Aug 6

LETTERS
Issn 0012-9976
Ever since the first issue in 1966,
EPW has been Indias premier journal for
comment on current affairs
and research in the social sciences.
It succeeded Economic Weekly (1949-1965),
which was launched and shepherded
by Sachin Chaudhuri,
who was also the founder-editor of EPW.
As editor for thirty-five years (1969-2004)
Krishna Raj
gave EPW the reputation it now enjoys.
editor
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

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Editor: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.
Mahasweta Devi (19262016)
ahasweta Devi, the activist writer,

was born in a village in Pabna
district (now in Bangladesh) of undivided
Bengal. She studied English literature
in Visva-Bharati and came into direct
contact with Rabindranath Tagore and
other luminaries in Santiniketan. Her
father, Manish Ghatak, was a poet, and
writer with the Kallol literary group
in Bengal. The iconoclast film director
Ritwik Ghatak, and Sachin Chaudhuri,
the founder-editor of the Economic Weekly
and the EPW, were her paternal uncle
and maternal uncle, respectively. She
married the radical Bengali playwright
and actor, Bijan Bhattacharyya and went
through a life of financial hardship.
They separated in 1962.
Mahasweta Devis historical novel,
Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi) was
published in 1956. The novel was focused on Lakshmibai, the queen of Jhansi,
who valiantly fought against British troops
in the 1857 mutiny and became a martyr.
It was based on extensive research, which
explored diverse sources, including family
reminiscences and local memories. In the
early 1950s, Mahasweta Devi travelled to
various placesincluding Bundelkhand,
Datiya, Orchha, Kalpi, and Gwaliorfor
collecting materials. She discovered a
particular type of folk song about the
Jhansi queen, called Rawso, and collected
a large number of such songs. This testifies to her seriousness at the beginning of
her literary journey.
Mahasweta Devi had been a keen
observer of tribal life since the mid-1960s
and started championing their rights,
particularly those of the denotified tribes
of West Bengal such as Kheria Sabars
and the Lodhas. Her important novels
connected with the tribal rebellion include
Aranyer Adhikar (The Right to the Forest),
centred on Birsa Munda and the Munda
rebellion against the British in the late
19th century, and Chotti Munda Ebong Tar
Tir (Chotti Munda and his Arrow), which
explored the tribal legacy and memories
of the Birsas uprising. The novelette,
Bashai Tudu, was framed in the context
of the Naxalite peasant movement and
counter-insurgency operations of the state.
The Naxalite movement of the late

1960s and early 1970s had deep influence
on her writings. Written in the context
of the police brutality of the time, Hazar
Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084) focused
on the trauma and mental journey of a
middle-class mother, who awakens one
morning to the shattering news that her
son is lying dead in the police morgue,
being reduced to a mere numeral: Corpse
No 1084. Govind Nihalani has made a film
on the novel, bearing the title, Hazaar
Chaurasi Ki Maa (1998).
In fact, Mahasweta Devi had direct
contact with the tribal people, some of
whom were active participants in the
Naxalite movement. Her short story,
Draupadi, written in the context of
police repression against the Naxalites,
tells a tale of brutal state violence suffered by a tribal woman and her unique
signature of resistance. The story reminds
us of contemporary violence against the
tribal community in Chhattisgarh and
other tribal regions.
Mahasweta Devis literary journey
bears testimony to the tales of tribal
insurgency and counter-insurgency in
colonial and postcolonial Bengal. Even
at her advanced age she did not hesitate
to extend her support to the peoples
struggles in Singur, Nandigram, and
Junglemahal, and fought for the release
of political prisoners.
Arup Kumar Sen
Kolkata
Firewalling the Big Fish
his is with reference to the article

GSPC: A Controversial Case Study
Attempts Are Being Made to Bail Out
a Gujarat Government Company by
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (EPW, 23 July
2016). Apart from the observations by the
Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG),
the basic issue is that Gujarat State
Petroleum Corporation (GSPC), with no
experience in offshore exploration and
production, went ahead with a difficult
high temperature, high pressure area by
hiring contractors with dodgy credentials. It is also surprising that the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH)
and the Management Committee (with
august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
Economic & Political Weekly
LETTERS
representatives of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural GasMoPNG) allowed

amateurs to tackle such a field. Even
after that, the GSPC has shown poor
contract management skills, as seen
from the CAGs report that shows it incurring avoidable losses and benefiting
some clients at its own cost.
It is an elementary financial principle
that you do not borrow short to invest
long. This is precisely what has been
done here. Even bridge finance seems
to have been invested. This cannot be
sheer ignorance and the motives are
suspect.
Exploration and production is a risky
game and that it is a case of writing off
all if nothing is found but recovering all,
including superfluous expenses if you
find oil/gas, as was done in the next
block, at public expense. This risk in this
business should not confer any licence to
incompetent people to splurge public
money and divert funds to unauthorised
sources. This speaks poorly of oversight
by the DGH and the MoPNG and even
complicity cannot be ruled out, as in the
other case of gold-plating in the neighbouring field.
The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation
(ONGC) seems to be resisting political
pressures on it to bail out the GSPC.
Petroleum industry journals have carried
reports of ONGC being asked to appoint a
particular reservoir expert without tenders on nomination basis. An Additional
Secretary in the MoPNG who noted on
file that a proposal to make ONGC take
over GSPCs field made no sense, was
summarily eased out of the ministry
and dumped in the Ministry of Water
Resources. Even in ONGCs books, an
additional debt of `20,000 crore will
have high visibility. In order to manage
the optics, one idea being floated is
to create a behemoth of all the public
sector undertakings under the MoPNG,
an idea that had been rejected by the
V Krishnamurthy Committee appointed
during Atal Bihari Vajpayees National
Democratic Alliance government, so that
this liability of `20,000 crore is not seen
prominently. But this will be totally
against the public interest. Big fish,
including the biggest fish, allegedly
involved in the hype created out of
EPW
august 6, 2016
GSPCs discovery are to be firewalled, in

case this blows up as another big scam!
T N R Rao
Former Secretary,
MoPNG, Government of India,
NEW DELHI
Kandhamal Cauldron
he encounter killings in Gumudumaha village in Kandhamal, Odisha

on 17 July have put the focus on the
acute poverty in that area, the emergence of Maoists and the repressive role
of the state.
By and large, the district has witnessed three major problems: first, land
encroachment by outsiders, petty traders,
moneylenders and contractors which
has reduced the original landowners
to sharecroppers; second, sectarian role
of religious leaders; and third, caste
conflict.
It is a classic case where caste, class,
ethnicity and religion have got enmeshed
to such a degree that it defies any stereotypical explanation. Violence in Kandhamal has seriously challenged the competency of the state. The dubious role of
civil society has only complicated the
issue. In fact, the Kandhamal crisis is the
manifestation of the states failure to
address the structural issues of poverty,
unemployment, and illiteracy.
Benami transfer of land has made the
Adivasis landless whereas the same
community earlier used to consider
itself as Kandha Raja. The grabbed
land is being used for private farming,
religious practices and stationing the
security forces.
Some of the parts such as Brahmunigaon, Katogarh, Daringbadi and Raikia
are known as the Lal Corridor or
red zone of Kandhamal. The killing of
Saraswati (2008) and abduction of an
Italian tourist (2012) by Panda cadres

generated fissures among Maoist groups
and that led to divisions.
Maoists garner strong support from
Adivasis and Dalits in Kandhamal. Many
young people have joined them against
the administrative apathy and exploitation
in the district. Consequently, the Odisha
state is hell-bent on finishing them off by
creating a war-like situation in the tribal
corridors. The government launched a
special attack by the greyhound force
(specialised and trained military personnel) from 2006. Currently, there are
seven battalions of the central government, the Central Reserve Police Force
and five battalions of the Border Security
Force deployed across Odisha, consisting
of nearly 12,000 paramilitary troopers.
There are also about 700 prisoners currently facing trial in Maoist-related cases,
indicating that the state government is
faced with tough decisions.
Between 2000 and 2016 more than 50
innocent tribal lives have been lost in
places such as Kashipur, Kalinganagar,
Paikmal, Kandhamal, Kalahandi and
Rayagada while leaving many seriously
injured. Neither the State Human Rights
Commission nor the state administration
is concerned or serious about the butchering of civilians by commandos. Maoists
are treated as terrorists. The state forgets that it is the poor tribals and Dalits
who have become supporters of this
movement because of forced marginalisation, deprivation and exploitation.
The Odisha government must understand that dispatching more military battalions will not resolve but aggravate the
crisis. Moreover, the policymakers should
emphasise a bottom-up development
model while encouraging peoples participation in the development processes.
Kamalakanta Roul
University of Delhi
Web Exclusives
The following articles have been published in the past week in the Web Exclusives section of the EPW website.
(1) Documents: Deaths of Child Workers in India's Mica "Ghost" Mines Covered Up to Keep Industry Alive
Nita Bhalla, Anuradha Nagaraj, Rina Chandran
(2) Debate or Debasement? A Rejoinder to Vamsee JuluriChinnaiah Jangam
(3) California Textbooks Issue: A ResponseVamsee Juluri
(4) GST and the States: Sharing Tax AdministrationA Sarvar Allam
Articles posted before 30 July 2016 remain available in the Web Exclusives section.
vol lI no 32
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august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
No Compensation, No Forests
The law on compensatory afforestation will only help those destroying forests.
here is no way to compensate for the destruction of a

natural forest. That is a lesson that ought to have been
learned long before we in India began discussing the
idea of compensatory afforestation. From the beginning, the
concept was fraught because it was premised on the belief that
if you replace one hectare of dense foliage with another hectare
planted with trees, you have compensated for the loss of a
forest. That a natural forest is much more than the trees it hosts,
that it is a repository of biodiversity, that it plays a crucial role in
replenishing underground water aquifers, that it is now recognised as a vital carbon sink for greenhouse gases, and that
above all it has been the home for millions of forest dwellers is
still not appreciated by those who make policies to compensate
for the loss of these natural forests. Few parliamentarians
would have thought about this as they passed the Compensatory
Afforestation Fund Bill 2016 last month.
The bill emerged from the accumulation of funds with the government for the purpose of compensatory afforestation. If standing forests are diverted for non-forest purposes, which include
mining, dams, highways and other infrastructure, the entities involved have to pay the government so that the loss of forests can be
compensated by afforestation elsewhere. The amount paid is
calculated on the basis of the net present value (NPV) of the forests diverted, which ranges from `5 lakh to `11 lakh per hectare
depending on the density of the forests. This calculation is based
on the understanding that it takes 50 years for a forest to revert to
its original state. By last year, the government had collected in excess of `40,000 crore. In 2002, on the directions of the Supreme
Court, the government was compelled to set up the Compensatory
Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA)
that after further prodding from the apex court finally began functioning in 2006. A law, similar to the one passed, was framed in
2008 but did not clear both houses of Parliament. As a result, in
2009, an ad hoc committee had to be set up to manage the fund.
The funds were earmarked for afforestation, wildlife protection
and to regenerate degraded forests. Although CAMPA disbursed
funds to different states, a Comptroller and Auditor General
(CAG) report in 2013 revealed that only 61% of the released
funds had been used. In fact, the CAG report was quite damning.
It stated: We noticed serious shortcomings in regulatory issues
related to diversion of forest land, the abject failure to promote
compensatory afforestation, the unauthorised diversion of
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
forest land in the case of mining and the attendant violation of

the environmental regime Numerous instances of unauthorised renewal of leases, illegal mining, continuance of mining
leases despite adverse comments in the monitoring reports, projects operating without environmental clearances, unauthorised change of status of forest land and arbitrariness in decisions of forestry clearances were observed.
The CAG report also observed that several forest departments
did not have the capacity to administer the fund. The new law fails
to address several issues raised in the CAG report, including the
failure of the regulatory framework. Instead, it has empowered the
same bureaucracy that failed in the past. More serious, it has deliberately removed the right of gram sabhas of forest dwellers to
decide how the fund will be used. In 2006, the Scheduled Tribes
and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest
Rights) Act, 2006, popularly known as the Forest Rights Act (FRA)
was passed. Coupled with the earlier Panchayats (Extension to
Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA), forest dwellers had the right to
decide whether the forests where they live could be diverted for
other purposes. In a landmark case exactly a year ago, the gram
sabhas in the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha voted against the multinational Vedantas plan to mine for bauxite in their forests. Now, under
the new law, although forest dwellers continue to have this right, in
the name of compensatory afforestation, the forest department can
take over what they deem are degraded forests and do compensatory afforestation. As finding land contiguous to forests that are
diverted for compensatory afforestation has become virtually impossible, it is a given that forest departments will pursue the strategy
of re-densification of existing forests. Already there are reports
from Odisha that tribal populations are resisting these efforts.
The government has also chosen to ignore recommendations
of the Kanchan Chopra Committee and the Indian Institute of
Forest Management Committee that the fund be shared with forest communities. Also, by leaving decisions to the forest
bureaucracy, the government has ignored evidence from around
the world and India that the best way to conserve forests is to
give the responsibility to forest dwellers. The fund would have
provided livelihood to such communities and ensured that forests
remain what they are, not just a collection of trees but also the
source that sustains life. Instead, we have reverted to the colonial
view of seeing forests as a resource to be exploited and then
compensated merely by planting trees.
7
EDITORIALS
A Scary Signal
The plight of the 7,700 starving Indian workers in Saudi Arabia is a warning.
hile the news around the beginning of August that

7,700 Indian workers were starving for lack of food
and living in abysmal conditions in camps in the
Shumaisi, Sisten/Macrona, Sojex, and Taif areas of Saudi Arabia
was shocking, the Gulf dream for Indian semi-skilled and
unskilled workers migrating to West Asia in search of jobs had
8
begun unravelling way back in the early 1990s. The Indian

media regularly reported incidents of cruelty and humiliation
by individual employers. Recently, there have been reports of a
number of construction worksites in Saudi Arabia being closed
down and workers not paid their salaries. How did Indian
authorities allow this without intervening?
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
EDITORIALS
The deteriorating economic circumstances in the West Asian

oil-rich nations have led to major flashpoints over the past few
years with almost all migrant workers, including Indians, halting work on large projects to protest non-payment of wages and
appalling working conditions. An Amnesty International report
(disputed by the Qatar government) claimed that 279 Indian
workers employed on construction sites preparing Qatar to host
the football world cup in 2022 had died (among many others) in
2012 due to the bad working and living conditions.
For long now, one of the criticisms levelled at successive
Indian governments is that as compared to the non-resident
Indians (NRIs) in white-collar jobs, especially in the West, their
counterparts in West Asia and in blue-collar employment do
not receive the same attention. It is well known by now that it
is the latter who are responsible for sending as much as 50% of
the nearly $72 billion remittances to India. Or that 52% of the
Indians working overseas are in this region. Why then, despite
major waves of migration from India to West Asia for work
beginning in the 1970s, are there no well-thought-out policies
and mechanisms to deal with all aspects connected with these
workers? In its absence, the trajectory following each catastrophic event is identical: frantic and ad hoc measures to deal
with the emergency.
It is also a well-known fact that the kafala (visa sponsorship)
system in a large number of West Asian countries binds workers
to their employers in terms of residency and right to seek other
employment (their passports are kept by the employers). In fact,
in the present crisis too, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj has said
that it is an uphill task to get the documents of the workers back
from their employers so that they can be evacuated smoothly.
What is not so well known is that Saudi Arabia has, according to media reports, initiated labour reforms to check abuses
by employers. However, domestic workers are left out of their
purview and the kafala system continues. Besides, their implementation would depend heavily on the will to enforce the law.
In April, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was conferred Saudi
Arabias highest civilian honour when he went there on a visit
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
and reports said that many economic and strategic issues

were discussed. How far the Indian government will be able to
negotiate for the labour rights of its citizens on Saudi soil is
difficult to estimate. Most of them work there as construction
labourers, drivers, sales personnel, mechanical and clerical
staff and have also gone there because the economic returns
are better than in their own country. A majority of them are
not in a position to bargain for labour and democratic rights
and the need for a support network backed by their own
government is essential.
With the flow of remittances to India from these countries
decelerating drastically due to falling oil prices, the Indian government will need to deal with large-scale return of the
emigrants. While this is not a new phenomenon and the most
affected state, Kerala, has initiated a number of measures to
deal with it, the central government will have to step up its
efforts in this direction.
Neither the familiarity with the problems faced by these workers
nor suggestions about what the Indian government can do to deal
with them is lacking. The bureaucratic quagmire associated with
the emigration process, the corruption involved at every level,
the working and living conditions in the host country and the
difficulties awaiting the emigrant workers on their permanent
returnall these areas have seen much discussion. The Indian
embassies and missions in the host countries must also be more
proactive in resolving the problems faced by these workers.
To start with, more systematic data on all aspects connected
with emigration for employment would be welcome. Paucity
of reliable data is a weakness that seems to span across most
welfare-related issues in India and is a severe handicap in
formulating a well-documented policy in most areas. The present
crisis faced by Indian workers (reportedly there are 8,000
Pakistani workers in a similar situation) in Saudi Arabia is a
precursor to what can happen with their counterparts in the
other West Asian countries. While the foreign ministry is
undoubtedly doing its best to meet the emergency, a workable
labour policy and redressal mechanism seems to be imperative.
EDITORIALS
First Published in 1966
To mark 50 years of EPW, each week in 2016 will

present an extract from our archives.
Vol XXXII, No 32
AUGUST 9, 1997
A Beginning Not the End

In the last two decades, the spread of electronic
media and the remarkable growth of the local
language press have helped [the poor and the
underprivileged] to recognise the importance
of taking hold of the governmental apparatus,
if their economic and social status is to change
for the better. This process has been further
assisted by the upper caste inspired Hindutva
programme of the RSS family, the atrocities
against dalits by the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
and by communal groups in Bihar, Tamil Nadu,

Karnataka and other states, the brutality of
the police everywhere to all of which the concerned state or central authorities have
turned a blind eye. Over and above all this,
the liberalisation policy has cut back even the
inadequate human development programmes
in which the central and state governments
were involved and shifted the priorities in
policy towards satisfying the consumption
and business requirements of the upper
income groups. ... the established powers ...
have already intensified their attempts to prevent a unification of political groups consisting largely of tribals, dalits and other backward classes. ...
... The hitherto backward sections are
learning fast and have begun to appreciate
their capacity to change the ordering of
things in society. They have realised that it is
vol lI no 32
not inevitable that they remain poor and

powerless, that they continue to be exploited
in every which way. They see no reason why
the nations natural and human resources
cannot be used to their advantage. If others
do not do so, what is more natural than to
take charge of things yourself? It is this enormous change in society and political attitudes
that marks the 50th anniversary of Indian
Independence.
... What we are witnessing today is more
like the beginning of a groundswell and its immediate consequences may be to uproot existing structures and clear the ground for new
construction. Perhaps the next 50 years will
witness the culmination of this process and
rapidly reach a situation in which the basic
democratic values of liberty, justice, equality
and individual dignity are secured for every
man, woman and child in India.
MARGIN SPEAK
Dalit Protest in Gujarat

Anand Teltumbde
Repression of Dalits has been

rampant in Gujarat and the
state also ranks high in terms
of atrocities against them. The
recent brutal attack on Dalit
youths unjustly accused of cow
slaughter is an open expression
of simmering casteist prejudices
under the cover of supporting the
Hindutva agenda.
he state of Gujarat was supposed

to be a model worthy of emulation.
This was the tall claim of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which has
governed the state since 2001. The BJP
however considers laudable what is
actually shameful. Four Dalit youths
were publicly flogged by a Hindutvavadi
vigilante group on 11 July. Members of
the Gau Raksha Samiti came across a
Dalit family skinning the carcass of a
dead cow in village Mota Samadhiyala
in Una taluka of Gir Somnath district.
Accusing them of cow slaughter, these
men beat up the entire family and then
picked up the four youths, stripped them
up to the waist, chained them to the back
of a car and drove it to Una town, where
they were again beaten up close to a
police station. The gau rakshaks, confident that they would not be punished,
filmed the entire act and uploaded the
video on the internet. However, this last
act of theirs backfired, as enraged Dalits
came out on the streets in protest and
there was condemnation from many
quarters. This atrocity exposed how emboldened anti-Dalit elements in Gujarat
have become to unleash their prejudices
under the guise of supporting the governments Hindutva agenda.
Modis Crocodile Tears
Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a

writer and civil rights activist with the
Committee for the Protection of Democratic
Rights, Mumbai.
10
ranked fourth among Indias states in

terms of the incidence of atrocities against
Dalits. The National Crime Records Bureau
(NCRB) in earlier years erroneously mentioned the number of atrocities per lakh
population and corrected it only in 2012.
Therefore, the incidence of atrocities
against the SCs as given in NCRB tables
would necessitate correction in absolute
figures. However, this is unlikely to alter
Gujarats relative rank among the states.
In terms of the major category of atrocities like murders and rapes too Gujarat
ranks higher than most states. Table 1
provides the rates of these atrocities for
2012 and 2013 to show how Gujarat
ranks high in the list of states for crimes
against Dalits.
In September 2012, in Thangadh, a
small town in Surendranagar district of
Gujarat, three Dalit youths were gunned
down by Modis police on two consecutive days (22 and 23 September 2012) but
the then chief minister did not utter a
word although he was barely 17 km away
from the spot, leading a Vivekanand
Youth Vikas Yatra. On the first day, the
police opened fire on the Dalits protesting against the Bharwads, who had
beaten a Dalit youth over a minor clash,
seriously injuring 17-year-old Pankaj
Sumra, who later died in a hospital in
Rajkot. News of the death sparked outrage
among Dalits who took to the streets
demanding that a complaint be filed
against the police officials responsible.
Table 1: Rate of Incidence of Murders and Rapes
(per lakh population of the Scheduled Castes)
Year
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is

said, was disturbed on learning about
what had happened. This seemed to
imply that he has never heard of atrocities on Dalits in Gujarat before. He must
surely know that Gujarat has the dubious distinction of consistently ranking
among the top five states in terms of
atrocities against Dalits. In 2013, even as
Modi was on the verge of being designated as the BJPs prime ministerial candidate, the number of atrocities per
1,00,000 Scheduled Caste (SC) persons
was 29.21, up from 25.23 in the previous
years. This was disgracefulGujarat
Gujarat
Andhra Pradesh
Bihar
Chhattisgarh
Haryana
Jharkhand
Karnataka
Kerala
Madhya Pradesh
Maharashtra
Odisha
Rajasthan
Tamil Nadu
Uttar Pradesh
2012
Murder Rape
0.56
2.29
0.39
1.49
0.16
0.49
0.18
3.86
0.37
2.79
0.03
0.41
0.34
0.83
0.03
6.34
0.78
6.75
0.27
1.49
0.15
2.21
0.54
3.44
0.26
0.47
0.57
1.45
2013
Murder Rape
0.71
3.82
0.38
1.64
0.30
0.85
0.18
3.37
0.43
5.45
0.15
0.31
0.30
1.29
0.07
7.36
0.68
7.31
0.30
2.75
2.26
2.77
0.62
5.01
0.19
0.39
0.54
1.91
Source: Crime of India, 2012 and 2013, National Crime

Records Bureau.
August 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
MARGIN SPEAK
The next day, the police again opened

fire on the agitating Dalits injuring three
of them, two of whom, Mehul Rathod,
17, and Prakash Parmar, 26, died at the
Rajkot civil hospital. These killings, just
before the state assembly polls in 2012,
had sent shock waves across the state
and complaints were lodged against four
police officials. Investigation was handed
over to the Crime Investigation Department. However, despite three FIRs being
filed against the accused policemen,
only in one case has a charge sheet been
filed and one of the accused B C Solanki
was not even arrested.
Pent-up Anger
Gujarat has a long history of feudal
repression of its Dalit community, which
being relatively small (7.1%) as compared
to the national average of 16.6, had
largely remained politically inert. After
a brief show of strength by the Dalit
Panthers in the early 1970s, they were
rudely shaken out of their Gandhian
slumber by the 1981 anti-reservation riots.
For the first time, a spate of Ambedkar
Jayanti celebrations were held all over
the state. But this awakening proved to
be short-lived. When the BJP realised the
electoral importance of the Dalits and
began wooing them, they succumbed and
found themselves participating in a big
way in the 1986 Jagannath rath procession
and later, even becoming its foot soldiers
particularly during the 2002 post-Godhra
carnage of Muslims. However, nothing
changed for them on the ground. The
discrimination, humiliation, exploitation
and atrocities continued unabated with a
complicit state overtly or covertly backing
the anti-Dalit elements in civil society.
A recent study has demonstrated that
of all the atrocity cases that occurred
across four districts in Gujarat, 36.6%
were not registered under the Scheduled
Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (better known
as the Atrocity Act). Where the act was
applied, 84.4% were registered under
the wrong provisions, thus concealing
the intensity of the violence in the cases.1
Earlier, the Ahmedabad-based Council
for Social Justice had studied 400 judgments delivered over a decade under
this act since 1 April 1995 in the special
EPW
August 6, 2016
atrocity courts set up in 16 districts of

the state, and found wanton violation
of the rules by the police to weaken
prosecution. The judiciary also contributed its own prejudices to render the
act toothless.2 No wonder, the conviction rate in atrocity cases in Gujarat is six
times lower than the national average
of over 10 years for crimes against the
SCs and Scheduled Tribes (STs). In 2014
(latest available data), 3.4% of the crimes
against SCs in Gujarat ended in convictions, against a comparable national rate
of 28.8%that is, one conviction for
every eight across the country.
A study titled Understanding Untouchability: A Comprehensive Study of Practices and Conditions in 1,589 villages,
conducted in Gujarat between 2007 and
2010, by the Navsarjan Trust, an organisation working among Dalits in Gujarat, in
collaboration with the Robert E Kennedy
Centre for Justice and Human Rights,
revealed widespread practice of untouchability in rural Gujarat.3 The new generation of Dalits, faced with a dark future
amidst the prosperity around, would not
stomach it. It is this build-up of anger
accentuated by the sugar-coated antiDalit policies of the BJP that burst out in
the form of spontaneous flare-up of Dalit
anger in the state.
BJPs Killer Cow
At the root of this atrocity and consequent flare-up lies the suspicion of cow
slaughter by the self-appointed vigilantes who directly derive their power from
the latest push by the ruling BJP. This
atrocity reminds one of the Jhajjar episode
in Haryana, where on 15 October 2002
five Dalits were lynched and set ablaze
by a Hindutva mob in front of the police
station in Dulina on similar suspicions of
cow slaughter. The police, instead of acting against the lynching, had registered
a case against the victims under the
Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act! The
case was withdrawn only after the
result of a post-mortem revealed that
the cow had been dead 24 hours before
the lynching. Only thereafter, two cases
of murder and attempted murder were
reluctantly registered against 32 villagers.
No sooner were they arrested, all of them
were out on bail by January despite
vol lI no 32
being booked under stringent sections:

murder, rioting with deadly weapons,
mischief by fire and explosive substances (435) and under the SC and ST
(Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
They bragged publicly that they would
not mind doing it again. The Hindutva
outfits openly justified it. On 28 September 2015, a Muslim family was attacked
by similar vigilante mob in Bishahra
village near Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, following rumours that it was storing and consuming beef. They lynched Mohammad
Akhlaq and seriously wounded his son
Danish. A case of cow slaughter has
been registered against the family of
Mohammad Akhlaq by the police at the
instance of a local court in Surajpur!
The government unashamedly continues to ignore the directive principles of
state policy in Part IV of the Constitution
that were to be the fundamental principles of governance but uses the alibi of
an Article to ban the slaughter of the
entire cow family to the detriment of a
vast majority of people and the economy.
This obsession is certainly going to be
the single biggest disaster for the country in the coming years but has become
the immediate killer for the Muslims
and Dalits, who are vocationally linked
to and derive their livelihoods from the
bovine economy.
The BJP may ignore its consequences
only at its own peril.
notes
1
2
3
http://navsarjan.org/navsarjan/status-of-dalitsin-gujarat/
https://www.sabrangindia.in/tags/council-social-justice.
http://navsarjan.org/Documents/Untouchability_Report_FINAL_Complete.pdf.
EPW Index
An author-title index for EPW has been
prepared for the years from 1968 to 2012. The
PDFs of the Index have been uploaded, yearwise, on the EPW website. Visitors can
download the Index for all the years from the
site. (The Index for a few years is yet to be
prepared and will be uploaded when ready.)
EPW would like to acknowledge the help of
the staff of the library of the Indira Gandhi
Institute for Development Research, Mumbai,
in preparing the index under a project
supported by the RD Tata Trust.
11
COMMENTARY
Burhan Wani and Beyond

Indias Denial, Kashmirs Defiance
Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal
The anger of the Kashmiri

people in the face of the Indian
establishments endeavour to
smother their legitimate political
aspirations is understandable.
Since 2008, attempts by civilians
to organise themselves peacefully
against their oppression or
even for their day-to-day needs,
including water, electricity and
jobs, have been met with brute
force, even murders. Post 2010,
Kashmir has moved in circles
from periods of unrest to calm
and then back to unrest. Burhan
Wanis death was just a small
spark that was needed to break
the pretence of normalcy thrust
on its people. The government
should realise that the stone
pelters on the streets are neither
Pakistanis nor paid agents.
Kashmir, today, needs an
open-minded political
intervention that is unconditional.
This article was earlier posted in the

Web Exclusives section of the EPW website.
Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal (anusaba@gmail.com)
is Executive Editor, Kashmir Times.
12
ashmir Valley is under siege,

turned into a prison inside out
since 8 July when unrest erupted
after the death of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen
Commander Burhan Wani. A local from
Tral, Wani was laid to rest amidst a huge
gathering of anywhere between an estimated one to three lakh people attending his funeral and giving him a heros
farewell. While Burhan Wani was being
buried amidst the eerie calm and conspicuous absence of security men and
police on the streets of this obscure town
of Tral, the rest of the valley was tearing
into chaosprotestors pouring out into
the streets, some marching peacefully,
while others went on a rampage, attacking police stations and security camps
with stones or whatever they could lay
their hands on. The security personnel
and police were quick in jumping to the
occasion with lethal weapons and
vengeance as if a war had been waged
no distinction made between peaceful
protestors and the ones with stones in
hand. The tone of this war was set in the
first three days with 30 civilians shot
dead during street protests. Ever since,
the number has risen to 46 (as on 21 July)
and over 2,200 have been injured with
severe bullet or pellet injuriesa vast
chunk of them physically impaired, and
more than 130 blinded partially or fully.
How does this vicious cycle of violence
and death, triggered by the death of
Burhan Wani (who joined the ranks of
militants six years ago), make its trajectory in Kashmir? What is it that made
him so significant and powerful for the
masses? Was he such a threat to security
that it had become so crucial to kill him?
Were the government and its security
apparatus aware of the repercussions his
death would evoke? There are media
reports to suggest that the pros and cons
were being weighed by security agencies
and the opinion remained divided. Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) parliamentarian Muzaffar Baig has also thrown
his weight behind the argument, maintaining that Chief Minister Mehbooba
Mufti had not endorsed the killing. Such
reports, if true, are a shocking indictment
of the security grid and of the patronising
political and official hierarchy, showing
that the possibility of militants being
killed or arrested depends on the whims
of some, not on the need of the situation.
This reveals the ugly nature of militarisation with the impunity to kill people,
militants or civilians, in custody. Burhan
Wani may have similarly been shot dead
in, what is proudly being claimed by
some army officers, a three to four minute
encounter? The details may have made no
difference to the present situation.
The outrage this time has resurrected
from Burhan Wanis grave, his death,
not why he was killed or how he was
killed. The allegations and theories of a
staged encounter remain inconsequential
for people who poured out on streets. His
death alone gave a boost to the uprising.
It is not just driven by anger and alienation, and not by the usual demands for
justiceit is also driven by passion and
the slogan of azaadi. It is not easy to
decode Burhan Wani, called the poster
boy and an icon for Kashmiri youth. On
the surface he symbolised the gun and
was commander of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen,
which has a particular ideology. His appeal, however, transcends that ideology.
Reports point out that Burhan Wani was
not involved in any killings and there
were no major cases against him but he
was a raging success on social media with
his videos and messages to motivate the
youth to pick up arms. His messages did
not use religion or jehad as a metaphor
but occupation and oppression. But
what made him unique within the Hizbul-Mujahideen was his recent call to not
attack Amarnath yatris or civilian areas
and to welcome Kashmiri Pandits, whom
he described as part of Kashmiri society,
back to their homes.
His appeal is best personified by his
own story. It is now well documented
that Burhan Wani picked up the gun
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
COMMENTARY
after he and his brother were humiliated,

harassed and beaten up by security forces
in 2010. His brothers death by security
forces over a year ago strengthened his
resolve. He operated without fear, moving freely in South Kashmir, mingling
with people and recently circulated videos of him playing cricket. His own personal narrative makes him a metaphor of
both the oppression that Kashmiris have
suffered at the hands of security forces
and the defiance against it. When he is
held in reverence by the masses, he becomes a personification of their collective oppression, of collective anger, of a
collective memory and a history of repression and also their collective dream
of defiance against that oppression. It is
for the same reason that security forces
felt he needed to be annihilated; their
psychological war against the oppressed
was under threat with such walking
symbols of defiance. His killing instead
of becoming a prized catch for security
men has inspired a rebellion.
The Burhan Wani phenomenon cannot
be decoded without a rereading of the
entire history of Kashmir, of which this
man at the centre of focus now, has become just another chapter. One way of
recalling history is to go backwards. In
the post-militancy period of Kashmir,
2008, 2009, 2010 and 2013 are important markers, preceding which there
was a relative period of calm between
2002 and 2007. During this period of
calm, one Prime Minister promised to
resolve the Kashmir dispute within the
paradigm of humanity and democracy,
and another held a series of round table
conferences that culminated in reports
with recommendations of confidencebuilding measures pertaining to human
rights and governance which continue
to gather dust on the shelves of government offices. Both, Atal Bihari Vajpayee
and Manmohan Singh, during their
respective tenures met and held consultations with select leaders of the Hurriyat
who represented the separatist ideology.
But there was no follow-up during these
years that also coincided with the peace
process between India and Pakistan, and
that would inspire hopes in Kashmir,
disenchanted by then by the gun and
militancy, of getting a space on the
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
dialogue table. The political lethargy and

hesitation to do so was making the masses
impatient and restless. Between 2002 and
2007, fed up with the gun of both the
militants and the security forces, Kashmiris reposed faith in a peace process but
patience soon waned when confidencebuilding measures did not translate beyond the symbolic opening of the Line of
Control, and dialogue remained confined to a few photo opportunities between select separatists and two successive prime ministers. Instead of initiating
a meaningful peace process for which
conditions were quite conducive then, the
ruling class went on the binge of celebrating the increased participation of
people in elections and misconstrued it as
a victory of Indian democracy. For Kashmiris, caught in the most militarised
area in the world with a miserable track
record of human rights, this democracy
does not extend beyond the right to vote.
In 2008, when people poured out on
the streets in peaceful assemblies over
the Amarnath land row, the residue of
that growing impatience was there. The
Indian government chose to use jackboots and bullets to fuel that impatience
and pushed the youth to find in stone
pelting their new metaphor of resistance.
In 2009, the campaign for justice in
Shopian rapes and murders, by and
large peaceful, disciplined and methodical unnerved the government. The
latter responded not with compassion
but by using its legal justice system to
subvert the truth through botched-up
investigations and lies, revealing to the
masses the ugly arrogance of brute power
emanating from the corridors of power
in New Delhi and their loyal junior
partners in Jammu and Kashmir. In 2010,
when cries for justice again erupted over
the Machchil fake encounter killings,
the street unrest was met with brute
force resulting in 120 deaths within a
span of five months. The impatience had
fully transformed into anger.
Since 2008, attempts by civilians to
organise themselves peacefully against
their oppression or even for their day-today needs, including water, electricity and
jobs, have been met with brute force, even
murders. Afzal Gurus secretive hanging
was the last nail in the coffin, convincing
vol lI no 32
Kashmiris that peaceful means of resistance and dialogue were not going to
happenthe incident metamorphosed
even the status quo-ists into sceptics, if
not pro-azaadi seekers. Playing against
the backdrop as a force multiplier was a
history of denials, unfulfilled promises,
betrayals, dilution of autonomy and rigged
elections right since 1947. Post Afzal Guru,
the rise of the Hindu fascist powers in
New Delhi, their ideology of communalism and politics of beef and love jehad,
and the historic formation of the PDP
Bharatiya Janata Party alliance in Jammu
and Kashmir were only add-ons.
A Simmering Volcano
Kashmir was already a catastrophe in the
making, ready to explode anytime. Post
2010, Kashmir has moved in circles from
periods of unrest to calm and then back
againevery time, the venom of the unrest
is far more bitter and lethal. The manner
in which jackboots and bullets are employed has been utterly brutal and cruel.
Kashmir moves in vicious circles. Crackdowns, raids and whimsical arrests have
become the norm and crimes like Facebook
terror have been invented to legitimise
such arrests. Separatist leaders continue
to be arrested or are placed under house
arrest almost on a weekly basis, with
hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani having
spent the last six years virtually under
house arrest. Any call for protest, political or otherwise, is sure to be responded
with heavy restrictions, unannounced
curfew imposition and brutal police action.
Locals continue to brave unpredictable
curfews, crackdowns, arrests, torture,
fake encounters and other kinds of influences of heavy militarism. These are indicators of a serious abnormality. The
periods of calm at best reflect fatigue,
which is arrogantly mistaken for normalcy,
and ultimately such misinterpretations
only add to the humiliation of an already
battered population. A simmering volcano
has been breathing in recent years beneath the calm surface of tulip gardens,
robust tourism and smarting business,
punctuated by the few odd militancy related incidents on the rise nonetheless.
All that was needed to inflame Kashmir
was just a small spark, breaking that
false narrative and pretended picture of
13
COMMENTARY
normalcy thrust on its people. Burhan

