. Claiming that “the poor are being pushed to the wall,” the court blamed increasing violence in the country on “predatory forms of capitalism, supported by the state.”
Since then Singh has also lost his main constituency: the beneficiaries, both real and potential, of “rising” India. Periodicals such as Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Financial Times that in 2005 hailed India as a “roaring capitalist success story” now wonder if India is descending into a Latin-American-style oligarchy. In recent months the global recession has also begun to affect the Indian economy. Inflation is running into double digits. Industrial production has declined; at one point, the rupee had fallen nearly 20 percent again the dollar; and foreign capital—the mainstay of India’s remarkable growth in the last decade—flows steadily out of the country. As though sensing the prevailing winds, India’s biggest companies are putting the bulk of their investments abroad.

There is simply nothing in Mishra's essay that strikes a discordant note in my ear.  My own take on Anna Hazare and the Indian economic conditions have pretty much been along the same lines too. 

I am worried though that there is an increasing level of intolerance in India.  As I see it, the corruption itself is less worrisome compared to a rapidly growing support for restricting the freedom for expression.  A tiny group of Muslims vocalize their protests, and then a tiny group of Hindus voice theirs.  The government wants to censor online speech.  My father worries that my blog posts and opinion pieces will not be welcomed by the Indian government; such is the level of "free speech" in India. 

I wonder where this is all headed.  One kind of turmoil in India and a completely different kind across the border in Pakistan, which shares borders with two other countries in much higher levels of turmoil: Afghanistan and Iran.  From Iran, it is a stone's throw away from Iraq, Syria, Israel ... 2012 is not looking good.

Anna Hazare's 15 minutes are over!

Three weeks ago, as the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement hit a high note, I blogged that this will not be any version of Arab Spring in India:

India is a country with a history of exciting events, which eventually die down without doing any serious damage to the status quo.

More than anything else, Hazare was proposing something quite bizarre--setting up an all-powerful body, and assuming that this will somehow be insulated from corruption.  I remarked elsewhere that such reforms cannot be legislated and that it has to come through changes in the everyday practices of people.  I have a metric for this: the day trash will not be dumped anywhere and everywhere.


Anyway, I am not the only one who thinks that this will not be productive, and could become highly counter-productive too.  Here is another immigrant from India, writing at Reason:

Protests are like morning ablutions in India’s cacophonous democracy: routine and purgative. One can’t sneeze without running into a demonstration by some interest group fighting for some special benefit....
one agency can’t effectively deal with the volume of grievances it is likely to receive. Alternatives to the Hazare proposal suggest creating mini-Lokpals at the municipal level. But all of them suffer from a fatal flaw: They treat corruption like an enforcement rather than a policy problem. ...
Eradicating corruption will require more than simply adding yet another layer of bureaucracy, however. So long as government officials have too much to gain from dishonesty—and citizens have too much to lose from honesty—corruption will remain a fact of Indian life.

The Economist adds this:

Mostly sceptics bristle at Mr Hazare’s methods. The most revered Dalit leader, the late B.R. Ambedkar, chief draftsman of India’s constitution, has been much quoted this week for an early warning about the “grammar of anarchy”, by which he meant using Gandhi-style fasts to impose your will on a democratic government. Hunger strikes, a form of blackmail, might have been justified against the British, but not against elected leaders.
Such grumbles will not dent Mr Hazare’s progress. His camp hints at possible future campaigns on electoral changes and education reform. Rival fasters might also jump in since a hunger strike’s extended drama so clearly suits live television. Yet elected politicians can push back. They have an easy way to remind voters how they matter, by getting on and passing many long-promised bills, for example on further economic reform. Dull and undramatic: but for many voters it matters at least as much as corruption.

Meanwhile, the country's attention has already turned away from Hazare to terrorism in the capital city of New Delhi:

Less than four months after a mysterious bomb went off in the parking lot, a powerful blast ripped through the reception counter of the Delhi High Court complex in the heart of the capital on Wednesday, leaving at least 11 people dead and more than 75 injured.

Even as a red alert was sounded in the city, an email sent to various media organisations claimed responsibility for the blast on behalf of the ‘Harkat-ul-Jihadi.'

The claim, sent from harkatuljihadi2011@gmail.com, threatened similar blasts at the Supreme Court and other major High Courts if the Parliament attack case convict Afzal Guru's death sentence was not “repealed.” (sic).

