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NOIDA/DELHI<br />
THE HINDU WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2015<br />
COMMENT<br />
11<br />
WORLD VIEW<br />
A portrait of modern<br />
inequality<br />
The National Gallery’s colonnaded splendour radiates across Trafalgar<br />
Square a sense of the importance of art in Britain’s national life. But<br />
the reality inside is far less glorious. The 400 gallery assistants are about<br />
to be outsourced to a private company against their will, to squeeze pay<br />
and conditions. A ballot by their union, PCS, closes this week, calling for a<br />
five-day strike in protest.<br />
All day they guard the nation’s treasures: not automata, but wellinformed,<br />
if untrained, guides who like to be asked questions, know<br />
where paintings are, are glad to advise nervous visitors unsure what to<br />
look at. Some have worked there for 40 years, some are younger, many<br />
former art students.<br />
A letter to staff from the director, Nicholas<br />
Penny, says all gallery services go out to tender<br />
in April, something no other national gallery or<br />
museum has done. As Tupe — Transfer of<br />
Undertakings (Protection of Employment) —<br />
regulations require, staff will transfer to a<br />
private company on the same terms, but that’s<br />
weak protection: they can be sent to work<br />
anywhere in that company.<br />
This is the only national museum in London<br />
not paying the living wage. A tangle of pay rates<br />
means that older staff (predominantly male) are<br />
paid more than newer (predominantly female).<br />
POLLY TOYNBEE The gallery’s grant is being cut, so it needs to<br />
make more money with extra paid evening<br />
events. Staff are willing — but expect extra pay.<br />
The only national<br />
Management says negotiations went nowhere,<br />
museum in London so they have to go nuclear: let a private company<br />
is not paying the<br />
get tough with them. That’s how private<br />
companies profit from these contracts: as old<br />
living wage<br />
staff leave, new staff can be hired at any pay<br />
rate.<br />
What happens in hard times is always the same: spreadsheets show the<br />
most crushable item is staff. Numbers are cut and squeezed hard for<br />
longer hours. It’s easier to let ruthless companies to do the dirty work, so<br />
squeamish managers can wash their hands of consequences. Both sides<br />
will now go to Acas: there is still time to pull back from this privatisation<br />
too far.<br />
The public servant<br />
This shedding of long-term employees is emblematic of low-pay<br />
Britain, where a million public jobs are being lost. Public servants are<br />
more unionised than other workforces, and so irksome to managers who<br />
eye a commercial world of 19th century employment practices — lump<br />
labour on zero hours, temp agencies, free interns, the bogus selfemployed<br />
free of national insurance. The public servants’ ethos, their<br />
attachment to the civic realm, has been systematically trashed as mere<br />
unionised self-interest.<br />
What’s afoot at the gallery explains why pay is falling as a share of GDP.<br />
Galloping inequality is the result of a million such decisions employers<br />
think prudent, mainly because everyone is doing it. The derelict Low Pay<br />
Commission has let the minimum wage itself fall £1,000 in real value<br />
since 2008. The Tory call last week for higher wages was breathtaking<br />
dishonesty, echoing the TUC’s “Britain Needs a Pay Rise” campaign. The<br />
government has huge sway over pay. If it demanded the living wage not<br />
just for its employees, but also from every contractor and supplier, then<br />
national pay norms would rise instantly. If the Low Pay Commission set<br />
higher minimums appropriate to each sector, like the old wages councils,<br />
larger companies could pay decent salaries according to profitability.<br />
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest report finds 40 per cent of<br />
families with children living below a minimum threshold of decency.<br />
Most are in work — but earning too little to buy what a majority of the<br />
public in focus groups consider essentials for participation in society: no<br />
drink or cigarettes, £5 a fortnight for eating out, £40 for Christmas food,<br />
one week’s U.K. holiday.<br />