Wanis death provided that. It could
have been anything else. The security
forces fuelled this fire with brutal methods
of crowd control that find no parallels
anywhere else in the country. The civil
administration went into deep slumber,
occasionally waking up with rhetoric of
appealing people to maintain calm but
gave a free hand to the security men to
kill and maim people, attack ambulances,
raid peoples homes and drag random
men out to be arrested or shot at. In a
land ruled by brute power and perpetuation of lies, lethal weapons are deemed
non-lethal and stones treated as
weapons of mass destruction in official
circles. Such a mindset allows for liberal
doses of brutality and use of disproportionate force against civilians. Everything
follows a familiar pattern. Yet, this summer, Kashmir has made a new statement.
This time it is not about fighting for
justice. It is fighting the mighty Indian
state, and a history of repression which
has turned a 22-year-old boy into a metaphor of rebellion and defiance. Burhan
Wanis videos inspired Kashmiri youth
because they showed that he had freed
himself of fear, and the present uprising
has incorporated the resonance of that
act of breaking away from fear. This uprising is driven not just by the usual
anger and alienation, it is driven also by
the passion to free themselves from constant oppression, a passion for freeing
themselves from Indian control. The
Kashmiri youth of today are politically
awakened and are trying desperately to
fill in the gap left by the disunited and
weakened leadership of separatists, owing
both to Indias systemic process of discrediting them and keeping them out of
circulation, as well as the separatists own
inability of reaching out to the youth.
The Kashmiri youth are driven by ideas
of revolution and liberty that the educated young among this generation have
fed themselves with, through readings
of conflicts around the worldrevolutionaries like Che Guevara and Bhagat
Singh and thinkers like Foucault, Voltaire,
Sartre, Marx, Kant and Rousseau; ideas
that have been craving for space to be
articulated and expressed; ideas that are
waiting to be translated into action.
14
As of today, many young Kashmiris

prefer to romanticise this moment and
choose to call it a revolution, though the
only connector is the slogan of azaadi
which remains ambiguous and unspelt
with revolutionary ideas, passion, anger
and religious symbols providing a medley
of images that project many shades and
dichotomies, if not confusion. Revolution,
if in the making, may still be too premature. However, there are many Kashmiris
who foolishly believe that the time of
reckoning has come and that Azadi may
be just a year away, if not days and
months. Which country has ceded even
half an inch of land only because its people
are out on roads in open rebellion?
Onus on the Government
Amidst this ongoing storm and vicious
cycle of violence and bloodbath, it is difficult to bring sanity to any discourse. But
then, it is important for everyone to learn
larger lessons, to find a way ahead. The
Kashmiri youth are among the worlds
most politically educated ones and are
struggling to reclaim their space. The
Indian government is either blind to that
or is extremely wary of the power of a
politically conscious generation and thus
it constantly pushes them into an alley
where gun and stones become the idioms
of a movement. The more they are crushed,
the greater is their resonance; every death
provides a new stimulus but it pours out
directionless and without a strategy. Given
the rigidity of the government, the space
for peaceful resistance does not visibly
exist. But the situation calls for imagination and foresight of the brainier and
the talented ones among the youth for
use of creative means of expressing their
revolutionary ideas, for a direction and for
the birth of a new leadership that Kashmir
is in need ofnot only to pursue their political dreams and aspirations but also
for saving Kashmiri society from this
brutalisation and dehumanisation by constant exposure to violence. The chances of
this are bleak as long as the government
continues to use its massive apparatus of
security forces to push them to the wall.
The larger onus, therefore, is on the
shoulders of the government. Its constant denial and its unspeakable crimes
against humanity in Kashmir completely
shrink the possibilities of that muchneeded space. It needs to realise and

grapple with the fact that anger of the
people and their political aspirations are
legitimate rights. Their methods of resistance, barring the gun, are not criminal acts. Pakistan and its agencies may
have their own axe to grind in Kashmir
but the stone pelters on the streets are
not Pakistani agents and they are not
paid agents of anybody else. Kashmir,
today, needs a political intervention that
is unconditional, not an offer of dialogue
made under pressure, like the one the
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh made
on the floor of Parliament in a patronising manner, and which was appended
with adjectives like misguided youth.
Any intervention has to be made with an
open mind and not by criminalising the
youth. But first of all, the government
should ensure an end to this ongoing violence by reining in their forces, stopping
the use of so-called non-lethal weapons
which kill and maim, not just due to poor
training but because they are used with
an intention to inflict fatal wounds. Whether
it is pellet guns or tear gas shells, they have
taken a heavy toll on civilians because
security men and police directed them
at crowds and even inside homes, above
the waist. On the day Rajnath Singh assured that security forces have been
asked to maintain restraint, two people
were shot dead, and another one on the
subsequent day. Apart from the falsehood of such assurances, scepticism and
mistrust is kept alive by the memory of
years of repression and brutality, coupled with failed attempts at dialogue
and interlocution in the past. The sincerity of New Delhi can be best measured by ending this bloodbath on streets
and making the atmosphere further
conducive for dialogue by introduction
of genuine confidence-building measures
like demilitarisation, removal of Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA),
and gearing up the legal justice system
to fairly probe cases of violations.
But first of all New Delhi must come
out of the denial mode and change both
its mindset and course on dealing with
the Kashmir conflict. The Indian government has done everything under the sun
to prolong the crisis, feed it through a
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
COMMENTARY
vicious cycle of repression and brutalities

and then concoct more lies to justify the
brutality, thus criminalising the desires
of the masses for liberty, freedom and
equality. This conflict management militarily has cost India huge sums of money,
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
manpower, loss of lives of soldiers who

do not count but for oiling the states
propaganda machinery. Besides, such a
policy of feeding conflicts murders the
basic spirit and inspiration of the Indian
Constitution as the state decides to cling
vol lI no 32
on to troubled territories by butchering

its people and bulldozing the very
essence of Indian democracy and its
cherished values of liberty and equality.
Conflicts have to be resolved politically
and in a civilised manner.
15
COMMENTARY
Bridging the DalitLeft-Liberal

Divide
Language of Recent Student Protests
B Rajeevan
Dalit and Adivasi politics, long

enslaved by liberal civil society,
has found a new voice in the
aftermath of Rohith Vemulas
suicide and subsequent student
protests. The leftliberal
establishments will benefit from
standing together with this
subaltern democracy in resisting
the Hindu right-wing forces.
he political significance of Kanhaiya

Kumars passionate address to the
students of Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU) can be deciphered to
reveal several interesting phenomena in
contemporary Indian politics. It outlined
the political desires of the student communities of India. However, these political desires have ramifications beyond the
interests of students alone. This was a
political manifesto of contemporary
social and political challenges faced by
Indian society.
New Democratic Agitation
This is a transcreation of a Malayalam essay

written by B Rajeevan in Mathrubhoomi on
3 April 2016. Pooja Sagar (poojasagar.invincible@
gmail.com) who teaches at the School of New
Humanities and Design, Srishti Institute of Art,
Design and Technology, Bengaluru, translated
the piece from the original Malayalam.
B Rajeevan (prof.rajeevan@gmail.com) is a
writer and literary critic who writes in
Malayalam and English.
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
Many experts observe that these protests

are reminiscent of the Paris student
struggles of 1968. It not only alludes to
the 1968 uprising but also follows the
revolution in content and essence.
The Paris struggle emerged as the
new face of democratic politics when
the traditional liberal politics and left
counterparts became obsolete by not
acknowledging the political desires of
people. Many contemporary thinkers
also compare it with the French Revolution of 1789, particularly with respect to
the new trajectory it opened to reorient
the world.
The JNU student protests also call for a
new democratic movement across India.
We can hear its resonance in Kanhaiya
Kumars proclamation of freedom. Like
the Paris student protests, his speech
points to slavery of all forms. It includes
demands for the freedom of movement
for both genders, be it day or night, for
vol lI no 32
them to love and live together irrespective of caste, religion and gender thereby
usurping patriarchy and caste segregation.
Another aspect that Kanhaiya Kumar
pointed out in his speech is the spontaneity of these protests. Such a spontaneous, powerful and organic coming together
was something that student outfits of
political parties have rarely witnessed.
Kanhaiya Kumar champions Rohith
Vemula, who committed suicide in Hyderabad, as his hero. Though Rohith Vemulas
suicide is certainly a personal tragedy, it
cannot be ignored as an isolated occurrence. Indeed, it is a political event that
represents the desperation of the downtrodden classes in all realms of life. It is
evocative of the challenges faced by
farmers driven to suicide from incumbent
debts that no longer make news headlines,
of Dalits and tribals facing extinction due
to eviction from their land, daily wage
workers living in miserable slums and
settlements, urban middle class and the
rural poor, and the subaltern classes and
castes. Rohith Vemulas suicide is a cry of
war against the conservative cultural and
political forces that dictate and perpetuate this predicament of Indian society.
Therefore, a revolt that adopts Rohith
Vemula as its leader must be regarded as
a foreshadowing of the new democratic
agitation eagerly awaited by India.
Redefining Political Concepts
The JNU student agitations highlight
the glaring shifts in the conceptual
framework of patriotism and nationalism and the need to redefine them in
the context of current politics. The secular and democratic nationalism that
has evolved by adopting inclusivity and
cultural diversity is not acceptable to the
religious nationalist imagination of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The students are leading a new front in
their battle with the RSS by outlining
several issues of Indian public life, from
15
COMMENTARY
DalitAdivasi minority living conditions

to gender equality.
The question is whether the left
liberal political leadership, that has
declared solidarity with the movement,
will stand by the spontaneous forces of the
democracy of the multitude inspired by
Rohith Vemula. In other words, will the
existing political establishments recognise this new tide in Indian politics and
acknowledge the challenges it raises?
Although the answer to this is uncertain, one can say that the future of these
political establishments depends on the
answer they give themselves.
Global Capitalism and Fascism
Let us examine the premise of this question. The immediate context in which
this question emerges is a changed political scenario where there have been
structural changes in the formation of the
worlds political and economic systems.
We have arrived at a new stage which
began with the end of the Cold War and
the fall of the Soviet Bloc. The current
form of globalised corporate capitalism
is not imperialism in the way Lenin described it, as independent nation states
exporting capital. Global capital broke
all old boundaries to become a worldwide phenomenon.
Indian politics and economy cannot
isolate themselves from this evolution
of structural formation of systems. The
recent changes we observe in Indian politics are evidences that point to this evolution. RSS, which was a negligible entity in Indian politics, which hid or presented itself when convenient, has not
only come to mainstream politics but
has also snatched the authority of the
government.
This is neither a temporary nor unexpected phenomenon. That is to say, it is
not an ideology that surfaced unexpectedly
in recent Indian politics. RSS has become
the handmaiden of the globalised capitalist
empire. The Sangh Parivar is an important
part of contemporary Indian political
reality where economic forces converge
with authoritarian forms of power.
In order to understand this reality,
the reciprocal relationship between antidemocratic establishments such as the
RSS and the system of global capitalist
16
empire, which makes the old liberal

political theories obsolete, has to be explicated. While on the one side, the global
capitalist empire attempts to amalgamate
the world in order to engulf both nature
and life, on the other it facilitates further segregation and conflict.
Today, several countries of the world
are under threat from civil wars and
conflicts. These wars are not interludes
to peace but a constant state of affairs.
Contrary to the past, war is universal and
peace has become an exception. The
crisis or emergency periods were only
intervals when the rights of humans
ceased to matter. Today, with the persistent normalisation of conflict, political
emergencies are part and parcel of daily
life, endless and without respite. Therefore, democracy is essentially ousted
from life.
Democratic rights that support the
existence of the common man and help
sustain life are thus slowly peeled away.
The sovereign states rule is seen to be
irrelevant to the functioning of global
capital.
Micropolitics of RSS
Organisations like the RSS thrive in this
political environment as the perpetrators
of political conflicts. What enables this
is their fundamentally fascist nature,
their micropolitics that can order, contain
and frustrate the politically mobilising
multitudes. This frustration is evident in
the recent struggles for the freedom to
express/practise beliefs and eat what
one desires during the regime of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi.
Power that lies with the government is
decentralised and redistributed amongst
the henchmen of the government who
thwart peoples rights to life. Fascist authoritarians will turn a blind eye towards
any breach of democracy for as long as
they can sustain this faade of democracy
through their puppets. They will give tacit
approvals to anti-democratic activities
for in the destruction of democracy lies
their interest. We saw this fascist indifference in the silence borne by many Sangh
Parivar leaders, including Narendra Modi,
in response to student agitations in
Hyderabad University, JNU and the Film
and Television Institute of India (FTII).
The aggressive growth of the RSS and

Sangh Parivar outfits in the last couple
of decades is due to their mobilisation of
the marginalised sections of society. The
left and the liberal political establishments failed to formulate a formidable
resistance to this move. Instead their
resistance was often superficial which
could not intercept the micropolitics of
the RSS.
Rising Subaltern Force
However, this does not mean that the
Indian masses have completely surrendered to fascism. A new politics is developing in India, a politics that attempts to
rise to a new level. Indian democracy is
a biopolitical force that eludes the definitive explanations of Western mainstream
political theories. Political theoreticians
were baffled by the coexistence of numerous cultures and languages in this
geographic space.
Its success as a nation is not because of
its liberal framework but due to the force
of the numerous struggles waged by
farmers, villagers and the poor for their
freedom. These forces have challenged
assumptions and predictions of political
experts, politicians and the media on
many occasions to deviate the course
of Indian politics. However, it still remains as a subaltern force that has not
been able to establish hegemony, a force
that is subject to domination by mainstream politics.
What we will see in the coming age of
Indian politics is the mutation and maturation of this subaltern force. In contemporary politics, one can discern the
weakening of the national capitalist
regime and its civil and democratic politics crumble under the globalised capitalist empire. This post-civil society context gives rise to the political environment in which the progressive forces of
subaltern democracy can form and
transform themselves.
Dalit PoliticsA New Direction
The student protests from Hyderabad
and Delhi send a strong statement from
the downtrodden minority to Indias contemporary politics. Indian universities
that have been producing elite westernised intellectuals are now resounding
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
COMMENTARY
with the cries of the millions living in our

forests and villages through the voice of
Rohith Vemula. It also marks a new direction in Indian Dalit politics. Dalit identity
politics was so far enslaved by the politics of civil society; Dalits and the Adivasis
were confined to the limitations of the
civil rights proffered by the state.
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
It needs to be seen whether the left

liberal political establishments can carry
forth the revolutionary spark lit by the
students to sustain the new democratic
footsteps. When the politics of the 21st
century is undergoing structural transformations of the kind I have elaborated
above, the leftliberal establishments
vol lI no 32
will benefit from standing together with

the subaltern democracy of the multitudes in its resistance of the RSS. This
will become the highlight of the multitudinous awakening of people of India
against the RSS and the politics that they
will uphold to deliver liberation from
age-old oppressions and exploitations.
17
COMMENTARY
IMFs Autocritique
of Neo-liberalism?
Pritam Singh
In a recent article published in

Finance and Development, an
International Monetary Fund
magazine, three economists
have critically evaluated the
policies the IMF promotes. They
acknowledge evidence that
suggests that economic growth
under neo-liberalism is difficult
to sustain, that it leads to an
increase in inequality, and that
continuing inequality is
harmful for sustainable
(or continuing) growth.
Pritam Singh (psingh@brookes.ac.uk) teaches

economics at Oxford Brookes University,
Oxford, United Kingdom.
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
group of three economists in the

International Monetary Funds
(IMF) research department have
written a joint paper criticising some key
aspects of IMFs creed of neo-liberalism.
Since it is only some aspects that are
criticised, it may be more appropriate to
call it semi-autocritique. However, the
significance of this even less than fullfledged criticism cannot be overstated. It
is as significant as it would be if one day,
a group of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
ideologues were to write in Organiser
that some aspects of Hindutva politics
are harmful for the Hindus, or a group of
Chinese Communist Party leaders were
to write in Peoples Daily that some aspects of the partys programme had
harmed the cause of communism.
The paper titled Neoliberalism: Oversold? by Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani and Davide Furceri in the June 2016
issue of IMFs official magazine Finance
and Development brings out for the first
time the flavour of the internal debates
raging at the IMF, and builds upon many
well-known criticisms of IMFs policy
paradigms of market fundamentalism
that advocates privatisation, deregulation, market liberalisation, and austerity
policies.
The acceptance and use of the word
neo-liberalism by IMF economists is
remarkable in itself. The word has been
used pejoratively mainly by left-wing
critics of the IMFs and World Banks policy
paradigm known as the Washington
Consensus (so named because both
vol lI no 32
organisations are based in Washington

and share the ideological framework of
free-market capitalism). It proves the point
that if a criticism is robust and is carried
on consistently, it may be brushed aside
as uncomfortable in the beginning but it
tends to have a lasting impact in the long
run. The authors of the paper in subtitling it as oversold seem to be aiming
at suggesting that not everything in the
IMF policy package is wrong. The abstract
of the paper sums up their intent of criticising the overselling of the IMF policy
package by referring to only some
aspects of neo-liberalism: Instead of
delivering growth, some neo-liberal policies have increased inequality, in turn,
jeopardising durable expansion (Ostry
et al 2016: 1).
The paper praises the role of increased
international trade in reducing poverty
and that of increased foreign direct investment in increasing competition and
efficiency. The paper then focuses on
criticism of neo-liberal agenda on three
aspects. One, that the evidence from a
broad range of countries suggests that the
claim that neo-liberalism always contributes to economic growth is difficult
to sustain; two, that even if growth takes
place in some countries, it leads to
increase in inequality; and third, that continuing inequality is harmful for sustainable (or more appropriately continuing)
growth. All these three self-criticisms
from the horses mouth, so to say, deal a
severe blow to the apologists of the neoliberal agenda.
On the face of it, it might seem like a
contradiction that if one aspect of the
neo-liberal policy framework, namely,
increased international trade, reduces
poverty, how can another aspect, namely
of economic growth, lead to increase
in inequality? The confusion over this
apparent contradictionreduction in
17
COMMENTARY
absolute level of poverty coexisting with

increased inequalitysometimes reaches
the top echelons of the decision-making
process. A few years ago, the then
president of the World Bank James
Wolfensohn came for a lecture to Oxford
where anti-World Bank students staged
a protest against his visit and lecture.
One brave young woman even managed
to enter the lecture hall in disguise and
harangued him by saying that World
Bank was contributing to Third World
poverty, an accusation that he stubbornly
denied. During the question time, I asked
him that I would be willing to accept his
claim that World Bank and IMF might be
genuinely interested in reducing poverty,
but that does not invalidate the argument that their policy framework contributes to increase in inequality. My
acceptance of the World Bank/IMF claim
in being genuinely interested in poverty
reduction was based on the understanding that reduction in poverty by expanding market for capitalism is in the interests of capitalism.
In his reply, Wolfensohn said that he
was baffled by my argument that reduction in poverty does not necessarily lead
to reduction in inequality and suggested
that we resolve this matter after the
lecture. During the private conversation
later on, I clarified that if while absolute
poverty is being reduced, but the income
of the rich is going up at a rate higher
than the rate in reduction of poverty,
both the phenomenon, that is, poverty
reduction and increase in inequality can
coexist. He promised to do more thinking on this and the matter was left at
that. It seems that this new confession
by IMF economists over the kind of growth
promoted by neo-liberalism promotes
inequality, is a step forward in recognising the dialectic of modern capitalism
where massive increases in the income
of the richest strata of society coexists
with some modest improvements in the
living conditions of the very poor.
That the state needs to intervene
through welfare measures to reduce poverty and inequality is also conceded in
the IMF paper. Also, unrestrained privatisation promoted by neo-liberalism is
criticised and austerity policies pursued by
many governments both in the countries
18
of advanced and developing capitalism

are considered counterproductive. The
counterproductive role of austerity and
increasing inequality is recognised purely
from the angle of their adverse consequences for economic growth. That having more equal societies might be intrinsically more desirable from a moral
point of view is of no concern to the IMF
economists. One might conjecture that if
empirical evidence were to show that
inequalities of various kinds, but especially income and wealth inequalities,
were actually conducive to economic
growth, the worshippers of economic
growth might even argue in favour of
increasing inequalities. Additionally, there
is no evidence of any rethinking that in
this era of global climate change and
global warming, there are ecological
limits to economic growth if humanity
has to be saved.
The positive role of the state in putting
restrictions on the easy flow of short-term
capital, that is, capital account liberalisation has been generously appreciated
in the paper as contributing to reduction
in economic volatility and instability.
The experience of China and India in
experiencing less shocks than the United
States and European economies during
the financial crisis of 2008 onwards seems
to have been recognised as a positive
outcome of the limited capital account
liberalisation in China and India.
Some Keynesians might jump at this

semi-official IMF critique of austerity
policies as harming economic growth as
a confirmation of their criticism of neoclassical economics and an indirect
endorsement of their stimulus-oriented
policies for sustaining economic growth.
However, any such celebration by ecologically-uninformed Keynesians would
be as misguided as the uncritical approach to economic growth by the ecologically-uninformed neo-liberal supporters of austerity (for a further elaboration of this argument, see Singh and
Bhusal 2014). A glaring weakness of this
otherwise praiseworthy IMF paper on
many points remains the absence of recognition of the ecological implication of
capitalist economic growth. Another set
of sustained criticisms is perhaps necessary to make the IMF policymakers or
other uncritical supporters of economic
growth aware of the historic need to
embed ecological sustainability into any
model of economic growth if humanity
has to avoid the threatening implications of global warming to our planet.
References
Ostry, Jonathan D, Prakash Loungani and Davide
Furceri (2016): Neoliberalism: Oversold?
Finance and Development, June, Vol 53, No 2,
pp 3841.
Singh, Pritam and Lok Nath Bhusal (2014): Austerity,
Welfare State and Eco-socialism with Special
Reference to the United Kingdom, Economic &
Political Weekly, Vol 49, No 39, pp 11118.
Oral History Archives

On behalf of EPW, the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Design, Bengaluru,
has put together extended interviews of 30 individuals associated with Economic
Weekly and EPW.
These are interviews with present and former staff, readers, writers and trustees, all
closely associated with the journal.
The interviews cover both the EW and EPW years, some are of the 1950s, others the
1960s and some even later. Each interview lasts for at least an hour and a few are
multi-session interviews.
The interviews maintained in audio files (with transcripts) are available at the EPW
offices in Mumbai for consultation by researchers.
Individuals interested in researching those times and the history of EW/EPW may write
to edit@epw.in to explore how the files may be heard and used.
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
COMMENTARY
Afzal Gurus Case

The Undiscussed Aspect
Anurag Bhaskar
The Supreme Court is often

regarded as infallible. But judges
are human and the Courts
verdicts should not be immune to
criticism, particularly when they
pertain to the death penalty. The
apex courts verdict which
sentenced Afzal Guru to death
may not stand ground if examined
in the light of the treatment of
evidence in a later case.
n February this year, there was outrage when some students of the
Jawaharlal Nehru University organised a protest to mark three years of the
hanging of Afzal Gurusentenced in
the Parliament attack case (State (NCT of
Delhi) v Navjot Sandhu 2005). The students were branded anti-national and
denounced for defaming the Supreme
Court. Anti-India slogans are definitely
uncalled for, and observing Republic Day
as Black Day and celebrating Gandhis
assassination (Hindu 2016a and 2016b)
should be criticised.
Having said that, there is nothing
wrong in criticising the Supreme Court.
There are several judgments that need
to be criticised. One such disappointing
verdict of the Court was in the ADM
Jabalpur case, AIR 1976, SC 1207, where
it ruled that in Emergency
No person has any locus to move any writ
petition under Article 226 before a high
court for habeas corpus or any other writ or
order or direction to challenge the legality of
an order of detention on the ground that the
order is not under or in compliance with the
Act or is illegal or is vitiated by mala fides
factual or legal or is based on extraneous
considerations.
The Supreme Courts latest disappointing verdict was in the Rajbala v State of
Haryana, AIR 2016, SC 33 case. The judgment upheld the constitutional validity
of Haryana Panchayati Raj Amendment
Act, 2015 debarring illiterate people,
those with unpaid dues to electricity
boards or unpaid loans to state cooperative banks, from contesting elections.
Matter of Life
Anurag Bhaskar (anuragbhaskar007@gmail.

com) is a student at Dr Ram Manohar Lohiya
National Law University, Lucknow.
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
Scrutiny, and criticism, if necessary, becomes all the more imperative in matters related to death penalty. Life once
taken cannot be given back. The apex
court has, in fact, admitted to committing mistakes. Examples of such admission include the UP Lokayukta appointment case (Indian Express 2016) and
vol lI no 32
Arunachal Pradeshs ongoing constitutional crisis (FirstPost 2016). But of what

use is an admission of error when it
comes in cases of death penalty?
In 2012, 14 retired judges wrote to the
President, pointing out that since 1996
the Supreme Court had erred in giving
death penalty to 15 people, two of whom
were hanged. In 2009, the Supreme
Court itself admitted that it had wrongly
sentenced 15 people to death in the
past 15 years (Frontine 2015). The Court
made this admission in the Santosh
Kumar Shantibhushan Bariyar v State of
Maharashtra (2009), 6 SCC 498, in which
the following judgments were held to be
per incuriam (out of error or ignorance):
(i) Ravji @ Ram Chandra v State of
Raja sthan (1996), 2 SCC 175
(ii) Shivaji @ Dadya Shankar Alhat v
State of Maharashtra (2008), 15 SCC 269
(iii) Mohan Anna Chavan v State of
Maharashtra (2008), 11 SCC 113
(iv) Bantu v State of Uttar Pradesh
(2008), 11 SCC 113
(v) Surja Ram v State of Rajasthan (1997),
CriLJ 51
(vi) Dayanidhi Bisnoi v State of Orissa
(2003), CriLJ 3697
(vii) State of Uttar Pradesh v Sattan
(2009), 4 SCC 736.
These judgments were contrary to the
binding rarest of rare doctrine, propounded in the Constitution Bench judgment in Bachan Singh v State of Punjab
(1980), 2 SCC 684.
Prabha Sridevan, former judge, Madras
High Court, said, There can be no
graver miscarriage of justice than this.
The Supreme Courts admission of error
was too late for them. They were
hanged because of erroneous judgments
(Telegraph 2015).
Parliament Attack Case
The apex courts verdict in the Parliament attack case is often taken as the
ultimate affirmation of Gurus culpability.
However, Justice Ajit Prakash Shah,
former Delhi High Court Judge and
former Chairman of the Law Commission of India, regards the sudden and
secretive hanging of Guru as a mistake
by the government. He has described
the verdict as completely political
(Indian Express 2015).
19
COMMENTARY
In the Parliament attack case, the

Supreme Court bench of the then Justices
P Venkatarami Reddy and P P Naolekar
had rejected senior counsel Ram Jethmalanis plea that Guru could not be
convicted as there was no direct evidence. But the verdict did acknowledge
that the evidence was circumstantial.
One of the main circumstantial evidence
on the basis of which Guru was held
guilty was frequent telephonic contacts
between Guru and Mohammed, one of
the terrorists killed during the attack.
The Court had rejected the following
contention regarding the admissibility
of electronic telephonic records:
It is contended by Mr Shanti Bhushan, appearing for the accused Shaukat that the
call records relating to the cellular phone
No 919811573506 said to have been used
by Shaukat have not been proved as per
the requirements of law and their genuineness is in doubt. The call records relating to
the other mobile numbers related to Gilani
and Afzal are also subjected to the same
criticism. It is the contention of the learned
counsel that in the absence of a certificate
issued under sub-Section (2) of Section 65B
of the Evidence Act with the particulars enumerated in clauses (a) to (e), the information
contained in the electronic record cannot be
adduced in evidence and in any case in the
absence of examination of a competent witness acquainted with the functioning of the
computers during the relevant time and the
manner in which the printouts were taken,
even secondary evidence under Section 63 is
not admissible
Irrespective of the compliance of the requirements of Section 65B which is a provision dealing with admissibility of electronic
records, there is no bar to adducing secondary evidence under the other provisions of
the Evidence Act, namely Sections 63 and
65. It may be that the certificate containing the details in sub-Section (4) of Section
65B is not filed in the instant case, but that
does not mean that secondary evidence cannot be given even if the law permits such evidence to be given in the circumstances mentioned in the relevant provisions, namely Sections 63 and 65.
However, the Supreme Courts ruling

two years later in the Anvar P V v P K
Basheer (2014), 10 SCC 473 made such
circumstantial evidence inadmissible.
The full bench comprising Chief Justice
R M Lodha, Justices Kurian Joseph and
Rohinton F Nariman, overruled the
Parliament attack verdict and reinterpreted the application of Sections 63, 65,
20
and 65B of the Indian Evidence Act,

1872. To quote the judgment:
The evidence relating to electronic record,
as noted herein before, being a special provision, the general law on secondary evidence
under Section 63 read with Section 65 of the
Evidence Act shall yield to the same. Generalia special bus non derogant, special law
will always prevail over the general law. It
appears, the court omitted to take note of
Sections 59 and 65A dealing with the admissibility of electronic record. Sections 63 and
65 have no application in the case of secondary evidence by way of electronic record; the
same is wholly governed by Sections 65A
and 65B. To that extent, the statement of law
on admissibility of secondary evidence pertaining to electronic record, as stated by this
Court in Navjot Sandhu case (supra), does not
lay down the correct legal position. It requires to be overruled and we do so. An electronic record by way of secondary evidence
shall not be admitted in evidence unless the
requirements under Section 65B are satisfied.
In the Parliament attack case, while

considering the printouts of the computerised records of the calls pertaining to
the cell phones, the Court had ruled that
even if the certificate containing the
details as required under Section 65B
was not filed in the case in question, the
evidence could be adduced if the law
permits such evidence to be given under
other relevant provisions, namely, Sections 63 and 65. This was a mistake and
the Court corrected it in the verdict on
the Anvar P V case. But it is too late now.
Had the judgment in the Anvar P V case
been delivered before the hanging of
Guru, his fate might have been different.
He may not have been hanged as the
Court was clear that the Parliament
attack case was decided on the basis of
inadmissible evidences and overruled
the decision to that extent. There was a
technical error in the judgment.
Question of Nationalism
structurally supreme. His contention

was that though the concept of judicial
infallibility is valid, but a legal pronouncement need not always be the last
word on a given subject (Hindu 2012).
The judiciary is prone to making mistakes. It, after all, consists of human beings.
It is not infallible. Therefore, the ordinary
man has a right to disagree with the Supreme Court, the importance of which
can be reflected by Justice Khannas dissenting opinion in the ADM Jabalpur case:
A dissent in a court of last is an appeal to the
brooding spirit of the law to the intelligence of a
future day, when a later decision may possibly
correct the error into which the dissenting
judge believes the court to have been betrayed.
References
FirstPost (2016): Arunachal Pradesh Crisis: Supreme
Court Recalls Notice Issued to Governor Jyoti
Prasad Rajkhowa, 1 February, http://www.
firstpost.com/politics/arunachal-pradesh-crisissupreme-court-recalls-notice-issued-to-governor-jyoti-prasad-rajkhowa-2606396.html.
Frontline (2015): A Case against the Death Penalty,
6 February, http://www.frontline.in/social-issues/
general-issues/a-case-against-the-death-penalty/article6805120.ece# test.
Hindu (2012): River-engineering and the Courts,
13 March, http://www.thehindu.com/ opinion/op-ed/riverengineering-and-the-courts/article2985193.ece.
(2016a): Hindu Group Observes Republic Day
as Black Day, Hindu, 28 January, http://www.
thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/hindu-group-observes-republic-day-as-black-day/
article8154921.ece.
(2016b): Hindu Mahasabha Celebrates Gandhijis Death Anniversary, 30 January, http://
www.thehindu.com/news/national/otherstates/hindu-mahasabha-celebrates-gandhijisdeath-anniversary/article 8172086.ece.
Indian Express (2015): Afzal Guru, Yakub Memon
Hangings Send Signals of Weak Government:
Justice Ajit Prakash Shah, 5 September, http://
indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/
afzal-guru-yakub-memon-hangings-send-signals-of-weak-govt-justice-ajit-prakash-shah/.
(2016): Uttar Pradesh: SC Recalls Its Order,
Appoints New Lokayukta, 29 January, http://
indianexpress.com/article/india/india-newsindia/supreme-court-recalls-order-appointingformer-judge-virendra-singh-as-up-lokayukta/
Telegraph (2015): You Were Wrong, My Lords,
2 August, http://www.telegraphindia.com/
1150802/jsp/7days/story_34917.jsp.
This aspect has not been discussed when

it comes to the debates on death penalty,
especially in the Parliament attack case.
The omission has perhaps to do with
nationalism. It is dangerous when nationalism overrides rationality. One of the
best judges of the apex court, Justice
V R Krishna Iyer once observed, What
the Supreme Court decides is final not
because it is infallible; it is infallible
because it is constitutionally final and
AUGUST 6, 2016
(All accessed on 10 June 2016.)
Attention ContributorsI
The EPW has been sending reprints of articles to
authors. We are now discontinuing the practice.
We will consider sending a limited number of
reprints to authors located in India when they
make specific requests to us.
We will, of course, continue to send a copy of the
print edition to all our authors whose contributions
appear in that particular edition.
vol lI no 32
EPW
COMMENTARY
Urban Governance
and Right to the City
Anil Kumar Vaddiraju
The right to the city means more

than just access to its resources. It
suggests that people, particularly
the marginalised, not only have
the right to inhabit a city, but
also the right to design, reshape
and transform it. An analysis of
urban governance in our country
keeping in mind this overlooked
human right.
Anil Kumar Vaddiraju (anilvaddiraju@

gmail.com) is with the Centre for Political
Institutions, Governance and Development,
Institute for Social and Economic Change,
Bengaluru.
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
Every city is a city of the rich and city of

the poor.
Plato
rban governance is a relatively

neglected area in governance
studies in India. From the point
of view of citizenship and rights, it is
even less studied. In the following article, we discuss the urban governance issues from the point of view of the concept of the right to the city. In the Indian
context, there is some urgency to emphasise this concept, as in many states of
the country, the constitutional provisions in regard to urban governance
have been inadequately implemented.
The right to the city means provision of
basic shelter, drinking water, sanitation,
and myriad other basic urban facilities,
in addition to the larger need to transform the city into a citizen-friendly
space. In urban studies, governance has
received the least importance, and the
existing discussion is limited to governance in metropolitan cities. But there is
need to apply the right to the city concept to cities at all levels. This article
attempts to elucidate this concept and
highlight its significance in context of
Indias bustling and burgeoning cities.
According to the 2011 Census, there are
377 million urban people in India, who
account for 31.6% of the countrys total
population (Shaw 2012). Indias 8,000
cities together contributed 62%63% of
the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007,
and this is expected to go up to 75% by 2021
(Zerah et al 2011). In 2011, the number of
cities with a population of one million or
more was 53, and people living in them
accounted for 43% of the total urban population of India. With more and more
people migrating to urban areas, questions
are being raised regarding the position of
the marginalised and their right to the city.
Urbanisation in the country so far has
largely been exclusionary (Kundu 2003,
2011), where poor migrants from the
vol lI no 32
rural areas are less welcome, where cities have been captured by the local elite,
and urban development is skewed towards big cities and mega urban agglomerations. Another important aspect
of this urbanisation has been the poor
implementation of urban decentralisation laws. Cities are crowded with migrants, resulting in informal economies,
crime, and congestion, causing cities to
become dysfunctional.
The elite capture results in the gentrification of cities, and urban governance
and policies reflect only the concerns of
the gentrified part of the city (Shaw
2012). When urbanisation is skewed
towards big cities, the small cities and
towns suffer serious neglect. The urbanisation process in India is largely governed
by the 74th Constitutional Amendment
Act, enacted in 1993. However, most
studies on urban governance have indicated that the act is largely ignored in
practice. This is due to the reluctance of
state governments to implement the law,
and as a consequence, urban planning,
participation, and urban citizenship
have been adversely affected.
The non-implementation of 74th Constitutional Amendment Act is particularly
glaring in small districts and lower tier
cities, where planning and governance is
largely bureaucratic and oriented towards
the commissioner system (Vaddiraju
2013; Zerah et al 2011). Elected representatives are largely dominated by the
bureaucracy. In larger cities, the problem
is that of coordination between multiple
governance bodies and absence of a
metropolitan planning committee (MPC)
in addition to the inadequate implementation of community participation law
(CPL). In both cases, the practice of urban citizenship is largely nominal and
limited to voting and at best to juridical
litigation. Participation of citizens, particularly in local and urban governance
is minimal.
A Moral Right
In the above context, a discussion on the
concept of right to the city makes
eminent sense. The concept was forwarded by the French social scientist
Henri Lefebvre in his book Right to
the City, written in 1968. The concept
21
COMMENTARY
is used in the context of practice of

urban citizenship, governance, and
social and political participation. The
right to the city is a moral right and has
not yet become a juridical right. The
concept provides us a lens to view urban
governance problems from a fresh perspective. It means the right to reclaim
public spaces, public participation in
the city, and, more importantly, right to
housing and basic amenities. The right
signals a fundamentally different approach to the city which is bottoms-up
and citizen-centric.
It draws attention to the private and
corporate takeover of public spaces. The
right also refers to the fact that not only
gentrification, but informalisation of the
city poor and immigrants also need to
be taken seriously. It is both a collective
right and an individual right and focuses
on enhanced participation in the existing governance structures and expands
the scope of democratic participation
and deliberation. The right to the city
emphasises on the right to habitation
and housing, especially in the face of

top-down bureaucratic beautification of
cities, which often leads to the dismantling of slums and informal habitation
settlements.
In the current context, an excessive
focus on managerial governance and
technocratic governance and top-down
approaches make the right to the city
difficult to realise. Further, non-implementation of existing laws for the practice of citizenship such as the creation of
ward sabha, district planning committee
(DPC), and MPC, and poor implementation of CPL also makes the right to the
city difficult to realise. Another major
threat to this right is the emergence of
land mafias and builder lobbies, who
are often patronised by politicians, in all
big and even in smaller cities,
Rights of the Marginalised
What are the implications of the right to
the city concept for urban governance?
The right calls for a renewed focus on
the rights of the marginalised in the city
and on the expansion of boundaries of

urban local governance and citizenship
practices. It lays stress on the provision
of affordable public housing and basic
amenities in the cities such as drinking
water, garbage removal, and sanitation.
It requires a better implementation of
existing laws to improve urban governance via enhanced public participation
extending beyond periodic voting, which
the urban middle class and upper classes
often do not do. The first step towards
realisation of the right to the city is proper and effective implementation of the
provisions of 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, which the civil society is anyway
active in demanding. It implies devolving all resources, personnel and functions to elected local bodies, going
beyond top-down governance.
Over and above, the right to city
means nothing less than individual and
collective determination of the present
and future of the city and its spaces. In
that it implies the transformation of
formal, legal citizenship into substantive
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vol lI no 32
EPW
COMMENTARY
citizenship and also extends the boundaries of formal citizenship in the city to
new entrants. In order to achieve this
transformation, some specific issues need
to be considered. These are democratic
urban governance; womens right to the
city and citizenship; caste and class;
minorities; urban citizenship; migrants
right to the city; urban spatial exclusion;
urban land rights; forced eviction of
slums; water and sanitation; urban healthcare; and urban transportation. Hence,
the right to the city goes beyond the
implementation of 74th Constitutional
Amendment Act.
Most of the above listed issues have a
deep bearing on the governance of cities.
Some of the issues involved are structural such as class and caste divisions,
gated communities in cities and so on.
Some of the issues are social, but politically sensitive such as religious diversity and issues of minority ghettoisation
and increasing incidences of communal
rioting in cities. Some of the issues require
social, attitudinal and policy changes,
for example, gender, wherein the city is
seen as city of men and not particularly friendly towards women. Women
have unequal access to city spaces and
their safety is a major concern.
Some Recommendations
For people, particularly the marginalised, to enjoy the right to the city some
steps need to be taken. Urban planning
should incorporate mixed land use,
promote hawkers and night markets,
improve infrastructural facilities such as
accessibility to public toilets, street lighting and public transport in cities. In terms
of urban governance, more womenfriendly police or more policewomen on
the streets are required. Public spaces
such as parks should be made safe for
women. Also, women need to play a
greater role in urban planning and
development.
Inadequate and poor quality of water
supply is a huge issue. Women bear most
of the burden of inadequate water provision. The right to clean drinking water is
a universal human right recognised by
the United Nations and India is signatory
to this. The problem of poor sanitation
is another major issue and should be
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
addressed on a priority basis. Only 63%

of urban population have access to sanitation facilities. Sanitation is closely
linked to hygiene, public and individual
health, and gender issues. Adequate provision of these two facilities is a major
governance challenge
The National Urban Transport Policy,
2006 seeks to make cities more pedestrian and bicycle friendly. But the policy
has not been implemented in its true
spirit. The focus on urban transportation presently is on improving mobility
of residents and not their accessibility to
public transport facilities. When mobility
is prioritised over accessibility, the transport needs of private and upper and
upper-middle class people takes precedence over transport needs of the poor.
The poor and marginalised who live in
the city often do not own private vehicles and are excluded from the urban
transport policy. The widening of roads
and the shrinking of footpaths make
way for more and more private automobiles, thereby reducing the city space for
pedestrians and bicyclists.
The introduction of metro rail systems
in major cities across the country is not
seen as a viable measure by the transport experts to meet the growing need
for public transport. The scholars prefer
the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS),
which is surface-based and can reach
poorer as well as richer areas of the city.
Overall, the metro is seen as one single
fallacious solution to the diverse transport needs of people. The future challenge lies in making public transport
facilities accessible to all. But the experience so far has been to prioritise transport requirements of the rich over those
of the poor.
Internal migration in India for employment purposes, often from poor rural
areas to urban areas, is said to be around
52% of the total migration. Migrants
right to the city is important in the sense
that they actually benefit the city by
bringing in new skills, cheap labour and
a willingness to work at low wages. Migrants in most cities are often the ones
who subsidise the rich in their lifestyles.
Their right to the city is particularly
important because they are very vulnerable and subject to ethnic and linguistic
vol lI no 32
prejudice, discrimination by the law

enforcement agencies, and often to violence. They have a constitutional right to
settle anywhere in the country and the
entitlement to the city is part of this
right. Thus both poor and not so poor
migrants benefit the city as much as they
benefit from the city. Therefore, the
right of migrant to the city should be
taken seriously in city planning, policy
as well as governance.
Thus, as can be seen from the foregoing discussion, the right to the city goes
beyond formal issues of governance. The
right to the city concept in fact raises
questions as to how the urban governance and planning policies are framed,
who is framing them, and what is the role
of the poor, marginalised, and excluded
in the framing of the above. Though the
concept goes beyond the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, the act is the
first step towards ensuring participation
of the people. In Lefebvres words, the
right to the city means transforming
the city spaces according to ones hearts
desire, nothing less. The rich and powerful succeed in achieving this. But what
about the poor?
References
Kundu, Amitabh (2003): Urbanisation and Urban
Governance: Search for Perspective beyond
Neo-liberalism, Economic & Political Weekly,
Vol 38, No 29, pp 307987.
(2011): Politics and Economics of Urban
Growth, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 46,
No 20, pp 1012.
Shaw, Annapurna (2012): Indian Cities, New Delhi:
OUP.
Vaddiraju, Anil Kumar (2013): A Tale of Many Cities: Governance and Planning in Karnataka,
Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 48, No 2.
Zerah, Marie-Helene, Veronique Dupont, Stephanie Tawa Lama Rewal (eds) (2011): Urban Policies and the Right to the City in India: Rights,
Responsibilities and Citizenship, New Delhi:
Centre for Human Sciences and UNESCO.
Obituaries
The EPW has started a section, Obituaries,
which will note the passing of teachers
and researchers in the social sciences and
humanities, as also in other areas of work.
The announcements will be in the nature of
short notices about the work and careers of
those who have passed away.
Readers could send brief obituaries to
edit@epw.in.
23
Taking Free Speech Seriously

