Posts Tagged ‘India’
The persistent fiction of independent India
Today morning, tens of millions of schoolchildren all over India were ordered to attend what is called flag hoisting. The national flag of India is run up a flagpole set in front of, or near, many thousands of schools, and a group of school functionaries pull a rope that sets the flag up atop the pole. The national anthem is played, several speeches are delivered, often including one or two (if the schoolchildren have ill luck) by a local political bigwig or member of the state assembly. The students may present a skit or two, in which they have been drilled during the preceding weeks, and then they disperse.
This has been the pattern to which Independence Day in India is marked and celebrated for as long as I remember. When the television era began, the live telecast of the indepdence day parade in New Delhi became a much looked forward to event. The parade has had the same ingredients for decades. Contingents from the three armed forces march, various sorts of wheeled and motorised weaponry drives slowly past, the President of India and as many members of Parliament as can be mustered sit in the VIP boxes to desultorily watch the parade. A number of what are called ‘floats’, tableaux mounted on lorries, are driven past, apparently representing the states of India or some theme.
And so it has gone, year after miserable year. The fiction of freedom is renewed annually by the independence day parade, which long ago became a collective ritual choreographed and managed. Like many invented rituals, this one applies a cosmetic veneer. Perhaps in the 1970s and 1980s, there were still Indians who saw the ritual for what it is, and who were aware of the forces that encircled what was presented to all of us as the “sovereign republic of India”.
Today I see very little indeed of that awareness remaining. The great mass of the Indian middle class has been distracted from such reflection by the baubles of “development” (‘vikas’ in Hindi) which has become an end in itself, and which is given any meaning that suits the Indian agents of those encircling forces. If – so the fiction goes – the last remnant of the colonial power whcih had ruled India withdrew on 14 August 1947, then we should, in a matter of no more than two generations, have had a country very different – very different indeed – from the one we see today called India.
What have we today in this colonised territory called India?
On India and democracy
The Journal of Democracy, which is published for the National Endowment for Democracy in the USA by Johns Hopkins University Press, has included in its July 2023 issue a symposium titled, ‘Is India still a democracy?’ The five articles together offer any observer of India a mostly balanced view of the current political state of the country. I found the group of articles (and the introductory editorial) compelling enough reading.
While not intending this posting to be a review of the journal’s symposium, I found some passages from each article worth unpacking and examining. The introductory editorial states that “India’s politics have been far more open, competitive, and democratic than one would expect from a country with its low level of socio-economic development and its high degree of ethnolinguistic diversity” and that “Narendra Modi, who since capturing the government in 2014” has “engaged in what is by some accounts a wholesale dismantling of the democratic institutions, norms, and practices that made India such a miracle.”
There are two assumptions these rest on. One is that India’s politics between 1977 (the end of the ‘Emergency’) and until 2014 (when the BJP-Modi first term began) was proceeding along acceptable lines. Two, that democratic institutions are crumbling since 2014. I think both these assumptions I cannot agree with, as a resident of India, and also because they are contradicted by the arguments made in two if not three of the papers in this symposium.
The editorial goes on state that what we are seeing is “a frontal assault on the world’s largest democracy, in the service of a majoritarian, ethnonationalist project that seeks to root out all forms of difference and impose a stultifying conformity on India’s hitherto-vibrant political and social fabric”. These are difficult terms to employ – majoritarian and ethnonationalist – and I daresay that the ordinary Indian voter would find them incomprehensible. Because the Indian voter, ever since the first general elections in 1951-52, has voted and still votes based on what he imagines has been promised.
This is the essentially immature character of representational democracy in India, which has not changed over 70 years, and whose immaturity has very cleverly been exploited by the BJP since 2014 (but also during the early 1990s), and equally cleverly by the Indian National Congress and various national and regional political parties and groupings throughout the decades of independence.
The first article is ‘Why India’s Democracy Is Dying’ by Maya Tudor, which could be read as her own examination of the question she asks: “So has India really departed the shores of democracy? And if so, is India’s transition into hybrid regime reversible? The answer to both questions is yes.”
A passage that helps the structure of her article is the one in which she enumerates five institutions that are central to a country’s designation as democratic. The five are: (1) elections for the chief executive and legislature (“first and most important”), (2) the presence of genuine political competition (“countries where individuals have the right to vote in elections, but where incumbents make it difficult for the opposition to organize are not generally considered democracies”), (3) governmental autonomy from other forces (“such as powerful military elites”) that can halt or wholly subvert democratic elections, (4) civil liberties, (5) executive checks (“what prevents an elected head of government from declaring l’état, c’est moi”).
An useful list. Employing it I see that No 2 has been missing or is ineffectual since 2014, my verdict for No 3 would be no, the government is not at all autonomous, not because of a military elite but certainly because of powerful indigenous corporate interests (veteran India-watchers will not have failed to note the meteoric rise in the fortunes of the corporate houses of Ambani and Adani since 2014).
No 4, civil liberties, deserves a symposium of its own, no doubt. It has become temptingly convenient to state that civil liberties in India has become more constrained in India since 2014 because of what the editors have described as “ethnonationalism”, but more experienced India-watchers can very well argue that the western concept of civil liberties could hardly take root in a country whose constitution reads as if it was written by a police constable, as Tripurdaman Singh so aptly points out in the second article.
No 5, executive checks, have certainly all but vanished. Perhaps the first stage of executive checks is operable in Parliament itself, through the Parliamentary standing committees, which both monitor and evaluate the workings of government. From my own experience of working with the central government machinery, I found that during the two terms of the UPA-Manmohan Singh government (2005-09 and 2009-14) the standing committees went about their work, conducted some very well known public consultations (such as the one of GM seed and crop, and another on a vaccination programme), and their reports carried weight. Over the last five or six years, I cannot recall a single such committee having completed its task in the manner it is expected to. But then, this has as much also to do with a key point made in Vineeta Yadav’s article.
‘The Authoritarian Roots of India’s Democracy’ by Tripurdaman Singh, the second article, flows from his argument that “Step after step has been and is being taken that tends toward … an inevitable authoritarianism interspersed with democracy”.
Singh explains that this authoritarianism interspersed with what I would put as the simulation of democratic motions “could not be done without securing the state that was to do it”. Secure the state from what and for whom? The ‘for whom’ part is more easily identified – “attempts to solve social questions through political action”. What this leads to, he says, is “invariably antithetical to freedom”, substantial restrictions of civic freedoms and the “licensing of coercive state power to redress socio-economic inequities (and arguably even to regulate social identities)”.
This regulation of identity is an important point, which I will try to expand upon in a later comment. But Singh makes a connection here that deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets, and that is the connection between socio-economic aspirations (more than inequities, I would say) and identity (but identity rather different from the identity associated with ethnonationalism).
“India’s constitution enables and underpins a vast armoury of coercive laws that it places at the executive’s disposal, and creates a political structure dedicated to promoting executive power”. This is I would say a most important insight. It cuts to the core of the question: who is India’s constitution for? He relates how Somnath Lahiri, a Communist member of the Constituent Assembly, described the fundamental-rights provisions as having “been framed from the point of view of a police constable” and goes on to relate how Lahiri taunted leaders of the Congress party in the Constituent Assembly, saying that they wanted even more power than the British government.
That is a taunt whose truth has echoed through 16 Lok Sabhas and into the 17th. “Every government, to the extent that it can command a substantive majority in the legislature, has ruthlessly used state force to push its agenda for social transformation and promote its version of state security. Yesterday it was Indira Gandhi, today it is Narendra Modi. Tomorrow may bring someone else.” In saying so, Singh buries the notion that apparently different political ideologies bring about different approaches to governance and therefore to the practice of democracy.
The third article by Sumit Ganguly is ‘Modi’s Undeclared Emergency’ wherein he says, “Beginning in 2019, however, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi started his second term in office with an overwhelming parliamentary majority, his government launched a steady attack on civil liberties, personal rights, and free speech across India without issuing any such proclamation or going through any constitutional channels, even for the sake of appearance”.
This assertion, while popular, has less substance than it seems to have. My point is not to dilute the real danger that Ganguly describes, but to draw attention to the fact that several well-known instances of social activists and their struggle with government is not representative of the general state of civil liberties and free speech in India. From 2013, when it became very likely that Modi was going to be the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, a raft of new online media publications began to be launched. These gained substantial readership and very shortly began to be quoted by western media.
Ganguly continues: “The government has not been content to limit its harassment to political opponents. It has also exploited legal means to harry any critics in the media, both domestic and foreign. Such incidents are too numerous to catalogue.” Indeed it has been well known in India that to fall afoul of the powerful and politically well-connected is to invite personal disaster and bankruptcy. This has been so throughout the career of Congress as the ruling party, of coalition formations, and since 2014 of the BJP. It is even more so in states, where regional political parties are even more brazen in attacking and silencing political (or any other kind of) opposition.
‘The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy’ is the fourth article. In this, author Rahul Verma brings out early what I think is an important point: “..a review of public-opinion surveys will give a clearer picture of how Indian citizens perceive their democracy to be functioning and whether they are worried about the country’s direction. Only then can we say whether Indian democracy is truly in peril”. What does the Indian voter think about, and how does he express what he thinks about using the means available? This, to paraphrase Verma, is what a significant amount of punditry on India often misses.
Verma writes about two such surveys. “More than 60 percent of Indians surveyed for Pew Research Center’s 2020 report on democratic values and satisfaction said they were satisfied with how democracy was working in the country” and “In 2022, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and the CVoter Foundation conducted a survey of more than five-thousand Indians that asked respondents whether they thought India had become more or less democratic in the last ten years. Almost half the respondents (about 48 percent) said that the state of democracy in India has improved in the last decade, and only a quarter said that it has declined (28 percent)”.
