At large, we are a 'stuck' generation with nothing more to ask and nothing new to answer that one has not already heard of... we are just one stuck generation with all the questions and solutions and with nothing new to find...
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Boring People
At large, we are a 'stuck' generation with nothing more to ask and nothing new to answer that one has not already heard of... we are just one stuck generation with all the questions and solutions and with nothing new to find...
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Identity and Conflict as Obstruction to Peace
titled, ‘A curriculum for peace studies’, published by WCC, ISBN: 978-93- 5288-704-
0, October, 2017
Title:
Identity and conflict
as obstruction to peace
Preface
“In
the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive
without a sense of identity.” Erik Homburger Erikson, Psychologist and
proponent of the Psycho-Social Theory of Development
Identity
as a multi-dimensional concept may be understood at a psycho-social level in
which a person takes up his/her chances to relate with the characteristics of a
group or certain groups - more as an attribute to choice than any that can be
contributed to discovery. Conflict, on the other hand, is described as a
serious disagreement or argument, a clash, a strike, a confrontation, a
collision, a fight or perhaps a struggle that can break instantly or over a
period of time. Either way, identity and conflict stem from an emerging tryst
of violence and parts connected therewith that this essay shall attempt to
elucidate.
This
essay aims at deconstructing the conceptual framework of identity and conflict
to understand the disenfranchisement and breach of rights and its process
continuum leading to inequality, injustice and exclusion that has moved through
history and has found its place in the contemporary scenario as obstruction to
peace.
Introduction
“The
identity of an individual is essentially a function of his/her choices, rather
than the discovery of an immutable attribute” Amartya Sen, Economist, in The
Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity
The challenge for humanity to find an order to set right
a few basic needs for survival by hunting, gathering or searching for better
grazing pastures, finding a place to safely rest before one could set forth to
explore the very purpose of life - was the natural and normal sequence of life…
once upon a time.
Over time, things have changed. We have others doing
things for us - from the past to the present - with the pretext of making life
easy for the next generation to continue, we have others who have thought for
us, who have carefully documented for us what they thought, others who have
taken care to even warn us of what to do and more of what not to; the ‘others’
from various spheres of life who have discovered and invented things that have
influenced us that we have incorporated into our daily use and life - from
religious notes to philosophies, from paradigms to theories, from materials to
food - that flood through art, science and business that the generation to
follow has to only improvise or customize to make life easier. All that one
needs to do now is decide from a plethora of choices presented in front of them
- from audio, visual medium to communication devices, from religion to
political parties, from automobiles to even life partners - all made available
to ‘surf, click and grab’ and that too with the best offer available being added
to the tag.
As we decide what to take and what to let go, what to
use and what not to, what to follow and who not to, we consequently choose a
few as we set aside the rest and set on to proclaim (even if we are not called
to do so) what defines us - an ‘identity’ we create in this trail of choices we
make or forego. Subsequently, the one element that we have managed to save in
this due process of attempting to make life easy is ‘time’; from the time saved
through the development and use of better and quicker equipments and gadgets
that perform with optimal efficiency to the availability of solutions to some
of the most complex problems confronting life itself, everything available at
our finger tips that calls for just a quick reference, we have saved a lot of
time indeed - so much of it that we have enough time to think of problems and
ways to create new ones in the meantime.
We have successfully moved our natural selection of
settlements from an ‘egalitarian society’ - centered around ecology, humanity
and a need that aimed at cooperation and unconditional support for peaceful
coexistence to a ‘profitarian society’ - centered around economics, money and
greed filled with expectations, conditions, stress and hypocrisy.
This movement nevertheless has had an impact
especially in three dominant areas:
·
our choice of
values
·
our idea of equal
distribution of resources, services and justice and
·
our way of life
The
clash of systems
“The increasing tendency towards seeing people in
terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must
commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to
this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and
arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who
can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which
he or she belongs).” Amartya Sen, Economist, in The Idea Of Justice
From
the age-old hunter and gatherer groups to the modern white and blue collar
groups, for centuries, humanity has learnt to stratify, divide and rule to
exist - nevertheless survive. The existence of groups co-depended on
establishing a ‘me-we’ bond with a group with what one saw familiar while at
the same time excluding another by what it saw as unfamiliar or what it could
not understand at that point of time; thus finding a reasonable justification
to avoid, refrain, hate and eventually differentiate by labelling a group as
‘they’ or ‘the others’ breeding contempt, prejudice, bigotry and dogmatism
established on the foundation of personal bias and shallow opinions in the
process.
From
the ‘master-slave’ relationship in the past to the ‘king-subject’ relationship
a few decades back, to what we call the ‘state-citizen’ relationship that we
claim to have now, we have always had the need to have the ruler and the ruled -
a prerogative than a conditional clause for claiming our existence and a
reclaim to understand the shifts in our economic and political systems as well.
With more and more emerging trends of violence, betrayal and conflicts
happening globally and regularly - combined with peoples’ apathy and display of
the bystander effect, along emerges a pattern of people being connected on
grounds of sharing a common enemy and a common target for hatred rather than a
bond established on the grounds of peace and love.
At
the political front, the concept of absolute freedom (Laissez Faire) gets
criticized for the idea of self-exercised conscience that it relies on rather
than a solid and tangible set of agreement collected from common conscience -
Gandhi, a promoter of peace and non-violence had a conscience and so did Godse
who killed him - the idea of conscience left to itself begs for clarity as to
‘whose idea of conscience is it anyway?!’ that we would follow as the very idea
of conscience melts down to just a suggestion and nothing more and nothing
less; while on the other hand, at the other extreme end lies the idea of
‘Absolute Control’ left to the hands of an individual or a group to decide that
also suffocates people midway and corrupts the people in power and others
around eventually as incidents from history like the inhuman atrocities that
happened at UT 731 in China, the Concentration Camps in Germany or at the Abu
Ghraib Prison in the US of A-occupied oil fields of the Middle East may point
out.