Vikram Raghavan
ne July evening in 1954, as Ram

Manohar Lohia sat down to eat
in Farrukhabad, there was a
knock on his door. The state police were
outside to arrest him. Earlier that day,
the socialist leader had made two fiery
speeches sharply criticising Govind Ballabh Pants administration for increasing
irrigation rates in Uttar Pradesh. He
urged farmers to refuse to pay the higher rates. An economist by training, civil
disobedience was not new to Lohia. He
had been jailed several times for it during the national movement.
Lohias campaign, the Nehar Rate
agitation, rapidly spread across the state.
Among its foot soldiers was a teenager
called Mulayam Singh Yadav (Jaffrelot
2003: 368). Lohia was charged under a
state law, which made it an offence to
instigate others to avoid paying taxes.
The law had been enacted in 1932 to
curb civil disobedience-type agitations
during the national movement. Like other
repressive colonial statutes, it remained
even after independence.
Lohia argued that his detention under
the statute violated his freedom of speech
under the Constitution. Accepting Lohias
argument, the Allahabad High Court
ordered his release. The state government complied, but promptly appealed
to the Supreme Court. When the case
was finally heard and decided, Justice
Subba Rao ruled that the law was an
impermissible restriction on free speech.
It bore no proximate relation with its
objective of maintaining public order
(Superintendent, Central Prison, Fatehgarh v Ram Manohar Lohia 1960).
Lohias case redefined our constitutional understanding of free speech. It is
one of many decisions that Gautam Bhatia examines in his enviably erudite
book, Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free
Speech under the Indian Constitution.
The books short title is taken from a
judgment of the European Court of
24
book reviewS
Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under
the Indian Constitution by Gautam Bhatia, Oxford
University Press, 2016; pp 392, `653 (hardcover).
Human Rights. That judgment cautions

that free expression extends to ideas
that offend, shock, or disturb just as it
protects those that are pleasant or favourably received. The books hardbound
edition runs into almost 400 pages. It is
typeset in a bold and easy-on-the-eye
font. It is wrapped in a simple, yet evocative, brown and maroon dust jacket.
On its back cover, the book reproduces Article 19(1) of the Constitution. That
article sets out an Indian citizens six
fundamental freedoms. At the top of this
list in clause (a) is the freedom of speech
and expression. Like most other fundamental rights, this freedom is not absolute. Article 19(2) authorises the State
to impose reasonable restrictions on the
freedom under several grounds: Indias
sovereignty and integrity, state security,
foreign relations, public order, decency,
morality, contempt of court, defamation,
and incitement to an offence.
Indian Roots of Free Speech
Offend, Shock, or Disturb covers a wide
panorama. It opens with an overview of
major legal and philosophical theories
about free speech. It then surveys the
constitutional framework under Articles
19(1)(a) and 19(2) and their political and
legislative history. It closely and critically examines how Indian courts have
scrutinised free-speech restrictions on
various grounds: public order, sedition,
morality, hate speech, film censorship,
defamation, and contempt of court. The
book also tackles frontier topics like net
neutrality and copyright. Towards the
end is a thoughtful chapter on the relationship between speech and economic
power. It concludes with some general
reflections and a just-in-time postscript

about the Supreme Courts judgment
striking down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act.
As Bhatia explains, the normative roots
of free speech in India can be traced to
Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who petitioned
the Supreme Court at Fort William against
restrictions on the native press. The
1895 Constitution of India Bill proposed
giving every citizen the freedom to express oneself through words or writing. As the national movement gathered
steam, prosecutions for sedition rose. In
response, across the country, free speech
became a rallying cry for agitators. At
one point, Gandhi suggested that free
speech and association were among his
core political demands.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, the
cause of free speech was championed
through political pamphlets, legal monographs, and Congress party resolutions.
Consequently, when the Constituent
Assembly opened in 1946, it was a foregone conclusion that free speech would
be made a fundamental right. What no
one expected, however, were deep divisions over what restrictions could be
imposed on that right.
The matter was first discussed at the
assemblys Fundamental Rights SubCommittee. Alladi Krishnaswamy Ayyar
warned that unfettered free speech
could endanger the new republics very
foundations. Restrictions were necessary,
he argued, to preserve public order, safety, and security. The debate continued
into the assemblys plenary. On the floor,
many members opposed the long list of
proposed restrictions (Rao 1968: 221).
But resistance gradually waned as partitions bloodbath unfolded. Ultimately,
members voted for the restrictive grounds
in Article 19(2) reflecting the needs of
the time (Austin 1966: 223).
After the first Republic Day, the assembly became Indias provisional Parliament. In that avatar, the house returned
to its free-speech debates in 1951 when it
considered the First Amendment to the
Constitution. That amendment further
strengthened the governments ability to
restrict free speech. But its wording gave
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
BOOK REVIEW
courts the ability to review whether the restrictions imposed were, in fact, reasonable.
Unlike its American counterpart, which
waited more than hundred years for its
first free-speech case, the Indian
Supreme Court handled such matters
right off the bat. The Courts early decisions revealed significant differences
among the justices over the meaning of
Article 19(1)(a). These differences led to
sharply diverging outcomes that Bhatia
diligently describes in his book. He
points out how, in case after case, judges
either misread or simply ignored relevant precedent. Their judgments included astonishingly contradictory or unsatisfactory reasoning.
Yet, the judiciarys free-speech record
has not been entirely dismal. Bhatia
highlights several progressive judgments
including Rangarajan v Jagjivan Ram
(1989). Rangarajan arose from Tamil
Nadus ban on Ore Oru Gramathile, a
film that mocked the states reservation
policy. Defending the ban, the state government argued that screening the movie
would cause law-and-order problems.
The Court decisively rejected this argument. It held that the state could not restrict speech unless there was a direct
and proximate danger. A restriction could
only be justified to prevent incendiary
expression whose impact is like a spark
in a powder keg.
Bhatia hails Rangarajans holding. At
the same time, he severely criticises the
judgments gratuitous observations extolling moral values and its odd defence
of pre-publication censorship. Bhatia reviews other leading free-speech cases in
similar fashion. He does not hesitate to
point out an opinions noteworthy qualities even as he criticises its flaws and
inconsistencies.
Theoretical Underpinnings
Central to the book appears to be Bhatias claim that judges decide cases under a variety of theoretical frameworks
even if they were not aware of them. If I
understand him correctly, Bhatia seems
to be arguing that every major judgment
can be explained through a specific legal
or philosophical theory. But why does
this matter? Well, Bhatia submits that
theory can help us better understand a
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
judgments foundations and critique the

judiciarys overall record.
Successfully identifying a decisions
theoretical underpinnings can be no
easy task given that Indian judgments
are notoriously verbose and densely
worded. Judicial opinions frequently include rhetorical flourishes that can befuddle the most dedicated reader. To
take but one example, the recent judgment upholding defamation prosecutions under the Indian Penal Code (Subramanian Swamy v Union of India, WP(C)
No 184 of 2014, 13 May 2016). The
Courts opinion is littered with catastrophic syntax and overblown, sometimes laughable vocabulary (Varadarajan: 2016). Trying to decipher how this
decision fits this or that legal theory is
likely to be a rather trying exercise.
Undaunted by this challenge, Bhatia
uses a leading case, Sakal Papers v Union
of India (1962), to illustrate the role that
theory can play in the process of an
actual judgment (p 22). In that decision,
the Court struck down regulations on
newspaper prices for violating the freedom of the press. The judgment pointedly emphasised free speechs importance
in sustaining Indian democracy. Bhatia
reasons that in the Sakal papers case:
The Court invoked democracy, whichcruciallyit located within the Constitution.
But it invoked a particularly cribbed Meiklejohnian version of democracy that is insensitive to prior distributional arrangements, as
opposed to its potentially richer Dworkinian or Postian versions...What if the Court,
instead, had chosen a Dworkinian or deliberative vision of democracy? (p 22).
I have no quarrel with this particular

line of inquiry. My point, however, is
that it can lead to traps of its own making.
One hazard is immediately evident from
the passage quoted. Bhatia believes that
Sakal papers case adheres to the philosopher, Alexander Meiklejohns position on
free speech. He contends that the judgment could have been more optimally
crafted by relying on Ronald Dworkin or
Robert Posts theories of free speech.
Now, the text of the Sakal papers case
opinion does not reveal whether the
judges may have been familiar with
Meiklejohns work. But it is highly unlikely that the bench was aware of either
Dworkin or Posts theoretical justifications
vol lI no 32
for free speech. Those philosophers theories were articulated in books, which
Bhatia dutifully cites, published long after Sakal papers case had been decided.
Using theory in this manner to critique a
decades-old decision may seem to some
people, at least, as indulging in rather
convenient, hindsight-based intertemporal analysis.
The Sakal papers example also reveals a larger methodological difficulty.
Seeking to discover or assign an animating theory to a judgment can gloss over
the realpolitik in which judges decide
cases. In our legal system, even the most
conscientious judges may find it impossible to systematically study, much less
reflect upon, the competing legal theories at play in every case. As the chief
justice of India recently noted, a judge
handles an average of 2,000 cases a year
(Agarwal 2016). These cases raise a dizzying range of constitutional, civil, and
criminal questions. Yet, with limited research facilities and infrastructural support, our judges bear
the burden of resolving, day after day and
week after week a long succession of issues,
each one of which occupies the professor critic
for months and even years of specialised
study (All India Judges Association v Union
of India 1993: para 8, citing David Pannick).
Thus, few, if any, of our justices can

operate like Dworkins ideal Hercules
judge with unlimited time to fully examine every cases theoretical premises.
To be fair, Bhatia readily acknowledges
the yawning gap between law in theory
and as it is applied in practice. But he
still seems to insist that a decision can be
matched with some or the other theory
even if the judges say nothing about it.
I agree that there could be legitimate
reasons to discover how or what theory
may broadly explain the outcome of a
case (DAmato 1999). But an attributive
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BOOK REVIEW
approach, which seeks to resolutely

assign every decision to a distinct set of
legal or philosophical theories, undermines the agency of judges in the judicial process. This reduces its attractiveness as a useful tool to study broader
judicial trends.
Furthermore, no theory-based analysis of judicial trends can be comprehensive if it relies mostly on a judgments
text or proffered reasoning (Baxi 1983:
220). There are a great many other variables that can equally affect a cases outcome or its wider consequences in law
and life. These variables include the parties identity, the lawyers involved, and
the background and ideology of the
judges (Gadbois 1970: 23). In addition,
in free-speech cases, the litigations surrounding political context can significantly impact the final verdict.
Thus, in Rangarajans case, it mattered greatly that the film producer was
also a publisher of the influential Hindu
newspaper. The proceedings took place
as Tamil Nadu underwent considerable
political turmoil following the passing of
Chief Minister M G Ramachandran. In
the Supreme Court, the producers hand

was strengthened by the central governments submission that the state ban was
unjustified. One can also reasonably
speculate that daily demonstrations during the hearings may have emboldened
the judges to invalidate the ban (Subramanian: 2012).
Politics rather than theory may also
explain the Courts marked deference in
free-speech cases to central laws when
compared to state regulations. With
exceptions like the recent Section 66-A
judgment, the Court seems to have generally refrained from invalidating statutes enacted by Parliament or its colonial predecessors under Article 19(1)(a). By
contrast, it appears to more closely scrutinise state laws and has struck them
down in several cases.
This review cannot fully appraise every
chapter in the book. Yet, Bhatias discussion on obscenity and pornography is
too compelling to ignore. The author begins by skilfully describing the Courts
shifting interpretations of obscenity and
pornography, which are the subject of
decency and morality-based restrictions
under Article 19(2). He argues that most

tests of obscenity flounder as they are
derived from popular or personal conceptions of morality that are both arbitrary and unreliable. As an alternative,
Bhatia recommends that the courts consider constitutional morality as the
touchstone to adjudicate obscenity and
pornography cases.
The expression constitutional morality has gained wide currency especially
after the Delhi High Courts gay rights
decision (Naz Foundation v Government
of NCT Delhi 2009). In that case, the high
court invoked constitutional morality to
decry attempts to stigmatise or criminalise sex between consenting homosexual
adults. As I have argued elsewhere, constitutional morality can be a wandering
standard unto itself. It gives judges
considerable discretion to determine
appropriate constitutional values in
each case.
Obscenity as Subordination
In the free-speech context, Bhatia proposes
that the content of constitutional morality can be derived from the Constitutions
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BOOK REVIEW
basic features: democracy, the rule of

law, secularism, and key fundamental
rights. Using this analysis, Bhatia argues,
somewhat disconnectedly, that equality
is incontrovertibly a part of constitutional morality. This leads Bhatia to the Constitutions textual provisions on equality,
which, he posits, taken together, reflect
an anti-subordination principle.
Bhatia borrows this principle from the
feminist scholar Catherine McKinnon,
whose work has influenced the Canadian Supreme Courts jurisprudence on
pornography. Relying on these sources,
Bhatia proposes that material may be
considered pornographic or obscene in
India if it depicts or constructs structural subordination between men and
women. Bhatia makes us jump through
several hoops to arrive at this formulation. But it is an innovative reimagining
of morality and decency-based limitations on free speech. Even so, as Bhatia
readily admits, his proposal to apply
structural subordination to Indian constitutional law can raise a few questions.
I, myself, have a few.
A Few Questions
First, it is unclear whether Bhatia is arguing that constitutional morality
should be narrowly grounded on equality
alone. If constitutional morality is not
confined only to equality, how do other
fundamental rights (like freedom of religion or the cultural and educational
rights) shape constitutional morality?
Second, if constitutional morality extends to other fundamental rights, could
it also encompass the other basic features of the Constitution from which
Bhatia began his analysis? There are
many such features and several are rather
loosely defined. Thus, a broader understanding of constitutional morality, which
incorporates these features in addition to
equality and other fundamental rights,
could perversely expand restrictions on
free speech rather than tighten them.
Third, modern equality doctrine in
India has many diverse strands: equal
protection and classification rules; vertical
and horizontal non-discrimination provisions; the anti-arbitrariness principle;
prohibition of untouchability; safe harbours for affirmative-action programmes;
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
and the constitutional basis for socioreligious reforms. It seems a bit of a

stretch to suggest that structural subordination can accommodate all of
these varying facets of equality under a
single roof.
Finally, in recent years, there have
been studies which suggest that Canadas
application of structural subordination
has, in fact, disproportionately impacted
gays and lesbians (Green 2005). What can
we do to mitigate this concern before
recommending the functional application of this North American doctrine in
Indian law?
This then leads me to the books overall scope. As the author himself admits,
his primary focus is on free-speech questions that are resolved by judges. The
book does cover developments outside
the courts like the First Amendment
debates and film certification proceedings (which can lead us back to a judge
as the recent Udta Punjab (2016) controversy reveals). But this coverage is rather
limited. Accordingly, in a future edition,
Bhatia may want to pay greater attention to the record of other institutions
like Parliament and the state legislatures, the Election Commission, or the
Telecom Disputes Settlement Appellate
Tribunal in fashioning free-speech jurisprudence.
A subsequent edition could also study
how diverse actors and constituencies,
such as media lobbies, political parties
and community organisations, civil society groups, as well as ordinary citizens
shape free-speech controversies. The
influence of long-time stakeholders like
journalists is well documented. In 1988,
for instance, Rajiv Gandhi withdrew a
sweeping anti-defamation bill reacting
to vehement objections from newspaper
editors rather than awaiting inevitable
litigation on the subject. Two decades
later, it was ordinary citizens and cyber
activists who deluged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India with outraged
emails over net neutrality. The emergence of these new actors and their
involvement with free-speech matters
behoves greater study.
Returning to where we began, Ram
Manohar Lohia was unchastened after
his release from prison. He would be
vol lI no 32
detained again, but he remained an

agitator against government policies for
the rest of his life. At a memorial lecture
for Lohia last year, Vice President Hamid
Ansari (2015) hailed the socialist leader
for squarely personifying the importance of political dissent to Indian democracy. Through his splendid book, Bhatia substantially broadens and deepens
that ideal by marshalling an unapologetically liberal case for free speech
through a fascinating ensemble of constitutional and philosophical arguments
for why it matters.
The reviewer is grateful to Aparna Chandra,
Sharan Bhavnani, Simon Hentrei, Mathew
John, Vasujith Ram, Arghya Sengupta,
Arun Thiruvengadam, and V Venkatesan for
their comments. The views expressed here are
entirely his own.
Vikram Raghavan (vikram1974@gmail.com) is
trained as a lawyer in India, and contributes to
the blog Law and Other Things.
References
Agarwal, Mayank (2016): Chief Justice Thakur
Makes an Emotional Plea for More Judges,
Mint, 25 April.
All India Judges Association v Union of India (1993):
AIR, SC, p 2493.
Ansari, Hamid (2015): First Ram Manohar Lohia
Memorial National Lecture, Gwalior, 25 September.
Austin, Granville (1996): The Indian Constitution:
Cornerstone of a Nation, Oxford.
Baxi, Upendra (1983): On How Not to Judge the
Judges: Notes Towards Evaluation of the judicial Role, Journal of the Indian Law Institute,
Vol 25, No 2, pp 21137.
DAmato, Anthony (1999): The Effect of Legal
Theories on Judicial Decisions, Chicago Kent
Law Review, Vol 74, No 2, pp 51727.
Gadbois Jr, George H (1970): Indian Judicial
Behaviour, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 5,
Nos 345, pp 14966.
Green, Leslie (2005): Men in the Place of Women,
from Butler to Little Sisters; Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination,
Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Vol 43, No 4,
pp 47396.
Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003): Indias Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India,
Columbia University Press.
Naz Foundation v Government of NCT Delhi (2009):
160, Delhi Law Times, 277.
Rangarajan v Jagjivan Ram (1989): SCC, SC, 2,
p 574.
Rao, Shiva B et al (eds) (1968): The Framing of
Indias Constitution: A Study, Bombay:
N M Tripathi.
Sakal Papers v Union of India (1962): SCR, 3, p 842.
Subramanian, Samanth (2012): From Tamil Film,
a Landmark Case on Free Speech, India Ink,
New York Times, 14 February.
Superintendent, Central Prison, Fatehgarh v Ram
Manohar Lohia (1960): SCR (2), p 821.
Varadarajan, Tunku (2016): Judgment by Thesaurus, Wire, 16 May.
27
BOOK REVIEW
Evictions of Urban Poor

Kalpana Sharma
his is a book by an academic who

is also an activist. It brings together the rigour of academia and
the passion of activism to a subject that
requires both in equal parts: the future of
our cities and the place of the urban poor
in them. Looking closely at contemporary
Delhi, Gautam Bhan assesses the legal
rights of the urban poor, non-existent in
the main, and also interrogates the strategies that the poor are forced to adopt to
wrest their basic rights as citizens.
The lens that Bhan uses to do this is
that of evictions of poor communities in
cities across India, but specifically Delhi.
He argues that evictions of urban poor
communities are well-established strategies for urban transformation and that,
the basti and its eviction are critical
sites to understand the dynamics of contemporary urbanism not just in Delhi
but across cities of the global South
(p 12). He does this by laying out six
lines of inquiry. Each is relevant and at
least one is an aspect that has not been
studied in any detail.
Lines of Inquiry
The first four are fairly well-established
within the discourse on the urban poor
and their lives and rights. For instance,
how do we look at the legality or illegality
of urban poor settlements and why are
they defined as encroachments? When
does an illegality that is the direct outcome of the way cities are organised
become legal? We know from the experience of cities like Mumbai and Delhi that
while poor settlements are inevitably
described as illegal or encroachments,
the transgressions of the better off are
either overlooked or accommodated and
only rarely bulldozed.
The second discussion centres on the
concept of good governance and how
to plan and develop our changing cities.
Where in all this are the urban poor
located? Do they even have a place?
The third, one that has outlived other
changes in cities, including many
28
In the Publics Interest: Evictions, Citizenship

and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi
by Gautam Bhan, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2016;
pp 290, ` 825.
technological changes, is the question of

citizenship. How do we define it? Will the
urban poor always be considered illegal
or constantly referred to as migrants
even when they have lived in a city for
generations? Will they never be citizens
with equal rights? I can remember at the
height of a string of evictions of urban
poor settlements by the municipal corporation in Mumbai, the largest circulating
daily newspaper in the city writing about
citizens and slum dwellers as if these
were mutually exclusive categories.
The fourth issue that Bhan addresses
is that of resistance by the urban poor.
How do they resist? What form should
such resistance take? Activists working
with the urban poor have often differed
on strategies. While one group argues
for confrontation, the other believes that
negotiation will best serve the interests
of the urban poor. The answer might lie
somewhere between the two strategies.
Bhan looks at the merits of both approaches although his sympathies appear to lie with the former.
And the last, which is linked to the fifth,

is the link between democracy and inequality. The latter has become the hallmark of our cities; infrastructure, development plans and laws are increasingly being
brought in to cater to the rights, demands
and entitlements of the rich, while the
poor are left to literally fester in their cesspools, or face being swept away to distant
outskirts of cities. How can such a vision of
a city fit into the concepts of democracy,
where everyone has equal rights? Indeed,
can democracy survive if we accommodate such crass levels of inequality?
Judicial intervention or judicial urbanism as Bhan terms it, forms the
most interesting part of this book. It is
something that is reported sporadically,
as and when it occurs. But taken together,
the role of the judiciary in this aspect of
urban arrangements raises several important and relevant questions.
For instance, while earlier the poor
had to decide how to deal with the executive in the face of an eviction order,
what do they do when there is a judicial
order? How do they view the judiciary?
Can a poor woman even imagine going
before a court and arguing for her right
to remain in her basti? We know of many
instances of poor people organising and
fighting for their rights with the city authorities, even with state governments.
But when an eviction order comes from
a court, poor communities are puzzled.
How can the adalat that is supposed to
dispense justice be the one that gives out
what to them are unjust orders?
Judicial Urbanism
What stands out as the new material in
this book is what the author sets out as
the fifth line of inquirythat of looking
at the role of the judiciary in dealing
with questions of the rights of the urban
poor. This is a fascinating arena, given
the larger than life role of the judiciary
in India has performed on issues as trivial
as the place where a cricket match will
be played, to whether a film ought to be
exhibited without censorship, to the
rights of poor people to their land. The
range is enormous; a weak and indecisive, or corrupt executive has compelled
citizens to turn to the judiciary that
ought to be their last resort but, has instead, become their only resort.
Judicial Interventions in Delhi

The author traces several judicial interventions in Delhi, a city he observes has
been shaped by judicial decisions taken
in the public interest (p 99). The import
of these decisions and what defines the
public interest are at the heart of the
discussion in the book under review. To
look at exactly how the judiciary and its
decisions have had an impact on the way
Delhi has grown and developed, Bhan
analysed 24 public interest litigations
(PIL) in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court that led to evictions between 1990 and 2007.
There are some overlaps that emerge
from the study of these judgments. One
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
BOOK REVIEW
is the definition of what is the public,

and therefore, what is in the public interest. Given the nature of these judgments, and the history of the PIL and the
initial breakthrough, the PIL represented
for the unrepresented to have their voices
heard through the judicial process, it is
indeed an irony and a tragedy that by
and large the judiciary has tended to
stick to the statist definition of the public
where the poor or their interests are definitely not included.
The courts also tended to view slums as
a failure of governancethat is, the government was blamed for even allowing
such encroachments. That governance
ought to also mean taking care of all citizens, rich or poor, and making sure that
every citizen can access basic services
such as water, sanitation and electricity,
did not form the courts rulings. Instead,
they focused on the apparent illegality
of the encroachments and demanded that
authorities act to remove them.
Those representing the poor in court
had to decide how to argue that poor
people also had a right to the city and
could not be treated as encumbrances to
be pushed out for some larger public
interest. The task was complicated
because the Constitution does not guarantee a right to housing (although some
activists did try hard to have this accepted in the 1980s). Bhan says that ultimately the only strategy that could be
used was to play up on the poverty and
helplessness of the poor and appeal to
the sympathy of the court to save them
from eviction. In other words, the poor
had to be projected as victims and not as
equal citizens with rights like anyone
else in a democracy.
Concept of Urban Planning
The other side of terming one set of people illegal is the very concept of planning for cities. Technocrats devise plans
without necessarily understanding the
realities or the extent of urban poverty.
While the disjunction between master
plans and the reality when these plans
are finally ready for implementation is
evident, particularly in cities like Mumbai, how should we understand the current buzzwords in urban planning, concepts like the global city or smart
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
cities? Is there any room here for the

poor, or for informality that constitutes
such a big part of the way Indian cities
function? In fact, it is this informality
that allows room for the poor to carve out
a space for themselves. But in a totally
planned environment envisaged as the
future of urban India, there will be no
such place. Where and how will the poor,
who currently provide so many essential
services to the city, be accommodated?
The courts have not noted this gaping
hole in the concept of future Indian cities
even as they criticise governments for
their failure to implement urban plans.
A telling quote that illustrates this
view is the following from the Supreme
Court in the Pitampura case (Pitampura
Sudhar Samiti v Government of the
National Capital Territory of Delhi,
CWP 4215 of 1995):
A welfare state is expected to care for its citizens from cradle to grave. This concept has
to change. The role of the State, in todays
world, has to be one of regulator. The state
has to create an environment of growth and
equal opportunity. Thereafter it is for each
to prosper or perish (p 136).
That is a brutal view: prosper or

perish. It is the poor who perish in such
a vision. And what is this welfare state,
where the citizens are looked after
from from cradle to grave, which the
NE
court feels needs to change?

There is much else in the book that
gives you pause to think and consider
what we are doing to our cities in India.
If we make our cities garib-mukt, as both
those who plan, govern, and judge seem
to desire, we will virtually lay the
ground rules for the destruction of
democracy. Policies that exacerbate inequity by literally eliminating the poor,
can only lead to violence and disruption.
If the poor cannot find justice through
courts, if their place in cities is marked
as illegal, if their villages are drying up
and dying, where are they to go?
In his Concluding Provocations,
Bhan throws out a challenge to urban
social movements and basti residents,
asking that they re-scale their arguments to the city. He argues that they
need to claim an urban rather than a
national citizenship and that they must
reject the courts view of the slum. Instead, they must reinsert the basti residents into the imagination of the city as
city-markers, workers, residents, tax
payers, consumers and voters all at
once (p 251). It is a challenge worth
heeding, given the current trajectory of
urban planning in this country.
Kalpana Sharma (kalpu.sharma@gmail.com) is
an independent journalist.
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vol lI no 32
29
PERSPECTIVES
Education for the Species

Nirmalangshu Mukherji
Respectable scientific opinion

holds that the human species is on
the verge of untimely extinction.
According to Noam Chomsky,
the so-called least advanced
people are the ones taking the
lead in trying to protect all of
us from extinction. Informed by
their ancient knowledge systems,
indigenous populations across the
world are resisting the plunder of
the planet. However, indigenous
knowledge systems are in radical
conflict not only with global
capitalism but with modern
education itself, thus raising the
issue of radical choice. The issue
goes much beyond the classical
domain of the pedagogy of
the oppressed.
oam Chomskys grimly titled book

Hegemony or Survival (2003)
opens with some observations of
contemporary biologist Ernst Mayr, who
is sometimes referred to as the biological giant of the 20th century (Foreman
2004: 24). After proposing a very reasonable notion of a species (de Queiroz
2005), Mayr (2001) held that about 50
billion species have appeared on this
planet since the origin of life. He estimated that the average life expectancy
of a species is about 1,00,000 years
(Chomsky 2003: 1). Exactly one of these
50 billion species achieved the kind of
intelligence needed to establish a civilisation, Mayr notes (Chomksy 2003: 1).
The civilisation-forming intelligence of
this species is the topic for this essay.
From studies on sudden expansion of
brain size (Striedter 2004), restructuring
of the brain for emergence of language
(Crow 2010), and proliferation of tools
and other signs of culture, it is now
estimated that the modern human species emerged roughly about 1,00,000
years ago (Tattersall 2012). Following
Mayrs statistical rule, then, the species
is possibly nearing its end.
Sixth Intelligent Extinction
This is an expanded version of the keynote

address to the Philosophy of Education
Conference at Azim Premji University,
Bengaluru in January 2015. I learned much
from a very lively discussion by a distinguished
audience. I have incorporated some of the
points raised during the discussion. The
original lecture can be viewed at https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=DR9ZepNelA4.
Nirmalangshu Mukherji (somanshu@bol.net.in)
is a former Professor of Philosophy, University
of Delhi.
30
We may hope to defy Mayrs doomsday

scenario under the impression that the
human species, apparently, has remarkable control over its destiny, precisely
due to the kind of intelligence with
which it is endowed. Humans may feel
reassured that this kind of intelligence
will ultimately devise ways, technological
and otherwise, to protect the species
beyond its statistical limit. Unfortunately,
the hope seems to lack foundations.
Mayrs controversial estimate is not the
only clue for his doomsday scenario. He
proposed another perspective in which
the prospect of premature extinction is in
fact enhanced by the human kind of intelligence. It is just that the two scenarios
seem to converge on the time left for

the species.
Biologists suggest that there are two
evolutionary scenarios that lead to the
extinction of species. The first form of
species extinction is called background
extinction. This form of extinction
happens due to background factors,
such as low density of population, limited
dispersal ability, inbreeding, successional
loss of habitat, climate change, competition, predation, disease, and the like
(Soul 1996). There is considerable dispute about the life of a species undergoing inevitable background extinction.
As noted, Mayr thought that specieslife is as low as 1,00,000 years. Others
calculate it bet ween 1 million and 510
million years.
Biologists also list a second form of
extinctionmass extinctionin which
more than 50% of all species on earth,
at a given point in time, are wiped out
simultaneously due to some massive
catastrophe. Biologists identify five events
in the last half a billion years when such
grand-scale extinction happened. The
last of thesethe Cretaceousoccurred
when, 65 million years ago, dinosaurs
and many molluscs became extinct, most
probably due to the striking of a giant
asteroid.
In either case, species become extinct
due to what may be viewed as natural
reasons that are external to the species.
These occur in nature periodically due to
circumstances beyond the control of the
members of the species. In these cases of
natural extinction on a geological scale,
nothing much can be done in the long
run, even if a variety of intelligence
and other favourable factors postpone
the inevitable in the short run. At the
current stage of knowledge, there is no
definite prediction that the human species is about to become extinct due to
the convergence of natural background
factors or some catastrophic event, such
as the striking of a giant comet.
The prediction, rather, is that, after a
lapse of 65 million years, the conditions
for anothersixthmass extinction are
rapidly maturing. The human species is
most likely to disappear due to phenomena
august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
PERSPECTIVES
such as nuclear holocaust, massive environmental destruction, global conflict,

including biological warfare, astronomical
poverty, irreversible damage to food chains, and maybe even just unavailability of
potable water. The extinction of the
species will most likely be caused by the
suicidal behaviour of the species itself.
As Chomsky puts it, we are the asteroid.
The author of The Sixth Extinction:
An Unnatural History (2014), Elizabeth
Kolbert suggests in an interview (Drake
2015) that the factor of environmental
degradation due to human recklessness
alone has enhanced the rate of species
extinction by more than 100 times the
normal rate in just the last few hundred
years. This is because, Kolbert argues,
we loaded the extinction rate with
widespread hunting,
brought in invasive species. We are now
changing the climate, very, very rapidly, by
geological standards. We are changing the
chemistry of all the oceans. We are changing the surface of the planet. We cut down
forests, we plant mono- culture agriculture,
which is not good for a lot of species.
Were overfishing. The list goes on and on
(Drake 2015).
To emphasise, Kolberts picture only

includes extinction of other species triggering mass extinction. To this picture,
we need to add factors like nuclear holocaust, global war, dislocation of food
chains, massive famines, depletion of
potable water, and the like, which more
directly relate to the extinction of the
human species itself.
Significantly, each of these doomsday
scenarios is critically linked to the species
unique endowment of the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilisation (Chomsky 2003: 1). No other species remotely has the ability to change
the chemistry of the planet and pollute
much of the potable water on earth by its
own diligent effort in just a few hundred
years, not to mention the ability to
construct weapons of mass destruction,
to which we will return.
As Mayr pointed out, there is no
evidence that nature prefers intelligence
over stupidity: beetles and bacteria, for
example, are vastly more successful than
the great apes, not to mention humans,
in terms of survival. Looking at humans
through this long lens of evolution, it
EPW
august 6, 2016
could well be, Chomsky holds, that

humans were a kind of biological error,
using their allotted 1,00,000 years to
destroy themselves and much else in the
process with cold and calculated savagery (2003: 2).
The centrality of the notions of intelligence and stupidity brings the topic of
the imminent extinction of the species
within the broad domain of education.
Hence, the title of this article.
Ideology and Hegemony
For his book Hegemony or Survival,
Chomsky used the subtitle Americas
Quest for Global Dominance, suggesting
that the prospect of human survival
depends primarily on how humanity
responds to the hegemony of the United
States (US). No doubt, with its absolute
military control over the planet and the
space around it, and its nuclear hardware
capable of vaporising much of the planetary system, the US has represented the
peak of the cold and calculated savagery
with which humans have proceeded to
destroy themselves. Moreover, using its
military control, the US has thwarted
almost every effort to get the planet on
some track of recovery. For example, in
the last few decades, it has not only
ignored the Geneva Convention on warfare and the United Nations (UN) resolutions on terrorism, it has walked out of
the Kyoto Protocol on the environment,
the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty,
and the convention on biological warfare
among others. There is some basis, then,
for viewing US hegemony as a principal
agent for the imminent extinction of
the species.
However, the US has not been alone.
The ideology that governs US hegemony
over the planet had precedents throughout the history of the Western world. As
Chomsky (2005: x) notes, the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, rated to
be one of the greatest thinkers of the
20th century by many scholars, viewed
Nazi Germany as the most metaphysical
of nations. After constructing the spectre
of the JewishBolshevik conspiracy to
take over the world, eminent Western
intellectuals thought that extreme measures were necessary for self-defence.
As the Nazi storm clouds settled over
vol lI no 32
the country in 1935, Chomsky continued,

