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EDITORIAL
Vol: 2, Issue: 65
“So the people will
pay the penalty for
their kings’ presumption,
who, by devising
evil, turn justice from
her path with
tortuous speech.”
—Hesiod
(active between 750 and
650 BCE)
People’s leader
Both Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have faced historic
assembly elections in 2011, ushering in new governments
led by J. Jayalalithaa of the All-India Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam and Mamata Banerjee of the All-India
Trinamul Congress respectively. Yet, the manner in which
the two chief ministers have functioned over the first 100
days could not have been more different. It merits mentioning
that both Ms Jayalalithaa and Ms Banerjee had practically
sank into oblivion after the 2006 assembly elections,
but both the doughty ladies bounced back phoenix-like to
demolish their opponents this year. However, Ms
Jayalalithaa’s victory has not sated her vendetta against the
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). She has declared war
on land grabbing by influential people. This has resulted in
scores of arrests, including those of several former ministers
of the DMK regime. Several schemes and projects of the
DMK period have been either reversed or replaced. The
scheme of distributing free television sets has been
dropped, a new state secretariat-cum-assembly complex,
built by the DMK, is to be converted into a hospital and a
grassroots heath scheme has been redone. In contrast, Ms
Banerjee has, commendably, turned
swords to ploughshares. She has strictly
prohibited a politics of revenge and has
chosen to involve the opposition parties in
the process of rebuilding the state. It is not
as if Ms Jayalalithaa has shown no interest
in governance; nor is it that the DMK does
not merit a measure of punishment for its
colossal corruption. But, then, the same
can doubtless be said about most political parties in India.
One is inclined to aver that Ms Banerjee’s eschewal of political
vendetta and her single-minded focus on governance is
more beneficial than Ms Jayalalithaa’s truculent modus
operandi.
In pursuing her pro-people goal, it may be mentioned
here, Ms Banerjee has added yet another feather in her cap.
The soaring prices of vegetables have recently deepened the
woes of the common people. Ms Banerjee therefore decided
to personally visit markets at Gariahat and Sealdah and also
the Koley wholesale market for vegetables. There she found
a considerable gap between the wholesale and retail prices
of vegetables like aubergine, ridge gourd, okra and tomato.
It is true that heavy rainfall has damaged vegetables grown
in some areas. But that cannot entirely explain the great difference
of price at the two ends of the farm-to-fork supply
chain. In view of this, Ms Banerjee suspects that a group of
middlemen are responsible for jacking up prices. To remedy
this, the chief minister has constituted a task force to monitor
the prices in vegetable markets. This is truly a pro-people
gesture that the common buyer would appreciate.
Row over death
No civilised nation should defend capital punishment.
However, the case of Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan,
the three convicts on death row for helping to assassinate
former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, is different because it
shows how sadly clunky executive and judicial procedure
can be in this country. The three were convicted by the
Supreme Court in 1999 and the Madras high court has now
granted them an eight-week stay of execution. The three
sought a presidential pardon after being sentenced. It is a sad
commentary that it took Rashtrapati Bhavan close to 12
years to decide to confirm the death sentence and deny
clemency. Since so much time has elapsed, the counsel for
the convicts have pleaded that their clients had undergone
deep “mental agony”, which they indeed may have, and
should be spared death. Their plea is that the death sentence
be commuted to life imprisonment. If this is granted, one
could be quite certain that the three will then seek discharge
from prison on the grounds that they have already been in
prison for 20 years since being committed, following the dastardly
crime.
Capital punishment is an unfortunate reality in India. Till
the day capital punishment is banned, parliament should at
least ensure that legal procedure relating to
such momentous verdicts is made expeditious.
It should lay down that the president
must take a view on clemency pleas within
a stipulated time so that there is no scope
for absurdities to be entertained, as we are
now witnessing in Tamil Nadu. Twelve
years is long by any stretch of the imagination.
In effect, the delay has been that of the
Union home ministry, which has to advise Rashtrapati
Bhavan on such matters. We do not know if Rashtrapati
Bhavan made enquiries with the home ministry in this matter
and in respect of other long-pending cases. The president
cannot in such matters remain a passive recipient of advice.
It is a great pity that political elements in Tamil Nadu have
summoned parochial and communal grounds to intervene in
this discussion. It is this that has given rise to the political
sentiment that parties like the DMK and MDMK are seeking
to irresponsibly spread. By implication, such elements are
suggesting that the Tamil people were being sought to be
penalised for the crime of killing a former Prime Minister.