While
these incidents of power, corruption and violence strike a chord with similar results
demonstrated through most psycho-social experiments conducted earlier like
Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, Muzafer Sherif’s Robber’s Cave
Experiment, Stanley Milgram’s Milgram Experiment, Hofling’s Hospital Experiment
or Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiment, the final learning still remains the
same - power corrupts, good people are capable of doing the most evil things
and people who must have stopped them usually allow violence to exist by
conforming to authority and/or display the ‘Bystander Effect’ by which most
watch incidents of violence sans response thereby promoting violence and
submersing peace in the process.
Establishing
Boundaries
Over time, grouping has been made a forced choice to
be endured by many - forced ideas, forced mores and stricter codes of conduct,
forced restrictions, forced choices, forced lifestyles and a life of forced
conformity to authority and standards set forth by those who claim to be the
guardians and the sitting elite of the group to monitor and control the rest
and others according to their whims and fancies.
The
Etic (external) and the Emic (internal) motivational factors that establish
one’s identity emerge, operate and configure conformity to authority and the
reasonable justification that helps one to understand ‘why so?’ is unclear
until ‘I become one with the affected’ or usually never until ‘I am the
affected.’ This violence that destroys the very fabric of our social
connections, ironically, also plays a role in reconnecting at a closer yet
closed level victims of hatred, violence, betrayal, inequality, poverty,
exclusion and injustice with yet another group and yet another established
identity.
Meeting
midway and accepting the decision of the majority as binding and normal by
implementing the idea of democracy is also seen having its own flaw – filth
doesn’t become food just because we would consider that by statistical majority
a million flies who devour it can’t be wrong - perhaps this analogy must
resonate to draw a parallel to help us understand why many of the
democratically-run countries have such lousy leaders though supposedly chosen
by the majority in the most democratic way. So, ‘what do we have left if
democracy - the suggested remedy for all world disorder - is out?!’ still remains
a favourite topic for intellectual brainstorming during coffee-table
conversations.
Instability of congruence
"Poverty
too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem. As though the poor
had not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to
exist, and can be rescued in the short term by a system of grievance redressal
(administered by NGOs on an individual, person-to-person basis), and whose
long-term resurrection will come from Good Governance — under the regime of Global
Corporate Capitalism, it goes without saying." Arundhati Roy, Writer and
Activist, in Capitalism: A Ghost Story
We
are simple creatures vulnerable to suggestions and a clever manipulator works
these suggestions at the right time in a right situation for every wrong reason.
We become vulnerable to suggestions to take up an identity imposed upon us, especially
in troubled and testing times in situations like trauma and grief especially if
it is in mass scale - times that are carefully monitored and optimally used by
people with cleverly masked identities - from the religious fanatic to the
local politician who count their existence through the communal divide they are
able to instil by tickling the most susceptible human emotions - fear, guilt
and shame - as a means to an end to fulfil their own personal wants and vote
banks. Many wars - from the Spanish inquisition to the one’s fought in Kashmir
or Syria - have been fought for an imaginary friend over imaginary lines -
visual and auditory hallucinations combined with persecutory and grandiose
delusions indicative of madness.
With
moral and self-righteous idealism that humans quote to control and kill each
other that unwritten social mores provide with authority than written civil codes
of conduct, the unseen cause for jurisprudence often finds a tryst with the visible
laws existing within the limits of a jurisdiction. This reasoned display of
madness often results in the unreasonable madness that overlaps and is seen in
the world today that is being entertained with equally seeming acceptance of
violence displayed - often fought over invisible superpowers in the name of
God(s) and Goddesses and over invisible territorial lines in the name of protecting
national security and promoting democracy - especially in countries where
minerals and oil can be found for the self-righteous and sacrosanct western
world to loot.
It
is always fear, guilt and shame that stress people and make them compromise on
their freedom and rights; giving perpetrators as well as hypocritic saviours of
the oppressed an opportunity to recognize these primal needs and optimize the
same for their own personal gains. At this point, it is hard to say if identity
begets violence or whether violence begets identity - at a time when we see
that one complements the other. Even when a person tries to shed his/her
identity to escape a label, through international migration, trans-cultural
assimilation or through inter-racial/caste accommodation, it only indicates a
transition from one labelled box to another - in this case, from the conditional
orthodox box into an unorthodox box with a set of other conditions. Identity,
like a shadow follows us stubbornly – through the darkest alleys to spotlights –
hardly giving us a chance to escape throughout our life. People seem to have a
need for identities to help establish prejudices based upon biases and baseless
opinions to accept or reject us – and to find valid reasons to do so – to take
us in or leave us out – with ruthless impunity while expecting acceptance with
stoicism.
Process continuum
The
usual process of taking over an identity - at least theoretically, happens as a
person goes through:
1. Formation
of an idea through group influence
2. Affirmation
of an idea through personal experience
3. Transformation
of a person upon reflection
4. Confirmation
of the transformation by the group to which one chooses to belong
5. Until
the identity takes over the person itself
Marking
of identity, on the other hand, is usually condensed to a few grounds:
·
Physical Trait:
Distinguishable physical features like hair, eye and skin colour or the very
shape of face and/or body or gender
·
Socio-Economic Factors:
Occupation, dressing, asset holding - including land, automobile, value of
possessions and liabilities including loans and debts
·
Social Affiliations:
Religion, nationality, family background, place of birth, language spoken and
accent and dialect used, caste, tribe, memberships in clubs and associations,
awards and accolades received, domicile and quality of neighbourhood,
educational qualification(s) and school(s) attended, criminal record and sexual
orientation
Forced truant
Imagine
being labelled as an ‘invalid’, a 'marginalized’, a ‘minority’, a ‘migrant’ or
a ‘victim’ - constantly reaffirmed and reminded of a memory one wants to shred
- identities forced even if one refuses to accept or wishes to shred. How would
we feel if our rights are to be decided by labels pasted on us by another and
the identity we carry is based upon the scars left behind by our oppressors?