That takes an income of £20,400 a year for a couple with two children<br />
— which is almost £3,000 more than National Gallery assistants earn.<br />
GDP growth is near invisible to the eight million squeezed hardest, by<br />
this government’s deliberate choice: average income loss since 2010 is<br />
£33 a week. Now the government promises full employment — but what<br />
kind? Most new jobs are low paid, precarious and part time. For all<br />
George Osborne’s hi-vis posturing about his sham “northern<br />
powerhouse”, the latest figures from the Centre for Cities show how far<br />
the gap between the south and the rest has widened.<br />
At Davos this week, central bankers will echo the fashionable view that<br />
accelerating inequality is the real economic risk, a danger to capitalism<br />
itself. Oxfam tells them one per cent of the population will next year own<br />
99 per cent of the world’s wealth: in Britain, the top one per cent has<br />
soared away, and the bottom 10 per cent has done worst while paying the<br />
highest proportion of its income in taxes: 47 per cent. But no sign yet that<br />
the Davos set is worrying unduly: by Epiphany — January 6 — FTSE 100<br />
chief executives had already earned more than a year of the average wage.<br />
How do you wrest back wealth from them? Restoring power to unions<br />
would help, ensuring every workplace is offered union membership.<br />
Instead, Mr. Cameron’s manifesto will make strikes near-impossible,<br />
with a 40 per cent ballot threshold unknown anywhere in the democratic<br />
west. That’s a reason to hope the ever-patient attendants at the National<br />
Gallery resist being cast out to G4S, Serco and the rest — and remain as<br />
treasured employees of us all. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited,<br />
2015<br />
Mexico’s drone plan for<br />
porpoise conservation<br />
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS<br />
>>Errors in front page graphic: “Left out in the cold” (Jan. 20, 2015) said<br />
L.K. Advani – Deputy Prime Minister from 1999 to 2004 – (it should have been<br />
2002 to 2004) and A.B. Vajpayee – Prime Minister from 1999 to 2004 – (it<br />
should have been 1998 to 2004).<br />
>>The opening paragraph of the Comment page article, “Memories of<br />
Jawaharlal Nehru” (Jan. 20, 2015), talked about Dr. Khan Sahib (Khan Abdul<br />
Jaffar Khan). It is Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan.<br />
>>“Can Barack Obama break the nuclear logjam?” (Jan. 20, 2015) – in the<br />
second and penultimate paragraphs – erroneously referred to Mr. Obama’s<br />
visit to India in 2008. It should have been 2010.<br />
CM<br />
YK<br />
Mexico is planning to use drones<br />
to patrol the upper Sea of Cortez<br />
to combat illegal fishing and save<br />
the critically endangered vaquita marina,<br />
the world’s smallest porpoise.<br />
Assistant environmental prosecutor<br />
Alejandro del Mazo said his agency<br />
has conducted tests of unmanned<br />
aircraft flights in cooperation with<br />
the Mexican Navy. Mr. Del Mazo says<br />
he hopes to have three drones patrolling<br />
the vaquita’s habitat in coming<br />
months. Also known as the Gulf of<br />
California, it is the only place vaquitas<br />
are found.Fewer than 100 of the<br />
shy, elusive porpoises remain.<br />
The vaquita is threatened by illegal<br />
gillnet fishing for totoaba, a large fish<br />
whose swim bladder is prized by<br />
chefs in China. Authorities are proposing<br />
a $37 million plan to ban gillnets<br />
in the upper Gulf. — AP<br />
It is the policy of The Hindu to correct significant errors as soon as possible.<br />
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For prudent crisis planning on terror<br />
Barack Obama and Narendra Modi should reaffirm their commitment to better cooperation<br />
on counter-terrorism and intelligence<br />
Bruce Riedel<br />
U.S. President Barack Obama’s<br />
visit to India, an unprecedented<br />
second trip in one Presidency,<br />
comes as the terrorist<br />
threat environment in the subcontinent is<br />
in transition and turmoil. Multiple massacres<br />
in Pakistan and the transition in<br />
Afghanistan are challenging the counter<br />
terrorist infrastructures built over the last<br />
couple of decades. It is a fluid situation<br />
that Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Narendra<br />
