Economic and Political Weekly

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

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Editor: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.
Down, But Not Out
Marxism: Managerial Politics?
he editorial Can the Congress Recover? (EPW, 28 May 2016) is thoughtprovoking. The vote share of the National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2014
elections (roughly 39%) indicated that
there was ample room for other parties.
Now, in the wake of recent assembly
elections in West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil
Nadu and Assam, this factor is being
stretched by the voices of far-flung, sometimes disparate, regions.
The successful electoral pact of the
Bharatiya Janata Party with the regional
Asom Gana Parishad and the Bodoland
Peoples Front in Assam shared a
majoritarian concern insofar as the
issue of illegal migration from Bangladesh is concerned. But the others demonstrated the potential of coming together under one umbrella as the rationale for the proverbial third front
in the next general elections within the
elbow room of heterogeneity. If the
Congress were to join forces with the
others, a two-way (rather than threeway) situation could shape up quite
spontaneously. A majoritarian approach axiomatically assumes an opposition which absorbs diversity.
On its part, the ruling alliance can
take heart from the fact that a bipartisan method can be generally helpful
in tackling an area like foreign policy
when domestic events are being recalled to forestall avowed national
objectives (vide the United States
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearings preparatory to Narendra Modis visit). The record of governance and adjustment to the big picture
will be critical by 2019 like the chaos
created by the onrush of liberalisation
and related globalisation pre-2014. The
right structures and processes will
have to be put in place. The probing
flash bulbs will not be focused on the
Congress alone, if it can stay afloat. A
quiet organisational rebuilding with a
world view has to be its agenda. The
party is down, but not out and has a
role to play.
Uttam Sen
Bengaluru
inarayi Vijayan as the new chief

minister will inaugurate a new era of
left politics in Kerala. Sadly this is
not going to include party discipline or
the restraint in administration that his
acolytes predict. Rather it is going to be
a kind of nonchalance that seems to be
gradually engulfing the space of democratic governance in the country. There
is a certain form of anxiety that is reproducing leaders like Pinarayi who can
preside over calculated violence by cadres,
defend it in public and even get away
with it by winning elections. A blatant
show of male chauvinism on the one
hand and a surrender of revolution to
lumpenism on the other marks his selection as the chief minister of Kerala by
the Communist Party of India (Marxist)CPI(M).
Kerala has been traditionally marked
by a strong rivalry between the North and
the South, integral to every dominant caste
in the state, especially the ThiyyaEzhava.
Pinarayis selection clearly indicates an
achievement for the sanskritic, arrogant
face of Hinduism. V S Achuthanandan
was quite easily marginalised even
after the left victory in 2006, but a
strong resurgence of popular emotion
in defence of his claims to the office
helped him survive. But this time
the marginalisation has been rendered
easier because of the age factor that
has been pointed out as unfavourable
to his selection. That Indian politics is a
factory to produce raw and aggressive
power and that wisdom is not its most
revered virtue any longer is a lesson
that the top brass of the CPI(M) like
Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury is
trying to teach the cadres and voters.
The transformation of Marxism to a form
of managerial politics is slowly happening under the younger crop of leaders.
Sadly this is a form of Brahminism that
a state like Kerala alone can support
because of its natural exclusion from
the rest of the peninsula. Its form
of social prohibitions, especially those
draped under the cover of communism,
has been comfortably concealed for decades but likely to emerge before long
June 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
Economic & Political Weekly
LETTERS
into broad daylight with the rise of Hindutva outfits steadily gaining ground
with a substantial share of votes in all
the constituencies.
The emergence of the region as a significant component of power will surface with the rise of Pinarayi in Kerala
politics. It is a sad deviation from a genuine assertion of regionalism that resulted in the creation of new states like
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand
and Telangana.
The CPI(M) which prides itself so
much on being a party of martyrs with
an impressive list of martyrdoms supporting its legitimacy to rule a specific
area or region has capitalised on all
the relations of consanguinity or family
through such martyrdoms. Virtually speaking, these are Pinarayis men. The politics
of martyrdom has come to dictate a
role like never before in Kerala. The
cadres are mobilised on specific forms
of vendetta, stage-managed in the form
of democracy by a party that represents
an even higher form of sacrifice than
the Nation.
These are peculiar forms of anomaly
in the Weberian sense of a party and
perhaps asking for rational explanations
may be looking for too much. But the
German sociologist who foresaw an utter disenchantment awaiting the human
race regarding its rational modes of
organisation of the world had predicted
the shaping of politics as a career by
modern societies. In compromising the
achievements of Achuthanandan and
wrongly touting the place where the first
elected communist government came to
power in 1957 (British Guyana had the
first elected communist government
under Cheddi Beret Jagan in 1953), the
CPI(M) leadership is exposing itself to
sectarian politics and extinguishing the
fire in its cadres for a future in politics.
The actual consequences of a masculine
politics of martyrdom can prove costly
to bear for any leadership that confounds virtues of age and wisdom with
power and authority. The welcome sign
to inflated loyalties and commitments
in the party is going to be a Pandoras
box as the CPI(M) is likely to witness.
Cybil Vinodan
On Falling Flyovers
he article, Why Flyovers Will Fall:

Decline of the Civil Engineering Profession in India by Shirish B Patel (EPW,
14 May 2016) is an eye-opener.
The collapse of a flyover under construction in Kolkata on 31 March killed
26 people and injured 90 (p 32). This is
the result of an age-old practice of the
government: concealing facts. On 16 April
I visited the site (Ganesh Talkies at Girish
Park in Kolkata) where a portion of the
flyover had collapsed all of a sudden during the busy hour of the day (12.20 pm).
There was no sign of crisis or sorrow.
The collapsed flyover was built close
to the old high-rise houses on either side,
many bearing Kolkata Municipal Corporation signboards saying dangerous
house. The flyover was built in one of
the busiest, most congested and oldest
areas of the city.
What did the government do soon
after the accident? The police were
deployed, the area was cordoned off and
the dead bodies were removed from the
site as much and as early as possible. As
per the locals estimate, casualties may
have been 1,500 or more, and surely not
26 as was reported in the media. Many do
not have any clue about their relatives
who went out on the day of the accident
and have not returned home yet. They
believe that all the missing people had
died under the fallen flyover and their
bodies were removed from the site immediately. What is more surprising is the
fact that a flyover was not even needed
at the site, according to the local people.
They believe that the sole purpose of
building this flyover was to earn money
out of the construction.
So many people died under the flyover: vendors, drivers, labourers, footpath
dwellers, and passers-by. But, there was
no march, no dharna, no uproar as
compared to when other incidents took
place, such as the Delhi or Kamduni gang

rape, Singur protest, Khagragarh bomb
blast incident, Saradha chit fund scam,
and the like. The opposition and other
political parties remained silent (except
blaming the party in government and each
other), whereas the heartless insensible
intelligentsia and the common people of
Kolkata were busy watching and enjoying
a cricket match.
Once again, Shirish B Patel is to be
appreciated for bringing the loathsome
reality of this construction project to
light, hitherto having remained in the dark.
But, as long as autocratic democracy
(pseudo-democracy) prevails in the
country, no eye-opener can help rectify
the situation, because making money in
the name of development, by hook or by
crook, has been the norm of the day, and
the public does not have the courage to
put up an honest protest for a genuine
cause.
Samares Kumar Das
Aizawl, Mizoram
Corrigendum
In the article Nothing Succeeds Like
Success in West Bengal by Rajat Roy,
published on 28 May 2016 (p 25), the figure
70 assembly seats should have read as 38
assembly seats.
The corrected version of the article has
been placed on the EPW website.
Errata
In the editorial Spectre of Debt (28 May
2016, p 8), the figures `14,283 and `3,918
should be read as `14,283 crore and
`3,918 crore.
In the editorial Killing Them Silently (28
May 2016, p 9), the phrase before being
hired was inadvertently left out after the
phrase, a medical examination of workers
exposed to silica dust.
The corrected versions of the editorials have
been placed on the EPW website.
The errors are regretted. Ed.
Web Exclusives
The following articles have been published in the past week in the Web Exclusives section of the EPW website.
(1) The She in ScienceAashima Dogra, Nandita Jayaraj
(2) How Kerala Is Destroying Its WetlandsChitra K P
Articles posted before 28 May 2016 remain available in the Web Exclusives section.
thrissur, Kerala
EPW
June 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
LETTERS
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June 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
Attacks on Africans
We need to address the deep prejudices of Indias culture, society and state.
ndia suffered a rare humiliation, but one which surely was

long overdue. Ambassadors and diplomatic envoys from
54 African countries boycotted the Government of Indias
Africa Day celebrations recently. It was unprecedented as a
diplomatic snub, given that 54 different countries had come
together to send out such a strong message.
The immediate provocation for the boycott was the murder of
Congolese national, Masonda Ketanda Olivier, who was beaten
to death in the national capital. The government seemed to react
quickly after the intent of the African envoys to collectively boycott
the governments programme was known. Minister for External
Affairs Sushma Swaraj sent off a series of tweetsthat curious form
of communication by government functionaries where we never
really know when the public relations end and official action
beginsstating the governments commitment to the safety and
security of African nationals in India and asking her junior
colleague, V K Singh, the retired general of the army, to meet the
heads of missions of African countries in Delhi and assure them.
Deploying his famous shoot first and ask questions later
strategy, the general said that it was just some minor scuffle
which had been blown up by the media. His colleague, the
Union Minister for Culture and Tourism Mahesh Sharma, then
sought to do more such damage control by stating that even
Africa is not safe and compared crime rates in Africa with
stray incidents in India. Making matters worse, Goas Tourism
Minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Dilip Parulekar,
publicly claimed that residents of his state were annoyed with
the Nigerians living there and spoke of deporting them.
Such responses from some of countrys highest political functionaries may be deeply offensive and embarrassing but are
hardly surprising. The BJP as a party has encouraged and justified
all sorts of prejudice and discrimination within our society,
whether these be based on religion, caste, gender, or language. Its
leaders display wanton insensitivity regarding race and prejudices towards Africans. But it is not just the BJP that displays such
racism; some years ago Aam Aadmi Partys Somnath Bharati had
displayed similar prejudices as a minister in Delhi. Attacks on
Africans in Punjab, Goa, Mumbai, Bengaluru and other places have
been routinely followed by government officials and politicians
mouthing crass and ugly racist stereotypes, while the government
officially scurries around to address diplomatic concerns.
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
Some sections of the government have actually tried to

address the issues concerned. President Pranab Mukherjee and
Vice President Hamid Ansari, who was on an official visit to
Morocco and Tunisia, reached out and condemned the violence
and assured all concerned that citizens of African countries will
be provided safety and protection in this country. However,
these two constitutional heads are hardly the political voice of
the current regime. Ministry of External Affairs officials have also
reached out to some of the important diplomatic missions from
Africa and worked with the home ministry to ensure that action
is taken quickly against those suspected of violence against
Africans. The Delhi Police has arrested some of the suspects of
Oliviers murder. It has also organised a trust-building meeting
between local residents and Africans in some South Delhi
localities which, media reports suggest, have been successful in
mending fraught relations.
This is, however, not just a matter of law and order; nor is it
something that can be addressed by Indias foreign minister
through social media outreach (Swaraj subsequently tweeted
again, asking Indian nationals to greet Africans they meet,
shake their hands and assure them that India loves you). This
is not the first time that there has been violence against
Africans. It must also be remembered that violence is almost
invariably directed only against Black Africans, not North
Africans of Arab descent nor whites or ethnic Indians who
come from there.
We need to acknowledge that racism is deeply embedded in
social and cultural attitudes and practices in almost all parts of
India, among its different communities. It may not be expressed
in formal settings but is clearly visible in our daily life and popular culture. What is more, there has hardly been any effort to
address and tackle racism and the prejudices involved with it,
either by the state or by the myriad institutions of civil society.
In fact, the manner in which racial prejudices are expressed in
our language, literature, films, songs and advertisements remains
a blot on our state and society.
Indias post-independence outreach to the global South in
general and to Africa in particular was motivated by high
idealism and commitment to anti-colonialism. In the last quarter
century of high realism which has directed our foreign policy,
solidarity and fraternity with other developing countries has
7
EDITORIALS
been replaced by great power ambitions. Africa is where India

sees itself in a contest with China to capture markets and
natural resources. There is now little inside India to keep our
cultural and social prejudices in check. We cannot fight this

cancer of pervasive prejudice with band-aids of sporadic
police action and anodyne tweets.
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
EDITORIALS
New Target of Vitriol

The attack against the Reserve Bank governor obfuscates issues facing the Indian economy.
he defining feature of the present regime is not effective

policymaking, as was promised, but the vitriol deployed by
its parliamentarians and its supporters against those who
do not fall in line. The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI),
Raghuram Rajan, is the latest to be labelled as an anti-national.
The Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) Subramanian Swamy, immediately after being appointed to the Rajya Sabha, proceeded to vilify
Rajan, accusing him of sabotaging economic growth through unfavourable interest rates and leaking sensitive information. Consequently, there has been intense media speculation about whether the
government will extend Rajans three-year term as governor when
it ends in September. While Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said,
rather predictably, that he did not approve of any of these comments being made by anyone as far as the personality is concerned
and despite Prime Minister Narendra Modis attempts to play down
the controversy, it is clear that the speculation relating to extending the RBI governors term has been fuelled by the ruling party.
There is routine tension between the government and the RBI
over the setting of interest rates. The government wants the apex
monetary authority to push interest rates lower to induce fresh
investment, while the RBI refuses to comply, ostensibly for price
stability. Just over 10 months ago, the government made a clear
attempt to curtail the RBI governors veto powers on the sevenmember committee for monetary policy in the July 2015 revised
draft of the Indian Financial Code. Further, over the years, governments have taken a far more lenient view on liberalising the
capital account, while the RBI has had a different opinion.
The raison dtre for central bank autonomy is based on the
understanding that governments, if left in charge of monetary
policy, would tend to alter policies to address immediate economic
concerns that are usually also politically expedient. This could put
at risk the longer-term macroeconomic stability of the economy.
Such an argument is in favour of experts, ostensibly insulated
from politics, deciding what is best for the economy in the
medium and long term. Leaving monetary policy to the experts
(who are supposed to understand the complexities of the tasks at
hand) can be easily misunderstood to mean that such policy is
fundamentally apolitical. This, however, is a narrow view of what
politics, and indeed what economics means. It is the underlying
ideological priorities of the thinking around monetary policy that
determines whose interests are served. As has been argued in
these columns, an autonomous RBI pursuing inflation targeting
tends to make the central bank more powerful and keeps a tight
leash on the union governments fiscal deficit. Such a strategy
need not necessarily work in the favour of the people and could
well be in tune with the needs of finance capital.
The BJP-led government, on behalf of domestic industrial

interests, has long been trying to pressurise the RBI to push lending
rates downwards. It is argued that since inflation has been relatively low, there is no need to have such a tight monetary policy,
which in its view is adversely affecting borrowing from banks
and hence fresh investment. The RBI can influence bank lending
rates mainly by adjusting the repo (or repurchase option) rate
(which is the rate at which the central bank undertakes short-term
lending to banks to meet their shortfall of funds), the reverse
repo rate, and the cash reserve ratio (CRR). It has indeed done so,
from time to time, taking into consideration trends in inflation.
However, banks have not passed on the lower interest rates signalled to borrowers, as the tools at RBIs disposal can only influenceand not dictatethe rates at which banks lend. Even as it
has been well established that interest rates alone do not determine whether investment is forthcoming or not, industry heads
and the finance ministry, with ample support from the financial
media, have clamoured for more and more rate cuts. After resisting
such pressure, the RBI did give in and with its latest announcement in April, has lowered the repo rate to a five-year low along
with lowering CRR requirements of banks. However, it did this
while simultaneously focusing on stressed assets in the banking
system. The non-performing assets in the banking system, mainly
accounted for by large infrastructure-sector business groups,
have to be addressed. This renewed emphasis on debt recovery
from wilful defaulters has put pressure on large corporations
to meet interest and amortisation payments. The RBI has
compelled banks to clean up their balance sheets and stop using
various subterfuges to conceal stressed and non-performing
assets. Predictably, big business and its political collaborators
have been irked by this insistence to identify wilful defaulters
and the forceful push for debt repayment.
There are no easy answers to issues of economic policy, or any
policymaking for that matter. But certain members of the government have chosen to disregard years of understanding and
research, oversimplify debates and cast aspersions on individuals,
while hoping to deflect attention from substantive questions of
policy. There are many intense economic problems confronting the
country: two years of drought, slow industrial growth, falling
exports for nearly a third of this governments tenure, and now the
stressed assets of the banking sector. The second anniversary celebration of the Modi government shows clearly that it seeks to paper
over its failings and continue with the rhetoric of its election campaigns. The choice to go after Rajan fits quite well with the political tactics of the ruling party, which time and again has resorted
to slander in order to divert attention away from crucial issues.
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
EDITORIALS
Choosing Speed over Diligence

Javadekar hopes to save Indias environment by diluting rules and laws.
rakash Javadekar, Union Minister for Environment, Forest

and Climate Change, is a man in a hurry. He is fond of boasting about his ministrys achievements. In the two years
that he has headed this important ministry, it is the speed with
which projects have been cleared that Javadekar claims as his
principal achievement. He was recently reported saying that his
ministry had cleared over 2,000 projects in two years, including
349 mining proposals. He said that the waiting period for a project
to be cleared had been reduced from 600 days to 190 days and
that he aimed to reduce this further to 100 days. Calling this a
revolution, he went on to boast that this would result in the
creation of millions of jobs and spur Indias economic growth.
Apart from the fact that many of such claims made by the Modi
government after two years in office have been shown to be short
on credible facts and high on bombast, Javadekars boasts are
reason for alarm, not applause. Either he has forgotten, or has
chosen to forget, that the idea behind environmental clearances was
to protect the environment, not make way for its destruction. Even
under existing rules, most environmental clearances are suspect.
They rely on data provided by project proponents, there are direct
conflicts of interest, the prerequisite public hearing is often stagemanaged, and the process is opaque. This was one of the important observations of the Supreme Court-appointed expert committee on hydroelectric projects in Uttarakhand after the June 2013
devastating floods. The committee emphasised that hydro projects
in ecologically-fragile areas like the Himalayas could not be viewed
individually; they had to be assessed in terms of their cumulative
impact on the region. It also noted that the environmental impact
assessments (EIAs) of the hydro projects it had reviewed, were
unreliable and that many of them had been done on the basis of
false information provided by project proponents. It urged that
future EIAs ought to be done by an independent agency.
There are other instances of existing environmental norms being
diluted. For instance, under Javadekars watch, the norm for setting
up a mining or an industry project near a protected area or a
forested area has been changedfrom a distance of 10 km to 5 km.
The moratorium on new industries in critically-polluted industrial
areas such as Ghaziabad, Indore, Ludhiana, Panipat, Patancheru,
Singrauli, Vapi and two other locations has been lifted. The loosening
of central controls is evident in the decision to allow state governments to clear projects occupying less than 10,000 hectares without
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
an EIA. Also, mandatory public hearings for establishment of private

coal mines with a capacity less than 16 million tonnes per annum
have been set aside. These are just a few of several such decisions
that suggest that the ministry is anxious to ease environmental
clearances rather than make them more rigorous.
The latest information indicating the ministrys policy direction
are the new rules issued regarding wetlandsthe Draft Wetlands
(Conservation and Management) Rules 2016. These will supersede
the existing 2010 rules once approved. The 2010 rules were formulated after extensive consultations with experts and environmental groups. They acknowledged the importance of preserving
wetlands which cover only 4.7% of Indias land area but play a
crucial role in moderating the impact of floods and cyclones, in
storing and purifying water and in recharging groundwater. The
wetlands are also repositories of precious and endangered
biodiversity and act as carbon sinks. The 2010 rules laid down
specific prohibitions on the use of wetlands to ensure that these
fragile ecospheres are not further endangered. The new draft
rules have no prohibitions, only criteria for what is permitted.
Further, the Central Wetlands Regulatory Authority will be
dismantled and instead states will be free to independently
decide how projects near wetlands are to be established. The
specious argument forwarded by the ministry is that since land
and water are state subjects, wetlands ought to come under the
jurisdiction of state governments. But wetlands are not just land
and water; these include forests and endangered fauna and
much more. By removing central control, the government is
literally allowing state governments to do as they wish with
wetlands. We have seen the consequences of such a policy. In
the 2015 floods in Chennai and Srinagar, wetlands that had been
filled up failed to act as buffers.
The ministry under Javadekar has also tried to dilute the
Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 or the Forest Rights Act (FRA) by
arguing that gram sabhas should not have the right to veto important mining projects in forested land. So far it has not succeeded in
doing this. Nor has its attempt to trim the powers of the National
Green Tribunal been successful. But its record so far, and its
choice of speed over diligence in clearing projects, indicates the
future direction of environmental policy under this government,
one that spells doom for Indias fragile environmental resources.
EDITORIALS
First Published in 1966
To mark 50 years of EPW, each week in 2016 will

present an extract from our archives.
Vol XXIV, No 23
JUNE 10, 1989
Reservations for Women in Panchayats

DN
Why should reservations for women be 30 per cent of
seats and not any other figure? What is the basis
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
for this figure? It can only be that, with the reservation of dalits and tribals at about 25 per cent and remembering that part of the reservation for women
is already included in this figure, the additional
reservation for women will still keep the total reservation below the less than fifty per cent that the
Supreme Court in its wisdom has specified as the
maximum allowable reservation.
There, however, is no logic in the Supreme
Courts judgment in this matter. Reservations can
have only one logical basisthat is, proportions
in the population. Anything else is the result of
tokenism or of motivated compromises.
Women in India occupy a double position
vol lI no 23
they belong to a particular caste/class; and, at the

same time, have a relation (of production) to men
of their own class.
What is interesting to note, however, is the position of the left and democratic womens movement.
They make no class distinctions at all in their proposal
on reservation for women. The mainstream left
protagonists of class struggle seem to have forgotten the factor of class struggle in their proposal on
reservation for women. When it comes to opposing to
reservations on a caste basis, they are quick to advocate class as a basis for reservation. But they are
willing to jettison this analysis in their attempt to
compete with the Congress.
MARGIN SPEAK
Two Years of an Ambedkar

Bhakt and the Plight of Dalits
Anand Teltumbde
With a self-proclaimed Ambedkar

bhakt at the helm of the
government, the Dalits might
have expected a modicum of
directional change in policies
towards them. Instead, the
two years of Narendra Modis
government have led to a reversal
of many of the gains made by the
Dalits in the past few decades.
Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a

writer and civil rights activist with the
Committee for the Protection of Democratic
Rights, Mumbai.
10
arendra Modi, the self-proclaimed

Ambedkar bhakt, has completed
two years of his boastful rule.
Babasaheb Ambedkar, an iconoclast par
excellence, was loath to having bhakts
but with characteristic pragmatism, he
might just have relented when a Prime
Minister announced himself as his bhakt.
Ambedkar had made a modest demand
for Dalit representation in the state structure. He had hoped that such representatives would safeguard Dalit interests from
the majority of the caste Hindus. Ambedkar experienced in his own lifetime the
futility of his demand. But with an allpowerful Prime Minister as an Ambedkar
bhakt, the Dalits could have expected a
change in their state of affairs.
A modicum of expectation that Dalits
would have had from an Ambedkar
bhakt would have been to turn the country somewhat along the direction prescribed by Ambedkar. It is well known
that he had asked the new rulers to bring
in social and economic democracy at the
earliest. For this purpose, he had provided a vehicle in the form of the Directive Principles. Although not justiciable,
they were to be the fundamental principles for governance of the country. But
these principles were totally ignored in
the 60 years of Congress rule. An Ambedkar bhakt would have been expected to
get them back into focus. He was also
expected to arrest the worsening conditions of Dalits. Two years may not be a
long time to show visible results but
certainly enough to mark a directional
change. What does the Ambedkar bhakt
have to show in these two years?
Rhetoric and Reality
On the eve of the last general elections,
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) upstaged
the Congress by buying off all the
prominent brokers of Dalit votes. This
investment paid rich dividends. Enthused

by this win, the BJP went full blast in
appropriating Ambedkar through a propaganda blitzkrieg and grabbing all possible places where his memorials could be
erected. Paradoxically, whatever Ambedkar stood for was being trampled upon
with impunity. There was harassment
and brutalities unleashed on Dalit students in higher education. There was
deliberate delay in scholarships to Dalit
students and institutional attempts to
smother voices of radicals among them,
eventually exposed by the institutional
murder of a bright research scholar
Rohith Vemula. As such, discrimination
is nothing new to Dalits but the institutional manner in which it has been
perpetrated in the past two years is certainly conspicuous. Despite countrywide
outrage and struggles for justice to
Rohith, Modi continues to back his killers.
Modi swears by the Constitution as
his sacred text but in the past two years
he has trashed it. He has not only
neglected the Directive Principles but
has also not hesitated to mutilate them.
Leave apart the spirit of the Constitution,
its key guiding principles like secularism,
equality and liberty have become a travesty in the past two years. The basic
principle of equality before law in the
Constitution, the single biggest constitutional solace for the poor and marginalised, has been almost dismantled as
evidenced by the clean chit to the
Hindutva criminals in Malegaon blast case.
Ban on beef eating, ghar wapsi, saffronisation of education, jingoist promotion
of nationalism/patriotism and irrationality are directly detrimental to the Dalit
interests. All these are effective reversals
of all gains made by Dalits during the
last century.
Deprivation of Dalits
We will see how deprivation of Dalits
has increased during Modis rule by
looking at the budget allocations for two
schemes: one, their overall development
vide Scheduled Caste Sub Plan (SCSP)
and Tribal Sub Plan (TSP) and, two,
through the safai karamchari-related
schemes.
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
MARGIN SPEAK
The Constitution recognised the need

to close the socio-economic gap between
these communities and the rest of the
was budgeted. Even with such misdoings, the allocations by the previous
regimes look better than the two budgets
Table 1: SCSP and TSP Allocations in ` Crore

200708
RE
Plan Outlay
1,58,491
SCP/SCSP
SCP allocation 12,368
%
7.80
TSP
TSP allocation
7,447
%
4.70
200809
RE
200910
RE
201011
RE
1,83,528 2,33,386 2,84,284
201112
RE
201213
RE
201314
RE
201415
RE
201516
RE
201617
BE
3,27,396 4,13,625 4,75,532
4,67,934
4,65,770 5,50,010
14,727
8.02
15,906
6.82
23,183
8.15
29,918
9.14
33,085
8.00
35,801
7.53
43,208
9.23
30,851
6.62
38,833
7.06
8,771
4.78
8,600
3.68
10,363
3.65
17,959
5.49
18,721
4.53
22,030
4.63
26,715
5.71
19,980
4.29
24,005
4.36
Source: Union Budgets 200708 to 201617.
were further slashed to a token entry of

`10 crore. The allocation for Pre-matric
Scholarships to the Children of those
Engaged in Unclean Occupations
shows an even more dismal picture:
while the budget allocation was marginally raised to `10 crore from the earlier
`9.5 crore, it was slashed to `2 crore in
the last budget.
Spurt in Caste Atrocities
While the BJP desperately depends upon
Dalit votes, its win in the last elections
with a clear majority in the Lok Sabha
for the first time, coupled with the overbearing style of Modi, has bolstered the
entire Sangh Parivar. Its aggressive Hindutva rhetoric generally emboldened
the feudal forces and lumpen elements
in rural areas to suppress any assertive
action by Dalits. Not everyone in the
Sangh Parivar internalises the tactical
need of the BJP to woo Dalits. Such
dynamics have aggravated caste contradictions in villages which often manifest
in gory atrocities. While the atrocity
graph has been going up since the economic reforms were instituted, the rise
during Modis rule appears spectacular.
The National Crime Records Bureau has
only the 2014 atrocity figures, but they
might be enough to reflect the nature of
this dynamics. Table 3 gives a glimpse
into the atrocities on Dalits, which
shows an alarming increase of over 19%
from the previous year.
In sum, the two years of Modi have
been grossly devastating to Dalits in the
short term and utterly ruinous in the
long term. Dalits had better realise that
the Sangh Parivars dream of establishing Hindu Raj, a curious cross of the
Hitlerite Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer
and Manus Brahmanism, is a deadly
antithesis of Ambedkar.
(201415 being the interim budget) of the Modi

government. As Table 1
Self Employment Scheme
shows, for the year 2015
for Rehabilitation of Manual
Scavengers
557.00 439.04 47.00 470.19 10.01 10.00 16 the ratio of the SCSP
Pre-matric Scholarships to the
allocation to total plan
Children of those Engaged in
outlay worked out to just
Unclean Occupations
9.50 10.00 10.00 10.00
2.50 2.00
6.62%, by far the lowest
Source: Union budget for respective years.
since 200708 and that
Table 3: Atrocity on Dalits from 2010 to 2015
for
the
TSP
at
4.29%,
lowest since 201112.
Type/Year
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014*
These ratios should have been 16.62%
Murder
570
673
651
676
794
and 8.6%, respectively, as per their popuRape
1,349 1,557 1,576 2,073 2,388
lation. Although, in view of the imporKidnapping
511
616
490
628 1,456
tant state elections, these ratios improved
Dacoity
42
36
27
45
37
Robbery
75
54
40
62
92
slightly in the current budget to 7.06%
Arson
150
169
214
189
201
and 4.36%, respectively, they were lower
Grievous hurt 4,376 4,247 3,855 4,901 4,531
than the earlier ratios. In these two years
PCR Act
143
67
62
62
101
Modi has deprived Dalits and tribals of
PoA Act
10,513 11,342 12,576 13,975 8,887
`13,370,127 crore and `5,689,940 crore
Others
14,983 14,958 14,164 16,797 21,541
from their legitimate share.
Total
32,713 33,719 33,655 39,408 47,064
Safai karamcharis, or manual scavenPercentage rise
3.08 -0.19 17.04 19.43
gers,
accounting for about 10% of the
* Break-up computed from the figures in Table 7.2, Crime
of India 2014.
total Dalit (SC) population, are the Dalit
Source: NCRB, Crime in India for various years.
among Dalits (Dalits Cry on the Eve of the
Indian population and mandated special Ambedkar Festival, EPW, 7 May 2016).
protection and provisions for the Sched- Modis concern for this section of the
uled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. It was population is evidenced by the drop in
actualised in prospective terms only in the allocation for Self Employment
the Fifth Five Year Plan period in 197475 Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual
by the policy of the TSP and later in Scavengers from `557 crore in the last
197980 in the Sixth Plan period by the two budgets (as Table 2 shows) to
Special Component Plan (SCP), later `439.04 crore and `470.19 crore, which
christened as SCSP. They were the statutory allocations to be made in every
EPW on Scopus Database
budget, central as well as state, to be
spent on these communities and were
EPW is now indexed on Scopus.
mandated to be budgeted in plan outlays
Scopus, published by Elsevier, is the worlds largest abstract and citation database of
in proportion to the population of the
peer-reviewed literature with tools that track, analyse and visualise research.
two communities. As in any scheme for
Scopus has begun indexing EPW articles and soon all articles from 2007 onwards will
Dalits, the government never kept its
be indexed.
promise. Most of the funds were diverted
to unrelated activities and even then the
Please visit www.scopus.com via your institutional subscription to that database.
actual spending was far less than what
Table 2: Outlays for Safai Karamchari-related Schemes (` crore)
201314 201415 201415 201516 201516 201617

BE
BE
Actual
BE
RE
BE
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
11
COMMENTARY
Studying Childhood in India

Krishna Kumar
A look at the various ideas

of childhood that have been
dominant in India over the past
century or so, and what they
mean for parenting, pedagogy
and politics in the new century.
This article is based on a keynote address

delivered at the seminar on Contested Sites:
Construction of Childhood held at the Indian
Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, on
26 November 2015.
Krishna Kumar (anhsirk.kumar@gmail.com)
teaches education at the Central Institute of
Education, University of Delhi.
12
ur ability to use childhood as an

analytical term depends on the
amount and type of knowledge
we possess about parenting, teaching,
childrens literature, and children themselvesboth past and present. These are
distinct areas of scholarly endeavour,
and none of them is particularly welldeveloped in our academic institutions.
So, when we discuss childhood, we must
recognise the limitations set upon our
aims by the availability of knowledge. A
major dimension of the limitations relates to the diversity of circumstances in
which childhood unfolds in our country.
Diversity is a deceptive term; it highlights attractive differences arising from
geography and culture, while seeking to
keep out of view the differences arising
from inequality rooted in economic conditions and the caste hierarchy. When
applied to childhood, diversity also tends
to place under a cover the sharp differentiation induced by culture over gender.
It may not be all that untrue to say that
when it comes to poverty and the female
gender, childhood in India is not all that
diverse. We will also have to recognise
rural and urban as categories relevant to
the study of childhood. Their relevance
is, in fact, growing as Indias modernity
passes through into increasingly impatient phases of economic development.
Indeed, we may have to recognise
new categories such as childhood under
forced displacement, just as the United
Nations has recognised childhood in difficult circumstances arising from war
and endemic violence.
Europes Child
Our contemplation on childhood in
India is likely to be framed by the dominant global discourse on the subject. Its
normative character has its uses, but it
also enforces an essentialised vision and
a compulsively comparative outlook on
our attempts to study the childhood that
surrounds us. The problem is linked

to the training that our curiosity has
received under a colonised system of education. We tend to look either for a replication of the European experience or we
yearn for reactive contrast. Colonialism
as the mother-ideology of the modern
world leaves its academic progeny with
limited options. Moreover, our discourse
is shaped by the location of our intended
audience. Any new project of knowledge
must keep these constraints in mind,
and this applies rather more to researchstarved areas like childhood.
The child, as a discourse of freedom,
individuality and equality, was born in
mid-18th century in Western Europe. This
constellation of terms lies at the heart of
pedagogic modernism and the practice
of setting childhood sharply apart from
adulthood. It was coming already for 150
years when, among others, Montessori,
and then Jean Piaget, etched the contours
of childhood. Both did it by locating the
growth of the young mind in biology.
But already, a major shift had occurred
in the study of life in relation to its environment. Behavioural study of childhood sounds simplistic and worthy of
criticism today, but it attained a major
victory over theories of inherited capacities by highlighting the role of the
environment. In a parallel development,
Freudian psychoanalysis demonstrated
the formative nature of early childhood
experience. The somewhat deterministic
explanation offered by Freud drove social
and political processes to make childrens
education and health the highest priority.
Scholarship in different academic areas
questioned the deterministic element in
Freuds theory, leading to advancements
in a range of early childhood care practices. Western debates between different
schools of theorisation about learning proceeded in early 20th century in a politically dynamic ethos shaped by democratic
struggles of different kinds. In the course
of its own political development, Europe
found many different answers to Rousseaus questioning of the idea of the loyal
citizen. Rousseaus engagement was centred in the child on whom nature had endowed freedom. How would such a child
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
be educated? This key question underlies

the history of educational progress and
the contradictions between child-centric
pedagogy and education for citizenship.
Our Colonial Context
More often than not, we fail to recognise
and appreciate these matters. Nor do we
attempt to interpret their implications
for our colonial context. And this is
not because we lack guidance. We have
had excellent teachers on this matter
teachers of the stature of Gandhi and
Tagore. Carrying forward their legacy,
Devi Prasad heard the child as a culture
in distress, craving for the means to express itself when its life had been
squeezed out of its body. As duly colonised citizens of India, we have been too
busy in national development to listen to
these teachers with attention. We do
need to study our political history more
imaginatively. If we agree to do so, we
will notice a transformative moment
when the child became a trope of independent nationhood.
This semiotic event occurred in the
1930s, after Gandhi established himself
as a magician leader who could turn
common salt into collective passion.
Idgah, a short story by Premchand, captures this moment. Its hero, a poor Muslim child, browbeats his richer neighbours by his choice of a pair of tongs over
colourful clay toys that break by the time
the children return home from a village
fair. Hamid flaunts his purchase as a super toy by imagining it in various roles,
but his grandmother is deeply touched
when he tells her that he bought it for her.
Hamids resourceful and earthy imagination, and his gift of verbal and moral fight
resonate in Gandhis style that stirred
Indias imagination with unusual symbols like salt and khadi. They connoted a
salvage archaeology aimed at reinventing a civilisation that had lost its soul.
It is no coincidence that childrens literature in Hindi and several other languages entered a prolonged spring in the
1930s. The range and quality of writing
for small children published during the
following two decades indicate a remarkable process of creative engagement with
childhood. There were different kinds of
elements in this surge. Experiment and
EPW
june 4, 2016
debate over child upbringing and education were in the air. Gandhis critique of
schooling and his proposal for a radical
version of pedagogic modernism should
be seen in this larger context. Tagore
and Gandhi made bold attempts to construct childhood with their distinct pedagogic visions and concerns. The bridge
between their thoughts that Marjorie
Sykes designed with her personal, interpretive effort is of rare significance for
anyone interested in the history of a major
discursive engagement with childhood.
Idea of Protection
European history and thought resulted
in the idea of an extended and protected
childhood. We can distinguish two facets of this idea of protection. One was
the physical protection of children from
induction into work; the other was the
protection of children from the knowledge of sexual good and evil, from the
social practice of sexuality. The first
resulted in the right of children to be
compulsorily looked after, not merely by
the family, but by an institutional apparatus managed by the state. The other
resulted in a notion of childhood as a
period of sexual innocence coinciding
with and extending the psychological stage
of latency. Many classics of European
childrens literature are steeped in this
idea and portray the innocent adventures of children enjoying a long latency.
For a colonised nation like ours, the
first aspect proved to be a difficult dilemma. The childs participation in the
familys occupational life is a fact of rural life, both for the agricultural and the
craft economy. It cannot be easily reconciled with the modern idea of prohibiting the childs involvement in income
generation. The modern state is impelled by the urge to ban all forms of
child labour so that every child can be
schooled into citizenship. But child labour has persisted and is taking new
forms, such as prostitution and domestic
servitude in cities. Compulsory education, on the other hand, is struggling to
acquire substance and meaning. The
state has failed to impart dignity to the
childs teacher, let alone the child.
The other modern parameter projects
the idea of innocence. It means the
vol lI no 23
childs isolation from sexuality during

the years of latency, and from the practice of sexuality during adolescence. Modernity for Europe meant letting children be free from sexualised imagination, to exercise their freedom to grow
into sexual beings at their own pace and
with awareness. This second aspect of
the European ideal of childhood has
contributed to the recognition of latency
as a significant period of intellectual
growth. Freedom from sexual exploitation during childhood has proved far
more elusive than freedom from participation in work.
The global discourse of childhood,
which was rooted in European thought
and experience, has made us aware that
the subject we are dealing with has many
layers, and not just many dimensions. As
one of the many societies in the world
where child marriage was the norm
barely three generations ago and is still
widely prevalent, we need to recognise
the struggle that the state and law have
to face while coping with the power of
culture. The law practises equity where
there is no equality, so it is unable to
deal with juvenile crimes in which girls
are mostly the victim.
Gendering Childhood
The study of gendering takes us to a
frontier we wrongly assume to be familiar.
The feminist movement and scholarship
have amply demonstrated how incomplete
and unbalanced the general knowledge
of childhood is. At the same time, this
radical development has given many a
sense of confidence that education will
soon set the gender balance right. My own
attempt to study the childhood of girls has
led me to recognise that our optimism is
unwarranted. In my recent book Choori
Bazaar Mein Larki, I have presented a
psycho-semiotic analysis of girls childhood.
It demonstrates the difficulties we face
when we try to include girls in a general
profile of childhood which is grounded
in the idea and images of boyhood.
Received knowledge in the area of
child development suggests that the childs
horizons widen as physical and intellectual capacities grow between the ages of
five and 11, that is, the primary school
years. In the case of girls, the curtailing
13
COMMENTARY
of their physical movement begins precisely during these years, long before
puberty sets in with its tougher regime.
Body-centric consciousness and active
denial of intellect are crucial aspects of
the socialisation of girls in the family.
Custom and ritual are implicated in the
upbringing of girls in ways that have no
parallel in the childhood of boys and
which clash with the aims of education
from the start of schooling.
To think that the girl entering the
gates of the school in her uniform leaves
behind that other girl who learns to live
all aspects of her daily existence in
accordance with custom and ritual is to
invite a fantasy to guide our analysis.
Child marriage has statistically declined, but preparing the girls mind to
hold matrimony and motherhood as
her highest goals is common, everyday
wisdom. These and numerous other
aspects of gendering make a compelling
case to say that our common construction of childhood is not compatible with
girlhood.
Caste of Childhood
Caste presents another frame that needs
to be fully incorporated into future attempts to study childhood in India. The
recognition of its strength and resilience as a social institution is yet to be
applied to the study of caste as a powerful agency of socialisation during childhood. Leela Dubes analysis of gendering points towards the role that castespecific customs and rituals might play
in the early and later parts of a girls
childhood. In the case of the boys acculturation into the caste system, there
is some knowledge available in autobiographical literature. Autobiographies
written by Dalit writers such as Om
Prakash Valmiki are valuable sources of
knowledge in the vast territory where
the school encountersor avoids
caste as a system that legitimises discriminatory practices.
There is little doubt that the role of
education as an agency of modernisation tends to get exaggerated when
we assume that an educated person will
be less caste conscious. The same can be
said about the role of urbanisation. Both
such assumptions need to be questioned
14
if the role of caste as a major agency

of socialisation during childhood is to
be fully comprehended. Such appreciation is necessary for childhood to
evolve, in the long run, as a social category in India.
Brave New World?
Before childhood could form and develop as a social category, with political
recognition a new unknown world has
overtaken our imagination. This is the
world of new information and communication technology. It has knocked down
the boundaries within which Europe
had tried to protect childhood. This episode needs careful examination because
it is so new and also because it is so firmly
embedded in the political economy of
footloose capital. Its impact on how human beings communicate and relate to
each other is being felt, but we do not
fully know its nature and impact. How
this impact is shaping adultchild relations is a similar grey area.
The new technological environment
blurs boundariesbetween nation states,
regions, cultures, and between ages.
Children can now be directly accessed
and inducted into a global community of
consumercitizens. All aspects of childhood, including play, are covered by this
new community which is managed by
global conglomerates who design video
games, toys and social media sites for

children. The elders living in the immediate vicinity of the child are no more
the only, or primary, agents responsible
for his or her socialisation.
Parents cannot anymore play the role
of protectors, nor can they set the contours of the childs knowledge. Like parents, the teacher too has less of a say in
the new order. In the technoromantic
view, this is the moment of the liberation of the child from adult control and
supervision. Children are no more citizens in the making; the state intends to
equip them for active membership of the
global marketplace long before they acquire legal citizenship of the nation. The
case of girls, once again, is somewhat
different. In the global marketplace,
they are of special interest because their
powers and patterns of consumption are
strongly linked to their own value as
objects of consumption.
The new geography of the childs
sphere of interaction makes older notions of protection and guidance meaningless. The child is back to being vulnerable in a boundless world. What this
implies for the childs physical wellbeing and for intellectual and emotional
development needs to be contemplated.
For this contemplation, we have little
guidance in the corpus of theory that
has been available so far.
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2016 and the way forward for the publication and the website.
1.
City: Mumbai
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Date: 8th July 2016 (Friday)
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Venue: India International Centre
Date: 16th July 2016 (Saturday)
Time: 3 pm to 5 pm
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City: Bengaluru
Venue: Bangalore International Centre
Date: 23rd July 2016 (Saturday)
Time: 6 pm to 8 pm
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june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
Why India Needs JNU

K L Sharma
A lifelong associate of Jawaharlal

Nehru University reflects on what
JNU means to higher education,
research, and indeed what it
means to the people of India.
K L Sharma (klsharma@hotmail.com) was

