The Population Crisis

(We are one………… billion)

There is hardly an Indian who hasn’t been stalked by the crowding syndrome. The perils of over population are conspicuous everywhere; overcrowded buses, jam packed railway stations, prolonged queues in the cinema theatres, the struggle of anxious parents to get an admission for their wards in nursery schools , the stiff rivalry for admissions to professional courses, the long wait for an LPG connection; the list of woes we are burdened to carry for being a nation of one billion goes on.
The fact that the birth of baby Aastha- the one billionth baby- was celebrated with so much hype, makes one wonder if atleast we as a nation are willing to confront the gravity of the issue. (Nobody marked the one- millionth sterilization or the one- billionth condom sale!!).
The problem of over population took an ominous turn when we acceded the one billion club, the only other member being China. However, the perils of population are definitely more sinister here than in China. The reason being, we do not have the large land mass that our neighbour has, which makes our population density three times as much as that of our neighbour.
It would be improper however, to directly attempt at analyzing the Indian scenario without an examination of the general theories of demography.

The Malthusian theory of population.

“An Essay on the principle of population” by Thomas Malthus published in 1798 was among the first and most significant theories on demography in that era. The book was later cited by Darwin as having had a significant influence on the formulation of his own theory of ‘Natural Selection’.
Malthus begins the dissection of the issue by defining the population problem as, ‘ the tendency of all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it.’ Malthus observed that in plants and irrational animals, nature has been generous in scattering the seeds of life but has been miserly in providing for the room and nourishment needed to sustain them. That is, the species are all compelled by an inherent tendency to increase their number but are limited by the means to provide for their offspring.
In man, this same limitation in acquiring food for large numbers, puts a check on population, which never increases beyond the lowest level of nourishment that can be supported by the environment. To quote Malthus, “Population when left unchecked, grows in a geometric ratio. Subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio.”
From this hypothesis, Malthus was able to conclude that both famine and poverty are natural outcomes of the tendency of all animated life to proliferate. When the number of individuals living in an area, increases beyond the subsistence level, natural laws intervene to put a check on the increasing numbers. Such interventions in the form of famines, epidemics, poverty, hunger-deaths, social unrest etc were named Malthusian catastrophes. Malthus proposed that the purpose of such a catastrophe was to contain the population and that it would return the population to subsistence levels.
The methods that Malthus identified that would put a check on such catastrophes was categorized as positive checks and vices. The former refers to moral restraint and the latter means acts such as homosexuality. Malthus advocated moral restraint among England’s poor and downtrodden population and also called for a repealing of England’s ‘Poor laws’ as food subsidies and subsidized shelter only encouraged the poor to reproduce more, he asserted. The Malthusian argument was fiercely class discriminatory as it argued that it was among the poor that the family size exceeded the means to provide for them.
The class bias of Malthus’s work is visible from this controversial quote from the second edition of his essay,

"A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come, fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those, who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counter-acting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all guests should have plenty, and knowing she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full."

Criticism of the Malthusian theory.

Much of the criticism to Malthusian theories came from the liberals and radical social reformers of the 19th century. They found it impossible to accept that the misery of the poor was on account of their reproductive practices. Marx and Engels in introducing their own theory of surplus labor to explain the population problem, attacked Malthus calling him, “a shameless sycophant of the ruling classes”
It must be recognized that the Malthusian argument was class discriminatory and justified the existence of a social structure based on the unequal distribution of nature’s resources. It’s critics also argued that poverty is not a natural condition as was implied in Malthus’s essay.
Also, Malthus’s theory predicted a huge catastrophe resulting from the lagging of growth in food production behind the growth in population. However this forecast proved to be wrong on account of new methodologies in agriculture that emerged after the industrial revolution.

Modern view points in demographic studies.

The issue of population explosion is a divisive one in economic circles today. Both apocalyptic views and dismissive complacency abound.
The former group present the picture of the population problem, as a bomb, that will soon go off and the people involved are treated as irrational beings -whose sexual instincts must be tamed- rather than as allies facing a common problem.
The latter group on the other hand are inspired by the ability displayed by the human race to cope with increases in population in the past. They remind us that not only has predictions of a Malthusian catastrophe failed in the past, but there has been an increase in the general standards of living and the consumption of food per person has also increased.
Complacency on this account cannot be justified, however. To quote Amartya Sen, “The fact that Malthus was mistaken in his diagnosis as well as his prognosis two hundred years ago does not, however, indicate that contemporary fears about population growth must be similarly erroneous. The increase in the world population has vastly accelerated over the last century. It took the world population millions of years to reach the first billion, then 123 years to get to the second, 33 years to the third, 14 years to the fourth, 13 years to the fifth billion, with a sixth billion to come, according to one UN projection, in another 11 years.6 During the last decade, between 1980 and 1990, the number of people on earth grew by about 923 million, an increase nearly the size of the total world population in Malthus's time. Whatever may be the proper response to alarmism about the future, complacency based on past success is no response at all.’