Martin Heidegger depicted Germany
as the most endangered nation in the
world, gripped in the great pincers of
an onslaught against civilisation itself,
led in its crudest form by Russia and
America (Chomsky 2005: x). According
to Heidegger, Germany stood in the
center of the Western world, and must
protect the great heritage of classical
Greece from annihilation, relying on
the new spiritual energies unfolding
historically from out of the center.
Hence, the catastrophic war was needed
to protect the great heritage of classical
Greece (Chomsky 2005: x).
When it was attacked by the Japanese
in Pearl Harbour, the US unleashed its
own legitimate exercise of self-defense
against a vicious enemy (Chomsky 2005:
xi) with a 1,000-plane daylight raid on
defenceless Japanese cities, culminating
in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Chomsky notes:
The paroxysm of slaughter and annihilation
did not end with the use of weapons that may
very well bring the species to a bitter end.
We should also not forget that these speciesterminating weapons were created by the
most brilliant, humane, and highly educated
figures of modern civilization, working in
isolation, and so entranced by the beauty of
the work in which they were engaged that
they apparently paid little attention to the
consequences (2005: x).
As Chomsky has pointed out, the basic

problem is much deeper and historical in
character than the immediacy of a current
rogue state (Gettys 2014). Thus, even if
the current neo-liberal phase represents
the extreme end of the traditional US
policy spectrum, these policies have
many precursors, both in US history and
among earlier aspirants to global power.
More ominously, Chomsky continued,
their decisions may not be irrational
within the framework of prevailing ideology and the institutions that embody it
(2003: 4). This is the crucial pointthese
are rational decisions taken in a civilisational mode, these are products of the
most sophisticated thinking pursued for
hundreds of years in great centres of
learning. In that sense, there is a direct
correlation between the culture of enlightenment and the untimely extinction of
the species.
31
PERSPECTIVES
Beyond US hegemony, there is now

growing concern that humanity might
well be led to a species-terminating global
war originating in West Asia. After bitter
plunder and strategic warfare conducted
by the West for over five decades, this
region has now spawned powers, such
as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS), that not only have the armed resources for acquiring local state power,
but have the determination to achieve
global dominance just like Nazi Germany.
In fact, their ideologies go beyond that of
Nazism to actually seek the end of the
world. Graeme Wood (2015) reports that
we can gather that [ISIS] rejects peace as
a matter of principle; that it hungers for
genocide; that its religious views make it
constitutionally incapable of certain types of
change, even if that change might ensure its
survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger ofand headline player inthe imminent end of the world.
It is instructive to note in this connection that the prospect of species termination is not restricted to avowedly hegemonistic violent states and their ideologies. Thus, Chomsky mentions the
apparently benign and peace-loving
country, Canada, to understand the real
scope of the concerned ideology. Speaking on the energy policies of the Canadian
government under former Prime Minister
Stephen Harper, Chomsky observed that
It means taking every drop of hydrocarbon
out of the ground, whether its shale gas in
New Brunswick or tar sands in Alberta and
trying to destroy the environment as fast as
possible, with barely a question raised about
what the world will look like as a result
(Lukacs 2013).
Needless to say, such destruction of the

environment continues across the world,
including in India. And, the destruction
of the environment puts immense pressure on available resources such that access to the remaining resources enhances the prospect of catastrophic war.
Indigenous Resistance
Most importantly, for our purposes,
Chomsky also sketched an alternative to
these entrenched ideologies by applauding the resistance against these policies
raised by the indigenous people congregating at the margins of Canadas muchflaunted multicultural society. It is pretty ironic, Chomsky remarked, that the
32
so-called least advanced people are the

ones taking the lead in trying to protect
all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction
(Lukacs 2013).
The general lesson is hard to miss.
Notice the expression all of us. The
resistance by the indigenous people to
the extraction of hydrocarbons not only
saves the environmental niche of these
people in New Brunswick and Alberta, it
is protecting all of us, the species. In
contrast, the rational choices enforced
by the ideologies and the institutions
controlled by the rich and the powerful
are driving the human race towards
extinction. It is, thus, an issue about the
salient authorship of knowledge.
The issue of knowledge emerged vividly nearer home in the jungles surrounding the Niyamgiri hills in the state
of Odisha. These hills contain about 1.8
billion tonnes of high-grade bauxite, the
source for aluminium, which a mining
gianteuphemistically called Vedanta
wants to extract to feed into giant factories built on this land. As they were
pushed out of the plains by the thrust of
mainstream civilisation, the local poor,
mostly tribals, had lived on this hilly
land for thousands of years. After years
of resistance by them, and much manipulation and show of muscle by the state,
financed by the mining oligarchy, the
government was compelled to organise
a referendum for 12 carefully-selected
villages when the fate of hundreds of
villages was involved (Kothari 2015;
Vanaja 2014).
As one of many moving studies reports
(Bera 2013), using the democratic and
peaceful resource of their own panchayatsunits of local self-government
village after village gathered en masse
amid heavy security cover of central
paramilitary and state forces. Ignoring
the guns and bayonets,
unlettered forest dwellersDongria Kondh
and Kutia Kondh tribals, and Gouda and
Harijan non-tribalsspoke of a religion embedded in the hills pristine ecology.
They told the district judge, appointed

observer to the meetings by the apex
court, that mining will destroy their god
and their source of sustenanceover
100 perennial streams, fruit trees like

those of jackfruit and mangoes, spices
like turmeric and ginger, wild roots, tubers
and mushroom, apart from the land for
shift and burn cultivation, dongar, where
they grow an enviable mix of native
millets, pulses and oil seeds (Bera 2013).
Having said this, each village unanimously rejected the Vedanta project.
Niyamgiri hills survived. For now.
Mark the word unlettered, as was
used by the reporter. The people themselves ratified this perspective of illiteracy.
Tunguru Majhi, a Kutia Kondh tribal,
declared at the Kunakadu palli village
council meeting, We will die like Birsa
Munda and Rindo Majhi (both Munda
and Majhi led tribal uprisings against
the British) if you dont give up now. We
are a murkhya jati (illiterate people) who
will never listen to you (Bera 2013). This
illiteracy, the absence of letters, the
stupidity of the ancient belief in a protecting the god of the hills, might just
provide the answer to the question of
whether the species will survive after all.
Questioning Liberal Pedagogy
Recall that when he mentioned the
resistance by the indigenous people of
Canada, Chomsky used the expression
so-called least advanced people (Lukacs
2013). He is not only referring to their
action of resistance, but pointing at
their intellectual achievement, without
which the action of resistance would not
have followed. In contrast, the rational
decisions reached by formidable intellectuals serving the rich and the powerful
lead the species to the verge of extinction. The contest is, therefore, between
two opposing systems of knowledge in
two different intellectual traditions.
Moreover, Chomskys contrast between
the two traditions implies that, in a crucial
historical sense, elite intellectual tradition has failed the species, while the
indigenous traditions, in almost total
isolation from the elites, opens the opportunity for the continued survival of
the species. In the same historical sense
then, survival of the species now depends
on incorporating marginalised indigenous
systems of knowledge into the mainstream. At the same time, there is a need
to severely critique and progressively
august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
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PERSPECTIVES
replace entrenched aspects of elite intellectual traditions, which have ruled the
world for at least the last few hundred
years in the garb of liberal pedagogy.
What does this scenario mean for education policy? What does it mean exactly
to prioritise and adopt the knowledge
systems of the murkhya to save the species and the planet? In the limited space
available to me for now, I will focus on
the prospect of incorporating indigenous knowledge in the mainstream education policy. In the process, I will be
able to touch barely upon the related,
but wider issue of dispensing with much
of the current liberal curriculum that
generates the mindset for plundering
the planet.
Ever since liberal education became
the agenda at the turn of the last century,
education of the poor and the marginalised
has concerned a range of progressive
thinkers. I will briefly touch upon two of
themRabindranath Tagore and Paulo
Freireto suggest why these responses
to the issue of the survival of the species
are inadequate. There are two reasons
why I wish to focus on these authors.
First, given the historical problems of
modernity, there is already growing
awareness that Western liberal education
has not lived up to its promise of enlightenment, as noted above. In that context,
it is of much interest that both Tagore
and Freire are non-Western critics of
Western elitism and are well-known for
their views on education policy. Second,
both direct their attention to the education of the marginalised as a form of universal welfare. How do their apparently
egalitarian liberal views fare with respect
to the issue of indigenous knowledge?
Education for Fullness
Tagore was deeply troubled by the extreme
elitism of the British-enforced education
system that catered only to the children
of the privileged. As is well known, he
was also deeply critical of the kind of
education that was imparted, the rote
learning that Freire later identified as the
banking method. Instead, Tagore advocated an enlightened and elaborate version of education for fullness, sarbangin
shiksha. This included not just the education of the intellect, combining the most
EPW
august 6, 2016
universal aspects of Western and Eastern

high culture, but also the education of
feeling for the other that extended to feeling for the nature and cosmos. In this
sense, he criticised the one-sidedness of
an education that only imparted bookish
knowledge in a narrow pragmatic sense.
His conception of education did not reject
the ideals of Western enlightenment, but
sought to embed it in a wider conception
of learning that, he thought, embraced
the whole human (Mukherjee 2013).
There is no convincing evidence that
the knowledge systems for fullness
that constituted Tagores conception of
sarbangin shiksha included the knowledge systems of the unlettered even in
its margins. So, his lament about the
absence of the poor from the field of
education may be viewed as a humanitarian lament, not really a humanistic
one, to use a distinction suggested by
Freire and to which I return.
In fact, there is evidence that Tagore
viewed the poor and the marginalised
as ignorant, dull and voiceless, to whom
language needs to be imparted, and hope
needs to be aroused in those broken
hearts.1 And, the knowledge that is supposed to enlighten the poor is the highculture knowledge already imparted to
the elite. Needless to say, this task of pulling the poor out of their misery through
sarbangin shiksha required novel educational practices such as teaching in the
mother tongue, using local flora and fauna
as examples, active agency of the learner,
the tapovan model of shunning bounded
classrooms and holding learning sessions
in the open air, etc. Yet, the knowledge that
was so imparted consisted of the products
of the elite high-culture, from the upanishads to modern science, via literature,
art and sophisticated musical forms.
I think the point about the ultimately
elitist character of Tagores otherwise
enlightened conception of education can
be strengthened with an example of the
novel educational practice followed in
Tagores school.2 Every afternoon, children
from Patha Bhavana were transported
in the university bus in batches to Silpa
Sadana at the rural setting of Sriniketan,
the location for rural education and
reconstruction. There, we sat down on
the floor to learn about woodcraft, papier
vol lI no 32
mch, basket weaving, lac work, etc,

from the ill-clad and impoverished, but
highly skilled village artisans. During
that period of active hands-on learning,
some of the rural folk were our teachers.
Our education, thus, included some of
the knowledge systems of the unlettered
and a reversal of class roles. No wonder,
this novel education practice was soon
abandoned due to logistical reasons.
Yet, the point remains that the appreciation and adoption of rural culture
was restricted to the crafts of a folk
nature. Elite, high culture still formed
the central ingredient for the development of sensitive intellect. Similarly,
farmers are sometimes consulted about
various agricultural practices such as
variety of seeds, condition of soil, multiple
cropping, organic fertilisers, etc. This is
the traditional domain of the unlettered
where knowledge is accumulated through
sheer practice over centuries. Beyond
this, rural culture (not to mention tribal
culture), except folk art, is not ascribed
any enlightenment value. The tribals,
the indigenous people, are not even in
view. They are curiosities hiding in hills
and forests.
Humanistic Education
Several decades later, Freire, in his classic
work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)
addressed the issue of resistance to the
ideologies and institutions of the elite
more directly (Freire 2005). The task for
education, he felt, was to reverse the
process of dehumanisation in which the
oppressed found themselves:
The struggle for humanisation, for the
emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of
alienation, for the affirmation of men and
women as persons ... is possible only because
dehumanisation although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result
of an unjust order that engenders violence in
the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes
the oppressed (Freire 2005: 44).
Freire (2005: 53), following George

Lukacs, elaborates that a revolutionary
educational practice aims to explain to
the masses their own action, to clarify
and illuminate that action, both regarding its relationship to the objective facts
by which it was prompted, and regarding its purposes. The more the people
unveil this challenging reality, which is
33
PERSPECTIVES
to be the object of their transforming

action, the more critically they enter that
reality. In this way they are consciously
activating the subsequent development
of their experiences (Freire 2005: 53).
Freire insists this form of education to be
essentially pre-revolutionary, such that
the oppressed can proceed to a revolutionary overthrow of the unjust order.
Freire, thus, goes beyond Tagore to view
education not only as a humanitarian
mode to include the oppressed, but as
that which triggers humanisation of the
oppressed by enabling them to erect the
other side of the barricade. Let us call it
the proletarian mode.
It is unclear if the envisaged overthrow
of the unjust order will in fact enhance the
prospects for the species as a whole. The
humanised education achieved through
the struggle of the working masses will
no doubt usher in an era of proletarian
freedom. But, will it ensure survival
for all? The answer will depend on the
content of the proletarian mode, the
knowledge systems so advocated. Here,
the prospects do not appear to be as
NEW
revolutionary as the emancipation of a

section of people.
There is little evidence that pre-revolutionary education practices among the
masses, undertaken by revolutionary
forces, address the issue raised here. In
his writings, Freire makes frequent references to political works of Mao during
the pre-revolutionary phase. Following
these examples and their implementation
during, say, the struggles in Yanan and
Vietnam, certain forms of educatio
n
al
practices have emerged. For example,
following lessons from Vietnam, Maoists
in India have organised Young Communist
Mobile Schools (or, Basic Communist
Training Schools), which host select groups
of 2530 tribal children in the age group
of 1215 years.
These children receive intensive training for six months in a curriculum consisting of basic concepts of Marxism
LeninismMaoism, Hindi and English,
mathematics, social science, different
types of weapons, computers, etc (recall
their age group). Needless to say, lessons
are conducted in Gondi, and local song
and dance forms are used to motivate

the children. Beyond this, there is no
evidence that the ancient knowledge
systems of the tribals form any significant
part of the curriculum, even though the
pupils concerned consist entirely of tribal
children. In fact, much of the c urriculum,
including lessons in modern science
especially, weapons training involving
not bows and arrows, but automatic rifles,
light machine guns, high-powered explosive devices, and the likego directly
against the foundations of tribal culture
(Mukherji 2012). While the children in
mainstream India sit through modernist curriculum under the aegis of notso-subtle capitalist propaganda, tribal
children sit through the same wearing
Maoist lenses. Education is imparted
in the proletarian mode, not in the indigenous mode.
Conclusions
It seems plausible to hold, then, that the
most progressive, enlightened forms of
thinking on education fail to offer a
sustainable perspective on the survival of
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34
august 6, 2016 vol lI no 32 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
PERSPECTIVES
the species. In some grim historical sense,

the prospects seem irreversible because
the so-called enlightened conception of
knowledge, which is primarily responsible for bringing the species to the brink
of extinction, is uncritically assumed to
be the only one we have. In fact, liberal
education, with its species-terminating
edifice of knowledge, is often ascribed
absolute value, since any alternative form
of education is viewed as either inconceivable or politically incorrect.
What is missed in these universalist
proclamations in favour of liberal education is that an entire range of indigenous
knowledge systems have existed simultaneously, but in almost total isolation
from the modernist liberal knowledge
systems. These are not primitive or
infantile systems of knowledge requiring further stages of development. These
systems are current adult systems of
knowledge with their own high culture
that have been sustained in favourable
environmental niches for thousands of
years. If liberal education can claim its
historical validity by referring back to
the Vedas, Sutras, Euclid and Plato, so do
the indigenous systems, except that their
classical heritage has remained unnamed
in the absence of global propaganda.
These systems define the alternative
forms of what it is to be human as a
species. The only problem is that these
systems, with their construction of
gods of Niyamgiri and reverence for
rivers, are viewed as inconsistent with
the modernist outlook. But, that certainly
is a problem for the modernist, not the
Dongria Kondhs.
In other words, a real solution to the
issue of survival requires that humans
learn to progressively forgetor, at least,
engage in severe criticism ofthe
knowledge systems currently advanced
in the most dominating centres of learning. If indigenous knowledge systems,
currently resisting extraction of hydrocarbons and bauxite from forests, are our
primary route for survival, every bit of
knowledge beyond indigenous knowledge
must be subjected to serious critique for
their relevance.
I am aware of the possible inconsistency in what I am proposing. While the
subliminal suggestion is to defray action
EPW
august 6, 2016
on all forms of so-called modernist highculture, are we not led into this forlorn
conclusion precisely by dint of the wonderful scientific work conducted by Mayr
and his colleagues at Harvard, which
has an annual budget of over one billion
dollars? So, is it not imperative that solutions to the dangers posed by the culture
of enlightenment are to be found within
enlightenment itself? Obviously, there
cannot be an immediately satisfying answer to this question either way. So, let
me ask a series of rhetorical questions to
conclude the discussion.
Can we not view the otherwise wonderful results from Harvard as a reductio
to the effect that this knowledge need not
be pursued anymore? Elizabeth Kolbert
has remarked with some irony that let us
not ask the scientific question of when
the human species might become extinct,
because we might be extinct before we
reach a definite scientific answer (Drake
2015). Sensible people have started advocating the disarming of the planet. Does
that not amount to the demand that the
knowledge systems that go into the construction of weaponryfrom pistols to
hydrogen bombsbe deliberately set
aside? Why should that argument not
extend to the knowledge of making cars
and aeroplanes, since these technologies
require extraction of bauxite from revered mountains? Once we get the feel
of the mess into which modern living
has pushed the planet, why should we
stop at cars and aeroplanes? Why not
computers, mobile phones, skyscrapers,
libraries, orchestras, art museums, cities
and asphalt roads? The children of the
gods of Niyamgiri lived without them
happily for thousands of years. Exactly
what argument do we have for not emulating their lives in full?
notes
1
Tagore, in the poem titled bra phir mr

from the volume Chitra: i-saba mr.ha mlna
mka mukh dit hab bhs
. ./ i-saba rnta
us.ka bhagna buk dhbany tulit hab .
I could not locate any official document for
this, but I can recount this curious practice
from my own experience as a student in
Tagores school at Santiniketan.
References
Bera, Sayantan (2013): Niyamgiri Answers, Down
to Earth, 31 August, viewed on 1 May 2016,
vol lI no 32
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/niyamgiri-answers-41914.
Chomsky, Noam (2003): Hegemony or Survival,
New York: Metropolitan Books.
(2005): Manipulation of Fear, Foreword
Essay, December 13: Terror Over Democracy,
N Mukherji, New Delhi: Bibliophile SouthAsia.
Crow, Timothy J (2010): The Nuclear Symptoms
of Schizophrenia Reveal the Four Quadrant
Structure of Language and Its Deictic Frame,
Journal of Neurolinguistics, Vol 23, No 1,
pp 19.
de Queiroz, Kevin (2005): Ernst Mayr and the
Modern Concept of Species, Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, Vol 201,
No suppl 1, pp 660007, viewed on 1 May
2016, http://www.pnas.org/content/102/suppl_1/6600.full.
Drake, Nadia (2015): Will Humans Survive the
Sixth Great Extinction?, National Geographic,
23 June, viewed on 1 May 2016, http://news.
nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150623-sixthextinction-kolbert-animals-conservation-science-world/.
Foreman, Dave (2004): Rewilding North America:
A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century,
London: Island Press.
Freire, Paulo (2005): Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
New York: Continuum.
Gettys, Travis (2014): Noam Chomsky on Human
Extinction: The Corporate Elite Are Actively
Courting Disaster, Raw Story, 18 June, viewed
on 1 May 2016, http://www.rawstory.com /2014/06/noam-chomsky-on-human-extinctionthe-corporate-elite-are-actively-courting-disaster/.
Kolbert, Elizabeth (2014): The Sixth Extinction,
New York: Picador.
Kothari, Ashish (2015): Revisiting the Legend of
Niyamgiri, Hindu, 2 January.
Lukacs, Martin (2013): Noam Chomsky Slams
Canadas Shale Gas Energy Plans, Guardian, 1
November, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/01/noam-chomsky-canadas-shale-gas-energy-tar-sands.
Mayr, Ernst (2001): What Evolution Is, New York:
Basic Books.
Mukherjee, Himangshu Bhushan (2013): Education
for Fullness: A Study of the Educational Thought
and Experiment of Rabindranath Tagore, New
Delhi: Routledge.
Mukherji, Nirmalangshu (2012): The Maoists
in India: Tribals Under Siege, London: Pluto
Press.
Soul, Michael E (1996): What Do We Really
Know About Extinction?, Genetics and Conservation, Christine M Schonewald-Cox, S Chambers, B MacBryde and L Thomas (eds), Menlo
Park, CA: Benjamin-Cummings, pp 11143.
Striedter, Georg F (2004): Principles of Brain
Evolution, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc.
Tattersall, Ian (2012): Masters of the Planet: The
Search for Our Human Origins, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Vanaja, Shiuli (2014): Lingraj Azad, Warrior of
Niyamgiri, Round Table India, 21 April, viewed
on 1 May 2016, http://roundtableindia.co.in/
index.php?option=com_content&view=article
&id=7375:lingraj-azad-warrior-of-niyamgiri&c
atid=119:feature&Itemid=132.
Wood, Graeme (2015): What ISIS Really Wants,
Atlantic, March, viewed on 1 May 2016, http://
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/?utm_source
=SFFB.
35
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Olaf Caroes Fabrication of the McMahon Line

Neville Maxwell
In the latter half of the 1930s, British officials under the

leadership of Olaf Caroe doctored and garbled the
records of the 1914 Simla Conference to make them
support the assertion that Indias north-eastern
borderline lay legitimately just where Henry McMahon
had tried to unsuccessfully place it. By the end of World
War II, Caroes fabrication had to a large extent been
made goodthe alignment he named the McMahon
Line had been established as the de facto BritishIndia
north-eastern borderline (falling short only in its leaving
Tawang to Tibet). The assertion that this was also the
de jure border had apparently solid evidence,
documentary and cartographic, to support it. The
evidence for its legitimacy was, however, fraudulent, and
Caroes deception was eventually exposed. Yet, Nehrus
absolute refusal to negotiate a boundary settlement
with China continues to be Indian government policy.
Neville Maxwell (nmaxwell@hinet.net.au) is a retired AustralianBritish

journalist and scholar best known for an authoritative analysis of the
1962 SinoIndian war in his book, Indias China War (1970).
100
So far as we are concerned, the McMahon Line is the firm frontier by

treaty, firm by usage, firm by geography.
Jawaharlal Nehru in the Lok Sabha, 13 August 1959
The McMahon Line, which sought to secure the main crest of the Himalayas
as the North-East Frontier of India, does not exist and never has existed.
Sir Henry Twynam, former governor of Assam, in The Times,
2 September 1959
Delimitation means the determination of a boundary line by treaty
and its definition in verbal, written terms; Demarcation means the
actual laying down of a boundary line on the ground and its definition
by boundary pillars or other physical markers.
Sir Henry McMahon1
An international boundary cannot be fixed solely by the administrative
act of one of the adjoining states.... Therefore if a state proceeds alone
to survey and delimit its border areas no juridical principle will apply
the effects of such unilateral action to the adjoining State, which has
not cooperated in its execution or consented to accept its consequences.
From the point of view of the non-participating State the international
boundary remains undefined (Cukwurah 1967: 159).
y 1935 the British Indian Empire and China had coexisted

as contiguous neighbours for just over a century. Their
initial contact, brought about in 1824 when Britain acquired Assam as booty from the Burma War, was hailed by a
British official in 1844 in these words: the two great governments
of Britain and China are now coterminous, their point of contact
being in a protrusion of Chinese territory carrying a trade route
between Tibet and north-eastern India known as the Tawang
Tract after the great Tibetan monastery which administered it.
Otherwise in that area the imperial domains were conveniently
separated by subordinate mini-states and by what the British
called a prickly hedge, a swathe of mountainous country thinly
peopled by tribes hostile to all outsiders. There was no formal
international boundary between the two Empires, but neither was
there any territorial dispute, overt or implicitat that moment.
A de facto borderline answered the felt needs of the five
authorities concerned, those in London, Delhi and Shillong on
the British side, Nanking (then seat of the Nationalist government)
and Lhasa on Chinas, and it was observed and given occasional
cartographical expression by all of them. It ran between Bhutan
on the West and into Burma on the East, following an unmarked
but distinct topographical feature where the broad plain of the
Brahmaputra River begins to rise into the foothills of the Himalayas, marking also the verge of the prickly hedge. The Raj called
this accepted limit to its rule the Outer Line and prohibited
unauthorised ingress or egress across it. To the Chinese the
delineation was hazier, more a zonal expiration of interest, with a
sense that thereabouts, between the high ground and the low,
lay a traditional and customary border, a belt of separation. The
Tibetans were clearer; they saw their rule as extending down
through the Tawang Tract to meet Britains Outer Line.
august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
SPECIAL ARTICLE
So far so good: mutually agreed borders are the sine qua non
of stable international relations. Within the Raj, however, there
was a grouping for which that very situation represented an
unacceptable strategic weakness and brought rueful memories
of diplomatic failure. Imbued with Lord Curzons perception
of India as an outlying Imperial fortress, eternally under
threat and therefore needing to set guard over and fortify the
surrounding high ground and command the glacis beyond as
well, these high officials viewed a borderline lying along the
foot of the hills as a flagrant point of strategic vulnerability
and a gross delinquency of those responsible for Indias security.
A Flashback to the Simla Conference
Some 20 years before this year of 1935 just those strategic

concerns had been sharpened by developments in China, first
a premortal, last-gasp expansionary impulse of the Manchu
Empire which in 190910 began to drive its power closer to
Indias north-east; then the Empires collapse and replacement
by a republican government which, it was expected, must in
the long run become a more restless and perhaps challenging
neighbour than the Empire had been. Stirred to action by
those events, Britain in 1913 issued invitations to the feeble
government of the newborn Republic of China and to the
monastic rulers of Tibet to confer in the Indian hill resort of
Simla with a view to resolving differences between Lhasa and
Peking and other matters of common interest. In truth there
were no common interests between the three, only contradictory
aspirations: the British purpose was regime change in Tibet,
subversion of the Chinese position there to make Britain the
dominant power; the Tibetan aim was independence from
both; Chinas hope was to assert and consolidate its ancient
dominance over Tibet. For the Chinese even to attend a tripartite
conference on equal terms with Tibet strongly derogated that
claimed suzerainty, but an invitation from the then mighty Britain
was in effect a summons which could not be defied.
Even on the British side there were internal contradictions
among them a primary but covert ulterior motive. The entire
project was the conception more of the government in India
than of the Home Government, and the initiative of the foreign
secretary of the Government of India, Sir Henry McMahon,
rather than of the Viceroy. The British convening and hosting
of the Simla Conference was essentially a project of the British
Indian, not the Home Government, and it was in Delhi that the
ulterior motive was the driving force.
The British ulterior motive was the rectification (as they
perceived and called it) of the current border with China, vulnerably aligned along the foot of the hills in Indias north-east, and
over the previous two years they had been exploring the region
north of the Outer Line in search of a suitable new alignment.
They decided upon that in the nick of time so far as the Simla Conference was concerned: a last-minute report from the surveyor/
explorers enabled McMahon to complete the delineation of the
projected new borderline between north-east India and China
on his maps. Not consistently following a crest-line, and certainly
not a watershed, the line, drawn in red, followed for most of its
length the edge of the Tibetan plateau, where it gives way to the
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broken, sharply ridged country which slopes down to the flat of

the Brahmaputra Valley. In achieving what the Raj considered strategic viability it would have advanced Britains territorial claim
in that sector by some 60 miles, cartographically annexing about
30,000 square miles of what the Chinese held to be their territory.
But that proposal (and that was all it then was) was never
put to the Chinese at Simla, presumably because McMahon
knew they would reject it. From the opening of the conference
the Chinese representatives made plain that they would never
agree to cede territory, and explained why: The Republic has
no right to alienate any part of the territory inherited from the
Manchu Dynasty, and must maintain the extent of its territory the
same as before (Kao 1980: 227). So instead McMahon opened
separate parleys with the Tibetan representatives, holding
those in Delhi the better to keep them secret from the Chinese;
and in those meetings in March 1914, with pressure and promises,
he obtained the Tibetan representatives agreement to the
boundary advance that was the British aim, that agreement being
registered in jointly signed Notes and initialled illustrative maps.
Becoming aware of those secret and in the Chinese view illicit
dealings, in the closing session of the conference the Chinese
representative formally, for the record, voiced a message from
his government: China would not recognise any treaty or agreement reached between Britain and Tibet.
Thus the Simla Conference, intending duplicity, ended in
failure, indeed fiasco. Reporting to London, the Viceroy
disowned McMahons privy dealings with the Tibetans and
their outcome, appreciative certainly of the fact that they were
in breach of a treaty with Russia binding Britain not thus to
engage directly with Tibet on issues of territory or sovereignty.
An American scholars commentary on the Simla Conference
is mordant and apt: the record shows responsible officials of
British India to have acted to the injury of China in conscious
violation of their instructions; misleading their superiors;
[forging] official documents; lying ... and bullying ....2
The conferences failure was in 1929 curtly and bleakly
registered as such in the official record of Britains diplomacy
in and around India, an irregular series of printed volumes
known as Aitchisons Treaties, Engagements and Sanads.
Doctoring and Garbling the Records
Such then was the known historical background when in 1935 the
British rulers of India began again to worry about the vulnerability
of their north-eastern border to possible aggression from China
and to hanker for a way to rectify its alignment. But history,
defined as the contemporary understanding of past events, is
variableand malleable. Given a political need sharp enough
there are always ways and means by which an authority may
distort and falsify the historical record to make it serve current
purposes. And that is exactly what a faction of British officials in
India, under the leadership of one of their number, Olaf Caroe, set
out to do: doctor and garble the records of the Simla Conference
to make them support the assertion that Indias north-eastern
borderline lay legitimately just where McMahon had tried unsuccessfully to place it. The aim of Caroes great pretension was
to establish the false belief that diplomatic agreement on the
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rectified alignment of the north-east border had in fact been

achieved at Simla, but that by reason of bureaucratic omission or
distraction in the turmoil of the Great War that broke out immediately after the Simla Conference, the provisions of the agreement
had never been put into effect. Once that belief was established
belated action to repair the omission with, on the one hand, documentary and cartographic amendments and on the other a forward policy on the ground would be seen as an urgent necessity.
Caroe and his associates would have accepted that to convince
the other Simla participants that the conferences outcome was
the opposite of what their records showed would be impossible.
But Chinas future was darkly uncertain, internally torn, its
government on the run already, so in the mid-1930s that Nanking
could ever face down Britain would have been inconceivable,
while the memories or wishes of Lhasas priestly rulers were
unlikely to weigh at all in the calculations of the Raj.
While naturally the thinking behind Caroes plot is not on the
record, the strategy can be inferred, as with a chess player, from
the way he moved the pieces on the board. Posted back to Delhi
in 1934 as joint secretary (and soon deputy foreign secretary, then
foreign secretary) from long service on the North-West Frontier,
Caroe was a classical Englishman of the ruling class (although
the name is Scandinavian): educated at Eton and Oxford then in
what Curzon called the frontier school of character where
men were forged in the furnace of responsibility and on the
anvil of self-reliance, he clearly was a man of marked moral
force. He was also an intellectual, with a bent for geopolitical
contemplation (Probst 2005: passim). Can he be seen too as an
unprincipled trickster, another McMahon? Certainly his political/diplomatic artifices were to lead to war and cost India and
China lives and treasure over decades, but the responsibility for
those consequences lies more on the later Indian politicians and
officials who could and should so easily have averted them.
Diplomatic Forgery
The opening move in Caroes long game was played in 1935 as

if in reaction to the detention by the Tibetan authorities in
Tawang of an Englishman, a renowned explorerbotanist
intelligence asset named Kingdon Ward, whose arrival in their
domain they considered unauthorised. That action, Caroe was
to claim, set him off on an archival investigation into the
grounds the Tawang dzongpens had, if any, for such punitive
action: and it was that side issue, as he called it, that led him
to the pretended discovery that, due to McMahons neglected
and forgotten diplomatic achievements in the Simla Conference,
Tawang had in fact long been legally British/Indian territory
and that therefore the Tibetans action was ultra vires, indeed
their very presence in Tawang illegitimate.
In the delusive light of Caroes faked discovery of what he
called the true position, it became incumbent upon the Raj
urgently to make good the administrative lapses that had left a
swathe of strategically critical British territory un-administered,
indeed unclaimed, and Caroe set in motion the bureaucratic
wheels that launched the British government into an annexationist forward policy, expressed militarily on the ground northward
from Assam and endorsed cartographically and diplomatically
102
from Delhi and then London. That procedure is traced in detail

through the files of the India Office and the Foreign Office in
London by the Indian scholar Karunakar Gupta in his Hidden
History of the Sino-Indian Frontier, by reference first to the Red
Line on the maps used by McMahon in his unsuccessful trickery
during the Simla Conference; the nomenclature McMahon Line
is introduced for the first time in this correspondence, which
suggests that in fact Caroe Line would be a truer patronymic. A
great deal of further detail is brought out by Alastair Lamb (1989).
Having made a good start on his McMahon Line fabrication in Delhi, Caroe proceeded in February 1937 to London and
further progress there. He arranged for, or personally exerted
pressure on the leading firms of cartographers, the Royal
Geographical Society, the War Office, etc, to terminate their
long-standing practice of marking Indias north-eastern border
along the foot of the hills and depict it instead on the McMahon
alignment, as shown in a revised map series now published by
the Survey of India. As later he testily noted only in the office
of The Times was he rebuffed, the Thunderers editors at first
rejecting his urgings. By and large, however, Caroe found little
difficulty in giving cartographic currency to his rectified version
of Indias north-eastern border: much more ingenuity and effort
was called for, however, in bringing the official diplomatic
record into harmony with his distorted historical account of
the outcome of the Simla Conference.
By the late 1920s when, for other reasons, thought began to
be given in London and Delhi to the need to bring the Aitchison
series up to date with a new edition, the Simla Conference and
the issue of Indias north-eastern border alignment were far
from pressing or even live matters of concern: indeed their
documentation was seen as dead letters. Consequently there
was felt to be no need for any reference to the Simla Conference
to be registered beyond the bare facts that it had been held
and been fruitless, hence the following sparse entry in the new
volume, Number XIV, published in 1929:
In 1913 a conference of Tibetan, Chinese and British plenipotentiaries
met in India to try and bring about a settlement with regard to matters
on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier; and a Tripartite Convention was drawn
up and initialled in 1914. The Chinese Government, however, refused
to permit their Plenipotentiary to proceed to full signature.
While it was extant, that entry, if only implicitly by its omissions, contradicted the Caroe fabrication, and therefore its
obliteration was essential to his project.
Under Caroes urging the relevant authorities in London were
brought to approve first that the Survey of India should forthwith
begin showing the north-eastern border on the McMahon
alignment on all official maps; and second that selected documentation from the Simla Conference which until then had been
considered to be invalid, indeed meaningless, should be exhumed and resuscitated by publication in a revised replacement
Volume XIV of Aitchisons Treaties, which would be substituted
for the original with due avoidance of unnecessary publicity.
Thus it came about that 60-odd copies of a new Volume XIV were
printed in India in 1938but bearing still the 1929 dateand
shipped to London for distribution to relevant libraries and institutions in the UK, with a few going to chosen libraries abroad.
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All recipients were requested to return the original volume to the