Professor of Sociology and Rector at
Jawaharlal Nehru University. At present,
he is National Fellow, Indian Council for Social
Science Research, New Delhi.
EPW
june 4, 2016
his article is somewhat autobiographical, but it is unbiased. I served Jawaharlal Nehru University
(JNU) for more than three decades
(19722004), from assistant professor to
professor at the Centre for the Study of
Social Systems (CSSS), and also as an
administrative functionary from warden
to rector (pro-vice chancellor). I was a
direct witness to the horrifying situation
of 1983, which resulted in a gherao of the
then vice chancellor, rector and registrar
for a couple of days. Indira Gandhi was
Prime Minister of India in 1983, and when
all negotiations of the JNU authorities
with the agitating students failed, she
directed the then Lieutenant Governor
of Delhi, Jag Mohan, to intervene and
take stern action. The university decided
to have no admission in 198384. After
this unfortunate incidence of 1983, the
incidence of 9 February 2016 is the second
unfortunate happening in JNU.
In February 2003, I joined the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur (on leave from
JNU), as its vice chancellor, though quite
reluctantly. Due to my love for Rajasthan,
being a native, and for my alma mater,
where I studied and taught for a while
(196170), I could not resist the temptation of being its vice chancellor.
In the 1960s and partly in the 1970s,
the University of Rajasthan was in fact a
great institution of academic excellence.
By 2003, it had become a university in
name only. The past glory and its legacy
had faded. It would, however, not be
appropriate to speak about the Rajasthan
University in this article.
After I left that university as vice
chancellor in October 2005, I spent a
year at the College de France, Paris, as
visiting faculty. I was requested to deliver
a couple of lectures on higher education
and caste, class and politics in India. I
chose to speak of JNU and the Rajasthan
University (24 November 2005 and 1 December 2005, respectively). I framed my
lecture in terms of the rise of JNU and
the fall of the Rajasthan University.
vol lI no 23
Now I will sum up my talk delivered

on 24 November 2005, on JNU, at the
College de France.
At the outset, it was stated that JNU
was established by an Act of Parliament
in 1966, for two reasons: for study and
research on modern India, and to create
an institution of academic excellence,
particularly for the social sciences, in
the wake of the decline of the universities
such as in Calcutta, Patna, Allahabad,
Lucknow, Bombay and Madras. The first
vice chancellor G Parthasarathy was
appointed in 1969, and he began to function from the Vigyan Bhawan Annexe.
The establishment of JNU was preceded
by a nationwide debate, and discussion
for more than two years, in various forums, including committees and the two
houses of Indian Parliament. Eminent
public intellectuals, educationists, judges, and thinking persons were engaged in
shaping the JNU Bill. Everyone agreed to
make JNU a unique national, liberal institution. Secularism was considered the
core of JNU. Its establishment evoked
sharp reactions too from the rightist political parties, and some of them dubbed
JNU as a den of communists/Marxists.
Some even opposed the naming of the
University as JNU. Recently, Rakesh Batabyal (2014), in his comprehensive analysis,
JNU: The Making of a University, reflected
upon the establishment of JNU.
Between 1966 and 1969 (the passing
of the act in 1966 and actual beginning
of JNU in 1969), Indira Gandhi was
Prime Minister of India. The split in the
ruling Congress Party in 1969 also
sharpened the criticism against JNU. It
was labelled as a mouthpiece of the Congress Party, a tool to promote Nehruvian
ideology and practice, and to perpetuate
the legacy of the Nehru clan. The Jan
Sangh, the socialists, and the Syndicate
(a faction of the Congress formed after
the 1969 split) joined hands as the bitter
critics of JNU. Let me mention here that
Indira Gandhi visited JNU only once,
and her presence was protested, and she
was not allowed to address the university community.
Despite all the bickering, the establishment of JNU was widely publicised,
and the media also played a significant
role in projecting JNU as a wonderful
15
COMMENTARY
experiment. It was often stated that JNU

would be Indias university, like Oxford,
Cambridge, Harvard, Chicago, etc. JNU
was essentially conceived as a research
university with a residential campus. It
was modelled on the American pattern,
whereas Delhi University continued to
follow the British structure and organisation. JNU was thought of as an institution of excellence, particularly in the
social sciences.
It would be quite proper to note that a
lot of serious academic and administrative groundwork was undertaken, for
nearly two years, between 1969 and
1971, before the beginning of the MPhil/
PhD programme in 1971 and masters
programme in 1972. During this period,
theme/white papers were prepared by the
committees of the experts for different
schools and centres. Based on the white
papers prepared, in 197172 and thereafter schools and centres were established. The expert groups, which were
formed for various disciplines, were
conceived as interdisciplinary and composite in nature. The theme papers highlighted three main points: (i) interdisciplinary approach; (ii) relevance of studies and research for progress and development of India; and (iii) liberal ambience for discussions and debates, and a
dialogical interaction between teachers
and students.
Though JNU has nearly 10 schools and
more than 40 centres and special centres, having studies and research in languages, social sciences, international relations, life sciences, environmental science, computer and physical sciences,
etc, JNU is best known for excellence in
the social sciences. A galaxy of scholars
have adorned the corridors of this unique
institution. It is not necessary to name
them here; the list is too long.
Institutional Practices
It may be stated that JNU has not earned
its fame merely based on the positions
held by its faculty and students outside
the campus. The most important factor
is the nature of functioning of the centres, schools, the Academic Council, research boards, and committees of advanced studies and research. I am not
referring here to other two bodies,
16
namely, the Executive Council and the

Finance Committee as they are concerned
mainly with administrative and financial
matters. In JNU, the composition of these
bodies is important as faculty presence
in these bodies is quite substantial. Of
all these bodies, the centre (conventionally a department) is a key organ, where
all faculty members, irrespective of their
ranks, participate in discussions and
decisions, even in routine and day-today matters. The annual meeting of a
centre, besides the faculty, has four
other members, two from other centres
of the university and two from outside
the university. Such a norm in regard
to composition of university bodies has
been appreciated by one and all. No politicians/bureaucrats are members of the
university bodies, except the court, which
is, in fact, more of an ornamental body,
and meets only once in a year, and its
meeting is chaired by the chancellor.
JNU is in fact an egalitarian, democratic and transparent university. Though,
there are formal ranks, such as professor, associate professor and assistant
professor, in practice, sharing of teaching and guidance of research is on an
equal basis. JNU has a teacher-centric
and student-friendly ambience. The semester system is practised in both letter
and spirit. A student is kept busy by way
of an ongoing continuous studies, and
evaluation, during the semester, by way
of tutorials, term-papers/seminars, midsemester tests, and finally at the end of
semester by end-semester tests. A student
is, in fact, made capable for: (i) writing,
(ii) oral presentation/articulation, and
(iii) disciplinary understanding. A large
number of students coming from rural
areas, backward regions and weaker
sections greatly benefit from such a praxis
of studies. Every teacher is required to
have a fixed contact hour to provide
guidance to students. Attendance for
students is not compulsory. But then,
generally most students attend lectures,
and even at times there are more students
attending lectures as some of them are
from other disciplines/centres.
Students are admitted through an
entrance test for masters programmes,
and for MPhil/PhD programmes through
both written test and interview. Faculty
members are involved in the process of

admission and evaluation. Since students
in JNU are from all over India, one can see
a mini-India on the roadside, in hostels,
and at its dhabas and shopping centres.
The students who find it difficult to cope
with studies are given the benefits of
advisory system, remedial courses to improve their performance.
The Public University
The presence of JNU in the public shows
relevance of teaching and research done
by its faculty in regard to ruralurban
networks, labour, peasants and farmers,
agrarian change, politics, diplomacy, economy, caste, ethnicity, religion, biotechnology, genetic engineering, environmental issues, development processes, etc.
Going by this yardstick, we can say that
there is presence of the public in JNU.
But I always wondered why there
were no students from the adjoining villages, like Munirka, Ber Sarai, Masoodpur, Mohammedpur, at JNU. I did not find
even one student at CSSS during 1972
2003. There are economically well-off
people in these villages, but they hardly
have an understanding about JNU. Ordinary villagers from Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh knew a
lot about JNU, and aspire to get their
wards educated at JNU. Living in a village in the heart of Delhi does not imply
more awareness about sociopolitical issues and career options and ambitions
than those who live in remoter areas.
Reactions of Munirkas rentiers against
JNU students are indicative of their ignorance about JNU and its role in higher
education in India.
There is an invisible but positive feeling of fair competition for success and
excellence among students and faculty
of JNU. Students spend long hours at the
library. They often engage themselves in
debates and discussions in hostels, dhabas
and seminar halls. Discussions are at
two levels: (i) on philosophies and ideologies, ranging from Marxism, functionalism, structuralism, modernity and
post-modernity, and (ii) on public issues,
happenings and events. Students also
bring out (often handwritten) pamphlets,
posters and write-ups on the current
topics and issues, ranging from an Indian
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
village to international happenings and

events. In this exercise, including elections of the Students Union, there is no
role of JNUs administration or outside
organisations/political outfits. The students do have affinities towards certain
political parties. Thus, JNU is a training
ground for personality formation and
citizenship building. Students of JNU
learn a lot more from its ambience than
from formal classroom lectures.
JNUs residential pattern is a mixed one,
as hostels, faculty residences and academic complexes are in close proximity,
and are not as segregated enclaves.
Everyone is passionate for his/her fellow
students, faculty members, and for JNU as
his/her own home. Teachers generally
know the students attending their lectures.
Government Non-interference
There has never been interferences in
the functioning of JNU by the government, except once when Prime Minister
Morarji Desai instituted an enquiry on
JNU, but that did not take off. The move
did not work as the students, karamcharis and faculty members unitedly
opposed such an unwarranted action
against the autonomy of the university.
The communitarian character of JNU
has been demonstrated from time to
time, whenever its basic organisation
and ethos have been challenged. The
former students of JNU, spread all over
the country and in different parts of the
world even after decades show a great
affinity and nostalgia for their alma
mater. Recently, more than 500 JNU
alumni, living abroad, expressed their
concern on account of the happenings in
February 2016. In an article, my colleague Rajat Datta (2016: 1013) stated
those salient features of JNU, which have
made it a distinct institution. According
to Datta, the guiding principles of JNU
are: humanism, tolerance, reason and
adventure of ideas. Students interact
freely on academic and non-academic issues. Freedom of expression and criticism are embedded in this great institution. Datta rightly says that JNU is an island, but not isolated. As I have stated
earlier, JNU is in the public and the
public is in JNU. I wish there could be
several islands of the kind in India.
EPW
june 4, 2016
The great universities, like Oxford,

Cambridge, Princeton, Chicago, Columbia, California, and institutions, like
College de France, London School of Economics, and many others have survived
for centuries with excellence because of
their pursuit for knowledge and concern
for human values. JNU is perhaps the
only university in India of academic
excellence, nationally, of course, and
internationally. In 2015, I was delighted
to know that the CSSS was ranked number one in India and number 59th all
over the world for its quality of teaching
and research. This year again, it is
number one in India and 52nd in the
world. This is because, the centre has
made significant contributions to the
understanding of weaker sections, Dalits,
women, caste, ethnicity, nature and
direction of social change, social movements, etc.
Institution of Higher Education
A university is not a factory, it is a social
institution with a cultural and human
ethos. It cannot be measured in terms of
its budget allocation, or taxes spent on
it. It creates and recreates a social stock
of knowledge. It questions the given
notions and frameworks, and works for
a modified and new system of knowledge.
The state and its political and administrative organs need to think about the
decline of higher education in India in
general, and of the great universities of
the yesteryears in particular. For sample,
the University of Rajasthan enjoyed a
very high academic reputation in the
1960s. Exodus of eminent scholars from
there to JNU in the first half of 1970s is
evidence of the attraction for JNU and
disenchantment with the Rajasthan University. This was mainly due to political
interference and lack of concern for the
autonomy of the University of Rajasthan.
Unionism, casteism and political interference influenced the functioning of
the university. Today, even the traces of
the past glory are invisible. Studies and
research have gone into the background
and politics of students, teachers and
karamcharis is in the forefront. Instead
of attacking JNU, the government needs
to see why and how the rot has occurred
on the campuses in India.
vol lI no 23
Let JNU remain as it has been so far.

It is a boon to the academic world, and a
source of inspiration for those who wish
to move up in academics in particular
and in their lives in general. I worked at
JNU, quite successfully, in academics
and also in administrative roles, without having any ideological godfather or
a patron. If someone is true to his/her
position and functioning, nobody becomes
an obstacle in JNU. A couple of colleagues
used to openly criticise, on ideological
grounds, senior professors, including vice
chancellors, but they were never harmed
on the basis of such a standpoint.
To conclude, the question is not
whether JNU is a breeding ground for
one or other ideology or a place for visits by leaders of particular parties. The
point is that JNU is truly a modern university, providing space for its students,
faculty and staff. Mahadevi Verma,
Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Gopichand
Narang, Bhimsen Joshi, Ravi Shankar, Raj
Narain, Chandra Shekhar, I Wallerstein,
J Derrida, E P Thompson, and many
litterateurs, scholars, artists and politicians have visited JNU since its inception. Therefore, the visits on 9 February
2016 by leaders of Congress, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Bharatiya
Janata Party and others are not so important for JNU as they have been made
out by the media and political parties
for the reasons best known to them
alone. More important is the need to
safeguard JNU as an institution of higher
education.
REFERENCES
Batabyal, Rakesh (2014): JNU: The Making of a University, New Delhi: Harper-Collins Publishers,
India.
Datta, Rajat (2016): The Spring of 2016 and the
Idea of JNU, Economic & Political Weekly,
Vol 51, No 9, pp 1013.
Attention ContributorsI
The EPW has been sending reprints of articles
to authors. We are now discontinuing the
practice. We will consider sending a limited
number of reprints to authors located in India
when they make specific requests to us.
We will, of course, continue to send a copy of
the print edition to all our authors whose
contributions appear in that particular edition.
17
COMMENTARY
Draft Guidelines for Safe

Handling of Nanomaterials
Indrani Barpujari
A look at the draft guidelines on

regulation of nanotechnology
in India brought out by the
Department of Science and
Technology through the Nano
Mission in the context of the
discourse on this subject abroad
as well as in India.
Indrani Barpujari (indranib22@gmail.com)

is Advisor (Governance) at the Atal Bihari
Vajpayee Institute of Good Governance and
Policy Analysis, Bhopal. She was with the
Energy and Resources Institute and is the
author of numerous publications dealing with
nanotechnology regulation in India.
18
t is indeed laudable that as a first

step towards regulation of nanotechnology in India, the Nano Mission
under the Department of Science and
Technology has come out with the draft
Guidelines and Best Practices for Safe
Handling of Nanomaterials in Research
Laboratories and Industries. Taking cognisance of the imperative for safe handling of nanomaterials, the Nano Mission
has constituted a task force consisting of
eminent experts who have prepared this
document. Involving the control of matter
at the nanoscale, nanomaterials are characterised by small dimensions, large surface area, and high reactivity which while
making them amenable to a large variety
of applications in various sectors also render them potentially dangerous for human health and environmental safety,
with considerable scientific uncertainty
regarding the risks. Nanotechnology presents before policymakers a classic case of
Collingridge dilemma or a dilemma of
control with policy decisions required to
be taken on the basis of uncertain scientific facts and under conditions of some
urgency. It is the unique combination of
high expectations and huge uncertainties (Van Lente 2010) associated with nanotechnology which has provided the required thrust for the current guidelines.
The draft guidelines, basically intended
as standard operating procedure (SOP) for
handling nanomaterials in research laboratories and industries, prescribe a combination of engineering controls, work practices and personal protective equipment
as part of a robust exposure control strategy. These lay down the process for identifying hazards, taking note of the specific
effect of surface chemistry, shape, size
and morphology on toxicity caused to
various organs. These address the potential exposure pathways and concomitant
safety measures to mitigate the same.
While prescribing certain best practices
for handling nanomaterials generally, the
guidelines also lay down another set of

best practices specifically pertaining to
the making and handling of nanopowders
and use of products relating to food and
healthcare. A precautionary approach is
advocated with detailed life cycle assessment and strong binding procedures
with respect to stakeholder involvement
for various players while formulating best
practices in the food sector particularly.
While the draft guidelines as a first
step cover reasonable ground, it may be
relevant to look at these in the context of
the discourse on nanotechnology regulation abroad as well as in India. The
focus of modern risk societies being more
on manufactured risks or risks which
are the product of human activity (Giddens 1999), governments, particularly in
the developed world, are increasingly
realising the need for risk-based regulation, to address potential risks from
emerging technologies like nanotechnology, while promoting their development.
Preliminary steps have been taken to
regulate nanotechnology despite the admitted difficulty in doing so owing to the
scientific uncertainty regarding its risks
and limited amenability to traditional
risk management approaches (Schummer and Pariotti 2008).
A consensus has been arrived at that
nanomaterials may be treated as a new
chemical, coming under the regulatory
purview of the European Unions (EU)
REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals),
the Toxics Release Inventory of the US
and other similar frameworks. Also, in
comparison to other emerging technologies such as agricultural biotechnology,
nanotechnology has been characterised
in the developed world by the emergence
of what Kaiser et al (2010) refer to as an
assessment regime, characterised by an
increasing demand for democratisation of
science and technology and hybrid governance, increased recognition of the
responsibility and accountability of science towards society as well as an epistemic shift from manufacturing socially
robust knowledge to the fabrication of
sustainable innovations. It is also characterised by increased demand for public
engagement and incorporating societal
concerns (Karinen and Guston 2010).
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
Thus, it may be surmised that the developed worlds engagement with nanotechnology to harness its benefits has
been characterised by an almost unprecedented focus on regulating its risks and
developing an anticipatory governance
framework, taking on board different
stakeholders including the public and
incorporating societal concerns. On the
other hand, with an almost single-minded
focus on promotion in the initial years,
the official pursuit of nanotechnology in
India has not accorded much priority to
its potential risks with the result than a
large number of nano-based products
are already out in the markets, without
any regulation (Barpujari 2011a). In
India, the government is the primary
promoter of nanotechnology, pursued
under the mission on nanoscience and
technology (Nano Mission) with a huge
budget outlay targeted at the development of nano-applications and creating
adequate infrastructural and human
capabilities for this purpose.
The Indian scientific establishment has
high expectations from nanotechnology,
with the technology expected to help
meet the development needs of the country, while also positioning India as a forerunner in the global arena. Srivastava and
Chowdhury (2008) observe that Indian
scientists at the helm of affairs perceive
that Indian science should not lose out
on this opportunity to establish itself as
a global leader and that it should not
miss the bus as it did during the previous semiconductor revolution. Sahoo and
Deshpande Sarmas (2010) survey on risk
perceptions among thirty scientists working in public-funded scientific institutions/laboratories indicate that Indian
scientists are not very much perturbed by
the risks of nanotechnology, and few take
special precautions while working with
nanomaterials, while very few are interested in taking up risk research.
The fact that the policy establishment is
yet to take into serious consideration the
potential risks of the technology is also
evident from the low priority accorded to
risk research, which should precede regulation. A very small number of projects
are being publicly funded to look into
toxicity issues, and there is almost no engagement with the social sciences and
EPW
june 4, 2016
humanities, as evidenced by the lack of

government funding for such studies.
At the same time, it must be acknowledged that different stakeholders in India
particularly policy researchers, civil society
actors and research institutions pursuing
risk research have been persistently making the case for nanotechnology regulation in the country and taken the lead in
charting the way ahead. It is acknowledged that problems in developing riskbased regulation are particularly compounded for a developing country like India, owing to a lack of resources, expertise
and regulatory mandate. The absence of
regulation, it is anticipated, would be even
worse as in the event of some of the risks
materialising, developing countries would
be ill-equipped to handle and mitigate
these (Barpujari 2011b).
Particularly noteworthy is a regulatory
matrix for India developed by TERI (2009)
comprising several central legislation,
rules and notifications which could have
relevance for regulation of environmental
risks, occupational health and safety risks
arising from nanotechnology development and applications in India. Another
report (TERI 2012) has provided leads for
adopting a precautionary approach and
developing an anticipatory regulatory
framework for nanotechnology in the
South Asian region, taking the particular
case of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
The Way Ahead
It is, indeed, a welcome move that after
years of inaction on the front of regulation while promotion and production has
gone from strength to strength, the Nano
Mission has released the draft guidelines.
These are intended, however, as only an
interim reference, as the guidelines
themselves state till a comprehensive
regulatory framework is put in place.
Thus, the draft guidelines constitute just a
small beginning and the task force will
have considerable work on its hands in the
next few years to lay down even the preliminary groundwork for nano-regulation.
With respect to leads for the nature of
future regulation, a tentative suggestion is
offered in the draft guidelines that
nanomaterials could be treated as chemical substances with regulation following
the direction of EUREACH.
vol lI no 23
The EU has advocated an incremental

approach deeming a separate regulatory
framework infeasible, with the best
recourse being to use existing legislative
structures to the maximum, revisit them
and where appropriate, amend them in
order to deal with nanomaterials (European Commission 2004). A similar approach may work well for India taking the
particular case of the Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical
Rules, 1989 enacted under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, which is the
primary legislation governing chemicals
in India. The Chemical Rules could be applied to nanomaterials but would require
substantial amendments, as at the moment, nanomaterials do not activate the
regulatory trigger (Barpujari 2011b). However, while treating nanomaterials as a
new chemical has become an accepted
practice, nanomaterials are not a uniform
class of materials (Royal Commission on
Environmental Pollution 2008) and hence,
may require to be regulated on a case-bycase basis, imposing a heavy burden on
the regulatory structure. Apart from the
chemicals legislation, the incremental approach may be applied to other relevant
laws applicable to nanotechnology development and applications under various
heads such as production and marketing,
occupation health and safety, environmental health, waste disposal, etc.
In addition to command and control
regulation, a number of other approaches
such as voluntary or self-regulation and informational regulation could help circumvent the challenges posed by the former.
Informational regulation could begin with
adaptation of existing information obligations under different Indian legislation and
would require no government action apart
from obliging facilities to disclose information, which is expected to be acted upon by
a third party (consumers and civil society)
creating pressure on the creator of the
social costs to consider voluntary action to
reduce it. However, many of these provisions would also require substantial
amendments to serve the purpose of
soliciting pertinent information about
nanotechnology (Barpujari 2011b). While
regulation can deal to some extent with the
uncertainties with respect to the risks to
human health and environment, there are
19
COMMENTARY
also apprehensions about future technological performance, actual demand for

the new product or process and its market, acceptance by the public as well as
ethical concerns. Enhanced public engagement, participation of civil society
organisations, increased focus and funding on risk research as a multidimensional issue and from a multidisciplinary perspective would be important strategies in
dealing with the latter.
Finally, it may be emphasised that
emerging technologies like nanotechnology create the conditions of what
Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993) calls postnormal science where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and
decisions urgent. This requires, according to them, acceptance of uncertainty,
welcoming the diversity and an extended
peer community consisting of all stakeholders to provide pluralistic inputs to
the policy process. Further, such technologies demand, according to Jasanoff
(2003), a shift from technologies of
hubrispredictive methods focusing on
20
the known to adoption of technologies

of humility by policymakers built around
the central points of framing, vulnerability, distribution and learning.
References
Barpujari, Indrani (2011a): Public Engagement in
Emerging Technologies: Issues for India, Quantum Engagements: Social Reflections of
Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies, Torben B
Zulsdorf, Christopher Coenen, Arianna Ferrari,
Ulrich Fiedeler, Colin Milburn and Mathias Wienroth (eds), Heidelberg: AKA GmbH, pp 12338.
(2011b): Attenuating Risks through Regulation:
Issues for Nanotechnology in India, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, Vol 7, No 1, pp 8586.
European Commission (2004): Nanotechnologies: A
Preliminary Risk Analysis on the Basis of a Workshop Organised in Brussels on 12 March 2004,
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_risk/documents/ev
_20040301_en.pdf, accessed on 22 February 2016.
Funtowicz, Silvio O and Jerome R Ravetz (1993):
Science for the Post Normal Age, Futures,
Vol 25, No 7, pp 73955.
Giddens, Anthony (1999): Runaway World, BBC
Reith Lectures, http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/
rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1999_reith1.pdf,
accessed on 19 February 2016.
Jasanoff, Sheila (2003): Technologies of Humility:
Citizen Participation in Governing Science,
Minerva, 41, pp 22344.
Karinen, Risto and David H Guston (2010): Towards Anticipatory Governance: The Experience with Nanotechnology, Governing Future
Technologies: Nanotechnology and the Rise of an
Assessment Regime, Kaiser, Mario, Monica Kurath,

Sabine Maasen and Christoph Rehmann-Sutter
(eds), Springer.
Kaiser, Mario, Monica Kurath, Sabine Maasen and
Christoph Rehmann-Sutter (2010): Governing
Future Technologies: Nanotechnology and the Rise
of an Assessment Regime, Springer.
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
(2008): Novel Materials in the Environment:
The Case of Nanotechnology: Summary of the
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollutions
Report, London: Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
Sahoo, Subhasis and Shilpanjali D Sarma (2010):
Nanotechnology, Scientists and Perceptions: A
View from the Field (Report), New Delhi: TERI.
Schummer, Joachim and Elena Pariotti (2008):
Regulating Nanotechnolgies: Risk Management Models and Nanomedicine, Nanoethics,
Vol 2, No 1, pp 3942.
Srivastava, Nidhi and Nupur Chowdhury (2008):
Regulation of Health Related Nano Applications in India: Exploring Limitations of the
Current Regulatory Design, paper presented
at the International Conference on Mapping
the Uncertainty of Nanotechnology Challenges
to Law, Ethics and Policy Making held on 2224
May at the University of Padua, Italy.
TERI (2009): Report on Regulatory Challenges Posed
by Nanotechnology Developments in India, New
Delhi: TERI.
(2012): Evolving an Anticipatory Regulatory Framework for Nanotechnology: Some Issues for India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (Report), New Delhi: TERI.
Van Lente, Harro (2010): Supporting and Evaluating
Emerging Technologies: A Review of Approaches,
International Journal of Technology Policy and
Management, Vol 10, No 1/2, pp 10415.
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
Satnam (19522016)
The Most Terrible Is the Death of Dreams
Vishav Bharti
A tribute to Satnam, a dreamer

living under many identitiesan
underground communist, an
employees leader, a leader of
migrant workers in Ludhiana,
a democratic rights activist, a
political commentator, a fine
translator, a poet, a writerwith
a dream to make this world
more beautiful.
Vishav Bharti (vishavbharti@gmail.com)

translated Jangalnama into English. He is a
journalist with Tribune, Chandigarh.
20
f you do not dream, you are dead,

he said to me that beautiful monsoon
night six years ago. Perhaps this greyhaired man was one of the few who have
not let their dreams die. But men do die.
Activist and author of the famous travelogue Jangalnama: Travels in a Maoist
Guerrilla Zone (2010; first published in
2004 in Punjabi), ended his life on 28
April 2016. He was 64. And, in his death,
Punjab has lost a lot. Not many knew
him as Satnam till 2004. This was the
year his celebrated work Jangalnama
reached Punjabi readers.
But, before that, for four and a half
decades, he had lived under many identities. As an underground communist, an
employees leader, a leader of migrant
workers in Ludhiana, a democratic rights
activist, a political commentator (who
would write an unconventional obituary

of Yasser Arafat), a fine translator who
gave Karl Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Howard
Fasts Spartacus to Punjabi readers, a
poet, a writer who wrote under different
pseudonyms, and so on. In each identity,
he had one dream: to make this world
more beautiful.
He was Gurmeet for his mother, but
he had shed the name long ago, in the
1970s, when he, as a student at Khalsa
College, left home in Amritsar to the join
the Naxalite movement. For the readers
of Peoples March, he was G Fellow, who
would write beautifully on West Asia
and nationality issues, while the Gond
tribals of Bastarhis favourite place to
travel toknew him as Ishwar Dada.
Writing Bastar
It was when Jangalnama, a travelogue
that captures the epic struggle of the
Gond tribals of Bastar against the might
of the Indian state, came into the hands
of Punjabi readers that they took notice
of the man. Published under the pseudonym Satnam, he had not been part of
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
any literary society or literary caucus.

But, the book had startled readers.
His dream to make a beautiful world
landed him among the Gond tribals in the
jungles of Bastar in 2001. Till then, Bastar
was still seen through the portrayal of anthropologist Verrier Elwin or the occasional
newspaper headlines of Maoists ambushes. For nearly two months, he walked on
serpentine tracks with Maoist guerrillas.
He could see dreams in their eyes. He was
witness to the breaking of a new dawn, a
new fight over jal, jangal aur zameen. He
came up with Jangalnama, after which the
Maoists struggle was understood beyond
the ambushes and IED (improvised explosive device) blasts. But, I never visited
Bastar with an idea to write something,
Satnam would often say.
It was two years later that while reading
something it occurred to him that he can
also write about Bastar. Thus, the book was
written in 12 days flat in 2003, when he
was busy with the editorial responsibility
of Peoples March in a two-room apartment
in a basti in Delhi. In 2003, he handed me
a bunch of handwritten papers and said I
have written something. I was amazed to
read that beautiful portrayal. I am glad I
was the first reader of Jangalnama, recalls Buta Singh, his comrade and the leftleaning publisher in Punjab who later got
the book published. Jnanpith awardee
Gurdial Singh was one of the first writers
to hail the stunning work by an author
he had never heard of before.
Around two years later, Penguin commissioned me to do the English translation
of the book. I knew it was not an easy task,
for the writer loved words, sentences were
his passion, and he was an eternal storyteller. It was not easy to satisfy him, especially when he could write with as much
ease in Punjabi as he could in English. I did
not know what I lost during the translation, but after reading the unedited draft,
he wrote back to me: Dear Vishav, all the
congrats in the world. Never thought that
such a beautiful translation would happen. No more words. Gamzatov will be
happy that there is no rape of the language
in this case.
Red and Expert
Jangalnama did not push only the boundaries of Punjabi literature. When it was
EPW
june 4, 2016
published in English in 2010, literary critics called it Indias answer to Edgar Snows
seminal work Red Star Over China.
However, for the establishment of the
largest democracy, he remained a perpetrator of the gravest internal security
threat faced by the nation, of Left-wing
extremism (Indian Express 2010). But, to
people who knew him, he was their darling. He was the one who would speak for
hours about the uniqueness of human relations, the beauty of stars, the music of the
falling leaves, the songs of the birds, the
need for struggle. And, then, he would say
our struggle is to make them more beautiful: So that every child born on this planet
can enjoy that beauty.
Satnam was an uncommon combination of intellect and activism. He describes the phenomenon of intellect and
activism in Jangalnama, thus:
Red and Expertthese two words became
famous and known in every part of the world
during Chinas Cultural Revolution (1966
76) and greatly influenced the educated generation of that time. But as the movement
began to lose colour, these words also slowly
lost their sheen. With the passage of time,
the Red was overtaken by the Expert until,
finally, only the Expert prevailed and the
communist vanished (2010: 67).
However, Satnam remained red as well

as an expert till his last breath; the expert
who refused to compromise with his ideas.
His comrades recount that when Khalistani
Kalashnikovs were at their peak, killing
Hindus in Punjab in the 1980s, he cut his
hair and removed his turban and said I will
roam in villages like that, let them kill me.
In his last days, he had started wearing the
skullcap worn by Muslims and would also
visit the masjid sometimes. When a comrade questioned this act, he said, now they
are killing Muslims, let me show them that
the Muslims numbers are increasing.
Of Daydreamers
Satnam had beautiful dreams for this
world, but refused to sell those dreams for
fame. A sceptic called it daydreaming.
But, he had himself penned the answer to
that in Jangalnama, where he tells the
tale of a young tribal fighter, Aetu:
of development through self-reliance and

indigenous resources (2010: 37).
Satnam talks about the dreams of Aetu

and of the worries of growing up for children
like Lachcha and Kanna in Bastar. They are
watching the moving of the mountain in
front of their own eyes, they are watching
the myth turning into reality (2010: 4950).
He also sees dreams in the eyes of Rajni,
who sings Dilli nanghna (Conquering
Delhi) despite being unaware of the distance between Delhi and Bastar. He calls it
a song of commitment, desire and passion.
Satnam gave words to the world of
Srikant and his comrades:
They want to reach out in all directions, but
with so little power in their hands, how would
it be possible? I have often wondered whether
a tiny force could influence millions of people!
But they believe that it will happen, that this
is how history is made. They consider themselves the seeds of a new future. Their selfconfidence is unshakablethey are determined to overcome every barrier. They quote
examples from history, of people who have
succeeded on this path and they vow to set a
new example The purity and conviction of
their aim gives them the courage to look death
in the eye. They love life but dont care about
death Such are these people, such are their
dreams and such is their life (2010: 7576).
Satnams dreams were no different than

those of Srikant. Amid the governments
fresh offensive, Mission 2016, Srikant is
still standing tall in the war zone of Bastar,
but his storyteller Satnam is no more
among us. Young boys and girls of Bastar
will miss Ishwar Dada, but he will live on
in the dreams of Srikant, Lachchakka,
Aetu, and many more whose dreams he
immortalised in Jangalnama.
Postscript
Satnam visited Bastar again at the peak of
Salwa Judum in 2006. In those days, he
was writing the sequel to Jangalnama in
English. In his last days, Satnam had turned
his every work, including the sequel, into
ash. Perhaps, he forgot about the one copy
that he gave me six years ago for editing.
That manuscript is still with me. The story
survived. And, so will the dreams. Because
even if men die, their dreams do not.
References
Aetu is no Sheikh Chilli, nor is he a day

dreamer. But yes, he is a dreamer, who has
definite plans for turning his thoughts into
realityhe wants to utilize forest produce
within the jungle itself. It is a great dream
vol lI no 23
Indian Express (2010): Naxalism Gravest Internal

Security Threat to Nation: PM, 21 April.
Satnam (2010): Jangalnama: Travels in a Maoist
Guerrilla Zone, Trans Vishav Bharti, New Delhi: Penguin Books.
21
COMMENTARY
Bringing Space Alive

Doreen Masseys World of Connected
Geography
have belonged to that comfortable

part of England in terms of obeying the
same laws and observing the same customs, though [t]his part of England,
and its little villages and grander estates,
represents (one face of) the enemy.
Massey expresses similar emotions about
her stay in Oxford.
Mallarika Sinha Roy
Doreen Massey (19442016), the

feminist geographer who passed
away recently, rued that space
was always treated like a residual
category in the social sciences.
The time has come to engage with
her multidimensional oeuvre and
reclaim space as a strictly
political category.
he centrality of politics in Doreen

Masseys intellectual and institutional life makes her a scholar extraordinaire. Her work, spanning nearly
half a century, combined academics and
activism in an exemplary manner. Massey belonged to the generation of Marxist scholars in the United Kingdom who
enlivened the intellectual debates in the
1970s. She was born to parents with little formal education in Manchester in
1944 and as a gifted student went to the
St Hughs College at Oxford. In her professional academic life she remained the
professor of geography at the Open University in London from 1982 to 2009 and
as an emeritus professor until her death
in March 2016.
Not Belonging
David Featherstone (2016) wrote in her
obituary, Her many honours included
the Prix Vautrin Lud, regarded as geographys Nobel prize, though she declined
the offer of being appointed OBE. Her
belongingness to the nation she was
born in was fraught with a sharp sense
of inequality. Massey wrote, much later
in her life, while doing a project on the
landscape, space, and politics of England, when she had to travel through
leafy counties of England,
along smooth roads, and lanes, and through
small contented villages. These are the elements of this landscape that are normally
taken as iconic of this part of England. Indeed often enough as iconic of England tout
court...The landscape of these villages is supposed to stand for me, in the classic iconography of the nation. Yet I feel utterly and totallyand both wilfully and notexcluded
from it. It is a matter, overwhelmingly, of
class: I come from Wythenshawe, a large
council estate in Manchester (2008).
Mallarika Sinha Roy (msroy@jnu.ac.in)

teaches at the Centre for Womens Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
22
I had felt the same thing while at Oxford

University and had the same wrestle there,
agog at the beauty of Radcliffe Square in
the lamplight at night and angry and alienated at what it stood for. Feeling like a space
invader. These are the wrenchings of a displacement effected by class. They reverse the
terms of the usual question of belonging in
relation to place and landscape. Rather than
that dwelling-saturated question of our belonging to a place, we should be asking the
question of to whom this place belongs. Who
owns it? Materially, and in terms of power,
the national working class (of whatever
ethnic origin) has no more ownership than
does the recent migrant (2008).
She further explains that she might

have become part of the democratic institutions of the country and she might
She participated in the support groups

for the Miners Strike in Thatchers Britain in 198485, worked with the Greater
London Council in the 1980s, visited Nicaragua in the mid-1980s to learn from
the Sandinistas, and shared her concept
of geometries of power with Hugo
Chavez for the Bolivian Revolution. Massey co-founded a journalSoundings
with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin in
1995. She also took her role as a public
intellectual seriously and had spoken
regularly in radio programmes and other
public forums about her work.
Grounding Geography
In an interview with Social Science Bites
in 2013, she begins her answer to the
questionSo, in your own work about
space what do you focus on?, by saying
that she had been angry at all social sciences, especially philosophy, for giving
more attention to time than space and
treating space almost as a residual category. Her work has been concentrated
on bringing space aliveto explain how
the dimension of multiplicity actualises
space as organisations of societies we
live in, and to pose the most fundamental
of political questions, which is, how we
are going to live together (Social Science
Bites 2013).
This clarity in defining politics is what
makes Masseys essays like A Global
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
Sense of Place (1994) a compelling read

for everyone interested in understanding how networks of social relations are
grounded in geographies of mobility,
identity, and labour. Her conceptualisation of power geometries of space and
time indicates the ways in which her
work was deeply engaged with the spatial
formations of inequality along the lines of
class, ethnicity, and gender.
The political nature of her work shines
through her engagement with dichotomies, especially that of space and place
and space and time, and has travelled
to the Indian intellectual scene in an
eclectic but effective way.
Saraswati Raju, one of the first generation feminist geographers in India, says
that her own research on gendered geographies began with the spatial turn in
social sciences in the 1980s and scholars
like David Harvey and Edward Soja
were as influential as Massey in theorising space and place beyond empirical
data. Raju says that though her own
work on gendered space and place in
South Asia has been influenced by Masseys conceptualisations, she had also
done a critical reading of Masseys take
on the dichotomy between space and
place (Raju 2011).
Imagining Power in Places
It is important, at this point, to take a close
look at the ways in which Massey made
her interventions in the debates on space
and place. In Geographies of Responsibility (Massey 2004), she argues that
notwithstanding the significance of local
agencies and the immediacy of place in
reimagining the relationship between
space and place, it will be erroneous to attach the same significance of locality to all
places since places are also connected
through geometries of power. Put bluntly, she argues, there is far more purchase
in some places than in others on the levers
of globalisation (Massey 2004: 11).
Her emphasis on the network of discrete places, which forms the global
space, does not elide the fact that the
hierarchy among places is not often recognised by theorists of space and place,
and even occasionally missed by theorists
of the local and the global. Citing Bruno
Latours example of the railways in We
EPW
june 4, 2016
Have Never Been Modern (1993) Massey

points out how selective amnesia of globalisation functions in terms of the sites of
postcolonial locality (Massey 2004: 8).
She repeatedly argues for a connected but
discrete embodiment of places to map the
flows of capital and labour, and such mapping lies at the centre of her imagination
of the geometries of power.
trenchant critique of the present form of

globalisation especially in the context of
the financial meltdown in 200708
(Hall et al 2013). Though Massey has
almost never referred to India specifically in her work, Sen maintains that her
concepts of spatial network in relation to
political economy have great potential
in interpreting how India is responding
to neo-liberal market capitalism.
Globalisation and Gender

Economic geographer Sucharita Sen is
especially appreciative of Masseys positioning between Marxist and feminist
geography and covering of a middle ground between postmodern gender geography and the Marxist geography of
David Harvey and Neil Smith. Sen is of
the opinion that Massey was a frontrunner in rescuing geography from dry
empiricism and her enormous contribution in terms of theorising space has
invigorated many geography classroom
discussions.
The larger understanding of gender,
space, and labour that Massey (1984)
offers, Sen argues, can become extremely
useful in understanding womens work,
womens work-related migration, and
gendered dimensions of urbanisation in
contemporary India. Masseys entry point
to feminist geography is through Marxist economic geography and her later
works have focused principally on the
nature of neo-liberal policies and their
impact on the working class, poor, migrant sections of the society.
World City (2007) tracks the changing
patterns of class relations and inequality
in London as it turns into a city of dreadful delights by the turn of 20th century.
One of her last projects, After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto (2013),
which she edited along with Stuart Hall
and Michael Rustin, puts forward a
Relations of Power
In the opening pages of her Space, Place,
and Gender (1994) Massey comments
that the spatial is political in its broadest
sense. The book goes on to argue that
the geographical variation is a significant element in the construction of
gender relations for its crucial role in
production and reproduction of imaginative spaces and uneven development.
Space, Place and Gender was a culminating
point of feminist geography which foregrounded gender as an analytical point
of view to make sense of the spatial. The
understanding of gendered space attains
a critical force when Massey (1994: 6)
spells out, It is, moreover, time which is
typically coded masculine and space,
being absence or lack, as feminine.
Unpacking the gender code inherent
in the conceptualisation of space and time,
Massey moves towards an understanding of the relations of power within the
simultaneity of spacetime. In doing so
she brings together the dynamism of
time with the multiplicity of space. Her
engagements with space and place in
regional, national, and local framings
continuously challenge fixed definitions
of geographical boundaries, focus on the
mobility of social relations, and never
actually lose sight of the politics of gender relations in making meanings for
space and place.
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vol lI no 23
23
COMMENTARY
Masseys intellectual oeuvre, thus, goes

beyond the disciplinary boundaries of geography and attracts scholars and learners from varied backgrounds to her world
of politicised space, geographies of identity and labour, and histories of place. Massey drew from works of anthropologists,
literary critics, political theorists, philosophers, and sociologists. Her analyses put
these specialised academic accounts in
conversation with one another with a remarkable ease. Such a feat seems unachievable in the laboured glossaries on
interdisciplinary methodology. In addition to the contents of her work, the structure and texture of Masseys work shows
how interdisciplinary arguments are constructed and why interdisciplinarity is an
asset in feminist scholarship.
Local Roots
My introduction to Masseys work was
fortuitous. My institutional location in
womens studies and my interest in gender politics of social movements have
resulted in constant exploration of interdisciplinary feminist work. While reading on the conceptualisation of region,
especially, in terms of feminist engagements with discourses and practices of
development and geographical space, I
came across Masseys Politics and Space/
Time (1992) and Geographies of Responsibility (2004). Together, these two
essays put me in the middle of the lively
debates on rethinking the connections
amongst geographies of care and loyalty,
power-geometries of the global, and
the politics of ascribing meanings to
space and time.
As I ventured more into her work, the
relation between dislocation and belongingness, flows of migration, and
spatial framings of collective social life,
began to influence my ways of thinking
about a geopolitical formation like South
Asia as a region. Massey emphasised that
regions are neither out there to be discovered nor passive entities created by
adding some border-sharing nation
states, but are spaces constructed through
several administrative, social, cultural
and economic flows and practices. Naming of concrete and symbolic landscapes
through memory and heritage marks the
process of institutionalising a uniform
24
regional (which can also be national in

certain cases) past.
South Asian Feminisms
Her metaphor of the Russian doll geography of care and affect tracks the different layers of belongingnessfamily,
locality, nation, regionthat obfuscates
geometries of power in linking localities/
regions hierarchically (Massey 2004: 9).
This conceptualisation of regions can
become a key point for the emerging
scholarship on South Asian feminism
(Loomba and Lukose 2012).
Loomba and Lukose write in the Introduction to their edited volume South
Asian Feminisms,
Feminist scholarship about South Asia was
in its earlier stages understandably preoccupied with undoing the legacy of colonial
epistemologies and knowledges, and offering insights into nationalism and the postcolonial state; thus interrogations of histories of the colonial past, decolonisation, and
the making of postcolonial nations were its
major burdens (2012: 4).
Ruptures in such national and territorial imaginings of feminist politics can

be significant for tracing the spatial
geometries of power and flows of goods,
capital, people, and practices across borderlands. Instead of creating a neat comparative model based on different nation
states that constitute South Asia as a
region, there are possibilities of further
dialogues between feminist work in
South Asia, and feminist scholarship that
has, from other locations, queried the
politics of national borders and scrutinised the histories of migration and the
constitution of diasporic communities
...[and] contemporary global politics
(Loomba and Lukose 2012: 8).
Erasure of internal inconsistencies
within national contexts and crossborder overlap of memories, populations
and social practices indicate limits of the
usual understanding of South Asian
region as an assemblage of several different nation states. Territorial boundaries
and their porosity are key elements of
rethinking regional history and how it
shapes governance, economy and culture. In other words, a comparative understanding dependent on finding similarities and differences between national
contexts is not enough to identify the
converging issues at stake for regional

feminist politics. It is equally important
to see how regions are constituted within
the wider discourses of feminist politics
beyond/internal to national borders.
Doreen Massey has left us a legacy of
innovative thinking, political commitment, and intellectual rigour. Those
who have known her personally have
written about her generosity towards
younger scholars, her energy for all
kinds of political activism despite serious physical challenges, her alertness
towards new movements and new academic thinking, and her fierce, kind
and creative commitment to struggle for
societies and for a planet in which we
share resources more equally (Gilbert
and Littler 2016). She remains an inspiring figure for struggles dedicated to educate, agitate, and organise against dominant relations of power in different connected spaces, of which she wrote so eloquently all her life.
References
Featherstone, David (2016): Doreen Massey Obituary, Guardian, 27 March, http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/27/doreen-massey-obituary.
Gilbert, Jeremy and Jo Littler (2016): The Doreen
Massey We Knew, openDemocracyUK, 14 March,
https://www. opendemocracy.net/uk/jeremygilbert-jo-littler/doreen-massey-we-knew.
Hall, Stuart, Doreen Massey and Micheal Rustin
(eds) (2013): After Neoliberalism: The Kilburn
Manifesto, Soundings, https://www.lwbooks.
co.uk/sites/default/files/00_manifestoframingstatement.pdf.
Loomba, Ania and Ritty Lukose (eds) (2012): South
Asian Feminisms, New Delhi: Zubaan.
Massey, Doreen (1984): Spatial Division of Labour:
Social Structures and Geography of Production,
New York: Methuen.
(1992): Politics and Space/Time, New Left Review, I/196, NovemberDecember, https://
newleftreview.org/I/196/doreen-massey-politics-and-space-time.
(1994): A Global Sense of Place, Space, Place
and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(2004): Geographies of Responsibility, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Vol 86, No 1, pp 518.
(2007): World City, Cambridge: Polity Press.
(2008): Landscape, Space, Politics: An Essay,
TheFutureofLandscape.wordpress.com (Blog),
June, https://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.
com/landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/.
Raju, Saraswati (ed) (2011): Gendered Geographies:
Space and Place in South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Social Science Bites (2013): Doreen Massey on
Space, Social Science Space, 1 February, http://
www.socialsciencespace.com/2013/02/podcastdoreen-massey-on-space/.
[All URLs accessed on 29 March 2016.]
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
Break the Umbilical Cord