Being
compelled to take the label on oneself like it were an honour offered in the
form of subsidies, scholarships and opportunities it may bring… if only we
don’t bargain and if we would just accept what is thrust upon us as is. After
all, ‘this is traditional, this is how the system works, this is how it has
been, is and will be,’ we shall be told; and given the unasked for right to be
stuck with an identity - silently yet systematically removing one’s right to
live sans an identity - even if one wants to. We shall find a cap of identity
available and wear the dunce cap silently to fit in with the rest of the
careless crowd in our regular pursuit to belong to the majority and to make our
way to the top of the normalcy curve of mediocrity as we are always taught to
adhere.
With
that, identity being confirmed, more by others than by oneself, here we are as
part of a larger group - a group that feels or that is relentlessly made to
feel as the marginalized, a part of the minority, a migrant, the oppressed, the
victim and as the violated. And now having worn the cloak, the appetite for
justice must match the voices of what others wearing similar cloak with rules
and roles to match command – and we march along - even if we do not understand
why we march with the crowd to a tune for a naked parade of the king.
From a slightly different perspective – perhaps the right
perspective - we are in a way bribed and lured by means of scholarships,
subsidies, waive-offs, freebies and other said opportunities available to a few
that make us and keep us ’a part apart’ rather than claim to welfare such as these
and more that must have been made a right available to all by bearing us as a
‘part of the whole’.
Invisibility of the visible
We
often undermine our capacity to hate rather than our capability to do so. As
Prof Philip Zimbardo puts it, “Good people can turn bad and become capable of
doing evil things bad people do, in overwhelming situations.” - A phenomenon he
called ‘The Lucifer effect’.
Incidents
of violence and persecution happen at the micro, mezzo and macro system at
various levels. Other incidents that exhibit the ‘Bystander effect’ at a larger
scale like our relative calmness as a witness to violence like genocides and
acts of terror that attempt to erase clueless and innocent civilians across the
globe - perhaps far from our television screens on which we gladly watch them
as mute spectators - like what happens in Syria, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Tibet,
Bangladesh, Philippines, parts of Africa, apart from North East India and
elsewhere too from a safe distance - safe enough for us to be comfortable to be
not bothered about anything happening at a distance far away from us.
Often
when we hear about incidents of violence where a person is left to die on the
road after being run over by a speeding vehicle or thrown out of one after a
brutal rape, with no one to help, we are left to the wits of our fantasy to
imagine, if at all they survive, what would they be thinking… Would they wonder
why no one cared when they were left to die? Would they be so gracious to see
and forgive the violence shown towards them (at times accidental and many times
deliberate)? Or would they go further to reflect on why the disregard and
apathy shown to them exists in the first place? Would they see an emerging pattern
of prejudice, bigotry, stereotyping and attitude - a result of constant and
continuous assimilation and accommodation of schemas within their frame of
reference that concludes in discovering and reaffirming their identity to
justify the injustice shown to them - a cognitive dissonance at any scale or
level as a natural tendency to move on - nevertheless survive as a group of
victims against a group of perpetrators - groups that often interchange their
stance in accordance to time for survival’s sake. Perhaps the same questions
rise from a point of reflection at a larger level as it does at times of
bearing individual trauma - only that this time it is reaffirmation and
reconfirmation of identities for resilience at a confirmatory scale.
The
upward mobility of the downtrodden
The
plight and fight of the socially (pushed) backward and traditionally oppressed
communities is more like a life on the wheel. The victims of violence and
injustice today being identified and recognized as such, command more than
demand their special provisions for upliftment in the name of social justice -
be it the Dalits from India or the Africans settled in America or the
indigenous people who were devoid of their rights in their homeland like the
Maoris of New Zealand or the Red Indians of America and every other colonized
country like India that is yet to recover from the aftermath of the mad
nightmare of the past.
This
self-imposed need to be identified and recognized as one belonging to the
victimized, marginalized and scheduled groups is a mandate to avail the rationed
welfare from the stored loot of his/her majesty’s invasion supplied in the form
of grants, aid and other concessions. This identity of the ‘receiver’ as an
ever-marginalized group or as a forever-developing country at large, gets
further cemented by the media and good Samaritans of the development sector who
make and take sensational coverage for overseas broadcast carefully selecting
the ‘target’ group to be showcased as dirty, humbled and always dressed up in
rags; while at the same time, the ‘giver’ being shown wearing the cloak of
superiority, authority and pride to break and throw morsels collected on behalf
of the victimized, poor, vulnerable, voiceless, haplessly helpless target
groups to fetch. In reality though, it is these non-governmental organizations
from the west whose survival depends by straining majority of the loot for
their own keep - collected in the name of the target group on whose behalf they
beg.
On
one hand, the people who carry the burden of the earlier oppressors and who are
widely pointed to for the blunders committed once for which they have no
rationale claim to be blamed, are subjected and go through the same level of
human disregard and discrimination which once their predecessors (alone) had to
be blamed for. This phenomenon is a turn of the wheel as we see the ones who
were up yesterday being crushed by the ones who were down today - just for the
simple way in which things have turned. Sadly, identities that were fought to
be cast away have simply become more certain, defined, nurtured, wilfully
promoted by many and unwilfully thrust on the rest - for the same reason it was
earlier done - for survival.