Modi need to compare notes on<br />
and develop strategies.<br />
Sponsor and victim<br />
Pakistan has long been both a sponsor<br />
of terrorism and a victim of terrorism but<br />
the balance seems to be shifting toward<br />
victimhood. Pakistan still sponsors the<br />
most dangerous terror group in South<br />
Asia, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which last May<br />
tried to disrupt Mr. Modi’s inauguration<br />
by attacking the Indian consulate in Herat,<br />
Afghanistan, just hours before his<br />
swearing-in ceremony. The Pakistani intelligence<br />
service, the Inter Services Intelligence<br />
(ISI) Directorate, continues to<br />
provide support to LeT and its leader Hafiz<br />
Mohammad Saeed lives freely in Lahore,<br />
Pakistan, with the ISI’s protection.<br />
The ISI also remains the primary patron<br />
of the Afghan Taliban in its war with the<br />
North Atlantic Treaty Organization<br />
(NATO).<br />
But Pakistan has been shaken profoundly<br />
by a series of mass casualty terror<br />
attacks on its own citizens. On November<br />
2, 2014, a suicide bomber killed sixty Pakistanis<br />
at the Wagah border crossing<br />
with India close to the border ceremony<br />
site. The Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility<br />
and said it was retaliation for<br />
the army’s Zarb-e-Azb counter terrorist<br />
operation.<br />
On December 16, 2014, seven members<br />
of the Pakistan Taliban attacked an armyrun<br />
school in Peshawar and killed 145<br />
people including 132 schoolchildren. The<br />
attack prompted an unprecedented public<br />
outcry for the government and army to<br />
take concerted action to defeat the Taliban<br />
and to stop all terror attacks in the<br />
country. Not since the assassination of<br />
Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 has<br />
there been so much public outcry against<br />
terrorism. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif<br />
and Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General<br />
Raheel Sharif promised collective action<br />
to destroy the Taliban and the army said it<br />
would no longer differentiate good Taliban<br />
from bad Taliban.<br />
Even al-Qaeda’s new franchise in the<br />
Indian subcontinent distanced itself from<br />
the school massacre, saying “our hearts<br />
are bursting with pain,” and urging its<br />
Shiv Visvanathan<br />
How does one talk of a man who<br />
defined a subject, determined its<br />
directions, was its dominating presence<br />
without a shade of pomposity or status.<br />
Rajni Kothari was clear about some of<br />
the subjects of his studies, irreverently<br />
and pragmatically certain that the Indian<br />
elite was knowledge-proof, that the<br />
only changes it would accept were pressures<br />
from below or by mimicking its<br />
colonial masters. Here was a man far<br />
ahead of his times, a futurist in<br />
perspective.<br />
Today the tributes will flow and embalm<br />
the man. Dissenting imaginations<br />
are best sanitised lest they destroy the<br />
hypocrisy and the current clichés of the<br />
establishment. The obituaries will recite<br />
how he started election studies,<br />
how he set up the institute of Chinese<br />
Studies, founded journals like the Alternatives<br />
and the Lokayan Bulletin.<br />
They will dub him the author of Indian<br />
Political Science’s only durable classic<br />
— Politics in India. Oddly, Kothari was<br />
embarrassed by the longevity of the<br />
book and even tried to stall further publications<br />
but the book like many of Rajni’s<br />
inventions had a wonderful life of<br />
its own.<br />
To me it was not just the inventiveness<br />
of the man that is important. It was<br />
the vision he brought to his work. Rajni’s<br />
enduring passion was his commitment<br />
to democracy, its sustainability,<br />
its creativity and its vulnerability. The<br />
sense of democracy was not an abstract<br />
one of formal definitions. He saw democracy<br />
as a way of life and wanted<br />
people to live it out and celebrate its<br />
everydayness.<br />
As founder of CSDS<br />
This is what impelled him to create<br />
that wonderful institution the Centre<br />
for the Study of Developing Societies<br />
(CSDS). CSDS was a community, a perpetual<br />
adda built around the gossip of<br />
democracy. Without this passion for democracy<br />