India Office for destruction, and it appears that almost all obliged.
The documents now inserted into the public record included
the Notes exchanged between the Tibetan representatives and
McMahon in their secret (so far as China was concerned)
exchanges in Delhi in March 1914 expressing agreement on the
Tibet/India border alignment proposed by McMahon: read
without knowledge that Lhasa and Peking had both repudiated
that agreement before the ink of it had dried, that exchange, with
other material now introduced, strongly suggested that the
McMahon Line border, as at this time it came to be called, had
had a legitimate birth in a valid international treaty. This exercise
in diplomatic forgery was executed with successful secrecy, and
at the time went unnoticed outside innermost official circles. As
the years passed, and students of these events and developments referred to and cited the official record, so the misrepresentation grew in apparent authenticity.
Tracing the steady development of the McMahon Line
fabrication through the records may suggest misleadingly that
Caroe met no resistance. Some resistant (or obstructionist)
voices may have gone unregistered, some stand out, like a
personal letter to the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow in March 1939
from the acting Governor of Assam, Sir Henry Twynam (text in
Gupta 1974: 86). Here the whole basis of Caroes campaign, the
ascription of legality to the goings-on in Simla and Delhi in 1914,
is challenged: If one of the three parties in a Tri-Partite Convention does not ratify, can another party to the Convention claim
that it is binding between itself and the third party?
Twynam goes on to suggest that since the Raj had treated the
Simla Convention as a dead letter from 1914 to 1938, both in law
and equity it had gone beyond revival; and he strongly argued
against the forward policy which aimed at occupying an area
which has always been oriented toward Tibet ethnographically,
politically and in religion and was still firmly under Tibetan
administration. He warned that the occupation of Tawang, which
Caroe and his supporters were urging, would risk incurring the
resentful hostility of not only Lhasa but of China too. Twynams
essential message might be summed up as Forget the McMahon
Line, leave Tawang alone, and take the pressure out of your forward policyand it was partially heeded at that time. Twynam
would not have known then of course of Caroes success in London
in insinuating a falsified version of the 1929 Aitchison volume
into the official record. Probably even the Viceroy would have
been outside Caroes tight need to know circle.
The weight Twynams letter to the Viceroy added to those
resisting Caroes urgings that Tawang should be occupied and
administration thus extended to the whole length of the
McMahon Line was decisive, and it was decided that the brakes
should be put on the forward policy bringing it to a halt short
of the annexation of Tawang. (That Twynam was left indignant
at the continuing success of the Caroe faction may have been
signalled years later, 1959, by his angry outburst in a letter to
the editor of The Times, the McMahon Line ... does not exist
and never has existed.) So the Raj did leave Tawang alone
and further followed Twynams advice in trying to use that
restraint as an inducement to obtain Lhasas agreement to a
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border on the rest of the McMahon alignment. The Tibetans

spurned that sop.
Japans irruption into the War both strengthened Caroes
cause and added to his difficulties. His superiors in Delhi and
London had long been chary whenever his machination looked
likely to arouse the indignation of China, now that unease was
accentuated by recognition that the United States (US) would
unquestioningly support any complaint from their favoured
ally Chiang Kai-sheik and his government. (A British attempt
to begin turning Tibetan autonomy into sovereignty at about
this time was immediately stamped out by the US State
Department.) But at the same time the advance of the Japanese
army towards India of course argued for building up and
advancing Indias defensive position, and so the militarys
forward moves in the north-east were accelerated and extended.
That processone of the British officers involved recorded
was strenuously opposed by secular Tibetan frontier officials
and by monastic authorities, but of course ineffectively.
The Caroe Line as the Incontrovertible Border
By the end of World War II, then, Caroes fabrication had to a

large extent been made good. The alignment he had named
the McMahon Line had been established as the de facto
BritishIndian north-eastern borderline (falling short only in
its leaving Tawang to Tibet). And the assertion that this was
also the de jure border had apparently solid evidence,
documentary and cartographic, to support it. It appeared that
what should have been called the Caroe Line had become
the incontrovertible Sino/Indian border, to the benefit of India
certainly and, arguably, of China too, since a settled and
agreed border is a boon to both concerned parties, except, of
course, that the evidence for its legitimacy was fraudulent, and
it was far from agreed. The Chinese government, by then
fighting for its very existence against Japanese invasion and
communist insurgency, had been slow to react to the British
incursions into its territory in the remote south-west, but in
1946 began protesting at the intrusions, demanding their
cessation and the withdrawal of the British forces.
Successive notes of protest were delivered to the British
embassy in Nanking in July, September and November of that
year, a fourth in January 1947; and as soon as diplomatic
representation of independent India was established in China,
February 1947, a note to the same effect was lodged with that
bureau. From Lhasa to the new government in Delhi came a
demand that India should relinquish and return all the territory
the British had annexed from Tibet since Younghusbands
invasionary expedition of 1904. The final official act of the
departing Guomintang Chinas ambassador to India was a formal
reminder that his government did not recognise as binding any
agreements reached at the Simla Conference.
Indias Illegitimate North-East Border Claim
Thus it was that India came into existence as an independent

state with a severe congenital affliction, a fraught territorial
dispute with China, with Indias claim resting insecurely on a
British diplomatic forgery.
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As the Transfer of Power to independent Indian and

Pakistani authorities approached the knowledge of that innermost flaw must have agitated Caroe and his associates. Yes, it
was only the grit that begat the pearl of Indias enhanced security
in the North East, but the fewer people who knew about it the
better. Critically, what about the immediate successors, the
men, politicians and officials, who would form the executive of
the first independent Indian government? Could they be taken
into the secret, or should they be left in misplaced confidence
that Indias north-eastern border claim was legitimate? Later
events showed that the Raj took the risk of bringing Nehru into
its confidencea risk because the British would be confessing
to exactly the kind of coercive imperialist trickery for which he
had been denouncing them for decades, and of which in this
instance China, which he intended to make independent
Indias close friend, was the victim. Nehru might repudiate the
confidence, even make their malpractice public knowledge.
By early 1946 when an Interim Government was established
in Delhi with Nehru at its head, Caroe, now Sir Olaf, had
become foreign secretary and it would undoubtedly have been
his responsibility to brief the new Prime Minister on the recent
success of the Raj in rectifying the alignment of Indias northeastern borderand indeed later Nehru was to tell Parliament
that the problem of that border was among the first issues he
had to consider in his new office. He was to deal with it in two
ways: by insistently and persistently proclaiming that the
McMahon Line formed Indias fixed and legal north-eastern
border; and always accompanying that reiterated proclamation
with the assertion that there could be no question about this,
the matter was closed, beyond negotiation, even discussion.
That emphasis is suggestive, inviting the surmise that Caroe
linked to his disclosure advice in words along these lines:
Since it is a convention of international law that a territorial
cession implemented by a treaty remains valid unless and until
superseded by a new treaty, your position in this matter will be
unchallengeable, Prime Minister, so long as you refuse to submit it to re-negotiation. There at least would be an explanation
for what otherwise is a puzzling fixation in Nehrus policy, the
unyielding, unchanging refusal to accept Chinas offer to agree
to the McMahon border alignment and formalise it in the normal
and essential process of diplomatic confirmation.
That offer sprang from the early decision of the Peoples
Republic, acting in rational self-interest, that it must abjure the
irredentist commitment of the predecessor Guomintang government to recover lost lands, and on the contrary would settle its
borders with its many neighbours on the alignments upon
which history had left them. In its flight to Taiwan the Guomintang had taken all it could of government files and documents,
leaving its successors ignorant of the details and burden of previous border negotiations and agreements; but in 1949 the de
facto SinoIndian border clearly lay on what the Indian government called the McMahon Line and the new men in power in
Beijing had no evidence to indicate that, contrary to the Indian
insistence, that border sector had no treaty basis or foundation
in international law. Accordingly, Zhou Enlai was candidly open
to the inveiglements of Nehru at their several meetings in the
104
late 1940s and early 1950s and unreservedly gave his undertaking that the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) would accept
the McMahon Line border. At that point Caroes great gamble
had succeeded. As he had expected, by acting decisively on the
ground the British in India had created the new border alignment they desired, making it a status quo which the Chinese
would accept, however reluctantly. Zhou Enlai gave that
acceptanceunaware of course that Nehrus absolute and
unyielding refusal to engage India in the customary and
essential diplomatic process of boundary confirmation would
deny China the opportunity to fulfil Zhous undertaking.
This is not the place to retell the process through which
India, having barred the way to border settlement by its refusal
to negotiate, then forced war upon a reluctant PRC by extending
the refusal to negotiate to all sectors of the China border, and
then acting as if when India claimed territory that ipso facto
became Indian territory. The elaboration of Indian border policy
brought in 1954 a categorical Indian claim to Aksai Chin, a desolate high altitude tract in Indias north-west which China had for
at least a century treated as its own and valued strategically as
providing a route between Xinjiang and Tibet, and which the
Raj had never claimed. That claim too Nehru asserted as an
absolute, unquestionable and never to be submitted to negotiation, with the connotation that Chinas persistent presence on
any Indian-claimed territory constituted a standing act of
aggression. Thus he metastasised Indias congenital affliction.
The protracted Indian attempt forcefully to extrude the Chinese
from Aksai Chin loaded the guns, so to speak, and an Indian
military thrust over the McMahon Line in 1962 pulled the trigger
of Chinese counter-attack and border war. Initially the outbreak
of conflict was gladly welcomed by the Indian elite, misled by
the government into expecting swift victory, so the shock of immediate defeat left it gullible to the official reversal of actuality
with the absurd charge of unprovoked aggression by China.3
Caroes Deception Exposed
Here what remains to tell is how Caroes deception was at last

exposed. The agent was John Addis, an Englishman of Caroes
own ilk, public school, Oxford and then a career in the Foreign
Service exclusively in Asia, with repeated postings in China,
Nanking and Beijing, finally as ambassador to the PRC. In 1963
a long-service leave gave him the opportunity to investigate, at
Harvards Centre for International Affairs, what appeared to
him the wildly uncharacteristic behaviour of the PRC in its
border dispute with India, as that was reflected in the Western
pressbellicose, deceitful and territorially acquisitive. His
studies convinced him that those epithets were in fact appositebut in application to Indias policy and actions, not
Chinas. That sharp revisionist interpretation he expressed in a
full paper privately circulated in 1963, The IndiaChina
Border Question, which this writer has placed on the internet
with a personal Introduction, from which he quotes here:4
Addiss first discovery was dramatic. On the Widener Librarys shelves
he found two copies of the 1929 [Volume XIV edition ... of] Aitchisons
Treaties and was surprised to note that the two were not exactly identical. Curiously, the difference lay in only one passage, on the pages
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describing the outcome of the [Simla Conference of 1914] in which the
British had covertly tried to induce China and/or Tibet to cede to India
a broad tract of territory in Indias north-east. One of the two volumes
reflected the failure of that attempt, the other claimed some success.
Addis deduced that the contradiction revealed a British diplomatic forgery, aimed to indicate falsely that India could claim legitimacy for its
de facto north-eastern border [which by then had been advanced at its
western extremity by independent Indias 1951 annexation of Tawang].
Addiss revelation should not have come as a surprise. The

truth about the origin of the McMahon Line had been on the
record since 1959, when the Indian government published
Zhou Enlais letter of the 8th September that year to Nehru. By
then the Chinese government had gained access to the documentation in the archives of the Potala in Lhasa and learned
the full, true story of what had happened at Simla in 1914, and
Zhou spelled it out to Nehru:
[T]he so-called McMahon Line was never discussed at the Simla
Conference but was determined by the British representative and the
representative of the Tibet local authorities behind the back of the representative of the Chinese Central Government through an exchange of secret notes at Delhi on 24 March 1914, that is prior to the signing of the
Simla treaty. This line was later marked on the map attached to the Simla
treaty as part of the boundary between Tibet and the rest of China. The
so-called McMahon Line was a product of the British policy of aggression against the Tibet Region of China and has never been recognised by
any Chinese Central Government and is therefore decidedly illegal.
That refutation of Nehrus persistent assertion of legality for

his border claim did not amount to or even suggest a retraction
of Zhous/Chinas commitment to accept the McMahon alignment for a delimited boundary in that sector: Zhou advanced it
only as a further argument for negotiation as the normal and
essential procedure for creating a legal boundary.
In his reply to Zhou and further correspondence Nehru simply
ignored that passage and its implicationsas, most culpably,
did Western observers. Addis did not bring his paper to the attention of the press, but he warned the scholar Alastair Lamb,
known to be writing a history of the McMahon Line, about the
nature of the forged Aitchison volume. Lamb, like everyone else
who consulted the Aitchison record at the time, had been taken in
by that forgery, mistakenly stating at the beginning of his major
study The McMahon Line (Vol I, p 4) that the main British gain
from the Simla Conference was the delimitation of the McMahon
Line. In a footnote on page 546 of Volume II he thanks Addis for
bringing to his attention the anomalous nature of the Aitchison
volume by which he had been misled, but shies away from admitting that Addis had exposed a diplomatic forgery and thus
4
NOTES
1
2
3
These definitions, now universally accepted

and critical in any discussion of boundaries,
were coined by Henry McMahon himself and
spelled out in a 1935 lecture to the Royal Society
of Arts. Sir Henry McMahon recorded in Journal
of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol 84, 1935, p 2.
A P Rubin in the American Journal of International Law, Vol 61, 1967, p 827.
For details of those developments, see Maxwell
(1970) and Chinas India War in Maxwell (2015),
Chinas India War: How the Chinese Saw the
Conflict, written in May 2011, can be found at
https://chinaindiaborderdispute.files.wordpress.
com/2010/07/neville-maxwell-chinas-indiawar.pdf.
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refuted the Indian claim that the McMahon Line represented a

legal boundary. Caroe was very much alive and a commanding
presence in Londons circle of Asia specialists, indeed in lectures
and the press was still brazenly promulgating the false story of his
discovery of the true position of Indias north-eastern border.
Addiss Harvard paper came to the attention of the Nehru
government soon after its circulation in 1963, occasioning an
indignant complaint to London that one of its officials had
been allowed to leak such a profound political secret, amounting to a stab-in-the-back of India. Addis was summoned by the
British Foreign Secretary, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, and sternly
rebuked for his grave indiscretion (Addis believed that punitively his posting to Beijing as ambassador, the longed-for
summit of his career, was delayed by some years).
Indias Obduracy
In the succeeding decades there has been no weakening in the

Indian governments insistence that the McMahon Line constitutes Indias legal north-eastern borderline, nor in the Indian
elites blind loyalty to that falsehood; and recognition that
Indias claim is entirely fallacious has only grudgingly been
allowed to seep into mainstream Western academic writing,
still drawn, as if gravitationally, to sympathy with democratic
India against even capitalist-road China. Beijings policy is
consistent too, insistent that while no legal boundary line
exists between China and India there would be no intractable
difficulties in creating one if only the Indian side would agree
to negotiate in a spirit of mutual understanding and mutual
accommodation. Implicit there is the message that India could
keep its Arunachal Pradesh; but Nehru further deluded his
people into believing that Aksai Chin was sacred Indian soil
that must be regained, and it appears that still no Indian
government can break free from that folly. Nehrus absolute
refusal to negotiate a boundary settlement continues to be
Indian government policy.
So it is that Indias obduracy sustains and perpetuates its
congenital border dispute with China, leaving India, with its
quasi-satellite Bhutan, isolated as the only ones of Chinas 14
sovereign neighbours which have not amicably settled their
China border through the customary procedure of diplomatic
delimitation and joint demarcation. That resolution of the dispute, in which each side already occupies its vital ground,
could be readily achievable through negotiation underlines
the perversity of the Indian position.
Neville Maxwells Introduction to J M Addis,

The India-China Border Question, at https://
chinaindiaborderdispute.files.wordpress.com /
2010/07/india-china-border2.pdf.
REFERENCES
Cukwurah, A O (1967): The Settlement of Boundary
Disputes in International Law, Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Gupta, Karunakar (1974): The Hidden History of
the Sino-Indian Frontier, Calcutta: Minerva
Publications.
Kao, Ting Tsz (1980): The Chinese Frontiers, Palatine,
Illinois: Chinese Scholarly Publishing Company.
Lamb, Alastair (1967): The China-India Border: The
vol lI no 32
Origins of the Disputed Boundaries, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.
(1989): Tibet, China & India 191450, Hertingfordbury, Hertfordshire: Roxford Books.
Maxwell, Neville (1970): Indias China War, London:
Cape.
(2015): Chinas India War: How the Chinese
Saw the Confl ict, in Chinas Borders:
Settlement and ConflictsSelected Papers,
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.
Probst, Peter John (2005): The Future of the Great
Game: Sir Olaf Caroe, Indias Independence and
the Defence of Asia, Akron, Ohio: University of
Akron Press.
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Driverless Vehicles and Their Future in India

Dinesh Mohan
As driverless vehicles become a reality, there is a need to

understand what such technology could mean for urban
transportation in India. Even as the penetration of
autonomous vehicle technologies may be limited in
India, and its labour market and land use implications
few, it could prove to be a highly efficient low-cost urban
transport alternative compared to the hugely expensive
metro systems of today.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on

Driverless Technology and Its Urban Impact, NYU Marron Institute of
Urban Management, New York, May 2015.
Dinesh Mohan (dineshmohan@outlook.com) is Guest Professor at the
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
106
f you search for literature on autonomous or driverless

vehicles (DLVS) you will find very few references before the
year 2005. This is interesting because beginning in the late
1980s, many driverless experimental platforms have been
built dealing with lane centring, distance keeping, obstacle
avoidance, lane changing, and intersection handling (Junqing
et al 2013). Robert W Lucky, writing in the IEEE Spectrum1
magazine, informs us that at the turn of the millennium he
was a member of a committee of the National Academy of
Engineering (US) whose task was to select most outstanding
engineering achievements of the 20th century, and among
others they selected the development of the automobile as it
profoundly changed where we lived and how we lived (2014:
28). But he goes on to say that at about the same time, people
were making lists of important future achievements for the
21st centurygrand challenges with social impacts. But as
far as I know, driverless cars were not on any of those lists
(2014: 28).
It is quite amazing that within a short period of time the DLV
has caught everyones imagination all over the globe as something that is not only possible but also expected to solve our
problems of safety and congestion in the near future. Many cities
have already announced intentions for putting such vehicles on
the road. For example, the transport minister of the United
Kingdom (UK) had announced that projects in Greenwich,
Bristol, Milton Keynes, and Coventry will be backed by 19 million worth of funding to test prototype DLVs on dedicated lanes
(Topham 2015). With these investments they expect to keep
the UK at the cutting edge of automotive technology and bring
more highly-skilled jobs to the UK, and be world-leaders in
this field and able to benefit from what is expected to be a 900
billion industry by 2025 (Topham 2015).
While many cities are preparing to introduce DLVs for limited
use, a number of vehicle manufacturers have announced their
intention to make commercial DLVs available for sale within a
decade. Google, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Nissan,
Volvo and Audi have all demonstrated prototypes of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the past couple of years and laws are
already being changed in many countries to allow use of such
vehicles in the public space (Lucky 2014; Schultz 2014;
Naughton 2015; Knight 2013). Even in India a vehicle manufacturer (Mahindra & Mahindra) has launched an all-India competition for design and fabrication of DLVs.2 Out of 670 applicants,
nine have been selected for the final phase and are expected to
be ready with their entries for the prize by October 2016.
While there are some sceptics who do not believe that such
cars will be a normal feature on public roads in our lifetime
august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
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Millions
Figure 1: Cars and MTW Registered in India by Year
Motorised two-wheelers
Cars
Actual numbers on the road would be considerably less; see text.

Source: Transport Research Wing (2014).
Cars
Source: Society for Indian Automobile Manufacturers and projections to 2030 at growth
rate of 10% per year.
(Knight 2013; Luettel et al 2012), others including many manufacturers have no doubt that we will see DLVs on highways in
some countries in the near future. It is quite clear that some
kind of DLVs will be on the roads in some parts of the world
within a decade.
In this paper we indulge in a thought exercise to understand
the possible role of DLVs in low- and middle-income countries
like India by 2030. For this purpose we assume that a fully
functional DLV will be available around 2025. The issues we
examine are:
(i) The composition of the probable vehicle fleet in India in
2030 and the possibilities of DLV penetration in that fleet.
(ii) Operational issues concerning DLV in the projected modal
shares on urban streets in the Indian future.
(iii) Influence of AVs on urban form, transit, and labour markets.
National Trends: Figure 1 shows the growth of personal

motor vehicles registered in India by year (Transport Research
Wing 2014). The official registration data exaggerates the
number of vehicles in actual operation because vehicles that
go off the road due to age or other reasons do not get removed
from the records. This is because personal vehicle owners pay
EPW
august 6, 2016
45
40.7
40
35
30
Personal Vehicles in India
Figure 3: Estimates of Light Passenger Vehicle Sales for Different Countries

in 2030
vol lI no 32
Million units
Vehicle sales per year, millions
Figure 2: Personal Motor Vehicle Sales in India 19722013
a lifetime tax when they buy a car and do not deregister their
vehicles when they junk them. The actual number of vehicles
on the road is estimated to be 55%65% of those on the records
(Expert Committee on Auto Fuel Policy 2002; Mohan et al
2014; Goel et al 2015). The number of cars and motorised
two-wheelers (MTW) registered in 2012 was 2,15,68,000 and
11,54,19,000 respectively. If we assume that 70% of them were
actually on the road, then car and MTW ownership per 1,000
persons was 13 and 67 respectively in 2012.
Figure 2 shows the sales of cars and MTW in India from 1972
to 2013. The average growth rate in the 10-year period 200413
was 11% per year for cars and 10% per year for MTW. The average growth rate of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the
same period was about 7% per year (Planning Commission
2014). This gives us an income elasticity of demand (motor
vehicles) of about 1.41.5 for India. In countries not in the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) this ratio varies between 1.4 and 2.2 with an average of
1.61 (Dargay et al 2007). The growth rate of vehicles in India
seems to be lower than that in many other non-OECD countries.
The projection of vehicle sales to 2030 is shown in Figure 2 by
dashed lines assuming a growth rate of 10% per year for the
period 201330. We use the projected sales figures for estimating vehicle population in India in 2030. Assuming a life expectancy of 17 years for cars and 10 years for MTW (Goel et al 2015)
in India, we get a total of 11,16,60,000 cars and 53,46,50,000
in 2030. For an expected population of 1.4 billion in India in
2030, we get ownership per thousand persons of 80 for cars
and 380 for MTW in 2030.
Figure 3 shows that our projected number for car sales in
2030 in India is similar to that estimated by Booz & Company
(Sehgal 2011). In 2030, the per capita income in India should
reach around $6,000 (at 201213 prices), similar to the present
per capita income of China and Thailand (National Transport
Development Policy Committee 2014). At this income our estimates suggest car ownership of 80 per thousand persons. Figure 4
(p 108) shows vehicle ownership and per capita income, historical
and projected, for eight large countries (Dargay et al 2007). Dargay et als estimates for India suggest vehicle ownership for
India in 2030 at a little more than 100 per thousand persons.
Their estimate for India would be higher than our number
because they would have used the official numbers for vehicle
ownership in India that overestimates the vehicle population.
25
17.6
20
15
11.7
7.8
10
5
5.2
3.7
2.9
2.4
2.4
1.9
Italy
Spain
0
China
United
States
Source: Sehgal (2011).
India
Brazil
Russia Germany France United

Kingdom
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
projected number, MTWs will still

outnumber cars by a factor of 2.4.
Figure 4: Vehicle Ownership and Per Capita Income, Historical and Projected, for Eight Large Countries
1000
900
800
700
US 2030
US 2002
Spain 2030
Urban Trends: Figure 5 shows the

car and MTW ownership levels in
South Korea
500
2030
Mexico 2030
Indian cities with populations greater
US 1960
400
than 1 million persons. There is a
Brazil 2030
wide scatter for ownership levels
300
South Korea 2002
especially in the smaller cities. This
China 2030
is probably because there would be
200
a variation in the income levels for
Mexico 2002
these cities. The proportion of MTWs
to cars seems to decrease in cities
Brazil 2002
with populations greater than about
India 2030
100
5 million. This would reflect the
90
80
greater prosperity levels in the meg70
acities. The average ownership per
60
thousand persons in large urban
50
areas is 31 for cars and 194 for MTWs.
40
This shows that the average urban
vehicle ownership is a little more
30
Japan
than double the national average.
1960
Therefore, if the average urban
Mexico
20
car
ownership in 2030 is double that
Brazil 1960
1962
South
Korea
China
of
the
national average, it would
India
1982
2002
2002
amount
to 160 cars per thousand
Spain
1960
persons.
In megacities, the MTW
10
2
3
4
5
6
7 8 9 10
20
30
40
50 60 population is about twothree
GDP per capita: historical & projected
times the car population, and this
Source: Dargay, Gately and Sommer (2007).
trend may continue up to 2030.
These
estimates
suggest
that
in most large cities in India, car
Figure 5: Personal Vehicle Ownership in Cities with Population > 1 million
in 2012 in India
ownership levels may still be significantly lower in 2030 than
those prevailing in the high-income cities of today, and MTWs
will continue to have a significant presence on our roads.
Spain
2002
Japan 2030
Japan
2002
Number of vehicles per 1,000 persons
Vehicles per 1,000 people: historical & projected
600
Income and Its Influence on Car Sales
Cars
Numbers from the source document have been adjusted downwards to account for
overrepresentation in the official numbers.
Source: Transport Research Wing (2014).
Figure 6: Estimate of Indian Household Income & Car Sales Distribution in 2003
40
108
60
50
% of households
Therefore, car ownership in India in 2030 at 80 per thousand persons would be less than that in most of the large
countries today and certainly much less than that in highincome countries (500800). The experience from countries
like Thailand, Taiwan and Colombia show that at per capita
incomes of around $6,000 per year, MTWs can still remain a
significant proportion of the vehicle share on the roads. Our
projection for India in 2030 suggests MTW ownership at 380
per thousand persons. However, it is possible that with rising
incomes penetration of MTWs may reduce. At even half the
30
Household income distribution
40
Distribution of car sales by segment
30
33%
20
20%
0
<$1K
B
$1K
$3 K
C
$3K
$5K
20
12%
11%
10
5%
2%
0%
E&F
12%
10
5%
% of total car sales
At present A (mini), B (compact), and C (sedan) category cars

constitute about 80% of the sales and non-luxury sport utility
vehicles (SUVs) about 15% of the sales in India (Team-BHP
2015). All these vehicles cost less than `12,00,000. Personal
vehicles costing more than `12,00,000 have a sales share of
less than 3%. India has one of the largest shares of A and B category cars among all the large countries in the world (Cather
2007). Figure 6 shows Indian household income and car sales
0
MPV
SUV
$5K $10K $15K $25K

$10K
$15K
$25K
$35K
Car Segments Income distribution
PUP
Other
$35K $50K >$75K

$50K $75K
Source: Sehgal (2011).
august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
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distribution in 2030 (Sehgal 2011). Figure 7: Development of the Indian City, 19th Century to the Present
Even in 2030, D (large sedans), E (exC
ecutive sedans), and F (luxury cars)
Present City
category vehicles comprise less than
3% of the sales. Among the SUVs and
multipurpose vehicles (MPVs) those
costing more than `12,00,000 are likely
to be a small proportion. It appears
that in 2030, cars costing more than
`12,00,000 may constitute less than
5% of the vehicle sales. The affordability of cars will have an important influence on the level of penetration of DLV
in the post-2025 period in India.
Driverless Cars in Urban India of
202530
Expected Modal Share of DLVs: One

of the important technologies necessary
for the operation of DLV is a system that
creates a map of the cars surroundings, including other moving and stationary objects, and integrates the information with existing maps and other sensors
as the vehicle moves. In the Google car this mapping is done by
LIDAR (an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) systems
that include a large number of lasers and receivers (Luettel et
al 2012). The present cost of this technology alone is estimated to
be `45,00,000 `60,00,000. However, costs of these technologies are expected to reduce over the next decade. The most
optimistic estimate for extra cost necessary for producing general use DLV is about `6,00,000 (Schultz 2014). At present
costs, the basic DLV would then sell for more than `12,00,000.
The cost criterion may remain an important issue. In a survey of public opinion about self-driving vehicles done across
six countries Schoettle and Sivak (2014: i) report that,
the respondents in the six countries surveyed, while expressing high
levels of concern about riding in vehicles equipped with this technology, mostly feel positive about self-driving vehicles, have optimistic
expectations of the benefits, and generally desire self-driving-vehicle
technology (though a majority in four out of the six countries surveyed are not willing to pay extra for such technology at this time).
A
Indian highdensity city
pre-1850
B
Colonial city
18501950
Commercial/industrial centres and

road and railway tracks
Chauffeurs vs DLVs: One way to understand the role of DLVs in

the future is to examine the role a chauffeur plays in the mobility
of upper-class citizens in Indian cities. The car owner is able to
issue instructions on the mobile phone and have the following
functions performed by the car (driven by a chauffeur):
(i) Have children and disabled members of the family taken to
their destinations without other members of the family accompanying them.
(ii) Pick up guests from airports, etc.
(iii) Run errands (including shopping) and making deliveries.
(iv) Transport owners to their destinations and then park and
wait at a location a distance away where parking is available.
(v) Cruise around if no parking is available while the owner
does some shopping.
It appears that the chauffeur-driven car is providing the
same benefits to the owner as a DLV would, except that the
DLV would not be able to perform the functions that require
human interaction (for example, shopping). However, it is
possible that the DLVs would provide a safer alternative to the
chauffeur-driven car.
The Indian respondents were willing to pay less than

`1,00,000 extra for such technology.
The cost component would restrict DLV use only to upperclass families, as households earning more than `22,75,000
per year will be less than 5%. In large urban areas this
proportion may be about 10%. At these income levels penetration of fully functioning DLVs in large Indian cities is not
likely to be more than 5%10% in 2030. At this price the DLV
is unlikely to replace the lower-end taxi service as chauffeurs
cost less than `1,80,000 per year at current prices and
vehicles used generally less than `5,00,000. However, it is
possible that the DLV might become economical for running
shared taxi services with vehicle capacities of more than 10
persons.
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august 6, 2016
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Mobility in Large Indian Urban Areas: Indian cities changed

form when the British established a new city for themselves in
most district headquarters of the country including the national
capital (Delhi). They lived and worked in this new city, which
included the Civil Lines (where all the civil service officers
living quarters and offices were located) and cantonments.
This city (B in Figure 7) was physically separated from the old
city where the natives lived (A in Figure 7). Starting in the
mid-1860s the old city (A) was neglected, did not get adequate
municipal services and decayed physically. After independence in 1947, the Indian elite took over the British city (B) but
the decay of the old city continued. When Indian cities
expanded after the 1950s, it was not easy for most people to
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
settle in the bureaucratic city and they did not want to live in
the old congested dirty city (A). In expansion, a third city
came into being (C) which surrounded the earlier two. This
historical development of Indian cities has to be taken into
account to understand the difference in mobility patterns
between Indian cities and mature European cities.
Most cities in high-income countries have important central
business districts (CBD) with thriving city centres that are also
the pride of the city. This is not true for most Indian cities
anymore, including the megacities. Most of these cities expanded after 1960 and planned for multiple business districts.
The old city generally includes wholesale markets, older
trades, and lower-income groups including minorities (A), the
old British city has government offices, official residences and
expensive real estate for private residences and offices (B), and
all the new development has taken place in the third city (C).
This has a significant influence on mobility patterns and where
people live and work.
Modern Indian cities have multiple business districts distributed
around the city and along the roads leading out of the city. This
is one of the factors that do not favour very high-capacity radial
transit systems bringing people to the centre. These cities have
developed urban forms that encourage sprawl in the form of
relatively dense cities within cities. Low- and middle-income
people do not require a very large pool of activities to find
work. If businesses are mixed with residential areas, and the
lower-income people allowed to live everywhere, then the lessskilled persons are more likely to find work closer to home. All
Indian cities now have polycentric forms with most of the new
development taking place on the periphery.
Recent studies suggest that Indian firms doing research and
development work appear to locate in larger metropolitan
areas while mass production of standard items locate in nonmetropolitan areas. As development proceeds, manufacturing
decentralises from large cities and moves to the periphery or
to smaller cities. But in India this may be happening prematurely as expensive land, lack of infrastructure and power,
force organisations to move to the periphery where they can
establish their own facilities. While many of the principles on
how and why cities grow may be common across the world,
Ejaz Ghani and Ravi Kanbur (2015) inform us that unlike the
West, with increasing incomes and urbanisation, the availability
of formal jobs has slowed down in developing countries, especially in India. It appears that for the time being, there is going
to be urbanisation of the informal sector and de-urbanisation
of the organised sector.
Because of the reasons cited above, low-income levels, wide
availability of MTWs and relatively low-cost para-transit facilities,
Indian cities demonstrate the following characteristics (Mohan
2013; Goel et al 2015; Mohan et al 2014):
Estimated modal share in urban trips
Cars:
~5%15%
MTW:
~15%25%
Para-transit:
~10%20%
Bus and metro transit:
~5%20%
Walk and cycle:
~30%60%
110
Annual average kilometres for cars and MTW

City
MTW (km)
Car (km)
Delhi (16.7 million)
12,804 349
12,199 435
Visakhapatnam (1.7 milllion) 9,238 576
Rajkot (1.5 million)

7,255 325
These data indicate that:

(i) Vehicles in a megacity like Delhi average only approximately 12,000 km/year and in cities 10 times smaller in population about 7,0009,000 km/year. The Delhi values are only
50% higher than much smaller cities. Therefore, the sprawl
of Delhi seems to be different in nature than that of Los
A ngeles, and does not increase travel distances as much as one
would expect. People appear to find places to live closer to
work. As mentioned earlier, Delhi may be functioning as a
combination of many small cities in close proximity without an
important CBD forcing long commutes.
(ii) The average distance travelled per year by car in Delhi is
less than in most large United States (US) and European urban
areas (approximately 18,000 km/year).
(iii) Annual distance travelled by cars and MTW is similar in
Delhi probably because the owners of both vehicles live and
work in similar locations and their trip distances are not too
long.
(iv) All Indian cities have average densities greater than 100
persons per hectare which is much greater than large cities in
high-income countries (less than 50 persons per hectare). This
makes it easier to plan for sustaining non-motorised and public
transport mode shares in the future.
Urban Settlement, Mobility and Future DLV Use
The future urban transport scenario in large urban areas may

have the following characteristics:
(i) Relatively high-density sprawling cities with polycentric
activity nodes enabling relatively short trips.
(ii) Car use limited to less than 20% of all trips, and nonmotorised trips may remain in the range of 30%40%.
(iii) At least 90% of all cars and taxis costing less than
`1,200,000. This will limit the penetration of fully AVs to less
than 5% of the fleet.
(iv) Public transit will probably comprise medium capacity
(< 20,000 passengers per hour per direction), high-density
(lines per square kilometre) systems. These arrangements will
need dedicated lanes for buses, and route taxi systems.
(v) With greater provision of route and shared taxis, MTW
share may reduce in urban areas.
If the above scenario plays out in 2030, then the role of DLVs
may be predicted as follows:
(i) Since DLVs may mimic chauffeur-driven private vehicles of
today, they are not likely to reduce vehicle use or kilometres
driven.
(ii) Penetration of DLVs may be less than 5% of the vehicle fleet.
(iii) Because of high cost and low penetration levels, high
degree of informality in trade and business, multicentric city
structure, the small DLV will probably not influence urban
labour markets, land use, and transit significantly in Indian
urban areas in 2030.
august 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
(iv) DLV may find an important role as large shared taxis

operating on dedicated corridors for public transit.
(v) DLV may have a niche role for last mile connectivity
between public transit nodes and large business/industrial
establishments.
(vi) DLV technology will probably be introduced in many areas
of public transport and other niche functions in India.
DLV Issues in Urban Traffic
Safety and Ease of Movement
In addition to urban mobility and affordability issues there are

a few other concerns that we must consider. The DLV is
expected to make our roads much safer as the route guidance
technology does not allow it to come into conflict with other
vehicles and objects on the road. However, many experts are
not so sure. A recent report states,
The expectation of zero fatalities with self-driving vehicles is not
realistic. It is not a foregone conclusion that a self-driving vehicle
would ever perform more safely than an experienced, middle-aged
driver. During the transition period when conventional and selfdriving vehicles would share the road, safety might actually worsen,
at least for the conventional vehicles (Sivak and Schoettle 2015b: i).
The last point would be especially true for Indian roads where
the DLV would have to share the road with MTWs, non-motorised vehicles and bicyclists.
The safety characteristics of the DLV make it unforgivingly
polite. It has to stop if it senses that it might impact another
vehicle or object. With pedestrians, bicyclists and MTWs
weaving their way around vehicles on urban roads a DLV
might find it difficult to move. Pedestrians and bicyclists
could stop them from moving by just stepping in front of the
vehicle.
The DLV needs to keep specific longitudinal and lateral
distances from adjacent vehicles to ensure safety. These distances increase with speed and remain fi xed as specified in
the software. With MTW weaving around the DLV it is possible that the DLV will slow down to maintain appropriate distances and brake very frequently. This could have adverse
consequences on the safety on non-DLV and MTWs and slow
down traffic.
Motion Sickness in DLVs

