"Es ist schwindelerregend"

-"It is dizzying", Lenin right after the Bolshevik takeover.

The UP elections are nearing their completion. Isn't it strange that elections are becoming long drawn out processes rather than short events? Stretched to the comical extreme, one can imagine when elections would turn out to be a 6 months affair or even year long tamasha. But that is beside the point. Every seasoned observer of UP agree on one basic thing: that it is undergoing tremendous social churning where the various caste components are trying to configure and reconfigure themselves in alliances and formations to seek social and political power. This extremely fluid and dynamic situation started with the decay of the 'massive mandate' of Rajiv in late 80s. The double whammy of Mandal and Mandir accentuated this process. Mandir originally was a vector directly counteracting the Mandal vector, the collision did create some internal schisms inside the Mandir array. But later on Mandir's returns started to diminish and as of now it is deprived of a major portion of its potency in state elections at least. That leaves the Mandal factor in the arena.

UP is a microcosm of India in terms of the social structure, though the word micro is ironic in UP's context because of its geographical size, population and political importance. It can also be said that nowhere the differences and attitudes among the social groups are as stark and as accentuated. In early 90s Kanshi Ram in an interview to Cho.Ramaswamy told that UP is the head of the Snake that is Brahminism. The best strategy would be to cut off the head first. With that purpose, he plunged headlong into UP, forfeiting his limited successes in Punjab, Delhi and elsewhere. The BSP strategy later finetuned and adjusted by Mayawati is to sell the idea of political power to dalits and mobilise them as committed voters and combine anybody who wishes to join this project accepting the dalit leadership. During the hey deys of Mandir, BJP had a firm grip over UP with support from overwhelming numbers of upper castes, a smatter of OBCs and benefited from the fragmentation in its opposition. This made the OBCs formations who were helpless on the face of the BJP onslaught to link up with BSP in 93-94. The Mandal logic seemed to provide the ideological ballast to the alliance. However on the ground level deep suspicions of one another's motives and counteracting forces did not let the alliance to live long. The main reason I believe was the OBC formation's wrong assumption that the BSP would be content to play a supporting role in the Mandal revolution. However the BSP would have none of it and it formed expedient alliances with Congress and even with BJP later.

If we do some fuzzy math one end of the spectrum we have BJP that relies on Brahmins + Thakurs + Vaishyas + non-dominant OBC castes + few dalits. And then we have the OBC behemoth of Yadav + Kurmi + some Jats and Thakurs + landed Muslims. We have the BSP 's dalits + some OBCs + some brahmins. Finally we have the pariah, the Congress party which mops the remains left over by these formations. The pertinent question is how far the traditional Brahmin and Kayasth groups would be accomodative(ed) in the BSP agenda. If BJP engages in a post-poll alliance with BSP, then its Thakur vote would evaporate and solidify into Mulayam's kitty. On the other hand if BJP joins hands with SP, then the combo of 2 prima donnas will not last even months. I would not put too much money on that. It would not make sense, near term or long term. I can see them co-operating on specific agendas in the Center against Congress, but a direct alliance is highly unlikely. How about BSP + Congress alliance, a fervent wish of some Central Congress leadership ? If the seats that Congress can get closer to catapult Mayawati over 200+, it will materialise. Otherwise BSP would prefer to dine with the BJP than Congress.

People who observe BSP say that it is devoid of any principles and its electoral strategy seems inconsistent. They however miss the fundamental nature of this movement. BSP has made a strategic choice to capture politcal power with a dalit core at the head of the pyramid; whoever wishes to join the bandwagon may do so. It puts a premium on capturing political power over anything else and then using the administrative power to implement its agenda.Thats why we see Mayawati remaining near silent on the quota issue. Once Kanshi Ram said, he is not interested in fighting for quota. His aim was to capture power and then reward reservation to the savarnas according to their meager numbers in the population. Now going back to the caste equations and the rearrangement of the variables, the interesting phenomenon in this round seems to be BSP's major foray into courting Brahmin votes. The precursor to this arrangement was the 96 alliance between Congress and BSP and further post-poll arrangements with BJP. The fact that these experiments failed has not made the BSP give up on the project. But it also depends as how one defines failure? In this context does it mean a durable and stable power sharing arrangement? If so one can say it was a failure. But BSP is a lot smarter than that. Their purpose is to bring down the edifice of the savarna power structures in this long drawn out process. All these experiments provided them a wonderful opportunity to learn lessons in how these groups can be accommodated in a dalit centric power structure.