These findings may appear counter-intuitive before the general thrust of this symposium, but they can perhaps be better explained by those within India compared to those outside it. What does the average Indian who votes think democracy is? India has during the 20th century (before 1947 too) been a land through which slogans reverberated. ‘Quit India’ was one, during the freedom movement. During the Indira years there was “garibi hatao” (remove poverty) and “jai jawan, jai kisan” (hail soldier, hail farmer), followed by the famous Twenty Point Programme, the forerunner of much larger, much more expensive and grandiose “development schemes” that later governments would invent.
This is what democracy came to mean for a large portion of the Indian citizenry, who wanted to put poverty behind them, find steady income, raise a standard of living that well into the late 1970s was precarious, and assure their children of education. The Indian apparatus known as democracy brought some of it and promised the rest. That’s what interested the voter far more than the five necessary institutions listed by Maya Tudor or the attacks on them outlined by Sumit Ganguly.
In ‘Why India’s Political Elites Are to Blame’ by Vineeta Yadav, the fifth article, I find a signal of how much for granted the elected representative has taken the voter’s gullibility. Yadav examines “Indian elites’ design and use of Parliament, the courts, and election commissions as well as state agencies”. She finds that “The quality of parliamentary representation worsened significantly after 2013… a positive long-term trend of rising numbers of lower-caste MPs and cabinet members reversed in 2014, while the share of MPs with criminal charges against them (from all parties) increased from 24 percent in 2004 to 43 percent in 2019”.
This alone reduces the weighty question upon which this symposium is based to a single trenchant question: what sort of democracy tolerates a doubling in the number of criminals elected? Little wonder then that “Parliament also continued its long-term decline as an institution of policy deliberation, legislation, and executive oversight. The total number of parliamentary sittings has decreased steadily, from a high of 464 days during 1980–84 (the first post-Emergency five-year-term government) to 332 in 2004–2009, 357 in 2009–14, and, finally, just 328 days in 2014–19. The current post-2019 parliament is on its way to having the shortest term of any yet.”
Well of course. Those who have business empires to run (whatever their legitimacy) can’t be bothered hanging around in Parliament, and even more so in state assemblies. This is how the “majority” of the BJP, as mentioned by Tripurdaman Singh, must be understood. India has long been burdened by what is usually described as the criminalisation of politics. I think it is fair to say that since 2014, with the active encouragement of all political parties and fronts and groupings, that the criminal character of Indian politics has deepened and widened.
These are a few views about salient points I found in the five articles. As a collection, I find that the authors have neglected two quite important aspects of India’s democracy. The first is the administrative cadres and their responsibilities. The functioning of governance and administrative machinery is as much an essential part of a democracy as are the observance of the integrity of its institutions. Yet this is the class – a super-class of administrators – which still wears the spurs and wields the crop just as the colonial administrators of the Raj era did.
Not a month goes by without a news report from somewhere in the country that describes a senior administrator grossly abusing his or her office, abusing and mistreating subordinates, harassing district citizens, writing out arbitrary “orders” that emerge not out of a responsive system but to favour interests, of administrators found with assets that far exceed what their salaries could have purchased. What we see from within the country therefore is the rapid criminalisation from the political realm of the administrative circles.
That also helps explain why executive oversight mechanisms exist on paper only. During the 1980-84 Parliament there were 56 short-notice questions and 85 discussions. During 2014-19 there were 8 and 5. Since 2014 the unacceptable practice of passing bills without a quorum has continued. The Union Budget, an annual exercise which even in the 1980s would occupy hours upon hours of discussion, cross-examination and wrangling, has for the last three years been passed almost no sooner than the budget proposals are presented.
The second is what I would call the monetisation of “vikas” (which is taken nowadays to mean ‘development’, but development of a myopic and material sort, for example, national highways, SEZs, new airports, new trains, more “multi-specialty hospitals”, in short anything that is large and visible nd new). It was present during the Congress-UPA terms (Manmohan Singh promoted it and P Chidambaram orchestrated its roll-out) and continued with greater vigour after 2014.
What the pursuit of “vikas” has done is to lock the Indian voter into a feudal relationship with a proximate politician and his enablers in administration. The escape from poverty took place in the last generation, or the one previous to the last. Now India has the world’s largest middle class (the population overtook that of China this year, according to the UN) and that middle class is being geared towards quickly accumulating and quickly spending.
Their concern with the efficacy and responsiveness of democratic institutions is a quantity which surveys are hard put to plumb. Horrific accidents and mishaps – such as three train collision in the state of Odisha in early June, which took the lives of more than 300 and severely injured hundreds more – are tut-tutted about and then the pursuit of “vikas” returns. The electorate pays little attention if at all any to the fact, concerning the railways, that over 100,000 posts in the Indian Railways (including those dedicated to safety) have been unfilled.
Looming above the debris on all sides is the cult of Modi. For several years now the Press Information Bureau, which is the cell in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting that distributes government press communiques, has showcased Modi (there really is no other way to put it) as the omnipotent ruler. Nine out of ten photographs it issues are of Modi, it has special sections for his speeches and his puerile, stilted ‘meet the people’ engagements. But the Modi cult infests states too. Everything from a new government school block in some out-of-the-way district to a new dockyard is inaugurated and “dedicated to the nation” by Modi.
Far more sinister is what has taken place behind the Modi silver screen. The Prime Minister’s Office was enlarged during 2014-19 and more so after 2019, and is today the size of a medium-sized ministry, with 52 senior officials (in the 1980s there was a single principal secretary). Its bloating is directly proportional to the entirely unconstitutional centralisation of power that the PMO now represents. Many line ministry decisions are taken here instead and, having been taken, are relayed to ministries as “prime minister’s orders”. On this basis, what India and Indians are experiencing since 2019 more visibly, is a dictatorial chief executive. The India of 2023 is ruled by edict, not at all by anything that can be considered democratic.
Why are thousands of millionaires leaving India?
India is going to become a US$ 5 trillion economy in a few years. India is losing US$ millionaires at a rate of several thousand every year. Can these statements both be true? I think not.
But first, where did the US$ 5 trillion economic meme come from? That’s difficult to say nowadays, because of the ways in which government public relations (PR) amplifies what international finance capital says, and what it says is often based on what politicians utter, and what they utter is based on what advice (from international finance capital) they’re given.
The US$ 5 trillion meme has been circulating for certainly two years, if not a little longer, so far as I recall. Like many pronouncements by the Government of India, it probably has its origin in some report by one of the multilateral lending agencies, was picked up by a government propagandist, and was well spun. Whatever its origin, you can read more about this particular meme here, here, here and here.
As for the second statement, two days ago this is the headline that caught my eye: “6,500 Indian millionaires expected to move abroad in 2023″. The publication that posted this, New India Abroad, appears to be USA-based.
The accompanying text read: “The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2023 envisages that India is expected to witness an outflow of approximately 6,500 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) this year. The report, published on June 13, 2023, by Henley & Partners, an investment migration consultancy based in London, ranks India as the second-highest country in terms of HNWI outflow, with China leading the list.”
It turns out that Henley has made a business out of monitoring and assessing the lives and times of the world’s rich and very rich. Whatever its methods, they appear to be taken very seriously indeed by the legion of wealth and investment advisers whose clients are the global wealthy.
This is what the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2023 (released on 13 June) has to say.
The UK is expected to see a net outflow of 3,200 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) in 2023 — higher than the projected 3,000 net loss for Russia, according to the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2023, which tracks wealth and investment migration trends worldwide. This will make the UK the third-biggest loser of millionaires globally after China (net loss of 13,500) and India (net loss of 6,500). Perhaps most notably, the UK’s anticipated HNWI flight is double that of last year, when it saw a net exodus of 1,600 millionaires.
The report explains the latest net inflows and outflows of dollar millionaires (namely, the difference between the number of HNWIs with investable wealth of USD 1 million or more who relocate to and the number who emigrate from a country) as projected by global wealth intelligence firm New World Wealth, which has been tracking wealth migration trends for over a decade. The HNWI migration figures focus only on HNWIs who have truly moved — namely, who stay in their new country more than six months a year.
Here’s what the report says about India: “Although the second-biggest loser globally, India’s net exit numbers are predicted to drop to 6,500 in 2023 compared to last year (7,500).” A consultant to a private wealth management firm quoted in the report had this to say about why Indian high net worth individuals are leaving the country: “Prohibitive tax legislation coupled with convoluted, complex rules relating to outbound remittances that are open to misinterpretation and abuse, are but a few issues that have triggered the trend of investment migration from India”.
Based on the trend over the last decade as observed by Henley and various other firms which monitor the movement of considerable wealth, India’s dollar millionaires have been moving out of the country at a good clip for several years. Should the 2023 forecast be fulfilled, then during the 2022-24 period some 14,000 millionaires will have left India with their investible monies. Those monies are at least US$ 14 billion, which is about 1,100 billion Indian rupees (INR, or 110,000 crore rupees). At a very rough estimate, India’s HNWIs have sent some US$ 50 billion out of the country over 10 years, which coincides directly with the two terms of the BJP government.
So much then for what the current government (now in its second term which ends in 2024) has been claiming since 2014 about India’s “ease of doing business” being among the best in the world.
Where are wealthy Indians who have quit and are quitting India moving to? “Dubai and Singapore remain preferred destinations for wealthy Indian families. The former, also known as the ‘5th City of India’, is particularly attractive for its government-administered global investor ‘Golden Visa’ programme, favourable tax environment, robust business ecosystem, and safe, peaceful environment.” Portugal has also been a recipient of significant wealth from the Indian diaspora.