A resulting paradox - an ingroup that fought against an outgroup
for stratifying, discriminating and labelling it, now takes up yet another
fight to belong and be identified as a group carrying its own marks and scars
of identity - quite ironically that becomes the new identity the
ingroup wants to establish – reaffirming and confirming its identity more
strongly rather than finding opportunities to shed the same for which it has
been fighting all the while.
The culture of reaction and response
As
a recourse for the perpetual violence and a way out of the suburban drudgery to
soothe the conscience and ever questioning superego - those that result as a
collective - is established through international treaties and national
policies in an attempt to provide damage control to protect the affected –
thereby promoting rather than suppress identities in the meantime. Thus, in a
pursuit of burying identities, we only end up finding grounds to breed the same
instead.
Others
who lack faith in the collective conscience numb
their pain and suffer in silence. This systematic depletion of unity, even
though sees the existence of issues, resists seeking solutions. Subduing
dissent as an opportunistic stand tends to be uncalculated risk every oppressor
and their promoters can postpone yet never completely douse. In the process of brushing
issues under the carpet to showcase and promote a false sense of complacency
among the masses, unaddressed problems lie repressed until they erupt at
unforeseen places at the least expected time and situation. Every issue calls
to be addressed; as often, the simple, neglected form of unaddressed abuse
turns out to become more complex and irreversible when not mitigated.
Interconnection
of the broken links
The
chances of cultivating singularity in the case of identity, is not as much an
easy task as the claim to success through plural affiliations. Just as impeding
individual freedom by imposing regulations for preserving common good cannot be
denied, exercising strata to advocate nation-building in the context of valuing
inclusion and pluralism cannot be dismissed - though both remain contradictory
and paradoxical in their approach.
If
one calls for scrutinizing the prevalence of poverty, inequality in the distribution
of resources, services and justice, it all stems up from a context of social
exclusion that prevailed at a period of time or that prevails still. From
racism, imperialism, structuralism, autocracy to the more recent technocracy,
stratification, discrimination and class distinction seems to be the way of
life set forth by some, widely accepted by many and consciously or
unconsciously followed by all indiscriminately. In our adherence to belong, we
ensure that we don’t fail to belong to some group or the other and consequently
by doing so, render to fail some way or the other.
Excessive
emphasis on attributes based on religion, place of origin, gender,
linguistic-similarities and differences and so on as an ascriptive attribute to
describe one’s belonging to a certain group is also the discriminating force
that mutilates multi-culturalism and turns out to be counter-productive to the
idea of peaceful diversity and the idea of coexistence.
Though
there have been enough and more academic dialogues, debates, discussions and discourses
on the idea of identity, chances remain that there have been more questions
than conclusions that have opened up. As we show greater resistance to be
discriminated on one hand, we get more and more wilfully stratified on the
other – either for political or it’s associated socio-economic reasons. Even
the decision to opt out of having an identity established for us, seems out of
question as we find ourselves struggling to get out of one box only to find
ourselves drop in and fit right into another - packed, labelled and
compartmentalized to be exhibited for the rest of the world to see and
recognize. Thus, a fitting conclusion to this essay would be the chance to
reflect only even more on the identities we chose and the identities that
choose us as we reach a point of mooting over this final thought:
“When
you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or
anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you
are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by
belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is
seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion,
to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total
understanding of mankind." Jiddu
Krishnamurti, Philosopher and Thinker
Points for further reflection:
1. How
do we identify our self?
2. How
are we identified by others?
3. What
are the identities thrust upon us that we wish were not thrust upon us?
4. What
are the identities we have thrust upon others?
5. How
violent have we been establishing and thrusting identities on each other?
6. How
long have we been and will continue to obstruct peace by promoting violence for
establishing identities?
7. What
is the way out for promoting peace and building a brave, new world free from
identities?
The Mining of Poverty
Title: The
Mining of Poverty
Type: Socio-Political-Economic
Analysis
Author: Ajith Fredjeev Dinakarlal,
Faculty, School of Social Work, Marian College, Kutikanam
(ajith.fredjeev@mariancollege.org, fredjeev@gmail.com)
Co-Author: Dr. Lokesha MU, Faculty, Department
of Studies and Research in Social Work, Tumkur University, Tumkur (lokesh_mu2000@yahoo.co.in)
Abstract:
“First they ignore
you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”
by Mahatma Gandhi
by Mahatma Gandhi
It is not NEWS that the
believers of the ‘divine right’ from the West as well as the pseudo-democratic
champions of the East have both been abusing the rights and minority interests of
the vulnerable for a very long period of time; yet, it must be realized that the
impact thus created, has been quite severe on skewing the identity of the
majority living within the barriers of geographical restrictions who end up bearing
misrepresentations and its subsequent consequences. Our resistance (as Indians)
to global disparities and dialectics of internal and external identities that
have emerged as a result of these causes has not altered as the majority still live
in a state of complacency of ignorance; if not, apathy. Resistance to forced
identities has remained unrevoked and the Indian identity that has been skewed on
the parallel to favour some hypocritical agendas set forth by funding and
funded organizations in the development sector, can be only set right upon the realization
of the fact that this plunder and ruin have been silently and systematically
hatched, patched and dispatched, ignoring the identity of the majority and of
course, with a certain level of deliberated resistance towards this wrongful
depiction and misrepresentation. The following analysis at a
socio-political-economic level, aims to disturb the complacency of silence in
order to stop manifesting what necessarily does not represent the identity of every
Indian and calls for rudimentary, majority response for its reversal.