Sumanta Banerjee
In the days of retreat, the fanatical has often sneaked into the liberal in Hinduism. Let
that not happen.Compromise will once
again repeat the errors of the past.
Rammanohar Lohia.1
Different political forces in the

country have either collaborated
with or tacitly approved the
Hindutva forces in their
early days.
Sumanta Banerjee (suman5ban@yahoo.com) is

a political commentator.
EPW
june 4, 2016
he wave of protests against the

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led
regime by a large number of Indian
intellectuals, set in motion by academics
and writers returning awards followed
by academics (both from India and
abroad) coming out against the Modi
governments suppression of democratic
rights in the campus have provided the
Indian intelligentsia with an opportunity
to historically examine the roots of the
crisis. It also presents an opportunity to
interrogate the concept of Indian nationalism that was chosen as a paradigm for
building up the post-independence Indian
nation state.
In other words, it is necessary to go beyond protests (against the lynching of
Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, the killing
of free-thinking rationalists like M M
Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra
Dhabolkar in Karnataka and Maharashtra,
and the authoritarian brutalities against
students in Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi).
These demonstrations were, of course,
extremely essential. But, it is also important to lift the debate to the level where
we must face up to the basic issue, which
was famously summed up by Jawaharlal
Nehru way back in 1958, as the problem
of creating a secular state in a religious
society (during an interview with the
French intellectual Andre Malraux).
More important is the problem of creating a secular environment and a mentality among citizens, who should be allowed to follow their respective religious
beliefs and practices in their private
space, but not to extend them to be imposed on the public space, which lead to
inter-religious violent conflicts.
Nehru inherited the problem from the
legacy of religious and other divisive
impulses that partly shaped the history
and concept of Indian nationalism by
vol lI no 23
heavily leaning on Hindu majoritarian

identityrepresented even in his own
Congress Party by people like Madan
Mohan Malaviya and Purushottam Das
Tandon. Although uncomfortable with
this legacy, Nehru left unfinished the
task of eradicating those majoritarian
Hindu socio-religious predilections in
post-independence politics. It is the reinforcement of these deeply embedded
mutually hostile prejudices (religious,
casteist, ethnic) by politicians that induces the public to remain mute witnesses
toor even collaborators inthe atrocities we witnessed in Delhi in 1984, in
Gujarat in 2002, and the killings in
Dadri, Maharashtra, Karnataka and other parts of India. They stand in the way
of building not only a secular state, but
also the much required need of a humanitarian society in India today.
Dubious Alliances
What is more disconcerting is that while
politicians of the extreme right are primarily responsible for the present communal violence, those from the centreleft (or
to be more precise Congress and socialist)
spectrum cannot escape their share of the
responsibility either. They have quite often allied with the religious right, or allowed it a free spaceeither from shared
religious beliefs and cultural values, or for
immediate political gains. In the long run,
however, such policies abetted in the consolidation of the power of the religious
right, and helped it to gain legitimacy. In
fact, however uncharitable it may sound, I
think that the legitimacy that the BJP
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
Sangh Parivar has acquired in Indian polity and public mind today has been due to a
large extent to the good terms that their
leaders and activists enjoyed with national
personalities like M K Gandhi, Rammonahar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayanto
name a fewduring various phases in the
years immediately preceding independence, and the post-independence period.
Gandhis Ambiguous
Relationship with RSS
To start with Gandhi, let us examine
some of his observations on the RSS. In
1942, when asked about his reactions to
the drills and virulent pro-Hindutva
25
COMMENTARY
slogans of the RSS, instead of condemning them, in a rather distant tone of ingenuousness, he said that he had heard
of the RSS and its activities, and knew
that it was a communal organisation.2
Yet, as later revelations were to prove,
Gandhi was not all that ignorant of RSS
activities. He had visited an RSS camp in
Wardha as back as 1934, and was reported
to have met its leader K B Hedgewar.
Still later, Gandhi betrayed the same
irresoluteness in taking the RSS by its
horns, after the communal riots on the
eve of independence. One day in Delhi,
when one of his disciples praised the
efficiency, discipline, courage and capacity
for hard work shown by RSS workers at
Wagah, a major transit camp for Punjab
refugees, Gandhi quipped back: But
dont forget even so had Hitlers Nazis
and Fascists under Mussolini.3 Yet, a year
later in September 1947, when in Delhi
and other places, RSS activists were massacring Muslims, Gandhi fixed an appointment with the then RSS chief Golwalkar,
and confronted him with the allegation.
Golwalkar reassured him by denying the
complicity of his ranks in the massacre,
and Gandhi, taking his words at face value, merely quoted his words of reassurance in his prayer talk that eveninggiving the impression that the RSS was innocent. He failed to publicly admit his own
suspicion that he did not find Golwalkar
convincinga confession he made later
to his circle of close followers.4
In the same September of 1947, when
Delhis Muslims were being killed by the
RSS activists, Gandhi on the 16th of that
month chose to address RSS workers in
Bhangi Colony in Delhi. Recalling appreciatively his earlier association with
the RSS, he said:
I visited the RSS camp years ago (1934 to be
exact) when the founder Shri Hedgewar was
alive. I was very much impressed by your
discipline, the complete absence of untouchability and the rigorous simplicity. Since
then, the Sangh has grown.
And then, his final chit for the RSS:

I am convinced that any organisation which
is inspired by the high ideal of service and
self-sacrifice is bound to grow in strength.5
Curiously enough, during his address,

there was not a single word condemning
the RSS workers for their role in the killing of Muslims. Looking back at those
26
tumultuous times, we may speculate

was Gandhi trying to appease the RSS
activists by publicly sharing with them
his social and personal priorities (regarding untouchability, rigorous simplicity, self-sacrifice, etc), with the hope
of dissuading them from their political
priority of eliminating, and driving out
Muslims from a future independent India?
Or, was there also his deep-rooted religious faith in Hindu sanatandharma that
made him reluctant to condemn outright
the RSS, which adhered to that faith?
When his attempts to appease the RSS
failed, a distraught Gandhi resorted to
the last weapon in his historical arsenal
of tactics (ranging from public demonstrations of satyagraha to personal acts
of fasting). He began a fast in January
1948. By an ironical twist of history, it
was a follower of RSS that he acclaimed
who assassinated him.
In Retrospect
Looking back at the past, we can trace
the roots of sustenanceand re-emergenceof the Hindu right in Indian politics today to the early days of the
national movement. The meshing up of
national politics with religion (Hindu in
this context) in the anti-colonial agitations, which in the Swadeshi movement
in Bengal and Maharashtra in the early
decades of the 20th century, reinforced
the Hindu icons of the past like Chhatrapati Shivaji and Pratapaditya as the main
symbols of protests against foreign invaders. The valorisation of Hindu heroes
and institutionalisation of Hindu rituals
like Ganesh Utsava (by Tilak) quite often
alienated the Muslim masses, the Dalits
and tribals, who did not feel a part of this
framework of nationalism that was being formulated by the upper caste Hindu
nationalist leaders.
This ideology of Hindutva (which in
its formulation went through various
stages) and its propaganda of setting up
a Hindu rashtra began to acquire a stringent political organisational form from the
191020 period, when the Hindu Mahasabha was founded by a leader from
within the ranks of the Congress Party
Madan Mohan Malaviya. Ever since then,
the ideology of Hindutva had acquired
legitimacy in the Indian constitutional
political scene. Over the years, it took

various political shapesfrom Ram Rajya
Parishad in the 1950s, and Bharatiya
Jana Sangh in the 1960s, to todays BJP.
But the common source which supplied
these political parties with both ideological inputs and human resources in the
pastand continues to provide leaders
for the present BJP-run government at
the centreis the RSS which was founded by Keshav Hedgewar (18891940) in
1925. This was a major step in the
institutionalisation of Hindutva through
a national organisation, that was to militarise its members on the lines of fascism
in the 1930s. In March 1934, Hedgewar
held a conference with his comrades in
the RSS, planning how to organise Hindus
militarily in accordance with contemporary Germany and Italy.6
Gandhis Role
Gandhi indeed in his innovative way
tried to bridge the HinduMuslim communal gap by picking upon the issue of
the Khilafat movement in 192022. He
attempted to harness the Muslim public
opinion of hostility against the Western
plans to destroy the Caliphate, to his
chariot of the Non-Cooperation movement, by aligning with the famous Shaukat and Muhammad Ali Brothers of the
Khilafat movement. But, in his wellmeaning efforts to consolidate the national movement in India, Gandhi lost
sight of the ground reality in Turkey
itself, where the Caliphate had already
lost its power and credibility, and Kemal
Pasha had mobilised the people to replace
the feudal kingdom with a secular and
modern regime. Unlike Gandhi, Jinnah
was able to analyse the situation from a
much more enlightened approach, preferring a secular regime to a theocratic
Caliphate, and hence he opposed the
linking of the Non-Cooperation movement with the obscurantist religious
demand (for the restoration of the Caliphate) of his own community.
Gandhis support for the Khilafat
movementand collaboration with it
could have been much to do with his
principle that each religious community
should be allowed to retain its respective traditional beliefs and customs.
Like his adherence to his own Hindu
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
COMMENTARY
sanatanadharma, he respected the faith

and practices of the orthodox sanatan
Islamic systemwhich he believed was
best protected by the Caliphate. His was
a belief in peaceful coexistence between
Hindus and Muslimsbut both strictly
adhering to their separate beliefs and
customs. In fact, Gandhi set the limits to
HinduMuslim relationship in the following words:
If brothers and sisters can live on the
friendliest footing without ever thinking of
marrying each other, I can see no difficulty
in my daughter regarding every Mohammedan brother and vice versa.7
Even at the height of the Khilafat

Non-Cooperation movement, when he
was embracing the Ali Brothers of the
Khilafat movement as his comrades,
Gandhi continued to oppose Hindu
Muslim marriages. He said:
In spite of the greatest regard for the (Ali)
brothers, I would not give my daughter in
marriage to one of their sons, and I know
that they would not give theirs to my sonI
do not partake of their meat foods, and they
scrupulously respect my bigotry, if my selfdenial may be so named.8
In those days of bonhomie of the KhilafatCongress alliance, Gandhi probably did not realise that this mutual respect for his (Hindu sanatana) bigotry,
and for the parallel Islamic sharia bigotrycoexisting within a fragile framework of nationalismcould not last
long. He failed to understand that it was
the bigotry that had to be eliminated
from within the social intestines of both
the communities. The aggressive and
mutually hostile edges of religious bigotry got sharpened over the years. Once
the mutually helpful CongressKhilafat
alliance of the 1920s broke down, Hindu
Mulsim relations relapsed into the same
old pattern of communal riots (for example, anti-Hindu outbursts in Kohat in the
North Western Frontier Provinces in
September 1924; waves of riots in Calcutta, Dhaka, Patna, Rawalpindi and
Delhi between 1923 and 1926).
Let us keep in mind the fissures in
HinduMuslim fraternity during various
phases of the national movement
whether in the Swadeshi agitation in the
early years of the 20th century, or the
Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience
movements later. What was ignored was
the basic need to combine anti-colonial
EPW
june 4, 2016
struggles with internal social reforms

within religious communities, that could
have destroyed the patriarchal religious
authorities that dominated those communities, and broken down barriers in
inter-religious relationships, and unite the
people into a sense of national solidarity.
Socialist Parivars Empathy
Apart from Gandhi, the other Indian
politicians who had engaged (and even
sometimes collaborated) with the Hindu
right-wing communal forces are the various socialist groups in post-independence
India. The empathy between the then
Socialist Party and the Jana Sangh
(reincarnated today in the shape of BJP),
grew from (i) their commonly shared
visceral opposition to Jawaharlal Nehru
and his family, and (ii) a sense of patriotism rooted to an equally visceral objection to any talks with China on the Sino
Indian border dispute.
The conflation of these two impulses
found expression in the 1962 general
elections in the Phulpur constituency,
where the Socialist Party put up its veteran leader Rammanohar Lohia as its
candidate to fight Jawaharlal Nehru and
came to an understanding with the Jana
Sangh which rallied its cadres in Lohias
support. Although Lohia lost the election, he continued to maintain relations
with the Sangh Parivar. On 12 April
1964, he met the Jana Sangh ideologue
Deendayal Upadhyaya and signed a joint
statement urging both India and Pakistan to explore the idea of an IndoPak
confederation for a peaceful coexistence
and friendly relationship between citizens. While such a statement, at its face
value, was of course welcome for the
people of both the states, the Jana Sangh
had a different strategy to turn the idea
into a sinister ambitious plan of an
Akhand Bharatan indivisible South
Asian subcontinent under the rule of a
Hindu hegemonic order, which it claimed, held sway at one time, over the
region from Afghanistan in the north to
Sri Lanka, or even further in the south
east. Such a map of Akhand Bharat had
always adorned the Nagpur headquarters of the RSS. Lohia, being a veteran in
wading through the slimy waters of postindependence Indian politics, should
vol lI no 23
have been aware of these sinister designs

of the Jana Sangh before signing a joint
statement with Upadhyaya, thus giving
credibility to a communal organisation.
The RSS ideologue who acted as a conduit between the Socialist Party and the
Sangh Parivar was a man called Chandikadas Amritrao Deshmukh (19162010)
later to be famous as Nanaji Deshmukh.
It was he who invited Lohia to a Jana
Sangh Karyakarta Sammelan, where he
was introduced to Upadhyaywhich
brought them closer in their campaign
against the Congress. Lohia, in his fanatical zeal to oust the Nehru Parivar, was
now prepared to align with the Sangh
Parivarforgetting the warning against
such alignments that he himself sounded
in 1950 (the quote with which I prefaced
this article).
Apart from Lohia, other socialist leaders like JP were also seduced by the
Sangh Parivar. Deshmukhs past participation in the Bhoodan movement earned
him appreciation from JP, who along
with Acharya Vinoba Bhave led that
movement. This led the way to the future proximity between the socialists
and the Sangh Parivar in the 1970s. JP
was prevailed upon by Deshmukh to lead
the students movement against the Congress government in Gujarat in 197374.
In Bihar, the old socialistJana Sangh
bonhomie resurfaced in 1974, when the
Bihar Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti
was built together by Lohiaites like Lalu
Yadav and Jana Sanghites like Sushil
Modi. Rabid anti-Congressism prevailed
over the issue of Hindu communalism
among socialists who chose to push back
communalism on the backburner in
order to meet their own goal: throwing
out the Congress regime at any cost.
When reminded of the fascist character
of the RSS, JP at that time was reported
to have come out with the response: If
the RSS is fascist, so am I.
The mass movement against Indira
Gandhis authoritarianism that brought together various sections of civil society
and political segments in 1974 provided
an opportunity for the RSS (with its political spokespersons like L K Advani and
A B Vajpayee) to sneak into the space of
political opposition. JP, by incorporating
them into his agitation, diluted the
27
COMMENTARY
character of what could have developed

into a secular, socialist and democratic
movement against Indira Gandhis authoritarian regime. At the later stage of the
electoral campaign in 1977, the Socialist
Parivar by supporting the Sangh Parivar
candidatesunwittingly perhapsunder
the canopy of the newly forged Janata
Party helped them to win enough seats in
the Lok Sabha by piggy-backing on the
anti-Indira wave, to enable it to be a part
of the Janata government. The dissensions
within the Janata government over the refusal of the Jana Sangh (the predecessor
of todays BJP) to dissociate itself from the
RSS were a foregone conclusion. But
couldnt JP and his followers in the Socialist movement anticipate this when they
forged an alliance with the Jana Sangh?
Despite this past history of the Sangh
Parivars betrayal of the Socialist Parivars
hopes, the latter continued to nurse a perverse affection for the former by offering
a peculiar logic. I remember George Fernandes telling me in the early 1990son
the eve of the BJP-led Ayodhya movementthat we the leftists should not
treat the BJP as untouchables, and push it
to the wall that would make it take an extremist fanatical Hindutva stand, but
should instead negotiate with them on
agreeing on the issue of Indian nationalism and Indias sovereignty, and then persuade them to take a less fanatical stand
on Hindutva. Was this a nave hope, or
a political opportunism that led Fernandesa veteran socialistto join the
first BJP-led NDA government? It not only
reflected the ideological degeneration of
the Indian Socialist Parivar, but also the
personal cupidity of its leaders.
Political Mileage of Sangh Parivar
The electoral compulsion to ally, or compromise, with the Hindutva stream of politics was not only confined to the Congress
and socialists, but also at one time, shared
by the communists. To give an example, in
the 1958 municipality elections in Delhi, in
a house of 80, the Jana Sangh won 25
seats, only two less than the Congress. The
CPI (Communist Party of India) won eight
seatsjust enough to tip the balance in favour of either the Congress or the Jana
Sangh. The CPI entered into an alliance
with the Congress, which agreed to elect
28
the formers nominee Aruna Asaf Ali (the

veteran socialist leader of the 1942 Quit
India movement, who had joined the
communists) as the mayor. The alliance
broke up within a year due to internal
squabbles, following which the CPI entered into an agreement with the Jana
Sangh, whereby the offices of mayor and
deputy mayor were to be shared by the
two parties on a rotational basisAli as
the mayor, and the Jana Sangh leader
Kedarnath Sahni as the deputy mayor. The
CPI being a minority in this uneasy coalition was soon marginalised by the dominant Jana Sangh which expanded its
power over Delhis civic administration,
and extended its political influence over its
citizens through the well-organised RSS
shakhas of propaganda of Hindutva, and
military practices in the parks and squares
of the national capital in the late 1950
early 1960 period.
The next phase in Indian politics which
offered an opportunity to the Sangh Parivar was the 1967 post-electoral stage,
when the Congress monopoly of power in
some of the states was broken by the victory of opposition candidates who formed
coalition governments in these states. On
the waves of the popular anti-Congress
sentiments, the Jana Sangh jumped into
the fray and entered into alliances with
the Socialist Party, Praja Socialist Party,
Bharatiya Kranti Dal, and regional parties
to be a part of the new governments that
were being formed in these states. The CPI
also agreed to share power with the Jana
Sangh in Bihar and Punjab.
The Sangh Parivars best opportunity
to gain respectability in the Indian political mainstream came with its acceptance by JP in his movement in 197475
a subject which has already been dealt
with earlier. It was thus a platter that
was offered to the Parivar, at various
stages of Indian politics, by nave or opportunist politicians (ranging from the
Congress to socialists and communists),
that enabled its political representatives
(beginning from the Hindu Mahasabha,
Jana Sangh and todays BJP) to crawl
into positions of power.
of constitutionally privileged opportunity to capture power at the centre (by

an electoral support of only one-third of
the voters for its political outfit, the BJP),
and extra-constitutional means of terror
employed by its foot soldiers (in the RSS
VHPABVPBajrang Dal) against minorities in the rural areas, and dissenters
in cities, is today marching towards
its goal of creating a theocratic Hindu
rashtra.
The Indian liberal political forces
(ranging from the Congress to the left)
are today paying the price for their long
history of appeasement ofand even
collaboration withthese forces of majoritarian Hindu religiosity in national
politics. Their belated attempts now to
oppose the Modi government and the
Sangh Parivar in the political sphere
however welcomeare not enough to
stem the tide of the fascist forces. They
have to take the bull of Hindutva by its
horns through vigorous campaigns in
the public domain to destroy its support
base. This would require courage to
break the umbilical cord with the political tradition of appeasing Hindu majoritarianism, and social toleration of obscurantist divisive religious beliefs and
customs (which, to recall Lohia, allowed
the fanatical to sneak into the liberal in
Hinduism). The time has come to challenge the Parivar and its government in
the socio-religious sphere, where they
violate every now and then, that provision of the Fundamental Duties section
in the Indian Constitution (Part IV A),
which requires every citizen to develop
the scientific temper, humanism and the
spirit of inquiry and reform.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
Challenges before Liberal Forces

When we come to the present times, we find
that the Parivar, through a combination
7
8
june 4, 2016
Rammanohar Lohia: Fragments of World Mind,

July 1950, Bombay: Akshar Pratiroop.
Harijan, 9 August 1942.
Pyarelal: Mahatma Gandhi, The Last Phase,
Ahmedabad, p 440.
The above references are from Ram Puniyanis
excellently documented article What Was
Gandhis Evaluation of RSS?, 21 January
2015, www.countercurrents.org/puniyani 210115
htm. My conclusions are however different
from his.
Reported in Hindu, 17 September 1947.
Re: Marzia Casolari: Hindutvas Foreign Tie-up
in the 1930s, in Economic & Political Weekly,
Vol XXXV, No 4, 22 January 2000.
Young India, 25 February 1920.
Young India, 20 October 1920.
vol lI no 23
EPW
Slow Violence of State Apathy

Atreyee Majumder
ayanika Mathur undertakes a

complex ethnographic journey.
In simple terms, her sites are the
institutions and terrains that are responsible for the implementation of the
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). As
a progressive poverty alleviation scheme,
the launch of the scheme carried great
expectations from and of the state. But
tracing the MGNREGS takes her into the
homes and hearts of many. Crucially, she
maps governance as a terrain of sentiment and affect.
The story that unfolds through the
generation of a labyrinth of paper is one
of uncertainty, precarity and oscillating
emotion towards sarkar. Mathurs ethnography of government is very different
from those we have read in the recent
pastAkhil Guptas Red Tape (2012) and
others. Mathur provides an important
corrective to the Weberian narrative of
the bureaucracy being an impersonal
vehicle of rules. Mathur shows emotion,
drama, humour, apathy and cunning in
the enactment of governance. She further shows the process of spatialisation
of the state.
I wish to treat the book by highlighting four themes: (i) sarkar, (ii) paper,
(iii) time, and (iv) space.
Sarkar
Mathurs ethnography based in Gopeshwar, Chamoli district of Uttarakhand
in the Indian Himalaya is one that experiences state power from a distance (altitudinal distance, even). I will consider
the notion of distance and remoteness
in the section Space. Mathur writes
(p 22):
Sarkar, in my reading, is best understood
as an intimate repository of power. Thus, it
can mean just the government but also, as
the prologue indicates, a person (DM sahib);
further certain objects such as documents
(sarkari kaghaz) and places (such as Delhi,
Gopeshwar, Dehradun, an office).
EPW
june 4, 2016
book reviewS
Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the
Developmental State in Himalayan India by
Nayanika Mathur, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press,
2016; pp xxii+192, price not indicated.
She points out the polyvalence in the

term sarkari (p 24):
Within the apparatus of the state, I show, for
instance, how sarkari or becoming sarkari is
a deeply aspirational state of being. But outside this particular context, to call someone
or something sarkari normally carries pejorative connotations. So, sarkari can mean
empty routine, or a numbed and dumbeddown manner of acting/thinking.
This aspect, as illustrated in the ethnography, is particularly interestingnumbness of governance, and of officials. It is
a kind of slow, simmering violence,
articulated through apathy.
Mathur makes two important points
about sarkar. One, that to be in the
sarkar one has to appear to be sarkari.
The term sarkari is polyphonous. It
carries the meaning of being officious
and authoritative. It also carries the
meaning of precarity and being in a limboa domain in which nothing will
happen. The sarkariness of the state
flow into the lives of people, especially
poor people. Mathur provides detailed
accounts of the rhythms and cadences of
mundane government meetings, the
routine changes in the verboseness and
silences of the block development officer.
The beneficiaries of the MGNREGS often
do not receive job cards, or the requisite
money for work done. To claim what is
theirs on paper, they must first know
and understand what the paper says,
they must locate the paper and attribute
it to the requisite wing of government,
and finally, they must interact with the
actors who pose themselves as sarkar.
Mathurs ethnography shows that the
government is not a monolith. Responsibility is passed on from one level of
vol lI no 23
officialdom to the next and the officer at

the very end of the MGNREGS ladder is
forever burdened. What she crucially
shows is the affective register of government, the uncertainty and emotional
experience of governancethe words,
gestures, rhythms, cadences that go
with having to perform sarkar; becoming sarkari (p 133). I found the section
on the bagh (tiger) encroaching into
Gopeshwar quite delightful and instructiveespecially, in the discourse that the
tiger should have known better than to
enter the garden of the district magistrate. The idea of an insecure and defensive sovereign is sketched out wonderfully. This is not the all-pervasive state
that Foucault (1977) describes. This is
not the grand sovereign picking out bare
life (Agamben 1998). This is the state
that is constantly trying to put together a
display of sovereignty, anxious that it
may come apart at the slightest provocation, in this case by a tiger. This is an
account of state that displays sovereignty
and attendant violence through apathy,
delay, numbness. I particularly liked that
a book titled Paper Tiger includes an
episode of an actual tiger to offset the
image of the powerful state that feverishly generates paper.
Paper
The biggest contribution of Mathurs
book is in tracing the life of paper. And
very differently from the life of the governance and paperwork as treated in
other recent works, in its highlighting of
the affective life of paper. It resonates
somewhat with Emma Tarlos (2003)
earlier work on the memory of the Emergency in Delhis resettlement colonies.
Paper artefacts are supposed to contain
and transmit truths. In so doing, they
are supposed to generate certainty on
rights and entitlements vis--vis state and
other citizens. But here, the contents of
paper (especially in the case of job cards)
are obscure, the paper is always a receding treasure in the horizon of poor
people trying to access them, and finally,
the paper holds power over people
through its obscurity and precarity rather
than clarity and truth-claim.
29
BOOK REVIEW
The chapter The Letter of the State

reflects comprehensively on the artefact
and the institution of the sarkari letter.
A letter sent indicates responsibility
abdicated in favour of a lower official.
It is a protective shield in Mathurs
vocabulary. Many letters are callously
put aside or trashed. The content of the
letter translates into a demand for action
only to the lowest official. Mathurs discussion of the grammar, language and
tone of these letters open up a new avenue of doing textual analysis of governing artefactsa sort of anthropology of
legal/official language.
Through the life of paper, Mathur
wonderfully illustrates a life of poverty
experienced in slow violence. What
kind of logic of governance is this?
What kind of governance reveals itself
in apathy, tiredness and slow, invisible
violence? Mathur does not unpack it
fully; I suspect she does that deliberately to let the ethno
graphic material
breathe life into the question.
Time
The experience of state, for most poor
MGNREGS beneficiaries, is one of uncertainty,
NEW
often manifest through waiting. Waiting is a kind of dead time, or captive

time, through which the social and
political subjugation of the person waiting is expressed. The beneficiaries are
forever waiting for the promises of paper
to materialise, for the state to show
some of its idealised character. The giving welfare state that presents itself
in shut windows and dead times
is not quite the picture of the ideal type
of welfare state. Mathur quotes Vincent
Crapanzano (1985):
Waiting means to be oriented in time in a
special way. It is directed towards the futurenot an expansive future, however, but
a constructed one that closes in on the presentIts only meaning lies in the future
in the arrival or non-arrival of the object of
waiting (p 143).
Space
Another important contribution that
Mathurs work has to the field of anthropology of state is showing the spatialisation of the state; the spatial relationship
with the state. Gopeshwar, for most
bureaucrats, is a punishment posting.
The dilapidation and emptiness of government buildings and the slowness of
everyday life is symbolic of the states

negligent relationship with places far
away from commercial and political
centres. Contra Scotts (2011) argument
that hill-people deliberately maintain
distance from state, Mathur shows an
affective register of craving better care
and attention from state. Mathur gives
a wonderful ethnographic account of
space in the anecdote about the petrol
pump being the watershed between
state-land and non-state-land (p 45),
the spatial imaginary of above and
below through the terrain is interpreted in the everyday.

In the burgeoning literature on the
anthropology of state, Mathurs contribution is a significant one. Paper Tiger
takes the inquiry of state away from the
body of the state, into the domains of
language, affect, emotion, time and
space. I was not clear about her argument regarding corruption, but I do
not see it as a major arc in the ethnographic n
arrative. It is commendable
that she avoids the usual Foucault
Agamben theoretical dyad in unpacking
the state. Mathurs marshalling of anthropological and theoretical literature
Social Policy
Edited by
Jean Drze
The reach of social policy in India has expanded significantly in recent years. Facilities such as schools and anganwadis,
health centres, nutrition programmes, public works and social security pensions are reaching larger numbers of people
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Yet the performance of these social programmes is far from ideal. Most Indian states still have a long way to go in
putting in place effective social policies that directly address the interests, demands and rights of the unprivileged.
This collection of essays, previously published in the Economic and Political Weekly, has been clustered around six major
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Pp xiv + 478 | Rs 795 social exclusion. With wide-ranging analyses by distinguished scholars brought together in a single volume, and an
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june 4, 2016 vol lI no 23 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
BOOK REVIEW
is admirable; I found especially delightful the use of literary sourcesSarnath

Banerjee and Kafka. I would have liked
the story to be grounded in specific
characters that run right through the
narrative. I am left waiting for Mathur
to tell me about the theoretical implications of it all, but I guess, on purpose,
she leaves out a grand theoretical
EPW
june 4, 2016
claim, in order to let the ethnography

do its job.
Atreyee Majumder (atreyee.m@gmail.com) is
an anthropologist.
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1998): Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
vol lI no 23
Crapanzano, Vincent (1985): Waiting the Whites of

South Africa, New York: Random House.
Foucault, Michel (1977): Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, New York: Pantheon Books.
Gupta, Akhil (2012): Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Scott, James C (2011): The Art of Not Being Governed, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Tarlo, Emma (2003): Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
31
BOOK REVIEW
Guilty until Proven Innocent

Gautam Navlakha
or the civil liberties and democratic

rights movement in India, conditions
of undertrials are of great importance. One of the staggering characteristics of Indias prison population is the
fact that out of 3,82,000 prisoners there
are only 12,700 convicts. Indeed, according to the online data site, IndiaSpend,
there are 22.2 million undertrials in
India, whose trials are yet to conclude
and that in 2013, in 85% of the cases trial
was pending. We know little about these
faceless undertrial prisoners and what
the charge-sheets claim to be their
crime. Why is it that when most undertrialsmore than 22 millionremain
free, 3,69,000 languish in jail? What
social background do they come from?
What is their economic situation? What
are their stories? Here lies the significance of this study, brought out by Bagaicha, a collective of activists and writers.
The study tells us about Adivasi undertrials of Jharkhand. It is, by no means, a
complete story. But the great merit of
this survey is that it takes us through the
history of Adivasis from early days to
now, introduces the role played by
Naxalites, in particular the Maoists, and
then provides readers case studies that
bring the faceless numbers to life.
The report notes its primary objective was to highlight, and document
the state repression on Jharkandis who
fight for their human and constitutional
rights. It is ambitious in trying to provide detailed information required by
the Supreme Court about Adivasis languishing in various jails of Jharkhand,
EPW
june 4, 2016
Deprived of Their Rights over Natural Resources,

Impoverished Adivasis Get Prison: A Study of
Undertrials in Jharkhand by Bagaicha Research
Team, Ranchi: Jharkhand, `100.
Odisha and Chhattisgarh. It might have

been useful if the report had referred to
the case before the Supreme Court, in
which this matter came up.
The study also aims to understand
the consequences for Adivasis to be so
accused and arrested. And finally objective of this study is also to examine
the reasons that cause the spread of
LWE [left wing extremism] in predominantly Adivasi regions (p 20). Although
the study sets itself a tall order, it does
come close to its objective.
There are 18,220 prisoners in Jharkhands 26 jails (five central, 17 district
and four sub-jails)as against an actual
capacity of 14,243 prisoners, constituting 128% occupancy as against an
all-India average of 118%. Of these 31%
are Adivasis, who comprise 26% of the
states population, 30% are Other Backward Classes (OBCs), who comprise 28%
of Jharkhands population, and 16%
Dalits who are 11% of the population.
Naxal Offence
After describing the methodology adopted
for this studywhich combines qualitative interviews with quantitative data,
and includes primary and secondary
sourcesthe report profiles the 102 prisoners surveyed for this study. The
researchers were denied access to jail
inmates; left with no choice the team
vol lI no 23
decided to get in touch with those they

knew were out on bail. So it was not a
random sample but a somewhat structured one: the 102 respondents were ones
who could be reached. All of them were
charged under, what has come to be
known as Naxal offence and that shows
in the social profile because out of the 102
surveyed 69% are Adivasis, 22% are OBCs,
and 7% Dalitsthe others are just 2%.
The survey brings out the fact that
those accused of Naxal offence could
simply have been protesting against
land acquisition or forest diversion. The
fact that upper caste/class is marked
by its absence in Naxal offence is not
fortuitous but symptomatic of Indias, in
this case Jharkhands, social reality. The
Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs are charged, as
the report says, for being members/supporters of a banned organisation or for
helping the proscribed organisation.
They are deemed guilty if they share
food with members of such organisations or if so-called banned literature
is found in their possession.
The socio-economic profile then acquires significance. Age profile of prisoners shows that 68% were in the age
group of 18 40 years; this rises to 89% if
the age group 4151 is added. So, an
overwhelming majority of people are
those who are in the working age group.
Therefore, their incarceration and long
drawn out and expensive criminal trials
affect their families in myriad ways.
The survey shows that 78% were married, 17% unmarried, 2% were widows,
2% widower and 1% divorced. Moreover,
63% were peasants, 17% casual labour,
11% self-employed, 4% were para teachers, 2% homemakers, 1% government
employees and 2% were students. As for
education, 21% had done intermediate
exams, 22% high school, 7% matric, 7%
31
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32
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
BOOK REVIEW
middle school, 13% primary school, 10%

were literate, 15% illiterate and only 5%
were graduate with BA. As for landholdings, 9% had no land, 8% owned less
than 0.49 acres, 12% owned more than
0.50 acres but less than one acre land,
23% owned more than 1 acre, 14%
2 acres plus, 22% between 3 and 5 acres,
6% 79 acres, 1% 10-plus acres and 5%
provided no information about landholdings. Monthly household incomes show
that 59% earned less than `3,000 a month,
38% less than `5,000, 1% earned more
than 5,000, and 2% had nil income.
Finally, the survey shows that whereas in 1992 and 1998 only 1% of those surveyed got arrested, there was a spurt
post 2000 when Jharkhand got formed:
20% were arrested between 2001 and
2005; 33% from 200610 and 43% between 2011 and 2015. In other words,
98% were arrested after Jharkhand state
was formed. But what it does not tell us is
how many of the 102 were female undertrials. They refer to 2% widows, but not
how many of the other categories comprised females and what percentage.
Coercion and Surrender Dramas
The survey then takes us through the
history of Naxalism, tracing it from its
early days to now, and brings out the
plight of the Adivasis who have seen
their land and forest being alienated
from them through legal legerdemain,
which lawfully divests Adivasis of their
access to and control over forests.
Sometimes extreme oppression can
embolden those who are fighting,
says the report.
It shows that 40% of land in Scheduled
Areas is with the government after the
settlement of 196365. In such a situation,
emergence of armed criminal gangs
offering protection and selling terror
makes life more difficult. The survey refers to a nexus between politicians, mafias, industrialists, contractors, bureaucrats as well as the Maoists. However,
they go on to claim that forceful opening
of areas where the Fifth Schedule of the
Constitution operates and land forest
rights of the Adivasis are formally
protected are facilitated through what
passes for counter-extremism measures.
But the report says that by depriving
EPW
june 4, 2016
people of their access to common property resources such as land, forest,

waterbodies, making little investments
in rural infrastructure, and instead encouraging commoditisation and corporatisation (p 43) as well as deployment
of military and use of colonial laws show
a multipronged attack on Adivasis.
In such a situation people desperate
for survival get trapped into participating
in surrender dramas enacted by the
government forces. Promise of government jobs first sees Adivasis having to pay
bribes, then their arms are twisted to
participate in a stage managed performance of surrendered Maoists only to
see themselves incarcerated in security
force camps.
The report speaks of how Adivasis are
kept ignorant of charges framed against
them, or do not have recourse to legal
assistance. There are very few who
speak their language or care about the
distress caused to their families. Most of
those arrested have been charged with
either helping Maoists or for possessing
Maoist literature.
Finally, Chapter 4 describes a few individual cases. This is rich with details
and other useful information. This slim,
127-page report is quite remarkable for
bringing to life a slice of Indias reality
about which so little is known or spoken
about. Chapters 2 and 3, notwithstanding their summary form, are particularly
useful for familiarising us with the
social context. As for the survey, it goes

beyond numbers by giving us a human
dimension and takes us through both
the Naxalite movement as well as the
legal regime which confronts the Adivasis,
ostensibly to protect their rights, only to
see them violated with impunity.
However, the report could have done
with some editing. It is not typos or
grammatical errors that irk, but matters
of substance get marred by poor editing.
Errors and sloppiness undermine the
reports credibility. And that is a pity. For
instance, we do not know which laws
the report is referring to when on page
53 it says that the police have mentioned
various sections such as 144, 147, 148,
149 of Criminal law and then adds that
Section 17 of Criminal Law too is invoked.
Surely the report meant Indian Penal
Code in the first instance. This could
have been rectified had the report been
edited. All this is particularly true for
the case studies where the reader is confronted by unevenness in case details.
There is a need for a new edition with
necessary improvements, precisely because the report does go some distance
to plug critical lacunae in our understanding of Adivasis, their struggles,
story of their repression, and the tyranny of law which subjects the marginalised to a ruinous legal process.
Gautam Navlakha (gnavlakha@gmail.com) is a
civil liberties and human rights activist.
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The titles are
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vol lI no 23
33
PERSPECTIVES
When Donald Trump Came

to Mumbai
Shekhar Krishnan
Mumbais real estate is among

the most expensive in the world.
What transpired when Donald
Trump decided to invest in the
unbelievably cheap real estate
of Mumbai is an example of
how real estate developers,
who now dominate the political
economy and public culture of
great cities, operate.
This article was first presented at

Constructing Asia: Materiality, Capital
and Labour in the Making of an Urbanising
Landscape at the Asia Research Institute,
National University of Singapore,
1213 May 2016.
The author wishes to thank workshop
organisers Eli Asher Elinoff and Malini Sur,
as well as Chandrashekhar D Chore, Deputy
Municipal Commissioner (Improvements),
Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai.
Shekhar Krishnan (shekhar@nus.edu.sg) is a
social scientist who is currently a Postdoctoral
Fellow with the Asia Research Institute,
National University of Singapore.
34
n an interview to Forbes India in