Firms such as Henley, which have made it their business to minutely observe the movements and habits of the world’s wealthy for well over a decade, say as plainly as can be that an increasing outflow of millionaires often points to a drop in confidence in a country as HNWIs are usually the first to exit and vote with their feet when circumstances deteriorate. “Affluent families are extremely mobile, and their transnational movements can provide an early warning signal in terms of a country’s economic outlook and future country trends,” observes Henley.
Inside the deepest tourist murk of Goa
What I will describe in the next few paragraphs has to do with a spot along the coast in Goa, the small state in coastal western India where I live. It’s called Calangute, and was once a village close to the sea. There’s a beach nearby. To the immediate north is Baga, to the immediate south is Candolim, and farther south is Sinquerim, and then the headland of Aguada and its Portuguese-era fort.
But it is Calangute about which I write. It has for some years now, and by that I mean certainly 15 years, come to mean all that is ugly about tourism in Goa. If it was ugly in 2005, its ugliness is simply off the scale, off any sort of chart, today. Its ugliness is breath-taking. The ugliness of what is absurdly called tourism in Calangute, Goa, is outright paralysing.
These photographs show you why I think so. There is a bus stand in Calangute, by which is meant an open plot into which buses from other states make their way and then halt. These buses arrive crammed with tourists from those states. (I will call them ‘tourists’, for now, only because to describe them more fully will surely require an essay.) The Calangute market zone, which extends for about half a kilometre, and perhaps a bit more, in all directions, is packed with small shops and all manner of hostelries, that is, places in which tourists can stay a few nights. There are hotels too, some style themselves as resorts. But for the most part, where tourists stay in Calangute are modest lodgings, what to the generation preceding my own were known as guest houses.
The din in Calangute is deafening. There is in the first place the sounds of traffic. For non-Indian readers of this irregular journal (i dislike the neologism ‘blog’) who have not travelled in India, traffic in India is synonymous with the sound of horns, because you see, the Indian driver of a vehicle, any vehicle, simply cannot drive without tooting the horn every few seconds.
There is the constant rumble of tourist buses, which crawl through lanes that really shouldn’t accommodate more than a couple of bicycles. Every bus like this is trailed by several demon taxi drivers trying to pass the bus, and leaning on their horns in the belief that their horn blasts will magically dissolve the bus in their path. There is also nowadays the rumble of powerful SUVs, in which the more well-to-do tourists travel, shiny and ugly new vehicles which to me seem the size of small Goan houses. There are scooters and motorcycles, ridden either by kamikaze tourists or by semi-somnolent bell boys going home after their shift or by maniac delivery boys speeding chicken biryani to a room on the second floor of the Top A-1 Seashore Residency hotel.
Right in front of what used to be quite simply, in the late 1970s, called the tourist hostel and cottages in Calangute (but which today sports some grandiose title) is a sort of quadrangle. The vehicular entrance to this quadrangle is marked off by not one but two small blocks of what in India are called Sulabh Shauchalaya, that is, public urinals and toilets. That these form modern Calangute’s landmarks tell one how far, how very far and how fast, this once idyllic seaside village has fallen.
The quadrangle is a large parking space, two rows in parallel on either side of a median. Why did they have it here? Perhaps to accommodate tourist buses, perhaps to accommodate the ever growing number of large private vehicles (jeeps and vans) in which groups of mostly men travel to Calangute. Whatever the muddled first reason, space in the cursed quadrangle is taken over by any vehicle can be driven in there and parked, at times for days on end. For a category of ‘tourist’ group that makes its way to Calangute, the vehicle becomes a sort of satellite camp. Plastic containers of water, bags and satchels, soiled clothes, are all stored in the vehicle, whose roof and bonnet are used to dry clothes washed at one of the Sulabh Shauchalayas.
The sides of the quadrangle are lined, most of all, with liquor shops. These do a constant business and it is common to see groups of men in them, arguing about what sort of liqour and which brands they should collectively buy, what they should take back with them, and what beer to drink on the spot while these decisions are being taken. There are restaurants, all of them without exception rude and cheap, whose rough menus – overspiced, oversalted, overoiled – are intended only to fill deadened tourist stomachs in the shortest possible time.
There are vendors, who sell all that is tawdry and throwaway: floppy hats, sunglasses, absurd plastic trinkets for women, shorts and T-shirts, flip-flops. There are tattoo ‘parlours’, holes in the wall with two stools and internet trance channel music. There are rows of brightly painted scooters for the tourists to rent, some with A4-sized sheets of paper carrying only a name and mobile phone number, flapping in the breeze.
There are boarding houses and guest houses. These are truly, and not only here but on every road and side street of Calangute, and likewise in every alley and side-street all across the Sinquerim to Baga beach strip, the ugliness generator of Goa. Usually two storeys, at times one more, they have been cheaply built, iron rebar protruding, water pipes and electricity cables and internet wires snake in open confusion up external walls and through stairwells and around dusty verandahs and into rooms.
They sport any shade of paint that was available to their reckless owners at a discount, or was mooched from another site. They are festooned with boards and signs advertising themselves. External units of air-conditioners are jammed into masonry whever they fit, their rusty water drip making muddy puddles below. Lines of varicoloured ‘fairy’ LED lights are looped from one unfinished unpainted beam to another, behind ragged awnings and around long-empty flowerpots. Their staff are indifferent to the tourists (who are very likely more so to them), surly, unkempt, engrossed by the flicker of their mobile phones, uncaring and unmindful of anything outside their grimy walls.
Why do they still come, ever more, ever fickle, ever banal, an endless tide of human ephemera? Do they not see and feel the rampant ugliness, which stretches like a giant sore right over ten kilometres of the north Goa beach strip, with Calangute its howling, festering centre? Or are they in fact escaping a far gloomier, far darker, ugliness of the urban Indian rot from whence they travelled?
Seventy-five years of extended colonisation
There is now a third generation of young adults in India who believe, because that is what they have been led to believe, that they live in a free and democratic country. In the way that their parents did and their grandparents did, the young adult Indians consider themselves to be citizens of a sovereign nation which has the wherewithal to determine its identity and place in the world, and that within that ‘national identity’ they are free to find and play out their individual identities and personal or family aims.
This idea is sustained and fed today by a set of tools very much more sophisticated compared with those that were available and used 25 years, ago, 50 years ago and 75 years ago. Many of the new tools are of course deliverred through the internet. Twenty-five years ago it was television, Fifty years ago it was radio. Assisting the new tools that create and spread crude ideas of ‘nationhood’, ‘patriotism’, ‘love for the motherland’ and ‘unity in diversity’ are a legion of minor methods. These include what are today called influencers, advertising by Indian commercial companies – and considerably more by the foreign multi-nationals whose products and services are sold here – television serials that are now beamed through the medium of smartphones perhaps more than they are beamed to TV screens, and a myriad ‘youth’ and ‘grassroots’ organisations controlled by the political formations.
What the young adult Indian of 2022 is fed is a diet of caricatured national belonging. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party formed the national government (it formed the government again in 2019), the childish sloganeering that has, for 75 years, been a feature of Indian ‘democracy’, has increased greatly in tempo and volume. This was a staple during the two earlier national governments – that of 2009 and 2004 – under the Indian National Congress.
The excuse very often given for the great prevalence of sloganeering as the primary communication between political formations and citizens, from the later period of the Struggle for Independence (in the 1940s) and including the two most recent phases of Congress rule, was that illiteracy is widespread, and such messages make a ready impact. That was the strategy for elections in India, and ever since the 2004 central government (and especially since 2014), has also been the strategy used to foist a misshapen brand of nationalism onto citizens, except that since 2004 the brand has had as a wrapper the term ‘development’, or ‘vikas‘.
To me it is very doubtful indeed whether there were more than a very tiny minority of young adults who, by the end of August 1947, when the fervour of the celebrations had abated somewhat, looked around them and asked one another with any seriousness, what is the form and substance of our independence. I do not think that in any of the years from 1948 until today, 2022, such a minority has enlarged its numbers (as a portion of thinking and critical young adults, or indeed adults of any age group of India).
There is nearly nothing at all today, which forms the apparatus and provides the methodologies, utilising which Indian families and adults pursue their lives and livelihoods, which is Indian in thought and form. India’s cities, in which perhaps 55% of the country’s people now live, are easily amongst the most polluted in the world and, together with their abysmal civic conditions, are just as easily amongst the most unlivable in the world. There is no Indianness whatsoever in these gigantic settlements, that are criss-crossed brutally by ‘infrastructure’ and befouled by industrial and consumer effluent. They are several degrees worse than the industrial townships of the communist bloc of the 1960s, but only much bigger.
The food that young adult Indians, that their children and babies are fed, that their elderly parents are offered, is designed to injure and weaken. What was by the late 1990s called the retail revolution in India was indeed revolutionary for the country, because it cunningly household cooking a drab drudgery that chained the woman (who if freed could puruse a ‘career’ and add to the national income) and introduced food ‘convenience’ in the form of Maggi two-minute noodles, which in more recfent years has become the ‘food service’ industry, ready-to-eat packets, and food ‘takeaways’ delivered on a two-wheeler to the consumer doorstep by an underpaid, un-unionised, dangerously overworked slave of a logistics enterprise who, himself underfed, steals from ‘cloud kitchens’ whenever he can.