Keywords: India, Identity, Human
Rights, Funding, Development Sector, Violations, Abuse, Resistance, Social
Action
Seeding
the thought
“Where
the clear stream of reason has not lost its way,
into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
where
the mind is led forward by thee into
ever
widening thought and action,
into
that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake” Rabindranath Tagore
If
one were to draw blind-folded, an image of an Indian, from what is heard and
seen about India and its people by others outside its borders, perhaps it
should not be surprising to see anyone drawing a dark, skinny and dusty person
with a grim face and a turban wrapped several times around the head, standing amidst
dark, gloomy clouds of lust and violence, corruption and scams, pollution and
population hovering in the backdrop, holding a deep-pitted begging bowl raised
towards any leaking place from which foreign funds have the slightest hint of
dripping… no matter how demeaning the picture might be.
A few decades back, this is how we too, as global
citizens, played a part in painting the whole of Africa as a continent with
sick, poor, bony, dusty, dark children; undeniable that we expected every child,
woman and man coming out of Africa to fit into boxes and images of our forced
imagination seeded by the exploitative colonial powers. To a certain extent,
seeding this dark thought of an entire continent into our minds that so
stubbornly refuses to leave has been achieved; so much so that we cannot stop
seeing Africa and its citizens without sympathy; even if they don't ask for it.
Thus remains Africa, a continent with absolute poverty and misery, violence and
barbarism, with resent for advancement and justice requiring the saviours from
the fair West to be present there all the time for establishing control of
biblical proportions over otherwise tagged “barbaric” tendencies-confirmed and
affirmed within the limitations of our mind if not anywhere else. With that
idea established, is sealed the fate of Africa as an ever-impoverished nation
in need of never-ending support in global perspective. Eventually, crossing
borders and treading seas, India, seems to have become the new destiny, the new
Africa, for the West to muse in the pretext of development.
Historically, the colonial powers
enter a particular territory only when there is a promise of economic
prosperity and would not leave until the last drop of anything left is drained.
Africa, I believe, has still some more fuel, diamond and un-questioning people
left for the colonies to optimize and the West would go any length to skew the
African identity to make space for them to remain until Africa’s resources are
completely exploited. Amidst faith-based, pseudo-justice-based, exploitative
colonial powers born out of intentions conceived through the marriage of
hypocrisy and greed, it would be interestingly revealing if the following
questions are reflected upon: How is this image drawn so
conveniently? Who frames these images? What benefit is derived by giving and
taking up such an identity?
From the Moral Eye of Democracy
Despite
glamour and its commercial side taking on the best centers and corners of the
mass media, some remnant gaps do bring highlights of contemporary social issues
by chance or by choice and at times articles with NEWS-value do make it through
media gate-keepers, that expose racist ideologies and stereotyping of the
subaltern collective that indicate the cause of the selective-perception. It is
then that the media finds its rightful place as the fourth pillar or rather the
moral eye of the democracy that opens to reveal hidden agendas. Instances may
be seen as run below.
The Problem of Plenty
For a
country which till recently had a weak civil society movement, India is now
witnessing a boom in the NGO sector. With a population of 1.2 billion, the
country could well be the land of opportunities for non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) with the Central Bureau of Investigation conservatively
estimating 20 lakh of them already operating in states and union territories.
The
mind-boggling figures boil down to one NGO for every 600 people. Compare this
to the latest government data on police. According to the latest figures from
the Union home ministry, India has just one policeman for every 943 people.
But there
is an accountability deficit among the NGOs. And that's how CBI got into the
picture as the Supreme Court responded to a PIL. Many don't submit details of
receipt of grant and spending to income tax authorities, the CBI told the apex
court.[1]
The Funding Inquisition
Based upon the receipt of previously received,
documented and established figures, NGOs operating in the country had received
a staggering Rs 11,070 crore during 2013-14, with the US topping the list
of donors by providing over Rs 4,491 crore, followed by the UK which
contributed Rs 1,347 crore, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
Interestingly, the NGOs received donations even from secretive countries like
North Korea.
· Malawi, a landlocked country in South East Africa,
which is counted among the world’s least developed countries, is mentioned as a
donor with over Rs 27 lakh donation to various NGOs during 2013-14.
·
Swaziland, one of the smallest countries in Africa,
donated over Rs 9.5 crore.
·
Donations from Pakistan during the same year were
about Rs 50 lakh while Greece, which has been gripped by its worst economic
crisis till date, donated Rs 61 lakh.
·
People from violence-hit countries like Afghanistan
and Bosnia too donated to the Indian NGOs. Rs 1.23 crore came from Bosnia while
Afghanistan’s contribution was Rs 1 crore.[2]
These are funds received besides the funding
NGOs/NPOs in India receive from the Government of India itself.