his many projects would have<br />
made little sense. They were mere pretexts<br />
for sustaining the texts of democracy<br />
which in a holistic sense went<br />
beyond elections, data analysis, governance<br />
and grassroots studies.<br />
Two things must be stated clearly,<br />
CSDS was a collage of friendships and<br />
Rajni invented many of his ideas along<br />
with his friends. He had an acute sense<br />
of the inventive and followed it up creatively.<br />
In that sense the idea often originally<br />
belonged to the others. Rajni’s<br />
idea of the Congress as a coalition of<br />
competing confusions was Gopal Krishna’s.<br />
The idea of Lokayan as a grass<br />
INTERNAL DYNAMICS: Pakistan has witnessed a series of mass casualty<br />
terror attacks on its own citizens, one being the November 2014<br />
suicide bomber attack near the Wagah border crossing. Picture shows<br />
the Indian side of the Wagah border crossing. — PHOTO: AFP<br />
Taliban allies to target soldiers in the future.<br />
Hafiz Saeed took the tack of blaming<br />
India for the attack, claiming it was a conspiracy<br />
orchestrated by Modi and vowing<br />
revenge on India. Former dictator Pervez<br />
Musharraf also blamed India and Afghanistan<br />
for supporting the Pakistan Taliban.<br />
It remains to be seen whether the Peshawar<br />
massacre and other atrocities will<br />
actually change the army’s behaviour toward<br />
terrorism. It is more likely than not<br />
that the ISI and COAS will remain patrons<br />
of some terror groups for the foreseeable<br />
future even as they fight others. The civilian<br />
politicians may be more determined to<br />
end Pakistan’s double policy but they have<br />
consistently failed to do so in the last<br />
decade.<br />
The ISI is particularly determined to<br />
see if its Afghan proxies, the Quetta Shura<br />
and the Haqqani network, can exploit the<br />
end of NATO’s combat presence in Afghanistan<br />
to gain control of significant<br />
parts of the country. Mullah Omar, the<br />
Taliban leader based in Karachi, has<br />
shown no interest in a political settlement<br />
and seems determined to try to resurrect<br />
his Islamic Emirate.<br />
New players<br />
Two new players in the terror game<br />
emerged in 2014. First is the al-Qaeda<br />
Another LeT attack on India is<br />
probably only a matter of<br />
time. Washington and New<br />
Delhi should have some idea of<br />
what the potential<br />
consequences of such an<br />
attack might be<br />
franchise for the Indian subcontinent. Al-<br />
Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri announced<br />
its formation which was immediately<br />
followed by an attempt to hijack a<br />
Pakistani frigate with the intention of using<br />
it to attack U.S. Navy ships in the<br />
Arabian Sea. The plot included an unknown<br />
number of Pakistani naval officers<br />
recruited to help al-Qaeda. Zawahiri remains<br />
hidden somewhere in Pakistan and<br />
continues to give lengthy audio messages<br />
to his followers. Al-Qaeda’s franchise in<br />
Yemen claims Zawahiri ordered the attack<br />
on the office of Charlie Hebdo this<br />
month, what it called the “blessed battle<br />
of Paris.”<br />
The other newcomer is the Islamic<br />
State, the heir to al-Qaeda in Iraq that<br />
proclaimed the creation of a caliphate this<br />
summer. Led by Abu Bakr al-Quraishi al-<br />
Hashemi al-Baghdadi, also known as Caliph<br />
Ibrahim, the Islamic State has attracted<br />
fighters from across the Islamic<br />
world to come and join it in Iraq and Syria.<br />
Several Indian Muslims have joined the IS<br />
and pro-IS propaganda has been distributed<br />
in India and Pakistan. Parts of the<br />
Pakistan Taliban have voiced support for<br />
Baghdadi. An Islamic State cell has been<br />
captured in Bangladesh. Al-Qaeda has denounced<br />
the caliphate as illegitimate and<br />
renounced any connection to Baghdadi<br />
roots experiment belonged more to Ramashray<br />
Roy and D.L. Sheth. Rajni took<br />
it and transformed it.<br />
As a commons of ideas, CSDS was<br />
extraordinary. For me, CSDS is that<br />
wonderful pack of quirky incorrigible<br />
scholars like Ashis Nandy, Basheer<br />
Ahmed, Sudhir Kakkar, Giri Deshingkar<br />
quarrelling over ideas at every lunch as<br />
if democracy was a hypothesis that had<br />