The medicine and ‘health care’ the young adult Indian is led to spend copious amounts of money on, for himself, children and parents (if his parents have not yet been despatched to a ‘seniors home’ or, more stylish, an ‘assisted living centre’) is, like food but more so (especially after March 2020), a fundamental means of control for the large group of transnational enterprises that in fact control the country. Whereas in the 1980s and even in the 1990s the reach of ayurveda, siddha, unani, tribal and indigenous medicine, homoeopathy, naturopathy and their allies were popular, if relatively inconspicuous, today they have been pushed well outside the margins of what is understood to be public health, whether as the government-sponsored and aided public health system or whether the commercial healthcare industry, both being equally controlled by the pharmaceutical and drugs multinationals.
There is nothing which today in India is called a ‘sector’ – by which a particular kind of activity and its asociated products and services are labelled – which is Indian in concept and finished form. Education is like a remote-controlled Frankenstein’s monster, a figure clumsily composed of ill-fitting parts. The Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management, the ‘top’ tiers of engineering and medical universities and colleges, all compel young Indians – not yet adults – to conform to the demands of global finance capital and the globalised industries such capital controls, invents and replaces.
Transport and mobility, energy and power, telecommunications, information technology, core heavy industry, all these are simulacra of the idea of western ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ transferred to Indian soil and using Indian raw materials. There is no Indian-designed equivalent of the internal combustion engine (nor even an Indian modification of the more than 100 most common kinds of automotive engines that have been invented elsewhere in the world during the last century). There is no Indian electricity-generating plant that does not burn coal or a petroleum derivative in faithful imitation of the west (the smokeless chulha remains a ‘development’ curiosity).
A public sector firm called Indian Telephone Industries used to make the rotary dial telephone instruments for decades. When the global telecom hardware industry invented the mobile phone, that too vanished. Even with the ‘smartphone’ there is no Indian telecom chipset manufacturer (naturally, because indigenous chipset development is prohibited by the same forces) nor is there an Indian operating system for the ‘smartphone’. This of course has much to do with the Indian servility, now more than 35 years old, in ‘info-tech’.
The young Indian adults, a group that forms the overwhelming majority of the ‘IT engineers’ of India, are lower than the assembly-line or factory shopfloor workers their parents and grandparents were. They modify nothing, their specialisations are extreme, their range of competencies is shockingly narrow, they are constantly goaded by externally-set and directed ‘performance markers’. They inhabit a truly frightening world. Their seniors write no standards for any product, and are chained by meaningless perquisites and stock options to the whims of the global capital vultures who use both info-tech and telecom as 21st century devices of overwhelming control.
There could be around 850 million adults in India in 2022. But we don’t know because the 2021 Census of India was not begun in 2020 and has still not begun. The administration of the colonised territory that is India has no interest in counting its people because that counting is done many times every single day – by the many subsidiaries of the transnational corporations whose smartphones, digital wallets, telecom service providers, ‘smart’ home televisions and assortment of ‘internet of things’ gadgets relay the daily minutiae of every Indian adult, child and senior that posesses them. The state, that is, what is presented as being the Republic of India, in this 75th year, is either redundant or is nearing redundancy. The notion of ‘independence’ therefore is an utterly false one.
Blocking a new GM Trojan horse in India
On 15 November 2021, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) issued a draft regulation called the Food Safety and Standards (Genetically Modified or Engineered Foods) Regulations, 2021.
This draft regulation, through the medium of a regulatory agency (the FSSAI) is the latest attempt by the agricultural biotechnology multinationals and their Indian subsidiaries and partners to trick Indians into consuming foods made from genetically modified or genetically engineered crops. Altogether the opposite of protecting the citizen, the draft regulation of the FSSAI is a Trojan horse which, the industry has built and deployed to pave the way for the easier entry of GM foods into India.
The first section of my response to the FSSAI follows, and the full document is available as a file at the end of this post.
Section 1, intent of the regulations
At the outset, I completely reject modern biotechnology in India’s farming and food. There is no case now, and there never has been a case, for its inclusion, based both on sound science and on public interest. Genetically modified/edited seed and crop of any kind is a threat to the health of Indian citizens. It is a threat to the environment and to the existing agricultural biodiversity of India. It is a threat to the socio-cultural traditions that our agriculture and food rests upon. The Union Government of India and every state and union territory government must prohibit genetically modified/edited seed and crop. There can be no compromise on this matter.
What then is this draft legislation brought for? Nowhere in the text of the draft legislation do I find any reference to any work carried out by the FSSAI or commissioned by it from independent authorities, nor any reference to such work carried out by either the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Environment – as both these are subject areas associated with the subject of this draft legislation – that assesses the need for such products in India.
In the same way, nowhere in the text of the draft legislation do I find evidence of the precautionary principle applied. The precautionary principle is central to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety which India has ratified. Thus the precautionary principle is an obligation, hence a draft legislation about genetically modified or engineered foods must explicitly state that such foods manufactured from, and such foods that contain ingredients derived from (whether in small part or larger part) genetically modified/edited seed and crop will under no circumstances be allowed into India, whether by import of finished goods, or by manufacture (food processing) based on such ingredients or by cultivation within India.
There is a voluminous international record of more than 25 years which shows conclusively that GM foods carry with them biosafety risks during production and health risks during consumption. No Indian citizen should be presented such foods, in whatever form, for consumption. Vulnerable sections of the public such as infants, children, pregnant and lactating mothers, the elderly and people with existing morbid conditions should more particularly be protected from such foods.
I find there is no recognition whatsoever – let alone the provision to act upon such recognition – of these first principles in the text of the draft legislation.
Where something can cause serious irreversible harm, it is right and proper for scientists to demand evidence demonstrating that GM is safe beyond reasonable doubt. This is also an approach that is contained by the precautionary principle (for scientists and for the public, it is just common sense). Scientific evidence is no different from ordinary evidence, and should be understood and judged in the same way. Evidence from different sources and of different kinds has to be weighed and combined to guide policy decisions and actions. That’s good science as well as good sense.
Genetic modification/ engineering/ editing involves recombining, that is, joining together in new combinations, DNA from different sources, and inserting them into the genomes of organisms to make ‘genetically modified organisms’. GMOs are unnatural, not just because they have been produced in the laboratory, but because many of them can only be made in the laboratory, quite unlike what nature has produced in the course of millions of years of adaptation and change. Thus, it is possible to introduce new genes and gene products, many from bacteria, viruses and other species, or even genes made entirely in the laboratory, into crops, including food crops. We have never eaten these new genes and gene products, nor have they ever even been part of our food chain.
The artificial constructs are introduced into cells by invasive methods that result in random integration into the genome, giving rise to unpredictable, random effects, including gross abnormalities in both animals and plants, unexpected toxins and allergens in food crops, and unknown effects on humans and animals. This problem is compounded by the overwhelming instability of transgenic lines, which makes risk assessment virtually impossible.
None of these risks are acknowledged by the draft legislation which therefore fails completely to establish why in the first place the provisions and mechanisms it contains are needed or are suitable for India. It also fails as a protective legislation by not prohibiting foods based on or derived from genetically modified/edited seed and crop.
You can find a pdf file of the full document here, or an open document format text file here.
Chargesheet against a junta
Since March 2020, beginning with the imposition of the “national lock down” in India, a host of measures have been ordered by the state – central government, state and union territory governments, and municipal corporations – which have been presented as means to control the coronavirus “epidemic”.
These measures are non-pharmacological and non-medical measures, that is, they are presented as controlling the transmission and spread of any disease outbreak or epidemic by halting, restricting, controlling or limiting the routine movement of citizens through the course of their day and week for social, commercial, leisure and faith-related activities.
I have opposed and continue to oppose and reject “lock down” and its host of associated restrictions as a means to address and control a disease outbreak/epidemic. Completely opposite to what their alleged aims are, all these measures cause harm to society and individuals. Moreover, these measures have no place – nor did they ever have any place, at any time during the modern medical history of India as has been recorded from the late 19th century – in elementary epidemiology.
The “national lock down” that was imposed from March to June 2020, and the many state “lock downs” that followed, including those imposed during the alleged “second wave” of March 2021 onwards, together constitute the most serious assault on citizens’ freedoms, civil liberties, inalienable rights, religious and faith-related customs, and livelihoods that post-Independence India has experienced. Not even during the notorious Emergency period (1975-77) were there such draconian measures.
These draconian measures, with no basis in public health whatsoever, gave rise to associated measures such as night curfews, quarantine centres, isolation centres, containment zones, quarantine periods and the like which all were alleged to control the transmission and spread of coronavirus. None of these measures, not a single one, was supported by the epidemiological evidence in India, of which there is a very extensive record.
Worse, not once was any such measure, whether introduced and enforced nationally, in a state or in a city/town/district, subject to review and assessment by any members of the large pool of experienced medical practitioners in India who have worked on public health. Instead, central and state governments, municipal corporations and district administrations either created as bodies to endorse these measure “expert groups” and “expert committees” whose members were chosen and selected opaquely, or issued administrative “orders’ to impose such measures which bore no reference whatsoever to any objective assessments of the situation on the ground.
The cumulative impact of such measures has been devastating to the public at large and the ordinary citizen. This impact is far greater, and has much more long-lasting consequences, than would have been the case had any disease outbreak/epidemic in India run its natural course. I say this unreservedly because never in the Indian public health record have healthy citizens been confined – under risk of penalty – and then subjected to continued and acute psychological pressures.
These pressures took the form, early during the “national lock down”, as compliance demanded by the state at the point of penalties and fines, and also through physical assault by the police, for not wearing face masks and coverings, or for missing curfew deadlines.