Many individuals, especially passengers, experience motion
sickness in vehicles because of conflict between vestibular and
visual inputs, inability to anticipate the direction of motion, and
lack of control over the direction of motion. A report calculates
the expected frequency and severity of motion sickness in fully
self-driving vehicles and estimates that 6%12% of adults would
be expected to experience moderate or severe motion sickness
at some time (Sivak and Schoettle 2015a). This is because none
of the passengers would be driving the vehicle, and therefore,
have greater dissonance between vestibular and visual inputs.
While the issue of motion sickness is not a major issue, in a
limited market in India, it is possible that it may reduce the
penetration of DLV in the market share.
Increase in Vehicle Use
DLV in high-income countries are expected to increase shared

vehicle use, but this may not result in reduction in total vehicle
distance travelled. Preliminary models indicate that each DLV
can replace around 11 conventional vehicles, but adds up to
10% more travel distance than comparable non-DLV trips (Fagnant and Kockelman 2014). Since DLV in personal use in India
may replace chauffeur-driven cars that probably do higher
annual mileage than self-driven cars, the increase in annual
mileage by DLV may not have a significant effect in India.
Actual figures for car sharing in India are not available, but
anecdotal evidence suggests that this may be much higher
than in US and Europe. Young professionals form car pools,
private buses and cars run shared taxi systems, government
and private employers provide shared car and bus facilities for
transport to work, and many children go to school in crowded
autorickshaws and vans. In light of the current scenario, it is
unlikely that expensive DLV will replace the current sharing
systems in any significant numbers.
Role of DLV Technologies in India
The fully functional DLV will be able to automatically generate

a route from the users current location to a desired destination. To be able to do this the DLV must have a host of sophisticated technologies which include: advanced driving system
sensors, system to produce optimal estimates of the braking
system, computer control of turn sigFigure 8: Autonomous and Semi-autonomous Vehicles Participating in a Citywide Synchronised Public
nals, hazard lights, dim bright headTransport System
lights, door locks, ignition, a horn,
controllers that allow the lateral trackAutonomous vehicle operation in platoons
ing error to be limited to within 30
centimetres even for sharp turns and
high-speed driving, work zone detection, and a three-layer safety system. It
Dedicated lanes on main arterial
is almost certain that some of these
Semi-autonomous operation on non-arterials
technologies will be used in vehicles
Vehicles can leave and join platoon
other than cars.
operations synchronised
Surface Public Transport Systems
Surface transport systems are likely to

remain the main stay of urban mobility
Station
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august 6, 2016
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
for a long time in India. These systems will need to combine

the flexibility of buses and vans and the efficiency of metrotransit systems. As mentioned earlier, Indian cities are unlikely to redevelop high-density central business districts and will
continue to develop as multinodal cities with large populations. Such cities will need dense medium capacity multimodal transport systems that are flexible and able to run vehicles
in platoons. The technologies being developed for the DLV can
be used to great effect in such systems.
Figure 8 (p 111) demonstrates a concept where semi-autonomous vehicles (buses and vans) operate in platoons on dedicated public transport lanes on the main arterials of a city.
These vehicles would be able to operate with very small gaps
and move at speeds of metro systems safely. Vehicles will be
able to leave or join the platoon on the main arterial from nonarterial roads and move with driver assist systems on the minor roads. The future technologies would enable these movements to be synchronised so that the platoons can keep moving smoothly and efficiently.
This system should make it possible to directly link origins
and destinations so that most commuters do not have to change
buses/vans in a journey. The flexibility of the system will allow
changes to suit transportation demand and changes in land use
over time. It is possible that such systems may have efficiencies
greater than present rail-based grade separated metro systems
at a fraction of the cost. The money saved on expensive infrastructure would more than offset extra cost of autonomous
vehicle systems. Use of DLV technologies could integrate highoccupancy shared vehicle/taxi systems with transport systems
and provide very efficient mobility options round the clock in
Indian polycentric cities at relatively low cost.
Freight Delivery Systems
The availability of dedicated lanes and automated transit technology would make it possible to design very flexible freight
delivery systems especially during off-peak hours. Many
reports suggest that freight trips may account for almost
one-third of all trips in a city (VREF 2012; Dablanc 2007). Large
manufacturing centres and permanent logistic installations
are moving away from urban territories and movement of
freight vehicles in major cities poses particular problems for
residents and commerce. In megacities with major ports,
airports, distribution centres, and multicentric business
centres this is becoming a major problem. Freight movement
activities are important contributors to the local economy, but
at the same time generate significant externalities in the form
of pollution, traffic accidents, congestion, and noise. Because
of these problems over the years, large truck movement has
deteriorated in many cities, and paratransit in the form of
small trucks/vans and non-motorised goods carriers have
filled the gap (VREF 2012; Sadhu et al 2014).
More dense development and mixed land use in large
multinodal megacities has further complicated the movement
of freight. It is possible that intelligent use of DLV technologies
to coordinate freight movement during the night utilising the
automated public transit network may solve some of these
112
problems very efficiently. Such solutions may become essential

in Asian megacities as the volume of internet-based home
deliveries become a large proportion of freight movement all
over the city.
Niche Applications
There will also be a number of situations where DLV applications would be justified as their use would replace more
expensive less-flexible systems or operations in hazardous and
polluted zones. Some of these possibilities are listed below:
(i) Operations in mines and quarries.
(ii) Transfer between airport terminals and other mass transit
centres.
(iii) Commuter dispersion from large transit centres and inside large commercial/industrial complexes.
Conclusions
Large Indian cities are likely to remain high-density sprawling

cities with polycentric activity nodes enabling relatively short
trips with car use limited to less than 20% of all trips, and
non-motorised trips may remain in the range of 30%40%.
Even in 2030 at least 90% of all cars and taxis sold may cost
less than `12,00,000 and this will probably limit the penetration of fully DLVs to less than 5% of the fleet.
One way to imagine the role of DLVs in the future is to
examine how personal chauffeur-driven cars and taxis are
used today. For the owner these vehicles perform similar roles
as the DLVs of the future. Like chauffeur-driven cars DLVs are
not likely to reduce miles driven or number of trips per day. In
addition, current wisdom suggests that people have similar
time budgets across incomes and countries and they do not
save time if given faster modes of transport (Crozet 2009;
Hupkes 1982; Kent 2014; Schafer 2000; Kung et al 2014; Metz
2008). The average number of trips per day (including all walk
and bicycle trips) also seems to remain relatively constant in
the range 34 (Knoflacher 2007; Giuliano and Narayan 2003;
Hupkes 1982; Santos et al 2011; Zegras 2010; Transport for
London 2011). Therefore, it is unlikely that DLVs will have a
significant influence on the way personal vehicles are used in
India in 2030.
Public transit will probably comprise medium capacity (less
than 20,000 passengers per hour per direction), high-density
(lines per square kilometre) systems. These systems will need
dedicated lanes for buses, and route taxi systems. With clever
adaptation, DLV technology may play an important role in
making surface transit systems much more efficient, convenient,
and reliable at costs lower than expensive metro systems of
today. These systems may also provide some relief for movement of freight efficiently with use of DLVs during off-peak
hours. There is also a great deal of hope that DLVs might
provide accident-free transport on our roads in the future.
However, since their penetration is likely to be very limited in
India it is unlikely that we will see much safety benefits
overall. Therefore, it is very necessary that we continue to
develop and implement safer designs of vehicles, roads and
infrastructure for the foreseeable future.
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We do not see fully functional autonomous vehicles to have

a major influence on urban labour markets and land use in the
future because of their low penetration in the market. However,
it is possible that autonomous vehicle technologies will make
notes
1
IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of

the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
E ngineers (IEEE), a technical professional
a ssociation.
Rise Prize: Driverless Car Challenge can be
viewed here: http://www.sparktherise.com/
program-detail/driverless-car-challenge.
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The Dynamics Driving the Global Automotive
Industry, Delhi: CSM Worldwide.
Crozet, Y (2009): Economic Development and the
Role of Travel Time: The Key Concept of Accessibility, Gothenberg: Volvo Research & Educational Foundations, pp 122.
Dablanc, L (2007): Goods Transport in Large
European Cities: Difficult to Organize, Difficult
to Modernise, Transportation Research Part A:
Policy and Practice, Vol 41, No 3, pp 28085.
Dargay, J, D Gately and M Sommer (2007): Vehicle
Ownership and Income Growth, Worldwide:
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pp 14370.
Expert Committee on Auto Fuel Policy (2002):
Urban Road Traffi c and Air Pollution in Major
Cities: Vol 1, New Delhi: Government of
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Fagnant, D J and K M Kockelman (2014): The Travel
and Environmental Implications of Shared
Autonomous Vehicles, Using Agent-based Model
Scenarios, Transportation Research Part C:
Emerging Technologies, Vol 40, pp 113.
Ghani, E and R Kanbur (2015): Urbanisation and
(in) formalisation, The Urban Imperative
Towards Competitive Cities, E Glaeser and A
Joshi-Ghani (eds), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp 173209.
Giuliano, G and D Narayan (2003): Another Look
at Travel Patterns and Urban Form: The US and
Great Britain, Urban Studies, Vol 40, No 11,
pp 229512.
Goel, R, S K Guttikunda, D Mohan and G Tiwari
(2015): Benchmarking Vehicle and Passenger
Travel Characteristics in Delhi for On-road
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Vol 2, No 2, pp 88101.
Hupkes, G (1982): The Law of Constant Travel Time
and Trip-rates, Futures, Vol 14, No 1, pp 3846.
Junqing, W, J M Snider, K Junsung, J M Dolan,
R Rajkumar and B Litkouhi (2013): Towards a
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Kent, J L (2014): Driving to Save Time or Saving
Time to Drive? The Enduring Appeal of the
Private Car, Transportation Research Part A:
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Knight, W (2013): Driverless Cars Are Further Away
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Knoflacher, H (2007): From Myth to Science,
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Kung, K S, K Greco, S Sobolevsky and C Ratti
(2014): Exploring Universal Patterns in
Human HomeWork Commuting from Mobile
Phone Data, PloS ONE, Vol 9, No 6, pp 115.
Lucky, R W (2014): The Drive for Driverless Cars
[Reflections], IEEE, Spectrum, Vol 51, No 7, p 28.
Luettel, T, M Himmelsbach and H J Wuensche
(2012): Autonomous Ground Vehicles
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commuting by public transit more efficient and thus maintain

personal vehicle use at present low levels. This should bring
greater overall efficiencies in matching job supply and demand, and promoting social interaction and trade in the city.
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Metz, D (2008): The Myth of Travel Time Saving,
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Mohan, D (2013): Moving Around in Indian
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Mohan, D, R Goel, S Guttikunda and G Tiwari
(2014): Assessment of Motor Vehicle Use Characteristics in Three Indian Cities, Lyngby,
Denmark: UNEP Ris Centre on Energy, p 54.
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Naughton, K (2015): Ford CEO Fields Predicts
Driverless Cars on Roads in 5 Years, Bloomberg,
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nic.in/data/datatable/data_2312/DatabookDec2014%2016.pdf.
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Santos, A, N McGuckin, H Y Nakamoto, D A Gray
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Journal Rank of EPW

Economic & Political Weekly is indexed on Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database
of peer-reviewed literature, which is prepared by Elsevier NV (http://tinyurl.com/o44sh7a).
Scopus has indexed research papers that have been published in EPW from 2008 onwards.
The Scopus database journal ranks country-wise and journal-wise. It provides three broad sets
of rankings: (i) Number of Citations, (ii) H-Index and (iii) SCImago Journal and Country Rank.
Presented below are EPWs ranks in 2014 in India, Asia and globally, according to the total
cites (3 years) indicator.
Highest among 36 Indian social science journals and highest among 159 social science
journals ranked in Asia.
Highest among 36 journals in the category, Economics, Econometrics and Finance in the
Asia region, and 36th among 835 journals globally.
Highest among 23 journals in the category, Sociology and Political Science in the Asia
region, and 15th among 928 journals globally.
Between 2008 and 2014, EPWs citations in three categories (Economics, Econometrics,
and Finance; Political Science and International Relations; and Sociology and Political
Science) were always in the second quartile of all citations recorded globally in the
Scopus database.
For a summary of statistics on EPW on Scopus, including of the other journal rank indicators,
please see http://tinyurl.com/qe949dj
EPW consults referees from a database of 200+ academicians in different fields of the social
sciences on papers that are published in the Special Article and Notes sections.
vol lI no 32
113
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Region without Regionalism

Cooperation in South Asia
Partha S Ghosh
Three decades have passed since the inception of the

South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. It still
is virtually a non-starter and has not addressed any
substantive issue. Intra-regional trade is minuscule. India
and Pakistan show little interest in the organisation.
Without judging their respective foreign policies, it is
argued that South Asian regionalism is not on their
agenda. Three questions arise: Is South Asia at all a
region? How much does the strategic divide between
India and Pakistan, with China factored in, come in the
way of South Asian regionalism? Why should India
bother about regionalism when its policy of bilateralism
serves it fine? To probe these, the regions history, global
perceptions of the region, Indias foreign and educational
practices, and interstate relationships are discussed.
he South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation

(SAARC) consists of eight nations: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri
Lanka. They constitute the region of South Asia. Is this institutional definition enough to call it a region? Five elements foster regionalism: shared history and culture, political similitude, economic cooperation for mutual gain, power balance
among member states, and non-conflicting strategic postures.
South Asia fails on all counts. Its so-called one civilisation, or
shared history, is always contested. The partitions of India
(1947) and Pakistan (1971) were the results of that contestation. The common factor of democracy has barely reduced the
danger of ethno-religious separatism. Intra-regional trade is
not complementary, and therefore, very small, just 5% of the
regions global trade. There is a gross mismatch between India
and the rest which also mars regional consciousness. The
worst handicap for the region is the strategic divide between
India and Pakistan which is further complicated by the China
factor. The weaker nations of the region take advantage of this
triangular conflict.
Institutionalisation
South Asia qualifies as region only in institutional terms. Till

2007 when Afghanistan was not in the SAARC it was not considered South Asian. Logically, therefore, if a country quits the
group it ceases to be South Asian. Already given Pakistans
alleged intransigence India has been promoting sub-regionalism.
The high-profile 65-page Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and
Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century ignores
SAARC altogether though it says that within the Asian theatre
no region is more vital for India than South Asia.1 The mere
six pages that it devotes to South Asia is primarily a discussion
on Pakistan. The latter ignores SAARC because it virtually
means India. After Bangladesh (1971) when Pakistans South
Asian connection became tenuous, it had developed the proclivity to come closer to its western Muslim neighbours. It may
be noted that both India and Pakistan were unsupportive of
the idea when Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh mooted it in the
late 1970s.
The author thanks Dietmar Rothermund, Stephen Cohen and Vikash
Kumar for reading the draft and making valuable suggestions. The usual
disclaimer applies.
Partha S Ghosh (parsarg@gmail.com) is Indian Council of Social Science
Research National Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and
Analyses, New Delhi.
114
Historicity
Historically there is no reference to South Asia. Reference was

only to India. As early as in 326 BCE the Greek warrior Alexander had come to India. In 52 CE Saint Thomas arrived in Kerala
which marked the beginning of Christianity in India. In
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
ancient and medieval times the Arabs traded with Indias

western ports. During the Renaissance Christopher Columbus
and Vasco da Gama searched for sea routes to India. In colonial
India, Indology thrived in a big way. All this contributed to
make India the reference point to characterise new areas.
Ergo, we had the Indian Ocean, West Indies, East Indies, and
Indochina. The company that pioneered the British Empire in
South and South-east Asia was called the East India Company.
Even the name Indonesia is derived from Indos Nesos, Indian
Island. That is why the Dutch company that traded in Indonesia
was called the Dutch East India Company. In short, it was India that dictated the geographic names rather than any
abstract notion of South Asia.
Western Conceptions
In the United States (US) the notion of South Asia developed in

the aftermath of World War II, as an offshoot of Oriental Studies,
the backbone of which was Indology. It had a long tradition in
American academia which in the interwar period (191939)
got a boost because of American missionaries. Many such
scholar missionaries ended up in American universities.
After the war, more particularly after Indias independence,
interest in India grew faster. Still, India mattered less than
China, Japan, Korea and the Soviet Union. In a similar way,
depending on their past connections or contemporary
involvements, other Western nations concentrated more on
region-specific studies. Thus, Britain focused on India, France
on Indochina, and the Netherlands on Indonesia (Ludden
2003: 1,059). In the 1960s many South Asia centres came up in
American universities (Cohen 2006: 14849). This interest in
South Asia, however, meant interest in India. Academic conferences on South Asia were largely led by India specialists.
For instance, the annual South Asian conference at Madison in
Wisconsin, the largest one, which had its origin in 1973,2 had
sprung out of the Indian Studies Department launched in
the 1950s (Cohen 2006: 159; Brown 1964: 5462). The only
other South Asian country that attracted attention was Pakistan,
but those involved were mostly strategic analysts.
India mattered also because of China. The two opposite
models of development that India and China represented
caught the imagination of the American academia. It was
important for America to understand how the two distinct
political and economic experiments would influence the future of Asia. All this led to the launch of the The India Project at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, US. Wilfred
Malenbaum (1958: Ch 1, p 2), the director of the project said,
[C]ountries, especially in Africa and Asia will be influenced in their
own programs by what seems to be happening in these two lands.
However much India and China disavow a state of competition between alternative paths for the transformation to growth, comparisons
will be made everywhere, and lessons put into practice.
Americas strategic thinking, however, was not Indo-centric.

It was more Pakistan-centric. This was the time when the
new dealers were on their retreat and the cold warriors on
ascendancy. The leading cold warriors were President Harry
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August 6, 2016
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S Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and their

respective successors Dwight D Eisenhower and John Foster
Dulles. A 1949 document prepared by the
Subcommittee for the Near and Middle East of the State-Army-NavyAir Forces Coordinating Committee (SANACC) noted that our national
interests requirethe orientation of South Asia toward the US and
other Western democracies, and away from the USSR. The basic strategic objectives of the US required, the report said, that Soviet encroachment or domination must be prevented; that the Soviets must
be prevented from obtaining military support from these nations or
given access to any of their facilities; that our side must endeavour to
obtain the support and access to facilities denied to the other side; and
that Pakistan should be cultivated with a view to gaining access in emergency to base facilities in the Karachi-Lahore area (Gould 2008: 109).
It may be noted that while in the pre-World War II period India

was the referral point in the period after the war Pakistan became the referral point to which India was appended.
Dulles was a pathological cold warrior for whom if one was
not with the US it amounted to immorality. American balance,
therefore, had to tilt in favour of Pakistan. For the same reason
Indias non-alignment, leave alone intellectually confusing for
the cold warriors, it was out rightly immoral. One must not
read too much into the fact that the then US Ambassador to
India, Chester Bowles (195153), was appreciative of Nehrus
foreign policy. His New Delhi posting itself was a White House
ploy to keep him away from the Washington circuit so that he
could not interfere with the US Cold War strategy (Gould 2008:
10227). The Dullesian naivet was exemplified in the following conversation he had with journalist Walter Lippmann
in 1954:
Look Walter ... Ive got some real fighting men into the south of Asia.
The only Asians who can really fight are the Pakistanis. ... We could
never get along without the Gorkhas. When Lippmann reminded
him that the Gurkhas are Indian, not Pakistani, Dulles replied, Well,
they may not be Pakistanis, but theyre Moslems. Lippman once more
corrected Dulles, saying, No, Im afraid theyre not Moslems either,
theyre Hindus. Dulles merely replied, No matter, and proceeded to
lecture Lippmann for half an hour on how SEATO would plug like the
dike against communism in Asia (Gould 2008: 161).
From the above discussion it emerges that while for the US

academia South Asia meant India, for the US strategic establishment it meant Pakistan. If at all the phrase South Asia
figured in strategic discussions it was more for geographical
reasons. It was as late as 1991 that the State Department had
clubbed South Asia with Near East, which received the lions
share of attention although it had one-third of South Asias
population. A deputy assistant secretary four levels junior to
the secretary of state handled relations with India. The same
arrangement held good for the National Security Council and
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It was only with the
creation of the National Intelligence Agency in 2005 that a
separate South Asia bureau was created which directly
reported to a director of the intelligence (Rubinoff 2008: 171).
Outside of the US the expression South Asia as an area studies region was specifically used when the South Asia Institute
(SAI) of the Heidelberg University (Germany) came into being
in 1962. In the early 1960s it was thought to establish an
institute in Heidelberg to study developing countries. Later
115
SPECIAL ARTICLE
South Asia was chosen as the focused region as Heidelberg

University had the long tradition of Indology. The idea was to
pool expertise from various disciplines to make the understanding of the region holistic. The result was the establishment of the IndoAsia Institute (Nuesser nd: 4). How IndoAsia Institute became the South Asia Institute is an interesting story which may be instructive for all those non-Indian
South Asians who allege that India suffers from a big-brother
superiority complex. Here is what German historian Dietmar
Rothermund (2010: 5, emphasis added) writes:
At the time when the Rourkela plant was built, the shortage of specialised engineers was a pressing problem in India and with German
aid one of the new Indian Institutes of Technology was established in
Madras (Chennai) in 1959. This period of very active German interest in India also witnessed the establishment of several branches of
the Goethe Institute which in India are called Max Mueller Bhavans
(MMBs). The South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, opened
in 1962 [23 May] in the presence of Nehrus sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, was another testimony to this German interest in India. Originally it was to be named Indo-Asia Institute, but President [S] Radhakrishnan suggested the name South Asia Institute as he felt that IndoAsia was reminiscent of Greater India and would be resented by Indias
neighbours.3
In the Indian Consciousness
If there was no clear concept of South Asia in Western academic and strategic thinking, in India it was not any better.
Indias consciousness about its pre-eminence in the region was
so overpowering that it viewed an Indo-centric regionalism to
be its destiny. Two years before Indias independence, Indias
first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, visualised a manifest
destiny for India in which only four powers would have the
strategic wherewithal to become major powers, namely, India,
America, Russia, and China. In a sense it was Curzonian.
J N Dixit, Indias former foreign secretary and author of many
books on foreign policy and diplomacy, considered Curzon one
of the greatest of the Indian nationalists (Raja Mohan 2006:
204).4 Although the partition of India made Nehrus vision
anachronistic, still Indias quest for regional leadership did not
die. It conceptualised its strategic doctrine in concentric circles in which Indias defence perimeter lay not at its own borders but at the outer borders of its regional neighbours.
One is not sure when the idea of South Asia as a region took
shape in India. For Nehru, the world as a whole mattered in
the Cold War in which Indias neighbours were mere dice. The
two pillars of Indias foreign policy were non-alignment and
treating Pakistan as an enemy as it was an active participant
in the Cold War. India, however, made it clear that nonalignment was not neutrality but it was an input from the
decolonised world to reduce the scourge of war inherent in the
Cold War circumstances. No particular country or region was,
therefore, to receive any special attention in Indias Area
Studies, not even Pakistan. For this, another explanation
could be that Pakistan, as a bad dream, better be underemphasised lest it could destabilise the delicate HinduMuslim
relations already under severe strain following the partition
riots and displacements. Nehrus fortnightly Letters to the
chief ministers (compiled and edited in four volumes by
116
G Parthasarathi) reflected this concern. Also to be noted is

that during his 17 years of rule (194764), the 1,742 documentaries that his government produced not for once mentioned
the issue. Their emphasis was entirely on modernism as a tool
of nation building (Taneja 2009: 14). IndiaPakistan borders
were not strictly enforced and it was common to have crossborder bridal processions, particularly in the Rajasthan sector
(Ghosh 2016: 44).
It may not be just a coincidence that during Nehrus time,
barring Kashmir, there was no other military confrontation
with Pakistan. On the contrary, there was evidence of a thaw
as seen in the coordinated refugee rehabilitation policies
(NehruLiaquat Agreement of 8 April 1950) and the resolution
of certain disputed border pockets (NehruNoon Agreement of
12 September 1958), Ayub Khans personal invitation to Nehru
to see the ongoing construction of Islamabad as Pakistans new
capital, and in his sending of Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah
to Pakistan as his emissary to discuss Kashmir (Nehru died
during Abdullahs sojourn making him rush back to Delhi
resulting in the collapse of the mission).5 Curiously, or expectedly, within less than one year after Nehrus death Pakistan
started its second war on Kashmir in April 1965 and also the
post-Nehru period experienced a visible rise in HinduMuslim
riots.6 From the discussion one may surmise that probably
Nehrus so-called lack of interest in South Asia was more dictated by his consideration to let India assume a low and humanistic profile in the region lest it could be seen as a big brother
which it was any way (refer to the discussion earlier about the
establishment of South Asia Institute in Heidelberg).
During the Bangladesh crisis of 1971, Indira Gandhi saw to it
that Pakistan was cut to size. Still she ensured that her diplomatic offensive did not complicate the HinduMuslim relationship in India. She feared that if the news spread that more
than 80% of the refugees arriving from East Pakistan were
Hindu it could cause serious communal strife leading even to
riots. To pre-empt that danger she took the Jana Sangh (forerunner of Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP) leader Atal Bihari
Vajpayee into confidence and requested him not to communalise the issue, which would give Pakistan the handle to portray
the Bangladesh problem as a HinduMuslim one thereby defeating the Indian plan (Raghavan 2013: 76, 120, 206; Bass
2013: 154, 23637). It was not merely Pakistan, Indira Gandhi
was equally determined to show Indias other neighbours that
Indias capacity to destabilise them must be respected for their
own political survival. The way India trained and financed the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the early 1980s to
thwart Sri Lankas alleged anti-India policy is a case in point.
So much is made out of the so-called Gujral Doctrine which
is claimed to have ushered in some kind of South Asian regionalism. The five principles that constituted the doctrine emphasised good neighbourly relations with Indias smaller neighbours like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka
(Afghanistan was not in South Asia then) even without expecting reciprocity from them, which culminated in subregionalism in later years. Moreover, the doctrine addressed
neither the real questionrelations with Pakistannor how
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
to reorient SAARC to make it handle bilateral and contentious

issues. The doctrine pontificated that all countries must respect each others territorial integrity but completely glossed
over Kashmir which was the bone of contention between India
and Pakistan. In his autobiography, Gujral (2011: 406) himself
confessed as much: The logic behind the Gujral Doctrine was
that since we had to face two hostile neighbours in the north
and the west, we had to be at total peace with all other immediate neighbours in order to contain Pakistans and Chinas
influence in the region.
Nothing has changed till this day in substantive terms. Although, following his victory in the 2014 elections Prime Minister Narendra Modi kick-started his regime with a South
Asian diplomatic blitzkrieg by inviting all SAARC leaders to his
oath taking ceremony and soon took steps to improve ties with
Bangladesh,7 Sri Lanka and Nepal, his ideological baggage
continued to remain his liability. The BJPs election manifesto
of 2014 had promised to establish friendly and cooperative
relations with Indias neighbours, but its underlying thrust on
Hindutva (though the word was not used) blurred Modis
promise. Besides bragging on Brand India the party highlighted Indias traditional glory as vishwaguru (the knowledgegiver of the world). The foreign policy section of the manifesto
read more like a propaganda statement on Indias traditional
greatness. Any student of South Asian affairs knows that there
could not have been a worse neighbourhood diplomacy to start
with than this. It could be actually viewed as offensive. For
example, juxtapose this to how Pakistan recognises its Indian
past. It starts with the invasion of Muhammad Ghori on India
(1202) and ends with the end of the Mughals (1857). Pakistani
textbooks completely gloss over the countrys pre-Muslim past
when Hindus or Buddhists had ruled.
Modis subsequent domestic record was potentially disruptive
of South Asianism. Events surrounding such controversies as the
murder of liberal thinkers, a general atmosphere of intolerance
to freedom of thought, refusal to allow the Pakistani cricket team
or artistes to play/perform in India, violence against alleged
beef eaters, and so on, were bound to hamper confidence
building in the region at the mass level. However much the BJP
supporters might argue that Hinduism by nature is tolerant and
that such controversies had taken place in the past as well these
issues became matters of popular debates all over the region in
which Modis India was not seen in a positive light. This
authors personal conversations with liberal voices in Indias
neighbourhood, spread over many years, have convinced him
about how much they have put in store in Indias secular/liberal
future. They argue that India alone can show the region the way
to encourage secular and scientific temper aimed at societal
development. And that if India itself falters there is little hope
for a liberal region to survive, and hence regionalism.
Beyond High Politics
In this section let us show that beyond high politics, South Asia
as a region is on the whole on the periphery of Indias
consciousness. Our sample consists of the organisational set-up
of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA): MEAs cultural wing
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called the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), the

MEA-funded Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD)-funded Indian
Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), the Ministry of Defence (MOD)-funded Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
(IDSA), the SAARC-sponsored South Asian University (SAU),
and South Asian Studies as Area Studies.
Ministry of External Affairs: In the MEA structure there is no
concept of South Asia though there is one division called SB &
BC Division, which deals with matters related to SAARC, Bay of
Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic
Cooperation (BIMSTEC), and border connectivity. Given Indias
growing interest in building relations with South-east Asia
and promoting sub-regionalism, SAARC receives relatively less
Table 1: Distribution of South Asian States among attention. In any
MEA Divisions
case, Myanmar and
Name of the
Name of the
Other Countries
Thailand, both in
Country
Division
Included
South-east Asia, are
Afghanistan PAI division
Pakistan, Iran
very significant inBangladesh BM division
Myanmar
Bhutan
Northern division
Nepal
sofar as BIMSTEC
Maldives
Indian Ocean Region Sri Lanka
and border connecNepal
Northern division
Bhutan
tivity issues are conPakistan
PAI division
Afghanistan, Iran
cerned. In bilateral
Sri Lanka
Indian Ocean Region Maldives
terms, Table 1 will
Source: Ministry of External Affairs website; Pakistan,
show how the South
Afghanistan and Iran (PAI) division; Bangladesh and
Myanmar (BM) division.
Asian states have
been organised in the MEA divisions (Table 1). There is indeed
geographical and strategic logic in this distribution but
the point we are making is that it obfuscates the concept of
South Asia.
Indian Council for Cultural Relations: With respect to culture promotion in South Asia, the activities of MEAs autonomous wing, the ICCR, may throw some light on Indias commitment to South Asian regionalism. Besides organising cultural
events abroad and inviting cultural troupes from outside of
India, ICCR has a massive scholarship programme meant for
students from developing countries, which include South
Asian nations. It distributes more than 6,000 scholarships
besides managing 16 scholarships funded separately by the
MEA and the Ministry of AYUSH.8 Africa and Afghanistan
each get 1,000 of them. The scheme for Afghanistan is called
Special Scholarship Scheme for Afghan Nationals which
started in 2005, two years before Afghanistan joined the
SAARC. Of the remaining South Asian countries, Bangladesh
is supposed to get 100 scholarships, Bhutan 20, Maldives 20,
Nepal 64, and Sri Lanka about 195.9 There are none for
Pakistan under the above scheme. Besides, there is the
SAARC Chair/Fellowship/Scholarship Scheme, the record of
which is dismal. The idea of SAARC Chair was first mooted in
1987 but it hardly worked. In 199293 Shelton Kodikara,
Professor of Political Science, Colombo University, was
invited by the University of Delhi to become the first SAARC
professor. But neither was he given a salary which could take
care of his stay (without any house or rent allowance) nor did
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
he have a well-organised academic programme. He returned

after his tenure most dejected.10 Many years later, in 201314
another professor from Sri Lanka held the chair at the PUSA
agricultural institute (Indian Agricultural Research Institute,
New Delhi). Under the SAARC Fellowship/Scholarship Scheme
India is supposed to bring 14 students, two each from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri
Lanka. This scheme was launched in 201314. But so far, it has
not recorded any activity. In 201516 the MEA discontinued it.
If one goes into the details of the application procedures under
all these schemes one would be struck by the bureaucratic red
tape. Inordinate delay in the processing of applications is
structured in the system, a typical Third World phenomenon.11
Indian Council of World Affairs: In the ICWA, South Asia is
not a thrust area. Though several ICWA fellows are working on
individual South Asian countries, yet if one goes by the ICWAs
calendar of events during the last two years, which coincides
with Modis high-profile South Asian diplomatic push, one
would be surprised to see how the region has been ignored.
Between May 2014 and April 2016, mostly on its own, but
sometimes in collaboration with other organisations, ICWA has
organised as many as 70 events of which South Asia-related
ones are just six, that too including three lectures delivered by
visiting South Asian leaders. In the activities scheduled for the
coming months also, South Asia does not figure.12
Indian Council of Social Science Research: South Asia hardly figures in the International Collaboration (IR) programme of
the ICSSR. It has ongoing collaborative programmes with 14
countries that include exchange of scholars and joint projects.
The active ones are with China, England, France, Germany,
Japan, the Netherlands, Thailand, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and Vietnam. The one with the US is nonfunctional, though it is on paper since 2013. Among the collaborative partners only one South Asian country figures, that
is, Sri Lanka. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was
signed with it on 13 March 2014 which envisaged exchange of
two scholars every year for 30 days each. So far no such exchange has taken place, though a joint seminar has been held
in Colombo in August 2015 and the next one is supposed to be
held in India. The neglect of South Asia is reflected in ICSSRs
fellowship programme as well. In the last decade only three or
four Bangladeshi and Nepali scholars were granted these fellowships, but none ever since.13
South Asian University: It is probably too early to comment
on the South Asian University (SAU) as it is just in its sixth year.
Still some preliminary remarks may be made. Its present
56-member faculty is virtually an all-Indian affair49 Indians,
three Bangladeshis, three Nepalis and one Sri Lankan. Even
by the measure that India is 75% of the region, Indias representation in the faculty is as large as 87.5%. The absence of
any Pakistani in the faculty shows that the university has not
been able to break the diplomatic sound barrier. Efforts are
now on to broad-base the faculty. So far as student intake is
118
concerned it is more broad-based, still not ideal, and here as

well Pakistani representation is small. Out of 490 students
admitted in 2014 and 2015, 301 were Indian, 36 Afghan, 66
Bangladeshi, three Bhutanese, three Maldivian, 49 Nepali, 23
Pakistani and nine Sri Lankan. The ratio is supposed to be 50%
Indian and 50% from the remaining seven countries.14 It
appears that the SAUs Delhi location and its overwhelmingly
Indian faculty have turned it virtually into an Indian university
with a large student population from South Asia. It is hoped
that when its campus shifts from its present building to its
sprawling campus now under construction the university will
pick up. Whether it would then be really South Asian and
really world class, only time will tell. The better, more ambitious, and richer students probably would still prefer to study
in Western universities for in any case, India too is a foreign
country for them.
South Asian Studies in India: Unlike in the West, South
Asian studies developed in India in a disorganised way. Since
area studies have a clear connection with a nations foreign
policy outlook, the neglect of South Asian studies in India is
explainable as we have seen how for Nehru the world at large
mattered and not any particular region, including South Asia.
This was evident in the formation of the Indian School of
International Studies (ISIS) in 1955, first as an affiliated institute of Delhi University and then from 1961 as a Deemed University. After the establishment of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 1969 the ISIS merged into it as School of International Studies (SIS). Among the various divisions of SIS, one
was on South Asia. In the University of Rajasthan (Jaipur)
also a South Asian studies department was started. In other
universities too South Asian countries were studied. Unfortunately, however, one does not find enough scholarly knowledge
on South Asian societies. In most places, barring JNU and a
select few other centres where domestic themes are also
addressed, doctoral dissertations by and large are written on
contemporary relational matters. On the whole, unlike the
Area Studies programmes in the US, which emphasise on
micro-research based on archival and anthropological sources,
travelogues, diaries, etc, Indian researches are basically oriented
towards macro foreign policy studies which by nature are
source-starved (Gangopadhyay 2008: 6768). Two reasons for
this are, one, resource crunch, for area studies are cost-intensive
involving field trips, and two, difficulties involved in conducting fieldwork in neighbouring countries. South Asian states
are more welcoming to Western researchers than their regional counterparts. This deficiency can be compensated to some
extent by exchange-of-scholar programmes, say, between
India and Pakistan, but their mutual suspicions come in the
way. That confirms our hypothesis that regionalism has little
future in South Asia.
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses: The only silver
lining in the above pattern is the IDSA. It gives adequate attention
to South Asia. Its South Asia Centre is most prominent among
its 14 centres (previously called clusters). It has the largest
August 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
number of researchers, 14 now, consisting of one distinguished

fellow, one senior fellow, one research fellow, one senior research associate, four associate fellows, five research assistants, one visiting fellow from Nepal, and one intern. Ever
since 2007 the centre has been organising an annual conference, the central theme of which is South Asian Regional
Cooperation. Till date about 100 participants from the neighbouring countries (including Myanmar though it is not in
SAARC) have attended these conferences. Besides these activities,
the IDSA also has a specific project on Pakistan and another on
Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK). Under these projects, the
IDSA organises conferences/workshops/seminars from time to
time. The faculty members of the South Asia Centre keep visiting their countries of specialisation which have led them to
develop expertise on these countries. Besides writing scholarly
monographs they also actively participate in print and electronic
media of the region.
Indo-centricity Overshadows Regionalism
India is too big compared to other states of the region. It is

more than two-thirds of the regions area and more than threefourths of the regions population, gross domestic product
(GDP), and military. To illustrate, its relative predominance, a
comparative chart will help (Table 2).
Table 2: Leading Country Shares of Regional Aggregates
Aggregates
Area
Population
GDP
Military spending
(%)
SAARC (8) African Union (53) Agadir (4) UNASUR (12) NAFTA (3) ASEAN (10)
India
Nigeria
Egypt
Brazil
United States Indonesia
66.22
76.41
79.65
82.24
3.40
18.05
16.40
22.90
58.69
61.30
63.17
19.81
48.02
49.79
16.54
47.12
44.40
71.4
83.99
99.02
42.71
67.37
37.73
39.18
Figures in the parentheses mean the number of constituent countries.