September 2014, Donald Trump
made a characteristically outrageous
statement.
Your real estate is unbelievably cheap...
Mumbai is a great city and yet it is not priced
like other comparable cities. It is priced lower
than cities that are less important. That gives
investors a tremendous amount of growth
potential (Srivastava 2014).
While not as controversial as his more recent slurs in his campaign for the United
States (US) presidency, Trumps hyperbole nonetheless was big news in India,
where Mumbais housing market is by
far the most expensive in the country. Since
the liberalisation of the Indian national
economy in the 1990s, Mumbai (then
Bombay) had routinely made headlines for
its pricy real estate, which is more often
compared to more prosperous global cities
like London or New York than to its peers in
India such as Delhi, Chennai or Bengaluru.
Trumps value proposition perhaps
made some sense from his perspective as a
foreign investor, going by prevailing market exchange rates between the dollar and
Indian rupee (around $1 = `60`62). By
most measures, the price of real estate in
Manhattan in the same period was anywhere between $1,250 and $1,500 per
square foot, whereas in prime areas in
Mumbai in 2014 around `40,000 `50,000,
or $650$800. This direct measure of
course takes no account of the almost
incommensurable differences in infrastructure and other aspects of both cities,
or relative urban income levels and purchasing power parity (PPP) per unit of currency between the US and India. In these
terms, one business journalist estimated
that the actual rate per square foot rate in
Mumbai would be more in the range of
$1,800$2,500 after adjusting for PPP
thus making Mumbai almost 50% more
expensive for its average citizen than
New York (Kaul 2014).
But beyond the calculations of economists and business journalists, Trumps

statement about how Indias most expensive city was unbelievably cheap begged
a wider question about the political
economy of urban real estate, indeed the
very reason for his very first business
visit to India in late 2014. What comprises
the value of urban real estate? The differential between land acquisition, construction and other material and transaction costs, and the market price of area per
square foot in a new building constitutes
the profit margin for real estate entrepreneurs like Trump. However, in island
cities such as New York and Mumbai
where vacant land or surface area is scarce
or already exhausted, almost all new
development is only possible via demolition of the existing built fabric, what in
Mumbai is known as redevelopment.
While popular accounts of investment
banking, financial capitalism andespecially in Mumbaiurban real estate mark
speculation as a form of gambling or
greedy profiteering, this moral discourse
is insufficient to characterise and understand the business strategies of real estate
developers who now dominate the political economy and public culture of cities
like New York and Mumbai. Purchasing
land and obtaining permissions for construction is a murky, cumbersome and
inevitably corrupt business, testing the
resilience and appetite for risk of even
the biggest builders and their investors,
as well as the limits of the law. Land
acquisition and assembly is a shadowy
domain for speculators who can materialise its uncertainty into potential profits
and possible futures (Bear, Birla and Puri
2015; Appadurai 2012). These powerful
gamblerssuch as Donald Trump and
Haresh Mehtaoften specialise in distressed, encumbered or disputed properties,
and have the resources and longevity to
displace or evict tenants, wage long court
battles, or wait out changes in legal
regimes and urban plans, as well as the inevitable personnel changes in local bureaucracies. Real estate speculation is a simultaneously legal and social terrain in which
entrepreneurs aim to realise incalculable
possibilities and unanticipated futures.
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
PERSPECTIVES
Such individualspart builder, promoter,

investor, and politicianmust inevitably
maintain a certain charisma, playing
the boundary between what is currently
legal and possible, and a dreamed-for
future which indexes their symbolic appeal to the media and public imagination.
Indeed successful speculation is the
materialisation of this uncertainty into
unique forms of image-building, profitmaking and law-breaking (and making).
The Art of the Deal
Trumps statement about cheap real estate
in Indias most expensive city came as he
was inking a new partnership with a local
construction firm, the Lodha group, after
exiting his initial collaboration with
another developer, with whom the initial
deal for a branded Trump Tower in
Mumbai had been negotiated in 2011 by
the tycoons son, Donald Trump Jr Soon
after his first deal with his then partner,
Rohan Lifescapes, had run into trouble
with permissions to construct a 45 to 60
storey building in South Mumbais posh
neighbourhood of Chowpatty. This luxury
sky-scraper was to come up on the site of
a former hospital and still-standing
housing estate earlier owned by a nonprofit community trust, which had sold
their buildings to the builder in 2007.
Rohan Lifescapespersonified by its
chairman and Trumps now-fired apprentice Haresh Mehtahad sought to amalgamate the two plots into a larger single
plot for Trump Tower Mumbai. However,
between 2012 and 2015, the company
was denied permission by state and municipal authorities for this redevelopment after it had already purchased the
sites, had nearly vacated the buildings,
and signed its branding agreement with
Trump (India Today 2012).
While Trump may have claimed that
Mumbais real estate came unbelievably
cheapproductive of new business opportunities and unforeseen valuethis
terrain is also fraught with tremendous
risks and uncertainties which are impossible to foresee or quantify. Though the
costs of cement and steel, or of construction labour, as well as certain rules and
regulations such as floor space index (FSI),
may be rationally calculable and amenable to forecasting and accounting in the
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
business strategies of real estate developers, there are other known unknowns
such as the demands of tenants and
owners, and changes in laws or norms,
which while able to be anticipated are not
empirically calculable. And these known
knowns and known unknowns are
quite apart from the further unknown
unknowns in urban politics and global
economics, such as the prolonged investment slump following the 2008 financial
crisis, and shifting public discourses
around urban real estate (Graham 2014).
Most significant in the period under
consideration was an urban scandal which
surfaced in Mumbai in late 2010 around
an under-construction skyscraper known
as the Adarsh Cooperative Housing
Society. The Adarsh scandal centred on
a plot of land in seaside South Mumbai in
which numerous ruling-party politicians,
bureaucrats and their families and staff
cornered a plot of land reserved under
law for housing the widows and families
of war veterans, and in which various
loopholes were exploited to both admit
non-military members as well as build
additional area in violation of development rules and environmental regulations.
The public anger around the scandal in
Maharashtra forced the then Chief Minister Ashok Chavanwho had allotted flats
to himself and his familyto resign. By
2012 the aftermath of the scam resulted in
a long-overdue revamp and tightening of
construction laws and norms in Mumbai,
which builders had long manipulated to
build and sell beyond stipulated limits.
Since the mid-1990s, as Indias cities
boomed in the first wave of liberalisation
and globalisation, Mumbais policy regime
for urban construction was modified to
encourage the replacement of old, wornout buildings and slum settlements which
had proliferated throughout the city in the
previous three decades. During this time,
urban rent control laws had discouraged
landlords from routine maintenance and
upkeep, and industrial zoning and land
ceiling regulations kept large tracts of
disused and undeveloped lands off
Mumbais market, even after the decline
of manufacturing industry and shipping
in the 1980s. By various accounts, almost
half of the citys total population now
lives in informal settlements, lacking
vol lI no 23
access to formal housing stock, or the

credit to finance a home. Even as the
other half lived in these slumsand
home ownership was possible only for a
relatively well-off minoritythe citys
old rental housing stock deteriorated, as
private landlords no longer found it feasible or profitable to repair buildings
which earned them rents effectively frozen in the 1950s. Despite minor amendments to the 1948 Bombay Rent Actincluding incremental rent increases in
1999the voting power of Mumbais
hundreds of thousands of old rent
tenants protected them from the market
and from eviction. But no law could stop
the passage of time, dilapidation, and increasingly frequent building collapses,
especially during the monsoon season.
In the early to mid-1990s the citys
planners and politicians finally began to
act on Mumbais housing crisis with new
laws for redevelopment which were
more business-friendly than the quasisocialist rent controls and land ceilings
of postcolonial urban policy. Under a new
legal regime legislated in 1991 by the state
government and municipal corporation,
incentive FSIor additional area for
construction and sale in the open market
to new buyersis now granted to builders
for rehabilitating old tenants living in
buildings constructed prior to the 1960s.
These structures number around 20,000
to 25,000 in the island city of Mumbai.
Known locally as cessed buildings
because their tenants paid a maintenance
cess to the local Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority
(MHADA), their private owners have for
decades eschewed repairs and maintenance on properties which no longer
fetched competitive rentals.
Significantly, more than the calculable
costs of land, materials, or municipal permissions, redevelopment introduced a
speculative as well as social dimension into
urban real estate in Mumbai. According to
the rules, redevelopment of old buildings
and slums would only be sanctioned provided the original tenants were re-housed
in the new development; and these entitled occupants must give their collective
consent in negotiations with builders, in
which their rights and demands must be
satisfied or bought over. In the newly
35
PERSPECTIVES
constructed building, the rehabilitated

tenants (and in most cases the ex-landlords) would become home owners, thus
superseding the age criteria of rent control
and removing old, protected tenancies.
For unprotected, informal settlements
outside the formal housing economy, in
1996, the state government subsequently
created the Slum Rehabilitation Authority
(SRA), wherein developers were granted
the rights to nearly-unlimited commercial
use of slum lands provided their occupants
were rehabilitated as owners in new, but
tiny, apartments of 300400 square feet
per family, thus bringing the urban poor
into the housing market. In the past two
decades, redevelopment of slums and
cessed buildings has become the primary
instrument for housing construction and
the production of new value in real estate.
While redevelopment became a marketfriendly route to renewal of Mumbais
housing stock, it introduced new uncertainty into the cost of real estate. Redevelopment is a very tricky and risky business
which is more about your power to convince... and ability to deal directly with
occupants as new builders soon noted.
It requires less capital investment while
being more profitable than open land
construction. In most cases the internal
rate of return (IRR) is higher as one
builder stated, but it requires goodwill,
a very good reputation and absolute
grassroots-level work where not many
will succeed. With less upfront investment in scarce and expensive urban land,
redevelopment is a field where a lot of
human element is involved, as the tenants or occupants must be persuaded to
sign over their buildings and land with
various incentives, from transit accommodation during the construction period,
to additional area in the new development, to cash corpuses and other financial incentives (Gokhlay 2011).
The Master of the Game
Several months after Trump juniors deal
with Haresh Mehta in 2011, the future
Trump Tower Mumbai was making local
headlines for the wrong reasons. One of
the two buildings acquired in 2007 by
Rohan Lifescapes had been constructed
a century earlier to provide housing for
members of the Pathare Prabhu caste
36
community, early settlers in colonial

Bombay. This buildingthen owned by
the Pathare Prabhu Charitable Trusthad
26 long-term tenants, caste members who
were protected by law in rent-controlled
500 square feet apartments. Though their
building had changed owners several
years earlier, these residents remained
at fixed rents. By 2010, Rohan Lifescapes
had settled with and bought out most of
them, acquiring their flats for redevelopment through shell companies in which
Haresh Mehta or his family members were
named as directors (Gemideals 2012).
However, on the first floor of this dilapidated ground plus three floors building,
one family had refused to settle with the
company and stubbornly resisted incentives and eviction. One Lady Stands in the
Way of Trump Tower Mumbai was just
one of the news stories which narrated the
resistance of 54-year-old Smita Panwalkar
and her husband Prasad and brother
Atul Rao, who told journalists that the
other 25 tenants of the building chose to leave,
but that was their choice. The developer offered
us money to move out, but we declined the offer and told him he should give us an apartment
in the new building (CNN Travel 2011).
The developer is violating the Development
Control Regulation 33 (7) according to which
he is bound to furnish permanent accommodation on the same plot of land and provide
temporary accommodation until he finishes
the project. But till date, he has not executed
any agreement with us... We want to stay here,
[but] forget about an apartment in Trump
Tower, they havent yet offered us an alternative accommodation (Mumbai Mirror 2011).
In an inquiry instituted by the government into various violations of rules concerning redevelopment of old buildings, officials had indeed concluded that
Rohan Lifescapes had applied for permission to demolish the Pathare Prabhu
buildings under DC Rule 33(7), the most
widely-used law for redevelopment in
Mumbai. In its probe in 2011, MHADA found
that of the 26 tenants then eligible for
rehabilitation, 22 were fraudulent, as the
original inhabitants had been replaced by
Mehtas proxies. By 2014, all 26 flats and
families, except for the PanwalkarRaos
on the first floor, had been bought out. No
permission can be granted for allowing
the incentives under DCR 33 (7) unless
the original tenants are rehabilitated in
the new building, stated a state housing
board official (Gemideals 2012). MHADA

revoked its earlier sanction for redevelopment granted to the Pathare Prabhu
Charitable Trust at the time of selling the
building to Rohan Lifescapes in 2007,
along with the sanctioned benefits of additional FSI which would make the project
commercially feasible, by allowing additional area to be sold on the open market.
The procedural lapses and tenants
resistance were not the sole source of
trouble for the developers of Trump Tower
Mumbai. Despite the fact that Rohan
Lifescapes and Mehta had purchased
and acquired ownership of the buildings
of the Pathare Prabhu Charitable Trust
and its neighbouring plot in 2007, the title of the land on which they stood was
another matter, as both plots were located within an old scheme of the erstwhile colonial Bombay Improvement
Trust (BIT) which had acquired the land
from its private owners to construct the
arterial Hughes Road and demarcate the
plots fronting on this thoroughfare at
the turn of the 20th century.
On further investigation, officials also
found further violations in the construction plan submitted for approval, in which
the developer attempted to manipulate
fire safety norms to generate even more
saleable area. As per the rules for redevelopment of old cessed buildings, the
maximum carpet area in a new flat for
rehabilitated tenants could be no more
than 753 square feet of permitted FSI. However, in the then-proposed Trump Tower
Mumbai, each individual luxury flat would
occupy an entire floor of the building, and
be around 1,600 square feet. In addition,
the builder had added a refuge areas on
every floor of another 3,000 square feet,
indicating these areas as safety precaution
in case of fire. These fire decks, in a thencommon ruse by builders, would later be
amalgamated into the carpet area of the
apartments at the time of sale. In fact
when Rohan Lifescapes had announced its
tie-up with Trump in 2012, it had already
publicly advertised luxury apartments
of more than 4,500 square feet each.
The Apprentice
Mehta is no less colourful a character
than The Donald himself. Born into an
orthodox Gujarati middle-class family
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
PERSPECTIVES
which owned a small surgical instruments

shop in Mumbais old inner-city, from a
young age he was drawn to the risky lures
of property speculation, as well as betting on horses at the nearby Mahalaxmi
Racecourse. In an interview to Racing
World India in 2011 after his deal with
Trump first made headlines, Mehta opened
up about his self-made fortune.
I fell in love with horses at first sight, and
seeing them gallop away majestically thrilled
me [to] no end. I knew at once [that] I will not
be able to keep away from these majestic
beautiful creatures since they had already created a deep impact on my mind.
Bored of his family business, in the early

1980s at the height of Indias closed quasisocialist economy, Mehta began importing
photo-copying machines into Mumbai,
when this novel new technology became
widespread in India. He observed,
I stayed in that business for many a year but
over time the profit margins started dwindling.
I have always believed that in any venture...
I am willing to take calculated risks, as long
as there is a high profitability margin. [I] guess
that holds good as my racing mantra too
(Mallya 2011).
In fact his first investment in the real

estate business came from his fathers
friend at the racecourse, one Parikh for
whom he sold a building, the first in what
became a series of profitable investments
in the 1980s and 1990s as Mumbais real
estate market and middle classes opened
up to the global economy.
Over the years I learnt the ropes and figured
out how to deal with tenanted properties,
registration laws and basic construction
guidelines. I kept buying properties and over
the years as they appreciated in value, the
profit margins kept increasing. To be honest,
as recently as four years ago, if someone
would have said that Rohan Lifescapes would
scale the heights that it has, I would have
been very sceptical. Yet, catering to niche
markets has always been my policy and the
rest, as they say, is history (Mallya 2011).
Mehta prides himself on his devotion

to nurturing his investments. Speaking
of his stable of prize-winning race horses,
he told Racing World India:
As an owner I keep tabs on my horses and
also the competition. It always helps to keep
abreast on developments, almost on a day to
day basis. But how many owners have the
time to spare? I have known owners who buy
a string of horses, enjoy a few winners and
they get such a high that their next purchase
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
goes awry and suddenly you find them totally

out of the game... Owning a horse requires a
lot of time to be spent in the stables, and
most owners being busy with their personal
agendas, find this difficult to do (Mallya 2011).
Indeed Mehta even took to breeding his

own horses at a friends stud farm in North
India so he always had the best pick over
the other big players (Mallya 2011).
Mehtas tenacity in keeping his horses
in the race would eventually help him ride
out the troubles he faced when Trump
pulled out. With the state inquiry into the
fraudulent tenancies created by Rohan
Lifescapes by buying out the old tenants
of Pathare Prabhu Building, as well as the
resistance offered by the sole surviving
tenant Smita Panwalkar to being evicted
by or selling out to Rohan Lifescapes, by
2014 all bets were off. Visits to Mumbai
by Trump junior to persuade officials to
let the project continuein which he even
met with state Chief Minister Prithviraj
Chavancame to naught. This finally
prompted the Trumps to withdraw from
their deal with Rohan Lifescapes in mid2013 and seek out new partners and sites
for Trump Tower Mumbai (Ashar 2013;
Babar 2013).
Soon after, Mehta and his company
attempted to call the bluff of the authorities. He did this by filing a suit in the Bombay High Court challenging the states
claim to ultimate ownership of the land
on which the plots stood. In 2013, the
Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai
(MCGM) had issued remarks on the proposed construction plan stating that as
the land fell within the boundaries of the
Gamdevi Scheme no 4 of the ex-BIT and
was thus municipal leasehold property,
payment to MCGM and its NOC (no
objection certificate) was mandatory before any development could be permitted
on the plots. The writ petition filed by
Rohan Lifescapes against MCGM argued
that the Pathare Prabhu Charitable Trust
had earlier held freehold ownership of
the land. As the Trust sold and conveyed
the plot to the builder in 2007, and
obtained the consent of the tenants for
redevelopment, they had both a clear title
and the requisite permissions to undertake
new construction on the plot.
This of course made no mention of the
fact that between 2007 and 2010 Rohan
vol lI no 23
Lifescapes had bought out all but one of

the remaining tenants in the building,
instead stating that they had moved out
into temporary transit accommodation,
due to the dilapidated and dangerous condition of the building, which was in urgent
need of redevelopment by the builder.
The said property... does not belong to [the
MCGM] Estate Department but is a freehold
land which belongs to the Pathare Prabhu
Charitable Trust wherein the Petitioner has
taken the Development rights. Therefore it is
clear from the above that it is a mistake/error in the records of the Respondent Corporation to demand for the NOC/Remark from
the Respondent... on the ground that the
said property is a part of the Gamdevi Estate
Scheme No 4 (Bombay High Court 2014).
With the chaotic state of colonial land

records kept by the MCGMand the
general pliability of a rent-seeking officialdom in issuing NOCs for construction
this legal gambit by the builder stood
some chance of success, unless the MCGM
could indeed prove to the court that
these lands had been acquired and subsequently given out on leasehold by the
state, rather than being a freehold private
property of the Pathare Prabhu Charitable
Trust as asserted by Rohan Lifescapes.
The Plot Thickens
Titling of land in the Indian legal system
is fraught with legal complications, as
definitive ownership is not certified or
proven by any state-sanctioned registry,
and is presumptive unless challenged in
court, where ownership must be adjudicated based on documentary evidence of
their claims by the parties to a suit. While
Rohan Lifescapes admitted that the neighbouring plotsincluding one which it
sought to amalgamate in the future site of
the skyscraperwere leasehold properties
of the MCGM, it claimed that the trust
building was given on freehold by the
erstwhile Improvement Trust to the
Pathare Prabhu community in recognition
of its charitable purpose of providing
housing to members of its caste in the
early 20th century when the Gamdevi
neighbourhood and Hughes Road had
been laid out by colonial town planners.
In its case to the high court, the construction company annexed the 1909 trust
charter deed and registered property
card of the Pathare Prabhu Charities
37
PERSPECTIVES
which stated that the then-BIT had given

the land to them on a freehold basis a
century earlier, with an endorsement by
their solicitors to strengthen their claim
to a clear title of ownership. But they had
no documents proving what is known as
the conveyance, despite having filed a
Right to Information (RTI) Act request
with MCGM to locate this crucial legal instrument in the municipal archive of
land records.
The Petitioner states that the said Trust after
conducting due search, unfortunately, could
not locate [the] conveyance executed by the
then trustees of BIT which was executed way
back in 1911. However, the said Trust holds
necessary documents to establish that they
[Pathare Prabhu Charitable Trust] are the
owners of the said property (Bombay High
Court 2014).
As I discovered on further research,

there was in fact no such conveyance or
documents ever executed in the records of
the MCGM Estates Department, the postcolonial successor to the BIT. The genealogy of the plots which Mehta sought to
amalgamate into the site of Trump Tower
further illustrates the charismatic entrepreneurship that marks Mumbais business history. The neighbouring site, known
in the archives as Plot 90 which had also
been acquired by Rohan Lifescapesand
which had once housed a clinic and residence called Ajinkya Hospitalhad been
conveyed on a leasehold basis to a local
landlord Shantaram Narayan Dabholkar,
as compensation by the BIT for expropriating his private holdings to construct
the adjacent roads. S N Dabholkar was
the son of Vasudeo Narayan Dabholkar,
founder of a prominent business clan who,
according to his grandson, also made his
first business contacts through his passion for horses. The elder Dabholkar
grew wealthy supplying provisions to
the Peninsular & Oriental (P&O) shipping
company when the port of Mumbais
trade boomed in the 19th century, a
job he obtained through the wife of a
British army captain whom he instructed
in horse-riding (Aras 2016). His son,
S N Dabholkar, became owner of much
of the surrounding area, where his father
had built a private bungalow and guest
house, garden, stables, temple and a
family shrine, which ran in the alignment of the new Hughes and Harvey
38
Roads (now Sitaram Patkar Marg and

Pandita Ramabai Marg) planned by the
BIT (Dabholkar 2014).
The BITformed by the British in the
wake of the plague epidemic in colonial
Bombay in 1896 to clean up the city and
redevelop its crowded slums into sanitary
housinghad acquired S N Dabholkars
lands under the 1894 Land Acquisition
Act, notifying them as cases to be heard
for compensation under its eminent
domain.1 Dabholkarwhose grandfather
had died in the plagueas a prominent
landlord and influential worthy in colonial Bombay, was nominated by the
British to be a trustee of the BIT, a position
from which he could exert influence on
its policies of eminent domain and urban
planning. The sites notified for acquisition under the BIT Gamdevi Scheme no 4
were numbered as Cases 26, 27 and 28,
with Case 27 eventually being realigned
and conveyed on a 999-year leasehold to
Dabholkar, now known as Plot 90.
Ajinkya Hospital, which once stood
on this site, had originally belonged to
Dabholkar and served as a guest house
on his family estate. However unlike this
acquisition case which became a Plot 90
in the new street scheme, the adjacent
Case 26 was granted in perpetuity by
the BIT Tribunal of Appeal to the Pathare
Prabhu caste community between 1903
and 1908. This grant was compensation in
lieu of the absorption of the site of the communitys funeral home and sanatorium
(dharamshala) into the newly aligned
Harvey Road. The BIT had officially recorded the protests of the Pathare Prabhu
community to its compulsory acquisition
notices in 1899 on grounds of interference with religious susceptibilities,
following which special consideration
was given and an agreement reached with
the case leaders, including a special fund
for reconstructing buildings demolished
to make way for the road. The cases were
closed and land acquired to construct
the road from a trader in horses named
Shahabuddin Gurte, who was awarded a
generous cash compensation in 1903 by
the BIT. By 190708 the colonial government had reached an amicable settlement to allow for the redevelopment of
the locality, and the Pathare Prabhus
legally registered a new charitable trust
to effect the agreement with the BIT for

leasing the land to the community.2
While it was clear from the archives that
the plot was not owned but given in perpetuity to the charitable trust by the BIT,
the 1909 charitable trust deed and indenture which Rohan Lifescapes had proffered
as evidence in the court to show its freehold ownershipwritten in hard-to-read
longhand in a poorly xeroxed annex of
evidencealso stated in its constitution
that its trustees shall have no power to
sell or mortgage or otherwise alienate any
of such landed properties. In the old
records of the BIT, it was further stated in
the 1908 agreement that the land grant
was subject to the condition that it be used
for charitable and/or religious purposes by
the Pathare Prabhu community. This meant
that the original sale by the charity of
the trust buildings to Rohan Lifescapes
in 2007 was in violation of its earlier
agreement, as well as its own charter.
Whether or not it owned the land or
held it on lease from its owner, the BIT or
MCGMwhich according to municipal
records it did notthis proviso cast doubt
on the very legality of the transaction by
Pathare Prabhu Charitable Trust with
the builder. But the Trust had sold off
and abandoned their property to Rohan
Lifescapes seven years earlier, and its
trustees refused to comment to curious
journalists now digging in the dirt at the
site of the much-hyped Trump Tower.
The high court, in hearing the petition
challenging the MCGMs landownership
by Rohan Lifescapes, ordered a stay in
the case, halting the demolition of the
Pathare Prabhu building and construction
of the now ex-Trump Tower in late 2014.
The End Game
By this time official investigations had
thrown up questions about how other
government agencies regulating urban
land use and the environment had allowed
these construction plans to pass in the
first place. The location of the two plots
within 500 metres of the beach and the
Arabian Sea to its west meant that it fell
under the nationwide coastal regulation
zone (CRZ), an environmental buffer zone
in which the height and structure of new
constructions is strictly regulated or
banned since the national law was
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
PERSPECTIVES
enacted by Indias Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in 1991. Further,

in the citys long-term development plan,
the two plots had for decades been
zoned for the construction of a future
Central Island Expressway, thus limiting
how much of the total plot area could be
used for construction, as some portion of
its setback would be reserved for building
the future expressway by the MCGM.
In 2011, the national CRZ rules were
relaxed by the central government to
permit for additional building construction in Indias coastal cities by reducing
the buffer zone from 500 metres to 100
metres. And in 2015, certain parts of
coastal Mumbai were entirely removed
from the CRZ restrictions after a group
of builders prevailed in the high court in
their argument that two neighbourhoods
in Central and South Mumbai were not in
fact next to the coastline, but were part of
the inland estuaries (Nair 2015). Perhaps
fortuitously, the site of the two plots for
Trump Tower are adjacent to South
Mumbais Marine Drive and Back Bay,
which thanks to this court ruling was now
no longer deemed to be within CRZ. And in
2015, the earlier-planned Central Island
Expressway was slated to be scrapped and
replaced in the revised long-term development plan of Greater Mumbai by an
entirely new plan for a coastal road on
stilts and tunnels in the Arabian Sea,
sanctioned by the newly-elected state
and central governments in 2014. The
legal reclassification of the coast as a
bayand thus the removal of valuable
seaside properties from the draconian
building restrictions of CRZand the
announcement of the coastal road development rendered calculable and profitable the designs of numerous builders
and coastal property owners beyond
their wildest dreams.
With these wider changes in planning
and environmental norms, Mehta rode
out his troubles. In 2015, the high court
lifted its legal stay and stop-work notice on
appeal by Rohan Lifescapes in its lawsuit
against the MCGM contesting the plots
ultimate ownership. Several months ago,
it appeared that Panwalkar and her family
had also vacated their flat in the old
Pathare Prabhu building, half of which
has since been demolished. In mid-2015
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
Mehta told a financial newspaper that

we want to hold on and sell only as much
as the cash flows we need to keep constructing the project, until there is an
improvement in sentiment... We will begin
construction and start the sales process,
though we are not planning a formal
launch as such (Nandy 2015). Just last
month another business paper announced
that Mehta had drastically scaled back his
earlier plans in the under-construction skyscraper, and entered into a new agreement with a local firm, Radius Developers,
to execute and market the project, while
Rohan Lifescapes will offer land and
secure approvals (Economic Times 2016).
In March 2016, Mehta described his
new business strategy going forward,
there will only be a few developers with
roles divided amongst them. There will
be the ones who can clear the land, get
the permissions and then there will be
those who have the financial strength and
development expertise to execute those
(Nandy 2016). As he told Racing World
India at the height of his deal with
Trump years earlier,
success or otherwise is part of the game. The
idea is to sustain. You are in the game for the
joy of it. In the bargain, if you hit upon a
winning streak, enjoy the moment. When
times are not so good, one must take it in
ones stride. That way you remain in the
game you love the most (Mallya 2011).
Notes
1
The Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA),

formed in 1996 almost exactly a century after
the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) was
formed, today holds similar statutory powers
of compulsory acquisition of privately-owned
lands encroached by slum settlements as the
colonial-era BIT established in 18961898.
This section is based on resolutions and minutes in the Proceedings of the Trustees for the
Improvement of the City of Bombay (BIT),
18991908, Municipal Corporation of Greater
Mumbai Estates Department Record Room.
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Cambridge Anthropology, 30, No 1, 1 March,
pp 317.
Aras, Abodh (2008): Straying Around: Datta Temple
at ChowpattyA Dabholkar Family Heritage,
accessed on 11 May 2016, http://strayingaround.blogspot.com/2008/12/datta-temple-atchowpatty-dabholkar.html.
Ashar, Sandeep (2013): Trump Walks Out of Super-Lux Girgaum Project after Setback, Mumbai Mirror, 10 August, http://www.mumbaimirror.com/mumbai/cover-story/Trump-walksout-of-super-lux-Girgaum-project-after-setback/articleshow/21740481.cms.
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Babar, Kailash (2013): Trump Inks Pact with Lodha

for Central Mumbai Project, Economic Times,
17 September, http://articles.economictimes.
indiatimes.com/2013-09-17/news/42148571_1_
rohan-lifescapes-donald-trump-panchshil-realty.
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(2015): Speculation Futures and Capitalism in
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and the Middle East, 35, No 3, 1 January, pp 38791.
Bombay High Court Writ Petition (L) 1399 of 2014,
Rohan Developers v Municipal Corporation of
Greater Mumbai and Ors.
CNN Travel (2011): One Lady Stands in the Way of
Trump Tower Mumbai, CNN Travel, 27 June,
http://travel.cnn.com/mumbai/life/trumptower-mumbai-193857.
Dabholkar, Chaitanya (2014): Family Histories,
accessed on 5 October 2014, https://sites.google.com/site/chaitanyadabholkar/Home/family-histories.
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Lifespaces in JV for SoBos Hughes Road Project,
22 April, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/
wealth/real-estate/radius-developers-rohanlifespaces-in-jv-for-sobos-hughes-road-project/
articleshow/51948720.cms.
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Graham, David A (2014): Rumsfelds Knowns and
Unknowns: The Intellectual History of a Quip,
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Cheap, Firstpost Firstbiz, 14 September, http://
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July, http://www.livemint.com/Companies/
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(2016): Cash-Starved Developers Tie up with
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39
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Adjudicating Litigotiation
Cases Filed in the Mumbai Family Court
Prashant Iyengar
How does litigation fare in Indian courts? How long do

cases last and how are they disposed? Do men and
women litigate equally and do they receive equal
justice? This paper offers a statistical snapshot of
litigation in Mumbais family court in the period
between 2010 and 2014.
The data presented herein indicates that family courts
today largely serve as venues for what Marc Galanter
termed Litigotiation. The data also reveals latent
patterns of discrimination in the adjudication of
womens economic rights.
This paper is an abridged version of an article with the same title

available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2604023. I am grateful
to my friends Lawrence Liang, Sruti Chaganti, Neha Tayshete,
Mohsin Khan, Aseem Prakash and Rajeev Kadambi for their constant
encouragement and comments on initial drafts. Much of the preparation
for this paper was undertaken during my employment at the Jindal
Law School, Sonipat to which I remain grateful for the resources made
available. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewer of this paper
for suggestions on shortening its length.
Prashant Iyengar (prashantiyengar@gmail.com) is a legal scholar
who teaches private laws, including family law, at the Jindal Global
University, Sonipat.
40
ndian legal scholarship has remained largely bereft of jurimetricsquantitative studies about the inner processes of
courts. A part of the problem is, of course, owing to the
difficulty in obtaining statistics of any kind about courts in India.
The Indian judiciary, unlike its counterparts in some Western
countries, seems either to suffer the consequences of being too
short-staffed or is disinterested (possibly both) in conducting
systematic studies of its own processes, save a horrified fascination with mounting figures of pendency of cases. Even the
few instances where courts publish annual reports, which would
be ideal vehicles for disclosure and stocktaking based on statistical data, frequently turn into hagiographies of sitting judges
and distinguished members of the bar. Such is in fact the template set by the annual reports of the Supreme Court of India.1
The dearth of officially produced statistics has therefore
understandably constrained the development of a legal scholarship founded on statistics. That however is only one aspect
of the matter, the other face to which is the heavy preoccupation of Indian legal scholars, myself included, with normative
law and doctrinal research to the exclusion of other modes of
inquiry. Upendra Baxis caustic remark that The Indian academic lawyer operates only at the cybernetic central point of
the normative legal system, namely, the appellate court system2 rings as true today as it did the day it was written 30
years ago. So a generalised aversion towards the domain of the
empirical among legal scholars has also contributed in some
measure to the neglect of jurimetrics in India.
Primarily though, jurimetrics is a field that is premised on
the existence of an entire infrastructure of information technology (IT) in courts which has been hitherto lacking in India.
Fortunately, the increasing uptake of information and communications technology (ICT) among the courts in India offers the
potential of overcoming this infrastructural hurdle. Over the
past two decades the Indian state has been assembling a robust
ICT infrastructure under the agency of the National Informatics
Corporation (NIC). So far, the NICs engagement with the judiciary has been limited to disseminating judgments and orders
of the higher judiciary. However, the decentralised organis
ational set-up of the NIC occasionally yields jurimetric treasuresrare lower court websites which offer richer details
than others. A case in point is the website of the Maharashtra
judiciary upon which my research in this paper is based.
The NIC has produced an exceptional website for the Maharashtra judiciary which provides both judgments and metadata
pertaining to thousands of cases decided by the lower courts
JUNE 4, 2016 vol lI no 23 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
SPECIAL ARTICLE
in that state. By serially downloading and aggregating information for all Mumbai family court cases from 201014 I was
able to arrive at some interesting data about litigation in the
family court presented in this paper.
This paper is aimed at two sets of audiences. First, it
is pitched at scholars interested in family law. In the past
decade there have been at least four very eminent ethnographic surveys of family courts in India by Flavia Agnes3
(West Bengal), the Ekta Trust (Madurai),4 Srimati Basu (2012)
(Kolkata) and Gopika Solanki (2013) (Mumbai). The present
study should be read as carrying forward the work of these
important predecessors.
Second, this paper is also pitched more broadly at anyone
interested in the functioning of Indias courts. While family
courts are only one small subset of the justice delivery apparatus in India, I would argue that due to the quotidian nature of
the issues they adjudicate upon, they form one of the chief sites
at which the civil justice delivery mechanism enters into commerce with the ordinary citizen. So the conclusions emerging
from this study could be read as being more than merely narrowly topical, and being metaphoric of the manner in which
dispute resolution takes place in contemporary India.
I open this paper with a methodology section explaining
the process by which the data for this paper was obtained. I
then offer some background information about family courts
in India and the Mumbai family court. This is followed by the
body of my paper in which I provide data about (i) the total
volume of cases handled by the court during the five-year
period of this study, (ii) the major enactments invoked in the
family court and the reliefs sought, (iii) the manner of disposal of cases, (iv) the average disposal time of cases and the
number of hearings they typically entail, (v) a gender breakup of litigants and how men and women fare differently in
the family court. I conclude the paper with some remarks
about the various findings.
Methodology
Mumbais family court classifies all cases filed before it primarily

into seven types of petitions:5
(i) Petition A: Divorce, annulment, judicial separation and restitution under all personal laws.
(ii) Petition B: Injunctions/marital property suits/declaratory
suits under the Specific Relief Act.6
(iii) Petition C: Applications for maintenance under the Hindu
Adoption and Maintenance Act (henceforth HAMA).
(iv) Petition D: Guardianship/custody issues both under the
Guardians and Wards Act as well as the personal laws.
(v) Petition E: Petitions for maintenance under Section 125 of
the Code of Criminal Procedure (henceforth CrPC).
(vi) Petition ER: Recovery of arrears/execution petitions for
maintenance orders granted under Section 125 CrPC.
(vii) Petition F: Mutual consent divorce under all personal
laws (interestingly, including uncodified Muslim law).
For each of these petition types, the website of the Maharashtra
judiciary permits visitors to access lists of all cases that are
either currently pending or have been disposed by the
Economic & Political Weekly EPW JUNE 4, 2016 vol lI no 23
court in any year. By sequentially retrieving these lists from

the period 201014, I was able to arrive at a figure of about
32500 total cases dealt with by the court during this period
(Table 1 and Figure 1).
Table 1: Total Cases Currently Pending or Disposed by the Court between
2010 and 2014, by Petition Type
Type of Petition

No
No
Total
Disposed Pending Cases
Pet A: Fault divorce, annulment, judicial separation,

restitution
Pet B: Marital property/injunction suits
Pet C: Hindu adoption and maintenance
Pet D: Guardianship/custody
Pet E: Maintenance under S 125 CrPC
Pet ER: Maintenance recovery petition
Pet F: Mutual consent divorce
Grand total
9,942 5,105 15,047

303
165
468
390
307
697
317
220
537
1,472
926 2,398
1,577
931 2,508
10,167
840 11,007
24,168 8,494 32,662
Figure 1: Category-wise Break-up of Cases Filed between 2010 and 2014

8000
8,000
7000
7,000
6302
6460
528
6852
6898
6150
507
481
470
152
437
406
115
6000
6,000
555
5000
5,000
546
157
4,000
4000
1924
3,000
3000
133
96
2886
3015
2743
101
2010
98
2011
111
2012
501
127
2095
475
146
2338
2547
68
80
3209
3194
108
2013
119
2014
2103
91
2,000
2000
1,000
1000
00
PetPet
D: Guardianship/custody
D:Guardianship/Custodycases
Cases
Pet Pet
A:Fault
divorce,
annulment,
A:Fault
Divorce,
Anullment,judicial
Judicialseparation,
Separation,restitution
Restitution cases
Cases
Pet B: Marital property/injunction suits
Pet F: Mutual consent divorce cases
Pet B:Marital Property/ Injunction Suits
Pet C: Maintenance under HAMA
Pet E: Maintenance u/s 125 CrPC
Pet F:Mutual Consent Divorce Cases
Pet ER: Maintenance execution petitions
Sum of grand total
Pet C: Maintenance under HAMA
Each
case listed
hasCrPCa webpage providing additional such
Pet E:Maintenance
u/s 125
Pet as:
ER:Maintenance Execution Petitions
details
Sum of Grand Total
(i) date of filing;
(ii) date of first hearing;
(iii) dates of interim hearings and the purpose of these hearings;
(iv) date of decision in case the suit is not currently pending,
and the next hearing date for pending cases;
(v) manner of disposal of the case;
(vi) act and section under which the application was filed;
(vii) name/description of the parties; and
(viii) links to any judgment/decree passed by the court in that case.
By serially downloading the pages for each of these cases I
was able to arrive at a consolidated table of data upon which
this research is based.
There are a few important caveats that I need to highlight
about the data. First, I assume in this study that the data uploaded on the website is mostly accurate. This is an assumption
that is not without its difficulties since the task of uploading
data onto the courts website appears to have been entrusted
41
SPECIAL ARTICLE
to the clerical staff or IT personnel rather than persons trained

in the law. Consequently, through random sampling I have
encountered an array of errorsmissing information, cases
mis-categorised, acts and sections mixed up, etc. To the extent
possible I have manually corrected these errors although it is
impossible to ascertain for sure to what extent the source is
tainted. All I can say is that I am confident that the magnitude of error is not so large as to derail the study entirely.7
Second, the website itself does not classify litigants by gender. Since I was keen on conducting a gendered inquiry of the
working of the judiciary I was left to classify the cases manually by relying for clues on the names of partiessome 64,000
in number, a dour matrimonial Necronominatum that resides
on my laptop.8 In the few instances where the case-page prefixed litigants names with Mr/Shri or Mrs/Smt identifying
their gender was simple enough. However for the large part, I
had to classify litigants based on my own estimation of whether
a name sounded male or female. This was relatively easier
to accomplish with Hindu names where feminine names
usually (but not always) end with vowels and masculine
names frequently end with consonants. However it was painfully difficult to classify Punjabi, Parsi, Muslim and Christian
names, owing to my unfamiliarity with naming conventions
within these communities. All this to confess that the gender
distribution I provide in this paper is despite the earnestness of
my labour, somewhat less than exact.
Finally, I feel it is important to confess that I have not ever
actually set foot in the Mumbai family court, and what knowledge I possess about the practices of this court is almost solely
induced from the data itself. Local factors and courtroom
realities that I am ignorant ofconventions of civil court
practice for instancemay lend an entirely different colour to
my results. Readers are invited to read this text as a companion to more methodical field-based ethnographies of Indian
courts to get a fuller picture of the experience of litigation.9
Before turning to the data, in the next section I provide some
background information about the family court in Mumbai.
Mumbai and the Family Courts
The Census of 2011 counted Mumbai as being home to roughly

2.6 million married couples.10 The manifold matrimonial disputes in this city are serviced by the family court in Bandra
established in 1989. It is (at the time of writing) staffed with
seven judges, three of whom, including the principal judge,
are women. It is assisted by a mediation centre comprising a
total of 10 trained mediators, 45 advocate mediators and seven
judge mediators.11
The Family Courts Act under which the Mumbai family
court was established was passed in 1984. It was a welcome
legislative response to the expressed concern from many quartersespecially womens organisationsthat matrimonial
cases be disposed speedily, non-adversarially to the extent
possible, through specialised courts.
The Family Courts Act does not define the word family. It
does not, therefore, deal with many problems that relate to
family, and only focuses narrowly on providing a common
42
forum for a handful of frequently-invoked matrimonial causes

of action namely,
(1) Decrees for nullity of marriage (2) Restitution of Conjugal rights
(3) Judicial Separation (4) Divorce (5) Declaration of marital status of
any person (6) Matrimonial property matters (7) Claims of maintenance both under personal laws as well as under the CrPC (8) Guardianship, Custody and Access to children (9) Injunction suits in matrimonial matters.
Despite its wide jurisdiction, however, the act left out of its
ambit all issues relating to inheritance and succession which
continue to be dealt with in ordinary civil courts. In addition
complaints under the newer Domestic Violence Act and petitions for the fixation of mehr amounts under the Muslim Women
(Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 do not currently,
except in Mumbai, fall under the ambit of the family courts.
There is a heavy emphasis on conciliation in many of the
acts sections, a feature that is important to bear in mind as we
move through the statistics quoted here. Judges are mandated
by the act to assist and persuade parties towards settlement.
The right to appeal is barred in all cases of disposal by mutual
consent, although the high court may, in exercise of its constitutional powers, review the record of any case on a motion by
either party. All cases must mandatorily be referred to conciliation proceedings immediately upon institution. Importantly,
if the parties arrive at a settlement before a counsellor, the
court is obliged to pronounce a decree in terms of that settlement unless the court considers the terms unconscionable or
unlawful or contrary to public policy.12
All of this describes the statutory parameters within which
the family court of Mumbai operates. In addition, it is vital to
bear in mind that this is the sole court for all matrimonial
disputes in the most populous city of the country. Events in
this court are frequently reported in the national print media,13
not least due to Mumbai being home to Bollywood, which adds
its share of lustre to the courts proceedings.14
So, whether viewed in terms of the volume of cases, their
high profile or the diversity of issues brought before it for adjudication, this is a court which has to contend with more than
most other lower courts in India have to. In addition, more
than other family courts, the pronouncements of this family
court undergo, regularly, public scrutiny in the popular press.
Against this context, I now turn to the data about the cases
filed therein.
Data Analysis
Some 32,662 cases are listed as having been filed and either
disposed or are still pending in the five-year period between
2010 and 2014. Figure 1 provides a category-wise break-up of
these cases. As is evident, the major matrimonial reliefs
divorce (including mutual consent divorce), annulment, restitution, and judicial separationmake up an overwhelmingly
high proportion of the yearly caseload of the court accounting
for fully 86%90% of cases filed.
While the filing of mutual consent petitions (Petition F) has
been on the ascendant during this period, they do not, from
this chart, appear to have risen at the expense of adversarial
SPECIAL ARTICLE
filings for divorce on fault grounds (Petition A), whose numbers have continued to grow steadily. Figure 2 charts the percentage growth/decline in the different categories of cases
during the study period.
Figure 2: Percentage Annual Growth/Decline in Petitions Filed before the
Family Court since 2010
Percentage
growth/decline
in petitions
%age Growth/Decline
in Petitions
since 2010
since 2010
40%
40
20%
20
0%0
-20%
-20
-40%
-40
-60
-60%
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
PetA:Fault
A: Fault
divorce,
annulment,
judicial
separation,
restitution
Pet
Divorce,
Restitution,
Anullment,
Judicial
Separation,
PetB:Marital
B: Marital
property/injunction
Pet
Property/Injunction
Suits suits
PetC:Hindu
C: Hindu
adoption
and maintenance
Pet
Adoption
and Maintenance
PetD:Guardianship/Custody
D: Guardianship/custody
Pet
PetE:Maintenance
E: Maintenance
Pet
underunder
S.125 S125
Cr. PCCrPC
PetER:ER:
Maintenance
execution
Pet
Maintenance
Execution
PetF:Mutual
F: Mutual
consent
divorce
Pet
Consent
Divorce
Cases Disposed and Pending between 2010 and 2015
Of the 32,662 cases filed during the study period, 74% were
Disposed during this five-year period (not necessarily in the
year that they were filed). Figure 3 (p 44) provides a categorywise break-up of these cases as on 25 March 2015.
First, the current (at the time of writing) caseload of the
family court consists predominantly of petitions filed in
the last two years. Second, the greater proportion of this
pending caseload consists of cases filed for matrimonial
reliefsfault grounds of divorce, annulment, judicial separation and restitutionPetition A cases. As Table 1 indicates,
these cases comprise up to 70% of the current caseload of the
family court.
Not surprisingly, there are certain kinds of cases that the
court is more adept at disposing than others. Mutual consent
petitions, for instance, seem to be promptly disposed of during
this five-year period and, despite the high volume of annual
filings, only 8% of these cases are currently pendingeven
these are largely those that have been filed during 2014. By
Table 2: Act-wise Break-up of Cases Filed between 2010 and 2014
Acts
Number of Cases
Hindu Marriage Act