 Caption at the source:

"A man injured in the bomb blast being brought to the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in New Delhi on Wednesday."

The Anna Hazare moment is not any "Arab Spring" in India

One of the neatest first experiences for me when I came to the US was at the Social Security office in Los Angeles.  Right on the first day, I was advised by personnel at USC and by other students that I needed to get to the Soc. Sec. card at the earliest--the lack of which meant no paycheck.

At least now, the neighborhood around USC looks presentable, especially since the construction of the Staples Center and USC's basketball arena.  Those days, it was a typical downtown in deterioration,  A couple of us walked over to the Social Security office, all the while wondering whether this was really the richest country on the planet when the conditions around us were not pretty.

The organized system at the government office made it clear that this was no India.  The ticket number I grabbed gave me an idea of how long I might have to wait for my turn. There were chairs to sit on.  When my turn came, I presented my papers to the clerk, and we both had a little bit of problem with our respective pronunciations and accents.  And that was it.

This was no where near any of my experiences at government, and private sector, offices in India.

In India, there is a formal way, which takes a very long time, and another way that cuts through the process as long as one paid the prevailing bribe rates.  When I got my driver license in India, for instance, all I did was give a couple of portrait photos and money to the driving instructor, who took care of things for me--a week later I had my license!

Every visit to India, there are more experiences--direct or otherwise--that remind me about the strange inner workings of the Indian system characterized by bribes, corruption, and "black money."

Though most people complain about all these, they generally feel powerless to change anything by themselves.  Further, bribes and corruption and black money do not become serious political issues primarily because getting elected even to the lowliest office is a sure way to start getting ahead in economic terms.

A few are now voicing that old movie line, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."

A small, quiet, 74-year old man has become the voice and symbol of this frustration.

Anna Hazare has quickly become a 21st century Mahatma Gandhi inspiration for millions of Indians fed up with rampant corruption, red tape and inadequate services provided by the state despite the country posting near-double digit economic growth for almost a decade.

As much as I am excited to follow the developments, I am equally confident that this too shall pass.  After all, India is a country with a history of exciting events, which eventually die down without doing any serious damage to the status quo.  Which is why I agree with this:

The anti-corruption movement has the simplicity of a third-rate fable.
There are the good guys (the reformers and the average Indian citizen) and the bad guys (the politicians). But the real story is not a fable but art cinema.
Indians have a deep and complicated relationship with corruption. As in any long marriage, it is not clear whether they are happily or unhappily married. The country’s economic system is fused with many strands of corruption and organized systems of tax evasion. The middle class is very much a part of this.
Most Indians have paid a bribe. Most Indian businesses cannot survive or remain competitive without stashing away undeclared earnings.
Almost everybody who has sold a house has taken one part of the payment in cash and evaded tax on it.
Yet, the branding of corruption is so powerful that Indians moan the moment they hear the word. The comic hypocrisy of it all was best evident in the past few months as the anti-corruption movement gathered unprecedented middle-class support. 

While the middle and upper classes might voice their support to the cause, particularly at the click of the computer mouse, as individuals they are trapped in a classic game theory situation: if they don't pay up for the service, then there is always somebody else who will, which makes a loser out of the one who wants to fight the system.  Not wanting to lose out, everybody becomes a participant.

Ultimately, it is the economically disadvantaged who get screwed.  Because, they cannot things the proper way, and nor do they have the resources to take the bribe route.  To make things worse, they trust the politicians to deliver for them :(

As I noted here earlier, in another context,

When I was a kid, I remember elected politicians switching parties like crazy depending on who offered a better deal.  And everybody knew that such deals were going on.  One politician was referred to as "aaya ram, gaya ram" (aaya meaning to come, and gaya means to leave--characterizing how the politician, ram, entered and left parties.  Hilarious it was to some extent, more so when we did not have television to entertain us ....

The Economist has a neat statistic about India:

The country’s politicians are mostly an unsavoury lot. Of the 522 members of India’s current parliament, 120 are facing criminal charges; around 40 of these are accused of serious crimes, including murder and rape. Most Indian politicians are presumed to be corrupt, which is less surprising. In India’s poor and fractious society patronage politics is inevitable. But Indian politics has got much muckier in recent years because of two factors: the rise of regional and caste-based parties, nakedly dedicated to delivering patronage; and the mutinous coalitions this has led to.