Sunday Posts

I am sparred into writing this post by a rather awkward exchange in a recent business meeting. I was there to discuss a project, but my client asked - before we discussed anything else - which side of the political divide I belong. The trigger was the emails that he regularly receives from a diaspora think-tank, where I serve as a trustee and which occasionally sends out emails in my name. Desperate to move on, I mumbled that in politics, I sit on the fence, though the fence is getting increasingly narrower. But I knew it was an inadequate answer: Fence-sitting is a poor excuse at a time of all-out war of ideologies! With reflection, however, I realise that this is indeed the right description of my political persuasion, though fence was a poor metaphor. This is because 'sitting on the fence' implies a lack of commitment, an opportunistic pandering of both sides. But that's not what I do: I am very much committed to my politics, though I may not buy into the labels of right...

India prides itself of its diversity, but lately it has decided to go monochrome. Suddenly, India's model is China, though no one would admit of it. Harmony, after all, is good for economic growth, goes the thesis. Therefore, Indian institutions - and the states - are being harmonised in the quest of economic growth. The protests, the cacophony of opinion, unmissable characteristics of Indian democracy for its first seventy years, are increasingly branded 'un-Indian' and pushed to the margins.  I am aware that my timing for bringing this up would immediately position this as a reaction of the farmer's protests and the Indian government's indifferent handling of the same. And, it is indeed something worth talking about : The lack of consultation and due process, the silence of most of the mainstream media, the underhand techniques used to undermine the credibility and even the Supreme Court's actions, indicate a total absence of space for alternative views. India...

Autocrats are on the rise. Many societies, presumed to be democratic, are under the sway of autocratic leaders. Others, who had been under autocratic rule for some time and recently disposed off the long-reigning autocrat, have gone back and got a new one.  Commentators, who initially saw such a political turn as aberrations and predicted democratic tendencies to triumph eventually, are now recalibrating their outlook. Books with titles such as 'death of democracy' are out now and those calling democracy a disorder seem to be around the corner. Protests, which are everywhere, are producing unintended consequences: Few years of battling Brexit have produced in Britain the most authoritarian right-wing government one ever imagined there would be; the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States may just help Donald Trump to scrape through again. The commentaries on how this came about focus on the usual suspects: The great recession of 2008, inequality, effects of globalisati...

There are times in politics when being in opposition isn't a bad thing. With Brexit tearing the Tory Party, and with it, politics as usual, apart, Jeremy Corbyn feels lucky to be sitting on the opposite side, watching the hapless Prime Minister trying to achieve the unachievable. So far, he has played the usual political game of obfuscation, never really taking a stance, letting the Tory Brexit fall apart on its own. Self-consciously, he stood up every day at the PMQs and got through it never really challenging the Prime Minister on the subject, almost making the point that her incompetence is self-evident.  It was a clever stance. It is hard to do what-ifs, but one can possibly argue that Corbyn's lack of stance unleashed the Tory civil war in full view. The political calculation of the Labour front bench was perhaps to enjoy a period of calm, after all the Blairite sniping of the past couple of years, and keep everyone guessing. Without this, Jacob Rees Mogg...

It is always poor people's fault. The world seems precarious at this moment. The neo-liberal activism since the 80s have destroyed the foundations of the Liberal system, its system of nations sustained by the welfare state: The neat structures of the world order seem to be withering away.  A Russian president openly talks about the possibilities of nuclear war; the leaders of Britain and Germany precariously hang on to power in the face of right-wing revolutions while the prospect of a left revolution looks real in France; in the United States, private interests of the President trump his public duties. At the turn of 2018, chaos reigns. If the newspapers have to be believed, it is all due to immigrants or poor people. In fact, it is immigrants AND poor people: Globalization unleashed people movements - from South and Central America to North America, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe and from East to West Europe - and this has made the poor people i...

When facts change..  I enthused when Labour Party chose Jeremy Corbyn as its leader. It promised an escape from politics as usual, a break from the smooth-talking career politicians who came to dominate the Labour Party. It heralded an age of authenticity, which was missing from the politics of the left. A break, finally, I thought, from the weather-cock politics of the Blair-Cameron era! Indeed, it was too good to be true, and I did not trust the Labour Party to change. A Blairite revolt was on the card, and it came almost immediately as posh politicians refused to serve in the shadow cabinet. Almost unbelievably, though, it never stopped - resurfaced again and again, whether in eagerness to bomb Syria or to overturn the members' mandate on the pretext of Brexit - and continued to demonstrate how Labour Party has become an apparatus without a purpose. While the career politicians ploughed on with the fantasist argument that someone else, who the Labour members won't ...