All of this brings me back an essential paradox. The snake analogy of Kanshi Ram was also used by his hero Mr. EV Ramasamy Naicker. His disciples still talk about the snake of Brahminism. The EVR revolution successfully eliminated the Brahmins out of TN power structure, but retained the facets of 'brahminism'. The personalities have changed (even this is arguable) but the attitudes have not changed towards dalits in the South. We see that the Thirumavalavans and Krishnaswamys beg for single digit seats before Poes Garden and Gopalapuram Towers. If BSP succeeds in its long term project in UP, it would have succeeded in breaking the 'brahminism' but retaining the Brahmins albeit in a subsidiary role. Now, that would be a true revolution!

Climate Change – Impacts on South Asia

Recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth assessment report. See Link. After seeing Al Gore's documentary my interest in this issue has definitely increased. I have also been following the 'debate' on global warming in the US. This would be one of the ridiculous debates since Galileo was persecuted in medieval times. A few Galileos from NASA have been 'burned' at the stake here as well. Well, I digress from my main intention for the post. One thing that was not clear to me was the level of apathy and the insouciance exhibited by Western Governments in general and the developed economies, which was markedly at odds with their pattern of alacrity in even dealing with remote threats such as Saddam's WMDs. After reading the report summary, it is so painfully apparent why it is so.

Though the primary cause of global climate change is the carbon emissions generated by human activities, the effect would be felt acutely by specific regions as climate systems are regional in nature. This would result in uneven effects on the globe, imparting benefits on some regions and unmitigated disasters on others in the near and medium term. In the long term, however entire globe would be affected. The major effects on the globe are classified into mainly Water, Ecosystems, Food, Coasts and Health. On water, the melt down of glaciers in the polar and high latitude regions is going to increase water availability and at the mid-latitude and semi-arid latitudes (a.k.a South Asia) the water availability is going to decrease by 20-30%.

In India, the Indo-Gangetic plains which get their water from the glacial lakes in Tibet, initially during the melt down and receding of the glaciers, in the very near term water availability will peak causing floods. However glaciers are banks; when the glacier melts more than it needs to, it is a draw down of the capital. Within few years, the water supply to Indus/Ganges river systems is going to considerably diminish resulting in low agricultural productivity, reduced hydel-power generation by 20-30% because of low availability and more droughts. In such a heavily concentrated area this will also strain our minimal adaptive capacity. When it comes to the peninsular rivers that get their catchment thru monsoon rains this is a dicier bet. Monsoons being highly unpredictable the effects of the temperature increase on ocean's surface and its increasing acidity , the monsoons may become more erratic and uneven , upsetting the patterns in agriculture, river water accumulation causing more droughts, laying waste entire swaths of our prime agriculture centers. To anyone who is plainly observing the average levels of water flowing in our rivers in the last 10-15 years this would be obvious.

Rising sea-levels due to glacial and snow melt down in the poles would cause significant strain on coastal deltas. The first layer to face this threat would be the mangroves and marsh vegetation which hold the sea water at bay and prevent salinity in our fertile coastal plains such as Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery deltas. Faced with multiple impacts of lower catchment on the rivers and rising sea levels, these areas are at significant risk. One tsunami takes two or three years to recover from; multiple natural disasters in a short period of time such as floods caused by uneven rainfalls and cyclone activity will be horrendous to even contemplate. Subsistence farmers and fishermen are at maximum risk. This will necessitate increased internal migration to in-land areas straining existing resources.

Au contraire, the near-term and medium term impact of the global climate change for developed countries is reduced winters and less harsh winters, increase in cropping season duration, increase in water availability in the low latitude regions, mostly in the northern hemisphere. Corn farmers in Iowa are going to have a field day, no pun intended. In urban centers, this will result in less energy consumption on heating and other winter living amenities. Improvement in these conditions will also result in higher productivity. This year in US the timing for switching to daylight time was advanced a full 3 weeks. The list is not entirely full of benefits but with some disadvantages as well. In countries as vast as the United States and Canada, there are bound to be some sub-regions that would be adversely affected. But then the adaptive capacity, mitigation capacity is order of magnitudes greater than developing countries such as India's or of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

All of this must give a pause to any serious policy maker in India. In the next few decades, we have to multiply our energy capacity, water capacity and other infrastructural needs just to keep up with the population growth and the share of the population joining the work force. The great Asian '8-9-10%growth' has a dangerous flip side to it. Already this growth has caused so much inflationary pressure on huge segments of population. The absence of this growth would cause jolts in society as there won't be enough revenues to even keep going. On the face of this generational and civilizational challenge what we can expect from our leadership is zilch. There is near total ignorance about this issue and nil debate as to what we need to do to cope, mitigate and overcome these challenges. On a final note, the IPCC report has a world map, where the observation centers to study the climate change are plotted. US, Europe, Russia, China, Antarctica and Australia have a large number of centers, in that order. The number of observation centers in India: ZERO.