Criminal Procedure Code
Special Marriage Act
Indian Divorce Act
Muslim Law
Mohammedan Law
Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act
S18/20 Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act
Guardianship/custody
Guardians and Wards Act
Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act
Family Court Act
Other acts
Grand total
20,690 (67)
4,512 (15)
1,842 (6)
1,115 (4)
946 (3)
722 (2)
224 (1)
714 (2)
453 (1)
387 (1)
66 ()
354 (1)
145 ()
30,771 (100)
Figures in brackets are percentages.

contrast, the court seems to have much greater difficulty in

disposing petitions of guardianship and maintenance.
Viewing the figures in this segment alone, the court seems
to be quite adept at managing its caseload. The backlog in
number of cases does not seem to be occasioned by delays in
justice delivery. As Upendra Baxi reminds us, time consumption is a structural property of legal systems related to the normativity of law. From the figures we have seen so far, it does
not seem like the family court has an abnormal appetite for
time-consumption. Of course a slightly different picture begins to emerge when this data is squared with data about the
manner of disposal and average disposal times, which we turn
to in later segments of this paper.
Major Enactments Invoked, and Grounds of Relief
In the
Years absence of a uniform civil code, family law in India is
comprised of a clutch of different personal laws applicable to
each religious community, as well as a few secular laws such
as the Special Marriage Act and spousal maintenance under
the CrPc. A listing of the major enactments invoked in cases,
therefore, yields a rough index of the participation of each religious community in the family court. Table 2 lists the major
acts under which petitions were filed during the study period.
Expectedly, an overwhelming majority of cases were filed
under the Hindu Marriage Act, followed by proceedings for
maintenance under Section 125 of the CrPc.
But what reliefs do parties claim under these enactments?
Which sections do they seek shelter under? In Table 3, I was
able to extract the primary reliefs claimed in Petitions A and B
cases15 wherever such details were available in individual case
pages. Where no section number was listed in Petition A case,
or more frequently, where the section was listed as 13 I classified the case as an unclear fault ground of divorce. Curiously,
a number of Mohammedan law petitions listed paragraphs
Table 3: Major Grounds of Relief Claimed in Petitions A and B Cases
(% of Parent Category Total)
Types of Relief
Fault divorce
Unclear grounds of divorce
Cruelty
Cruelty + desertion
Cruelty + failure to maintain/perform
marital obligations
Desertion
Divorce: refusal to consummate
Failure to maintain/perform marital
obligations
Restitution
Annulment
Maintenance
S125 Maintenance recovery appln
Maintenance under S 125 CrPC
HAMA maintenance petition
Judicial separation
Khula/mubarat
Grand total
Pending
3,837 (32)
364 (14)
2,662 (34)
708 (54)
27 (50)
64 (40)
1 (8)
Disposed
Grand Total
8,130 (68) 11,967 (56)

2,225 (86) 2,589 (12)
5,152 (66) 7,814 (36)
609 (46)
1,317 (6)
27 (50)
96 (60)
11 (92)
54 (0)
160 (1)
12 (0)
11 (52)
10 (48)
21 (0)
978 (36) 1,706 (64) 2,684 (12)
269 (28)
699 (72)
968 (5)
2,130 (41) 3,072 (59) 5,202 (24)
931 (37) 1,576 (63) 2,507 (12)
892 (45) 1,108 (55)
2,000 (9)
307 (44)
388 (56)
695 (3)
215 (41)
308 (59)
523 (2)
60 (40)
90 (60)
150 (1)
1 (25)
3 (75)
4 (0)
7,490 (35) 14,008 (65) 21,498 (100)
43
SPECIAL ARTICLE
PetER:
ER:Maintenance
Maintenance Execution
Pet
execution
1924
A:Fault
Divorce,
Anullment,judicial
Judicialseparation,
Separation, Restitution
Pet A:Pet
Fault
divorce,
annulment,
restitution
158
2728
PetMarital
B:Maritalproperty/injunction
Property/Injunction Suits
Pet B:
suits
14
119
C:Hinduadoption
Adoptionand
and maintenance
Maintenance
Pet Pet
C: Hindu
136
PetPet
D:D:Guardianship/Custody
90
PetE:E:Maintenance
S.125
Cr.CrPC
PC
Pet
Maintenanceunder
under
S125
21
11
33
513
PetER:
ER:Maintenance
Pet
execution
81
447
PetF:F:Mutual
Pet
Mutual Consent
consentDivorce
divorce
2095
A:Fault
Divorce,
Anullment,judicial
Judicialseparation,
Pet A:Pet
Fault
divorce,
annulment,
restitution
348
2667
PetMarital
Pet B:
suits
76
C:Hinduadoption
Adoptionand
and maintenance
Maintenance
Pet Pet
C: Hindu
100
PetPet
20
27
14
84
PetE:E:Maintenance
S.125
Cr.CrPC
PC
Pet
Maintenanceunder
under
S125
68
433
PetER:
ER:Maintenance
Pet
execution
165
316
PetF:F:Mutual
Pet
Mutual Consent
consentDivorce
divorce
2103
A:Fault
Divorce,
Anullment,judicial
Judicialseparation,
Pet A:Pet
Fault
divorce,
annulment,
restitution
616
2127
PetMarital
Pet B:
suits
35
56
C:Hinduadoption
Adoptionand
and maintenance
Maintenance
Pet Pet
C: Hindu
60
86
PetPet
76
35
PetE:E:Maintenance
S.125
Cr.CrPC
PC
Pet
Maintenanceunder
under
S125
319
156
PetER:
ER:Maintenance
Pet
execution
293
214
PetF:F:Mutual
Pet
Mutual Consent
consentDivorce
divorce
2299
A:Fault
Divorce,
Anullment,judicial
Judicialseparation,
Pet A:Pet
Fault
divorce,
annulment,
restitution
PetMarital
Pet B:
suits
99
53
PetPet
59
49
PetE:E:Maintenance
S.125
Cr.CrPC
PC
Pet
Maintenanceunder
under
S125
292
178
PetER:
ER:Maintenance
Pet
execution
351
86
PetF:F:Mutual
Pet
Mutual Consent
consentDivorce
divorce
In every suit or proceeding, endeavor

shall be made by the Family Court in the first instance, ... to assist
and persuade the parties in arriving at a settlement in respect of the
subject-matter of the suit.
Section 9 of the Family Courts Act
The individual case pages provide single word descriptions of

the manner in which the case was disposed. So a case may be
listed as having been withdrawn or dismissed. While
these seem sensible enough, other descriptors used by the
court are confounding. Several cases, for instance, are listed
as Dispossed Of (sic) or Judgement (sic) which do not aid
us very much in understanding what happened to the case
did the petitioners claim succeed or no? Notwithstanding
this disarray, some patterns are discernible and Table 4 (p 45)
is the result of my attempts to impose some linguistic order
on the confusion, often conflicting or self-cancelling terms
used in the courts website. I have listed disposal figures for
14,200 cases where such details were available (excluding
some 10,000 mutual consent divorce petitions (Petition F)
which were mostly, by their very nature, disposed by consent
or allowed).
2535
659
PetMarital
Pet B:
suits
Manner of Disposal of Cases
801
1746
A:Fault
Divorce,
Anullment,judicial
Judicialseparation,
Pet A:Pet
Fault
divorce,
annulment,
restitution
PetPet
38
30
C:Hinduadoption
Adoptionand
and maintenance
Maintenance
Pet Pet
C: Hindu
C:Hinduadoption
Adoptionand
and maintenance
Maintenance
Pet Pet
C: Hindu
39
1448
1761
58
22
15
18
PetE:E:Maintenance
S.125
Cr.CrPC
PC 29
Pet
Maintenanceunder
under
S125
44
41
514
PetF:F:Mutual
Pet
Mutual Consent
consentDivorce
divorce
Year-wise/category-wise status of all cases filed between 2010 and 2014

2014 2013 2012 2011 2010
2014
2013
2012 Axis Title
2011
2010
from Mullas textbook on Mohammedan law as Sections. Illustratively, a case page might list Momidian
law as the act under which a case
was filed and 281 as the section under
which it was filed. Paragraph 281 of
Mullas textbook on Mohammedan
law, of course, deals with the topic of
restitution of conjugal rights. It is possible that the statutory organisation
of Mullas textbook confused the clerk
into mistaking it for a statutean inadvertent instance of legislation by
scholarship!16
Cruelty is clearly the most frequently invoked ground of relief by
litigants in the family court. However, this figure is possibly only expressive of the fact that due to the absence of irretrievable breakdown as
a ground for divorce in India, cruelty is relied on by litigants as a residual ground to seek divorce where
there is no evidence of any other matrimonial fault (such as adultery, desertion, mental disorder, etc).
Is there a difference in the way in
which the court tries these different
claims? Are some causes of action
more prone to failure than others? In
the next section we turn to data about
the manner in which these cases
were disposed.
Chart Title
Figure 3: Status of All Cases Filed between 2010 and 2014
100
101
377
Axis Title
Number of cases
Listed as disposedListed asListed
as pending
Disposed
Listed as Pending
What is immediately striking is the high percentage of petitions that end up being disposed as I have classified them without entering into merits, that is, owing to the agency of the litigants themselves rather than a deliberated determination by the
court. In at least a third of all cases (32%) resolution is arrived at
by a settlement brokered between the parties. This should not
come as a surprise since the family court itself incorporates a
policy bias towards settlement in Section 9 that I have quoted.
This figure is a testament to the success of the policy goal behind
the statute, although much remains to be said about the fairness,
quality and conditions of the settlements that are arrived at. 17
In addition, about 17% of all cases are either withdrawn by
the litigants themselves or are abatedmeaning they are
closed by the court due to the long inactivity of the petitioners.
This percentage is higher in maintenance cases, approaching
50% of all cases for maintenance under the Hindu Adoptions
and Maintenance Act (HAMA) and 40% in disputes over
marital property and 30% in proceedings for maintenance under the CrPC. This high attrition rate especially in areas of litigation that are crucial for securing womens economic rights
SPECIAL ARTICLE
signals a latent gender bias in the access to the courts. Significantly, in each of these categories of cases, the percentage of
resolution by consent is minor (~13%) indicating that they
are vigorously resisted by respondentstypically husbands.
This leads us to the third significant percentagean average
of 22% of all cases end up being dismissed or are rejected.
Once again there are thematic variations to this figure and if
one only focuses on the four categories of womens claims
maintenance under the CrPC and HAMA, maintenance recovery
petitions and marital property disputesthis percentage
nudges up to an average of 30%.
To turn these statistics into a narrative, when the average
litigant files a petition in the family court, he/she has a 32%
chance of the matter ending in a mediated settlement. Then,
there is a 17% chance that he/she will tire of the case midway
and will withdraw it or cease to pursue it. Should he/she
persist with the claim despite the failure of a settlement, there
is a 22% likelihood that the case will be dismissed and a maximum chance of 28% that the litigant will achieve his/her
desired result. Different teleologies may be written up by varying the relief claimedfor instance, a 60% of chance of a
mediate settlement in the case of fault grounds of divorce.
Viewed from the perspective of the court, in half of all cases
that come before it (that are not instituted as mutual consent
divorce petitions), the court ends up not having to exercise its
judicial mind upon the issues raised. This is not to suggest that
this administration of consent that the court is engaged is not
time-consuming. If litigants end their cases with a settlement,
or withdraw their cases midway, they do so having taken up a
significant amount of the courts time.
Disposal Times, Interim Hearings per Case Type

Each case page provides details of the number of hearings in
that case along with their dates and brief details about the
purpose of the hearing. I was able to extract these details and
construct a picture of the average lifespan of different types
of petitions.
Table 5 focuses only on the cases disposed by the court
during the study period and provides details of the number of
interim hearings between the first date of hearing and the date
of decision, it takes for a petition to be disposed. So 4% of all
Petition A cases were disposed after a single interim hearing,
19% were disposed within two or three hearings and so on.
These figures (Table 5) lend support to the assertion made
earlier that the court has an easier time of disposing certain
types of petitions over others.
These figures are broken down further in Table 6 (p 46) which
provides the average, median and modal number of hearings
per relief type. In addition the table also provides the average
number of days the court took in these cases to dispose the
petition and the average number of days between hearings.
For instance the average number of hearings in an annulment petition was eight, although most frequently, in 22% of
cases that were disposed, the court only took three hearings to
dispose of the matter. The average time the court took to
dispose of annulment petitions during the study period was
440 days or roughly a year and two months. The average
interval between hearing dates in petitions for annulment
was 47 days.
Once again, the average number of hearing dates and the
average decision time are the highest for Maintenance cases
Table 4: Manner of Disposal by Relief Claimed

Manner of Disposal
Restitution
Annulment
Judicial

Separation

Without entering merits

Consent terms
Withdrawn
Reconciled/abated
Transfer
Dismissed/rejected
Ex parte
Allowed
Judgment/disposed of
Disposed otherwise
Fully satisfied
Grand total
869 (51)
318 (19)
439 (26)
84 (5)
28 (2)
606 (36)
108 (6)
55 (3)
55 (3)
12 (1)
()
1,705 (100)
364 (52)
256 (37)
86 (12)
7 (1)
15 (2)
119 (17)
49 (7)
50 (7)
39 (6)
73 (11)
()
694 (100)
64 (71)
39 (43)
21 (23)
2 (2)
2 (2)
16 (18)
5 (6)
2 (2)
3 (3)
()
()
90 (100)
Number of Cases (%)

Marital
Guardianship/ Fault Grounds
Maintenance Maintenance S125 Maintenance
Property/
Custody
of Divorce
under CrPC
under HAMA
Recovery
Injunction
Appln
99 (44)
9 (4)
86 (38)
3 (1)
1 ()
59 (26)
9 (4)
15 (7)
33 (15)
10 (4)
()
225 (100)
102 (33)
17 (6)
78 (25)
4 (1)
3 (1)
89 (29)
17 (6)
31 (10)
60 (19)
9 (3)
()
308 (100)
4,892 (60)
3,863 (48)
742 (9)
140 (2)
147 (2)
1,333 (16)
862 (11)
605 (7)
344 (4)
70 (1)
7 ()
8,113 (100)
367 (33)
15 (1)
319 (29)
32 (3)
1 ()
391 (35)
66 (6)
108 (10)
161 (15)
12 (1)
2 ()
1,107 (100)
Total
Number
of Cases
214 (55)
157 (10)
7,128 (50)
11 (3)
6 () 4,534 (32)
188 (49)
147 (9)
2,106 (15)
14 (4)
4 ()
290 (2)
1 ()
()
198 (1)
77 (20)
404 (26) 3,094 (22)
23 (6)
()
1139 (8)
27 (7)
5 ()
898 (6)
43 (11)
181 (11)
919 (6)
2 (1)
16 (1)
204 (1)
()
812 (52)
821 (6)
386 (100) 1,575 (100) 14,203 (100)
Table 5: Running Total of Number of Interim Hearings before Disposal of Petition

Number of Hearings
1 hearing
23 hearings
410 hearings
1115 hearings
1620 hearings
2050 hearings
50100 hearings
Grand total
Cri App E
Petition A
Petition B
Cases Disposed (Running Total %)

Petition D
Petition F
16 (1)
65 (7)
420 (44)
212 (62)
156 (76)
273 (100)
4 (100)
1,146
346 (4)
1,416 (19)
4,377 (65)
1,646 (82)
841 (91)
834 (100)
31 (100)
9,491
14 (5)
27 (14)
94 (46)
50 (63)
39 (76)
67 (99)
3 (100)
294
14 (4)
22 (12)
131 (56)
51 (74)
23 (82)
51 (99)
3 (100)
295
5,424 (54)
3,344 (87)
1,187 (99)
121 (100)
10 (100)
(100)
(100)
10,086
Petition C
Petition ER
Total
8 (2)
9 (4)
141 (41)
62 (57)
57 (72)
102 (99)
4 (100)
383
68 (4)
73 (9)
532 (44)
327 (65)
220 (79)
316 (100)
4 (100)
1,540
5,890 (25)
4,956 (47)
6,882 (76)
2,469 (87)
1,346 (93)
1,643 (100)
49 (100)
23,235

45
SPECIAL ARTICLE
both under the CrPC and the HAMAboth lasting an average

of between 650 and 660 days or about a year and 10 months.
Translated into the ordinary lives of litigants, these statistics would mean that if a woman intends to file a petition for
maintenance against her spouse, the average time she can expect to have to wait is nearly two years. She or her lawyer
would also, very likely in this period, have to make between 14
and 16 trips to court at intervals of every one and a half month.
If she is lucky her case could be disposed in fewer hearings
six hearings in the case of maintenance petitions under the
CrPC and nine in case of petitions under the HAMA. Of course,
there is always the possibility that she must weigh that hers
could be one of the unlucky ones that is heard more than 60
times. It would be pertinent to recall here that maintenance
cases coincidentally have the highest percentage of withdrawalsa s tatistic that seems quite understandable in the light of
the timelines seen.
In Table 7 I provide details of the number of hearings and
the average decision time taken to dispose cases, arranged
according to five common grounds of disposalby consent,
withdrawn, fully satisfied, dismissed and allowed. I
have excluded figures from mutual consent petitions which
are presumably all disposed by consent or, less commonly,
withdrawn.
Table 7 indicates that it takes up to four interim hearings
and an average of 240 days to dispose a third (36%) of all cases
that end up being disposed by consent, in a third of all
petitions that were disposed under this category, litigants
were able to arrive at a settlement before the fifth date of hearing or roughly eight months. Similarly a third of all cases that
are withdrawn (31%) do so within four hearings and 214
daysthat is, within seven months of filing, 60%70% of both

types of cases are disposed before the tenth hearing after the
lapse of 390 daysa little over a year.
By contrast, in only 40% of cases where the petitioners relief was allowed, did this occur before the tenth hearing.
Viewed differently, 60% of cases where the petitioners relief
was allowed took more than ten hearings. In a quarter of
these petitions the case lasted more than 20 interim hearings
and an average of 1,128 days or a little over three years.
Over a third of all cases that were classified as fully satisifiedmostly maintenance recovery petitionsproceedings
lasted an average of over 900 days, over 2.5 years.
The broad story that emerges from these figures is that the
court does dispense speedy justice, but this is only available
for those who are able to arrive at a settlement with their
opponents. In many of the cases where settlement is not an
option, the ordinary time consumption of the court in adjudicating norms proves too burdensome for litigantsespecially
womento persist with.
Distribution of Cases by Gender of Petitioner
There has been a growing recognition in feminist literature

that securing rights for women is a reliable route to enhancing
the welfare of the family overall18that in some senses the
word woman is metaphoric of the family as a whole, in
ways that the word man is not. The inverse of this insight is
somewhat borne out by the distribution of cases by gender in
the family courtthat is, viewed solely on the yardstick of the
gender of the petitioners, family courts are largely womens
courtsor at least this one in Mumbai is. Table 8 provides a
distribution of the various reliefs claimed by the gender of
the petitioner.19
Table 6: Cases DisposedAverage, Medians and Modal Number of Hearings, Average Interval between Hearings,
Average Decision Time
Clearly the majority of petiReliefs Sought
Average Median No of Max No of Modal No of Average No of Average Std Dev of Number of
tions
(57%) in this court are

No of Hearings Hearings
Hearings
Hearings Days between Decision Decision
Cases
filed by women against men.

per Case
per Case in Any Case (Frequency) Hearings Time (Days) Time
Disposed
Annulment
8
6
55
3 (22%)
47
405
277
699
Leaving out figures of petitions
12
9
67
6 (35%)
40
487
346
308
for restitution of conjugal
Fault grounds of divorce
9
7
81
3 (26%)
50
451
300
8,130
rights this percentage nudges
Judicial separation
10
8
59
4 (26%)
47
511
303
90
upwards to 62%. That is,
Maintenance under CrPC
14
12
70
6 (23%)
45
648
356
1,108
three-fifths of all petitioners in
Marital property/injunction
14
12
100
3 (13%)
40
566
403
225
the family courts are women
Mutual consent divorce
2
1
46
1 (53%)
79
221
100
9,212
seeking some kind of relief.
Restitution
9
7
62
3 (18%)
50
474
296
1,706
The variations in the genHindu Adoption and Maintenance Act 16
13
63
9 (36%)
48
660
395
387
S125 maintenance recovery appln
14
12
59
7 (27%)
43
547
365
1,575
der distribution across the difGrand total 23,440
ferent reliefs are notable. Up to
Table 7: Number of Hearings, Average Decision Time by Disposal Type
Number of Interim
Hearings

Avg Decn
No of Cases
Time (Days)
(%)
Consent/Convert
Avg Decn No of Cases

Time (Days)
(%)
Withdrawn
Avg Decn
No of Cases
Time (Days)
(%)
Fully Satisfied
1 Hearing
24
510
1115
1620
21100
Grand total
197
240
389
622
787
1,123
453
107
214
393
602
782
1,105
477
80
157
322
520
714
1,064
529
172 (5)
1,185 (31)
1,345 (35)
520 (14)
290 (8)
296 (8)
3,808 (100)
135 (7)
483 (24)
669 (34)
308 (15)
182 (9)
220 (11)
1,997 (100)
43 (5)
78 (10)
242 (30)
174 (22)
114 (14)
148 (19)
799 (100)
Avg Decn
No of Cases
Time (Days)
(%)
Dismissed
107
227
427
665
848
1,144
586
30 (1)
443 (15)
1,198 (39)
639 (21)
324 (11)
407 (13)
3,041 (100)

Time (Days)
(%)
Allowed
108
184
374
596
763
1,158
657
5 (1)
47 (6)
227 (31)
175 (24)
99 (14)
178 (24)
731 (100)

Time (Days)
(%)
Disposed Of/Judgment
94
180
365
580
707
1,105
672
27 (3)
93 (10)
228 (25)
118 (13)
111 (12)
320 (36)
897 (100)
46
SPECIAL ARTICLE
79% of all restitution cases are filed by men against women.

This figure accords with the observations and findings of several
commentators that this is a ground that is frequently abused by
husbands to harass their wives.
The second lopsided figure to note is that of guardianship/
custody petitions where again, an overwhelmingly large percentage of petitions are filed by husbands/men against women.
This data, however, must be viewed as incomplete until we
have a fuller picture of the disposal of custody of children as
Table 8: Distribution of Reliefs (Excluding Mutual Consent) Claimed by
Gender of Petitioner in All Cases That Are Both Pending and Disposed
Reliefs Claimed

Filed by
Filed by
Husbands/Men Wives/Women
Annulment
Fault divorce
Judicial separation
Restitution
Maintenance under CrPC
Marital property/injunction
HAMA petition
S125 maintenance recovery appln
Grand total
547 (57)
6,081 (51)
331 (65)
74 (51)
2,120 (79)
60 (3)
95 (26)
()
()
9,308 (43)
419 (43)
5,864 (49)
181 (35)
72 (49)
559 (21)
1,919 (97)
271 (74)
697 (100)
2,508 (100)
12,490 (57)
Total
966
11,945
512
146
2,679
1,979
366
697
2,508
21,798
Table 9: Gender-wise Break-up of Fault Grounds of Divorce

Grounds
Husband
Wife
Total
Cruelty
3,965 3,841 7,806
Cruelty + desertion
695
618
1,313
Desertion
82 76 158
Divorce: refusal to consummate
9
3
12
Curelty+failure to maintain
54
54
Unspecified fault grounds
1,330
1,251
2,581
Failure to maintain
21
21
Grand total
6,081
5,864
11,945
ancillary reliefs in suits for divorce. In the course of divorce

proceedingsespecially mutual consent petitionsmen typically completely cede their right to custody and guardianship
over children in exchange for a reciprocal waiver of future
maintenance claims by their wives. Against this context, these
petitions for guardianship/custody must be viewed as exceptions to the overall pattern of retreat by men from the responsibilities of parenting.
Lastly, one cannot help noticing that petitions for maintenance under the HAMA and the CrPC are exclusively by women
against men. This is unsurprising given the statutory language
under which these cases are filed which exclusively enables
women and children to obtain financial relief from men
mostly husbands.
Turning briefly to a gender-wise breakup of petitions filed
on fault grounds of divorce, from the cases (both disposed
and pending) from which such details were extractable the
number of petitions filed on each of the grounds seem fairly
equally distributed (Table 9). Specifically men ground their
claims for divorce on allegations of cruelty as frequently as
women do. Of course this gives us no insight about the seriousness of the allegations of cruelty that men and women each
level. As mentioned before cruelty has turned into a residual
term for filing divorce cases and is invoked elastically to
include frivolous complaints of not preparing food or neg
lecting household chores. Against this context, Table 9 must be
viewed as merely expressing the absence of any superficial
links between gender and the grounds upon which divorce is
sought.
Table 10 shows a gender-wise breakup of the manner of disposal of suits.
Table 10: Gender-wise Breake-up of Nature of Disposal of Cases

Gender/Nature of
Annulment
Fault Divorce
Disposal of Suit

Husband/men
Consent/converted
to consent
Dismissed/rejected
Withdrawn
Allowed
Exparte
Disposed of
Transferred
Reconciled/abated
Fully satisfied
Wife/women
Consent/converted
to consent
Dismissed/rejected
Withdrawn
Ex parte
Allowed
Disposed of
Reconciled/abated
Fully satisfied
Transferred
Grand total
Guardianship/ HAMA Petition

Judicial
Maintenance Marital Property/ Restitution
S125 Maintenance
Custody
Separation
Under CrPC
Injunction
Recovery Appln
Number of Cases (% of Parent Row Total)
346 (56)
3910 (49)
181 (62)
0.00
44 (49)
31 (3)
52 (24)
139 (40)
66 (19)
53 (15)
24 (7)
23 (7)
21 (6)
15 (4)
5 (1)
()
275 (44)
1,773 (45)
725 (19)
394 (10)
262 (7)
347 (9)
174 (4)
144 (4)
88 (2)
3 ()
4,113 (51)
12 (7)
57 (31)
48 (27)
14 (8)
8 (4)
37 (20)
2 (1)
3 (2)
()
112 (38)
385 (100)
20 (45)
7 (16)
9 (20)
1 (2)
4 (9)
()
1 (2)
2 (5)
()
45 (51)
()
14 (45)
3 (10)
2 (6)
2 (6)
10 (32)
()
()
()
1,057 (97)
2 (4)
13 (25)
25 (48)
2 (4)
2 (4)
7 (13)
1 (2)
()
()
161 (76)
117 (43)
53 (19)
33 (12)
26 (9)
26 (9)
18 (7)
2 (1)
()
()
621 (100)
2,079 (51)
608 (15)
345 (8)
512 (12)
341 (8)
170 (4)
52 (1)
4 ()
2 ()
8,023 (100)
18 (40)
15 (1)
9 (20)
372 (35)
12 (27)
315 (30)
1 (2)
64 (6)
1 (2)
106 (10)
3 (7)
150 (14)
()
32 (3)
()
2 ()
1 (2)
1 ()
89 (100) 1,088 (100)
7 (4)
46 (29)
61 (38)
6 (4)
13 (8)
25 (16)
3 (2)
()
()
213 (100)
4 (4)
31 (28)
28 (25)
9 (8)
16 (14)
23 (21)
1 (1)
()
()
293 (100)
11 (3)
77 (20)
189 (49)
23 (6)
27 (7)
43 (11)
14 (4)
()
1 ()
385 (100)
1369 (81)
Total Number of
Cases
0.00
5933 (43)
249 (18)
489 (36)
368 (27)
41 (3)
84 (6)
43 (3)
27 (2)
68 (5)
()
316 (19)
1,559 (100)
2,195 (37)
1,371 (23)
900 (15)
346 (6)
470 (8)
292 (5)
190 (3)
166 (3)
3 ()
8,023 (57)
68 (22)
113 (36)
68 (22)
24 (8)
14 (4)
12 (4)
16 (5)
()
1 ()
1,685 (100)
6 ()
404 (26)
147 (9)
()
5 ()
181 (12)
4 ()
812 (52)
()
1,559 (100)
2,325 (29)
1,713 (21)
1,198 (15)
665 (8)
549 (7)
625 (8)
124 (2)
818 (10)
6 ()
13,956 (100)

47
SPECIAL ARTICLE
At first glance, as bare percentages, the petitions filed by

both men and women fare near equally on almost every relief.
On a closer look at the individual relief types, however, interesting patterns begin to emerge. For instance, although the
greater percentage of cases for restitution of conjugal rights is
filed by men against women, their petitions are only allowed
in 3% of these cases, 36% of their petitions end up being dismissed by the court and 27% are disposed as withdrawn.
This indicates that whatever their intentions may have been in
filing the suit, the court only seems to issue such orders with
reluctance and in only up to a maximum of 10% of cases (if
one counts the cases disposed as ex parte and disposed of
as being favourable to the petitioner). The high rate of eventual failure of these petitions, however, does not turn it any less
into an instrument of harassment. The fate of petitions filed by
men for guardianship or custody suffers a similar trajectory
where up to 60% of cases filed by men are either dismissed or
withdrawn.
Women do not appear to fare comparatively better in the
maintenance suits that they file, with 65%70% of all suits
filed by women for maintenance either under the HAMA or the
CrPC ending in either withdrawal or dismissal. More encouragingly, however, 52% of all petitions for recovery of maintenance are disposed of as fully satisfied indicating that the
court takes the business of enforcing its maintenance orders
with seriousness.
Discussion and Conclusion
Let me briefly summarise the data presented here. First, despite the high volume of cases filed before it (between 6,000
and 7,000 annually during the study period), the family court
seems to have achieved a fairly brisk turnover rate, and only a
quarter of the cases filed during this period are currently
pending. However, the data also indicates that the court has a
lower turnover rate in cases of determining spousal maintenance and custody arrangements which are suits crucial to securing womens rights. Second, figures on the manner of disposal suggest that a high volume of cases end up being either
settled by consent between the parties, or are withdrawn. In
only half of the cases that are filed adversarially (or up to a
third of all cases filed), does the court end up having to go
through all the motions of a trial and pronounce a judgment.
Third, although the statistics appear to indicate no significant
difference between the manner of disposal in suits filed by
men and women, suits filed by women for recovery of maintenance and child custody appear more prone to higher number
of hearings and much longer disposal times.
In light of the data presented, I would like to make two brief
points about settlement and women in the family court.
First, the statistics presented here attest to the emergence of
consent/settlement as the predominant mode of disposing
cases in the family court. As I have mentioned previously, this
is unsurprising, even expected, given the policy thrust of the
Family Courts Act. As a proportion of cases that are disposed
after trial, it even accords well with international practices
(read the US).20 While this would ordinarily be a welcome shift
48
away from the agonist nature of litigation, in the case of the

family court, there is cause to temper optimism with caution:
(i) Galanters paper discusses evidence from studies that indicated that the increasing shift towards mediation had no impact, and at times even an inverse relationship with the number of cases disposed by judges. That is, if the rationale of an
increasing shift towards mediation is to free up judicial time to
adjudicate more intricate cases, this was not borne out by the
actual practices of courts in the US.21 The statistics about the
Mumbai family court seem to affirm this insight. The high volume of cases that are disposed by consent seem to have had no
bearing at all on the remainder of caseschiefly maintenance
petitions which continue to take an average of two years or
longer to dispose. This does not mean that mediation is
un
desirable, only that a more systematic stock-taking and
budgeting of judicial time is warranted at an institutional level.
(ii) Any evaluation of the desirability of increased courtannexed mediation must also factor in the quality of the
bargains that litigants enter into under the courts shadow.
Although I have not yet systematised the data in this regard,
consent terms recorded in the decrees of the court seem to
indicate that it is nearly a template for women to waive all present and future maintenance claims in return for unhindered
custodial access to their children.22 Against this context, the
increased frequency of cases disposed by consent may be
read as an assessment by women that they cannot hope for
better justice from the processes of the court. The insubstantive justice of these private orderings by litigants should be a
greater concern of the court than it currently appears to be.
The second and final point I would like to make in this conclusion is about the role that gender plays in the family court.
Access of women to courts generally has been a concern of the
womens movement both nationally and internationally. While
it is encouraging to note that the Mumbai family court seems
more accessible to women generally (although we have no
system-wide statistics to form any basis for comparison), it is
worrying that the average disposal times of cases are longer,
and the rate of withdrawal of cases are higher in the categories
of cases litigated by women. These factors operate as structural
impediments to access to justice, of which the visible symptoms are the comparatively lower number of cases filed by
women for maintenance and its recovery.
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Notes
1 Annual Report 20082009 (New Delhi: Supreme
Court of India, 2009), http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/annualreport/annualreport200
8- 09.pdf.
2 Upendra Baxi, Towards a Sociology of Indian
Law (New Delhi: Satvahan, 1986), 3.
3 Flavia Agnes, A Study of the Family Courts,
West Bengal, September 2004.
4 EKTA Resource Centre for Women, A Study
of Family Courts in Tamil Nadu, November
2008, http://ektamadurai.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/pdf/Family_Court_Study_Book_
let.pdf.
5 It is important to note that these seven categories are only the major kinds of petitions filed
before this court and should not be read as expressing the total volume of cases that the
court has to contend with. In addition to these
seven categories, the Mumbai family courts
website also displays data about Criminal and
Civil Miscellaneous Applications and Regular
Darkhast petitions filed before it. I have omitted these casesamounting to about 1,200
cases every yearfrom my survey both because they appear to form only a negligible
component of the courts caseload and also
since they only deal peripherally with the
matrimonial issues that are the chief object of
my study.
6 A number of suits of annulment or divorce are
filed under the category of Petition B suits
chiefly (but not only) by parties who are
Muslim for whom a declaratory decree under
the Specific Relief Act seems the only way possible to obtain a judicial affirmation of their
talaq. The absolute number of these petitions,
however, is not so large as to skew the broad
contours of the data.
7 To be utterly clear, I am unable to verify whether some glitch in the courts system or typists
ignorance did not lead inadvertently to a 1,000
cases being wrongly classified as something
they were not! Likewise, I cannot say for sure if
the fall in numbers of cases filed/disposed during 2012 was a natural occurrence or is simply
reflective of the fact that fewer cases were uploaded by the courts IT Division that year. This
is the unfortunate flip side to working with
large quantities of electronic data. As a researcher, however, I am entitled to my optimism about the absolute integrity of my data.
8 I am profoundly conscious that this work was
built upon what seems to be a rather wholesale
violation of privacy of the litigantsfirst by the
courts website in uploading their data and secondarily by myself in making use of this data.
Since the turn of the century the Indian state
has capped a long period of opaqueness by taking remarkable strides towards openness of information. This new culture of transparency,
however, seems driven more by an exuberant
and almost desperate embrace of IT as a source
of salvation for the problems of underdevelopment rather than a normative embrace of the
ethic of transparency. Commissioning IT projects for each of its departments has become a
routine activity of most arms of the state, and
these projects are almost somnambulistically
implemented in the same manner as civil
works projects were commissioned in the preIT era. Welcome though all the surfeit of information that this IT-besotted-state has produced is, it has frequently come at the expense
of the individuals right to privacy. For instance
in the 50 page National Policy on IT in the Judiciary prepared by the Supreme Court in 2005
and pursuant to which the Mumbai family
courts website was set up, the word privacy
is mentioned not even once. E-Committee,
Supreme Court of India, National Policy and
Action Plan for Implementation of Information

And Communication Technology in the Indian
Judiciary, New Delhi, 1 August 2005, http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/ecommittee/actionplan-ecourt.pdf.
9 See, for instance, Jayanth K Krishnan et al,
Grappling at the Grassroots: Access to Justice
in Indias Lower Tier, Harvard Human Rights
Journal 27, accessed on 10 April 2015, http://harvardhrj.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/
V27_Krishnan_et_al.pdf.
10 The census provides details of the number of
married couples per household. Census surveyers were given the following instructions: A
couple is formed through marriage. All currently married couples living in the household
irrespective of their age are to be included. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Instruction Manual for Houselisting
and Housing Census, 2011, 45, http://catalog.
ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/4161/download/
55469.
11 Sonam Saigal, Bandra Family Court Receives
1000 Divorce Pleas Every Month, Free Press
Journal, 1 January 2015, http://www.freepressjournal.in/bandra-family-court-receives1000-divorce-pleas-every-month/; High Court
of MumbaiHandbook of Mediation 2012
(Main Mediation Centre, Mumbai, October
2012), http://mediationbhc.gov.in/PDF/Handbook2013.pdf.
12 See Rule 31 of the Maharashtra Family Courts
Rules 1987.
13 In my own media analysis of some 540 English
newspaper accounts of family law matters that
had been reported in 2014, 171 or about 31%
were from the city of Mumbai, followed at a
distance by New Delhi at 23%reflective perhaps of the urban bias of these newspapers, but
also indicative of the domineering presence of
this courts utterances in the national media.
14 In the last year alone, the family court of
Mumbai was constantly in the spotlight due to
matrimonial disputes filed by stars such as
Hrithik Roshan, Leander Paes, Yukta Mookhey,
Karishma Kapoor and Om Puri, among others.
15 Omitted from this table are all cases from Petitions C, D, E, ER and F which deal exclusively
with reliefs under particular sections (Petition
F for instance only refers to cases of Divorce by
mutual consent under the various matrimonial
statutes, Petition E deals exclusively with
claims for maintenance under S 125 CrPC) do
not require further disaggregation.
16 To be sure such mis-identification is not restricted to untutored court clerks. In many instances high court judges have referred to the
popular commentary by Mulla almost as if it
was an act of Parliament. In Tara Banos case
(2009) for instance, a judge of the Rajasthan
High Court refers to Section 272 of the Muslim
Law Sheriyatmeaning, in fact, the particular
passage from Mullas commentarya curious
case of a commentary evolving into legislation
through judicial easement!. So commonly does
this misidentification seem to occur that at
least on one occasion, a judge of the Allahabad
High Court was prompted to include in his
judgment a cautionary note that paragraph 310
of Mulla was not to be called as Section 27
since Mullas Mohammedan Laws is not enactment Tara Bano v Iqbal Mohd (Rajasthan High
Court, 27 January 2009), http://indiankanoon.
org/doc/294178/ (last visited on 22 February
2012); Imtiyaz Ahmed v Shamim Bano, 1998
CriLJ 2343 (Allahabad High Court, 1997),
http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1274334/ (last
visited on 23 February 2012).
17 An illuminating article to read in this context is
Bina Agarwals paper on bargaining and gender
relations listing the various constraints, aside
from the purely economical, that constrain the

bargaining capabilities of women. Bina Agarwal,
Bargaining and Gender Relations: Within and
Beyond the Household, Feminist Economics, 3,
No 1 (1997): 151, http://www.binaagarwal.com/
downloads/apapers/bagaining_and_gender_
relations.pdf.
18 I particularly have in mind the works of Bina
Agarwal for this insight. See for instance Bina
Agarwal, Gender and Land Rights Revisited:
Exploring New Prospects via the State, Family
and Market, Journal of Agrarian Change 3,
Nos 1 and 2 (April 2003): 184224, docs.escrnet.org/usr_doc/Agarwal-_Gender_and_Land_
Rights_Revisited.pdf. And more generally Bina
Agarwal, A Field of Ones Own Gender and Land
Rights in South Asia, Cambridge South Asian
Studies, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
19 I exclude from this figure some 10,000 cases of
Divorce by Mutual Consent which by their very
nature are joint petitions and so the labels of
petitioner and respondent are superficial.
20 Writing almost 30 years ago, Marc Galanter
wrote in the same article from which I borrowed the word Litigotiation for this papers
title, Bargaining in the shadow of the law is
the prevalent means of resolving civil cases in
American courts: fewer than ten percent of cases
are tried. Marc Galanter, A Settlement Judge,
Not a Trial Judge: Judicial Mediation in the
United States.
21 Galanters more interesting conclusion in this
paper is that despite the rhetoric of reducing
case load, the push towards mediation is the
product of a convergence of fundamental strategic considerations between all of the participantslitigants, lawyers and the court. In
seeking to achieve their goals while avoiding
unacceptable risks [they each, for different reasons] find full-blown adjudication inexpedient. Galanter proposes this not as an accusation but as a corrective to the unanimous perception that mediation is a response to the increased volume of cases congesting the courts.
Rather than a response to increased case load,
he sees the shift towards mediation as being a
function of the increased complexity of adjudication which in the process of becoming freer
of arbitrary formalities, more open to evidence
of complicated states of fact, and responsive to
a wider range of argument has in fact inadvertently become more complex, more expensive, more protracted, more rationaland
more indeterminate.
22 Courts have unevenly enforced such contractual waivers of maintenance rights, and have
alternatively either struck them down as being
opposed to public policy or upheld them in
some cases. See Geeta Gokarna v Satish Gokarna AIR 2004 Bom 345 for an example of the
court refusing to enforce such a contractual
waiver, and Ranawat v. State of Gujarat (2010)
II DC 730 Guj for an instance of a contrary ruling.
References
Basu, Srimati (2012): Judges of Normality: Mediating Marriage in the Family Courts of Kolkata,
India, Signs 37, No 2, pp 46992,
doi:10.1086/661712.
Galanter, Marc (1985): A Settlement Judge, Not a
Trial Judge: Judicial Mediation in the United
States, Journal of Law and Society 12, No 1
(Spring 1985), http://www.marcgalanter.net/
Documents/papers/scannedpdf/settlementjudge.pdf.
Solanki, Gopika (2013): Adjudication in Religious
Family Laws: Cultural Accommodation, Legal
Pluralism, and Gender Equality In India, Cambridge University Press.
49
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Transformations in Sinhala Nationalism