·
In the last decade, more than Rs 85,000 crore has
come in for the NGO sector from global patrons
·
Of the 40,000-odd NGOs registered under Foreign Contributions
Regulation Act (FCRA), at least half do not file proper accounts with the
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA)
·
As per a report published by the Home Ministry for
the year 2011-12, there were 41,844 registered associations under the FCRA and
some 22,702 NGOs reportedly received Rs 11,546 crore as foreign contributions
·
As compared to 2004-05, the amount received in
2011-12 was up by 85 percent (from Rs 6,257 crore to Rs 11,548 crore) and their
number 38 percent (from 30,321 to 41844)
·
A total of Rs 1,16,073 crore was received by the
NGOs between 1993-94 to 2011-12. Only about 55% NGOs gave audited account
·
Among the list of donors, the United States tops
the list (Rs 3838.23 crore) followed by the United Kingdom (Rs 1219.02 crore)
and Germany (Rs 1096.01 crore)
·
A majority of donors, including the top three, are
church-based organisations such as Compassion International USA (Rs 183.83
crore) followed by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, USA (Rs 130.77
crore) and the Kindernothilfe e.V. (KNH) Germany (Rs 51.76 crore)
·
Of the top 15 donor agencies, 13 are related to
some or the other Christian sect. Over 90 percent of the top 30 recipient
organizations are engaged in missionary activity
·
The highest amount of foreign contribution was
received by the following Christian organization namely World Vision India,
Chennai (Rs 233.38 crore), followed by the Believers Church India
Pathanamthitta, Kerala (Rs 190.05 crore) and Rural Development Trust,
Ananthpur, Andhra Pradesh, (Rs 144.39 crore)
·
To put this in perspective, India’s total defence
allocation (2011-12) was Rs 1,64,000 crore. Thus, foreign-funded NGOs (FFNGOs)
in 2011-12 received seven percent of India's then defence budget[3]
The
Emerging Thought
Over six decades of freedom later and after millions
of dollars raised outside our borders in promised lands by the so called
“compassionate” and those living off that money raised in the name of the poor,
with a stage set for provider-receiver drama to happen with lakhs of
organizations to act as actors, traitors and betrayers (from within and out),
nothing much has changed in the socio-economic-political diaspora of our
country; we remain still burdened and still plundered and those we claim need
help, upon whose needs the welfare-oriented development sector fuels itself,
remain deprived, marginalized, excluded and vulnerable till date. Let us take
the following statistics[4] available
from the past five years for some revelation:
·
The Planning Commission of India has
accepted the Tendulkar Committee report that says that 37% of people in India live
below the poverty line (BPL)
·
The Arjun Sengupta Report (from National
Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector) states that 77% of
Indians live on less than INR 20 a day (about $0.50 per day)
·
The N.C. Saxena Committee report states
that 50% of Indians live below the poverty line
·
A study by the Oxford Poverty and Human
Development Initiative using a Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) found that
there were 650 million people (53.7% of population) living in poverty in India,
of which 340 million people (28.6% of the population) were living in severe
poverty, and that a further 198 million people (16.4% of the population) were
vulnerable to poverty
·
421 million of the poor are concentrated
in eight North Indian and East Indian states of Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand,
Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. This number
is higher than the 410 million poor living in the 26 poorest African nations
·
The World Bank estimates that India is
ranked 2nd in the world of the number of children suffering from malnutrition
·
The UN estimates that 2.1 million Indian
children die before reaching the age of 5 every year – four every minute –
mostly from preventable illnesses such as diarrhoea, typhoid, malaria, measles
and pneumonia
·
Every day, 1,000 Indian children die
because of diarrhoea alone.
The 2011 Global Hunger Index (GHI) Report ranked India 15th, amongst leading countries with hunger situation and
The 2011 Global Hunger Index (GHI) Report ranked India 15th, amongst leading countries with hunger situation and
· The Oxford Poverty and Human Development
Initiative in its Global Multidimensional Poverty Index published in 2015,
ranks two North Indian states amongst the five “poorest” sub-national regions
in the world
The only thing gained and maintained by us at the
end of the day, is the image of an always poor and absolutely needy, ever
“developing” nation. As we continue to be abused for the virtue of patience we
hold, often we are forced to live in a culture of fear, denial and silence. This
attitude of ours to supply to the demand of other nations with our poverty,
will always remain and be kept that way for a very long time. The image thus
created and along with our identity, just like that of Africa, will be a story
of never ending poverty and sorry endings and we shall soon be dressed in rags
with Western imagination for the amusement of the rest of the world. This
misrepresentation of our identity, (ab)using the vulnerability of select
targets, has been the greatest injustice done to the people of India and the
greatest damage done to the image of the country… the greatest abuse of our
collective patience.
Most
funding organizations function nothing more than as the neo-capitalists of the
contemporary scenario who see the poor and the vulnerable as nothing more than
a Return on Investment (RoI); and their lives, their communities and the
problems they deal with in everyday life as their Unique Selling Point (USP) to
be optimized and highlighted outside the borders to nurture profits and
dividends back in their homes out of which a portion found fitting is thrown at
us for which we are busy fighting among ourselves to take a grab.
And up the political front and in government
quarters, leave alone finding it difficult to strategically tackle poverty over
the years, our topied-babus seem to find it hard enough even to define it.
Shifting from per-capita income to kilo-calorie food consumption, we have
indeed shifted focus defining poverty rather than focusing on the welfare of
the poor. Of late, we have brilliantly figured out that the fastest and
immediate way to bring down the poverty level of a country is to just adjust
the way we define it. The once Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek
Singh Ahluwalia, submitted new price data that pegged the urban poverty line as consumption
of Rs. 32/day per person in urban areas and Rs. 26/day in rural areas, a
revision that would immediately lower India’s own measure of its poor from 37%
to 32% of its population. Behold! Sixty million people, suddenly are no more
poor by definition.
Optimizing
on the poor who the government manages to define and the remaining that are
left out undefined, at the end of the day, the NGOs from within and out, hover
to notice and peck and fill themselves with benefits sought in their names.
Big Fish Eats Smaller Fry
Cracking
down on erring NGOs, government has cancelled licenses of 1,142 NGOs belonging
to undivided Andhra Pradesh, under which they get foreign funds, for not filing
their annual returns for three consecutive years. Earlier, government has said
that 69 NGOs have been blacklisted from receiving foreign funds after finding
fault in different aspects. Among those NGOs which were prohibited from
receiving the foreign funds include 14 from Andhra Pradesh, 12 from Tamil Nadu,
five each from Gujarat and Odisha, four each from Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and
Kashmir and Kerala and three from Delhi. Government had also initiated action
against 26 NGOs in current fiscal after finding “irregularities” in receiving
foreign contribution while 14 foreign donors have been placed under prior
approval category.