During 2021, these pressures have taken the form, especially since early February 2021, of submitting to the illegal and unconstitutional “vaccination drive” (or “tika utsav“, which translates as ‘vaccination festival’, a hideous travesty of public health) that was commenced by the central government, and which quickly thereafter was attempted to be enforced by making vaccination against coronavirus the condition against which employment as a government or public sector employee could continue, against which essential services such as food rations from fair price shops could be disbursed, and against which transport services such as metropolitan commuter trains and buses could be boarded. As I state towards the close of this chargesheet, these wholly authoritarian measures have ignored all democratic scrutiny and oversight.
The wage labour and informal sectors of the Indian economy, which have depended on and continue to depend on daily or weekly wages, were especially from late March until July 2020 reduced to penury and starvation by these draconian measures that had nothing whatsoever to do with public health.
From July 2020 when these measures began to be relaxed in different regions and states, earning daily and weekly wages and monthly salaries once again became possible as commercial and business activity resumed. But by then, three to four months of living off debt for a large number of households proved to be a crushing burden. It has been estimated that between 20% and 25% of all households in India were made poorer, and pushed below the true poverty line, directly because of the “lock down” and associated restrictions.
Whether during the “national lock down” or during the many state-level lock downs and movement restrictions during the 2020-21 period, daily and casual wage labour lost income. Surveys have shown that 6 out of 10 domestic workers did not get paid at all during lock downs, that 9 out of 10 casual labourers (such as those who labour at construction sites) did not get paid. Their capacities to save, already small, were ruined for 20 months and counting, and the great majority of such households have been pushed into debt.
The floor minimum wage in India – which was set at some 18,000 rupees a month about three years ago – has proven during 2020-21 to be wholly inadequate to provide for a family given the steep rise in food and fuel prices (about half the cost of the LPG cooking gas cylinder has been added during only the last 12 months). Even until the start of 2020, the average Indian household paid some 60 out of every 100 rupees of its medical expenses out of pocket. The “epidemic”-related costs of tests and access to basic medical care have only pushed up this already very high out-of-pocket expenditure. I have no doubt that all these factors have contributed to a rate of household indebtedness that has not been seen for two generations.
Other than during war time, which after 1945 are periods that Indians have experienced for short spells (such as in 1971), there has never been such a long period of concentrated deprivation. The cumulative effect of the “national lock down”, the state lock downs that followed, the restrictions placed by municipal corporations and district administrations have caused directly the sharp reversal of all the average standard-of-living and public health gains that have slowly and painstakingly been secured over the previous 70 years.
Not once since March 2020 until now, December 2021, has the central government or state government or municipal corporations or district administrations when imposing “lock down” and associated restrictions, acknowledged the specific needs of large sections of the population: those up to 18 years old (about 240 million male and 220 million female, total about 460 million), the population above 60 years old (about 143 million), the labour force (about 470 million).
The restrictions of all kinds taken together have affected India’s large population of children, adolescents and teenagers severely. Their schools and colleges were shuttered for over a year (and continue to be in some places, while where normal classes resumed, they are limited in frequency and attendance). Children, adolescents and teenagers being snatched away by the tens of millions from socialising settings, where they meet and play and speak to those of their own age group, and also from social and family settings, has caused both psychological and physiological harm to a degree that is still, 20 months after the onset of the alleged “epidemic”, neither recognised by the government authorities nor remedied in any way.
This impact comes on top of the already very alarming situation that was recorded by the central government in 2017 which showed that more than 840,000 children die before completing the first year of their lives. This number is more than that recorded by any other country in the world. India’s infant mortality rate was still 34 per 1,000 live births in 2016, but several states (such as Assam and Odisha with 44 per 1,000, Chhattisgarh with 39 per 1,000, Madhya Pradesh with 47 per 1,000) are very much above the national infant mortality rate.
I stand appalled that for 20 months, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Indian Council of Medical Research and the health departments of all states and union territories have refused to acknowledge or consider the effects of their “lock down” and associated restrictions on so fundamental an indicator as the infant mortality rate.
Moreover, the shuttering of schools all over the country also stopped the provision of the mid-day meals. For pre-primary, primary and upper primary school students from 2001 – and for all children in government and government-aided schools until the age of 14 as per the 2013 National Food Security Act – the mid-day meal programme provides fresh cooked food to 120 million children in over 1.26 million schools (and centres under the Education Guarantee Scheme).
With the schools shuttered the meals to children stopped – directly contravening the provisions of the 2013 Act – depriving them of one of their fresh cooked meals a day. No central or state government authorities have recognised or remedied this effect of the “lock down” and associated restrictions in a country that has over a third of the world’s stunted (chronically malnourished) children.
Ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), stroke, diarrhoeal diseases, neo-natal disorders, lower respiratory tract infections, tuberculosis, diabetes and cirrhosis were the leading cause of deaths in India in 2019. Yet throughout the period March 2020 until the present (December 2021) health authorities in central and state governments, and in municipal corporations, refused to ascertain, prior to considering any restrictive public health measure such as ‘lock down’, what the effects of such restriction, the curbing of personal mobility (in all situations including medical consultations and routine treatments), and the health effects of reduced income or no income at all were likely to be.
This omission to be one of the gravest committed by central, state and city administrations, an omission whose scale and true impact will not be known as the authorities have refused to monitor it. In India in 2015, as per an assessment by the WHO, nearly 5.8 million people died because of non-communicable diseases such as these. Their causes include physical inactivity, unhealthy food (diets low in fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, but high in salt and fats), daily exposure to air pollution (the 2016 Global Burden of Disease report showed that 920,000 premature deaths occurred because of household air pollution and 590,000 premature deaths because of ambient air pollution), tobacco use (smoking, smokeless tobacco), and the harmful use of alcohol. The lock down and associated restrictions, for months on end, strengthened these risk factors. It is inconceivable that the administrative and health authorities were unaware of the increased risks their orders directly caused.
During the period March 2020 until the present (December 2021), central and state governments, municipal corporations and district administrations alike have grossly and continuously abused emergency powers. Their applications of the Epidemic Diseases Act 1897 together with the Disaster Management Act 2005 and the imposition of sections of the Indian Penal Code (such as Section 144) has in every single instance been abuse of power under the guise of addressing an epidemic.
The necessary democratic safeguards that accompany all emergency powers – they must be invoked only through legislative process, their use must be proportionate, their application must be specific, they must be shown to be necessary, their application must be non-discriminatory, their implementation must not infringe rights and freedoms recognised by the Constitution, they must observe time limits, they must be subject to judicial correction – have in every instance been done away with.
The attempts being made by the state and its partners to accelerate the rate of vaccination rests entirely on the stripping away of judicial and legislative checks and balances, and the blocking of citizens’ oversight. What is alarming is the readiness of the state and its agencies to ignore entirely the directions given in Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India, and likewise the obligations upon the Republic of India as a signatory to international conventions such as the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights 2005 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966.
What the state refuses to abide by however is what the citizens of India will defend.
The hollowing out of India
This is not about an ‘epidemic’. And it is not about a virus.
The awful series of events that have taken place since I wrote ‘India and the illiteracy of fear’ has occupied many people in India at least part time if not full time, especially if they are in one or the other of our major metros and especially Delhi-NCR and Mumbai (and more recently Bangalore).
For those new to this subject, here are the reasons that I have since early May 2020 called it a stage-managed ‘epidemic’, with its main props being face masks and the PCR ‘test’. (1) Before December 2019 never for any disease outbreak or epidemic or pandemic were the healthy immobilised and quarantined. (2) ‘Lock down’ was never and is not a public health measure, nor are any of the associated restrictions. (3) The face mask/covering is never to be used by anyone other than patients or hospital workers in a hospital/institutional care setting. (4) The PCR is a laboratory process and was never to be used as a diagnostic. PCR can neither find a virus nor can it measure infectiousness. Its ‘positive’ has no clinical meaning. (5) ‘Social distancing’ because of ‘asymptomatic transmission’ was and is false as a public health measure. (6) No medical research centre anywhere in the world has been able to prove that any virus, let alone Sars-CoV-2, survives our outdoors climatic conditions of +35C, +65% humidity, direct sunlight and moving air laden with organic and other particulate matter.
Some points to consider:
What happened in January and February 2020? There were less than 500 so-called “confirmed cases” worldwide outside China and most of these were said to be in South Korea and Italy. On 30 January 2020 the WHO declared a worldwide public health emergency. Yet the campaign to develop vaccines was initiated prior to the World Health Organisation’s declaration of worldwide public health emergency and it was first announced at the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos (21-24 January).
The WHO has been corrupt throughout the tenure of the predecessor of Tedros – Margaret Chan (who served two terms). The WHO brought in through various channels the interests of the global pharma MNCs, of the biggest philanthropic foundations and international financial institutions. Under Tedros (backed by PR China), this control increased. One of these foundations is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which at the 21-24 January 2020 Davos meeting announced with the World Economic Forum the vaccines campaign. On 24 February 2020 a new company called Moderna announced that its experimental mRNA vaccine was ready for human testing. On 28 February 2020 the WHO vaccination campaign was announced by Tedros who said that more than 20 vaccines were being developed globally.
The Government of India did not demand to know from WHO on what basis a worldwide public health emergency had been declared, and did not demand to know how experimental vaccines had already been prepared for a virus that wsa still called “novel”. Instead, three weeks later India’s national ‘lock down’ was imposed.
Concerning the two main props of the ‘epidemic’:
A massive expert review was published on 20 April 2021 assessing reports on 65 studies showing the medical harms of face masks. The key findings: the concentration of oxygen in the air under the masks was significantly lower (minus 12.4 in volume %) compared to oxygen in a room. At the same time, the health-critical value of carbon dioxide concentration in the air under the masks increased by a factor of 30 (!!) compared to normal room air was measure. The study said that this caused “a statistically significant increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) blood content in mask wearers”. In addition to the increase in the wearer’s blood carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, another consequence of masks that has been proven is a significant drop in blood oxygen saturation. This has the effect of an accompanying increase in heart rate as well as an increase in respiratory rate have been proven.