Sankajaya Nanayakkara
This examination of the formations and transformations

of the Sinhala national movement in Sri Lanka from the
Buddhist revival in the mid-19th century to modern
times focuses on the changes in the ideology and the
varied political manifestations of Sinhala nationalism. It
asks whether there is a way of understanding nations
and nationalisms that does not reject the desire for
belongingness as fascism in disguise.
This article has benefited greatly from the suggestions of the anonymous
reviewer.
Sankajaya Nanayakkara (sankajayananayakkara@gmail.com) is an
independent researcher.
50
he parallel processes of formation and dissolution of

national unions have come to characterise the times we
live in. While the European Union has achieved to a
great extent a postnational unit transcending territorial and
other borders, the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia
have dismembered into diverse nationalethnic states. New
nationalisms of all varietiescultural, territorial and citizenshipare emerging all over the world with a vengeance and
fighting each other (Cheran 2000: 3). According to certain
analysts, ethnicity has already replaced social class as the
main form of social cleavage in modern society (Glazer and
Moynihan 1975). Moreover, Parming and Cheung (1990) argue
that modernisation created simultaneous pressures, which reinforced ethnic identity. For Wallerstein (1979), ethnic conflict
is an inevitable reality of multi-ethnic societies. Separatist
movements, ethnic revivals and ethnic conflicts have come to
characterise the present social milieu. There needs to be a
critical reappraisal of conventional theories of nationalism
that privilege the European experience. It must critique the
orientalist, colonial, Eurocentric and masculine discourses of
nationalism (Cheran 2000: 2). For a fuller understanding of
nationalism, one has to take into account the colonised
peoples experience as well. Fanon in his book, The Wretched of
the Earth (1990), argues that victims of national oppression
suffer physically, materially and psychologically. According to
Miller (1997), even though nations emerge and change over
time, they are not mere inventions. Furthermore, he says,
identification with a national community is not irrational.
Historically, nationalism has often played a progressive role in
the resistance to colonial conquest.
Resistance to foreign occupation and oppression had a politicising effect on underclasses that remained or have been
forced to remain outside the domain of politics (Cheran 2000:
11). However, Said (1993) argues that if anti-colonial nationalism cannot mature into a struggle against all forms of oppression, it cannot be considered liberationist. This paper examines the formations and transformations of the Sinhala national movement in Sri Lanka from the Buddhist revival in the
mid-19th century to modern times. It focuses on the changes in
the ideology and the varied political manifestations of Sinhala
nationalism. The discussion on the Sinhala national movement is situated within the broader political, social and cultural contexts of Sri Lanka.
The roots of the modern Sinhala national movement can be
traced to the Buddhist revival of the mid-19th century that took
place in low country, coastal, urban areas in Sri Lanka. However,
there were notable instances, in 1818 and 1848, of anti-colonial
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Sinhala uprisings. The 19th century Buddhist revival was basically

a religious and cultural revival among the Sinhalese with strong
anti-colonial political underpinnings. It was guided by the
leading bhikkus of the day and their close lay associates such as
Ven Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, Ven Ratmalane Sri Dhammaloka,
Ven Ratmalane Dharmarama, Ven Migettuwatte Gunananda,
Ven Dodanduwe Piyaratana, Pundit Batuwantudawe, M Dharmaratna, Anagarika Dharmapala, Piyadasa Sirisena, John de Silva,
Walisinha Harischandra, C Don Bastian and Sri D B Jayatilaka
(Dharmadasa 1992). The Buddhist revival took the forms of
voluntary associations, scholarship, literature (newspapers,
journals and novels) and theatre. They were in fact both the
product as well as the engine of the revival.
Numerous voluntary associations started to appear among the
Sinhalese Buddhists to promote their interests from mid-19th
century onwards. One of the earliest such voluntary associations
is the Sarvagna Sasanabhivruddhi Dayaka Dharma Samagama
founded by Ven Migettuwatte in 1862 (Dharmadasa 1992: 130).
A notable voluntary association that consisted of Buddhist businessmen in Colombo and major towns was the Bauddharaksaka
Samagama or the Buddhist Defence Committee formed by Olcott
in 1883 soon after Kotahena riots to defend and promote
Buddhist interests (Dharmadasa 1992: 109, 110). The Bauddha
Mahajana Sangamaya or the Association of the Great Buddhist
Populace formed by English-educated Buddhists such as
D B Jayatilaka in 1903 with the objective of uniting Sinhalese
to present their grievances to the government, was an ambitious
project with an all-island focus (Dharmadasa 1992: 133).
The ideology of the Buddhist revival revolved around the
AryaSinhala identity. It is an ideology that basically emphasised
the Indic origins of the biology and culture of the Sinhalese.
Moreover, Buddhism was highlighted as the essence of the
Sinhala identity by the ideologues of the revival. According to this
ideology, the entirety of Sri Lanka is considered the homeland of
the Sinhalese Buddhists and the need to guard Sinhalese people
and Buddhism against alien forces (Dharmadasa 1992: 260).
However, by the 1920s, according to Dharmadasa, the significance of Buddhism in the Sinhala identity started to recede
and broader ethnic cohesion that transcended religion, creed,
caste, and region was emphasised (1992: 222, 223). Against this
background, young Christians started to assert their Sinhala
identity by becoming prominent in organisations like the
Sinhalese Young Mens Association, which was established in
1914 (Dharmadasa 1992: 224). The fluency of Sinhala language
(written and spoken) became the hallmark of the Sinhalese
ethnic identity in the 1920s (Dharmadasa 1992: 233). In the
19th century, before the Buddhist revival, Sinhala Christian
scholar James De Alwis, tried to define Sinhala identity in
terms of the Sinhala language. But his lone attempts were
drowned in the popular Buddhist revival.
Political Expression of Sinhalese Ethnic Interests
In 1931, the National Reform Society was formed in Colombo

to promote the national dress, and the study and use of national
languages. Some of the prominent members of this organisation
included G P Malalasekera, W A de Silva and C W W Kannangara.
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S W R D Bandaranaike, P de s Kularatne, C Suntheralingam and

S A Wickremasinghe (Russell 1982: 137, 138). In the period from
1928 to 1936 a large number of organisations were promoting
Sinhala Buddhist interests (Russell 1982: 139, 140). They were all
inspired by the Buddhist revival. One such influential organisation was the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress, the umbrella
organisation of numerous Buddhist societies in the country.
The Sinhala Maha Sabha (SMS) or the Great Association of
the Sinhalese was formed in November 1936 (Russell 1982:
141). The SMS is the first island-wide formation that gave
political expression to exclusively Sinhalese ethnic interests
(Dharmadasa 1992: 258). At the time of the formation, politicians
like S W R D Bandaranaike opposed the name. For them, it
sounded too communal. Bandaranaike proposed the name SMS
or the Greater Congress of the Indigenous Peoples as a more
inclusive name for the association. But the name, SMS, proposed
by Piyadasa Sirisena and supported by figures like Munidasa
Cumaratunga, who advocated a more Sinhala nationalist line,
won the day. Unhappy with the communalist outlook, politicians
like Dudley Senanayake, walked out of the inaugural meeting
(Russell 1982: 141, 142).
The SMS was not a tightly knit or neatly structured organisation.
It consisted of three panels. The majority of the religious panel
were bhikkus. The literary panel was made of scholars and
literati. These were forces that were involved with the revival
of Buddhism and Sinhala language. The political panel, which
became the dominant panel soon, was headed by Bandaranaike
who also functioned as the president of the organisation
(Dharmadasa 1992: 255, 256). By July 1941, weeklies such as
The Nation (English) and the Sinhala Bauddhaya (Sinhala) were
initiated by Bandaranaike to propagandise the politics of the SMS
and boost his image as the Lake House publications that served
the interests of the Sinhalese power elite were unfavourable to
the SMS line of politics and Bandaranaike who was emerging
as a serious contender to power (Russell 1982: 305).
Sinhala identity was perceived by the SMS as componentially
and experiantially multifaceted (Dharmadasa 1992: 261). The
Marxist state councillor, Philip Gunawardene, characterised it
as the most rabid, the most narrow minded, most chauvinist
organization...not a national organization but a tribal one...
appealing to the basest instincts of the people (Dharmadasa
1992: 259). The SMS maintained extensive links with rural areas.
Furthermore, it attempted to unite the Sinhalese by forging
links between the up-country and low-country and among
different caste groups. The backbone of the SMS was the middlelevel Sinhala educated local elite (Russell 1982: 224). It was
thus instrumental in laying the foundation for the massive
electoral triumph of Sinhala nationalism in the mid-1950s.
The ethnic mobilisation was not, however, unique to the
Sinhalese in the 1930s. A large number of organisations that were
formed along ethnic lines sprang up under the Donoughmore
constitution whose express aim was the negation of such loyalties.
The All Ceylon Moors Association (1935), the Burgher Political
Association (1938) and the Ceylon Indian Congress (CIC)
(1939) are few examples for such organisations (Dharmadasa
1992: 255).
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By the mid-1940s, at the time of the arrival of the Soulbury

commissioners in 1945, the Muslim community had two new
communal organisations, the Ceylon Muslim League and the
All Ceylon Muslim Political Conference. The Ceylon Malays had
three different organisations to assert that Malays were racially
distinct from Muslims (Russell 1982: 220). Apart from these,
there were a number of religion- and caste-based organisations during this time such as, the Catholic Union of Ceylon,
Hindu Societies and the Central Fisheries Union that represented
the Karava caste interests (Russell 1982: 220, 221).
The All Ceylon Tamil Conference, formed in January 1934,
greatly contributed to the emergence and support for formations
like the SMS. The roots of the formers communal politics can be
traced to the Tamil Mahajana Sabhai formed in 1921. In
Nawalapitiya, a town with high concentration of Tamils of
recent Indian origin, G G Ponnambalam, the Cambridgeeducated lawyer and the leader of the All Ceylon Tamil Conference stated at a public rally in 1939 that the greatest Sinhalese
kings are Tamils. The Tamils had an unparalled history and an
unequalled traditional culture...(whereas) the Sinhalese were
a nation formed from the hybridization of a small class of people
from north India; they were a nation of hybrids without history
(Dharmadasa 1992: 294).
A branch of the SMS was established in Nawalapitiya soon
afterwards while A E Goonesinghe organised a boycott of
Tamil shops in Colombo (Dharmadasa 1992: 295). This kind of
inter-ethnic political tension contributed greatly to ethnic politics in the country. The decision of the Tamil leaders to leave
the multi-ethnic Ceylon National Congress and form an exclusively Tamil political organisation in 1921, the Tamil Mahajana
Sabhai, significantly contributed to unleash interethnic political
rivalry in the island.
The widening of the franchise in the early 1930s inadvertently
contributed to ethnic politics. The large number of ethnic
oriented formations discussed above is a testimony to the state
of the ethnopolitical entrepreneurship of the political class of
the country at the time.
The Pure Sinhala Movement
The Hela movement or the pure Sinhala movement was very

active from the late 1930s to mid-1940s. The key figures associated
with this movement are Munidasa Cumaratunga, Raipiel
Tennakoon, Jayantha Weerasekera and Jayamaha Wellala
(Dharmadasa 1992: 272). The Hela movement produced literary
as well as Hela grammar texts. Moreover, it attempted to
discover the authentic Hela industry, Hela cuisine and Hela
theatre and music (Dharmadasa 1992: 27173). The founding
of the Sinhala language journal Subasa (good language) in
1939 and the English language journal The Helio in 1941 and
the founding of the Hela Havula or the pure Sinhala fraternity
in 1941 are important milestones of the evolution of the Hela
movement (Dharmadasa 1992: 262).
The Hela movement reformulated the Sinhala ethnic identity
in a way that marked a clear rupture with the AryaSinhala
identity of the Buddhist revival, which emphasised Indic
connections such as the islands Buddhist heritage, Pali and
52
Sanskrit influence on Sinhala language and the theory of

Vijayan colonisation. The Hela ideologues conceptualised the
Sinhala identity as purely an indigenous phenomenon free of
all foreign influences. As a consequence, they denounced all
foreign influences on Sinhalese. Repudiating the dominant
discourse on the influence of Pali and Sanskrit on Sinhala,
Hela ideologues argued that Pali, one of the so-called mothers
of the Helese language has been fathered by the Helese
themselves. How far the Sanskrit language has been enriched
by the ancient Helese language, only time will disclose
Likewise, they denounced Vijayan, the founding figure of
the Sinhala nation, as an arch robber and articulated on preVijayan glorious Hela empires (Dharmadasa 1992: 263). Moreover, Buddhism was considered as a foreign influence and
hence underemphasised. Pure Sinhala (Elu or Hela) was conceived as the essence of the Sinhala ethnic identity. Land,
nation and religion (rata, jatiya, agama) formula of the Buddhist revival was reconfigured by Cumratunga as language,
nation, land (basa, rasa, desa) by replacing religion with language and giving language precedence over nation and land
by placing it first in the formula (Dharmadasa 1992: 266).
Inevitably, the Hela ideology created conflicts with the
British colonial administration and the local elite. The local
scholarly establishment and the political elite were severely
criticised by the Hela movement as fakes and obstacles to
the emancipation of the Sinhalese (Dharmadasa 1992: 277).
According to Dharmadasa, the failure of the Hela movement to
attract the bulk of the Sinhala literati and the population was
due to the opposition to the movement shown by their influential opponents, the Sangha and lay hierarchy in the country
The main support base of the Hela movement was Sinhala
schoolteachers (Dharmadasa 1992: 275). Sinhala Christian
schoolteachers also played an active part in the movement
(Dharmadasa 1992: 286). This was facilitated by the inclusive
Sinhala identity of the movement. By playing a leading role in
the campaign to make Sinhala the only official language in Sri
Lanka, the Hela movement attempted to represent the interests of the bulk of the Sinhala literati: Buddhist monks, Sinhala schoolteachers, notaries public, ayurvedic physicians and
Sinhala journalists (Dharmadasa 1992: 303).
At this time, the British dominated the economy of the
island. Major plantations as well as the bulk of the import
export trade were in their hands. Coveted positions in
public and private sectors were a European monopoly. After
Europeans, the Moors and the Indian Tamils controlled the
import-export trade. Moreover, in the government service,
especially in professions such as, law, medicine, engineering
and surveying, the Sinhalese presence was minimal compared to its proportion in the total population, while minorities such as Tamils and Burghers were overrepresented
The intermediary classes in the Sinhala society remained
marginalised throughout the long colonial reign. Sinhala only
was seen by these sections as the stairway to socio-economic
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mobility. Moreover, according to Dharmadasa, Sinhala only

advocates reasoned that,
If Tamil is placed on an equal footing with Sinhala concerning its use
in government administration, education, job opportunities, and so
on, Tamil, having the advantage of a massive base in neighboring
Tamil Nadu, with the support of over fifty million speakers and having
large literary and scholarly resources, will soon become the dominant
language, eventually eliminating Sinhala, which has only ten million
speakers who are confined to the island of Sri Lanka (1992: 308).
Bandaranaike, the future Prime Minister, gave expression

to these anxieties during the language debate in the House of
Representatives in October 1955:
I believe there are a not inconsiderable number of Tamils in this country out of a population of eight million. Then there are forty or fifty
million people just adjoining, and what about all this Tamil literature,
Tamil teachers, even the films, papers, magazines, so that the Tamils
in our country are not restricted to the northern and eastern provinces
alone; there are a large number, I suppose over ten lakhs, in Sinhalese
provinces. And what about the Indian labourers whose return to India
is now just fading away into the dim and distant future? The fact that
in the towns and villages, in business houses and in boutiques most
of the work is in the hands of Tamil-speaking people will inevitably
result in a fear, and I do not think an unjustified fear, of the inexorable
shrinking of the Sinhalese language... (Wilson 1974: 25).
According to the Tamil perspective,

the demand to make the Sinhala language the sole official language
arose from a mixture of motives. Primarily the motivation was
cultural and economic. There was widespread anxiety that the process of deracination gaining ground among middle and upper rungs of
the Sinhala society would ultimately destroy the Sinhalese language,
Sinhalese culture, and Sinhalese Buddhism. There was besides fear of
Tamil domination from south India. But above all there was antagonism to the presence of large numbers of Ceylon Tamils in the public
services (Wilson 1974: 24).
Turbulent 1950s and 1960s
The Sinhala ethnic interests were to a large extent institutionalised

with the coming to power of the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna
(MEP) or the Peoples United Front led by Bandaranaike in 1956.
Sinhala was made the only official language in Sri Lanka. The MEP
was a coalition which included the Sri Lanka Freedom Party
(SLFP) of Bandaranaike, Philip Gunawardenes Viplavakari
Lanka Sama Samaja Party (vLSSP) or the Revolutionary Lanka
Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), the Bhasa Peramuna or the Language
Front led by W Dahanayaka and a group of independent MPs
led by I M R A Iriyagolle (Wilson 1974: 140).
The somewhat liberal leadership of the MEP attempted to
accommodate the aspirations of the Tamil political class through
the BandaChelva Pact of 1957. The pact envisaged to make
Tamil a language of administration in the northern and eastern
provinces and devolve a measure of power to district councils.
The Sinhala national movement resisted these attempts.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) or the National
Liberation Front was one such Sinhala nationalist formation
that resisted the BandaChelva Pact. It came to limelight
during 195759. The JVP was led by K M P Rajaratna and his
wife Kusuma Rajaratna. F R Jayasuriya, the Ceylon University
economist, was the advisor of the party (Wilson 1974: 169,
170). Jayasuriya led a fast-unto-death in 1958, the first one in
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post-independence Sri Lanka, against the clause on the reasonable use of Tamil in the proposed Official Language Act bill
of the MEP government.
The DudleyChelva Pact also experienced a similar fate in
the mid-1960s. It was signed by the United National Party
(UNP) to get the support of the Federal Party to establish a
solid parliamentary majority. The pact included the use of
Tamil in the North and the East in administration matters and
in courts and a framework for devolution of power in the form
of district councils. Moreover, it included issues involving the
land development ordinance and colonisation giving priority
to landless Tamils in the resettlement in the North and the
East. The pact was resisted by the SLFP, the LSSP, the Communist Party (CP), the Sangha and Muslim groups fearful of the
impact of the political balance in the eastern province (International Crisis Group 2007: 6).
In 1966, the JVP opposed and voted against the Tamil
Regulations of the UNP-led government of which it was part of.
Tamil Regulations, though not fully enforced, provided for
Tamil being a parallel official language with Sinhalese in the
northern and eastern provinces. The JVP continued to remain
politically aligned with the UNP despite differences on the
Tamil question (Wilson 1974: 51, 171, 172). The husband and
wife party was wiped out in the 1970 general elections.
The resistance to these deals was due to Sinhala fears. The
spread of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in the hill
country, territorial demands of the Tamil leaders and the continuing marginal status of the Sinhala Buddhists contributed
to create anxieties in Sinhala minds. The presence of more
than a million Indian Tamil estate workers in the heart of
Sinhalese country, and also in economically most rewarding
sectors (tea and rubber plantations) posed both a political and
economic threat to the Sinhalese people, especially to the
Kandyan Sinhalese (Wilson 1974: 28). The Sinhalese felt the
Indian threat since the 1920s with the issue of representation
in the legislature. The CIC was formed in 1939 at the instance
of Nehru when he visited Sri Lanka. Ceylon Tamils and Indian
Tamils increasingly worked together on issues against Sinhalese
(Wilson 1974: 29).
Increasing political links between Tamil separatist politics
in India and Tamil politics in Sri Lanka exacerbated the situation. The working relationship between the secessionist DMK
and the Sri Lanka Tamil Federal Party (in Tamil, Tamil Sate
Party), which made territorial claims, is a case in point. As a
part of this relationship, DMK activists later came to Sri Lanka to
work for the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) candidates
in the 1977 elections (Goonatilake 2001: 190, 191). Moreover,
an organisation known as the DMK of Ceylon that operated
among Tamils of Indian origin in the hill country was banned
in 1962 (Goonatilake 2001: 203).
The powerful trading community of Indian origin controlled
the wholesale trade of the country. Nationalist activists like
Anagarika Dharmapala identified this social group as exploiters
of the local population.
With the colonial conquest of Sri Lanka, an aggressive
campaign of proselytisation was unleashed by the colonial
53
SPECIAL ARTICLE
powers. Unsettled Sinhala Buddhists parents demanded that

religious instruction be imparted to Buddhist children attending
schools run by the Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary
organisations. This demand arose from the anxiety that these
schools were used for religious conversion (Wilson 1974: 19, 20).
The best schools in the country were run by the Christians
and the alumni of these schools had better opportunities of
securing employment in the public and private sectors (Wilson
1974: 20). Moreover, important positions in the public services
and armed forces were held by Christians, particularly Roman
Catholics and Ceylon Tamils (Wilson 1974: 20).
This situation gave rise to the demand for nationalisation of
schools in the mid-1950s. However, it was only in 196061, under
Sirimavo Bandaranaikes SLFP government that a majority of
denominational schools were nationalised (Wilson 1974 20, 21).
This is the context which gave rise to some short-lived Sinhala
nationalist political formations during this period. The Buddhist
Republican Party (BRP) led by A P de Zoysa was one such
formation. It lasted for only one general election (1952). The
BRP fielded three candidates and all of them were defeated.
The party polled close to 4,000 votes (Wilson).
The Dharma Samaja Party (DSP) or the Righteous Society
Party was formed prior to the general election of March 1960.
It was led by L H Mettananda, the leader of the Bauddha Jathika
Balavegaya or the Buddhist National Force, a prominent
political formation in the 1950s. The DSP campaigned for
Buddhist rights and was in alliance with Philip Gunawardenes
MEP. The party disappeared after the general elections of July
1960 (Wilson 1974: 170, 174).
Another short-lived political entity was the Sinhala Mahajana
Peramuna (SMP) or the Sinhala Peoples Front. It was formed
prior to the general elections of May 1970 by R G Senanayake.
The party stood for Buddhist rights and Sinhala middle class
interests but was routed in the elections (Wilson 1974: 174).
Two key texts were instrumental in articulating the Sinhala
nationalist discourse during this period. D C Vijayavardhanas
The Revolt in the Temple published in 1953 was a curious mixture
of Buddhism, cultural nationalism and socialism. The other
document is The Betrayal of Buddhism, the report of the 1952
Buddhist Commission of Inquiry (Matthews 198889: 624).
Abuddhassa Yugaya1
The 1972 constitution consolidated the momentum of the 1956.

It accorded Buddhism the foremost status in the island. The
1978 constitution continued in this direction with further
centralisation of power in the hands of a newly created powerful president.
The liberalisation of the economy in 1977 increased competition from Tamil and Muslim businesses. Sinhala business
interests were championed by Cyril Mathew, a minister of the
UNP government and trade union boss of the party. The force
that Mathew led consisted of politically connected criminal
elements, Sinhala businessmen and politicians. They are
responsible for the infamous 1983 anti-Tamil riots that systematically attacked Tamil owned businesses, homes and civilians
in Colombo and other major towns.
54
Apart from Mathew, there were other nationalist ministers

in the J R Jayawardene government. Gamini Dissanayake was
a young minister then who was in charge of the Accelerated
Mahawali Development Project. As a part of this project, he
took measures to populate the hill country of the island with
Sinhalese to counter the demographic influence of Tamils of
Indian origin (V Nanayakkara, personal communication,
4 March 2006). Gamini Jayasuriya was another nationalist
minister in the UNP government of 1977 who resigned from
his cabinet portfolio with the signing of the IndoLanka
peace accord in 1987.
A significant development of the Sinhala national movement
in the early 1980s is the emergence of the Jathika Chinthanaya
school or the school of national thinking, spearheaded by
Gunadasa Ameresekera and Nalin de Silva. It laid the philosophical foundation for the Sinhala nationalist discourse
(Nanayakkara 2004).
Sinhala nationalism became a decisive anti-systemic political
force with the signing of the IndoLanka peace accord in 1987
by J R Jayawardene and Rajiv Gandhi with the objective of
ending the decades-long Tamil secessionist struggle. It envisaged a measure of autonomy for Tamil-dominated areas.
Resistance to the accord was spearheaded by the Maubima
Surakime Vyaparaya (MSV) or the Movement for the Protection
of the Motherland, founded in 1986. It consisted of MEP,
sections of the SLFP, the JVP or the Peoples Liberation Front
and the militant sections of the Sangha and public intellectuals.
The roots of the MSV lie with the Jathika Peramuna or the
National Front formed under the leadership of Gamini Iriyagolle
as a protest against the Thimpu, Bhutan talks between the
Sri Lankan government, the Indian government and Tamil
armed groups in 1985 (Matthews 198889: 629).
Apart from the MSV, which was the most prominent formation, there were many Sinhala nationalist grouping in the
late 1980s (Matthews 198889: 621, 622). The Sinhalese
saw the peace accord as a humiliating violation of Sri Lankas
sovereignty.
The mass political agitation against the accord was used
by the JVP to launch its second armed insurrection under the
dreaded front known as the Deshapremi Janatha Vyaparaya
or the Patriotic Peoples Movement. The JVP was decapitated
in late 1980s with founder leader Rohana Wijeweera and almost
all of the top political and military leadership eliminated.
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
The JVP emerged in the mid-1960s and its roots are with the
Ceylon Communist Party, which supported the Peking line, led
by N Shanmugathasan. The educated unemployed rural
Sinhala youth has been the backbone of the party and in recent
times, the party has gained support in urban areas as well.
In 1971, it launched an unsuccessful armed insurrection to
capture power. After the release of its leadership in 1977, the
JVP engaged in mainstream politics till it was banned in 1983
on false charges of involvement in 1983 anti-Tamil riots.
Capitalising on the growing mass agitation against the Indo
Lanka accord, towing a Sinhala nationalist hard line, the JVP
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launched another insurrection in the late 1980s to capture

power which also ended in disaster.
After the massacre of the leadership and cadre of the JVP in
the late 1980s, the party gradually entered the democratic
mainstream. It contested and won one seat in 1994 and
gradually increased its parliamentary seats until it parted
ways with the SLFP-led political alliance. The JVP possessed
39 seats in Parliament in 2004. The party also held four
ministerial portfolios for a brief period under President
Kumaratunga in 200405. Moreover, the JVP controlled the
Tissamaharama Pradeshiya Sabha (local council) in the deep
south of Sri Lanka from 2002 to 2011.
The JVPs political ideology is a synthesis of Marxism and
Sinhala nationalism. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the current
leader of the party, stated in an interview with this author in
Toronto in October 2008, that they will reach socialism
through a national liberation struggle like in Vietnam,
through a combination of national and class forces. The JVP
represents the left-wing of Sinhala nationalism, pioneered by
Philip Gunawardene, who is considered as the father of socialism in Sri Lanka. Depending on the objective conditions, the
party strategically emphasises either the class or the nation.
The JVP maintained many fronts to further its then Sinhala
nationalist line. One such JVP-dominated organisation was
the Deshahithaishee Jathika Vyaparaya or the Patriotic National Movement (PNM). The PNM was a broad alliance that
brought together nationalist forces like Ven Elle Gunawansa,
Gundasa Ameresekera, S L Gunasekera and Udaya Gammanpila of the JHU (International Crisis Group 2007: 12). It was
formed in 2003 to galvanise resistance to the United National
Front (UNF) government and the cease fire agreement of Ranil
Wickramasinghe. The Manel Mal Vyaparaya or the Water Lily
Movement, which provided material, legal and spiritual
support to security forces personnel and their families, was
spearheaded by the PNM (International Crisis Group 2007: 12).
The JVP attempted to penetrate the lower ranks and the junior
rungs of the officer corps of the security forces who come from
a similar socio-economic background as the party carders.
Moreover, the Mawbima Lanka Padanama or the Motherland
Lanka Foundation, an association of businessmen and industrialists, was also under the influence of the JVP when the
party was toeing the Sinhala nationalist line.
The more nationalist current broke away from the JVP and
formed the Jathika Nidhahas Peramuna (JNP) or the National
Freedom Front under the leadership of Wimal Weerawansa in
May 2008 and became a part of the United Peoples Freedom
Alliance (UPFA) government. The more Marxist tendency in
the party broke way and formed the Frontline Socialist Party
under the leadership of Kumar Gunaratnam in April 2012. The
JVP leadership states,
We are a secular party. We have never used religion for political
purposes... Weve always treated all three ethnic groups as equal
citizens. Weve always believed you need to distinguish between
the tigers and Tamils. The JHU on the other hand is talking about a
Sinhala Buddhist country. This is unimaginable. It cant be accepted... We oppose Tami chauvinism and Sinhala chauvinism both.
Weve always said the JHU shouldnt create a Sinhalese Prabhakaran
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JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
(leader of the LTTE) to face a Tamil Prabhakaran (International Crisis

Group 2007: 13).
Activism among Buddhist Monks
A significant development of Sinhala nationalist politics is the

formation of a political party of Buddhist monks known as the
Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) or the National pure-Sinhala
Heritage Party in March 2004 whose roots are with the Sihala
Urumaya (SU) or the Sinhala Heritage party formed in 2000. The
JHU is the culmination of the Vidyalankara school of thought,
which legitimised and promoted the active participation of
bhikkus in politics, especially in the writings of its theorist,
Ven Walpola Rahula.
The Eksath Bhikkhu Peramuna or the United Monks Front
was formed in the early 1950s by these politically active monks
under the leadership of Ven Mapitigama Buddharakkhita to
back the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) led by Bandaranaike.
Moreover, the Jathika Sangha Sabhava or the National Sangha
Council formed in 1997, which was supported by the monks of
the three monastic fraternities was a milestone in the development of political activism among Buddhist monks (Deegalle
2004: 94).
The participation of monks in active politics has not been
the Theravada Buddhist ideal. Ven Migettuwatte Gunananda
is the first Buddhist monk to have contested an election. He
contested in 1943 for the Colombo Municipal Council but lost
(Deegalle 2004: 84).
The JHU campaigned in the April 2004 elections on a platform of militant Sinhala nationalism and moral regeneration.
It enjoyed massive support in certain urban middle-class areas
in the Colombo district and was able to return nine Buddhist
monks to the Parliament. The JHU was a member of the UPFA
and held influential posts in the UPFA government, including a
cabinet portfolio.
Some of the key figures of the top leadership of the JHU like
Champika Ranawaka, Ven Athuraliye Rathana, Nishantha Sri
Warnasinghe were part of the resistance campaign spearheaded by the JVP against the 1987 IndoLanka accord and
were affiliated with the JVP. But in the early 1990s they parted
ways and formed the Janatha Mithuro or the Friends of the
People in 1992 which advocated a brand of eco-nationalism.
The same cadre was instrumental in setting up the National
Movement Against Terrorism (NMAT) in 1998 before forming
the Sinhala Urumaya.
Unlike the JVP whose support base has been rural and urban
poor, the support base of the JHU has been semi-urban and
urban lower-middle class and middle class elements respectively. The semi-urban lower-middle class is a transitional
class who has migrated from rural areas to the Colombo
suburbs. They have strong Sinhala Buddhist cultural roots.
Thrown into a complex and stressful urban life, the JHU political programme with a Sinhala Buddhist orientation has had
an appeal to these people. The JHU is also supported by urban
bourgeois elements. Former stalwarts of the party such as
Thilak Karunaratne and S L Gunasekera embodied these
sections of the society.
55
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Ideologically, the JHU is closer to the Jathika Chinthanaya

school of thought. The party rejects Marxism outright as an
alien ideology and advocates an indigenous path based on the
civilisational consciousness of the island. This ideal is conceptualised as Dharma Rajya (Righteous Sate), the Buddhas
teachings on statecraft. Buddhist statecraft is based on
dasarajadharma (the 10 virtuous deeds of the righteous king). It
is thought to be the underlying public policy of ancient Buddhist
politics of the island (Deegalle 2004: 94). Following are the 10
virtuous deeds of the righteous king: charity, morality, liberality,
honesty, mildness, religious practice, non-anger, non-violence,
patience, and non-offensiveness (Deegalle 2004: 88, 100).
The JHU has not been averse to private enterprise, as some
of the major financiers of the party are Sinhala businessmen.
Hence, some have characterised the JHU as the right-wing of
Sinhala nationalism (International Crisis Group 2007: 14).
The Sinhala Veera Vidhana (SVV), now defunct, was primarily an association of Sinhalese traders and businessmen,
formed in the mid-1990s, to protect and advance Sinhalese
business interests. It was closely affiliated to and politically
guided by the Sihala Urumaya. Like the SVV, in the past, the
Thri Sinhala Vyaparaya or the pan-Sinhala movement and
the Diyasena2 movement spearheaded campaigns to boycott
Tamil and Muslim businesses (V Nanayakkara, personal communication, 7 April 2013).
The Sihala Urumaya was not a successful political project.
In the 2000 general elections, it was only able to gain 1.47% of
the national vote and one seat from the national list. The ideal
climate for nationalist politics in the South was created by
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe by signing the Cease
Fire Agreement (CFA) with the Tamil Tigers in 2002.
There was widespread dissatisfaction with the UNPs commitment to protect Sinhala Buddhist interests and the sovereignty
of the country, fears of religious conversions, westernisation,
moral and cultural decay among urban and semi-urban middle
and lower-middle classes. Ven Soma was a key figure who
moulded the opinion of these sections of the society in the above
manner by regularly appearing on television talk shows. This tense
social environment and the sudden death of Ven Soma in Russia
in 2003, alleged to have been a conspiracy of evangelical forces,
translated into a magnificent JHU electoral victory in 2004.
One consequence of the emergence of the JHU is the shift
that has taken place in the orientation of the politically active
monks. In the beginning, these monks, spearheaded by the
Vidyalankara group, were affiliated to the Trotskyite LSSP.
Later, they aligned with the Maoist JVP. With the emergence of
the JHU, the politically active monks have been radically
reoriented to the Sinhala nationalist politics or the so-called
far-right politics of Sri Lanka.
New Wave of Nationalist Formations
Since the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil

Eelam (LTTE) in 2009, a new wave of Sinhala nationalist
formations has risen. The most prominent among them is the
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56
JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
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Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS) or the Buddhist Power Force. One of

the main targets of the BBS has been the Muslim community in
Sri Lanka. SinhalaMuslim relations have come under tremendous pressure in recent times due to the BBSs activism. The
driving ideology of the group is to reappropriate the Sinhalese
land, wealth and the women from the aliens. The BBS emerged
after a bloodcurdling campaign in the cyberspace against the
Muslim community in Sri Lanka.
The BBS stormed a house in Piliyandala, a Colombo suburb,
in October 2012 alleging that an evangelical group was
operating from there to convert Sinhalese Buddhists. In
February 2013, the BBS launched a very successful campaign
against the newly introduced Halal certifying system in the
country. The Muslim-owned Fashion Bug clothes shop in
Pepiliyana, a suburb in Colombo, was attacked in March 2013
by a mob led by Buddhist monks. The BBS was implicated in
this incident. However, the outfit denied any involvement in
the attack.
The BBS and its chief Ven Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara were
prominently associated with the AluthgamaBeruwela antiMuslim riots in June 2014. The riots resulted in four persons
getting killed and 80 being injured. Moreover, 8,000 Muslims
and 2,000 Sinhalese were displaced by the mayhem that took
place in south-western Sri Lanka.
The Sinhala Ravaya (SR) or the Sinhalese Roar led a raid
on a prayer centre in Nawala, a Colombo suburb, in March
2013. Another prayer centre in Katuwana, Weeraketiya was
attacked by the same group during this period. The 30-yearold Ven Bowatte Indraratana, a member of the Sinhala Ravaya,
set himself on fire in front of the Temple of Buddhas Tooth
Relic during vesak, the day of the Buddhas birth, enlightenment and passing away, as a protest against cattle slaughter.
He was the first monk in Sri Lanka to self-immolate for a
political cause. During a protest march against cattle slaughter
and religious conversions in June 2013, members of the Sinhala
Ravaya attacked a meat shop in Tangalle city, in the deep south
of Sri Lanka, and destroyed its premises.
The Ravana Balaya or the Ravana Power, named after the
mythical 10-headed demon king of Lanka, raided a biriyani
dansala, a makeshift structure that served biriyani free of
charge as a meritorious act in Rajagiriya, a Colombo suburb,
on poson day3 in June 2013 alleging it served chicken. Members
of the group arrested and threatened Jehovahs Witnesses
Christians in Mulleriyawa, a suburb in Colombo, in June 2013
for engaging in religious conversions. Moreover, this particular
organisation is implicated in the Grandpass area, a Colombo
suburb, mosque attack that took place in August 2013. The
former United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Navaneetham Pillays visit to Sri Lanka was denounced by the
Ravana Balaya by organising a protest in August 2013 opposite
the UN headquarters in Colombo.
Most of the top leadership and the cadre of these outfits
have their roots in JHU politics. The BBS was founded by Ven
Kirama Wimalajothi and Ven Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara
who were earlier members of the JHU and left the party
because it was not militant enough in protecting Buddhism.
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JUNE 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
The leader of the Sihala Ravaya, Ven Akmeemana Dayaratana,

is a former parliamentarian of the JHU. The monk who immolated himself was also a former JHU local council member.
This new wave of Sinhala nationalism, in a way, is a
response to a steadfast demand in the Sinhala society for a
non-partisan national movement, a national movement that is
devoid of petty party politics. Nationally-oriented radical
youth are losing faith in mainstream nationalist parties.
All these groups vow to protect and promote Sinhala
Buddhists interests. The three groups tend to be independent
of each other and at times hostile to one another. They are in
competition with each other to win the ultranationalist
sections of the society as the more established parties such as
the JHU and the JNP have toned down over the years. The grotesque and horrific forms that this new wave has taken have
led certain commentators to characterise this phenomenon as
the ugly underside of Sinhala Buddhism (Senaratne 2014).
In an interview to the Asian Tribune, Dilanthe Withanage,
the chief of the BBS, stated that the group was launched on 7
May 2012 after their visit to Norway.4 This Norway connection
has led to a section of the nationalists like the former minister
Wimal Weerawansa to claim that the BBS is funded by Norway
and operates as a front for western countries who wish to
divide the Sri Lankan population in order to serve their vested
interests. Moreover, they claim that it was a western conspiracy
to undermine the Buddhist dispensation and the Rajapaksa
regime in Sri Lanka. In return, at a BBS conference in Kurunagala
in August 2013, its chief, Ven Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara
accused Weerawansa of setting up the Ravana Balaya. It is
widely believed that the Sinhala Ravaya is linked to the JHU.
In this new wave of Sinhala nationalism, one can observe a
dynamic of proxy politics in operation.
The issues that face these groups include unorthodox practices in Buddhism such as, claims to Buddha-hood, religious
conversions, especially by foreign-funded evangelical Christian
groups, cattle slaughter and the sale of beef, increasing Muslim
influence in the society and the threats to sovereignty of the
country. The new wave seems to be a reaction, a grotesque one
nonetheless, to these concerns. However, with the change of
government in 2015, the activism of these groups has died
down giving credibility to the argument that these groups,
especially the BBS, operated under the protection of the former
secretary of defence.
What Makes the Sinhala National Movement Tick?
Is there a way of understanding nations and nationalisms

which does not reject national sentimentsa desire for
belongingness and even a subject position of nationas
tyranny, primordial and fascism in disguise? asked Cheran
(2000: 14). The Sinhala national movement is not a monolithic
entity. It is a complex, multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon.
As Aijaz Ahmad (2000) correctly pointed out, there are historic
and diverse practices of nationalisms. Political, historical and
social conditions under which nationalisms emerge and the
power blocks that drive them determine the character of diverse practices of nationalisms.
57
SPECIAL ARTICLE
There have been a number of attempts to unify the Sinhala

national movement without much success, which seems to be
a major weakness of the movement. In February 1986, Ven
Palipane Chandananda, with his considerable influence, attempted this without success (Matthews 198889: 630). Then
again in the mid 1990s, an umbrella organisation of Sinhala
nationalist groups called the Jathika Ekabaddha Kirime
Kamituwa or the National Joint Committee was formed to
oppose President Chandrika Kumaratungas peace attempts.
Due to personal issues among the top leadership, this project
did not last long. At present, there is the Jathika Sanvidhana
Ekathuwa or the Collective of National Organisations consisted
of nationalist personalities such as Gunadasa Ameresekera
and organisations like the Patriotic Bhikku Front led by
Ven Bengamuwe Nalaka and Thri Sinhala Bhikku Front of
Ven Omare Kassapa.
Sinhala nationalism is too influential a player in Lankan
politics to be dismissed as a false conscience (Nanayakkara
2004: 17). It is a critical factor in the political trajectory in the
island. However, after the presidential and parliamentary
elections of 2015, Sinhala nationalism is on the retreat but
would most certainly play the once powerful anti-state role it
played in the 1980s and 1990s, in the context of the new
governments reconciliation programme and war crimes
investigations. Thus, it is crucial that we properly understand
the dynamics of contemporary Sinhala nationalist politics. Many
factors contribute to legitimise and sustain the movement.
Even though the Sinhalese are the majority community in
Sri Lanka, in regional and global terms, the Sinhalese (Buddhists)
are demographically, politically, economically and culturally
insignificant. This is not the case with minority communities
in Sri Lanka like the Tamils or the Muslims who are spread
over the world in large numbers and politically, economically
and culturally influential. The Sinhalese are aware of this reality.
In fact, opinion makers like Ven Soma, was lamenting on the
notes
1
2
3
4
A dark age, Gunadasa Ameresekeras characterisation of the J R Jayawardene era.