The passage of the resolution in the state assembly urging
commuting of the Supreme Court verdict unfortunately
invokes the same imagery. Under our law, individuals are
charged with a crime, not their communities. If the matter is
not allowed to rest on this premise, we will be opening an
ugly can of worms.
Back in Time
Ms
Banerjee’s
politics has
consistently
been propeople
Individuals
are charged
with a
crime, not
their communities
On September 2, 1946, the
Interim Government of India
is formed from the newlyelected
Constituent Assembly
of India for the task of assisting
the transition of India
from British rule to independence.
With Jawaharlal Nehru
as Vice President, it remains
in place until August 15, 1947.
Kolkata Friday September 2, 2011
www.thebengalpost.com
Time to give the gatekeeper the boot
George Monbiot
Who are the most ruthless capitalists
in the western world?
Whose monopolistic practices
make Walmart look like a corner
shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist?
You won’t guess the answer in
a month of Sundays. While there
are plenty of candidates, my vote
goes not to the banks, the oil companies
or the health insurers, but —
wait for it — to academic publishers.
Theirs might sound like a fusty
and insignificant sector. It is anything
but. Of all corporate scams,
the racket they run is most urgently
in need of referral to the competition
authorities.
Everyone claims to agree that
people should be encouraged to
understand science and other academic
research. Without current
knowledge, we cannot make coherent
democratic decisions. But the
publishers have slapped a padlock
and a ‘keep out’ sign on the gates.
You might resent Murdoch’s paywall
policy, in which he charges £1
for 24 hours of access to the Times
and Sunday Times. But at least in
that period you can read and
download as many articles as you
like. Reading a single article published
by one of Elsevier’s journals
will cost you $31.50. Springer
charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell,
$42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times.
And the journals retain perpetual
copyright. You want to read a letter
printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.
Of course, you could go into the
library (if it still exists). But they too
have been hit by cosmic fees. The
average cost of an annual subscription
to a chemistry journal is
$3,792. Some journals cost $10,000
a year or more to stock. The most
expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is
$20,930. Though academic libraries
have been frantically cutting subscriptions
to make ends meet, journals
now consume 65 per cent of
their budgets, which means they
have had to reduce the number of
books they buy. Journal fees
account for a significant component
of universities’ costs, which
are being passed to their students.
Murdoch pays his journalists and
editors, and his companies generate
much of the content they use.
Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for
by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers.
But the academic publishers get
their articles, their peer reviewing
(vetting by other researchers) and
even much of their editing for free.
The material they publish was
commissioned and funded not by
them but by us, through government
research grants and academic
stipends. But to see it, we must pay
again, and through the nose.
The returns are astronomical: in
the past financial year, for example,
Elsevier’s operating profit margin
was 36 per cent (£724 million on
revenues of £2 billion). They result
from a stranglehold on the market.
Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who
have bought up many of their competitors,
now publish 42 per cent of
journal articles.
More importantly, universities
are locked into buying their products.
Academic papers are published
in only one place, and they
have to be read by researchers trying
to keep up with their subject.
Demand is inelastic and competition
non-existent, because differ-
Afterthought
ent journals can’t publish the same
material. In many cases the publishers
oblige the libraries to buy a
large package of journals, whether
or not they want them all. Perhaps
it’s not surprising that one of the
biggest crooks ever to have preyed
upon the people of this country —
Robert Maxwell — made much of
his money through academic publishing.
The publishers claim that they
have to charge these fees as a result
of the costs of production and distribution,
and that they add value
(in Springer’s words) because they
“develop journal brands and maintain
and improve the digital infrastructure
which has revolutionised
scientific communication in the
past 15 years”. But an analysis by
Deutsche Bank reaches different
conclusions. “We believe the publisher
adds relatively little value to
the publishing process … if the
process really were as complex,
costly and value-added as the publishers
protest that it is, 40 per cent
margins wouldn’t be available.” Far
from assisting the dissemination of
research, the big publishers impede
it, as their long turnaround times
can delay the release of findings by
a year or more.
What we see here is pure rentier
capitalism: monopolising a public
resource then charging exorbitant
fees to use it. Another term for it is
economic parasitism. To obtain the
knowledge for which we have
already paid, we must surrender
our feu to the lairds of learning.