On the PCR test, the Public Health Agency of Sweden in April 2021 said: The PCR technology used in tests to detect viruses cannot distinguish between viruses capable of infecting cells and viruses that have been rendered harmless by the immune system, and therefore these tests cannot be used to determine whether someone is infectious or not. RNA from viruses can often be detected for weeks (sometimes months) after infection but does not mean that a person is still infectious. The recommended criteria for assessing freedom from infection are therefore based on stable clinical improvement with freedom from fever for at least two days and at least seven days since the onset of symptoms. For those with more pronounced symptoms, at least 14 days since onset of illness and for the sickest, individual assessment by the treating physician.
Neither the Indian central government nor state governments have reviewed or reconsidered any of their ‘epidemic’ measures for what they have done, since March 2020, and what they continue to do to the largest section of the population, that is children and teenagers.
How large is this section? The estimates (UN Population division) for 2020 are: age 0-4 years, 116 million; age 5-9 years, 117 million; age 10-14 years, 126 million, age 15-18 years, 126 million. The 18 and under population is about 485 million. They have been kept out of school and college for 13 months, in cities they have been kept largely away from their friends and peers for 13 months, in cities they have been kept away from extended family for 13 months, they have not pursued sports nor outdoor play, no hobbies and no cultural activities, they have been “taught” and “given lessons” through computer screens, and for those in cities and towns, have been confined in apartments often together with parents who are “working from home”. Their psychological condition is unknown. The effects of the non-stop, around the clock barrage of fear-mongering by the television channels on their young psyches is unknown and unremarked. This is a section nearly equivalent to the entire population of the European Union. They have been seriously mentally scarred for 13 months, with cognitive and learning abilities impaired in way that are neither inquired into nor understood.
Teachers and education authorities have been caught up in the hysteria of fear promoted around covid19 and many have lost all sense of proportion. Where schools were opened, the wearing of face masks by children and teenagers was made mandatory. This is completelty false and is an abomination. Children, teenagers and the youth have a susceptibility to Sars-CoV-2 that is so negligible as to be nearly statistically zero. No school or college can adopt such flawed government or local authority “guidance” on face coverings without failing properly to consider the impact on the children and staff (which they are obliged to do).
Where did the so-called “second wave” come from, especially when until January 2021 the central government was advertising that India’s recovery rate was >96%?
India’s urban population is generally more unhealthy thaan its rural population. Those who live in the major metros are generally more unhealthy than thosw who live in smaller towns. In regions like Delhi-NCR and a large part of the urbanised middle Gangetic belt, the quality of air is very poor. The Delhi-NCR region has had the worst air quality in the world (!) for the last three years running (!). The lungs and respiratory tracts of these urban residents is anyway weak because of cumulative exposure to airborne pollutants, year after year. Then they have been ‘locked down’ and denied what small exercise they could normally have. They have been ordered to cover their nose and mouth when outside, in temperatures of more than 40C or humidity of more than 80% (in Mumbai and Chennai). They have been ordered to cover their nose and mouth when it rains and wear wet cloth right next to their nasal passage. Damp cloth breeds bacteria which travel directly into the upper respiratory tract. A number of the 18 symptoms of covid19 are common to India’s existing respiratory diseases. Not a single agency of the central government and no state government has till date studied the effects of mask wearing on the health condition of an average urban resident.
These are the people who have been injected with vaccines under the “vaccination drive” or the macabrely named “tika utsav“. They have not been told what effect these injected substances will have on their existing ailments, they have signed no free, prior and well informed consent document to say they have been properly explained the risks and consequences, general and specific, of the injections and agree to be injected. They have not been informed about a process of lodging complaints about possible post-injection side effects nor about a process of compensation should they suffer a lasting debilitating effect, and they have not been informed about either a change in the status of their health insured lives nor compensation for serious vaccine-related injury or death.
These vaccination injections have immediately – because that is the intention of the western medical rationale for vaccine – lowered their natural immunity. Those who are healthier and fitter have had few or no effects. Others have taken ill, some seriously ill. The effect of a rapidly lowered natural immunity on those who are already unhealthy in cities, and whose respiratory tracts are already weakened, becomes clear. When they seek institutional medical help, the allopathic doctors, to allay fever, chills, cough, tiredness and shortness of breath are prescribed an armada of antiviral and antibiotic drugs. Some of these substances that can have fatal side effects even when taken alone. I know of several people who become even more ill with 500mg a day of such drugs but have been prescribed more than 4,000mg a day! Those who do not survive are counted statistically as “covid19 death” attributed to Sars-CoV-2 but not attributed to overwhelming reactions to toxic drugs, that is, iatrogenic deaths (whcih for years has been one of the largest causes fo death in USA).
Whereas in 2020 it was said by government propaganda and the media that “covid19 deaths” are “any death within 28 days of a ‘positive’ PCR test result”, in 2021 deaths one or more days after vaccine injections are counted as “with pre-existing conditions”.
The central and state governments, the PMO, the Ministry of Health, the Home Ministry, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Ministry of Science and Technology, have all repeated over and over again that vaccination is the only exit from the ‘epidemic’. India’s traditional medicinal systems – ayurveda, yoga, unani tibb, siddha, homoeopathy, sowa-rigpa, naturopathy and tribal and indigenous medicinal practices – have been all but outlawed. The wholly illegal “vaccination drive” of the government and supported by the BJP and all political parties (whether opposition or allies) is said to be “protective”.
This justification is false and deceiving. It is very well known in international medicinal science circles that on 1 December 2016, a verdict was given by the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court in Germany and upheld by the German Federal Court of Justice. This is called the measles virus trial verdict. It said that the first publication about the measles virus, the publication of the Nobel Prize winner, John Franklin Enders and his colleagues in 1954, does not constitute proof of the alleged existence of the suspected “measles virus”.
What makes this so important is that this publication is the sole and exclusive basis of all other approximately 30,000 “scientific” publications on the subject of “measles virus”, “infection” of measles and “protective vaccination” against measles. All statements thereafter on the “measles virus”, the transmissibility of measles and measles vaccination are based exclusively and only on this publication. Since the 2016 verdict it is now case law that this 1954 publication does not contain any evidence for the alleged existence of the assumed measles virus, hence it is clear that all 30,000 specialist publications on these topics are without foundation.
This is exactly the situation with the so-called simulated ‘modelling’ of the likely spread and toll of the ‘pandemic’ that was done by Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College, London, and Christian Drosten of Berlin Charité – the WHO backed both, and the government of India slavishly adopted the fake projections of these ‘models’.
Before December 2019, “lock down” did not exist in the world’s recorded practice and history of public health for respiratory and other disease outbreaks and epidemics. “Lock down” was invented by the Chinese Communist Party and propagated around the world by the WHO and its partners and sponsors, including its primary funders the Gates Foundation and GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, which is made up of the pharma and medical technology MNCs). All associated measures – mass testing, social distancing, contact tracing, health surveillance, and vaccination – for the ‘epidemic’ have come from the same source, the CCP.
India’s so-called ‘right wing’ media and groups – all supporters of the BJP – were very active in 2020 to call Sars-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus”. None called ‘lock down’ the CCP ‘lock down’ and none has till date. India’s record of public health has no instance of such a measure, ever, for any disease outbreak. The BJP government implemented, from 25 March 2020, a Chinese communist measure of social control. There has been not a single ruling party or opposition party Member of Parliament who asked why, neither during the September 2020 Lok Sabha session nor the February 2021 session. MPs asked about the availability of vaccines and medicines, but not about a communist measure that has been used at least once following the national ‘lock down’, and in several places more than once, by state governments.
It is the CPIM that is demanding “vaccination for all”. It is the same with the Democrat Party of the USA and its enormous left-liberal network of foundations, media and celebrities. It is the INC that is doing the same. It is the TV channels and newspapers that belong to the major media houses that are doing the same. And it is the BJP that is using all the muscle of the state to show that its implementation of a totalitarian agenda is better than what even China has done.
See for example: “India is the fastest country in the world to administer 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine. India achieved the feat in 85 days whereas USA took 89 days and China reached the milestone in 102 days. The Prime Minister Office tweeted: ‘Strengthening the efforts to ensure a healthy and COVID-19 free India’.”
And: ” ‘Tika Utsav’ is beginning of second major war against Corona: PM
Make targets at personal, social and administration level for ‘Tika Utsav’ and make effort to achieve them: PM”
Why the forcing through punitive measures of not breathing naturally (masks) and denying the sun (stay indoors)?
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika (2, 3) says: “As long as the vayu (prana) remains in the body there is life, Death occurs when the vayu leaves the body, therefore retain the vayu“
The face mask/covering will not let you retain the vayu.
‘Prana and Pranayama’, by the Bihar School of Yoga, 2009, says:
“Inside a closed room in a modern city there may be less than 50 negative ions per square foot and in the mountains there are about 5,000. It is now an established scientific fact that depletion of negative ions leads to discomfort, enervation, lassitude and some degree of mental and physical inefficiency. Negative ions are therapeutic partly because they kill germs. In human beings, they act on the capacity to absorb oxygen, accelerating the blood’s delivery of oxygen to cells and tissues. Negative ions are not prana, but when one inhales them the level of prana in the body increases. In this context it is interesting that negative ions work only so long as they are being inhaled. It has also been observed that the ability to assimilate negative ions goes up during yogic practices such as pranayama.”