Sources: Computed from the country chapters of The New Encyclopaedia Britannica 2011;
GlobalSecurity.org. For the GDP and Military Spending figures of Nigeria it was difficult to
compute the figures from the above sources as a result we depended on somewhat old
data available in Rudolph and Rudolph (1987: 5).
It may be seen in Table 2 that the US too is dominant in the

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But there is a
difference. First, America is a superpower, and second, there is
no China-type challenge in the neighbourhood which can
make it vulnerable if Canada or Mexico wants to take advantage of that factor. Also, there is no substantive security disagreement among NAFTA members. In other words, neither
Canada nor Mexico can afford the luxury of having conflicting
security outlooks with respect to the US. Even though Mexicos
presence in NAFTA is not appreciated by some of its Latin
American neighbours like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Uruguay,
economic advantages of a partnership with America trump
those concerns. Even after 9/11, when border movements between the US and Canada and between the US and Mexico
were restricted to prevent the entry of potential terrorists, the
countries worked out the idea of smart borders so as not to
allow their trade to suffer (Andreas 2003: 9396).
Sub-regionalism Dilutes SAARC
In promoting intra-regional trade SAARCs record is dismal. It is

as little as 5% of the regions total international trade. Here are
some comparisons: in NAFTA it is 40%, in Association of
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August 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) it is 26%, and in the European

Union it is 67% (Jain and Singh 2009: 82). Since the India
Pakistan conflict is at the core of this problem, India has tried
to find a way out: go for sub-regionalism.
Nepal had originally mooted the idea in December 1996
which had Indias blessings. There is nothing wrong with subregionalism as complementary to regionalism. Many regional
groupings have taken recourse to this method to supplement
their cooperative efforts. Variously called growth triangles,
transnational economic zones, micro-regional organisations,
natural economic territories, etc, these subregional formations
have been there since the 1980s (Kumar 2016). But the point
being made here is that in the South Asian context, it poaches
into the notion of regionalism. Whether it is the South Asian
Growth Quadrangle comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India
and Nepal in the GangaBrahmputraMeghna basin or the
2001 Asian Development Bank (ADB)-mooted BIMSTEC and
South Asia Free Trade Association (SAFTA) involving South
Asias neighbours in East and South-east Asia, it gives Pakistan
the impression that they are meant to marginalise its importance in the region which is indeed one of Indias mottos. Some
economists have argued that probably through these processes, the economic integration of South Asia could be possible
(Batra 2015), but this author would take the logic with a pinch
of salt given the regions complex politics and strategic differences. It may be noted that besides Pakistan sub-regionalism
has not been well received in Sri Lanka and Maldives on the
ground that it was at the cost of the SAARC.
Strategic Divide and the China Factor
Ever since the days of the Cold War, the strategic divide between India and Pakistan is total. Thrice have they gone to war
(1947, 1965 and 1971). In the 1950s, Pakistan was an active conduit for Americas anti-Soviet strategy. From the late 1960s onwards, against the background of a growing rift between the
Soviets and the Chinese, Pakistan played a critical role in
bringing rapprochement between the Americans and the
Chinese. Basss (2013: 30310) study shows that in graphic
detail. In contrast, India was non-aligned, which, let alone the
US (discussed above), even Pakistan used to mock. Its first
foreign minister, Muhammad Zafarullah Khan (194754),
famously sneered at the idea by saying that it amounted to
0+0+0+0=0, each zero standing for a non-aligned country.
Later the IndoPak divide became much wider when India
moved closer to the Soviets. The strategic shift came in handy
for India to dismember Pakistan and help create Bangladesh.
In its aftermath, the PakistanChina friendship became stronger.
To the above-mentioned three wars one must add the 1999
Kargil (Jammu and Kashmir) conflict. Its potential escalation
raised the spectre of a nuclear war as both belligerents had by
then possessed nuclear weapons. The global community was
so alarmed that President Bill Clinton (of the US) had to use his
arm-twisting diplomacy to force Pakistan to withdraw its forces.
India was convinced of Pakistans complicity in the terror
attacks of 1 October 2001 on the Jammu and Kashmir assembly,
and of 13 December 2001 on the Indian Parliament. Once
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
again, on 28 November 2008 the commercial capital of India,

Mumbai, was attacked by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists. To
draw global attention to these terror tactics, India twice had to
indulge in brinkmanship, in 2002 and 2008, by amassing
troops along Pakistans borders. Expectedly, global anxiety
went out of bounds. There was a flurry of diplomatic activities
between Washington and Islamabad and between Washington
and New Delhi. The war was avoided, but peace remained
elusive. Soon cross-Line of Control (LoC) firing and shelling
became routine, keeping the countries constantly in war mode.
Accusations of mutual interference also became routine;
Pakistans in Kashmir and Indias in Balochistan. The most
dramatic was the Pakistan-origin terrorists attack of January
2016 on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot that exposed
Indias vulnerability.15
IndiaPakistan conflict apart, the entire web of South Asian
relationships is complex in which China is a common denominator. Its proximity to the region and its growing power makes
it attractive to many of Indias neighbours. The China card
comes handy to them in bargaining with India. Bangladesh,
Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and to some extent even Bhutan and
Maldives, have played the card, and, at times even the Pakistan card, to neutralise Indias predominance.16 The hard reality is that China is far more powerful than India. For one of my
earlier papers, I had prepared a chart to show their comparative strength. The chart was revealing. India was way behind
China in almost everything from electricity generation to
vocational training to cement production to healthcare and in
many other sectors (Ghosh 2013: 116). On the militarystrategic
front also the technological gap between India and China was
expanding. Against the background of the systematic dulling
of Indias conventional military edge over Pakistan the spectre
of the SinoPak threat is much more than academic. The strategic bonding between China and Pakistan was demonstrated
in June 2016 when the former successfully convinced 16 countries of the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) that
was held in Seoul to rake up procedural issues to block India
entry to the group for which India had tried so earnestly. What
irked India the most was that China equated Pakistans case
with that of India (Gilani 2016).
The only advantage India has over China is its model of
democratic development. Since all South Asian states have
moved towards democracy they all look upon India as their
role model. But Indias negative record in respect of healthcare, child mortality, illiteracy, and social strife dents that image. Although IndiaChina relations have improved on the
economic front in terms of increased trade and investment cooperation, given Chinas larger strategic considerations, India
should not expect China will discourage Indias neighbours to
play their China card. A bigger problem that India could confront is the likely Chinese response to Indias growing bonhomie with America as well as with some of the South-east Asian
countries (most notably, Vietnam), particularly on the South
China Sea issue. On this question India is in favour of the global
rule of law and freedom of navigation in accordance with the
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
120
Chinas discomfort was aggravated after the Permanent

Court of Arbitration ruled on 12 July 2016 that China was violating Philippines sovereignty (A Ruling Tells China Why No
Country Is an Island 2016).17 India had sided with both the
Philippines and Vietnam on the matter. Against this background it may not be surprising if China tends to exploit the
situations in Indias North East to New Delhis discomfiture
(Panda forthcoming).
Conclusions
Mark Twain once said: A person with a new idea is a crank

until the idea succeeds. The same is true of SAARC. It is a great
idea but it has to succeed. The problem, however, is that India
and Pakistan, the two dominant South Asian nations are indifferent towards it. The general impression in India is that for
the failure of SAARC it is Pakistan which is responsible. But we
have shown in this paper that India is equally to blame. The
fact that India has larger ambitions which SAARC cannot fulfil,
and that its bilateral diplomacy serves it better, are both well
taken but that is another story which this paper is not addressing. Our argument is that India has done precious little to
building regional consciousness in South Asia.
Still, everything is probably not lost. Notwithstanding so
much of animosity between India and Pakistan displayed
through their public posturing, Indians and Pakistanis feel at
home in each others country. Anand Patwardhans anti-nuke
documentary film War and Peace, produced right after the
back-to-back nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998
was hugely appreciated in both countries at the popular level
in spite of all hurdles that the dominant political forces in the
countries tried to put up (Patwardhan 2010: 95102). The
runaway success of Rajkumar Hiranis Bollywood film PK
(2014) and Kabir Khans Bajrangi Bhaijan (2015) both of
which portrayed IndiaPakistan relationships in positive
terms, yet again proved the point. The region displays an
unusual socio-cultural congruity. Bengali, Hindi, Nepali,
Pashtu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, and Urdu are widely spoken in
at least two countries of the region. Most music and dance
forms are a shared heritage of all South Asians. One single
individual, Rabindranath Tagore, composed the national
anthems of Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. Muhammad
Iqbal, Pakistans national poet, is revered in India, whose
poem Sare jahan se achchha Hindustan hamara (meaning:
best amongst all nations is my country, India) is sung as a
patriotic song.
There is no doubt that if India and Pakistan loosen their
mutually harsh visa regimes there will be a huge spurt in bilateral tourism, which has been on the rise. In 2013, there was a
huge jump in the number of Pakistani tourists in India. Although the top-ten tourist-sending countries remained, as always, the same, namely, the US, the United Kingdom, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Russia, Canada, Germany, France, Malaysia,
and Japan; as many as 1,11,000 Pakistani tourists visited India
in that year (Dhawani 2014). Since high diplomacy has failed
let us wait for the success of subaltern regionalism in
South Asia.
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Notes
1 It is authored by Sunil Khilnani, Rajiv Kumar,
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Lieutenant General (retired) Prakash Menon, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Shyam Saran and Siddharth
Varadarajan under the auspices of the National
Defence College and the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi ostensibly with the support
of the Government of India. The document is
available online. The quotation is from page 15.
2 In 1968, the European Conference on Modern
South Asian Studies was launched. It is held
every two years. In 2016 it will be in Warsaw.
3 In the beginning SAI had departments on
Myanmar and New Zealand but after 1995 it
became only South Asia-centric.
4 To know more about Curzons vision of Indias
place in the world, see Lord Nathaniel Curzon,
The Place of India in the Empire, London: J Murray,
1909, 46 pages. Curzons views were opposed
by the Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian
Army, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who found
India not so important for the overall British
Empire. Curzon had to resign (details of the
controversy in Cohen 1968).
5 Indias defeat in the war with China (1962)
made Nehru understand that there was no
escape from adjusting with Pakistan and resolving the Kashmir tangle. India could ill afford
two hostile neighbours. He seemed to be in favour of a confederation of India, Pakistan and
Kashmir. See Guha (2014: 13839).
6 Even before Nehrus death some riots took pace
which disturbed Nehru but he seemed to be
helpless to prevent them. After his death such
riots became frequent. See Engineer (1999:
26465).
7 If Bangladesh today is one of Indias most
friendly neighbours, the credit should not
entirely go to the Modi government but to the
way Indira Gandhi had supported the liberation warriors of Bangladesh against all odds
and to the texture of West Bengal politics
which has all along shunned communal politics. Even after partition communalism could
not play any role there (for more on this point,
see Ghosh 2016: 6269).
8 Ministry of AYUSH was formed on 9 November
2014. It was the upgrading of the Department of
Indian Systems of Medicine and Homoeopathy
(ISM&H) created in March 1995. The abbreviation AYUSH stands for Ayurveda, Yoga and
Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy.
BJP in its election manifesto had said that it
would increase public investment to promote
AYUSH and start integrated courses for Indian
systems of medicines and modern science.
Ayush is also a common Hindu given name,
derived from Sanskrit, meaning life.
9 Information available in public domain is very
sketchy. It is not possible to know how many
students have actually availed themselves of
these scholarships. Presumably the slots are
not filled as a matter of routine.
10 Personal knowledge.
11 See the following links: http://saarc-sec.org/
areaofcooperation/detail. php?activity_id=16;
http://iccr.gov.in/content/many-otherschemes; http://SAARCChairFellowshiScholarshipScheme 2007.doc; http://Scholar shipnotifications.pdf, all viewed on 5 May 2016.
12 Based on information collected from ICWA
sources.
13 Information collected from various ICSSR
sources.
14 Thanks to Rajen Harshe of the SAU faculty for
supplying me these data.
15 For a critical appraisal of the vulnerabilities of
the elite National Security Guard (NSG) as
compared to their American, British, French
and German counterparts, see Ojha (2016).
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August 6, 2016
16 In May 2016 when Nepals K P Sharma Oli

government was on the verge of collapse as the
Maoist leader Prachanda threatened to withdraw his support to the government it was reportedly the Chinese intervention that saved
the day for Oli. The Chinese persuaded Prachanda to withdraw his threat. According to
analysts this was the first time that China expressed a firm opinion on the domestic political
situation in the country. See the report by
Nepal watcher Prashant Jha (2016).
17 For an analysis of the Chinese ambitions in the
region, see Burgess (2016).
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Rothermund, Dietmar (2010): Indo-German Relations: From Cautious Beginning to Robust
Partnership, India Quarterly, Vol 66, No 1,
pp 112.
Rubinoff, Arthur G (2008): From Indifference to
Engagement: The Role of the US Congress in
Making Foreign Policy for South Asia, Making
US Foreign Policy Toward South Asia: Regional
Imperatives and the Imperial Presidency, Lloyd I
Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (eds),
New Delhi: Concept, pp 169224.
Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (1987):
In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of
the Indian State, Chicago: Chicago University
Press.
Taneja, Anand Vivek (2009): Muslimness in Hindi
Cinema, Seminar, http://www.india-seminar.
com /2009/598/598_anand_vivek_taneja.htm.
available at
Ideal Books
26/2082, Tutors Lane
Secretariat Statue
Thiruvananthapuram 695001,
Kerala
121
NOTES
Greece Crisis and

European Integration
A Critical Approach to Regional Integration
Dhananjay Tripathi
The Greece crisis sparked a new

debate on the European Union
and also on regional integration.
There are several established
theories and approaches on how
to study the RI process, but these
have not provided satisfactory
answers to the Greece crisis.
Taking this crisis as a case study,
we have to develop a critical
approach to the study of RI. Until
and unless we do so, we will only
continue to focus our attention
on certain groups and thereby
keep ignoring the interests of
common people.
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer

for constructive comments and suggestions to
improve the quality of this article.
Dhananjay Tripathi (dhananjay@sau.ac.in) is
at the Department of International Relations,
South Asian University, New Delhi.
122
onsidered as one of the best examples of regional integration

(RI), the European Union (EU) is
presently facing a number of crises that
are making citizens of Europe wary
about its policy objectives and long-term
existence. Lately, there has been a rise in
number of eurosceptics across the EU
member countries and interestingly both
right- and left-wing political organisations have their set of grievances against
Brussels. The highly bureaucratic model
of the EU and its centralised policymaking is criticised by the citizens of member states and on times these criticisms
have translated into big protests. This
was manifested in the United Kingdom
(UK) where the majority (51.9%) voted
against membership of the EU in a referendum on 23 June 2016.
The Brexit has not only shocked the
whole of Europe, but people across the
world are curious to know what exactly
went wrong with the European integration process. It was the Conservative
Party (Tory) that in its 2015 election
manifesto promised an in-out referendum on Britains membership of the EU
(Richardson and Tripathi 2016). The
manifesto termed the EU as too bureaucratic and too undemocratic, and also
blamed it for the scale of migration triggered by new members joining in recent
years, which has had a real impact on
local communities (The Conservative
Party Manifesto 2015: 72). These allegations against the EU reverberated in the
UK throughout the period of political
debate on the referendum. The repercussion of this implicit hate-mongering, targeting the immigrants, was quite visible
after the referendum. Immigrants were
abused in Britain and the British parliament regretfully acknowledged it.
For the overwhelming majority of

leave campaigners, immigrants were
seen as stealing the jobs and benefits of
locals by accepting lower wages. The British
contribution to the EU fund was also
depicted as wasteful, adding an extra burden to taxpayers. Interestingly, those who
were defending the membership vociferously put forth arguments of economic
benefits related with the EU. The right
wing in Britain, in order to demonise the
EU, politically channelised the economic
distress, particularly in the post-recession
phase; the recovery in Europe is still slow
and fragile. Notably, a majority of the
business community in Britain supported
the remain vote (Richardson and Tripathi
2016). This is quite contradictory because
the membership is opposed as well as
defended on economic logics. The big
business is for the EU, whereas the masses
are blaming it for their economic hardship. This paradox is now apparent in
many other member states of the EU.
Thus, there are high chances that demand
for such a referendum will only grow in
other member states.
Unfortunately in this charged debate,
the sociopolitical benefits of the EU, in
terms of promoting peace and stability
in the region, are largely negated.
There are prominent examples of
growing dissatisfaction with the EU and
one such case is discussed in this article.
Greece, a small nation that had raised a
rebel flag by voting No in the highly
discussed referendum of 5 July 2015 to
defend its sovereign right, finally lost
the battle against the powerful troika:
European Commission (EC), European
Central Bank (ECB) and International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Struggling with
an economic crisis, Greece is a part of
eurozone and is financially attached
with the common currency of 19 states,
the euro. Thus, Greece did not have the
freedom to take any independent monetary decisions even during the economic
crisis, and it remains dependent on
mercy of the international and regional
donors. While discarding the drachma
in favour of the euro in 2001, the ordinary
citizens of legendary Greece had failed
to apprehend that the very eurozone
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
NOTES
they joined should eventually turn out to

be a trap.
Riding high on the chariot of success
after the fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the European integration process acquired immense
popularity to attract anyone and everyone to its fold. Moreover, the eastward
enlargement of the EU to accommodate
other countries of the erstwhile socialist
bloc also earned for the former a reputation of being one of the best examples of
RI. The international community appreciated the peacemaking role of the EU during ethnic conflicts that proliferated in
the Balkans. Recognising the EUs normative role and influence in spreading democratic values, rule of law, respect of human
rights and rights of minorities, it was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
These are some of the reasons as to why
scholars remain hesitant to term the EU as
a strategic bloc in world politics, and a
considerable majority are quite comfortable in using terminology like civilian
power to define the EU (Tel 2006). In
brief, it will not be an overstatement if we
assert that the EU till date has successfully
portrayed an inspiring image of RI.
Unfortunately, during the Greece crisis, the EU, contrary to its established
persona, acted as a bully, in an undemocratic fashion, showing utmost disregard to the Greek referendum that overwhelmingly rejected (61% No votes)
further imposition of austerity on its
people. Here, the most pertinent question is why the EU decided to act harshly
against Greece, whereas it had a history
of acting compassionately while dealing
with critical situations. For a student of
RI, the related question is whether the
theories of RI give us a credible answer
for the Greece crisis, considering the fact
that it will have a long-term effect on the
EU. This article is an attempt to test the
explanatory capacities of accepted theories of and approaches to RI with respect
to the Greece crisis. Thereby, it briefly
highlights the limitations of present
theories and approaches. This article has
argued for the development of a critical
approach, which seems to be presently
missing from the discourse of RI studies.
RI signifies deep political and economic cooperation between countries of
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
a particular region. RI undoubtedly has

come to be regarded as one of the most
important phenomena influencing contemporary international relations (IR).
This can be inferred from the fact that
practically every country of the world
today is a member of at least one regional organisation. Relevance of regionalism is also accepted and endorsed by international organisations like the United
Nations (UN) and World Trade Organization (WTO).
Theories and Approaches
There is a wider consensus that regional
organisations help promote peace, democratisation, and trade bet ween nation
states (Fawcett 2013). This argument,
for instance, stands validated in the case
of the EU, as it played a vital role in promoting peace and democracy in Europe,
particularly after the disintegration of
the Soviet Union. Likewise, the African
Union (AU) for the first time proposed
that the international community has a
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and, incorporated it in the Constitutive Act of
the AU. The UN eventually adopted the
R2P in 2005. These undoubtedly are
epitomes of the constructive contributions by regional organisations, both at
regional and international levels.
Behind such appealing and acknowledged success stories of RI, however,
remain veiled myriad critical issues that
are often ignored in academics. The suffering of the people of Greece is one such
glaring example, which compels us to go
beyond the well-established arguments
about advantages of RI. In other words,
without critical engagement with the
process of RI we will not be able to get
answers for a situation like Greece.
The EU evolved from the ruins of
World War II, initially with a commitment to integrate coal and steel in a way
whereby it restricted possibilities of a
future war between France and Germany.
The European Coal and Steel Community
(ECSC) that was established in 1951 proved
a success, and also in a true functionalist
description had a spillover effect. The
European integration process that had
begun with the ECSC intensified and added
more feathers to its cap. The destruction
caused by World War II compelled the
vol lI no 32
European governments to work for an

enduring peace agreement.
At this juncture, a federalist prescription for Europe had lost its appeal and this
was more due to the failure of the League
of Nations (LoN). Critiquing the LoN, David
Mitrany, who was associated with functionalist school of thought, wrote that the
League failed not from overstrain but
from inanition (Mitrany 1966: 94). Mitrany, while raising doubts on the role of
supranational organisations, put more
faith in functional areas of cooperation.
Mitrany based his theory on two central
assumptions. First, that political divisions
are a source of conflict among nations.
They can however overcome these divisions by figuring out areas of mutual interests and establishing a working web of
international institutions, managed by
technical elites. Second, that in todays
world of interdependence, no nation state
can individually solve all its economic and
social problems (Mitrany 1966).
Through cooperation in functional
areas, Mitrany explained that subsequently people will develop higher stakes
in integration, and thus it will continue
to be sustained. According to the functionalist theory, RI is a process that includes groups, which in the long run will
be benefited by cooperative projects in
functional areas.
Intellectually engaging with functionalist theory, E B Haas insisted that political involvements are also essential for
RI. Haas believed that
Politics need not be envisaged as the crude
clash of interests, each rationally conceived
and defended, but may yield to problem
solving. Interests need not be reconciled if
they can be integrated at a higher level of
perception by engaging the actor in a working effort (1964: 2021).
Haas was not opposed to politics and

political involvements and also acknowledged the role of regional organisation
and bureaucracy. Haas believed that
regional bureaucracy in the long run
develops a kind of allegiance towards
the region. Following Haass academic
contribution, functionalism is termed as
neo-functionalism.
There are other approaches to studying RI, influenced by dominant theories
of IR, like realism and liberalism.
Both these state-centric IR theories are
123
NOTES
focused on explaining different political

positions of nation states, assuming prevalence of anarchy in the international
system. In this, realism resolutely defends acts of the state that are inspired
to enhance the national interest. Therefore, according to realist scholars, cooperation (regional/international) is supported by nation states for absolute as
well as for relative gains (Grieco 1988).
Political economist Robert Gilpin, adhering to realist school of thought, explains RI in a more precise way. According to Gilpin, RI is preferred by states to
safeguard their interests through cooperation at the regional level in the contemporary era of globalisation (2001).
Unlike realists, liberals have faith in international institutions. According to the
liberals viewpoint, international regimes
often redefine the notion of national interest and promote cooperation between
states (Keohane 1984). Though both the
realist and liberal theories of IR explain
and endorse cooperation between nation
states for different reasons, these explanations are not specifically focused on RI.
Andrew Moravcsik is another established scholar who has extensively
worked on European integration from the
politicaleconomic perspective. Moravcsik argued that economic interest is the
main motivating factor for European
integration. This process is then pushed
by relatively powerful member states,
and regional institutions are created for
ensuring credible long-term commitment
(Moravcsik 1998). Moravcsik made it
clear that economic interests motivated
European integration, and most of the
powerful countries set the agenda for integration. The present Greece crisis and
the role of Germany in a way authenticate the Moravcsik argument on European integration.
Amongst the contemporary scholarship,
Luk Van Langenhove and his colleagues at
the United Nations University Institute on
Comparative Regional Integration Studies
(UNU-CRIS) are working dedicatedly on
the Positioning theory of regional integration. Drawing from social constructivism,
the positioning theory has developed the
concept of integration speak.
Integration speak is about how the different
issues of regional integration are constructed,
124
represented and negotiated in different sorts

of discourses by different actors positioning theory proposes a discursive ontology
according to which relevant components to
be studied are speech acts, positions and storyline (Slocum and Langenhove 2003: 6, 12).
The positioning theory accepts that

regionslike statesare not a given
part of reality, but are the result of a process of social construction (Slocum and
Langenhove 2003: 21).
We will be discussing the positioning
theory in the context of the Greece crisis
later in this article. While discussing the
social aspects of regionalism, we should
not forget about transactionalism as propounded by Karl Deutsch. Transaction
amongst citizens of different countries is
essential so that they can develop a community bond and subsequently have
a common sociopolitical perception. A
security community is possible through
such transactions, and political integration should be preceded on social closeness (Hurrell 1995).
Not so popular within RI studies is the
Marxist approach that regards regionalism as a means of accumulating capital at
the regional level. Marxist scholars accept
that integration in Europe mainly commenced for spread of the states function
so that the fundamental features of capitalism [remained] intact Political and economic integration are methods of providing
the institutional conditions for the expansion of capital, while social integration is the
process of legitimating the new institutions
(Cocks 1980: 14).
The Marxist perspective on RI, particularly in context of the EU, lacked many
takers. This is primarily due to the overall normative appeal of the EU, which
overshadowed its critics who targeted it
on the premise that the EU is a project of
capitalist expansion.
On objective analysis, in the last 60
years Europe remained one of the most
stable, democratic and peaceful regions
where general prosperity could be easily
witnessed. The entry of the former socialist countries to the EU was a smooth
affair. The European welfare system is
also praised all over the world, and this
is very well represented in rankings of the
Human Development Index (HDI). Crass
class contradictions that were evident
during the early 19th century in Europe
are not a common sight in the modern
Europe of today. Former colonisers of

the world have also learned useful lessons
from World War II, and have showed immense and praiseworthy commitment
for regional cooperation. Some of these
changes of the last century and the fall
of the Soviet Union have turned Marxist
analysis on the EU to be quite ostracised.
Growing Inequality
Times have changed and the post-Cold
War euphoria in Europe has now receded. New critical and social issues like immigration, racial discrimination, terrorism, ultra-nationalism, etc, are oozing
out in abundance, exposing volatility in
Europe. Along with social issues, problems on the economic front have also
started haunting the EU. This situation
emerged after the United States (US) economic recession that began in 2007 and
thereafter spread to Europe. While economists accept that the US is on the path
to recovery, Europe is still struggling
with the euro losing its lustre and unemployment rate of the EU-28 rising to
about 8.8% in March 2016 (for the eurozone region alone, unemployment was at
10.2% in March 2016).1 During this period of economic hardship, the social and
economic contradictions have now openly
spilled over into the public domain. Some
of these contradictions are captured in
Thomas Pikettys distinguished work,
for instance, in the following on growing
inequality in Europe:
German private wealth has increased enormously since World War II: it was exceptionally low in 1950 (barely a year and a half of
national income), but today it stands at more
than four years of national income German private wealth in 2010 was noticeably
lower than private wealth in Britain and
France: barely four years of national income
in Germany compared with five or six in
France and Britain and more than six in Italy
and Spain (2014: 144).
Piketty brings forth the fact that the

growing inequality in Europe might not
be as devastating for the current phase
but it will certainly have long-term repercussions. Since Europe is an extensively
integrated region, the growing income inequality will affect the entire region; it
might already be showing its impact. We
will come back to the Marxist analysis of
RI with focus on Europe later in this article. Meanwhile, it will suffice to mention
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
NOTES
that presently not many students prefer

the Marxist paradigm for the study of RI.
In fact, there is doubt whether we have an
acceptable Marxist approach to RI.
Theories must have explanatory powers and should be able to provide answers to our queries. Should we test the
Greek crisis from some other theoretical
lens to understand its overall implication on the EU? Before we proceed to answer this, one can argue as to whether
the Greece crisis is fit/a worthy case for
testing theories of and approaches to RI?
What if, this is only a momentary uprising in Greece, which might not have any
long-term effect on the mighty and organised EU? These are pertinent points
and have to be addressed, particularly
the question of the Greece crisis as a
case study for making observations on
these theories and approaches.
The Case of Greece
Contemporary Greece has 10.8 million
inhabitants and geographically it lies at
the meeting point of three continents
Europe, Asia and Africa.2 Historically,
Greece is a land of art and culture, intellect, power, and it had always resisted
foreign subordination. This is true of its
tourism slogan, which says, Greece, all
time classic. The country was home to
the greatest philosophers of all time
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others.
Athens (the ancient centre of democracy),
the Olympics, and classical Western literature, are a few more scribbles in the
never-ending list of Greeces glories.
During World War II, Greece was first
attacked in 1940 by Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini, who failed to secure a victory
over it. Afterwards, Greece was captured
by Germany but the communists supported by the majority strongly resisted
Nazi occupation. Finally, in 1944 Nazi
forces were defeated and withdrew from
Greece. This is also a notable point that
Greece always remained strongly centre
of left and socialist in the political activities in Europe. Panhellenic Socialist
Movement (Pasok) has dominated the
Greek political scene for more than
three decades. It soared to power in
1981 (Lowen 2013). Facing severe corruption charges, coupled with public discontent accruing from austerity measures
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
introduced in 2009, Pasok fast lost its

popularity. When Pasok slipped from a
position of significance to irrelevance in
the politics of Greece, it was Syriza,
a left-wing radical political party, that
started gaining popularity.
So what is replacing Pasoks Social Democracy? The answer is clear in nearby Patras.
The city was always a party stronghold. But
in last years election, it ditched Pasok for
the first time, backing the new anti-bailout
leftists, Syriza. Its leader is often compared
to Andreas Papandreou for his firebrand
rhetoric (Lowen 2013).
Pasoks three-decade rule is associated with modernisation and reform in

Greece as a number of pro-people policies were introduced. These include the
establishment of the national health system, hikes in wages, abolition of certain
patriarchal provisions in laws, recognising
civil marriages, etc (Clogg 1996). Pasok
leader Andreas Papandreou was known
for his independent and radical left political position. In Papandreous opinion,
the US was a centre of imperialism and
the Soviet Union was genuinely offering
resistance to the spread of capitalism
(Kamm 1984). With a close logical analysis
of the political history of Greece, we can
draw a simple conclusion that the left
and socialist views are not new to this
country. In the past, left-leaning political
parties were voted to power in Greece,
and Syriza is not an exception. Syriza
has only replaced a degenerated Pasok
with similar slogans and promises, once
associated with the latter.
Coming to the economic crisis of
Greece, this article will not only highlight certain relevant facts for familiarising ourselves with the existing situation,
but will also be focusing on the RI process, taking the EU as an example in
light of the crisis in Greece. Greece is not
an early member. It had joined the EU in
1981 and was given membership of the
eurozone in 2001. Interestingly, Greeces
entry into the eurozone is a controversial issue. In the words of centre-right
leader and German Chancellor, Angela
Merkel, one should not have accepted
Greece into the Eurozone... Chancellor
Schroeder accepted Greece and weakened the stability pact... Both were fundamentally wrong and are the reasons for
our problems today (Thompson 2013).
vol lI no 32
Merkel might have some reasons to get

angry at Greece and at her predecessors
for including Greece, but she misses the
point that many leading economists are
also averse to the idea of a single currency.
This was like establishing a regionstate without dismantling the inherent
structures of the nation state. With a
single currency, the sovereign right of
the state to devalue its currency in times
of crisis had been taken away by a supranational organisation. While governments
are responsible towards their citizens,
regional technocrats are not. There are
economists who pronounced that the
euro was not an economic but a political project, which lacked a democratic
approach (Werner 2015).
Unwilling to introspect the decision of
opting for a single currency, there are
others as well, blaming Greece of deception while joining the eurozone. Former
ECB Chief Economist Otmar Issing had
said, Greece cheated to get in (Weinberg
2011). Former French President Nicolas
Sarkozy also levied similar charges:
Greece entered with false [economic]
figures (Elliott et al 2011). It is widely
believed that these charges against Greece
are true, and the sentiment among several EU technocrats is to punish the former
for lying to others (Ali 2015). At the same
time, it is also true that Greece was debarred from joining the eurozone at the
time of its inception. This exclusion of
Greece was precisely because experts
were disappointed by the economic performance of the country, which was in
no way close to meeting the inclusion
criteria. For being left out initially, Greece
adopted tough austerity programmes,
making deep cuts in public spending
(BBC News 2001). Needless to mention,
then there was general support in
Greece for joining the eurozone. Interestingly, even when Greece joined the
eurozone, its economic condition as per
eurozone criteria was not good. The following comment is apt:
We used to call him the magician, because
he could make everything disappear. He
made inflation disappear. And then he
made the deficit disappear, recalls Greek
economist Miranda Xafa She knew
and advised her clientsthat the countrys
economy was not ready, that the statistics its
government was publishing did not reflect
reality (Little 2012a).
125
NOTES
Why was this well-known intended deception of Greece ignored then? Have
there been any political and economic
reasons for this? Certainly the inclusion
of Greece into the eurozone implied 10.6
million more members in the eurozone,
which would boost the gross domestic
product (GDP) by 2% (BBC News 2001).
Greece fudged its statistics for the eurozone membership, but there are instances of other big and powerful eurozone
members flouting rules. In 2003, France
and Germany had both overspent, and
their budget deficits had exceeded the 3%
of GDP limit to which they were legally
bound (Little 2012b). For violating rules,
the EC had the power to fine both France
and Germany, but the other eurozone
member countries voted against the EC.
The EC, headed by Italian Prime Minister
Romano Prodi, at the time, was forced by
Germany and France, along with other
eurozone members, to ignore the flouting
of rules (Little 2012b).
According to some reports, both Germany and France are again in a situation
where they will not be able to respect
eurozone rules. Frances budget deficit in
2016 is expected to cross the permissible
limit of 3% and will be around 4.7%. In
contrast to the French problem, as per a
2014 report, Germanys balance of payments position with the rest of the world
is due to reach a record surplus of 7.1% of
GDP next year. This is far above Europes
mandated 6% maximum (Khan 2014).
Although, Greece has been vilified for
breaking eurozone rules and for not adhering to prescriptions given by experts,
other powerful countries are also equally at fault. This, again, makes us think
about the rationale of a single currency
when economic requirements and trajectories of every country are different.
The problem in Greeces economy started taking shape in 2009 and it was primarily due to the proliferation of the economic crisis that first gripped the US.
With the crisis hitting Greece in 2009, its
budget deficit exceeded 15% of the GDP.
This was the first time when Greeces
government started pushing hard for economic measures that continued thereafter. Till date, at least nine times austerity policy measures have been implemented in Greece, making life miserable
126
for its ordinary citizens. At the same

time, the troika has helped Greece
with two bailouts eventually total[ing]
more than 240 billion (New York Times
2016). The troikas dole has, however,
failed to usher in positive changes to
Greeces economy. Thus, the question is,
where did the money actually go?
Interestingly, much of this money is
utilised to repay the loan. So, while
Greece is slipping more and more into
foreign debt, the debt money is going
back to those who are giving it in the
name of help and support for Greece.
This was also the case post the referendum when the EC on 20 July 2015 issued
a bridge loan to Greece. The European
Commission is sending a $7.2bn bridge
loan to Greece today; the money is being
used to repay a maturing debt repayment owed to the ECB, and to cover outstanding bills to the IMF (Wearden and
Allen 2015). Greece is in such a situation,
where even the IMF accepts that it is difficult for them to repay the entire loan.
The situation that Greece lies in today
draws attention to the fact that the eurozone itself is also a part of the problem.
As Krugman points out,
Imagine, for a moment, that Greece had never adopted the euro, that it had merely fixed
the value of the drachma in terms of euros.
What would basic economic analysis say it
should do now? The answer, overwhelmingly, would be that it should devaluelet
the drachmas value drop, both to encourage
exports and to break out of the cycle of deflation (2015).
Greeces economy can also be revived

in case the troika waives a substantial
amount of the loan. Leaving the IMF
aside, even EU institutions can waive
their loans, but this is possible only with
the support of the economically stable
European countries. With the loan waiver,
Greece will be given a new economic life
and such a gracious gesture will also
re-establish the strength of European
integration. Unfortunately, none of the
strong proponents of the EU are willing
to accommodate Greece when it is suffering for various reasons, including for
its decision to join the eurozone.
History, intensity, complexities, and
even the involvement of the EU institutions in the Greece crisis make it a relevant case study for various academic
disciplines, particularly for students of RI.

Greece is a fully integrated country of the
EU. It is also part of the Schengen visa-free
area, and the eurozone. Grexit will have
its own repercussions for the EU. In short,
the Greek crisis is an appropriate case for
testing theories of and approaches to RI,
particularly in relation to the EU.
Re-engagement
The Greece crisis is in no way helping the
EU presently, when there is a discussion
on deeper integration. This is possible
only by ensuring greater coordination of
fiscal, economic and social policy within
the Eurozone (Habermas et al 2012).
Contrary to this ambitious design of deeper
integration, the EU is now facing intense
criticism. Lately, anti-EU parties are gaining popularity in different European countries. In this, the left-oriented political
parties are critical of Brussels economic
approach and the right-wing parties are
attacking the EU on migration and on the
question of sovereignty (Tripathi 2015).
With this kind of credibility deficit, it is
difficult for the EU to initiate any big-ticket
reforms. The surge in the anti-EU opinion
can be interpreted in different ways, but it
also implies that the estimated benefits of
RI have not reached the people.
Undeniably there are several benefits of
European integration, like political stability, regional peace, economic coordination
between members of the EU, common
market, etc. These are some of the basic
conditions that helped the growth of capitalism in Europe after the end of World
War II. Likewise, the European public in
general also benefited, but there are discrepancies. Economic inequality is a reality across the EU. This is better revealed
by Pikettys study, discussed in this article. Due to growing economic hardship
and rising unemployment, there is a rise
of anti-immigration sentiment not only
for the outsiders (non-EU citizens), but
also for free movement across the member
states. For example, East European migrants are often been blamed for grabbing
jobs and making economic life difficult in
prosperous European countries. In Britain, there has been a strong wave of opposition for East European migrants and,
on this basis, the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) is gaining acceptability
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
NOTES
(Maclellan 2014). The National Front in