to be digested every day. No group had a<br />
greater passion for politics, its myths,<br />
its facts and its folklore.<br />
The style, the theory, was as important<br />
as the substance. Neither CSDS nor<br />
Rajni will rest in peace if I do not resort<br />
to a few anecdotes.<br />
I remember how he recruited me.<br />
Rajni was chairman of ICSSR and he<br />
had heard rumours about me as a rebellious<br />
and even problematic PhD student<br />
at the Delhi School of Economics. He<br />
dropped in one day for a casual chat and<br />
asked me to join CSDS. Some of my<br />
teachers warned him against it. And one<br />
of them even complained that I was a<br />
goonda, a gangster. Rajni smiled and<br />
said, “I need a few intellectual gangsters<br />
for my new project.” He had an easy<br />
charm that soothed opponents and part<br />
of it came from his acute ability to listen.<br />
If you insulted him, he listened intently<br />
almost as if you were wooing him.<br />
Role during the Emergency<br />
CSDS and Rajni became institutional<br />
legends during the Emergency. It was<br />
during that monstrous period that Centre<br />
became home for every dissenting<br />
imagination: George Fernandes, Romesh<br />
Thapar, Arun Shourie and Kuldip<br />
Nayar were frequent visitors. This hospitality<br />
to dissent seeded the creative<br />
style of the future where the Centre<br />
became home to critical studies, social<br />
movements and the search for alternative<br />
imaginations. The Centre, which<br />
glorified the Nehruvian era and the initial<br />
creativity of the Congress, now became<br />
Indira Gandhi’s fiercest and most<br />
obsessive critic. It became the hub of<br />
human rights movements, environmental<br />
struggles, and development battles<br />
that insisted that democracy had to reinvent<br />
itself beyond its electoral form.<br />
Civil society became the creative subject<br />
of study: a counter to the elitist<br />
preoccupation with the state and its development<br />
project.<br />
The Left was the dominant intellectual<br />
imagination of the period. Rajni<br />
had no quarrel with the left, only with<br />
leftists who romanced with the state,<br />
infiltrating government committees as<br />
if they were party cells. Oddly, both the<br />
Left and the Right were obsessed with<br />
being legitimised by the state. During<br />
the infamous controversy involving<br />
History text books when ideologists<br />
went hysterical, Rajni observed quietly:<br />
“That both sides wanted the state to<br />
approve of their version of history”.<br />
This intellectual dependency on state<br />
approval of scholarship worried Rajni.<br />
and his group. Zawahiri and Baghdadi are<br />
rivals for leadership of the global jihad and<br />
competing for the loyalty of jihadists<br />
around the world including in south Asia.<br />
Mr. Obama and Mr. Modi should reaffirm<br />
their commitment to close counterterrorism<br />
and intelligence cooperation.<br />
Much has improved since 2008 when the<br />
U.S. and the U.K. had intelligence on the<br />
Mumbai plot but failed to share it with<br />
India and failed to analyse it properly<br />
themselves. LeT is now a priority for both<br />
Washington and London. Mr. Obama<br />
should send his Central Intelligence<br />
Agency (CIA) Director to New Delhi to<br />
further improve cooperation.<br />
Mr. Obama and Mr. Modi should also<br />
upgrade efforts to stabilise Afghanistan<br />
after the withdrawal of most NATO<br />
forces. India should consider sending military<br />
field hospitals and personnel to help<br />
the Afghan Army as it did in the Korean<br />
War in the 1950s to support the United<br />
Nations forces. It should also help train<br />
and equip the Afghan Air Force, an area<br />
that NATO has been remiss in addressing<br />
robustly. Mr. Obama should rescind his<br />
decision to withdraw all U.S. forces by<br />
2017 and commit to long term advisory<br />
role.<br />
No tolerance policy<br />
Pakistan remains the heart of the issue.<br />
Late last year the U.S. hosted a visit by<br />
Gen. Raheel Sharif and Indians will be<br />
interested in hearing American impressions<br />
of him. Mr. Obama and Mr. Modi<br />
should compare notes on Pakistan’s support<br />
for terrorism. They should also address<br />
the blow back in Pakistan to the<br />
Peshawar massacre. They should encourage<br />