The legendary liberator of the Sinhala nation.
It commemorates the arrival of Theravada
Buddhism in Sri Lanka.
Genesis of Bodu Bala Sena, 7 April 2013. Retrieved on 1 August 2014 from http://www.asiantribune.com/node/62223.
References
Ahmad, A (2000): Lineages of the Present: Ideology
and Politics in Contemporary South Asia, London:
Verso.
Cheran, R (2000): Changing Formations: Tamil
Nationalism and National Liberation in Sri
Lanka and the Diaspora, PhD thesis, York
University.
Deegalle, M (2004): Politics of the Jathika Hela
Urumaya Monks: Buddhism and Ethnicity in
Contemporary Sri Lanka, Contemporary Buddhism, 5(2).
Dharmadasa, K N O (1992): Language, Religion, and
Ethnic Assertiveness: The Growth of Sinhalese
Nationalism in Sri Lanka, Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press.
58
declining fertility rates of the Sinhalese as further compounding their precarious existence. Furthermore, the Sinhalese
know that they have a state only in Sri Lanka and nowhere else
in the world. Hence, the majority of the Sinhalese come forward to defend the status quo against any threats or potential
threats to it.
Militant minority nationalisms, the bargaining power and
the kingmaker status of ethnic minority political parties,
radical Islam, evangelical campaigns of religious conversion,
business competition from minorities, foreign political interventions in the internal affairs of the country, political solutions based on devolution of power on the basis of ethnicity
are all perceived as direct threats by the Sinhalese to their
interests in the island. Furthermore, more conservative sections
of the Sinhala society are unnerved by modernisation and the
accompanying social, economic and cultural changes. The
national movement articulates these fears and concerns of the
Sinhalese in political, economic and cultural terms and engages
in political practice.
This peculiar demographic composition led to the foremost
LSSP theoretician, Leslie Goonewardene, to articulate that
...in the same way as it is necessary to provide special assurance to the smaller nationalities in other countries for building
national unity, it is necessary to provide special assurance to
the Sinhalese people for the sake of building national unity in
this country (Wilson 1974: 25).
According to Said (1993), if anti-colonial nationalism cannot
mature into a struggle against all forms of oppression, it cannot
be considered liberationist. The hallmarks of a national liberation
struggle include the following (Cheran 2000: 55): a broader
and inclusive ideology, deeper commitment to class, caste and
gender equality and democracy and transparency in the conduct within and outside the organisation. Measured by this
yardstick, the Sinhala national movement is yet to mature into
a national liberation project with great emancipatory potential.
Fanon, F (1990): The Wretched of the Earth, 3rd ed,

Trans Constance Farrington, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Glazer, N and D Moynihan (1975): Ethnicity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Goonatilake, S (2001): Anthropologizing Sri Lanka:
A Eurocentric Misadventure, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
International Crisis Group (2007): Sri Lanka: Sinhala
Nationalism and the Elusive Southern Consensus,
Brussels: International Crisis Group.
Lankadeepa (2014): Colombo: Wijaya News Papers,
24 April.
Matthews, B (19881989): Sinhala Cultural and
Buddhist Patriotic Organizations in Contemporary
Sri Lanka, Pacific Affairs, 61(4), Winter.
Miller, D (1997): On Nationality, Oxford: Clarendon.
Nanayakkara, S (2004): Jathika Chinthanaya,
National Thinking, Boralesgamuwa: A Young
Socialist Publication.
Parming, T and L Mee-Yan Cheung (1990): Modernization and Ethnicity, National and Ethnic
Movements, A D Smith (ed), London: F Pinter.
Russell, J (1982): Communal Politics under the
Donoughmore Constitution 19311947, Dehiwala:
Tisara Prakasakayo.
Said, E (1993): Culture and Imperialism, London:
Chatto and Windus.
Senaratne, K (2014): The Mad Monk Phenomenon:

BBS as the Underside of Sinhala-Buddhism,
Sunday Island, 20 April.
The Island (2013): Colombo: Upali Newspapers,
11 September.
Wallerstein, I (1979): The Capitalist World Economy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, A J (1974): Politics in Sri Lanka, 19471973,
London: Macmillan.
JUNE 4, 2016
EPW Index
An author-title index for EPW has been
prepared for the years from 1968 to 2012. The
PDFs of the Index have been uploaded,
year-wise, on the EPW website. Visitors can
download the Index for all the years from the
site. (The Index for a few years is yet to be
prepared and will be uploaded when ready.)
EPW would like to acknowledge the help of
the staff of the library of the Indira Gandhi
Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, in
preparing the index under a project supported
by the RD Tata Trust.
vol lI no 23
EPW
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Policy Studies, Policymaking, and

Knowledge-driven Governance
Anindya Chaudhuri
The academic and policy worlds have drifted apart since

the early years of the Indian Republic. Can a new Public
Policy field help reconnect academia to policymaking?
The genesis and evolution of Public Policy in the United
States holds important learning lessons. The raison
dtre of Public Policy, the academic discipline, is to aid
and inform public policy, the process; sans state
imprimatur, cross-institutional coordination and
demand-scoping, discrete supply-driven initiatives are
unlikely to have substantive impact. Public Policy has
considerable scope in India, provided academia and
government join hands to create a policy ecosystem for
meeting the specific challenges of Indian governance.
This is an excerpt from a research financially supported by the

vice chancellors office, Jamia Millia Islamia University, by an MPL
Fellowship through the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance,
under the Ford Foundation funded project Mapping Media Policy and
Law in India. Vibodh Parthasarthi was instrumental in persuading me
to take up the assignment and Arshad Amanullah kept me on track.
I have benefited immensely from discussions and conversations with
Parthasarathi Banerjee and Pronab Sen, as from interviews conducted
on the understanding of anonymity with people at Azim Premji
University, IIT Delhi, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, the Indian School of
Business, University of Delhi, University of Mumbai, and PRS Legislative
Research. An anonymous referee provided valuable feedback.
Anindya Chaudhuri (ac1947@gmail.com) is with the Global
Development Network, New Delhi.
EPW
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
1 Background and Motivation
awaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister, went to

great lengths to bridge the academic and policy worlds.
Widely acknowledged as a scholar in his own right, Nehru
took a keen professional interest in academic matters and
enjoyed intellectual kinship with the likes of Prasanta Chandra
Mahalanobis, Homi J Bhabha and V K R V Rao. He actively promoted the use of cerebral means for practical ends by tasking
these luminaries with finding solutions for the myriad social,
economic and technological challenges of the infant democracy.
He was also the driving force behind a host of stellar academic
institutions, including the Delhi School of Economics and the
twin systems of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian
Institutes of Management (IIMs), created with the explicit mandate of producing the skills and knowledge needed for advancing the countrys governance and developmental frontiers.
Thus, in those halcyon formative years of the republic, not
much separated the public intellectual from the public administrator. In fact, the planning system itself was appropriated
and largely adopted and moulded for India from academic
debates then raging in Europe and the United States (US) by
Mahalanobis (who also founded the famed Indian Statistical
Institute). From sociologists to nuclear physicists, leading scholars
had the ears of the prime minister; this automatically translated
to academic influence at the highest levels of policymaking.
The subsequent years witnessed a drifting away from this
promising entente. First, the politico-bureaucratic establishment
usurped policymaking as its strict monopoly and crowded out
academic consultation. In higher education, scholastics yielded
to politicsfirst in finance and administration, and eventually
and inevitably in thought as well. Creeping centralisation
caused policy decisions to be dutifully handed down the
administrative hierarchy, each level expecting the one below
to implement them with little or no introspection on form,
function and fallout.1
Second, a tendency emerged of reducing the complexity of
policymaking to the simplicity of resource allocation. This was
perhaps to a large extent driven by the growing influence of
the Planning Commission, which by its nature favoured economics over other disciplines. The only other field which has
managed to hold its own is law, if only because major policy
decisions get frequently, publicly and noisily dragged into
lengthy legal proceedings.2 There is little evidence at present
of physicists, biologists or sociologists having any voice or
relevance left in policy decisions.
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The phrase public policy has in recent times started making

appearances in politics, administration and popular discourse.
Perhaps driven by changing ideas of governance and growing
demands for policy professionalism, a smattering of institutions
of higher education have begun to offer programmes in Public
Policy. (Henceforth, Public Policy refers to the academic discipline, and public policy to the governance endeavours.)
Public Policy was an unknown entity in Indian academia as
little as a decade ago, and has not yet acquired a unique scholarly identity. There is no evidence of consensus, coordination
or debate over the nature or scope of the field, either amongst
the pioneering institutions themselves, or with the government.
In this context, can these institutions and programmes bring
academic expertise back into the policy process?
The absence of a Policy Studies discipline in India is quite
paradoxical, given the promising early academia-policy connections, the famously vocal nature of Indias democracy, and
the long history of policy analytical work from a plethora
of think tanks. Since the Indian Administrative Service is
known to admit the crme de la crme of Indian tertiary
education, one would presume the bureaucracy would also be
sympathetic to the idea of knowledge-driven policymaking.
What, then, explains the disconnect between the policy and
academic worlds?
In order to grasp this, it is first necessary to understand its
genesis and development in the country of its origin, the US.
Indeed, an intriguing question is why Policy Studies originated and developed in the US and nowhere else. There are critical learning lessons in that historythe most important being
that a field which by definition caters to the needs of the state
cannot be created solely by academic fiat without state support
and interest. Public Policy has considerable scope in India,
provided academia and government can join hands to create
a policy ecosystem for meeting the specific challenges of
Indian governance.
2 Current Map of Policy Studies in India
In the US and elsewhere (see Appendix, p 67), how to structure

programmes in Public Policy and its agnate fields, Public Administration and Policy Sciences, has long been hotly debated.3 In
India, no literature yet exists that systematically explores the
need for and the means of establishing Public Policy as an
academic discipline. Though some conferences in Public Policy
have appeared domestically in the last few years, for the
purposes of this research none of the papers presented could
be traced to a published finality. There are no publicly available
documents from any government or academic institution
which brainstorm the strategic considerations of creating a
complex, new academic field, or its feasibility, objectives and
curricular structures. Mapping Policy Studies programmes in
the country is hence perversely a short and simple exercise.
These include the following:
The Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B), an
autonomous institution under the central government, has a
Centre for Public Policy (CPP) offering a masters level Post
Graduate Programme on Public Policy and Management
60
(PGPPM), and a doctoral level Fellow Programme in Management

(FPM) in Public Policy.4 It is somewhat fitting that IIM-B, originally
created with the sole mandate of producing professional
expertise for public sector enterprises (MHRD 2008), would take
the lead in Policy Studies in the country. CPP was initiated in
2000 under a tripartite agreement between IIM-B, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), Government of India,
and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).5 The
students are mid-career government employees.
Management Development Institute, Gurgaon (MDI-G) is
another notable management institution which runs a similar
programme, called Post Graduate Programme-Public Policy
Management (PGP-PPM).6 The programme also runs in partnership with DoPT and caters to mid-career public sector employees, and is thus pitched as executive education. The focus is
again far removed from what would normally be called Policy
Studies in other parts of the world. The clientle is a captive
one, and the only competitionif it may be called sois provided by IIM-B.
Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C) has a Public
Policy and Management Group (PPMG). Because of capacity
limitations due to its modest size and operationswhich become
apparent when juxtaposed against IIM-B/PGPPMIIM-C/PPMG
does not offer any specialisation in Public Policy. Unlike IIM-B/
PGPPM, which was created with an explicit if idiosyncratically
defined Policy Studies mandate, IIM-C/PPMG emerged out of
an interdepartmental restructuring. A creation of convenience, the faculty size of the programme pales in comparison
with that of IIM-B.
The Jindal School of Government and Public Policy (JSGPP),
Gurgaon started operations from 2012.7 This is a privately
owned and managed institution which charges a commensurately hefty fee for its MA in Public Policy.8 Unlike the welldefined if un-academic constituencies of IIM-B and MDI-G, the
objectives of the programme is somewhat inchoate.
The Central University of Rajasthan has started an MA in
Public Policy, Law and Governance in 2012.9
The Indian School of Business (ISB) has set up the Bharti
Institute of Public Policy at Mohali, Punjab, offering a Management Programme in Public Policy.10
The Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, has recently
started offering an MA in Public Policy and Governance.11
The University of Mumbais Department of Civics and Politics
offers a Post Graduate Diploma in Public Policy.
The University of Delhis Department of Political Science
has three faculty members who work broadly in Public Policy.
However, there is no formal programme being offered by
the university.
The IIT, Delhi, has been internally discussing the possibilities of
creating a Policy Studies programme. The plans are at the preliminary stages with no guarantees of coming to fruition. India
also has a number of think tanks or research institutions operating in broad or niche policy domains. A majority of them conduct
economic research, but there are well-established and wellknown exceptions. Some of them run short training workshops,
but none offers any serious long-term academic programme.
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Policy Studies, as an academic discipline, hence cannot be

said to be even in the preformative stages in India. That is not
to say there is a complete and absolute lack of interest among
Indian academics. While researching this article, I interviewed a number of faculty members at universities and colleges who were either offering some flavour of Policy Studies
or had done so in the past. Almost all of them belonged to the
University Grants Commission (UGC)-recognised academic
departments. In conversation, all of them declared their
course-offerings were driven by personal interest, with little
departmental or administrative support. General administrative and collegial reactions ranged from apathy regarding
details of courses or curricula to outright resistance over any
necessity of Policy Studies as an independent field within
the existing academic superstructure. Despite their obvious
tenacity and dedication, few appeared optimistic about their
efforts bearing fruit.
3 Understanding the Genesis and Evolution
of Public Policy
But is such pessimism warranted? Prima facie, India should be

fertile ground for Policy Studies. The country takes pride in
being a stable democracy where policies are constitutionally
decided through discussion and debate. It had a clear head
start in involving academics in development and Public Policy,
and policy analysis has long been a cottage industry. The government is a voracious consumer of charts and tables, and
every ministry and department across the board commissions
reports and studies from academics, researchers, and consulting firms at considerable expense to the public exchequer. The
real puzzle may be why Policy Studies is not yet an established,
flourishing academic field.
This paradox can only be understood in a global, historical
context. Indeed, a better, more intriguing question is: Why
did Policy Studies originate in the US and nowhere else? Many
of the features of the academic-policymaking nexus which
characterise Policy Studies, for instance, can be traced back to
Germany or Britain. Berlin (1959) pointed out that the 19th
century German philosophers enjoyed social and political
authority far above their academic mandate, while the Oxford
dons at the turn of the 20th century were engaged to a large
extent in producing superbly-tuned administrators for the
British imperium. In that case, why did Public Policy in
academia not emerge in either country to complement public
policy in governance?
The key to understanding this is the central importance
of knowledge, built into the heart of the American constitutional system of governance to aid and inform public
policy. Alexander Hamilton in his essay Federalist No 1
left little doubt that the young nation was going to govern
itself by informed discussion and debate, and by no
other means:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved
to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide
the important question, whether societies of men are really capable
or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or
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whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force (Hamilton 1787).
A remarkable section in Federalist No 62 (Hamilton or

Madison 1788), quoted below, provides an astute insight into
the significance which the US founding fathers accorded to
knowledge in the policy process:
It is not possible that an assembly of men called for the most part from
pursuits of a private nature, continued in appointment for a short
time, and led by no permanent motive to devote the intervals of public
occupation to a study of the laws, the affairs, and the comprehensive
interests of their country, should, if left wholly to themselves, escape a
variety of important errors in the exercise of their legislative trust. [...]
A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge
of the means by which that object can be best attained. Some governments are deficient in both these qualities; most governments are deficient in the first. I scruple not to assert, that in American governments
too little attention has been paid to the last. The federal Constitution
avoids this error; and what merits particular notice, it provides for the
last in a mode which increases the security for the first.
The founding fathers themselves were an extraordinary

group of thinkers, never rivaled before or since as an intellectual
collective in governance and public welfare. Their thoughts and
writings, including the Federalist Papers, continue to be used
as guideposts for governance, both in the US and elsewhere.
On hindsight, their unique blend of liberalism, erudition and
practicality, and the emphasis on informed decision-making as
the bedrock of democratic governance, made the US the
perfect breeding ground for the emergence of Public Policy,
the discipline, as an integral part of public policy, the process.
The emergence of Policy Studies as its own academic field
nevertheless had to wait till the late 19th century, shaped
by the concurrent growth of administrative complexity and
academic specialisation. It was fitting that the call to arms was
sounded by Woodrow Wilson, a noted scholar and still the
only president ever to have held a doctoral degree. In an 1887
essay, Wilson called upon academia to forge a science of
administration to meet emerging challenges in governance.12
What made the essay particularly prescient was its insistence
that such a field be created distinct from political science,
though at the time of writing the latter itself was in the formative stages.13 Wilson was a past president of Princeton University and was famous for implementing fundamental and profound curricular and administrative reforms; his pronouncements hence carried considerable weight in both academic
and administrative circles. In particular, his insistence that
higher education should be a vehicle for public welfare rather
than a resting place for pedantic abstraction was to have a profound impact on the subsequent development of the American
academic system and its intertwined relationship with the
official policy apparatus.14, 15
The scholarly roots of Public Policy can be traced back to
behaviouralism and the backlash against the disciplinary fragmentation of the early 20th century.16 The leaders at the helm
of the movement, including Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell
and Myres McDougal, were not failed scholars working at the
fringes but, on the contrary, giants of American academia.
The ideas they championedcross-disciplinarity, linking
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knowledge to action, quantification in research, the importance of civic participation in public discourse, and personal
commitment and involvement in public affairsstill resonate
as the core features of modern Policy Studies. They were public
intellectuals of the first water, with considerable influence in
policymaking at the highest levels. Merriam, for example, was
adviser to three of the most powerful presidents in American
history.17 The transmission of ideas was often indirect but farreaching; for instance, President Bill Clinton publicly acknowledged the influence of McDougal on him and other classmates
at Yale who later went into public service.18
The study of governance and Public Policy started acquiring
a distinct academic identity through the work of secondgeneration behaviouralists such as Lasswell, Lerner and Dror,
in the form of what they called the Policy Sciences (Ascher
1986). The field received a substantial boost in the New Deal
era, with the enormous boost in public expenditures and the
direct involvement of the government in social and economic
matters. In an act which surely went a long way in legitimising
policy studies, Harvard University established the Graduate
School of Public Administration in 1937, now more famous as
the Kennedy School of Government.19
A subsequent landmark development was the creation of the
Inter-University Case Programme and the publication of Public
Administration and Policy Development: A Case Book (Stein 1952).
The impact across multiple disciplines was immediate and
profound.20 The programme and the study had far-reaching
consequences for at least two reasons. This was perhaps the
first time that a group of academics across the nation applied
scholarly analyses on policy instruments in multiple arenas.
Moreover, as pointed out by Yeung (2007), the effort had tremendous academic and practical authority, from being a collaboration of a whos who list of public administration titans.
In that way, the programme set in motion a new stream of academic discourse.
The prosperity and national confidence of the immediate
post-war period somewhat cooled the earlier drive for Policy
Studies. The succeeding years resurrected both political volatility and the demand for informed policymaking. From the late
1960s, the field expanded swiftly, not least because of the
exploding demand from the federal government for skilled policy
personnel. It even found presidential backing when Lyndon B
Johnson mandated the adoption of Robert McNamara and the
RAND Corporations Public Policy Budgeting System (PPBS) for
his Great Society initiatives (Stokes 1996). Between 1967 and
1971, nine universities started programmes in policy analysis
(Allison 2006).21 In the early 1970s, the Ford Foundation
provided multimillion dollar general-support grants, helping
create the original eight policy schools (Allison 2006; Dunn
1975).22 All were free-standing schools, with no legacy departmental entanglements.
By the mid-1970s, the field had become sufficiently well
established and self-confident to initiate introspection. The
year 1970 marked the creation of both the National Association
of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA)
and the Policy Sciences journal. In 1975, the Ford Foundation
62
organised a conference of the directors of the original eight

schools. Interestingly, within a half decade of operations, the
programmes had developed commonalities as well as signature
profiles (Dunn 1975). For example, almost all had economics
and statistics as core courses, with either workshops or internships, or both, being mandatory. Philosophical disagreements
existed mainly over the nature of PhD programmes, with
RAND being a strong outlier from the general belief of the
masters level being most appropriate for a policy practitioner.
In 1978, the Sloan Foundation sponsored a conference of policy
schools for curricular stocktaking, where a professional association of graduate schools was proposed.23 The Association
for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) was
founded in 1979, and the first issue of the Journal of Policy
Analysis and Management (JPAM) came out in 1981.24 Starting
from 1986, the APPAM conferences have continued to be venues
for institutional sharing of notes on programme structures,
curricula and change of directions.25
Growth of Think Tanks
A parallel and complementary development from the early

20th century was the growth of professional research and
advocacy organisations. These think tanks joined hands
with academia and the government to complete the American
policy triumvirate, the distinctive structure and operational
characteristics of which have since become institutionalised in
the American policy system. A number of them, such as the
Foreign Policy Association26 and the Council on Foreign
Relations,27 grew out of a perceived need around the time of
World War I to address the USs position in a changing world
order. On the domestic front, the National Bureau of Economic
Research28 and the Social Science Research Council29 came
into existence in 1920 and 1923 respectively. Both have housed
several Nobel laureates over the years, including Simon
Kuznets,30 Douglass North31 and, most recently, Alvin Roth.32
The first true prototype of the think tank model where
policymakers hobnobbed with powerful intellectuals was the
Brookings Institution.33 It was created in 1916 by a businessman,
Robert S Brookings, in a remarkable testament to the interest
and involvement of the American moneyed class in governance and public policy.34 Brookings inception mandate was to
pursue scientific research in governance and administrative
matters, broadly defined. However, it quickly went beyond the
mere conducting of research to acquiring enormous clout in
terms of actual policy implementation as well. For instance, it
played a key role in the formulation of the Marshall Plan and
the setting up of the United Nations.35 It managed to achieve
this by hiring first-rate, non-partisan scholars, and forging
close bonds with the government. Its influence could even
mould the very functioning of the government over the very
long term. A vivid demonstration of Brookings heft was the
creation of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) by the passing
of the 1974 Budget Act, something which it had been pushing
for a long time. The influence was further solidified by the
appointment of Alice Rivlin, a Brookings economist, as its first
director. Rivlin went on to mould the CBO to her own vision of
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adhering to fair, non-partisan operation and research standards (Irving et al 1988).

The RAND Corporation represents the diametrically opposite
model, where the supply of research and analysis grow to meet
an institutional demand for policy alternatives. Originally set
up through a military contract given to the Douglas Aircraft
Company in 1948, RAND has since then grown to behemoth
dimensions, with 1,700 employees with multiple offices within
the US and outside.36 It also houses a distinctive and highly
regarded doctoral degree programme at the Pardee Rand
Graduate School.37 Though RAND entertains international
clients, the majority of its contract remain federal.38
4 The Need to Connect Public Policy to public policy
What are the takeaways from the short history of the origin
and development of Policy Studies in the US presented above?
The most obvious point to be noted is that its genesis and evolution happened neither in a vacuum, nor was the architecture
derived from alien blueprints. Indeed, the entire process was
organic and endogenous. Policy studies emerged and developed in the US over the course of a century to address American
concerns, using domestic human and financial resources, within a homegrown politico-philosophical framework, without
mimicking intellectual movements from foreign shores. In
other words, Policy Studies emerged as a part and parcel of a
policy ecosystem whose other constituent elements evolved
synchronously. Counterparts of some of the elements of this
ecosystem can be found in other countries, including India,
but only in the US did they historically form a systemic whole.
The process of drafting of the Indian Constitution, for instance,
can perhaps be compared to the creation of the US counterpart
in the liveliness of the discussions, and the Constituent Assembly
Debates are perhaps no less important historically than the
Federalist Papers. But the resemblance did not carry over to the
respective social, political and administrative systems of the
two countries. As a consequence, it was the American education
system, and neither the Indian nor any other, which engendered
Policy Studies spontaneously.
Second, undoubtedly the most important factor behind the
rise of Public Policy in the US was public policy in the US. In
every country, the academic process is itself shaped by the process of governance. In the US, it was mandated from inception
that democratic decision-making be based on informed choices.
Public Policy is distinct from every other academic discipline
in that the subject, object and end consumer of all scholarly
output is the government. The economist or political scientist
can find ready harbour in a department insulated from the
nuts and bolts of administration, but an aloof government
effectively dooms the employment prospects of the budding
policy scientist. He needs the government to be open, interested,
and supportive of his work. In turn, his work must be useful to
the government in its public welfare activities. By definition,
he straddles two worldshe must analyse and discuss the
complexities of policy problems with other subject matter
experts, and he must simplify the solution alternatives for the
policymakers consumption and use.
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Third, the US policy system has long been unusual in having

a freely revolving door between public debate and public
serviceit is as common for practitioners to teach as it is for
scholars to enter the administration.39 US lawmakers have
typically always been highly educated, with Ivy League backgrounds almost being de rigueur over the last century. Many
presidents have been intellectuals of a high order.40 US administrations have perhaps often been enamoured of scholarly
brilliance and expert advice to a fault. It has historically been
easy for the policymaker and the policy scientist in America to
understand each other since they spoke the same language, if
perhaps different dialects.
It should finally also be noted that American higher education
has produced not only Policy Studies, but has been leading
the world in every field for nearly a century. The defining
characteristic of the US educational system has always been institutional flexibility to accommodate intellectual freedom.
American universities have produced and attracted the worlds
greatest thinkers, who have been drawn in by superlative financial remuneration, splendid infrastructure and support, and
complete freedom and independence from external interference. The extraordinary density of first-rate universities across
the nation, and the agglomeration of first-rate scholarship in
all disciplines on their campuses have made collaboration
across disciplines easier than anywhere else in the world. It is
a system which has bred and rewarded curiosity, courage and
eclecticism. Such a state of affairs has long become unimaginable in independent India, where education is considered an
extension of state bureaucracy, and government circulars
casually describe scholars as teachers and equivalent cadres
in universities and colleges.41
5 Checking the Boxes
The difference with the Indian system, where the public

administrator and the public intellectual live on separate
planets, is stark and obvious. It is interesting to note that
Indian policymaking has been most dynamic whenever a
scholarly person has been at the helm. Nehru was as comfortable
among intellectuals as he was among statesmen. The former
Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, considered the architect of
the modern Indian economy, spoke seven Indian languages in
addition to English, French, Arabic, Spanish and Persian.42
Raos finance minister, Manmohan Singh, who subsequently
went on to serve two consecutive terms as prime minister,
holds a DPhil from Oxford.43 Despite embarrassingly frequent
charges of financial mismanagementthough Singh himself
remained untainted till the very endhis two terms saw a
remarkably high amount of social legislation, including the
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act,
the Right to Education Act, and the Right to Information Act.44
It was also on his watch that the Planning Commission started
accepting internships for graduate students, something unthinkable a decade earlier when I was a doctoral student in
Public Policy at the University of Texas, Austin.45
India does not suffer from a dearth of think tanks (Gold,
Zonana and Nayyar 2009). However, social or scientific research
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cannot translate to policy research in exile from the policy

process. Policy Studies operate in a monopsonistic market, with
the government effectively being the sole buyer of all scholarly
output. Insularity of operation and apathy to external knowledge long being a hallmark of Indian governance, the market
for policy analysis simply failed to develop. This was pointed
out several decades ago in a powerful two-part commentary
by Myron Weiner (1979a, b). His observations remain relevant
till date. He noted that first, studiesdespite being commissioned governments to assist state projects or programmes
were rarely utilised in policies.46 Second, there was no scope
of lateral entry for academics (except economists) into the
government. Third, the government overwhelmingly controlled
the funding of policy research. (This contrasts with the US,
where a host of foundations and philanthropies sponsor research
of every kind, and universities compete fiercely over endowments and research grants.) Thus, research which contradicted
official presuppositions could be and frequently was suppressed.47 The net result was that the basic policy feedback
loop of analysis, formulation, implementation and reanalysis
did not exist in the country.
The academic system has its own challenges, including
issues such as promotion of collaborative scholarship and
curriculum design. Collaborative research, though particularly
important for policy studies, is problematic for Indian higher
education in general. An important roadblock is scale. Indian
departments tend to be small, with very little scope for faculty
groups coalescing around specialty areas.48 If larger faculties
can better facilitate within-and cross-disciplinary collaboration,
then scaling up might be one of easier solutions that can be
adopted. (This presumes the education system is not constrained by limited supply of professorial material, and completely
ignores the quality aspect.) Likewise, curricular design may
also not be an insurmountable obstacle, considering Policy
Studies, being loosely defined under the strictest of conditions,
offers greater flexibility than any disciplinary subject regarding course content.49
Marketability presents a trickier, egg-and-chicken problem.
In the absence of any space in the policy process for either the
scholar or the graduate, selling a programme in Policy Studies
to prospective students is a difficult proposition. Conversely,
without an assured supply of fee-paying students, no academic
programme of adequate quality can be sustained. IIM-B and
MDI-G have solved this problem by courting a captive market
with third-party (that is taxpayer) sponsorship. Knowingly or
unknowingly, this approach follows Lasswells (1943b) original idea of an institute for policymakers rather than aspiring
policy analysts which the overwhelming majority of the policy
schools cater to.50
In 2006, as a part of their Vision 2025 exercise, ISB conducted
an internal evaluation of the feasibility of a Masters in Public
Administration programme (ISB 2006). The study looked into
50 leading US programmes, and considered the possibilities of
a one- as well as two-year programme, finding merit in both
approaches. It also went into details of possible curricular
structures, faculty composition, and infrastructural requirements.
64
It identified several benefits to the nation as well as accruing

parochially to ISB from establishing the first Master of Public
Administration (MPA) programme in the country. But it also
came to the conclusion that such a programme was not likely
to be financially self-sufficient, given that the students would
necessarily have to be charged less than their Master of Business
Administration (MBA) counterparts, in line with their expected
lower earning potential. Without getting into details, the report
considered alternative financing models such as cross-subsidisation from the MBA programme and funding from foundations
or the public and private sectors. The solutions, however, avoid
the elephant in the room, namely, guaranteeing employment
for the graduates of the programme. The crux of the matter is
that without openness in governance and administration, a
Policy Studies field is neither feasible nor sustainable.
Assuming away bureaucratic closed-mindedness and the
difficulty of finding employment for the graduates, the primary
hurdle of creating a Policy Studies programme would then be
locating people with both good disciplinary training and interest
and competence in practical policy applications. The US solves
this problem through an open system of revolving doors
between government and academia. In American academia, it
is taken for granted that professors will go beyond classroom
responsibilities and engage with society at large. This is done
through interfacing with policymakers on matters of social
importance. For instance, it is very common for leading scholars
to testify before lawmakers in their areas of expertise. But more
direct and sustained involvement comes from periodic lateral
transitions between government employment and academic
ones. There is little possibility of the Indian policy process
taking this approach in the near future.
6 How to Create an Academic Discipline51
A number of discrete challenges can be identified for setting

up Policy Studies as an academic discipline in India, including
separation of the academic and policy processes, intellectual
pigeonholing, and the absence of a critical mass of faculty.
Broadly speaking, these can be binned into three overlapping
categories. At the lowest level are the instructional barriers
such as curriculum design. The second may be described as
administrative barriers, which would include branding and
marketing dimensions and faculty recruitment. Bureaucratic
hurdles such as the UGC apparatus would comprise the third
and most problematic set.
The problem of recruiting qualified people for a Public Policy
programme is an illustration of how the problem can be exacerbated by the structural inflexibility of Indian higher education. Academic recruitment in India is a formidable hurdle in
itself, over and above the fact that there is no established
framework of Policy Studies in the country. A fundamental
problem is that recruitment is linear and disciplinary by
design, and deviating from established norms is frowned upon
if not actively resisted. Because Public Policy does not exist in
India as an academic discipline, neither do norms for recruitment. This presents a peculiar catch-22 challenge. Since policy
research by definition works across disciplinary boundaries,
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administrators can be reluctant to back the candidacies of

people who cannot be judged by the usual lowest common
denominators of disciplinary parameters.
Innovation and institution-building in academia require
scholarship, but of an even greater importance is leadership.
Unfortunately, this is where the Indian education system has
been gutted maximally. Consider the example of the Delhi
School of Economics. K N Raj, brought in and given a free hand
by V K R V Rao, managed to rope in Amartya Sen, Sukhamoy
Chakravarty and Jagdish Bhagwati in its initial years, a coup
which would have brought credit to any department of social
science in the world (Bteille 2010). The full professorial
appointments of all overlooked their youthful chronological
ages for their academic brilliance. Such a wilful disregard for
institutional norms would not be tolerated today.52
What could be an ideal model for a Public Policy field
for India? We have seen that a fundamental prerequisite for
Public Policy is pre-existing demand from the government.
Can we realistically expect supply from the academic institutions
(listed in Section 2) to create its own demand from the government? Interestingly, Lasswell, who comes closest to being
called the father of Policy Studies, rejected the in-house model
in a couple of highly influential documents. Both were written
while he had stepped down from his faculty responsibilities at
the University of Chicago to take up the post of chief of the
experimental division for the Study of Wartime Communications
Notes
1 Administrative feebleness keeps getting periodic rappings from the Indian courts. See, for
example, the ruling by the Supreme Court in
Tarlochan Dev Sharma v State of Punjab & Others
(25 July 2001), http://www.indiankanoon.org/
doc/1389589/, accessed on 29 March 2016.
2 The importance of the lawyers and the economists in Public Policy is not an Indian idiosyncrasy. For a humorous but pithy commentary,
see Stigler (1972).
3 For the purposes of this paper, these phrases
are used interchangeably. The differences between these academic cousins are subtle and
have grown blurred over time, especially between Public Policy and public administration,
though in general the former tends to emphasise research and analysis while the latter
tends towards the functional and practical. See
Hur and Hackbart (2009). See also MPA & MPP
FAQ, National Association of Schools of Public
Affairs and Administration (NASPAA): http://
www.naspaa.org/students/faq/faq.asp, accessed on 29 March 2016. For an understanding
of the evolution of Policy Studies over these
different avatars, see Stokes (1996) and
Allison (2008).
4 http://www.iimb.ernet.in/centres/centre_for_
public_policy, accessed on 29 March 2016.
5 Ibid.
6 See http://www.mdi.ac.in/admission/pgp-public-policy-management.html, accessed on 29
March 2016.
7 See http://www.jsgp.edu.in, accessed on 29
March 2016. The school did not respond to numerous overtures apart from a disjointed
emailed offer from the dean, not followed
through subsequently, to meet at the Constitution Club over a report launch.
8 See Fees, http://jsgp.edu.in/content/fees, accessed on 29 March 2016.
EPW
june 4, 2016
at the Library of Congress. The documents combined his

scholarly background with insight from his practical experience with the policy world. In the first memorandum, he
reasoned that working within any particular institution of
higher learning would impose a collegial restraint on the
exercise of professional integrity (Lasswell 1943a). In the second, he proposed an alternative modelan independent Institute of Policy Sciences (Lasswell 1943b). Institutions such
as the Congressional Research Service and the CBO which aid
and inform the government embody these ideas. The organisations work closely with academic institutions and think
tanks for knowledge servicing, capacity building and even
long-term recruitment.
In the context of the demise of the Planning Commission
and the severely understaffed state of the NITI (National
Institution for Transforming India) Aayog, this could perhaps
be a good model to emulate. It is inconceivable that a handful
of people sitting in the capital city, no matter the depth and
breadth of the expertise in their respective fields, can service
the policy demands of a country as vast and complex as India.
It would be logical to harness the intellectual reserves of the
country, scattered in the universities and think tanks, to aid
the process of governance. The onus is as much on the government to open the system enough to facilitate intellectual connect
as it is on academia to step down from the ivory towers to
understand the needs of governance.
9 See http://www.curaj.ac.in/Default.aspx?PageId=134, accessed on 29 March 2016.

10 Bharti Institute of Public Policy, http://www.
isb.edu/bharti-institute-of-public-policy, accessed on 29 March 2016.
11 http://campus.tiss.edu/hyderabad/programs/
master-degree-programmes/ma-public-policyand-governance, accessed on 29 March 2016.
12 The idea of the state and the consequent ideal
of its duty are undergoing noteworthy change;
and the idea of the state is the conscience of
administration. Seeing every day new things
which the state ought to do, the next thing is to
see clearly how it ought to do them. This is why
there should be a science of administration
which shall seek to straighten the paths of government, to make its business less unbusinesslike, to strengthen and purify its organisation,
and to crown its duties with dutifulness. This
is one reason why there is such a science
(Wilson 1887).
13 The time will soon come when no college of
respectability can afford to do without a wellfilled chair of political science. But the education thus imparted will go but a certain length.
It will multiply the number of intelligent critics
of government, but it will create no competent
body of administrators. It will prepare the way
for the development of a surefooted understanding of the general principles of government, but
it will not necessarily foster skill in conducting
government. It is an education which will equip
legislators, perhaps, but not executive officials
(Wilson 1887).
14 Wilson also made his stand unambiguously
clear in his inaugural address as President of
Princeton University on 25 October 1902: We
are not put into this world to sit still and know;
we are put into it to act, http://infoshare1.
princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/
online_ex/wilsonline/4dn8nsvc.html, accessed
on 29 March 2016.
vol lI no 23
15 Isaiah Berlin (1959) uses Wilsons ideas on education to illustrate the philosophical conflict
between Cambridge idealism and Oxford practicality which played out across the pond in
early 20th century in his characteristically perceptive style.
16 It would be impossible to cover the origin and
development of any discipline in a single section of a single article. For an excellent overview, see Ascher (1986).
17 See http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/cemerriam.htm, accessed on 29 March 2016.
18 See Renowned International Law Scholar Myres S McDougal Dies, Yale Bulletin & Calendar,
http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/ybc/v26.n32.
news.11.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
19 See http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/history,
accessed on 29 March 2016.
20 See, for example the review by Hyneman
(1952), a political scientist, in the Louisiana
Law Journal.
21 These were Carnegie Mellon, Duke University,
Harvard, Michigan, the RAND Graduate School,
the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin.
22 The beneficiaries were Carnegie Mellon, Harvard,
Michigan, Princeton, the RAND Graduate School,
Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley,
and the University of Texas at Austin.
23 See http://www.appam.org/about-appam/, accessed on 29 March 2016.
24 Ibid.
25 See, for example, Ellwood (2008), accessed on
29 March 2016.
26 See http://www.fpa.org/, accessed on 29 March
2016.
27 See http://www.cfr.org/ accessed on 29 March
2016.
28 See http://www.nber.org/ accessed on 29 March
2016.
65
SPECIAL ARTICLE
29 See: http://www.ssrc.org/ accessed on 29 March
2016.
30 See http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/
economic-sciences/laureates/1971/kuznets-bio.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
31 See http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/
economic-sciences/laureates/1993/north-bio.
html, accessed on 16 September 2013.
32 See http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/october/nobel-economics-roth-101512.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
33 See http://www.brookings.edu.
34 Brookings Institution History, http://www.
brookings.edu/about/history, accessed on 29
March 2016.
35 Ibid.
36 For more on RAND, see http://www.rand.org/
about/glance.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
37 See http://www.prgs.edu/, accessed on 29 March 2016.
38 See http://www.rand.org/about/clients_grantors.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
39 Consider, for example, the media statement by
the University of Chicago Law School regarding
President Barack Obamas stint as a professor,
which highlights the dual teaching/public
service engagements of many of the professors,
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media, acce ssed on 29 March 2016.
40 There may be a correlation between executive
achievement and scholastics for US presidents.
Barack Obama taught for 12 years at the University of Chicago, John F Kennedy won the
Pulitzer Prize in History, Theodore Roosevelt
was a prolific writer and led several professional zoological expeditions, and Woodrow
Wilson was president of the American Political
Science Association as well of Princeton University. The scholarly calibres of the Founding
Fathers, of course, were superlative. For short
biographies, see: http://www.whitehouse.gov/
about/presidents, accessed on 29 March 2016.
41 Circulars/Orders/Notification No F3-1/2001UI, Department of Higher Education, Ministry
of Human Resource Development, Government
of India, http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/
mhrd/files/fittab.pdf, originally accessed on 26
September 2013. The document has since been
removed from the MHRD website, but is available at http://www.nitt.edu/home/righttoinfoact/fittab.pdf. Link verified on 29 March 2016.
42 See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1479685/PV-Narasimha-Rao.html, accessed
on 29 March 2016.
43 See http://pmindia.gov.in/en/former_pm/dr-manmohan-singh-2, accessed on 29 March 2016.
44 See http://pib.nic.in/archieve/upareport/ppa/
empowering.pdf, accessed on 29 March 2016.
45 See http://planningcommission.nic.in/news/
intern/, verified on 25 September 2013.
46 When probed, officials responded that (i) they
already knew the answers and no external input was needed, (ii) academics lack practical
experience, and (iii) there was no tradition of
research in government.
47 In one hilarious instance, the Department of
Prohibition of the Government of Gujarat
refused the publication of a study by the Sardar
Patel Institute of Economics and Social
Research which found that banning alcohol
caused a rise in gambling instead of in food
consumption. Weiner discovered that the prevailing attitude in officialdom was that taxpayerfunded studies belonged to the government
and were not public documents by default.
48 The Faculty of Law at the University of Delhi,
among Indias biggest, lists 50 faculty members
(http://www.du.ac.in/index.php?id=344).
Har vard has 215 (http://www.law.harvard.
edu/faculty/index.html?g=all). Differences in
66
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
scholastic levels go deeper than the numbers.

Both URLs accessed on 29 March 2016.
It should in fact be noted that curriculum design
is one of the perennially revisited aspects of the
domain (Lasswell 1943b; Lepawsky 1970; Yates
1977; Friedman 1991; Geva-May and Maslove
2006; Morl and Ivanova 2010).
It should, however, be highlighted that Lasswells conception applied to policy leaders.
Whether mid-level officials in Indian bureaucracy qualify for the moniker is debatable.
A more detailed discussion is left for a subsequent paper.
Incidentally, all three academic superstars left,
according to Desai (2010) because of the high
inflation, shrinking real salaries, and intellectual intolerance [of Indira Gandhi].
For details, see http://www.univcan.ca/aboutus/, accessed on 29 March 2016.
Canadian Association of Programmes in Public
Administration (CAPPA). The website was under reconstruction at the time of going to press.
An archived version (31 December 2014) can be
seen at https://web.archive.org/web/20141231232856/http://www.cappa.ca/, accessed on
29 March 2016.
Ibid.
See, for example, the MA in Public Administration at Carleton University (http://calendar.
carleton.ca/grad/gradprograms/publicadministration/#text) and the master of public administration at the University of Victoria, Canada (https://www.uvic.ca/hsd/publicadmin/graduate/future-students/grad-programs/pa-campus/index.php). Both accessed on 29 March 2016.
:http://www.sg.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/programme/
philosophy.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
http://www.sg.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/programme/
courses/course01.html, accessed on 29 March
2016.
See Curriculum in Common http://gspa.snu.
ac.kr/en/node/243, accessed on 06 April 2016.
See: http://gspa.snu.ac.kr/en/portfolio/type/1,
accessed on 6 April 2016.
See Overview and History, LKYSPP, NUS:
Archived webpage dated 04 April 2013, https://
web.archive.org/web/20130404085356/http://www.spp.nus.edu.sg/Overview_History.aspx, accessed on 29 March 2016.
See, for example, the list of courses at Kyoto
University, http://www.sg.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/programme/courses.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
See http://gspa.snu.ac.kr/en/node/243, accessed on 6 April 2016.
See http://www.ppaweb.hku.hk/programmes/
tpg/mipa, accessed on 29 March 2016.
http://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/admissions/graduateprogrammes/master-in-public-policy-mpp/. accessed on 29 March 2016.
See http://www.ppaweb.hku.hk/programmes/tpg/mipa#Elective, accessed on 29 March 2016.
See: http://www.pp.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/mppip/index.htm, accessed on 29 March 2016.
See: http://www.ppaweb.hku.hk/programmes/
tpg/mpa#stru, accessed on 29 March 2016.
The programmes offered by these universities
are, respectively, MSc in European Public Policy
(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/teaching/masters/
msc-european-public-policy), MPA European
Public and Economic Policy (http://www.lse.
ac.uk/IPA/MPA/Streams/EPEP.aspx), MA-European Public Affairs (http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/show/id=323147/langid=42), MSc-Politics and Public Policy (http://courses.cardiff.ac.uk/postgraduate/course/detail/
p252.html), and European Masters in Public
Administration (http://portal.uni-corvinus.hu/
?id=14783). All URLs accessed on 29 March 2016.
See, http://www.lse.ac.uk/IPA/MPA/Curriculum.aspx, accessed on 29 March 2016.
71 See https://www.hertie-school.org/studyabroad/, accessed on 29 March 2016.