Population and emigration

On studying the regional distribution in the growth of world population one observes serious imbalances. More than 90% of the increasing population is in the developing world. The largest absolute growth takes place in Asia.
This has lead vast multitudes of people in the developing countries to emigrate to the west. More than any other social and economic factor population growth is considered the single most important reason behind the growing pressure of emigration to the west.
However to cite that population growth is the sole factor responsible for immigration into the developed world is to close one’s eyes to the rapid internationalization of cultures and integration of world economies that has occurred in recent times. The dynamism of international capitalism is more pronounced than ever and its growing reach and absorptive power has removed many obstacles to the free movement of labor.

In the west the large number of immigrants moving into their shores has caused much alarm and there are fears that a growing third world population will further push more people into the west. This fear has also metamorphosed into the apprehension by westerners that they are being engulfed by Asians and Africans. The share of the world population by the latter group increased from 63.7 percent in 1950 to 71.2 percent by 1990, and is expected, according to the estimates of the United Nations, to rise to 78.5 percent by 2050 AD. Relatively well off people surrounded by a very large impoverished population does bear the potential for serious social unrests.


Population and food production.

Although most public discourses seem to suggest that the growth of population will soon outrun our ability to produce food, there is no real evidence to support this claim. The rise in food output is infact outpacing the expansion of food production and the major contributors to the increasing food supply are India and China.
There has been however, a decrease in the per capita food production as well as net production of food in various regions of sub Saharan Africa most conspicuously, Somalia. The decrease in food production, can only be linked to political turmoil, civil war and climatic changes. Of course, many countries in the world—from Syria, Italy, and Sweden to Botswana in Africa—have had declining food production per head without experiencing hunger or starvation since their economies have prospered and grown; when the means are available, food can be easily bought in the international market if it is necessary to do so.
All attempts that try to convince us of the proximity of a catastrophe owing to fall in food production must be dismissed, outright.

Link between population, poverty and the slums.

Average income and food production per head can go on increasing even as the wretchedly deprived living conditions of particular sections of the population get worse, as they have in many parts of the third world. The living conditions of backward regions and deprived classes can decline even when a country's economic growth is very rapid. Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s provided an extreme example of this. The sense that there are just "too many people" around often arises from seeing the desperate lives of people in the large and rapidly growing urban slums in poor countries, sobering reminders that we should not take too much comfort from aggregate statistics of economic progress.
The present situation in India is not different. The question here however is whether the deep poverty and the growth of slums that we observe in the third world derive directly from population growth.
To once again quote Amartya Sen, “To see in population growth the main reason for the growth of overcrowded and very poor slums in large cities, for example, is not empirically convincing. It does not help to explain why the slums of Calcutta and Bombay have grown worse at a faster rate than those of Karachi and Islamabad (India's population growth rate is 2.1 percent per year, Pakistan's 3.1), or why Jakarta has deteriorated faster than Ankara or Istanbul (Indonesian population growth is 1.8 percent, Turkey's 2.3), or why the slums of Mexico City have become worse more rapidly than those of San José (Mexico's population growth rate is 2.0, Costa Rica's 2.8), or why Harlem can seem more and more deprived when compared with the poorer districts of Singapore (US population growth rate is 1.0, Singapore's is 1.8). Many causal factors affect the degree of deprivation in particular parts of a country—rural as well as urban—and to try to see them all as resulting from overpopulation is the negation of social analysis.”
This is not to deny that population growth may well have an effect on deprivation, but only to insist that any investigation of the effects of population growth must be part of the analysis of economic and political processes, including the effects of other variables. It is the isolationist view of population growth that should be rejected. Population growth is not the root cause rather the catalyst in this situation.

Population and the environment.

The pressure exerted by an increasing population on the raw materials of the earth could be a good deal more serious than the stress put on food production as proposed by Malthus. If the environment is tapped beyond its serving capacity, then it will adversely affect the standard of living of the population. In the dissection of this argument it is interesting to note that the per-capita consumption of food, fuel, and other goods by people in third world countries is often relatively low; consequently the impact of population growth in these countries is not, in relative terms, so damaging to the global environment. But it remains true, that one additional American typically has a larger negative impact on the ozone layer, global warmth, and other elements of the earth's environment than dozens of Indians put together.


The Indian context

The causes for population explosion in India have been widely discussed and the following general deductions, arrived at

Universal marriages and universal motherhood: The 1981 census reveals that, of all the women in the 40-44 age group those who have never married are only 0.55% of the total. Marriage in our society is universal and is considered a religious and sacred duty. The 1981 census also reveals that only 6.1% of all the women above the age of 50 have had no live births . Motherhood too is universal.

Early marriages: India is a tropical country and girls reach puberty at an early age owing to the hot climate, thus making child marriages prevalent.

Joint family system: the joint family system gives security to idle hands and numbers are allowed to multiply without any concern for the supporting conditions.

Poverty: it has been universally acknowledged that the weaker sections of the population tend to increase their number as they feel that more children would imply more hands to work.