a no-tolerance policy by Prime Minister<br />
Sharif while recognising his<br />
limitations. They should look for opportunity<br />
to encourage Pakistan to take action<br />
against all groups, especially LeT.<br />
But they should also plan for the worst.<br />
Another LeT attack on India is probably<br />
only a matter of time. Washington and<br />
New Delhi should have some idea of what<br />
the potential consequences of such an attack<br />
might be. This is not a matter of<br />
ganging up on Pakistan or trying to pressure<br />
it in advance, rather it is prudent<br />
crisis planning and coordination. It might<br />
be wise to involve others like the United<br />
Kingdom in such discussions. If all this<br />
seems too sensitive for public officials,<br />
then it can be put in the hands of think<br />
tanks and former officials to study with a<br />
mandate to report to their governments.<br />
(Bruce Riedel is Director, The<br />
Intelligence Project, The Brookings<br />
Institution. This article is excerpted from<br />
a paper for The Brookings report on: The<br />
Second Modi-Obama Summit: Building<br />
the India-U.S. Partnership.)<br />
A prophet abandoned by his own community<br />
A tribute to political scientist extraordinaire and teacher, Rajni Kothari (1928 – 2015)<br />
FUTURIST: “Rajni Kothari had an acute sense of the inventive and<br />
followed it up creatively.” — FILE PHOTO: S. ARNEJA<br />
Rajni’s enduring passion<br />
was his commitment to<br />
democracy, its<br />
sustainability, its<br />
creativity and<br />
its vulnerability<br />
Did truth need to be approved by<br />
power?<br />
Rajni had a playful response to criticism.<br />
I remember when a Serbic Marxist<br />
wrote a critique of his work claiming<br />
that Kothari had forgotten to mention<br />
the word class. With easy equanimity<br />
Rajni replied that he had not mentioned<br />
cucumbers either. This ease was important<br />
because the period of the 1960s and<br />
the 1970s was dominated by a pompous<br />
left which treated Marxism with a form<br />
of idolatry. Rajni felt that Marxist critiques<br />
dealt more with the formal economy<br />
and had little place for marginal<br />
groups and the informal economy. Little<br />
protests did not acquire the officialdom<br />
of trade union struggles. The<br />
movements alone in the era, Chipko,<br />
Narmada, Balliapal and fishermen<br />
struggle in Kerala had to struggle with<br />
the official radicalism which refused to<br />
go beyond conventional categories.<br />
CSDS became an archive and a sounding<br />
board for many of these struggles which<br />
linked ecology, livelihood and empowerment<br />
to the still life of electoral democracy.<br />
Rajni had an easy way of<br />
pushing younger colleagues to stretch<br />
beyond themselves. I remember when<br />
the Bhopal gas disaster occurred. He<br />
looked at me and said, “Let’s see if your<br />
work on science helps. Pack up. You are<br />
leaving for Bhopal tomorrow.” When I<br />
began my work on science and violence,<br />
he sent me to Hiroshima requesting the<br />
Mayor to take me around the city. He<br />
believed that projects should begin as<br />
pilgrimages; he was always nudging us<br />
to see linkages and connectivities. He<br />
never lectured, and wanted us to discover<br />
and internalise and share our insights.<br />
For him mistakes were<br />
something precious one owned up to.<br />
He was a great teacher but always<br />
taught by anecdote and example.<br />
I must confess that in the final decade,<br />
many of us moved away from the<br />
Centre and Rajni. Quarrels are important<br />
because they mark the contours of<br />
a relationship. One felt that the Centre<br />
was now imitating itself rather than inventing<br />
ideas. In spite of having moved<br />
on and all the distance I realised how<br />
much the Centre had taught me.<br />
In his final years, Rajni Kothari was a<br />
lonely man — ill and broken by the<br />
death of his wife Hansa and son Smithu.<br />
In the meanwhile, political science had<br />
lost its flavour of dissent. It had become<br />
a game of think tanks and Rajni must<br />
have watched it with wry sadness, a<br />
prophet abandoned by his own community.<br />
But the future will no doubt celebrate<br />
the man.<br />
(Shiv Visvanathan is a social<br />
scientist.)<br />
ND-ND