72 See http://www.appam.org/.
73 See http://www.naspaa.org/.
74 See http://www.aspanet.org/.
75 See http://www.cappa.ca/.
76 See http://www.eapaa.org/index.php.
77 Academic homogenisation in the European
Union has also been spurred by the Bologna
Process, which seeks to make higher education
more compatible and comparable across the
board. See The Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area, http://ec.europa.
eu/education/policy/higher-education/bologna-process_en.htm, accessed on 29 March 2016.
78 See http://www.juaa.or.jp/en/accreditation/
public_poricy.html, accessed on 29 March 2016.
79 See http://www.kapa21.or.kr/english/.
80 See http://www.hkpaa.org.hk/.
References
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Public Policy: Reflections by a Founding Dean,
The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, Goodin,
Robert E, Michael Moran and Martin Rein (eds),
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Ascher, William (1986): The Evolution of the Policy
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pam.4050050212.
Berlin, Isaiah (1959): Woodrow Wilson on Education,
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Desai, Ashok V (2010): Effervescent Idealist: The
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Hur, Yongbeom and Merl Hackbart (2009): MPA
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Hyneman, Charles S (1952): Rev of Public Administration and Policy Developments; A Case Book,
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Yale University Library, Published in Policy Sciences, Vol 36, No 1, March 2003, pp 7198.
(1943b): Proposal: The Institute of Policy Sciences. Memorandum, October 1. Harold D Lasswell
Papers (Box 145), Manuscripts and Archives,
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Appendix
Policy Studies Globally
Public Policy has carved out niche positions
within the tertiary education systems of many
other countries. US influence and linkages are
EPW
june 4, 2016
very apparent in non-European places. Canada,

with the highest number of academic programmes in Policy Studies after the US, is coloured by geographical and cultural proximity.
Of the 97 universities represented by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada
(AUCC),53 25 offer masters programmes in policy, with 11 offering doctoral programmes as
well.54 There are also a substantial number of
related programmes which have a direct relevance to policy and administration.55 Though
Canadian programmes partly grew out of a domestically perceived need for a more analytically trained bureaucracy, they were and
remain influenced by developments south of
the border (Geva-May and Maslove 2006). This
is readily apparent in their curricular structures, with cores designed around economics,
quantitative methods, and public sector management (including public finance), along with
specialisations depending on student interest
and faculty competence.56 This model was developed over decades at the US universities.
The Far Eastern Quartet

One group of countries which have consciously
modelled their curricular structures on the US
approach is the Far Eastern quartet of Japan,
South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. For
example, the declared Educational Philosophy
of the programme at Kyoto University echoes the
tenor of any leading US programme.57 Excepting two Japan-specific courses on the countrys
legislative and legal systems, the core curriculum is likewise indistinguishable from a
standard US one.58 The core curriculum at the
flagship Graduate School of Public Administration (GSPA) at Seoul National University (SNU)
is even more American in spirit, incorporating
a course on ethics and leadership in line with
recent US trends.59
This is not surprising, given the political
and economic kinship of these countries with
the US. The American training and background
of the faculty provide a more straightforward
and persuasive explanation. At GSPA, 23 of the
29 permanent faculty members did their doctoral work in US universities.60 The structural
and curricular affinity is reinforced through
institutional connections with US policy programmes. For example, the formal creation
of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
(LKYSPP) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2004 can be traced back to the
Public Policy programme set up in partnership
with Harvards Kennedy School of Government
(KSG) in 1992.61
All four countries, presumably taking their
smaller sizes into consideration, have adopted
a strategy of balancing local needs with international marketability. In line with Japans relatively larger territorial expanse and population,
the Japanese programmes attempt to maintain
parity by offering a higher proportion of courses
which either specifically address domestic issues
or are easy to extrapolate to international settings.62 GSPASNU, in the much smaller Korea,
vol lI no 23
leans farther towards internationalisation; of all

the courses in the programme in public administration, for instance, only a tiny minority have
a stated domestic focus.63 International inclinations are commensurately stronger in the even
smaller Hong Kong. For instance, the Department of Politics and Public Administration
(DPPA) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU)
offers a specialised degree of Master of International and Public Affairs (MIPA) with a pragmatic emphasis on China and the Asia-Pacific.64
Many of the programmes assert their global
credentials through partnerships and collaboration with sister institutions abroad. The Lee
Kuan Yew School at NUS, for instance, highlights its association with Columbias School of
International and Public Affairs (SIPA), the London School of Economics and Political Science
(LSE), the Institut dtudes politiques de Paris
(Sciences Po), University of Geneva, and University of Tokyo, offering double degrees with
each of them.65 Similarly, MIPA at DPPAHKU
allows students to take one-course-equivalent
electives at Peking University, Johns Hopkins,
George Washington, and Seoul National University.66 The Master of Public Policy, International Program (MPP/IP) at the Graduate School
of Public Policy, University of Tokyo, advertises
not only international curricular compatibility and
outreach with other universities, but a professional connection with the World Bank, Asian
Development Bank (ADB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through dedicated
scholarships.67 The realistic value addition in
some cases is doubtful, for example, the MPA at
DPPAHKU has an optional residency at Chinese
Academy of Governance, but the two-week duration is unlikely to be sufficient for any manner of meaningful learning.68 Nonetheless,
international linkages are clearly a signalling
mechanism for attracting well-heeled students.
European Schools
The programmes offered by the European
Schools display a third major approach. They
tend to be Eurocentric rather than either
country-specific or global. The universities
themselves range from the front-ranking (the
University College London, LSE and Maastricht University), to the middle-tier (Cardiff
University and the University of Bath), to the
relatively low-profile (the Corvinus University
of Budapest).69 The bigger schools often also
offer more broadly defined programmes or a
broader range of them in order to appeal a wider clientle. For example, the MPA programme
at LSE has five policy streams(i) Public and
Economic Policy, (ii) Public Policy and Management, (iii) International Development, (iv) European Public and Economic Policy, and (v) Public and Social Policy.70 However, the general
tendency is to focus on the administrative and
governance problems of an integrating Europe.
All these programmes are relatively young,
most dating back to less than a decade. This
is again a reflection of the uniqueness of the
US and its policymaking structure, as also its
67
SPECIAL ARTICLE
attractiveness to much of the rest of the world.
In many ways, European academics is moving in the direction of the US, and the steady
increase in the number of policy programmes
offered by the traditionally cautious European
universities is an affirmation of these tendencies. This is also affirmed by the evidence of
competition amongst institutions through product-differentiation in a crowding market. The
Hertie School of Governance provides an excellent example; it clearly attempts to position
itself as being international rather than European by offering a spectrum of dual degrees
and exchange programmes.71 Thus, Policy
Studies as an academic field is clearly making
headway in many countries, but it is difficult
to ascertain their relevance to their respective
policy-processes.
Commonalities across Institutions

Leaving aside differences in curricular philosophy, Policy Studies share at least two commonalities across institutions, countries and
continents. The first is that all programmes are
binned into one of two categories, each catering to a distinct student outcome profile. The
masters programmes are designed to produce
policy practitioners. They are professional
programmes that may best be characterised as
being public-sector counterparts of MBA programmes. So, for example, they are expected to
produce policy analysts, equivalent to business

analysts, while leadership skills are emphasised
in both. As in business studies, students are
usually expected to intern at organisations in
line with their professional interests. Doctoral
programmes operate at a very different level,
and are geared towards producing the next generation of policy scholars. They also share an
equivalence with their counterparts in business
schools in that unlike in traditional disciplines,
the research explorations at the doctoral level
are understood to ultimately address practical
questions of governance and administration.
In a second departure from more academic disciplines, there is no step up in hierarchy from
the masters to the doctoral levels; the programmatic structures are tailored to different career
aspirations. Policy Studies and business studies
are kindred spirits in this respect as well.
The second point to note is that a large part
of the homogeneity of the programmes stems
from their affiliation to associations which either act explicitly as accreditation agencies, or
as forums where academics and administrators
exchange notes on current developments and
future directions. Most US schools are aligned
to either the APPAM,72 or the NASPAA,73 or the
American Society for Public Administration
(ASPA).74 Canadian programmes are accredited
by the Canadian Association of Programmes
in Public Administration (CAPPA).75 European
programmes, apart from their respective

national higher education accreditation agencies,
can seek the higher stamp of approval of the
European Association for Public Administration
Accreditation (EAPAA).76, 77 All Japanese programmes have to be certified by the Japan University Accreditation Association Standards for Professional Graduate Public Policy Schools.78 The
Korean schools interface through the Korean
Association for Public Administration (KAPA).79
Even diminutive Hong Kong has the Hong Kong
Public Administration Association (HKPAA).80
Apart from coordination at the institutional
level as and when needed, these associations
perform an aggregative function through two
primary means. The first is through organising
annual conferences which serve multiple purposes. They act as networking venues for administrative and academic personnel. They are also
meeting grounds for policy researchers and
practitioners. No less important, they are de
facto recruitment events for doctoral students
who showcase their research skills before the
faculty of national and international schools
which they hope to join. A more sustained
and recurrent function performed by the associations is the publication of journals. Many
of these are well respected not only in Policy
Studies, but compare very favourably with
leading field journals in the disciplinary social
sciences.
Higher Education in India

In Search of Equality, Quality and Quantity
Edited by
JANDHYALA B G TILAK
India has a large network of universities and colleges with a massive geographical reach and the facilities for higher
education have been expanding rapidly in recent years. The story of higher education in India has seen many challenges
over the decades and has not been without its share of problems, the most serious being a very high degree
of inequity.
Drawn from writings spanning almost four decades in the EPW, the articles in this volume discuss, among other
Pp xiv + 538 Rs 745
ISBN 978-81-250-5131-2 things, issues of inclusiveness, the impact of reservation, problems of mediocrity, shortage of funds, dwindling numbers
2013
of faculty, and unemployment of the educated young.
Authors: Andr Bteille Shiv Visvanathan Suma Chitnis Satish Deshpande K Sundaram Rakesh Basant, Gitanjali Sen Jayati Ghosh
Thomas E Weisskopf Lloyd I Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph A M Shah Errol DSouza G D Sharma, M D Apte Glynn L Wood
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68
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
DISCUSSION
Scapegoating Climate Change

Sachin Tiwale, Dipti Hingmire
tul Deulgaonkar and Anjali Joshi

have described the drought experienced in Marathwada in their
article Agriculture Is Injurious to Health
(EPW, 7 May 2016). As the impacts of
drought, they have highlighted the low
reservoir levels, depleting water levels
in aquifers, failure of consecutive crops,
acute shortage of drinking water both in
rural and urban areas culminating in the
increase in number of farmers suicides,
displacement of capital, human beings and
entrepreneurial talent causing socioeconomic devastation across urban and
rural fabric cutting across class and caste.
In addition, they have also mentioned
the agricultural policy issues.
However, they have hurriedly connected these series of events and observations to climate change without giving
appropriate evidences.
Rainfall Data Set
According to the authors, the deficient
rainfall of 2014 and 2015 is due to the
impact of the changing climate. They
claim that in Marathwada, The normal
rainfall of 780 mm during monsoons has
dropped to less than 260 mm (p 14).
However, these claims are not substantiated with any scientific evidence. We
hereby invite attention to the data sets in
which experts have acknowledged the
variable nature of monsoon with significant fluctuations across the years.
The homogeneous rainfall data set prepared by the Indian Institute of Tropical
Meteorology (IITM), including 306 raingauge stations spread across the country,
has proven the inter-annual and decadalscale variations in the monsoon. As per this
long time series data set, since 1871 we
have witnessed 26 major drought years.
Further, there is a pattern to these drought
years. The decadal scale variations in the
monsoon have been noted in alternative
periods with less and more frequent weak
monsoons extending up to three to four
EPW
june 4, 2016
decades. For example, from 1921 to 1964,

there were two drought years and from
1965 to 1987 we witnessed 10 drought
events (Kothawale and Revadekar 2016).
As per the end of the season report of
the South West monsoon of 2015 produced
by the India Meteorological Department
(IMD), 2014 and 2015 was the fourth case
of two consecutive all-India deficient
monsoon years during the last 115 years
(IMD 2015). Earlier, 190405, 196566
and 198687 were the consecutive years
with deficit rainfall. The droughts are not
uncommon, and therefore, based on the
rainfall data of the last few years, one
should not link the variations in monsoon rainfall with the climate change
without providing any logical evidence.
Based on a homogeneous rainfall time
series of the period 19012003, Guhathakurta and Rajeevan (2006) of the National
Climate Centre, IMD, Pune have analysed
the characteristics of the Indian summer
monsoon in the context of climate change
at the scale of a subdivision. Their analysis
concludes that for the Marathwada subdivision there is a slightly increasing trend
in monsoon rainfall which is not statistically significant.
Moreover, the authors have reported
that in Marathwada the normal rainfall
during the monsoon season has dropped
to 260 mm. The authors have neither
explained the rainfall time series they have
used to come to this conclusion nor have
they cited the source of this number. However, as per the long period average (1901
2015), the normal seasonal monsoon rainfall for Marathwada is 682.9 mm and not
780 mm as reported by the authors.1 Moreover, in 2014 and 2015, the worst-affected
years, the monsoon rainfall was 398.8
mm and 412.4 mm, respectively which is
much more than 260 mm (IMD 2015;
Srivastava et al 2015). Therefore, it is very
difficult to believe in the figure of 260 mm
of normal rainfall. Surprisingly, in the case
of the number of rainy days, the authors
vol lI no 23
have deviated from their own figure of 37

days quoted in their article to 55 rainy days
in another article written on 31 March
2016 (Deulgaonkar and Joshi 2016).
There is no way to understand the reasons behind such a huge discrepancy in
these important figures. Another misleading fact that the authors mention is
Marathwada is also completely dependent
on Western Maharashtra for water (p 15).
In reality only a small portion of Marathwada (part of Osmanabad and Beed districts) lies in the Bhima river basin originating in western Maharashtra. The remaining more than 86% area of Marathwada is
in the Godavari River basin originating in
North Maharashtra and then entering
Marathwada. Thus, Marathwada is largely
dependent on the upper Godavari basin
covering Nashik and Ahmednagar districts and not western Maharashtra.
Though some of the studies have
uncovered the variability in the Indian
summer monsoon in terms of changes in
number of rainy days, intensity and frequency of dry spells and wet spells in the
recent period (Singh et al 2014), it is not
yet known how much the contribution of
this climate change-induced variability
within a monsoon season is responsible
for current droughts in Marathwada. The
rainfall received in Marathawada for the
two consecutive years is 40% deficient
and this deficiency is a part of normal
behaviour of the monsoon.
Hailstorm Incidents
In addition, according to the authors, In
the past seven to eight years, untimely rain
and hailstorms during February or March
have become a regular phenomenon
(p 14). The hailstorms in February and
March were not a new phenomenon. After
the hailstorm in FebruaryMarch 2014,
that affected large parts of the country, including Maharashtra, the Central Research
Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA)
produced a report on the historical perspective of hailstorm covering entire India
(Rao et al 2014). As per this report analysing hailstorm events between periods of
18981935 and 19722011, in February and
March the northern Vidarbha region of
Maharashtra, including Nagpur, Amravati
69
DISCUSSION
and Akola districts experienced the highest

incidences of hailstorms in India.
The frequency analysis of hailstorm data
for 38 years (19722011)2 indicates that
Nagpur district had witnessed the highest
hailstorm events (40) and with frequency
ranging between 25 and 30 for Amravati
and Akola districts. Further, it has been
noted that after 1972, the geographical
coverage and frequency of hailstorm events
have increased, however, as per the report,
apart from weather changes, there might be
other reasons, including growing awareness on the losses and development of
communication network leading to surge
in frequencies. We are not sure how hailstorms are linked with the changing climate.
Climate Change
We neither deny the climate change phenomenon nor are we against climate change
mitigation plans. However, it is illogical to
quote randomly from international reports
without providing their link to the current
situation in Marathwada and concluding
that climate change is the cause. We
need to segregate carefully between
what is to be attributed for changing climate and what not.
We feel that by connecting the dots in
this manner we are escaping from the
responsibility of looking into our own
backyard for solutions. Framing a relationship between extreme events like drought
and changing climate without any
evidences misleads the entire discussion
of management of these extreme events.
The technocratic representation of drought
and its impact as an outcome of changing
climate conveniently neglect the sociopolitical aspects of drought and invariably
demand modern technological solutions
such as cloud seeding as suggested by
the authors. We need to be very careful
while defining and analysing the problem
as it determines the kind of solutions we
choose and those like cloud seeding are
definitely not going to solve the issues of
recurring droughts in Maharashtra as
they are not addressing the main issues of
managing water which aggravates the
impact of the drought.
Missing Dots
The missing dots highlighting sociopolitical
dimensions of water management include
70
water use practices involving 70% losses in

canal irrigation network and 40%50%
losses in urban water distribution network
(MoWR 2014), inefficient use of available
water with promotion of water guzzling
crops like sugar cane, inequitable upstreamdownstream distribution of water
between upper Godavari basin and Marathwada which does not provide appropriate share of water to Marathwada, overexploitation of groundwater without any
substantial conservation measures, lack
of demand-side management approach
involving selection of appropriate cropping
pattern, use of water saving technologies
like drip irrigation, and recycle and reuse
of wastewater, and absence of multidisciplinary and integrated approach for water
management considering basin as a unit.
According to the National Water Policy
(2002 and 2013) as well as the Maharashtra State Water Policy (2002) water should
be managed following the river basin as a
unit. In addition, the Maharashtra Water
Resources Regulatory Authority Act of 2005
has mandated the state government to prepare a draft integrated state water plan
within six months of the act coming into
force. That has not happened. In 2015, the
state government prepared its first draft
river basin plan for Godavari River covering
a major portion of Marathwada. However,
the draft plan was full of flaws and does
not mention anything about drought management though historically Marathwada
has seen recurring droughts (Tiwale 2015).
Inadequate legal provisions are a major
hurdle in managing water across the state
as the rules of Maharashtra Irrigation Act
(MIA), 1976 are not prepared even after 40
years. The MIA 1976 is the parent act and it
provides foundation for irrigation water
management, as all other irrigation related
acts, including Irrigation Development
Corporation Acts, Maharashtra Management of Irrigation Systems by Farmers
Act and Maharashtra Water Resources
Regulatory Authority Act time and again
refer to MIA 1976 assuming it is in force
(Purandare 2013). The absence of rules has
created chaos in irrigation water management across the state.
Thus, a causal analysis of Marathwada
drought is incomplete without taking into
account the water management practices
adopted and promoted. It would be unfair
to neglect these dimensions of water

management. Before hastily describing
Marathwada as an environmental disaster
in the wake of climate change, without
any scientific evidence, and accordingly,
promoting solutions, we need to be extremely careful, as factors such as change
in land-use pattern, growing population
affecting per capita water availability and
practices of (mis)managing water would
aggravate drought in Marathwada.
Sachin Tiwale (sachin.tiwale@gmail.com) teaches
at the Centre for Water Policy, Regulation and
Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai and Dipti Hingmire (diptikalyanshetti@
gmail.com) is a junior research fellow at the
Centre for Climate Change Research, Indian
Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune.
notes
1
Even as per the homogeneous Indian monthly

rainfall data set made available by the Indian
Institute of Tropical Meteorology for the period of
18712013 (http://www.tropmet.res.in/static_
page.php?page_id=53), the normal rainfall for
Marathwada during monsoon is 691.1 mm, significantly less than 740 mm quoted by authors.
For the data series 19722011 covering total 40
years, data is not available for 1977 and 1984.
References
Deulgaonkar, Atul and Anjali Joshi (2016): Deaths
Multiply in Parched Marathwada, 30 March, retrieved from http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2016/
03/31/deaths-multiply-parched-marathwada/.
Guhathakurta, P and M Rajeevan (2006): Trends in
the Rainfall Pattern over India, Pune: India:
National Climate Centre, India Meteorological
Department.
IMD (2015): SW Monsoon 2015: End of Season
Report, Pune: India Meteorological Department,
Ministry of Earth Sciences.
Kothawale, D and J Revadekar (2016): Inter-annual Variations of Indian Summer Monsoon,
February, retrieved from http://www.tropmet.
res.in/~kolli/mol/Monsoon/Historical/air.html.
MoWR (2014): Guidelines for Improving Water Use
Efficiency in Irrigation, Domestic & Industrial
Sectors, New Delhi: Central Water Commission,
Ministry of Water Resources.
Purandare, P (2013): Wanted: Rule of Law, What
Plagues Maharashtras Irrigation Sector, retrieved
from http://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/
wanted-rule-of-law-41156.
Rao, V, B Rao, A Sikka, A Subba Rao, R Singh and
M Maheswari (2014): Hailstorm Threat to
Indian Agriculture: A Historical Perspective and
Future Strategies, Hyderabad: Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture.
Singh, D, M Tsiang, B Rajaratnam and N S Diffenbaugh (2014): Observed Changes in Extreme Wet
and Dry Spells during the South Asian Summer
Monsoon Season, Nature Climate Change, 4(6),
45661, retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/
nclimate2208.
Srivastava, A K, P Guhathakurtha and S Kaur
(2015): Rainfall Statistics, Monsoon 2014: A
Report, D S Pai and S C Bhan (eds), Pune: National Climate Centre, India Meteorological
Department, pp 92108.
Tiwale, S (2015): Flaw Overflow: Has the Maharashtra Government Prepared the Draft River Basin
Plan for Godavari to Push for More Projects in the
Region?, Down to Earth, 1631 December, 5657.
june 4, 2016
vol lI no 23
EPW
CURRENT STATISTICS
Wholesale Price Index
Foreign TradeMerchandise
The year-on-year (y-o-y) inflation rate based on WPI turned positive to 0.3%
(after 17 months) in April 2016 against (-)2.4% in April 2015. The index for
primary articles rose by 2.3% in April 2016 compared to 0.5% a year ago, while
rise in the index for food articles slowed down by 4.2% compared to 5.9% in
April 2015. The index for fuel and power continued to decline for 18th month in a
row, however, at a decelerated rate of -4.8% in April 2016 compared to -13.0%, a
year ago. The index for manufactured products increased by 0.7% in April 2016
against (-)0.5% in April 2015.
The merchandise trade deficit narrowed to a five-year low to $4.8 billion in

April 2016 from $11 billion, a year ago. Exports contracted for 17th month
in a row by (-)6.7% to $20.6 billion in April 2016 from 22.1 billion in April
2015. Imports fell sharply by (-)23.1% to $25.4 billion in April 2016 from
33 billion, in the same month last year. Oil imports declined by (-)24% to
$5.7 billion and the non-oil imports by (-)23% to 19.8 billion in April 2016,
compared to $7.4 billion and $25.6 billion, respectively, a year ago.
Consumer Price Index
Index of Industrial Production
The CPI inflation rate rose to 5.4% in April 2016 compared to 4.9%, a year
ago, as the food price index increased by 6.3% compared to 5.1% in April 2015.
The CPIrural and CPIurban inflation rate increased to 6.1% and 4.7%,
respectively, in April 2016 from 5.3% and 4.4%, respectively, in the corresponding
month last year. As per Labour Bureau data, the CPI inflation rate for
agricultural labourers and industrial workers increased to 5.3% and 5.9%,
respectively, in April 2016, compared to 4.4% and 5.8% in the corresponding
period last year.
The y-o-y growth rate of IIP slowed down to 0.1% in March 2016 from 2.5%, a year
ago, with manufacturing growth declining to -1.2% from 2.7% in March 2015.
The index of eight core industries rose to 8.5% in April 2016 from -0.2%, in April
2015. Growth in refinery products, electricity, fertilisers, steel and cement grew
sharply to 17.9%, 14.7%, 7.8%, 6.1%, 4.4%, respectively, in April 2016. Growth in
coal production fell substantially to -0.9% in April 2016, against 8.1% last year,
and growth in natural gas and crude oil too, declined to -6.8% and -2.3%,
respectively, compared to -3.6% and -2.5%, respectively, in April 2015.
Movement of WPI Sub-indices JanuaryApril 2016
Merchandise Trade April 2016
Year-on-Year in %
12
Primary Articles
Exports
Imports
Trade deficit
2.3%
0.7%
Manufactured Products
Over Month
(%)
20.6
25.4
4.8
-9.5
-8.5
-4.5
Over Year
(%)
(AprilMarch)
(201516 over 201415) (%)
-6.7
-23.1
-55.9
-15.9
-15.3
-14.0
Data is provisional. Source: Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Trade Deficits April 2015April 2016
-4.8%
-6
April 2016
($ bn)
$ billion
0
Fuel and Power
-12
-3
-18
January
2016
February
March*
-9
Over Month
Over Year
100
20.1
14.3
14.9
65.0
1.4
2.1
2.0
1.7
0.9
0.3
2.3
4.2
-4.8
0.7
-$4.8 bn
Oil
Trade Deficit
Total Trade Deficit
Trends in WPI and Its Components April 2016* (%)

Weights
-$3.7 bn
-6
April*
* Data is provisional.
All commodities
Primary articles
Food articles
Fuel and power
Manufactured products
-$1.2 bn
Non-oil Trade Deficit
-12
Financial Year (Averages)

201314 201415 201516
6.0
9.8
12.8
10.2
3.0
2.0
3.0
6.1
-0.9
2.4
-2.5
0.2
3.4
-11.7
-1.1
* Data is provisional; Base: 200405=100. Source: Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
-15
-18
April
2015
Jan
2016
Oil refers to crude petroleum and petroleum products, while non-oil refers to all other commodities.
Movement of Components of IIP Growth April 2015March 2016

Year-on-Year in %
Movement of CPI Inflation April 2015April 2016
16
Year-on-Year in %
11.3%
Electricity
10
8
8
-0.1%
6.1%
5.4%
4.7%
Rural
4
2
CPI (Combined)
Manufacturing
-1.2%
Mining
-8
April
2015
J
2016
M*
* March 2016 are quick estimates; Base: 200405=100.
Urban
Growth in Eight Core Industries April 2016* (%)
0
April
2015
Jan
2016
A*
Weights
* April 2016 is provisional. Source: Central Statistics Office (CSO); Base: 2012=100.
Inflation in CPI and Its Components April 2016* (%)

Weights
CPI combined
Consumer food
Miscellaneous
Latest Month Over Over

Index Month Year
Financial Year (Avgs)

201415 201516
100 127.2
39.1 131.2
28.3 120.1
1.0
1.5
0.7
5.4
6.3
4.3
5.9
6.3
4.6
4.9
4.9
3.7
271
843
1.1
0.0
5.9
5.0
6.3
6.6
5.6
4.4
CPI: Occupation-wise
Industrial workers (2001=100)
Agricultural labourers (1986-87=100)
* Provisional. Source: CSO (rural and urban); Labour Bureau (IW and AL).
General index #
Infrastructure industries
Coal
Crude oil
Natural gas
Petroleum refinery products
Fertilisers
Steel
Cement
Electricity
100.0
37.9
4.4
5.2
1.7
5.9
1.3
6.7
2.4
10.3
Over Month
7.4
-6.2
-30.0
-3.4
-2.0
-5.7
-20.9
-3.4
-7.9
3.5
Over Year
Financial Year (Avgs)

201314
201415
0.1
8.5
-0.9
-2.3
-6.8
17.9
7.8
6.1
4.4
14.7
-0.1
4.2
1.3
-0.2
-13.0
1.5
1.5
11.5
3.1
6.0
2.8
4.5
8.1
-0.9
-4.9
0.3
-0.1
4.7
5.6
8.4
# March 2016, * Data is provisional; Base: 200405=100. Source: CSO and Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Comprehensive current economic statistics with regular weekly updates are available at: http://www.epwrf.in/currentstat.aspx.
EPW
JUNE 4, 2016
vol LI no 23
71
CURRENT STATISTICS
Indias Quarterly Estimates of Final Expenditures on GDP

201415
` crore | at 201112 Prices
Private final consumption expenditure

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

201415 ($ mn)
Q4
Q3
Current account
Merchandise
Invisibles
Services
of which: Software services
Transfers
of which: Private
Income
Capital account
of which: Foreign investment
Overall Balance
-7721
-38635
30913
19982
17844
16428
16521
-5497
22864
13194
13182
Q1
-645
-31560
30916
20116
18625
16425
16600
-5625
30023
22993
30149
201516 ($ mn)
Q2
-6147
-34181
28035
17750
17556
16153
16267
-5868
18595
10308
11430
-8748
-37425
28677
17897
18029
16263
16421
-5483
8576
3198
-856
201415 (` bn)
Q3
Q3
Q4
-7081
-34004
26923
18083
18418
15250
15305
-6409
10536
10576
4056
-478 [-1.5]
-2393
1915
1238
1105
1017
1023
-340
1416 [4.5]
817
816 [2.6]
201516 (` bn)
Q2
Q1
-40 [-0.1]
-1964
1924
1252
1159
1022
1033
-350
1869 [5.6]
1431
1876 [5.7]
-390 [-1.2]
-2,170
1,779
1,127
1,114
1,025
1,033
-372
1,180 [3.7]
640
725 [2.3]
Q3
-568 [-1.7]
-2432
1863
1163
1171
1057
1067
-356
557 [1.7]
427
-56 [-0.2]
-467 [-1.3]
-2242
1775
1192
1214
1005
1009
-423
695 [2.0]
697
267 [0.8]
Figures in square brackets are percentage to GDP.
Foreign Exchange Reserves

Excluding gold but including revaluation effects
` crore
$ mn
Variation
20 May
2016
22 May
2015
31 Mar
2016
2268120
338437
2100400
330904
2229020
337605
Over
Month
Over
Year
24620
-598
196470
10056
Financial Year So Far

201516
201617
90000
9595
Monetary Aggregates
` crore
Money supply (M3) as on 13 May

Components
Currency with public
Demand deposits
Time deposits
Other deposits with RBI
Sources
Net bank credit to government
Bank credit to commercial sector
Net foreign exchange assets
Banking sectors net non-monetary liabilities
Reserve money as on 20 May 2016
Components
Currency in circulation
Bankers deposits with RBI
Other deposits with RBI
Sources
Net RBI credit to government
of which: Centre
RBI credit to banks & commercial sector
Net foreign exchange assets of RBI
Govts currency liabilities to the public
Net non-monetary liabilities of RBI
Outstanding
2016
Over Month
11901380
20090 (0.2)
Over Year
201516
1120660 (10.4)
Aggregate deposits
Demand
Time
Cash in hand
Balance with RBI
Investments
of which: Government securities
Bank credit
of which: Non-food credit
Capital Markets
S&P BSE SENSEX (Base: 197879=100)
S&P BSE-100 (Base: 198384=100)
S&P BSE-200 (198990=100)
CNX Nifty (Base: 3 Nov 1995=1000)
Net FII Investment in equities ($ Million)*
201213
108086
-14361
82800
-485
Variation
201617
Financial Year
201314
251570
16769
247040 (2.1)
201415
201516
322660
40486
218620
16297
Financial Year
201415
201314
230550 (2.2)
1127560 (13.4)
1032790 (10.9)
201516
1104170 (10.5)
1678100
950560
9259520
13200
23950
-64540
61380
-690
(1.4)
(-6.4)
(0.7)
(-5.0)
216170
71910
829170
3410
(14.8)
(8.2)
(9.8)
(34.8)
75750
-12980
172580
-4810
(5.5)
(-1.5)
(2.1)
(-32.9)
80000
-46460
215740
-2250
(5.0)
(-4.7)
(2.4)
(-14.6)
104760
58760
965330
-1270
(9.2)
(7.8)
(14.9)
(-39.2)
140360
79650
800150
12630
(11.3)
(9.8)
(10.7)
(641.1)
211920
105390
786010
850
(15.3)
(11.8)
(9.5)
(5.8)
3503560
7788560
2510370
1923020
2186980
-40280
-5590
16100
-49860
17590
(-1.1)
(-0.1)
(0.6)
(-2.5)
(0.8)
328030
686960
148980
45660
272450
(10.3)
(9.7)
(6.3)
(2.4)
(14.2)
168130
58970
110740
107420
-13930
(5.6)
(0.8)
(4.9)
(6.1)
(-0.7)
262530
-33350
19670
1810
6240
(8.1)
(-0.4)
(0.8)
(0.1)
(0.3)
335850
777430
287280
275010
217860
(12.4)
(13.7)
(17.6)
(16.8)
(14.4)
-37470
597340
326710
-144130
195710
(-1.2)
(9.3)
(17.0)
(-7.5)
(11.3)
233630
779280
240050
151270
252280
(7.8)
(11.1)
(10.7)
(8.5)
(13.1)
1744840
429070
13070
20540 (1.2)
-2440 (-0.6)
-500 (-3.7)
224810 (14.8)
44420 (11.5)
3220 (32.7)
71720 (5.0)
-80910 (-17.4)
-4740 (-32.5)
616670
615650
114560
2422800
21910
988960
4340
5680
15070
24790
0
26620
204840
204470
-4360
199560
2360
129940
47300
50150
-83580
95970
120
73740
(0.7)
(0.9)
(15.1)
(1.0)
(0.0)
(2.8)
(49.7)
(49.7)
(-3.7)
(9.0)
(12.1)
(15.1)
(13.0)
(13.9)
(-41.3)
(4.5)
(0.6)
(9.4)
Scheduled Commercial Banks Indicators ( ` crore)

(As on 13 May 2016)
39100
657
201112
Outstanding
2016
Over Month
201516
9542990
851600
8691400
63880
392580
2713040
2711450
7253160
7142330
27 May
2016
26654
8266
3436
8157
167599
Over Year
(-3.3)
(-2.4)
(-1.7)
(-2.1)
(-0.9)
-3250
-64140
60900
8080
3060
-28100
-28280
-6530
-26730
(-0.0)
(-7.0)
(0.7)
(14.5)
(0.8)
(-1.0)
(-1.0)
(-0.1)
(-0.4)
Month
Ago
26064
8100
3371
7980
167273
855530
72750
782780
8800
32050
109420
109730
649240
649940
(9.8)
(9.3)
(9.9)
(16.0)
(8.9)
(4.2)
(4.2)
(9.8)
(10.0)
Year
Ago
27565
8468
3497
8335
169137
(12.3)
(14.1)
(17.5)
(13.9)
(10.0)
154180
-15180
169350
1720
-12550
111800
111970
67510
50380
81380 (4.9)
-72750 (-14.5)
-2380 (-15.4)
191670
191090
-189970
39330
0
34780
110090 (9.2)
109020 (34.0)
-1280 (-39.5)
(45.1)
(45.0)
(-62.4)
(1.7)
(0.0)
(3.6)
108120
107150
14070
244460
2000
150810
Variation
201617
(1.8)
(-1.9)
(2.2)
(3.2)
(-3.4)
(4.5)
(4.5)
(1.0)
(0.8)
215700
-37390
253100
6440
5140
87530
87510
3550
-2040
(18.3)
(18.1)
(32.4)
(15.7)
(13.0)
(21.8)
-334170
-336620
145020
324750
2090
-58040
(2.3)
(-4.2)
(3.0)
(11.2)
(1.3)
(3.3)
(3.3)
(0.0)
(-0.0)
201516
Trough
Peak
24674
7656
3193
7546
-
22952
7051
2938
6971
-
955110
51620
903480
5380
34080
206720
207540
733640
731610
(14.1)
(7.8)
(14.8)
(13.3)
(12.1)
(10.3)
(10.4)
(13.9)
(14.2)
827720
80110
747630
7490
56740
279000
278560
542310
546360
22386
6707
2681
6704
149745
(10.7)
(11.2)
(10.7)
(16.3)
(17.9)
(12.6)
(12.6)
(9.0)
(9.3)
End of Financial Year

201415
201314
29044
8980
3691
8834
-
(-47.8)
(-48.3)
(0.0)
(18.0)
(12.1)
(-6.9)
Financial Year
201415
201314

Trough
Peak
26654
8266
3436
8157
-
147240 (11.3)
35860 (8.3)
12630 (644.4)
(18.8)
(18.1)
(17.2)
(18.0)
(9.9)
27957
8607
3538
8491
168116
(24.9)
(28.3)
(31.9)
(26.7)
(12.3)
215150 (14.9)
36260 (7.8)
860 (5.9)
60470
63530
102030
256200
2480
168900
(16.6)
(17.6)
(0.0)
(12.0)
(12.8)
(21.5)
201516
794010
94960
699030
4080
14360
133690
134190
713200
702360
(9.3)
(12.0)
(9.0)
(7.6)
(3.8)
(5.4)
(5.4)
(10.9)
(10.9)
201516
25342
7835
3259
7738
166107
(-9.4)
(-9.0)
(-7.9)
(-8.9)
(-1.2)
* = Cumulative total since November 1992 until period end | Figures in brackets are percentage variations over the specified or over the comparable period of the previous year | (-) = not relevant | - = not available | NS = new series | PE = provisional estimates
Comprehensive current economic statistics with regular weekly updates are available at: http://www.epwrf.in/currentstat.aspx.
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Scavenging for the State

Anagha Ingole (recontreanagha@gmail.com) teaches in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Research and
Training Institute (BARTI), Department of Social Justice and Special Assistance, Government of
Maharashtra.
A study of sewage workers and toilet cleaners employed with the Pune Municipal Corporation
shows how solid waste management is narrowly focused on dry latrine cleaning. One needs to
urgently reform solid waste management system and improve the working conditions of people who
are employed in cleaning our cities.
The author would like to thank the Pune Municipal Corporation authorities for their cooperation
and the research team at BARTI for their assistance and valuable inputs. The author would also like
to thank the referees for their comments and suggestions which were helpful in revising the draft.
There are about 1.8 lakh households across India still engaged in manual scavenging, according to
the Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011. Maharashtra has the highest number of manual
scavengers at 63713.
The census defines manual scavenger as someone who cleans a dry latrine or carries human waste
to dispose it off. This definition, like much of the discourse on manual scavenging in India, is
centred upon dry latrine cleaning (Government of India 2014).
Even the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), one of the largest organisations campaigning against
manual scavenging in India, gives primacy to dry latrine prohibition followed by septic tank
cleaning. Though the SKA has made important interventions and argued for a broader definition of
manual scavenging in the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their
Rehabilitation Act 2013, it may not have worked in reality. Local body authorities, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and even the United Nations (UN) still associate manual
scavenging with dry latrines and open defecation.
This leaves out the mechanisms and practices of waste disposal and manual scavenging in civic
municipalities where dry latrines do not exist. Therefore it is important to investigate the condition
of sewage workers in urban municipalities in Indiaparticularly in Maharashtra. This piece
presents the findings of a survey conducted in 2015 for 1091 workers (sewage cleaners and toilet
cleaners) of the Pune Municipal Corporation.
The study[i] found that government agencies or contracts under government agencies are the
largest beneficiaries of manual scavenging. Though the case of the Pune Municipal Corporation
(PMC) was taken up for the study, the purpose was not to take one particular city corporation to
task, as these conditions prevail in most corporations.
The case study of PMC was taken to stress that if the third best functioning corporation in the
country (Press Trust of India 2011) cannot ensure eradication of manual scavengers and better
working conditions for sewage workers, then the situation in the rest of the country could be worse.
Working Conditions
The workers were asked about the process of cleaning waste. They were also asked whether they
came into direct contact with human excreta or not. Most of the sewage workers said that they
come into direct contact with human waste during the course of their work. Some of them said that
they have even cleaned manual waste with bare hands though most of the workers use basic
equipment like spade and baskets allotted for these tasks.
When we visited a choked sewage at Ashoknagar in the Yerwada slum area we saw how the
workers struggled for two hours to find the blockage. When they finally opened the blocked
sewage, they discovered that it was a large mass of human excreta, which had blocked the
sewerage line. The workers had to clean the waste with help of a rod, but not without using their
bare hands substantially. They said they were lucky that the waste had floated and accumulated at
the mouth of the sewage manhole, otherwise they would have to descend into the hole to remove it.
The workers were also asked which of the 44 mandatory protective equipments they were provided
and which ones they used. We realised that even when some safety measures such as soap or
gloves are given, very few actually use them. It was the poor quality of the equipment provided that
deterred most of the workers from using it.
For example, the soaps that were bought by the municipal corporation at an exorbitant price were
of extremely poor quality. The workers union had also staged an agitation protesting the purchase
of such substandard soaps. One worker said that he had hurt himself after a rod slipped from his
hand because the gloves provided by the corporation were too large and inflexible for the nature of
his work.
Lack of Training
In what is a categorical violation of the 2013 Act, most of the sewage workers have not received
any form of training regarding their work whatsoever. Even in case of the few respondents who
said they have received training, the training is informal. This is in clear contravention of the
Central Government Notification on Rules and Obligations to the 2013 Act[ii].
Some of the workers are exclusively engaged in cleaning of round chambers. This involves
cleaning of chambers that have a depth of anything between 6 ft to 14 ft. Most of the workers said
they have to enter sewers on a regular basis thus proving that the governments claims that these
processes have been mechanised are untrue. There are strict provisions in the act to not allow
persons to enter the sewer manually even with protective gear and safety devices.
The rules also specify that there should be a minimum of three employees present during sewage
cleaning, one of whom should be a supervisor. The workers said that they were occasionally
accompanied by a co-worker and a supervisor but most of the time had to perform the tasks
unsupervised.
There are also detailed rules about the procedure to be followed before opening the drainage
network. The rules are clear that the atmosphere within the confined space should be tested for
oxygen deficiency and toxic and combustible gases including but not limited to poisonous gases.
Not only are these rules not followed, but workers do not even know that such procedures are
required. The rules state that workers should test if the chamber is full of inflammable or harmful
gas by holding a lead acetate paper. In reality, most workers just hold a lighted matchstick at the
mouth of the sewer to confirm the presence of combustible gases.
Toilet Cleaners
Toilet cleaners were the next category of workers amongst whom the survey found the highest
incidence of manual scavenging. Apart from the 436 toilet cleaners working with the PMC on both
permanent and contractual basis, 69 workers from Sulabh Shauchalayas across Pune and 95
workers from Sassoon General Hospital and College of Nursing, Pune were also interviewed. The
workers from medical facilities were included because dealing with biomedical waste can be
relatively more dangerous and required specialised training, procedure and equipment.
The survey asked similar questions to toilet cleaners and inspected their conditions of work. It was
found that most of the toilet cleaners working with the PMC come in contact with manual waste. In
a few cases they used specialised equipment provided to them by the municipal corporation.
Figure 1: Category-wise distribution of sewage workers in PMC.

Role of Caste
The toilet cleaners suffer humiliation not just at their place of work but also where they stayed.
Rajesh Santu, 36-year-old man from the Valmiki caste lived in the Pashan Kothi area of Pune. He
had been working as a toiler cleaner for the last 10 years and has been made the caretaker for the
Sulabh Shouchalaya in his area. This meant that he had also received a house above the toilet
complex.
He receives no salary or equipment for cleaning and is supposed to collect money from the
residents of the slum. The slum dwellers think they are under no obligation to pay Rajesh as he has
been given a free house above the toilet. At times brawls among drunk men spill onto his house as
they fail to make a distinction between the toilet and Rajeshs house in an inebriated state. He
himself is an alcoholic and blames the work for his addiction. The family is treated as untouchables,
have no social life in the slum and verbal abuses are a regular affair.
People from the slum often defecate in front of his house. He thinks that could be because the
people are trying to teach him a lesson but its also true that the slum is over populated. Most of
the times water supply is erraticthe stench in the toilet as well as his house above it is
unbearable. The only thing that motivates him to work every day he says is the future of his
daughters.
Figure 2: Caste-wise distribution of sewage workers in PMC.

Involvement of Family
Most of the toilet cleaners and sewage workers employed with the municipal corporation were from
the scheduled castes, predominantly Valmikis, Mehtars and Bhangis. This also led the government
to employ people only from these castes for manual scavenging. The ones who had received jobs
under the open (general) category were largely from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Most of workers who were surveyed said that there were from a family that was traditionally
involved in manual scavenging. This is almost institutonalised as a system called varsa hakka or
hereditary right system which the class IV workers can avail. Under this system an employee can
get his or her offspring/close relative appointed in their own place in case of retirement or injury.
Though there is a provision that if the dependant is educated he or she may be appointed to higher
posts such as mukkadam, peon, and clerk etc, in reality most children of these workers take up the
profession of their parents.
Figure 3: Caste-wise distribution of toilet cleaners in PMC.

Way Forward
It is clear that manual scavenging is an everyday reality of civic municipalities. The problem of sole
insistence on the abolition of dry latrines and open defecation however is a mere symptom of a
larger malaise. If these derogatory practices are to be abolished only to be replaced by equally
dehumanising and, at the same time, legalised systems of manual scavenging then the cause is
already lost.
The larger goal should be to identify and accept loopholes in the states approach towards the
management of solid waste produced in cities from its very inception. This state of permanent
exception is the accepted norm necessary for our normal civic life to run by making permissible
manual scavenging under the agencies of the state. No amount of new toilets we manage to build
can create a Swaccha Bharat unless the state agencies themselves reform the way they imagine the
sphere of human solid waste management and the work remains relegated to certain caste groups
that continue to remain pools from which manual scavengers are drawn generations after
generations.
The first step in the direction is identifying manual scavenging even outside the sites where dry
latrines exist. This means a strict adherence to the definition of the 2013 Act, scrutiny mechanisms
for the way municipalities work, arresting contractualisation, rehabilitation and special assistance
to children of these workers. In the long run the talk about smart cities must imply smart not only
in terms of concrete sky scrapings above the ground but also smarter and humane systems below
it; through which our waste runs.
Notes
[i] The survey for 491 sewage cleaners and 600 toilet cleaners was conducted from 25 May 2015 to
23 June 2015 in all 14 wards of the Pune Municipal Corporation by a team of 20 trained
investigators under the supervision of 5 research officers of the institute. The survey was
conducted across 161 kothis (primary work units of PMC) and personal interviews were conducted
for all 1091 workers.
[ii] The Central Government Notification on Rules and Obligations to the 2013 Act, ChapterII
Obligations of Employer towards Employees engaged in the cleaning of Sewer or Septic tank
dated 12th December, 2013 says All employees who are present on-site during cleaning work are
given training and adequately familiarised with the knowledge to operate all equipment involved in
cleaning work, to avoid injuries or diseases associated with such work and to take necessary steps
in case of emergency arising at the place of work and the training shall be conducted every two
years and the employees shall be familiarised with any changes in method and technique with
respect to the above.
References
[All URLs accessed on 30 May 2016]
Government of India (2014): Guidelines for Swachh Bharat Mission, December, New Delhi: Ministry
of Urban Development, Government of India,
http://swachhbharaturban.gov.in/writereaddata/SBM_Guideline.pdf.
Press Trust of India (2011): PMC Ranked Third Best Corporation in India, Business Standard, 9
July,
http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/pmc-ranked-third-best-corporation-in-indi
a-111070900054_1.html.
Tags:
Waste
Waste Disposal
Pune
Pune Municipal Corporation
Manual Scavenger
Manual Scavenging
Solid Waste Management
Solid Waste
Caste

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Down, But Not Out

Marxism: Managerial Politics?

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