Fatalism and orthodoxy: family planning and birth control measures have proved to be ineffective as we live in a largely conservative society. The excesses during the emergency era have also added to the people’s apprehensions regarding birth control measures.

The enormity of the problem of demographic growth has not created much alarm as it does not have the same immediacy as a tsunami or a terror attack. There are certain striking elements that come to light when Indian population growth patterns are analyzed.
The most significant being the sharp distinction between the backward states and the others in containing the rising population.
The southern states, especially Kerala and Tamil Nadu have almost achieved replacement levels( levels where there is not much difference between the birth rate and the death rate, thus stabilizing the population.) but at the other extreme is a region that comprises Bihar, Chhattisgarh, eastern Uttar Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan where the growth is virtually out of control. More than 53% of the population in these states has no access to family planning methods like condoms or contraceptives.
The problem of migration that was discussed earlier, again surfaces. Once the population in the southern states stabilizes, there will be a great influx of job seekers to the south. This again bears the potential for severe social unrest. In the past we have witnessed the surfacing of the ‘sons of the soil’ theory in Maharashtra and assam. The pattern of growth in this country suggests the fragmentation of this nation into the developed and the underdeveloped half which is bound to have serious consequences of dissent and unrest unless rectified.

Combating the problem.

The French mathematician and thinker Condorcet identified two approaches to combat the population crisis
(1) developing new technology and new behavior patterns that would waste little and pollute less, and
(2) fostering social and economic changes that would gradually bring down the growth rate of population.

Women’s power:

The drudgery of a life of constant child bearing and rearing faced by third world women is on account on the prevalence of illiteracy and lack of education among women. A better educated population has more chances of engaging in discussions that concern the kind of life we have reason to live .Womens empowerment has enabled them to take decisions such as the size of the family and also family planning measures. In country after country the birth rate has come down with more female education, the reduction of mortality rates, the expansion of economic means and security, and greater public discussion of ways of living.

Kerala’s example:

China has adopted a very stringent “over ride” policy of family planning to achieve population stability. The rationality and inevitability of such coercive methods have been questioned by many economists and social scientists. It would be interesting to compare china’s policies with that of Kerala.

The roots of Kerala's success are to be found in the kinds of social progress Condorcet hoped for, including among others, a high female literacy rate (86 percent, which is substantially higher than China's 68 percent). The rural literacy rate is in fact higher in Kerala—for women as well as men—than in every single province in China. Male and female life expectancies at birth in China are respectively 67 and 71 years; the provisional 1991 figures for men and women in Kerala are 71 and 74 years. Women have been active in Kerala's economic and political life for a long time. A high proportion do skilled and semi-skilled work and a large number have taken part in educational movements. It is perhaps of symbolic importance that the first public pronouncement of the need for widespread elementary education in any part of India was made in 1817 by Rani Gouri Parvathi Bai, the young queen of the princely state of Travancore, which makes up a substantial part of modern Kerala. For a long time public discussions in Kerala have centered on women's rights and the undesirability of couples marrying when very young. This political process has been voluntary and collaborative, rather than coercive, and the adverse reactions that have been observed in China, such as infant mortality, have not occurred in Kerala. Kerala's low fertility rate has been achieved along with an infant mortality rate of 16.5 per 1,000 live births (17 for boys and 16 for girls), compared with China's 31 (28 for boys and 33 for girls). And as a result of greater gender equality in Kerala, women have not suffered from higher mortality rates than men in Kerala, as they have in the rest of India and in China. Even the ratio of females to males in the total population in Kerala (above 1.03) is quite close to that of the current ratios in Europe and America (reflecting the usual pattern of lower female mortality whenever women and men receive similar care). By contrast, the average female to male ratio in China is 0.94 and in India as a whole 0.93. Anyone drawn to the Chinese experience of compulsory birth control must take note of these facts.
The temptation to use the "override" approach arises at least partly from impatience with the allegedly slow process of fertility reduction through collaborative, rather than coercive, attempts. Yet Kerala's birth rate has fallen from 44 per 1,000 in the 1950s to 18 by 1991—not a sluggish decline. Nor is Kerala unique in this respect. Other societies, such as those of Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Thailand, which have relied on expanding education and reducing mortality rates—instead of on coercion—have also achieved sharp declines in fertility and birth rates.
It is also interesting to compare the time required for reducing fertility in China with that in the two states in India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which have done most to encourage voluntary and collaborative reduction in birth rates (even though Tamil Nadu is well behind Kerala in each respect). Despite China's one-child policy and other coercive measures, its fertility rate seems to have fallen much less sharply than those of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The "override" view is very hard to defend on the basis of the Chinese experience, the only systematic and sustained attempt to impose such a policy that has so far been made.
It is time for our planners to recognise the enormity of this disaster, and to put together a group that can prepare a plan to involve all sections of society in preventing this from happening. In the target areas, concentrated unremitting work is needed to reverse or at least to slow the explosive growth rate. It only needs some organised work by persons within the administrative system. If it can be sustained with every section of the people actively involved, perhaps the generations to come can cope with the enormous population of India in the 2050s.
THE END