On
February 25, government told Parliament that more than 31,000 NGOs were served
notices for not filing annual returns on their foreign contribution. In
2011-12, notices were sent to 21,493 associations which were found to have not
submitted annual returns under Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act 2010 for
2006-07, 2007-08 and 2008-09 and in 2014, and notices were issued to 10,343
associations which had not filed annual returns for 2009-10 to 2011-12.[5]
In October, the Home Ministry announced
that the non-governmental organizations can’t do transactions of over `20,000 in cash—a clause
which is applicable to only business enterprises under the Income Tax Act. In
December, a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular was released, listing NGOs
whose funds it said should be monitored by banks. In January, a new circular
was released with a list of 10 donor organizations, including Danish
International Development Agency (Danida), Mercy Corps, US; Hivos International
of the Netherlands; Climate Work Foundation, US; and Greenpeace International.
Any NGO receiving funds from them will
now need prior permission of the MHA before they bring in the funds. In fact,
starting 1 April, 2015, all organizations registered under the FCRA have to
reapply for licence within a year. While licences issued by the MHA in the
ongoing year will be applicable for five, those issued before 1 April 2015 will
be deemed cancelled from April 2016. Anil Choudhary, senior member with Indian
Social Action Forum (INSAF), said, “If you are independent and critical of the
market and the government, you face the music in the form of regulatory
restrictions.” Those working in the development sector are hopeful of
alternative funding models emerging, though not necessarily through CSR. Once
community-centred funding comes into the picture, the voices of dissent and
people’s movements will be harder to stamp out; it is believed.[6]
At the
end of the sudden screening and lowering of shutters of NGOs by suddenly
vigilant government bodies and the ironical subsequent screaming of “foul-play”
by representatives from the civil society who claim this to be a direct attack on
democracy to shut voices of dissent and disapproval of activists and
nationalists, I wonder why voices of dissent and disapproval over a
government’s unjust manifestation of oppressive tendencies to cover-up hideous
corporate crimes suddenly stop when financial ties are cut(?!) Do voices of
such heightened passion earlier heard require financial assistance to ensure
volume?! Is this the junction of hypocrisy?
The painting of M.F. Hussain,
titled 'the Rape of Mother India, portrays the image of a woman caught in a
struggle to escape from the strangling force of two wild bulls; this painting
was heavily criticized for the imagery as well as the titling. Revisit the
painting and you get to see the Indian identity suffer a similar accord; torn
apart by the betrayer from outside and the traitor from within and it is then
that you realize that the painting would find no more contempt yet just
absolute relevance in the present context to understand the fate of the poor
caught between these two sectors that promise development.
The Mining of Poverty
“The identity of an individual is
essentially a function of his/her choices, rather than the discovery of an
immutable attribute.” Amartya Sen
India
has always been seen as a land of harvest if not by us, at least by the West.
As we try to think that gone are those days, when the great whites packed up
after reaching our shores and mining us off our riches that they controlled,
reaped and shipped to their land to be preserved, wrapped and sold, it is
equally pertinent to be a little watchful and realize that today those we
believed to be gone, are back in our shores and this time, to mine us off our
poverty instead. Their first stop often as they reach our land are the slums,
pavements and areas of claimed-underdevelopment, poverty and hunger-their
choicest destinations (often with good connectivity through air), where they
pull out their point and shoot cameras, to do exactly what it is meant to
do-point and shoot-megapixel after megapixel of great whites amidst the poor,
vulnerable and unprotected lot in an impoverished nation that will soon get captioned,
tagged, uploaded, downloaded and blown up to unimaginable proportions to be
presented in slides, posters, brochures, coffee-table stand-alone and anything
creative and unimaginable during hair-raising, fund-raising campaigns to a
bunch of mesmerized audiences who fill the high-raised bowls of those that seek
on behalf of those who are not even aware (nor ever will be.) Thus emerges a
breeding ground for forced-need-based communities and strategic-greed-based
organizations and the marriage of these two groups have become subsequently complementary
for each other’s survival.
In
this rights-based-era we live in, with globalization in vogue, it is not just
commodities that are traded yet often tags that come with an unstoppable influx
of infused culture-new, foreign and distant to us; and as we stand in awe at
the conqueror, we despise our own within the boundaries and step across even if
it is in the risk of giving up our culture, traditions and freedom. There is a
wide difference between these cross-cultural ideas; like the idea of feeling
self actualized and satisfied that according to Western philosophy is possible
when facilitated through the accumulation of materialistic resources to
maximize satisfaction that is directly contradictory to the Indian philosophy
that speaks about the idea of giving up materialism to attain nirvana. The
solution to many problems in the Indian context cannot lie in plausible
formulae that seems to have worked in the West or elsewhere; owing to the fact
that there is a serious discrepancy in the way hypothetical assumptions have
been made of Indians and India on the basis of flawed conclusions drawn from
misrepresentation and ideas drawn from an equally plausible imagination.
Concluding
Idea of Justice
India has become a country where a plethora of projects
are drafted for the money collected; when ethically it should be the other way
around; this is when and where the Indian soil and its people have become
testing grounds for launching medical and other researches banned in other
sensible parts of the world, where pesticides, bio-modified seeds and pilot
projects considered harmful gets conceived, incubated and hatched on our open
grounds thus condensing our land to blocks of wasted and barren exploited
pieces and our people to mere guinea pigs and lab rats capitalizing on the
illiteracy and ignorance of the exploited masses.
Eventually,
it is the poor, blanketed under the darkness of poverty, who are being silently and systematically plundered, ruined and
tagged and we, as a majority carry these imprints in our represented, presented
and misrepresented identity; yet it is not such a rarity that these isolation
chambers are what many walk into these days willfully and voluntarily; giving
up pride, respect and dignity which some of our earlier Indians refused to
exchange. Much of the damage has been partly due to an
identity thrust upon us and much more attributed to us for accepting the
identity thrust without defending our own.