There are many possible ways of looking at history. One could be a pessimist or an optimist, see progress or decline, and believe in either preserving the past or reinventing the future.  Indeed, the facts or truth, if there is such a thing, should perhaps be free of such ways of seeing, but then facts, without such interpretation, however subjective, may have no intrinsic value. History is most useful in shaping our ideas of the present and of our future, through these narratives or processes of making sense. And, the way we look at history makes all the difference. And, besides, one could see progress either as a straight-line and a continuous story, or one of struggle - two steps forward and one step back - to make life better. And, which one you see depends on what side you want to be on: One could see progress as providence and destiny, or a gift from the great and the gifted, or a few hard-earned accomplishments through accidents and agitation. These are reall...

As Bernie Sanders catches up with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump raves and rages, and Jeremy Corbyn holds on - even if rather precariously - at the British Labour Party, we can reasonably think that an era of anti-Politics has began. The slick politics of the mid-90s, when Centrism took hold, but all it meant was a breed of cynical politicians who stood for nothing but the craving of power (brilliantly represented in Frank Underwood in the US version of The House of Cards), seems all but gone. Ideology, of sensible and insensible variety, is back in the mix, all over again. This is counter-intuitive. As we entered the Age of the Millennial, we were expecting a sweeping victory for those smooth-tongued Centrists, who wanted to hold the centre-stage, but not any ground in anything else. The millennial would be, we expected, products of a 'liquid' modernity,  for whom the pursuit of pleasure, rather than any fixed commitment, is all pervasive. But their surging support for al...

I predicted Jeremy Corbyn to be a different type of politician, and he indeed turned out to be one. He stood steadfast, somewhat in defiance of public opinion, for what he believed in. His was a lonely stance though, as the career politicians that surround him squirmed and fretted to do what they do best - power play without regard to what their constituents want. So, in a little over two months after his landslide victory in Leadership elections, we see headlines of MPs revolting against his leadership. He may survive another week, may be another month - but it seems that the knives are already out for him. I voted Labour in the last election, but did not sign up for its membership. I must admit I was tempted and spent time filling out a membership form, just after Mr Corbyn was elected (and a few times before that, as I wanted to vote for him) but decided against it - as, I wrote on this blog, I could not trust Labour to follow through. It is a party of Blairite career politici...

Jeremy Corbyn has won the Labour Leadership election with 59% of the votes. After the darkness of May, suddenly it is the season of hope again in Britain. Many people are calling it the biggest upset in British political life in many years, and they are right. No one was expecting a 66-year old, steadfastly socialist outsider to win the leadership of a party, which has all but lost its ideological roots and connection with people they represent, under the years of careerist New Labour. It has become, over the last twenty years, a party of sartorial ambitions, smooth accents and middle class obsessions, a party which is sustained by the promise of cheaper mortgages than the hope of social equality. At every turn, under the excuse of being Centrist, the Labour Party became a pale shadow of the Thatcherite conservatives, offering no alternative in the election of 2015, where a coalition legacy of the middle-of-the-road policies won the day for the Conservatives who took the credits ...

There are many remarkable things about the Indian Elections 2014. Many in the country believe that this will mark an end and a beginning: Which end and which beginning are being contested, though. It may be the end of the unipolar politics of Congress versus the others, but then only to be replaced by Hindu Nationalists versus the other politics. It may be the decline of India's most prominent political family, the Gandhis, which is drawing most attention: The family scion, Rahul Gandhi, has been comprehensively rejected by the Indian voters. This may also be the end of the Indian Republic as conceived by its founding fathers, and what comes next can be reasonably called the Second Republic.  That may mark a new beginning. Indian Second Republic may not have any of the indecisiveness of the French. Duke of Wellington mused during the Second Republic "France needs a Napoleon and I can't yet see him", but India has its Bonaparte now.  This election marks a firm ch...