Global Terrorism

(An essay on terror hit regions across the globe)

Terrorism refers to a strategy of using violence, or threat of violence targeted against non-combatants to generate fear, cause disruption, and ultimately, to bring about compliance with specific political, religious, ideological, and personal demands.[1] The targets of terrorist attacks typically are not the individuals who are killed, injured, or taken hostage, but rather the societies to which these individuals belong. Terrorism is a type of unconventional warfare designed to weaken or supplant existing political landscapes through capitulation or acquiescence, as opposed to subversion or direct military action. The broader influence of terrorism in the modern world is often attributed to the dramatic focus of mass media in amplifying feelings of intense fear and anger.
1. INDIAN CONTEXT
1.1 Kashmir
India has been a victim of cross border terrorism for decades now. After independence, princely states were given the freedom to decide whether to join the Indian union or not. The Maharaja of Kashmir dilly-dallied on the issue and it was only when troops from
Pakistan came marching into the valley that he implored to the Indian union for help. Kashmir was annexed by India on October 10th 1947. What followed was an invasion of the region by Pakistan and the greatest flaw in diplomatic history from the Indian side. While Prime Minister Nehru could have taken the prudent decision to push back the invaders back to their own soil, he took the impractical and over idealistic step to approach the UN. With support from the western powers that didn’t want Pakistan swaying to the Soviet block (refer cold war) Pakistan succeeded in gaining control of one-third of the Kashmir valley. The land of seductive beauty thus plummeted to the status of the valley of death.
The last decade of the previous millennium – which contained the most violent 100 years of human history (according to Pope John Paul Marpappa)-witnessed the oozing of terror into the heart of the Indian mainland. There have been bombings in Mumbai (over 10 times in as many years), attack on the Akshardham temple (Gujarat), hijacking of the Indian airlines flight in Kandahar and even an attack on the citadel of the world’s largest democracy ‘the Indian Parliament’.
Of all the Indian territories Mumbai has been the worst hit.

1.2 WHY MUMBAI?
The isles of Bom Bahia (the good bay) were given to Prince Charles II when he entered into a matrimonial alliance with Princess Catherine de Braganza of Portugal. Reclaimed from the sea, these would become the modern metropolis of Bombay. Renamed Mumbai after the stone goddess Mumbadevi, the city represents the marriage of affluence with abject poverty where India in all its diversity converges.
Mumbai is a potpourri of ethnic, linguistic and religious sub cultures and economically it represents India’s capital of ‘capital’. Which could be an explanation as to why it has been a popular target for terror groups having their base in Indian and foreign soil. The communal element has been their trump card. Terrorist organizations have always aimed at unleashing riots between the country’s various religious groups. After the failure at Akshardham , Bombay was the next attempt.
Also being India’s Hollywood and Wall Street merged into one with bustling activity and housing two stock markets (NSE and BSE), an attack on Mumbai would cripple the country’s economy, it must have been felt.
But what we saw was a manifestation of the indomitable and indestructible Indian heart as Mumbaikars resisted the attacks bravely and life returned to near normalcy by the next day.

1.3 NAXALISM
Naxalism has it’s origins from the Sino-soviet split in the communist party. It began as a movement in the west Bengal peasant area of naxalbari in 1967 with an uprising headed by Charu Majumdar. Majumdar was a great admirer of Mao Tse Tung and drew inspiration from the long march of Mao during the Chinese revolution. The movement called for an all out militant war against the government and the upper class of land owners and businessmen whom they held responsible for the peasant plight.
The faction broke away from the communist party of India and formed the all India co-ordination committee of communist revolutionaries that is today known as the Communist Party of India (Marxist- Leninist).
After the death of Majumdar, the party broke into many fractions.
Today Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand are the states worst affected by the naxal menace.

1.4 Attitude of the International community to the Indian plight.
It is nothing but a matter of irony that it took the west, who claim to be the god fathers of democracy world wide, an attack on their mainland (World trade centre attack – September 11, 2001), to recognize the ugly face of Pak sponsored terrorism. It took an other two attacks on the London suburbs (July 7th and 21st 2005) for the great powers to declare as terrorists ,organizations such as the lashkar e toiyyaba that operate from Pakistan’s soil. These were in fact organizations, against whose acts of barbarism, India had been trying to draw world attention for many years.