In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen, hints on the
need for the concept of ‘open impartiality’ in a global context that cannot be
abstracted without the existence of ‘global democracy’. This is one of the
weirdest situations where a global dialogue that is imperative for ensuring
global justice under the organization of commonalities of identities and
institutions in the contemporary world gets dismissed for evoking ‘distracting
details’ that shun the purity for exercising fairness while delivering justice.
Often, this is the same detailing that is available to understand the global
presentations of vulnerable people and communities and their identities that
are un-spared and brutalized, very often on global grounds of injustice.
The
images of the beggar tapping at car window at a traffic signal, a working child
carrying a sack-load of waste in a gunny bag, a pavement dweller living in a
pipeline discarded from an unsuccessful project, a pathway seller rushing to
hide his commodities when the cops come in, a push-cart monger who yells at the
top of his voice right outside the house and everyone else we drive past or
possibly just pause to pick a decent bargain or take a moment to pity have been
raised to be identified as the symbols of poverty and objectified.
The
life that drives these people into who they are, where they are and where they
come from and why they do what they do, are interestingly heart-warming stories
of endurance and courage if rightly captured and truthfully represented. The
stories from the everyday life of these people, true and alive, have a greater
significance for living the great Indian philosophy that teaches of artha,
kama, dharma and moksha that will help us to understand the essence of breaking
barriers of conceived perception by observing their very simple way of life amidst
struggles like anyone else’s. The idea to capture their lives, courage and
dream amidst their struggle may change our perspective of them and provide a
spectrum of understanding of the immense resilience of an ordinary, regular
Indian to the rest of the world.
The
irony behind these stories of struggles and endurance amidst suffering,
tragedies and difficulties is that these issues need not be faced in the first
place if policies that run the government, non-government and community systems
were functioning as promised and as truthful as told in the first place.
Diamonds are rare, beautiful and valuable, but their beginnings were always as
humble in form as the common carbon-dark, dirty, and combustible. Through years
of withstanding intense heat and high pressure, they become pure, beautiful and
strong; this makes the gem a good metaphor for the patient Indian endurance
that has historically withstood abuse, chaos and catastrophe. This can be
understood through the lives of a few contemporary and lesser known Indians
when presented and represented from an un-hideous and positive angle and their
misrepresentations get subsequently erased.
Reference
[i] , [ii]
, [iii]
, [iv]
, [v]
, [vi]
, [vii]
, [viii]
, [ix],
[x],
[xi],
[xii],
[xiii],
[xiv],
[xv]
[1]
Dhananjay Mahapatra, India witnessing NGO boom, there is 1 for every
600 people, Times of India, Feb 23, 2014 retrieved from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-witnessing-NGO-boom-there-is-1-for-every-600-people/articleshow/30871406.cms
as on 4th April, 2015
[2]
Yatish
Yadav, NGOs Got Rs11K Crore Foreign Funds
in 2013-14, The New Indian Express, 27th February 2015 retrieved from http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/NGOs-Got-Rs11K-Crore-Foreign-Funds-in-2013-14/2015/02/27/article2689210.ece
as on 4th April 2015
[3]
Tarique
Anwar, Scrap FCRA, NGOs doing
Church work with foreign funds: Experts, Feb 1, 2015 retrieved from http://www.firstpost.com/india/scrap-fcra-ngos-church-work-foreign-funds-experts-2074339.html
as on 4th April, 2015
[4] Source available in reference
[5]
Press
Trust of India, Govt cancels licenses of 1,142 NGOs to receive
foreign funds, The New Indian Express, 17th March,
2015 retrieved from http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/govt-cancels-licenses-of-1142-ngos-to-receive-foreign-funds/
as on 4th April, 2015
[6] NGOs facing a funding challenge:
Are funds drying up due to increased scrutiny or because India is now seen as
an emerging economic power? Retrieved from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/hTcPwLtj9qU8tvVVudUDMJ/NGOs-facing-a-funding-challenge.html?facet=print as on 4th April, 2015
[i] Amartya
Sen, 2005, The Argumentative Indian, Writings on Culture, History and Identity,
New Delhi, Penguin Books
[vi] Rabindranath Tagore, 1913,
Gitanjali, London, Macmillan and Co., Limited
[vii] Oxford Poverty
and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), Excerpt from Sabin Alkire and Gisela
Robles Aguilar, January 2015, University of Oxford
[viii] "Country Briefing: India,
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) At a Glance". Oxford Poverty and
Human Development Initiative
[ix] "8 Indian states have more poor than 26 poorest African
nations". Times of India. July 12, 2010
[x] Quote by Mahatma Gandhi, retrieved from http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4694-first-they-ignore-you-then-they-ridicule-you-then-they as on
19th April, 2015
[xi] Rupashree Nanda, It's official: 37 pc live below poverty line, Apr 18, 2010, CNN-IBN, retrieved from http://ibnlive.in.com/news/its-official-37-pc-live-below-poverty-line/113522-3.html as on
19th April, 2015
[xii] Poverty in India, retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India
as on 19th April, 2015
[xiii] Malnutrition in India, retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India as on
19th April, 2015
[xiv] Jyoti ThottamWhose Line
Is It Anyway?: India Rethinks Its Poverty Schemes, Oct. 04,
2011, Time, retrieved from http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/10/04/whose-line-is-it-anyway-india-rethinks-its-poverty-schemes/#ixzz1nOwM3yzQ as on
19th April, 2015
[xv] SA Aiyar, Middle class hypocrisy on the poverty line, October 2, 2011, Times of India retrieved from http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Swaminomics/entry/middle-class-hypocrisy-on-the-poverty-line as on 19th April, 2015
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