Recall the 12 mantras that accompany the 12 positions taken during suryanamaskar:
Om mitraya namaha, Om ravaye namaha, Om suryaya namaha, Om bhanave namaha, Om khagaya namaha, Om pushne namaha, Om hiranya garbhaya namaha, Om marichaye namaha, Om adityaya namaha, Om savitre namaha, Om arkaya namaha, Om bhaskaraya namaha
These are the life-giving and life-affirming bhutas. We cannot be separate from them. India and Indians cannot be ruled by a monstrous totalitarian-communist system such as we have seen being formed in India since 24 March 2020.
India and the illiteracy of fear
The great dislocation of public and family life began in India in February 2020. Events since late February 2021 show that the Indian public now urgently needs to better understand what is called the ‘epidemic’. Here are some points to consider. From mid-March 2021 several states began to report a rise in ‘covid19 cases’. This has led to an sharp increase in the fearfulness of the general public about what is claimed to be a ‘second wave’. Grossly irresponsible reporting by the print and broadcast media – they have done nothing else since February 2020 – has fanned the panic-hysteria.
During the last three weeks we have seen state governments and also city municipal corporations take shocking decisions that have no basis whatsoever in public health and are completely contrary to India’s record (until 2019) in managing disease outbreaks. The municipal corporations of Indore, Pune and Surat issued orders to private companies to have their employees tested with the PCR ‘test’ every week or twice a week, or to have their employees vaccinated, else they would face fines. Centres of education – the IITs and IIMs – have hardly been wiser, with IIT Gandhinagar coercing some 900 students into having themselves vaccinated.
The migrant labour population of Mumbai began taking trains to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and elsewhere from late March, fearing a repeat of the disastrous ‘lock down’ imposition of March 2020. The state government of Maharashtra did nothing then and has done nothing since to reassure labour in the city that their work and livelihoods will not be affected. On the contrary, the state government has for more than a fortnight been threatening a state-wide ‘lock down’. That this has happened in Mumbai and in Maharashtra is not happenstance. Mumbai is the financial centre of India. What affects its markets affects the country. Handicapping Mumbai and several other cities all over India has exactly the same effect as economic warfare. Wholly distracted by the round-the-clock fear-mongering of the media and municipal officials, Hindu samaj has failed to see and understand this.
In several states, there have been numerous confrontations between small businesses, neighbourhood and ward shops, single propreitor services, vendors, autorickshaw drivers etc and police and/or municipal officials who try to forcibly close down their business, which is their only livelihood. Several times these have become violent and at least once (Indore) these confrontations have resulted in death. The crippling of the economy at the levels in which most of the working and productive population is active, can be seen in every single city, town and district.
Since June 2020, when ‘unlock regulations’ were issued, the economic and livelihood effects of the ‘lock down’ have been blamed, gratuitously, on the ‘epidemic’/’pandemic’. This is false but has been repeated since many times by the central government through statements and the Ministry of Information’s Press Information Bureau, and repeated many hundreds of times by a press and broadcast media. The effects are entirely because of ‘lock down’ and allied restrictions, not because of a purported ‘epidemic’.
The completely illegal “vaccination drive” promoted by the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Health, the Indian Council of Medical Research, together with health departments in the states began in late January 2021 using unassessed, untested, dangerous, experimental substances falsely called ‘vaccine’ (this term has a pharmacological definition, which must include testing, with test terms of reference being in public domain, and test data being ditto, and testing for all possible recipient ages and conditions). Central and state governments ran and still run mass vaccination drives in complete violation of every international and inter-governmental bioethics and health convention signed by India.
The vaccination of several million people has been carried out and continues to be in complete violation of the requirement that likely recipient of a vaccine can only have agreed to be vaccinated after free, prior and informed consent. In no government hospital nor private hospital or clinic anywhere in India has this been assured let alone fulfilled. The “vaccination drive” – or the BJP’s “tika utsav” ‘(vaccination festival!) in a distasteful and grotesque simulation of election sloganeering (which is very obviously the BJP’s only obsession) – has metamorphosed so that the outlet from the ‘epidemic’ is a ‘vaccine’, except it isn’t. In a country that says it belongs to a civilisation that has a profoundly well-developed view and practice of all dimensions of life and living, temporal and spiritual, how has it come to be that there a ‘vaccine’ (an alien concept to our system of medicine in every way) is the only remedy. It is a nostrum if ever there was one.
State government administrations – whether or not there has been election campaigning – have since March 2021 issued orders that restrict normal public movement and gathering such as curfew, the imposition of Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code citing the provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act, bans on religious gatherings and observances, etc. None of these are supported by any public health evidence whether from India or anywhere in the world. These are measures of social control, they have nothing whatsoever to do with an alleged ‘epidemic’. They amount to the partial suspension of our Constitutional rights and civil liberties. The ‘right wing’ dislikes the term ‘civil liberties’, associating it with movements that are against the state, but the ‘right wing’ does not know that social, cultural, religious and customary rights and freedoms are associated with and part of civil liberties, and that what the centre and state governments have done since March 2020 and continue to do is partially or wholly suspend Hindu social, cultural, religious and customary rights and freedoms.
The absurd measures introduced together with the 25 March 2020 ‘lock down’ imposition – face masks and coverings, ‘social distance’, PCR ‘test’, isolation and quarantine – have no basis in the public health management of any respiratory disease outbreak and have, from May 2020, been shown to be false and debunked by the foremost authorities in medical science the world over (and more particularly from Europe, whose section of medical professionals with integrity is sizeable).
Not once since March 2020 has the ICMR, for example, proven how a face mask/covering halts any particle of the size of a virus (when the fabric gap of the N95 mask is >100 times the size of a virus particle), nor has it or any Indian government-sponsored or private medical research organisation investigated the directly hazardous effect on the respiratory and pulmonary system of the individual by binding a mask over one’s nose and mouth in India’s warm and humid climate. This officially sanctioned assault on the respiratory health of the Indian citizen – enforced by lathi-swinging policement and by municipal fines – is directly responsible for the health degradation of tens of millions of Indians (but especially children, teenagers, the elderly, the infirm), who were by February 2021 far more susceptible to respiratory ailments than they were a year earlier.
The mainstream English and non-English press and broadcast media have run a 24×7 campaign of fanning fear hysteria synchronous with what is seen in Europe and elsewhere. The Indian press and broadcast media has completely blacked out the many, repeated, demonstrations and protest marches in a large number of European cities which began in December – after a majority of European country goverments “cancelled” Christmas – and which continue till today. The only medical sources India’s media quote are allopathic doctors, the Indian Medical Association (which with well over 4 million members is an Asian fortress for the global pharmaceutical transnationals), and the leadership of the ICMR, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and India’s largest private hospitals.
In the land of its birth, ayurveda has been practically outlawed. Several important surveys and cases involving several hundred respiratory patients each with successful outcomes through ayurveda and a combination of ayurveda and yoga, remain ignored by Indian media, but also by the Ministry of Health, the ICMR, the PMO and state health departments. Ayurveda vaidyas carry out their treatment clandestinely through social media. Several ayurveda treatment centres have been forced to have their vaidyas and staff submit to vaccination in order to continue working.
These points, which only signal but in no way properly describe the calamitous turn taken by Indian society during the past three months, should be treated as a great red warning beacon flashing. The Indian public has been swept up by the crazed fear-hysteria which has altogether replaced any reasoning view and any reasoned method. Acute schizophrenia of the central government has been the norm since February 2020, but never more so that the January-February 2021 period, when in January it was still boasting a “recovery rate” of more than 96%, but then went on to push with the full force of all state machinery “the world’s largest vaccination drive”. A “drive” for what, when very obviously all those who have recovered from the set of symptoms called covid19 have done so by using cheap, safe and effective ayurveda, or siddha, or unani, or homoeopthy, or naturopthy, or allopathy (in the form of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or even more ubiquitous drugs used for influenzas)?
There has been not a trace – from the Indian public, let alone the central and state governments and their utterly corrupted agencies – of a traditional medicinal knowledge view about what was presented, by the WHO in early March 2020, as a ‘pandemic’. The precept of proper examination before treatment has been entirely thrown out. It needed aptopasadesa (instruction), pratyaksha (direct observation), anumana (inference) to be able to decide line of treament for which ‘dosas‘, ‘desa‘ (habitat), ‘kala‘ (period), ‘bala‘ (strength), ‘sarira‘ (body), ‘ahara‘ (diet) and ‘agni‘ (digestive fire), ‘satmya‘ (suitability), ‘satwa‘ (endurance), ‘prakriti‘ (psychosomatic constitition) and age have to be considered carefully.
Instead, Indians have raced into the technological trap of ‘track and trace’ and vaccine and the completely bogus PCR ‘test’ – a ‘test’ that can find neither an alleged virus, nor infection nor infectiousness but which has been rammed through our pliant public health system monitors to altogether replace even western medicine’s physical diagnosis, let alone the ayurveda vaidya’s lengthy and exacting direct physical diagnosis.
The Indian public has failed ayurveda, eyes wide open but seeing nothing. And that is why vaidyas are being driven underground, which is what happened in the 1860s and 1870s as the British Presidency medical colleges grew and strengthened their hold on medicine in India. Thirteen months after the imposition of ‘lock down’ in India on completely spurious grounds, central and state governments are again bringing in restrictions based only on paralysing fear-hysteria about ‘variant’ and ‘mutant’. Not once have India’s medical researchers mentioned existing natural immunity. Not once in 13 months. The ayurvedic vaidyas have, throughout, but they are deliberately unheard by the PMO, the Ministry of Health, the ICMR, AIIMS, Ministry of Science and Technology, Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology and all state health administrations. Indians should have heard them too, if they were not rushing in all directions to get themselves vaccinated.