2. ETHNIC CONFLICT IN SRILANKA
The fact that a country’s well being and progress is as much dependent on its external stability as its internal stability is evident from the conditions of all world nations. The United States and Canada for example have an open border as does the European Union. In striking contrast is the situation in the Indian sub continent having three nuclear powers (India, china, and Pakistan), each nation spending millions of dollars on the deployment of troops across its borders?
The ethnic conflict in Srilanka is no exception. The civil war there which can be traced to the black July events of 1983, spilled into the Indian heartland in 1992 when PM Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by LTTE rebels.
2.1 History
Since medieval times, Srilanka has had two ethnic groups namely the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils. The former being natives and the latter, people of Tamil origin. Tamils came to settle in Srilanka following the invasions by various kings from the Indian mainland. Again many Tamils were exported from India to work in the island’s tea plantations under British colonial rule. Even after many years of cultural and commercial interactions the two groups were geographically and linguistically stratified.
The British policy of divide and rule favored the Tamils as is evident from the fact that they occupied the brute majority of posts in the civil services, medicine etc. The bitterness induced by years of favoritism towards the Tamils induced the Sinhalese to counter act with the ‘Sinhala only act’ of 1956 (post independent Srilanka) that declared Sinhalese as the official language and restricted government jobs to Sinhalese speakers and even altered university admission policies in favor of the sect.
The Tamils retaliated politically by advocating a ‘Tamil Eelam’ under the banner of the Tamil union liberation front. The group was later banned from Parliament.

2.2 IMMEDIATE CAUSE (Black July)
July 23rd 1983, marked the commencement of full fledged armed struggle between the Sinhalese and Tamil groups.
Tamils who alleged the rape of a doctor of Tamil origin by Sinhalese soldiers retaliated by attacking army officials in Jaffna. Thirteen soldiers were killed in the riots. Sporadic violence, which has been recorded as one of the worst massacres in the history of the subcontinent, ensued. The riots were well organized as women were raped, motor vehicles set alight and occurrences as uncivilized as the bombing of Jaffna with human excrement by the srilankan air force. The situation rose to such a level that the Dravidian movements of Tamil nadu, India found it impossible to stay aloof.
Ultimately it was Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that asked the Srilankan government to end the mayhem.
Srilanka is today, a nation devastated by years of civil war. Recent developments include the involvement of the Norwegian government in the peace talks and the calling of cease fire from both sides following the same.
The LTTE is the most organized terrorist group in the world having its own army, navy and air force.
3 .0 THE WORLD’S GREATEST HOTSPOT: JERUSALEM
The city of Jerusalem is the source of three great world religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Important to the Jews who claim it to be the Holy land given to them by the Jehovah (God), sacred to the Christians as it is the birth place of Christ and it also houses the third holiest shrine of the Moslems ‘the Al-aqsa mosque’.
The beginnings of the dispute over Jerusalem dates back to 40 AD. When the roman Caesar invaded the city and destroyed the temple of Solomon (sacred to the Jews). Jews were then exiled from their land and had lived as refugees across the globe till 1945.
There have been great atrocities against them in the times of Stalin and more popularly under Hitler (The holocaust).
In the latter half of the last century Jews began to emerge as the most influential people in the world. They made their mark especially as business tycoons and men of science (Einstein, Freud, Oppenheimer to name a few) exerting enormous influence on the elite political class in Europe and the United states.

The demand for an independent state of Israel with Jerusalem as its capital was first raised by the Zionists which had as its members towering personalities such as Albert Einstein. Even before the claims of the Zionists, there was an exodus of Jews into the ‘Promised Land’ from across the world where they were being persecuted. This exodus had sparked tensions between the settlers and Arabs.
Even in the days of the Ottoman empire, rich Jews purchased land from the ottomans and settled there.
The Jews laid claim to their ancestral land from which they were expelled in 40AD and the need for a kingdom for the Jews.
World sympathy following the holocaust was with them and the United Nations in a historic resolution with all the support from the US and Great Britain allocated a homeland for the Jews in the British colony of Palestine in 1948 with David Ben Gurion as the first president.
An Arab Israeli war followed and Israel occupied The Golan heights from Syria, Gaza and west bank and a part of Jerusalem from Palestine and also parts of Lebanon.
The conflict continues till date.
The main Terrorist groups operating in the region are Hezbollah and Hamas.

4.0 AFGHANISTAN AND THE AL-QAEDA
The emergence of the fundamentalist Sunni group Al-Qaeda ( the foundation) can be traced to 1979 when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in response to the call from the then President, Hafizullah Amin, to aid in curbing an armed rebellion by the tribals of the country.
The Soviet Union had close ties with the region after the pro Marxist People’s democratic party of Afghanistan assumed power there. The soviet involvement in the region was described as an invasion by the west. As in the words of US President Jimmy Carter “This is the greatest threat to world peace since WW2”
It took a longer while for us to realize that US involvement in Afghanistan had begun 6 months prior to the soviet deployment as revealed in “From the shadows” by Robert Gates, former director of the CIA. President Carter had authorized the Intelligence Agency to conduct covert operations in Afghanistan.
The entry of soviet troops into the region was depicted as an attack against Islam by the west. Under the pretext of driving the ungodly communists out, the US were able to gain military bases in various parts of the Gulf including Saudi Arabia. Trained mujahideens funded by American capital were armed and sent to Afghanistan.