It’s bad enough for academics, it’s
worse for the laity. I refer readers to
peer-reviewed papers, on the principle
that claims should be followed
to their sources. The readers tell me
that they can’t afford to judge for
themselves whether or not I have
represented the research fairly.
Independent researchers who try to
inform themselves about important
scientific issues have to fork out
thousands. This is a tax on education,
a stifling of the public mind. It
appears to contravene the universal
Kurds must find a peaceful solution
Kaya Genç
The latest escalation of violence
in Turkey is indicative of a new
atmosphere of political unrest in
the country. In the last month
alone, 40 soldiers of the Turkish
military forces have been killed by
the Kurdistan Workers’ party
(PKK) militants. The response to
the attacks came in the form of air
raids in northern Iraq. Targets in
the Qandil mountains, Sinath-
Haftanin, Hakurk and Gara were
demolished by the three-day military
operation last week.
According to the military forces
the operation was a success, with
“the destruction of up to 100
members of the PKK”. That is
almost double the number of
fatalities in Afghanistan in the
same period of time.
The political sphere in Turkey
seems to have been gravely
wounded this summer. And we
should urgently rediscover ways
in which we can dismantle this
atmosphere of war.
Over the course of the last
decade, the ruling AK party has
tried hard to change the official
line on the Kurdish population.
Unable to claim their linguistic
and cultural rights, Kurds were for
a long time refused their proper
and ethnic names: the official etymology
of the word ‘Kurd’, for
example, used to be that it merely
came from the sound made by
boots on snow (‘Kart-Kurd’). At
other times they were claimed to
be the Turks of mountains, speaking
in a strange, undecipherable
dialect. Little acknowledgement
was made of the fact that Turkey’s
Kurds, who make up one fifth of
the national population, have a
distinct sense of their own cultural,
religious and political identity,
and that they have clashed
with the policies of both the
Ottoman empire and the modern
Turkish nation state.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government
led the initiative to reform
the debate over Kurdish identity.
Following his “Kurdish opening”
project, more and more politicians
now talk openly about Turkey’s
Kurds and their suppressed political
rights. Erdogan’s government
criticised Turkey’s age-old politics
of nationalism and pointed to the
failures of the modernising ideals
behind the nation state. Instead of
nationalism we were offered a
discourse of Islamic tolerance and
Kurds were invited to be pious citizens
of the country that pledged
never again to discriminate
against them.
However, Kurdish politicians in
the Democratic Society party
believed that the discrimination
was far from being over: it just
took a different shape. Following
last June’s elections the independent
Kurdish candidate Hatip Dicle
was elected to parliament but was
refused entry to Ankara because
of a previous terror conviction.
This resulted in a stalemate in
Turkish politics — Kurdish politicians
decided to protest against
parliament. The conflict was further
intensified by threats from
the PKK’s radical branch, the
Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK),
to attack tourist locations and
destroy as many Turkish soldiers
and civilians as possible.
In this fragile state of affairs,
Erdogan seems to be repeating the
mistakes of his predecessors. He
believes that the Turkish state
apparatus is no longer an unjust
and oppressive organisation, and
that it will behave benevolently
Parliament is the
channel through
which rights for Kurds
can be secured and
this era of political
violence in Turkey
can end
and altruistically to all those who
observes its rules. Turkey’s
Kurdish population are not convinced.
Erdogan needs to understand
how his offerings of a tolerant
but religiously ordered society
might be unattractive to Kurdish
people.
Turkey’s Kurdish politicians,
meanwhile, are not doing any better
at improving the situation. Last
weekend’s bombing of a tourist
beach in Antalya attests to the
desperate state of Kurdish militants
and Kurdish politicians took
pains not to condemn the use of
political violence when it comes
from the Kurdish militants. Antimilitarists
and socialists who
sided with the Democratic Society
party are now irritated by their
essentially religious and at times
militarist discourse of martyrdom.
Kurdish politicians don’t sound
terribly secular when they talk
about glorious operations of liberation
(that is, suicide attacks)
against the military that laid the
foundations of the PKK movement.
We should demand they go
back to the parliament to fulfil
their much-needed function of
struggling for more political rights
for the Kurds. This autumn will
see the drafting of a new constitution:
placing bombs under tourist
beaches won’t help Kurdish rights
in the future. Both state and terrorist
violence should be opposed
by an anti-militarist movement
calling for mutual dismantling of
arms.