Global Citizenship has a problem. Despite being a suitably high sounding thing often appearing in management literature, it has no apparent meaning: In an age citizenship has come to mean where one pays one's taxes, Global Citizenship is an empty term to be used as a feel-good, like Rotary membership in some countries.  However, global citizenship is more than just that: There are people who believe Global Citizenship is possible. They live in a neoliberal bubble that the world is going through a transformation - being homogenous, using Internet, drinking Coke, speaking English and living the local version of the American dream and even watching MTV - and therefore, whatever is the politics, we are all global now by our consumption. 'Democratisation of Commerce' is what underlies global citizenship: Global citizens don't vote, they buy. But, if Global Citizenship is to be defined this way, the concept is divisive and hierarchical, rather than being integrative and democ...

There are two ways of looking at globalisation.  One is an imperial way, which is more common: This is about some country or the other ruling the world, one culture or the other being in ascendency, one way of doing things being better than another way of doing things. This is indeed the predominant way of thinking about globalisation, which we can call globalisation-as-dominance. This is the way most people think, even the ardent globalisers. True, they are slightly embarrassed by their own views, and therefore, they would usually highlight the impermanence of such dominance, pointing to the ongoing dynamics of the global equation, but accept dominance nonetheless as the way of things, as it always have been. But, then, there is another way of looking at things. This, perhaps less articulated, view of globalisation is less about dominance and more about connection. This is based on a more optimistic view of human beings, perhaps something which we lost touch with. This v...

I maintained social media silence on the playing out of the American election, despite the alluring narrative of this being Wall Street versus the world. Despite, admittedly, there was much at stake: If Wall Street could impose its views of the world on America, the World would have been in line, with the guns and bombs and enough American young men still ready to sacrifice their lives without really knowing why. While I got up early enough on Wednesday to catch Obama give his victory speech, and exclaimed on Facebook that he seemed to have got back his oratory just in time, this was very different from what I did four years back: Sat through a night of vote counting, in a hotel in the middle of a business trip, just because I hoped that this President would be different. In 2008, in a world of continuous war, terrorist attacks and recession, I needed the hope as badly as anything: I surrendered my sense to the blind belief that if someone looked different, he must be. Obama turne...

Francois Hollande may just win the French presidency on 6th May, and break the habit of the Centre-Left of losing elections. In fact, one could argue that the Centre-Left parties, across the developed world, can offer an useful alternative perspective to pandering of bankers that the Right wing Neo-liberal incumbents seem to limit their imagination to. Their promises always seem to be what Gandhi described as, in an altogether different context, 'a postdated cheque on a failed bank': Often, this metaphor seems literal. Views of Centre-Left, men like Mr Hollande, do indeed sound very different, and therefore, promising. However, I am waking up not just to the news of Mr Hollande's first round victory, but also the rather expected but still disappointing surge of the Far Right, in the figure of Marine Le Pen, in the French election. She indeed managed to come third, with 18% or so of votes, a greater proportion of votes than her father ever won. Indeed, she couldn't ...

I wrote a note on Kolkata, the city I come from and would always belong to, in July 2010. Since then, the post attracted many visitors and comments, mostly critical, as most people, including those from Kolkata, couldn't see any future for the city. My current effort, some 18 months down the line, is also prompted by a recent article in The Economist, The City That Got Left Behind , which echo the pessimism somewhat.  I, at least emotionally, disagree to all the pessimism: After all Kolkata is home and I live in the hope of an eventual return. Indeed, some change has happened since I wrote my earlier post: The geriatric Leftist government that ruled the state for more than 30 years was summarily dispatched,  and was replaced by a lumpen-capitalist populist government. Kolkata looked without a future with the clueless leftists at the helm; it now looks without hope. However, apart from bad governance, there is no reason why Kolkata had to be poor and hopeless. It sits ...

The economic crisis, that we lived with for the last few years, is finally changing the intellectual landscape: After years of conformity, radicalism is again back in fashion. It is no longer daft not to be at the centre, no longer funny to believe in some sort of world's end theorem - grand narratives are back in fashion. Is this a neo -modern turn then, in our history? The post-modern thinking, the grand narrative that established the absence of grand narratives, robbed us of beliefs to live for. The fragmentation of working class - every man as an island bounded by mortgage - was complemented by a theory of doing so. The pursuit of happiness, the grand narrative that it is possible to be happy by winning a lottery ticket, took over the mantle of the struggle for rights that the earlier generations waged. Indeed, there was nothing to fight for. The shopping malls were there, the bewildering choice of objects as a proof of existence of happiness: The TV laid out the perfect life a...