Osama Bin Laden, a multi millionaire business man in the construction industry in Saudi, was inspired by the resistance of the Islamic world against the Soviet ‘invasion’. Though he had strong reservations against the presence of American troops in the sacred land, he was assured by the Saudi royals that their presence would cease to exist once Afghanistan was liberated.
Soviet troops left Afghan in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev assumed office as the president of the USSR. The US bases in the gulf however continued to function.
The presence of unislamic elements in Saudi was unacceptable to the highly influential Bin Laden who called for their immediate expulsion. The Saudi royalty under American pressure did not oblige.
The mujahideens, bred by American capital thus transformed into a modern era Frankenstein that boomeranged on American dreams to contain soviet communism.
American presence in the Middle East was their main cause of embitterment.

5.0 RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM

5.1 CHRISTIAN
5.1.1 In India the Nagaland rebels and the national liberation front of tripura are active terrorist groups that seek freedom of the two states from the motherland claiming they are Christian majority areas. These groups also seek to annex parts of neighboring Burma with a similar religious divide.

5.1.2 The lord’s resistance army. (Uganda)

This group has been responsible for Africa’s greatest running conflict. They have the proclaimed aim of overthrowing the Ugandan government to establish a state based on the Ten Commandments.
The LRA has been responsible for murder, rape, use of child soldiers, mutilation and abduction of innocent civilians.

5.1.3 God’s Army

God’s army is a resistance group that opposes the Buddhist militia of Myanmar and fighting for a homeland based on Christian or biblical ideals.
The group has been responsible for the seizure of the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok, Thailand in 2000.

5.2 HINDU
5.2.1 RSS
The Rashtriya Swayam sevak sangh has been described by ‘the economist’ as the largest non communist organization in the world having 1.3 million members. It was banned in India thrice. After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, during the emergency (1975) and following the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992.
It was founded in 1925 by K B Hedgewar.the organization preaches cultural nationalism.

5.2.2 SHIV SENA
Founded by Bal Thakrae in 1965. the name literally means the army of Shiva. When Bombay became a part of maharashtra a large number of the jobs in industries were occupied by non marathis. The growing sense of marginalization among the natives was monopolized by the shiv sena. In the early 70s when an influx of south Indians into the region began. They politicized the occurrence with slogans such as lungi hatao, pungi bajao.


6. RECENT EVENTS
6.1 THE HEATHROW TERROR PLOT
On august 10th 2006, the world was once again woken up to realize the terrorist threat is still alive as British police informed us of a foiled plot to bomb and destroy trans Atlantic flights to the US from Heathrow, Britain. The plot, had it been successful, would have caused loss of life on an unprecedented scale.
From the preliminary information available we realize that even the best security measures in the world can be infiltrated and we are taken aback by the extent of technological know how that the terrorists have amassed.(liquid explosives hidden in cases resembling laptops and compact enough to be carried in handbags.) This, beyond doubt, could not have been possible unless these fanatics were aided by governments.
While Europe and America were busy applauding the Pakistan governments involvement in foiling the plot, no one cared to notice the Karachi based ‘The herald’s’ report that the inter services intelligence of the Pak government provide the lashkar-e-taiba and Jaish-a-mohammad 2 to 3 million rupees every year for its operations in the Indian region alone.
The west meanwhile, have found an other reason in support of their war on terrorism. The fact remains that unless the hand of Pakistan is recognized, attempts to disarm terrorists groups will remain unsuccessful.

6.2 VIOLENCE IN SRILANKA
On august14th 2006, four soldiers and three civilians were killed by an attack in Colombo by LTTE Rebels. The killed soldiers were a part of the security wing of Pakistan high commissioner Basheer Wali Mohammed. Though it is not known whether it was the commissioner who was the target of the attack, motives abound.
Mr. Basheer was appointed by the Musharraf regime and has been credited for the cementing of Pak-Srilanka relations especially in the defense sector. It is possible that this was a message from the LTTE telling Pakistan to ‘take your hands off’ the ethnic conflict and not to help the Colombo military. This is the first time that a diplomat was made the target of an attack in the Indian sub-continent and the international community was quick to express their alarm and revulsion.
CONCLUSION
The above mentioned groups only represent the tip of the iceberg. Most regions of the world are today directly or indirectly hit by terrorism.
Since it has a global nature its elimination too will have to take place at the global level.
Nations must cooperate and share technical know how as well as jointly take part in operations to combat the menace.
Terrorist groups in one region must not be given asylum in other parts of the world and assets of these criminals against humanity must be freezed simultaneously all over the world.
It has also become high time that the west stop taking double standards. While on the one hand supporting the state sponsored terrorism of Israel and on the other hand waging war against sovereign nations like Iraq.
- THE END

The Meaning of Life

(In a universe of chaos and uncertainty)


The search for a comprehensive meaning to life – our purpose here, where, how and why the universe began, its fate, our future etc – is not new to mankind. It has been, perhaps, the most persistent of all the intellectual adventures in man’s eventful history.
The adventure has seen many deviations and pitfalls, vehement clashes against dogma and the subsequent sciences degrading to dogma in the hands of vested interests.