France, Northern League in Italy, Danish
Peoples Party in Denmark and Finns
Party in Finland are some of the political
clones of the UKIP.
These right-wing and anti-EU political
parties have a good support base in their
respective countries, which explains that
the spillover effect as assumed by the
functionalist theorists has had a limited
reach and has somewhat failed to sustain
a pro-integration wave in Europe. European integration has had beneficiaries,
but particular classes are the most prominent winners in this process. For example,
the harmonisation of EU policy for the
success of the common market helped
only a few and created problems domestically for member states, particularly for
the former socialist countries (Majone
2012). Moravcsik (1998) argues that integration was mostly driven by European
elites and the role of general public was
minimal. All these and more are sufficient
reasons to raise substantial doubts on the
optimism of the functionalist theory of RI.
While retaining basic assumptions of
functionalist theory, neo-functionalists
expressed faith in regional bureaucracy,
which according to the latter will help
develop loyalty towards the region. Going
by the history of EU institutions, this
cannot be authentically certified. On
occasions, EU institutions were forced to
favour some member states over others;
a few examples are discussed in this
paper. Neo-functionalists relied more on
regional bureaucracy for RI by discarding the relevance of peoples support for
the success of such a process. At present,
in Europe, regional institutions are losing
popular support and are largely considered as inefficient in providing solutions
to imminent problems (Majone 2012).
The efficacy of regional bureaucracy has
repetitively come under question, thereby posing a challenge to the basic analysis of neo-functionalist theory in regard
to European institutions.
Regarding the issue of Greece, both
functionalist and neo-functionalist theories cannot provide a satisfactory answer
as to what went wrong with European
integration. Why are the people of Greece,
who enthusiastically joined the EU
and afterwards the eurozone, suffering
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
immensely since 2009. EU institutions

have not honestly come forward to rescue
the people of Greece. Loans with conditions,
support for austerity, and loans for repayments and not for investment, define the
role of EU institutions in the Greek crisis.
Pushed to the margins, an overwhelming large majority in Greece resolutely rejected the troika conditions in
the referendum. The Greece referendum
result depicts the fading faith of the people in the EU and its institutions. Greece
was ready to take hardship knowing
well the consequences related with a
negative or No vote in the referendum.
Thus, European integration has failed to
create its own constituency in Greece,
and ultimately the EU had to rely on coercive tactics to keep Athens under its
ambit. In brief, functionalist and neofunctionalist theories are falling short of
locating those faults that resulted in economic disaster for Greece, as also in
explaining the reactions of the EU.
We are not engaging with realist and
liberal theories. As mentioned earlier,
both these theories are not very specific
on RI. Coming to Moravcsiks political
economic analysis, it is a convincing
narration of European integration. Economic factors influencing decisions of
nation states in respect to European integration is a point well argued by
Moravcsik. This is even the case with the
eurozone, where Germany was the most
interested party for the following reasons:
Germanys main motivation for a single currency, contrary to popular belief, was neither
to aid its reunification nor to realize an idealistic federalist scheme for European political
union. It was rather to promote its own economic welfare through open markets, a competitive exchange rate, and anti-inflationary
monetary policy (Moravcsik 2012: 55).
German Hegemony
This is a frank description, but the explanation remains incomplete. One can understand the interest of Germany in supporting the eurozone, but what explains
its contemporary political position on
Greece? Whose interest is being promoted/safeguarded by the Greek government? Is Germany such an economic and
political power that its hegemony cannot
be challenged by Greece? Has Greece
strategically been reduced to an extent
vol lI no 32
that it cannot take a different path other

than one offered by the EU? What about
those in Greece who support austerity
measures? Have they also been affected
or are there two categories in Greece?
One category is of those people who
oppose austerity because they are suffering since 2009, and other category is of
those who support austerity as suggested
by the troika. One does not require a research report to understand that those
who support austerity either have not
been affected by these measures, or else
they have benefited by these policies. In
both the cases, the interests of the non-affected category is directly related to the
interests of the troika, and this category
will defend the euro as well as the EU. The
problem with Moravcsiks thesis is that
the analysis of economic interests is limited to the level of a country (assumed a
homogenous entity) supporting or opposing RI. This analysis does not give us any
information as to whose economic interests are safeguarded or promoted in these
countries. Until we know who the beneficiaries and losers in the process of RI are,
we will not get a complete picture.
In a crisis like the one in Greece, Germanys attitude proves that it still retains
a very powerful position in the eurozone
and is unwilling to compromise on its
interests. Adopting a tough posture, Germany is ruling out any leniency for Greece
in terms of loan waivers. There is a situation of revolt in Greece against the EU but
Germany is still not budging from its position. Although this time Alexis Tsipras
had taken a U-turn after the referendum,
more austerity measures in Greece will
make people further frustrated with the
EU. Syriza came to power riding on an
anti-austerity wave and in the future
many other political outfits may emerge
on similar lines. It only indicates that with
acceptance of the troikas conditions
Tsipras has avoided an immediate Grexit,
but there is uncertainty about the future.
It is also difficult to assume that the present Greece government, by going against
the referendum mandate, had represented
the interests of the people. Similarly, EU institutions had shown contempt towards
the democratic views of Greece. So, while
the political economic approach as presented by Moravcsik helps us analyse the
127
NOTES
politics of decision-making, it does not

provide us enough tools for understanding the Greece crisis and role of the EU in
this whole episode.
The present situation in Greece is enough
to make us understand that the economic
interest of a nation is not synonymous to
the economic interest of all the people.
So, while staying in the eurozone is defended on the pretext of it being in Greeces
interest, the majority of its people will have
to pay a heavy cost for it. From a Marxist
perspective too, the economic interest of a
state does not necessarily imply the economic interest of the society at large. It depends on the character of the state. Private
economic interest dominates in a capitalist
society and it is normally equated with the
nations economic interest.
In the case of Greece, all proposals to
tax the rich were turned down by the
troika. Greece, together with the euro,
cannot revolt against the troika, which
controls the flow of the euro to Greek
banks. Thus, the troika ultimately regulates the financial lifeline of Greece
(nc 2015). Greece, being a member of
eurozone, lost its sovereign power to
help its suffering masses. On the contrary, it is contributing to the EU agenda
and also helping maintain the relevance
of the euro. Greece is a glaring example
of something being extremely wrong
with the European integration process.
Where is the normative image of the
EU, which had once been regarded as an
example for every region? The condition
of Greece will only dampen the spirit of
RI in other parts of the world. One can
draw inferences from the positioning
theory to understand the repercussions
of the Greece crisis, particularly in Europe and generally on the process of RI.
By its stubborn act, Germany has only
created a negative storyline for the region
that will reverberate in the future. A
reflection of this was an angry backlash
on social media after the Greece referendum, mainly targeting Germany on
twitter with the hashtag #ThisIsACoup.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was
also targeted along with EU institutions,
which prominently include the ECB and
EC. These damaging storylines against
the EU will be a catalyst for anti-EU forces
throughout Europe.
128
The Greece crisis has hit the reputation

of the EU and will definitely strengthen
the ultra-nationalist forces in EU member
states. Even now, it is clear that the EU
will not relent on Greece, it is therefore
expected that many such negative storylines will develop in the future. The positioning theory in this regard is of great
help, to assess the damage done to the
image of the EU by the Greece crisis. A
concrete assessment might help the EU
change its course, although, at present,
it is a highly pessimistic situation.
The positioning theory will help us
estimate, to some extent, the sociopolitical
impact of the Greece crisis, but reasons
behind it will not be properly estimated
by the theory. For this, one needs to look
at the entire development not from 2009,
but go back six decades. The development of capitalism in post-World War II
Europe will perhaps give us some answers. For this, one has to academically
analyse how RI stirred development of
capitalism in Europe. The establishment
of the European single market and single
currency (for 19 states) are decisions
motivated by multiplying profit; even
free movement of labour (Schengen visa
free area) helps in keeping a check on
wages across the EU zone. Some of these
pertinent issues require extensive discussion in relation to European integration.
A Critical Approach to RI
In terms of a critical approach, RI sometimes is broadly debated along with globalisation. Critically, regionalism is also
described as a response to capitalist globalisation and global uncertainties (Langenhove and Scaramagli 2011). Regionalism, as a reaction to the globalisation thesis got much attention after Jagdish Bhagwati, one of the well-known proponents
of globalisation, raised questions on
regional economic arrangements (Bhagwati 2007). Although, there are scholars
who are of the view that regionalism complements globalisation by creating a favourable liberal market atmosphere at the
regional level (Schiff and Winters 1998).
There has been intense debate on globalisation and regionalism, but that is not the
case with RI. In fact, a critical debate on
RI is largely identified with a debate on
regionalism and globalisation.
To reiterate, the role of capitalism in promoting/supporting RI requires extensive

academic engagement. The reasons for
the spurt in RI arrangements cannot be
properly studied only through the linear
lens of political economy or the established theories of RI. Marxist understanding of the process will help us obtain
many crucial answers, the lack of which
will cause our knowledge of RI to remain
narrow. The Greece crisis, its origin, and
its long-term impact necessitate a comprehensive analysis, which is only possible by
enlarging the scope of RI studies. The student of RI can use the Greece crisis for
re-engaging with the study of RI. Lastly,
while making a case for critical analysis,
we have to be cautious because stress on
the need for a Marxist or critical approach
does not imply the vilification of RI. As a
matter of fact, people have benefited from
the process and internationally there is
growing demand for borderless and integrated regions.
A critical approach to RI has to be
inclusive. As of now, RI studies is overly
concentrated with vocabulary like economy of scale, interregional trade, custom
unions, market access, labour movement,
trade corridors, regional economic development, etc. Sociopolitical issues, like
culture, social communities, borderlands
issues, etc, are largely left to other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and
sometimes to geography. Thus, at present, it has largely a statist approach.
Critical approach for the study of RI has
to transcend this conventional boundary.
The positioning theory is of some help
and fundamental Marxist analysis of
capitalism is also necessary for developing a comprehensive critical approach
to RI. Constructive engagement with
other disciplines will only broaden the
research agenda and help establish a
different identity to RI studies.
Without developing a critical approach
to RI, we cannot understand the complexities related to the Greece crisis and will
certainly get even more confused on the
subject. The Greece crisis and its overall
link to RI requires an honest and credible
academic engagement, its absence might
injure the embryonic discipline of RI.
This article is not an attempt to negate
the established theories of and approaches
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
NOTES
to RI. All of these are of great relevance

in understanding the various dynamics
related to RI. This article is only making
a point that the prevalent theories and
approaches to study RI have limitations
in properly explaining a situation like
the Greece crisis. The positioning theory
is of some value in making an assessment related to the Greece crisis and its
overall social impact. The big question
of what really triggered the crisis and
intensified it cannot be answered without developing a critical approach on
this subject.
In precise words, we need a critical
approach by drawing fundamental arguments from Marxism to expand the
horizon of our understanding and investigate the role of capitalism in RI. We
also have to draw out certain points
from the positioning theory. The main
objective of the critical approach in the
study of RI is to analyse how people will
receive maximum benefits, which is
presently not the case. This entails further
research on the topic from a critical
approach, the collection of more data in
support of the basic arguments, and also
the investigation of other case studies,
both in and outside the EU.
Notes
1
2
For more statistics on the EU, see Statistics Explained (2016).

For more detail on Greece, see the official portal for tourism in Greece (Visit Greece nd).
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129
DISCUSSION
non-existent argument that the farmers

pay commission to arthiyas. It is common
knowledge that commission agents collect
commission from the buyers and not
from the farmers. Contrary to what has
been stated in the critique, this fact has
not been put otherwise anywhere in the
original article.
Commission Agent System

What Ought To Be Done
Sukhpal Singh, Shruti Bhogal
Responding to the critique of

their article on the commission
agent system in Punjab, the
authors highlight the perils of
private solutions to agrarian
problems. They propose an
enhanced role of the public sector
in obliterating the exploitative
stronghold of arthiya system in
order to protect the interests of
farmers and address the problems
of Punjabs agrarian economy.
ukhpal Singhs article on Arthiyas

in Punjabs APMC Mandis: Inadequate Analysis and Solutions that
appeared in EPW on 9 April 2016 is a critique of the article Commission Agent
System: Significance in Contemporary
Agricultural Economy of Punjab published in EPW by us on 7 November 2015.
The economists and thinkers debating on
inherent problems of commission agent
(arthiya) system point to the broad realisation of the gravity of this issue.
Both articles advocate curtailing the
role of this system in the agrarian economy but with different road maps. The
original article stresses on the role of the
public sector, whereas the critic looks
upon the ongoing process of liberalisation
as a measure to remove the middlemen.
Irrelevant Arguments
Sukhpal Singh (sukhpalpau@yahoo.com) is

the head of the Department of Economics and
Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University,
Ludhiana. Shruti Bhogal (shrutibhogal@
gmail.com) is a research fellow in the same
department.
130
The critic has challenged the analysis

without providing empirical or theoretical
basis to support his strong words. The
reference at the beginning of the original article, to inflation and subsequent
elimination of fruits and vegetables
from Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Act, was for better understanding of the significance of the study,
and is not the articles core subject. The
opinion expressed in the critique that
this reference takes away from the
study, is irrelevant.
Majority of the arthiyas, dealing with
foodgrains, in Punjab are kachcha arthiyas.
They act as middlemen between buyers
and sellers, and do not purchase from
farmers on their own account. The original
article specifically focuses on the role of
these arthiyas in the rural agrarian economy. The need to discuss pucca arthiyas,
therefore, did not arise. This has been
needlessly argued in the critique.
The knowledge of the authors has
been impulsively contested based on a
Public vs Private Solution

Reducing the role of the state and enhancing that of private players in agrarian
market through direct purchase system,
private wholesale market, restructuring
of APMC Act and contract farming were
the plausible solutions stated by the critic
to deprecate the arthiya system. Encouraging such models entails various challenges contrary to the interests of farmers, especially small farmers.
(i) Role of State and APMC Act
Non-restructuring of the APMC Act in
Punjab has been blamed in the critique
for the problems in the states agricultural marketing. Though restructuring
of the APMC Act may abolish existing
commission agent system, what cannot
be ignored is the detrimental role of private players that comes with the package. While the commission agent system
would reappear in some form to facilitate
private firms, privatisation would have
lasting antagonising implications. The
interface between farmers and private
firms can challenge protection of farmers
income and sustainability (Vijayshankar
and Krishnamurthy 2012: 3437).
The states role in safeguarding the
interests of farmers cannot be negated.
The critic writes, It is surprising that when
the state should control less of markets
in a state like Punjab where it has caused
enough damage, Singh and Bhogal argue
for an enhanced role of the state. Making
the bureaucracy and the government
liable and competent is the ticket to
comprehensive development. Dormancy
of the government and pro-activeness of
private players increases economic disparity. Therefore, as intellectuals, to
check the incompetence of the government and constantly strive for pro-masses
policies should be our commitment.
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
DISCUSSION
It is easy to talk about APMC Act

reforms without comprehending the complexities of agricultural markets (Krishnamurthy 2012). Strengthening of public
procurement system and APMC is vital.
In the absence of APMC, the farmers in
Bihar resorted to distress sale of wheat
at `800 `900 per quintal; whereas
farmers in Punjab with the APMC intact,
were able to sell at `1,310 per quintal
(Sharma 2014). Ever since, Bihar has not
seen any revolution in the agrarian markets, rather the farmers are often left in
lurch (Sharma 2014). The critic himself
has highlighted the plight of small farmers in such markets; and that such markets suffer from lack of infrastructure
and no checks on malpractices (Singh
2015). Restructuring an efficacious marketing system, managed by Punjab Mandi Board, with a network of well
equipped 151 regulated markets and 275
sub-yards spread over 12,581 villages is
far from being rational and constructive.
(ii) Realities of New Initiatives
The critic suggests new initiatives to
abolish the commission agent system.
He remarks about the authors,
They are unmindful of the new initiatives
like the FPCs [Farmer Producer Companies],
and unaware that mechanisms like direct
purchase from farmers and private wholesale
markets could provide a break from the past.
The direct purchase of grains by private

firms can entirely bypass the minimum
support price (MSP) system which is the
only hope for crisis-ridden farmers. At a
time when intellectuals, political parties
and farmer organisations have been
demanding implementation of the Swaminathan Report for enhancing the MSP,
arguments by the critic would automatically enable the government to dodge
this farmer-friendly proposal.
The critic proposes contract farming,
which is an attempt to promote corporate
farming in guise. Various studies have
shown that contract farmers have
suffered due to undue price deductions
on quality parameters, delayed payments,
vagaries of nature, and raised cost of
production (Rangi and Sidhu 2000: 15
23; Satish 2003: 603). Manipulative provisions of contracts exploit the poor
farmers (Singh and Asokan 2005). The
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
critic himself highlighted the plight of

small farmers and the preference for
medium and large farmers by contract
farming firms (Singh 2012: 95105).
Hence, proposing contract farming to
evade the exploitation of farmers, especially small farmers, is ironical.
The argument for FPCs has intrinsic
problems. Farmers face difficulties as they
are illiterate, resource poor, lack in-house
professionals, are unable to raise capital
from outside, etc. This concept has neither historical nor practical basis. The
critic himself holds out that these institutions being commercial entities, are
unable to access benefits like state grants,
export incentives, tax exemptions, landlease at nominal rate, marketing support,
etc unlike cooperatives (Singh and Singh
2013). Hence, the proposed cooperative
marketing system in the original article
is gainful.
The critique argued for diversification
from wheat and paddy as another initiative to abolish commission agent system.
The original article discusses the dependence of farmers on commission agents
who act as suppliers of credit and farm
inputs, and bind the farmers to sell their
produce through them. Apparently, crop
diversification offers no remedy to the
role of these agents and aforementioned
dependence. Moreover, the implementation of crop diversification programmes
has not been fruitful in the state as no
considerable progress has been made
ever since the Johl Committee on diversification of Punjab agriculture submitted
its report in 1986.
The critic is also a proponent of
National Agricultural Markets (NAM).
This has its own demerits, especially for
surplus states like Punjab which have
extensive network of mandis, vast infrastructure and an effective procurement
system. Almost all farmer organisations
are opposing NAM and arguing that the
sole agenda behind such initiatives is a
concerted effort to do away with MSPs
and honour World Trade Organization
agreements. The online dealing under
NAM system might not be very successful
when a large proportion of farmers are
illiterate. A study highlights that small
and marginal farmers might not benefit
from the proposed electronic portal of
vol lI no 32
NAM (Dey 2016: 3539). Markets are

flooded with farm produce within 10 to
15 days of harvesting. During this short
window, assuring the sale of produce at
the best price without the present procurement system would be difficult.
Trivialising the role of public sector in
the agricultural market system will have
malignant implications. We need to prioritise framing of initiatives which would
save the farmers and abolish the commission agent system. On the contrary,
focusing on policy initiatives which while
abolishing the system would be detrimental to farmers is unreasonable. There
is an urgent need for the learned of our
nation to understand that the inherent
problems of our economy have to be sorted
in a manner which favours the masses.
References
Dey, Kushankur (2016): National Agricultural
Market: Rationale, Roll-out and Ramifications,
Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 51, No 19,
pp 3539.
Krishnamurthy, Mekhala (2012): All in the Name
of Farmer, Hindu Business Line, 2 January,
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/
all-in-the-name-of-the-farmer/article2769198.ece.
Rangi, P S and M S Sidhu (2000): A Study on Contract Farming on Tomatoes in Punjab, Agricultural Marketing, Vol 42, No 4, pp 1523.
Satish, P (2003): Contract Farming as Backward
Linkage to Agro Processing: Experiences from
Punjab, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol 58, No 3.
Sharma, Devinder (2014): Ground Realities: How
to Kill Farmers, 20 January, http://devindersharma.blogspot.in/search?q=apmc.
Singh, G and S R Asokan (2005): Contract Farming
in India: Text and Cases, New Delhi: Oxford
and IBH.
Singh, Sukhpal (2012): New Markets for Small
Holders in India: Exclusion Policy and Mechanisms, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 47,
No 52, pp 95105.
(2015): APMCs: The Other Side of the Story,
Hindu Business Line, 8 February, http://www.
thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/apmcs-theother-side-of-the-story/article6871346.ece?homepage=true.
Singh, Sukhpal and Tarunvir Singh (2013): Producer
Companies in India: A Study of Organisation
and Performance, Centre for Management in
Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management,
Ahmedabad.
Vijayshankar, P S and Mekhala Krishnamurthy
(2012): Understanding Agricultural Commodity
Markets, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 47,
No 52, pp 3437.
available at
Gyan Deep
Near Firayalal, H. B. Road
Ranchi 834 001, Jharkhand
Ph: 0651-2205640
131
OBITUARIES
Inder Malhotra (19302016)
Silence Is Not Golden, The Telegraph,

4 October 2015).
Ajoy Bose
nder Malhotra was a no-nonsense

journalist with a rare lack of selfimportance that so many media stalwarts assume. I got to know him in 1978
when I took over as India correspondent
for the Guardian which he had to give
up after becoming editor of the Times of
India, Delhi. He was my senior by more
than 20 years and one of the best known
journalists in the country but insisted on
a matey backslapping relationship with
a young maverick like me. I think he
quite liked and supported the surprise
decision by the then Guardian South
Asia bureau chief Simon Winchester to
offer the much sought-after India string
to a 25-year-old over the claims of far
more senior contenders.
He himself leapfrogged in his 20s to
covering national politics at a time when
veteran journalists ruled the roost. Inders
phenomenal people skills helped him
cultivate important political figures and
key bureaucrats as prized sources who
provided both information and insights
about the corridors of power. Many of
them regarded him as a personal friend.
The most notable of these was Feroze
Gandhi, son-in-law of the then Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
The close companionship that developed between the budding young journalist and the charismatic Congress leader
from the mid-1950s gave the former
an exceptional insiders view of the
behind-the-scenes drama of the formative years of government and Parliament
in Indias first decade of independence.
As Feroze got more and more estranged
from his politically ambitious wife Indira,
he turned increasingly confrontational
with his father-in-law Prime Minister.
He was both lonely and in an insurgent
mood. Inder became his sounding
board. They drew closer and closer
their relationship cemented by latenight drinking bouts, forays to Moti
Mahal in Daryaganj, Old Delhi to eat
132
tandoori chicken and dal makhani

accompanied by endless political discussions. Indeed the day he died (7 September 1960), Feroze, a heart patient,
after developing a sudden pain in his
chest chose to visit his journalist friend
rather than the doctor. It was on Inders
insistence that he went to Willingdon
Hospital where he collapsed and was
declared dead.
To Inders credit he did not use his
personal access to the first family of
India to push his career prospects or
peddle gossip about them after Feroze
fell out with his wife and father-in-law.
Although he must have been privy to
a lot of salacious details of the break-up
between Feroze and Indira, the young
journalist was a professional as well as a
gentleman to reveal too much even in
his later biography of Indira Gandhi,
regardless of the sensational publicity
the book would have received had he
done so. On the other hand, Inder was
far too good a newsman not to use his
friendship with Feroze to both expand
his network of contacts in the Congress
and get insights into the working of the
Nehru administration.
Astute Political Commentator
Yet Inders uncanny skill at networking
political and bureaucratic contacts was
not his only journalistic quality. He also
developed into an astute commentator
as early as in his mid-30s and was known
for his piercing leaders (editorials).
After Lal Bahadur Shastri took over the
reins of power, Inders prescription for
the task before the new leader who had
large shoes to fill was memorable:
the countrys first post-Nehru prime minister
needed steady hands, not brilliant minds,
reliable men and women to serve as selfeffacing, industrious ministers who would
diligently study files and briefs, ably answer
questions in Parliament, be of comfort to
the state even if a bit of a bore, perhaps,
to the Opposition (Gopalkrishna Gandhi,
A few years later when the Congress

suffered a series of shock defeats across
the country from Punjab to West Bengal,
the political commentator summed it up
in one brilliant line, There was not a
single Congressman in power all the
way from Waga Border to the Hoogly
River.
While Inders heart lay in writing
political reports and commentary and
not in editorial administration or institution building, he displayed fine professional mettle when it came to taking
a stance on office politics and issues.
In the late 1960s, he resigned from the
Delhi resident editors job in the Statesman in protest against the arbitrary
manner in which the then editor Pran
Chopra was sacked by the management
ostensibly for not being more critical of
the Marxist-led Left Front government
in West Bengal. Although Inder was
not even remotely left wing he felt that
this was an unacceptable breach of
editorial freedom. Many years later he
would react the same way and leave
the Times of India Delhi resident editors
job after the advent of Samir Jain,
the proprietors son and the new vicechairman of Bennett Coleman, who
sought to diminish the status of journalists
in the newspaper.
Inder was not inclined towards any
particular ideology, political party or
even social cause. Nor did he project
himself as a media crusader or a votary
of the freedom of expression. Yet despite
this very down-to-earth approach to
journalism, his 65-year-long career was
almost entirely guided by a fierce but
quiet commitment to journalistic ethics
far more perhaps than others of his
tribe who made a bigger noise about it.
He remained a quintessential reporter
doggedly pursuing his basic professional
task of writing on events around him
without fear or favour and Indian journalism will be very much poorer without his presence.
Ajoy Bose (ajoyboss@gmail.com) is a
New Delhi-based senior journalist and author.
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol lI no 32
EPW
CURRENT STATISTICS
Wholesale Price Index
Foreign TradeMerchandise
The year-on-year (y-o-y) inflation rate based on WPI increased to 1.6% in

June 2016 against (-)2.1%, a year ago. The index for primary articles rose by
5.5% in June 2016 against (-)0.5% in June 2015, as the index for food articles
grew sharply by 8.2% compared to 3.1% in the respective month. The index for
fuel and power continued to decline for 20th month in a row, however, at a
decelerated rate of (-)3.6% in June 2016 from (-)8.9%, a year ago. The index for
manufactured products increased by 1.2% in June 2016 against a fall of (-)0.8%
in June 2015.
The merchandise trade deficit narrowed to $8.1 billion (bn) in June 2016 from
$10.8 bn, a year ago. After declining for 19 months in a row, exports registered a
positive growth of 1.3% in June 2016 to $22.6 bn from $22.3 bn in June 2015.
Imports fell by (-)7.3% to $30.7 bn in June from $33.1 bn, a year ago. Exports
declined by (-) 2.1% to 65.3 bn and imports by (-)14.5% to $84.5 bn during April
June 201617, from $66.7 bn and $98.9 bn, respectively, during corresponding
period last year. The trade deficit narrowed substantially by 40.3% to $19.2 bn
during AprilJune 201617 compared to $32.2 bn, during same period last year.
Consumer Price Index
Index of Industrial Production
The CPI inflation rate inched up to 5.77% in June 2016 compared to 5.76% in May
2016 and 5.4%, a year ago. The consumer food price index rose sharply by 7.8% in
June 2016 compared to 5.5%, in June 2015. The CPI-rural and CPI-urban inflation
rate increased to 6.2% and 5.3%, respectively, in June 2016 from 6.1% and 4.6%,
respectively, in the corresponding month last year. As per the Labour Bureau
data, the CPI inflation rate for agricultural labourers increased to 6.0% in June
2016 from 4.5% in June 2015, and industrial workers remained same at 6.1% in
June 2016.
The IIP grew by 1.2% in May 2016 compared to 2.5%, a year ago. The index of eight
core industries rose by 5.2% in June 2016 compared to 3.1% in June 2015, with
growth in electricity generation, coal, fertilisers, and cement production increasing
sharply to 8.1%, 12%, 9.8% and 10.3%, respectively, in June 2016 from 1.2%, 5.4%,
5.8%, and 2.9%, in June 2015. However, crude oil and natural gas production
continued to decline by (-)4.3% and (-)4.5% in June 2016 compared to -0.7% and
-6.0% in the same period last year. Growth in refinery products and steel production
slowed to 3.5% and 2.4%, respectively, in June 2016 from 7.5% and 4.2%, a year ago.
Movement of WPI Sub-indices JanuaryJune 2016
Merchandise Trade June 2016
Year-on-Year in %
12
Manufactured Products
Over Month
(%)
22.6
30.7
8.1
1.8
7.9
29.4
5.5%
Exports
Imports
Trade deficit
1.2%
Data is provisional. Source: Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
-3.6%
Trade Deficits April 2015June 2016
Primary Articles
6
June 2016
($ bn)
-6
Over Year
(%)
(AprilJune)
(201617 over 201516) (%)
1.3
-7.3
-25.0
-2.1
-14.5
-40.3
$ billion
0
Fuel and Power
-12
-$3.4 bn
Non-oil Trade Deficit
-3
-18
January
2016
February
March
April
May*
June*
-$4.7 bn
-6
* Data is provisional.
Oil Trade Deficit

-$8.1 bn
-9
Trends in WPI and Its Components June 2016* (%)

Weights
Over Month
Over Year
100
20.1
14.3
14.9
65.0
1.4
2.9
2.9
3.4
0.2
1.6
5.5
8.2
-3.6
1.2
All commodities
Primary articles
Food articles
Fuel and power
Manufactured products
Total Trade Deficit
Financial Year (Averages)

201314 201415 201516
6.0
9.9
12.9
10.3
3.0
2.0
3.0
6.1
-0.9
2.4
-2.5
0.3
3.4
-11.7
-1.1
* Data is provisional; Base: 200405=100. Source: Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
-12
-15
-18
April
2015
Jan
2016
Oil refers to crude petroleum and petroleum products, while non-oil refers to all other commodities.
Movement of Components of IIP Growth April 2015May 2016

Year-on-Year in %
Movement of CPI Inflation April 2015June 2016
16
Electricity
Year-on-Year in %
10
8
4.7%
1.3%
Rural
6.2%
5.8%
5.3%
6
4
2
Urban
CPI (Combined)
0.7%
Manufacturing
Mining
-8
April
2015
Jan
2016
May*
* May 2016 are quick estimates; Base: 200405=100.
Growth in Eight Core Industries June 2016* (%)
0
April
2015
Jan
2016
June*
Weights
* June 2016 is provisional. Source: Central Statistics Office (CSO); Base: 2012=100.
Inflation in CPI and Its Components June 2016* (%)

Weights
CPI combined
Consumer food
Miscellaneous
Latest Month Over Over

Index Month Year
Financial Year (Avgs)

201415 201516
100 130.1
39.1 137.0
28.3 121.5
1.2
2.4
0.7
5.8
7.8
3.8
5.9
6.3
4.6
4.9
4.9
3.7
277
860
0.7
1.4
6.1
6.0
6.3
6.6
5.6
4.4
CPI: Occupation-wise
Industrial workers (2001=100)
Agricultural labourers (198687=100)
* Provisional. Source: CSO (rural and urban); Labour Bureau (IW and AL).
General index#
Infrastructure industries
Coal
Crude oil
Natural gas
Petroleum refinery products
Fertilisers
Steel
Cement
Electricity
100.0
37.9
4.4
5.2
1.7
5.9
1.3
6.7
2.4
10.3
Over Month
3.6
-1.8
-2.6
-0.1
-3.6
1.1
4.7
-5.3
-1.1
-2.2
Over Year
1.2
5.2
12.0
-4.3
-4.5
3.5
9.8
2.4
10.3
8.1
Financial Year (Avgs)

201415
201516
2.8
4.5
8.1
-0.9
-4.9
0.3
-0.1
4.7
5.6
8.4
2.4
2.7
4.6
-1.4
-4.2
3.8
11.3
-1.5
4.7
5.3
* Data is provisional; #- May 2016; Base: 200405=100. Source: CSO and Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Comprehensive current economic statistics with regular weekly updates are available at: http://www.epwrf.in/currentstat.aspx.
EPW
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol LI no 32
133
CURRENT STATISTICS
Indias Quarterly Estimates of Final Expenditures on GDP

201415
` crore | at 201112 Prices
Private final consumption expenditure

Government final consumption expenditure
Gross fixed capital formation
Change in stocks
Valuables
Net trade (Exportimport)
Exports
Less imports
Discrepancies
Gross domestic product (GDP)
Q1
201516
Q2
1406817
294338
832420
48976
42871
-40831
620869
661700
-49687
2534903
(8.2)
(9.0)
(8.3)
(23.0)
(16.3)
Q3
1422029
322557
828754
48434
38194
-55355
625875
681230
-36835
2567778
(11.6)
(-0.6)
(7.5)
(9.2)
(15.4)
(2.2)
(20.6)
(0.3)
(1.1)
(4.6)
(8.3)
1495823
261886
843733
45077
37174
-45813
636468
682281
21305
2659185
Q4
(1.5)
(33.2)
(3.7)
(16.0)
(10.8)
(2.0)
(5.7)
(6.6)
1539614
223826
903344
52521
55036
-13988
625191
639179
29933
2790285
Q1
(6.6)
(-3.3)
(5.4)
(21.6)
(32.2)
1504442
293720
891627
50754
43138
-60253
585324
645577
761
2724188
(-6.3)
(-6.1)
(6.7)
Q2
(6.9)
(-0.2)
(7.1)
(3.6)
(0.6)
1511464
333116
909117
51068
42932
-78201
599264
677465
-7146
2762350
(-5.7)
(-2.4)
(7.5)
Q3
(6.3)
(3.3)
(9.7)
(5.4)
(12.4)
1618333
269808
853858
48547
42192
-59076
579684
638760
78020
2851682
(-4.3)
(-0.6)
(7.6)
Q4
(8.2)
(3.0)
(1.2)
(7.7)
(13.5)
(-8.9)
(-6.4)
(7.2)
1666888
230308
886147
55448
45549
-15520
613471
628991
143210
3012029
(8.3)
(2.9)
(-1.9)
(5.6)
(-17.2)
(-1.9)
(-1.6)
(7.9)
Indias Overall Balance of Payments (Net): Quarterly

201415 ($ mn)
Q4
Q3
Current account
Merchandise
Invisibles
Services
of which: Software services
Transfers
of which: Private
Income
Capital account
of which: Foreign investment
Overall balance
-7721
-38635
30913
19982
17844
16428
16521
-5497
22864
13194
13182
Q1
-707
-31560
30854
20036
17382
16425
16600
-5607
30085
22993
30149
-6132
-34175
28043
17751
17512
16153
16267
-5861
18637
10226
11430
201516 ($ mn)
Q2
Q3
-8559
-37173
28614
17835
18058
16263
16421
-5484
8121
3150
-856
Q4
-7121
-33975
26854
18013
18556
15250
15305
-6408
10915
11256
4056
201415 (` bn)
Q4
Q3
-338
-24755
24417
16077
17328
14961
15146
-6621
3455
7259
3274
-478 [-1.5]
-2393
1915
1238
1105
1017
1023
-340
1416 [4.5]
817
816 [2.6]
Q1
-44 [-0.1]
-1964
1920
1247
1082
1022
1033
-349
1872 [5.6]
1431
1876 [5.6]
201516 (` bn)
Q3
Q2
-389 [-1.2]
-2169
1780
1127
1111
1025
1033
-372
1183 [3.7]
649
725 [2.3]
-556 [-1.7]
-2415
1859
1159
1173
1057
1067
-356
528 [1.6]
205
-56 [-0.2]
Q4
-469 [-1.4]
-2240
1770
1187
1223
1005
1009
-422
720 [2.1]
742
267 [0.8]
-23 [-0.1]
-1671
1648
1085
1170
1010
1022
-447
233 [0.6]
490
221 [0.6]
Figures in square brackets are percentage to GDP.
Foreign Exchange Reserves

Excluding gold but including revaluation effects
` crore
$ mn
Variation
22 July
2016
24 July
2015
31 Mar
2016
Over
Month
Over
Year
2268320
339734
2125240
333270
2229020
337605
-16260
1663
185750
10541
Financial Year So Far

201516
201617
114840
11961
Monetary Aggregates
` crore
Money supply (M3) as on 8 July

Components
Currency with public
Demand deposits
Time deposits
Other deposits with RBI
Sources
Net bank credit to government
Bank credit to commercial sector
Net foreign exchange assets
Banking sectors net non-monetary liabilities
Reserve money as on 22 July 2016
Components
Currency in circulation
Bankers deposits with RBI
Other deposits with RBI
Sources
Net RBI credit to Government
of which: Centre
RBI credit to banks & commercial sector
Net foreign exchange assets of RBI
Govts currency liabilities to the public
Net non-monetary liabilities of RBI
Over Year
Aggregate deposits
Demand
Time
Cash in hand
Balance with RBI
Investments
of which: Government securities
Bank credit
of which: Non-food credit
Capital Markets
S&P BSE SENSEX (Base: 197879=100)
S&P BSE-100 (Base: 198384=100)
S&P BSE-200 (198990=100)
CNX Nifty (Base: 3 Nov 1995=1000)
Net FII Investment in equities ($ Million)*
201213
108086
-14361
82800
-485
Variation
201617
Financial Year
201314
251570
16769
201415
201516
322660
40486
218620
16297
Financial Year
201415
Outstanding
2016
Over Month
12058530
142870 (1.2)
1152110 (10.6)
356250 (3.4)
440910 (3.8)
1678470
972450
9394140
13460
-190
2870
140080
100
(-0.0)
(0.3)
(1.5)
(0.7)
239210
96650
813850
2400
(16.6)
(11.0)
(9.5)
(21.7)
53080
-15830
322520
-3530
(3.8)
(-1.8)
(3.9)
(-24.2)
81210
-17380
379060
-1990
(5.1)
(-1.8)
(4.2)
(-12.9)
104760
58760
965330
-1270
(9.2)
(7.8)
(14.9)
(-39.2)
140360
79650
800150
12620
(11.3)
(9.8)
(10.7)
(640.6)
211080
98200
757310
860
(15.2)
(11.0)
(9.2)
(5.9)
3690210
7827630
2580060
2061980
2162840
66260
51590
57080
32770
-2850
(1.8)
(0.7)
(2.3)
(1.6)
(-0.1)
391940
668910
237760
149110
262090
(11.9)
(9.3)
(10.2)
(7.8)
(13.8)
290880
109000
91650
135840
-27710
(9.7)
(1.5)
(4.1)
(7.6)
(-1.4)
451720
24570
46340
82420
-17900
(13.9)
(0.3)
(1.8)
(4.2)
(-0.8)
335850
777430
287280
275010
217860
(12.4)
(13.7)
(17.6)
(16.8)
(14.4)
-37480
604430
326710
-137040
195710
(-1.2)
(9.4)
(17.0)
(-7.2)
(11.3)
231100
753340
283070
202530
252280
(7.7)
(10.7)
(12.6)
(11.4)
(13.1)
1736180
413070
13590
3770 (0.2)
-6960 (-1.7)
340 (2.6)
201516
699620
698370
-12270
2424700
22600
971820
39160
38930
-57430
-13970
690
-28680
(5.9)
(5.9)
(-127.2)
(-0.6)
(3.1)
(-2.9)
248340 (16.7)
20220 (5.1)
-6480 (-32.3)
214250
215890
-20550
177790
2360
111760
(44.1)
(44.7)
(-248.2)
(7.9)
(11.7)
(13.0)
39520 (2.7)
-72710 (-15.6)
5480 (37.6)
120850
121440
-194230
119630
810
74790
(33.2)
(33.6)
(-95.9)
(5.6)
(4.2)
(9.5)
Scheduled Commercial Banks Indicators ( ` crore)

(As on 8 July 2016)
39300
2972
201112
Outstanding
2016
Over Month
201516
9671440
866160
8805280
65900
388450
2796070
2794380
7292300
7188910
29 July
2016
28052
8856
3692
8639
170188
Over Year
(1.8)
(4.3)
(4.8)
(3.1)
(0.5)
117650
-4080
121730
3860
2360
43690
43530
53620
47040
(1.2)
(-0.5)
(1.4)
(6.2)
(0.6)
(1.6)
(1.6)
(0.7)
(0.7)
Month
Ago
26740
8336
3477
8204
168289
841330
89890
751430
11550
25400
158170
158580
650340
654830
(9.5)
(11.6)
(9.3)
(21.3)
(7.0)
(6.0)
(6.0)
(9.8)
(10.0)
Year
Ago
27563
8492
3522
8375
169388
(6.0)
(8.7)
(11.9)
(8.1)
(7.0)
296830
-17760
314590
1000
-10030
146070
146050
105540
92090
201314
1127560 (13.4)
110090 (9.2)
109020 (34.0)
-1280 (-39.5)
147250 (11.3)
35860 (8.3)
12630 (644.4)
215150 (14.9)
36260 (7.8)
860 (5.9)
274630
273810
-316810
41220
700
17640
108120
107150
14070
244460
2000
150810
-334180
-336610
145030
324760
2090
-58050
60470
63520
102030
256200
2470
168910
344150
-22840
366990
8460
1000
170560
170450
42680
44550
(64.6)
(64.5)
(-104.0)
(1.7)
(3.2)
(1.8)
(18.3)
(18.1)
(32.4)
(15.7)
(13.0)
(21.8)
(3.7)
(-2.6)
(4.3)
(14.7)
(0.3)
(6.5)
(6.5)
(0.6)
(0.6)
201516
Trough
Peak
24674
7656
3193
7546
-
22952
7051
2938
6971
-
955110
51620
903480
5380
34080
206720
207540
733640
731610
(14.1)
(7.8)
(14.8)
(13.3)
(12.1)
(10.3)
(10.4)
(13.9)
(14.2)
827720
80110
747620
7480
56740
279010
278560
542320
546340
22386
6707
2681
6704
149745
(10.7)
(11.2)
(10.7)
(16.3)
(17.9)
(12.6)
(12.6)
(9.0)
(9.3)
End of Financial Year

201415
201314
29044
8980
3691
8834
-
(-47.8)
(-48.2)
(0.0)
(18.0)
(12.1)
(-6.9)
Financial Year
201415
201314

Trough
Peak
28209
8875
3697
8666
-
201516
1067450 (10.1)
72710 (4.4)
-88750 (-17.7)
-1860 (-12.0)
Variation
201617
(3.5)
(-2.2)
(4.1)
(1.9)
(-2.7)
(5.9)
(5.9)
(1.6)
(1.4)
1032790 (10.9)
(18.8)
(18.1)
(17.2)
(18.0)
(9.9)
27957
8607
3538
8491
168116
(24.9)
(28.3)
(31.9)
(26.7)
(12.3)
(16.6)
(17.6)
(0.0)
(12.0)
(12.7)
(21.5)
201516
794010
94970
699030
4090
14370
133680
134180
713200
702370
(9.3)
(12.0)
(9.0)
(7.7)
(3.9)
(5.4)
(5.4)
(10.9)
(10.9)
201516
25342
7835
3259
7738
166107
(-9.4)
(-9.0)
(-7.9)
(-8.9)
(-1.2)
* = Cumulative total since November 1992 until period end | Figures in brackets are percentage variations over the specified or over the comparable period of the previous year | (-) = not relevant | - = not available | NS = new series | PE = provisional estimates
Comprehensive current economic statistics with regular weekly updates are available at: http://www.epwrf.in/currentstat.aspx.
134
AUGUST 6, 2016
vol LI no 32
EPW
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