South Asia Citizens Web

I refer to your highly reassuring article in The Hindu today on the safety of nuclear power. I understand that you even went to the extent of assuring the people of Kudankulam that nuclear power is “100% safe”. Though my knowledge of statistics is rather rudimentary, I wonder how one can make such a resounding assertion, especially when anyone with some semblance of familiarity with the technology would hesitate to assert like that!

. . . economic growth is not constitutively the same thing as development, in the sense of a general improvement in living standards and enhancement of people’s well-being and freedom. Growth, of course, can be very helpful in achieving development, but this requires active public policies to ensure that the fruits of economic growth are widely shared, and also requires—and this is very important—making good use of the public revenue generated by fast economic growth for social services, especially for public healthcare and public education.

The censors of Delhi University obviously have no stomach for an epic whose main characters suffer from human frailties, characters who face tough moral choices and who, like ordinary mortals, sometimes choose expediency over principle and virtue. [. . .] The moral of the censorship story is this: you play safe when you teach your students a monochromatic, sanitised, morally smug and politically correct version of the great epic. In the bargain, you shrivel their imagination, imprison it in the narrow confines of parochialism and plant in their minds the seeds of bigotry. You tutor them to mock at modernity.

. . . The crisis of revolutionary doctrine has one root in the history of leninism with its programmatic presumptions of absolute truth; and its dubious concept of the Outside. The ossification of critical thought in the Indian Left is partly the product of the resonance between brahmanical and leninist epistemology, both of which presume a social division between those who possess knowledge (seen as an entitlement to power), and those who work. An absolutist starting point also generates the approach of using theory as a means of sectarian demarcation, rather than understanding and changing social reality. The purveyors of this outlook may be named the “aristocracy of the intellect”. The view that a certain caste or a group of theoreticians are naturally qualified to produce the truth for society is at heart antithetical to “the democracy of the intellect”, which alone can develop the resources for social transformation.

In the general reckoning of the country’s politicians, Kashmir is an inalienable part of India, no further questions are to be entertained. This assertion has a coating of opportunism, for the same politicians are wondrously absentminded over the unearthing of more than two thousand unmarked graves across the valley: it is as if it was too small a matter to detain them. These graves, overwhelming sections of Kashmiris are convinced, are of young men killed by Indian armed forces in fake encounters. The army is in Jammu and Kashmir because of the dispensation of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. The statute allows the armed forces a free rein over the lives and limbs of residents of the area where it is enforced.