The search for a meaning to life or the quest for a ‘theory of everything’ is about finding a theory that describes in a nutshell, all the phenomenon that we observe. A mother theory, of which all other theories are merely corollaries. Only such a hypothesis appears to bear the potential, to shed light on why we are here. Why it is that the universe appears to be so perfectly designed to accommodate us. The theory- if at all it exists- must be able to unify the fundamental forces of nature, predict the number of particles in the universe and unify them into a single family, it must be able to specify the boundary conditions of the universe –the instant of creation; it must explain why the universe is, the way it is. Further, the theory while allowing for enormous complexity must be simple. At the end of it all we must be able to wonder ‘How could it have been otherwise? How could we not have comprehended it for so long?’
The search for such a comprehensive theory is like trying to infer the rules of a board game, the rule book for which is missing. We and everything in the universe are obeying the very laws that we attempt to discover.

The fact that science has been descending in complexity over the ages promises hope that a theory of everything can be discovered. We have been discovering over the centuries that nature is infact, less complicated than it appears to be. Studies in mechanics, thermodynamics and acoustics, for example, converged after the postulation of Newton’s laws as it became evident that sound waves and other forms of energy are governed by the same laws of motion.
Like wise all the matter that we observe in the universe today can be classified as belonging to either the class of bosons or fermions. A grand unified theory that shall unite these two classes of particles into a single one and also unite the four fundamental forces of nature – gravity, the weak force, strong force, and electromagnetic force- into a super force are being sought.

The giant mathematician Laplace once boasted, that given the velocity of any moving body he could predict its position at any other instant of time. On hearing Laplace’s claim, the French emperor Napoleon asked,
“Where does God fit into this picture”, to which the former replied, “Sir, I did not find the need for such a hypothesis.”
The belief in a static and deterministic universe pervaded over human psyche for many centuries and influenced the course of our intellectual evolution. The belief that we live in a completely deterministic world- that the state of the universe at any instant can be predicted given it’s conditions at a previous instant- came to be called ‘scientific determinism’.
The deterministic view of life implied that our future could be predicted, at least in principle. While it is seemingly evident that the position of a particle can be predicted by Newtonian mechanics, could scientific laws empower us to determine something like ‘who would be our next president?’ Determinism answers in the affirmative, it is very much predefined. But the complexities of the equations are so severe that we are too crippled to solve them and further they have an inherent property called chaos.


The tables were overturned against scientific determinism in the wake of the discovery of the uncertainty principle proposed by Werner Heisenberg. That the position and velocity (or momentum) of a particle cannot be simultaneously determined with absolute precision- or in other words, that the position of a particle is always uncertain- was a concept that stood against centuries of scientific development.
In an election with two candidates and one post, the voters can cast their votes in favor of any one of the two which again is a case of uncertainty. But the uncertainty arises from the fact that we are ignorant of the pattern of voting. If one were to hide cameras in the polling booth, the outcome then won’t be uncertain.
The uncertainty as described in the ‘uncertainty Principle’ is not likewise. Scientists have devised ingenious ways to sneak up on particles and yet attempts to determine simultaneously, their position and velocity have proved futile. Meaning, these parameters not just appear to be uncertain, they really are uncertain. The prediction of the future then becomes ‘not difficult but impossible’, in principle. No matter how powerful a super computer we build, if we input uncertain and lousy data in, we will get lousy data as the output.

The uncertainty principle that gave birth to quantum mechanics and the two theories of relativity are the two giant intellectual achievements of the 20th century.
Relativity showed that our hitherto notions of space and time were infatuations and that we live in a four dimensional world, not the three dimensional one as it appears to be. Space and time after relativity could no longer be considered as separate entities but a single one called space-time. Time is not absolute but married to space to give a single entity called ‘space-time’.
A lesser discussed implication of relativity was that it predicted an expanding universe. Yet, the belief in a static universe was so strong that Einstein introduced a cosmological constant in the equations to nullify the expansion. A constant he later described as the greatest blunder of his life.
It was not until Hubble’s observation of a Red shift in light, coming from distant galaxies that we began to conceive that the universe is expanding. The Red shift implied that distant galaxies are receding from us from which we can logically conclude – by reversing the direction of time- that all galaxies were lumped together at some point in the history of the universe. All the matter in the universe condensed to a point of infinite density and zero volume; what mathematicians call a singularity.

An expanding universe, a big bang, singularities, uncertainty, chaos , disorder, not very optimistic terms, and where does that leave us?
Are we living in a universe where we cannot even judge whether something before us is real or virtual; dead or alive?
Take the example of Schrödinger's cat, a famous thought experiment.
Consider a cat in a closed box. To kill it, a gun is set within the box which will be triggered only if a certain radioactive nucleus will disintegrate, the probability of which happening is 0.5.
If the box is not opened and we try to predict, what can we say of the state of the cat- is it dead or alive? The probability of each event occurring is 50%.
The cat is infact both dead and alive!