Supreme Court, Reservations and Beyond

The recent Supreme Court order on staying the OBC reservation in centrally funded educational institutions should be viewed as a significant event in the post-Mandal era. The arguments for and against reservations are well known.^[1] It requires a different kind of polemics, standards and value judgments for any reasonable debate to occur. We all know that is impossible in today's India. Hence I want to move away from it and focus on how this debate is likely to play out in the political arena and what it will entail.

First and foremost the central challenge this issue poses to our republic is to the overall constitutional scheme in lending the power of State to affirmatively discriminate and simultaneously retaining the essential character of equality of the citizenship. Any such boundary between these two conflicting imperatives cannot be set in stone nor can the causal factors be easily benchmarked. Such a boundary will be ultimately a function of the political forces that our republic will produce. No group of judges in the Supreme Court, now or in the future can thwart or push back this line for any reasonable period of time.

Since the issue being constitutional in nature, it is prudent that it be settled within the parameters of the current constitution. With all their short falls, the present constitution endowed to us was created by the giants of our time. This issue was beyond even their capacities; that's why we see such lack of clarity and tenuousness in how this issue figures in our constitution. Perhaps they hoped that with passage of time and more economic development and equity in the society, the sanity of better angels would prevail. The failure to codify any sunset clauses for reservation and the failure to strictly deal with the definition of 'backward' and 'discrimination' is bedeviling us. Ambedkar's hope was that this issue will not be relevant for too long have been nullified.

Once the State has been granted the power to determine who constitute the "socially backward classes" and the power to provide active discrimination for them, the genie was out of the bottle. Now any attempt to curtail it on the basis of Article 16/ equality is going to be nebulous at best. Any attempt to invoke the creamy layer or require recent data will/can be easily shot down by the legislature, as they do not find mention in the constitution. If the parliament goes ahead passes constitutional amendments enumerating its power to provide reservation without creamy layer exceptions and/or providing recent caste census or rationale, then the last resort will be for the Supreme Court to rule those amendments unconstitutional invoking the 'basic structure' doctrine. If that happens, what will be next?

The voices headed by Karunanidhi that we need a 'new' constitution will reach a crescendo. For a person who was mourning on our independence day and whose party refused (or failed) to get to the original constituent assembly, this indeed is audacious. But today's realities are different. Such a development is terrifying only because it is possible. There are very few states in India where the OBC political power can be reasonably checkmated. With the flurry of castes being blessed as 'backward' everyday, the arithmetic is heavily loaded in their favour. Himachal Pradesh, Uttarkhand, J&K, North-eastern states and probably Punjab will be against this. Even they could be compromised by evolving a formula wherein they get to choose their own mix for reservation.

Having painted the doomsday scenario and this being late in the night, I need to present an optimistic ending so I can go to sleep peacefully. My primary source of optimism is in the diminishing role and effectiveness of the Indian State in influencing the role of our citizens. This may seem like a cynic's optimism. However in today's globalizing world, the role of private sector and those dreadful 'foreigners' are on the increase. The other day I just saw Karunanidhi signing the bonnet of first car out of BMW factory in Chennai, just the day before he imperiously sat on an 'all' party meeting to force a bandh in the state against the Supreme Court order. These two images are inherently incompatible: in the long run, they are headed for collision.

The other source of optimism is that once the entire course of this meal has been run out, successfully or unsuccessfully, the latter being more likely, the 'panacea' effect will wear out of the drug and its placebo effect will become more and more apparent. With the increase in literacy and awareness, the issue will lose its potency to emotionally charge the vote banks. On a serious note, when this happens, fissures are likely to develop within this 'reservation' coalition, most likely between the dalits and OBCs, or between the OBCs and the 'most backward' of the OBCs. When these fissures erupt out in the open the current OBC power holders are not likely to relinquish easily their 'hard earned' fruits but likely to talk the 'lingo' of meritocracy than in advancing a further generation of reservation and retooling it. Because adopting the latter strategy will not be electorally attractive as the share of the pie will get smaller and smaller. But I do concede that all or some of these predictions are likely to fail. Who can bet against India?

However there is a short term hope which is getting slimmer and slimmer and that is for the two serious stakeholders in the system Congress and BJP to silently come together with the following aims: to keep the process of providing constitutionally viable affirmative access in reasonable ways, keeping the extremists on both sides away from overreaching and forcing a showdown, growing the economy and improve the general governance gradually and ultimately obviating this issue.

^[1]

The best arguments against Mandal commission implementation in Parliament were made by none other than Swargiya Rajiv Gandhi. See Link.