It is an appalling sight when
politicians settle their disagreements
at the expense of the lives
of young soldiers. If Erdogan and
his Kurdish counterparts want to
leave a positive legacy, they need
to put an end to this terrifying era
of political violence. And the only
means of achieving this will be by
debating in the parliament buildings
of Ankara, and not with
adventures in the Quandil mountains.
—The Guardian
declaration of human rights, which
says that “everyone has the right
freely to … share in scientific
advancement and its benefits”.
Open-access publishing, despite
its promise, and some excellent
resources such as the Public Library
of Science and the physics database
arxiv.org, has failed to displace the
monopolists. In 1998 the
Economist, surveying the opportunities
offered by electronic publishing,
predicted that “the days of 40
per cent profit margins may soon be
as dead as Robert Maxwell”. But in
2010 Elsevier’s operating profit
margins were the same (36 per
cent) as they were in 1998.
The reason is that the big publishers
have rounded up the journals
with the highest academic impact
factors, in which publication is
essential for researchers trying to
secure grants and advance their
careers. You can start reading openaccess
journals, but you can’t stop
reading the closed ones.
Government bodies, with a few
exceptions, have failed to confront
them. The National Institutes of
Health in the US oblige anyone taking
their grants to put their papers
in an open-access archive. But
Research Councils UK, whose statement
on public access is a masterpiece
of meaningless waffle, relies
on “the assumption that publishers
will maintain the spirit of their current
policies”. You bet they will.
In the short term, governments
should refer the academic publishers
to their competition watchdogs,
and insist that all papers arising
from publicly funded research are
placed in a free public database. In
the longer term, they should work
with researchers to cut out the middleman
altogether, creating — along
the lines proposed by Björn Brembs
of Berlin’s Freie Universität — a single
global archive of academic literature
and data. Peer-review would
be overseen by an independent
body. It could be funded by the
library budgets which are currently
being diverted into the hands of privateers.
The knowledge monopoly is as
unwarranted and anachronistic as
the corn laws. Let’s throw off these
parasitic overlords and liberate the
research that belongs to us.
—The Guardian
World Window
As the killings mount in Syria, the US
and its allies are not the only ones
declaring their revulsion. A number of
President Bashar al-Assad’s longtime
apologists have decided that they can
no longer stand mute. Over the weekend,
the Arab League finally urged Syria
to “end the spilling of blood and follow
the way of reason before it is too late.”
Foreign ministers agreed to send the
group’s secretary general, Nabil el-
Araby, to Damascus with proposals to
end the conflict. According to Al Jazeera,
those include holding presidential elections,
withdrawing the army from
cities, releasing political prisoners and
forming a national unity government.
Set aside the obvious fact that Arab
League members are not strong on
democracy. They are right to worry that
Mr. Assad’s murderous behaviour could
destabilize the region by fomenting allout
civil war between Syria’s ruling
minority Alawites, a Shiite subgroup,
and the majority Sunnis. Even Iran, in
the height of hypocrisy, is urging
Damascus to be more ‘patient’ with its
people — a sign that it, too, is worried
about the instability spreading.
The Arab League can certainly give it
a try, but Mr. Assad has promised
reforms before and kept on killing. On
Tuesday, his forces killed at least seven
people as protesters left mosques after
prayers at the end of Ramadan. The
Arab League needs to impose tough
sanctions, now.
Turkey is also speaking out — but not
as clearly or forcefully as it should. On
Sunday, President Abdullah Gul said he
had “lost confidence” in the Syrian government,
but Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan was still giving Mr.
Assad a lifeline by exhorting him to “listen
to people’s demands.” The Obama
administration has frozen all Syrian
government assets here and banned
American citizens and corporations
from doing any business with
Damascus. But Washington has limited
leverage. The European Union, a major
importer of Syrian oil, could have a far
greater impact. The Europeans ann -
ounced last week that they would
impose new sanctions, but members
are still squabbling over details. An oil
embargo is essential, but sanctions
should also be imposed on Syrian
banks and energy and telecommunications
companies.
And Mr. Assad still has a few, far
too powerful, protectors. Russia and
China, along with India, Brazil and
South Africa, are blocking a United
Nations Security Council resolution
that could impose broad international
sanctions on Damascus. Their complicity
is shameful.