In these 13 months, the Indian public has not asked about the effect of the ‘lock down’ and restrictions on mobility on those who have blood disorders but have not had their regular treatments, those with cardiac and pulmonary disorders but who have not had their regular treatments, those with gastrointestinal disorders, those with immune system disorders, those with muscle and tissue disorders, those with neurological disorders, those with psychiatric disorders, those with renal and urinary disorders, those with reproductive disorders. How many deaths has this induced negligence caused? What effect will the vaccines have on those with one or more of these conditions, for whom treatment has been interrupted and sporadic over the last 13 months? No questions, no answers.
Since February 2020 and with greater intensity since late January 2021, all sections of Indian urban and rural society has consumed uncritically the lies, propaganda, deceit and manipulation that is broadcast, around the clock, on televisions and by the same organisations, through their social media channels. There are the broadcasters that the ‘right wing’ have for several years disliked and abused. Yet the pro-‘right wing’ channels broadcast the same fiction, the same scare-mongering, about the ‘epidemic’. What the left-liberal press does, the ‘right wing’ press does, the only difference being that whereas the left-liberal press calls for more ‘lock down’, more testing, more restrictions, the ‘right wing’ press defends the BJP-NDA’s asinine decisions on the ‘epidemic’ to claim that it is being well handled. Neither side has displayed even the slightest professional interest in even providing views other than those given sanction by the global pharma industry, let alone tackle more fundamental questions of medical science.
Nor has the Indian public seen and understood that ‘second wave’ (as fictitious as the ‘first’) is designed to be a hammer blow by the global industrial pharma establishment which since 1860 has caused the world’s traditional, indigenous, tribal and natural medicinal systems to be marginalised or outlawed. Ayurveda is squarely within their target sights. For the medical-global infotech giants, who have collaborated on this nightmare project with the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation, the extinguishing of ayurveda would be a blip on the wider radar screen. That wider screen is the economic gutting of whole sectors of the economies of countries, the bankruptcy of their public and private sectors, followed by the acquisition of mainly public assets at throwaway prices. This is the World Bank and IMF’s structural adjustment speeded up by a large factor – The World Bank has a ‘Covid-19 Emergency Response and Health systems Preparedness Project’ that is to run until December 2024. Now I have given you a clue about how long this ‘epidemic’-‘lock down’-‘vaccine’ circus could run – if not challenged.
The WEF globalists – the Davos set – have had an important role in the setting of India’s ‘development’ agenda for the last 20 years. The contours of the annual Union budget are drafted by the international banksters, pension funds, the Bank for International Settlements, and the India country managers of the multilateral development banks. India’s monetary economists are peons who push and pull the levers as required. In the same way that the ‘top doctors’ of Fortis, Medanta, Apollo, Narayana Health, Escorts, Max, Columbia etc are crammed full of the very latest in western advanced medical terminology which they regurgitate to a wide-eyed and dumbed-down public, the ‘top’ economists and monetary wizards and ‘development’ technocrats are crammed full of the very latest in western advanced finance terminology and the same performance follows.
This is not about an ‘epidemic’. India had better awaken right now.
Farmers’ protest and the shaping of public perception
Rioting and violence took place in New Delhi on 26 January 2021, Republic Day, allegedly by members of the farmers’ groups that have since November 2020 been protesting the three farm acts (‘reforms’) that were passed through Parliament.
My reading of the day’s incidents in Delhi – the destruction of corporation commuter buses by tractors, the videos of the Indian tricolour being dishonoured and a Khalistani flag being hoisted in its place, scores of Delhi police being injured and hurt – points to the beginning of a signal shift concerning India’s perception of ‘farmer’.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha – the umbrella organisation for the protesting farmers’ associations and groups – had for several days earlier said that the intentions of the movement were confronted from the outset by the central government which first stopped them from coming to Delhi, then by defaming the movement, using the Supreme Court to dilute the movement’s objectives.
It had for several days prior to today called for several events leading up to 26 January, such as a people’s ‘Kisan Sansad’ (farmers’ parliament), since the normal winter session of Parliament was cancelled.
The farmers’ organisations have been demanding a full repeal of the three recent agriculture related acts: the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, and the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020. These have been dubbed the ‘APMC Bypass Act’, ‘ECA Amendment’ and ‘Contract Farming Act’ respectively.
The grave dangers to our systems of agriculture posed by these acts – individually, when read together, and when read against the background of legislation and policy over the last 20 years that has favoured the food industry over farmers – has been well written about and discussed in many fora and channels.
An example of the effects of changed perceptions about farmers
The new worry that has today come out of the shadows is that of perception: how the Indian citizen and particularly the middle-class urban citizen, considers the farmer. Until now the tone towards the protesting farmers’ organisations has been either neutral or somewhat supportive. This is so despite consistent efforts by the ruling BJP-NDA and its many forward cells in social media to paint the protesting farmers’ as ‘privileged’ by being beneficiaries of lavish subsidies, users of free electricity who don’t pay income-tax, incited by opposition parties, accompanied by anti-national groups and so on.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha and the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee represent some 130 farmers’ associations and groups that have come together in protest. The chief coordinating organisations are the All India Kisan Sabha and the Centre for Indian Trade Unions, both of which have studied and analysed the causes of agrarian distress in India since the mid-1990s (after liberalisation began in earnest in 1991) and which have consistently mounted campaigns to forestall the corporate take-over of crop cultivation and food distribution in India.
Placed on such a time-line, the protests against the three destructive new ‘reform’ acts of 2020 represent the latest stage of a continuum.
What has however happened is the hijacking of a legitimate protest and its expression by forces about which at this point I know very little, but whose agenda is revealed. The distance between especially India’s middle-class urban citizens and the sources of their food has only widened in recent years. As long as sorted, graded, cleaned and packed raw foodstuffs are available in local markets (or from online marts) little or no thought is given by urban India to farmers.
There is a residual respect (‘jai jawan, jai kisan’ was the slogan coined by Lal Bahadur Shastri, prime minister during 1964-66) that has continued to remain. If this residual respect continues to fuel sympathy for the farmer and his lot, then it also is a potential source of support to farmers’ organisations protesting further ‘reforms’. The previous term of the BJP-NDA, 2014-19, saw the introduction of a number of policy measures (called ‘reforms’) that taken together point to the intent to corporatise cultivation and the movement of harvested crop, to a much greater degree than is currently done.
India’s urban based mainstream media not only is removed from the concerns of the rural population but also is absent the experience to understand the cumulative impacts of nearly 40 years of neo-liberal economics on agriculture and food cultivation.
During the first term of the UPA government (2004-09), farming was seen as unremunerative and a drag on the growth rate of India’s GDP. This is a position held by central government planners and economics advisers that did not change during the two following governments (UPA2 and NDA2), both of which added laws and policy to accelerate the industrialisation of food, and which the current NDA3 government (from 2019) wants to further fast track. Hence the three disastrous ‘reform’ laws of 2020 have predecessors going back more than 15 years.
A commentary published three years ago had stated: “The government also expanded the definition of industrial corridors to include land up to one kilometre on either side of designated roads or railway lines serving these corridors. Organisations such as the AIKS had called for provisions to ensure acquisition of land to the extent required and legal safeguards for landowners. However, the rights of landowners and those dependent on land and community rights were all diluted and the basic tenets of transparency were ignored. Food security safeguards were done away with, and even fertile multi-cropped land and productive rain-fed land could be acquired without any restriction.”
Yet there is a series of hurdles that have come in the way of national governments since 2004 in their bid to justify and ram through farm and agriculture ‘reforms’. The hurdles are the conditions, created by poor policy and government’s subservience to the demands of Indian and foreign agritech industry, which from the early 1990s came to be called ‘agrarian distress’, which through the 2000s intensified as the national crisis of farmers’ suicides, and which during the last decade has taken the shape of an ‘unperforming’ sector that is seen as an albatross around the neck of an Indian economy but which is claimed to have great promise.
Part of CITU’s statement on the 26 January 2020 incidents.
The responsibility for the human and community consequences of India’s agrarian distress is the state’s, but none of the central governments from 2004 onwards has acknowledged it has such a responsibility.
Further ‘reform’ has been given a distinct shape and plan over the last four years. It includes encouraging (or coercing) the cultivators and agricultural labour to migrate with family to towns and cities, leaving behind their lands. It includes dramatically increasing corporate denominated farming (under contract) and corporate controlled collection, sorting and movement of food, instead of by farmers’ cooperatives and consumers’ cooperatives. It includes the plan to introduce genetically modified seed and crop. It includes the full conversion of human labour on the farm to automation (using GPS, internet-of-things, 5G, drones, real time remote sensing and robotics).
To begin to do this, the residual respect and fraying connect between urban consumer and farmer must be severed. This severance began on 26 January 2021, with the farmers’ protest movement being hijacked. The casualty will be the citizen’s regard for and trust in the farmer. That casualty will be exploited to offer to the citizen the ‘reliability’ of food that promises to be produced in an ‘agricultural reform’ regime, in which the farmer will have no place.
It is unclear to me as of now who the prime actors are of this hijacking and where the state’s interest is. India’s commentariat has little knowledge of the 30-year-old saga of agrarian distress. Its mainstream media has done everything possible to aid the demonising of the protest and has given no airtime worth the name to farmer representatives and coordinators. Both commentariat and media appear ignorant of the greater arena, that of the gradual outlawing of the hereditary farmer, and his systems of cultivation and crop management, from farming.
Shaktichakra, the wheel of energies 