This is what quantum mechanics teaches us of life. That whatever occurs does so, only as a matter of chance. This physical meaning of quantum mechanics was initially fiercely contended on the reasoning that something or someone cannot be half alive and half dead no more than a woman can be half pregnant. Each event has a number of histories adding up to give the event we observe. This is what has come to be termed as ‘The sum of Histories’ method. Most of the histories cancel out, but in some cases as that of the Schrödinger’s cat, the histories add up to make the uncertainty conspicuous.



Frustrated with the bizarre consequences of quantum mechanics, Einstein in vehement opposition to it declared, “God does not, play dice with the universe.” Einstein proposed the hidden variable theory to make the uncertainty principle consistent with physics. But experiments conducted by the British physicist John Bell produced results inconsistent with hidden variables.

The quantum mechanical model of life and the universe was initially put forth by Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac and Heisenberg. Here the position and velocity of particles are represented by wave functions, the magnitude of which represents the probability of finding the particle in that position and the rate of variation of the wave equation gives the velocity of the particle. Therefore given the wave equation at one point of time the wave equation of the particle at a later time can be determined. There is still an element of determinism in this, as one combination of position and velocity is still determinate.
More recent developments in physics have shattered this hope too, for advocates of determinism, as we now know that gravity wraps space-time to extreme levels that there are dimensions of the universe we cannot observe. The last nail on the coffin of determinism came from the proposition of the second law of black hole dynamics which predicted that black holes emit radiations now called Hawking radiations. This was like a correction to the first law which affirmed that the event horizon or the boundary of a black hole cannot decrease. The event horizon is infact a measure of the entropy of the black hole which again is a measure of its mass.
During the postulation of the first law it was believed that the mass and entropy of the black hole cannot decrease as nothing comes out of the black hole. The second law showed that it need not always be so. Black holes do emit radiations at a steady rate. Particles and anti particles emerge from the vacuum fluctuations of space, one of which can enter into a black hole and the other forsaken into empty space. To preserve the law of conservation of energy, one of the particles must possess positive and the other negative energy, equal in magnitude. The negative energy particle - or the virtual particle as it is called- falling into the black hole decreases it’s mass and energy, causing its event horizon to decrease. The real particle on the other hand appears to be radiated by the black hole. What comes out of the black hole therefore is always the same, immaterial of what goes into it. There is no way, even in principle, to determine what exactly falls into the black hole in this case, as the particle is virtual. While in the Schrödinger’s equations one combination of speed and position can be determined, the same in the case of black holes would amount to predicting the nature of a particle – antiparticle pair. It is impossible to determine the nature of the virtual particle and hence the real particle radiated by the black hole too must have an indeterminate nature because the same is dependent on the virtual particle.

Hence our hopes, if any, of an orderly, predictable, controllable and determinate world finally breaks down. To quote Stephen Hawking, “Not only does God play dice with the universe, he is an inveterate gambler too, throwing the dice in places where we cannot see it.”

Does that leave us in a world where we can affirm that our lives are not governed by the position of the stars, where fate is a fad and a life which we can mould by our sheer hard work, determination and will? The future after all, is not predefined.
We should think not, because the future being unpredictable and not pre decided, assures a life where we cannot predict the outcome for any given inputs. There is no one-to-one correspondence between any set of given inputs and outputs. A life of randomness, a world of chaos.

Like biologists describe how small random variations can affect large ecosystems in an unpredictable fashion, all non-linear dynamic systems like the world we live in are chaotic.
Chaotic systems are ones whose outcomes are random. They are extremely sensitive to initial conditions and have an exponential error dissipation which is the cause of their randomness.
Each point in the initial conditions of such a system is arbitrarily closely approximated by other points each of which have a significantly different future trajectory. This sensitivity to initial conditions is called the butterfly effect.
The term butterfly effect was first coined by Edward Lorenz in a paper he presented to the American society for the advancement of science. The paper quite entertainingly proved that a ‘butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can change the weather in Washington DC’. The flapping of the wings represent a small change in the initial conditions which cause a chain of events leading to large scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory leading to a final output, would have been different.

No matter how sincerely we may work to achieve a particular goal, like preparing for a university exam, the chaotic nature of the system shall ensure that the outcome is unpredictable for apparently no other reason than chaos!!.

Yet another dimension to the meaning of life, is regarding the origin of the universe, the development of intelligent life on earth as well as the fate of the universe.
Life can be defined as any ordered system that can constantly sustain, grow and reproduce itself. The second law of thermodynamics maintains that all systems pass from a state of order to disorder and consequently the total entropy of the universe should increase. This is true of the total entropy of the universe. The entropy of a system can however decrease, if it is accompanied by a corresponding increase in the entropy of its surroundings. And this is what happens in a living being. Biological beings have a set of instructions embedded in them that describe how to sustain itself called the genes and an accompanying process of metabolism that carries out these instructions.

But is there anything biological about life? A computer virus for example, can make copies of itself in the memory of a computer and also spread itself. A function similar to biological viruses. They should very much count as life. But what does it speak of man’s nature that the only form of life that we have created is something destructive?

The evidence that we possess, that the universe began in a big bang around 20 million years ago is substantial. Nothing more than a logical deduction of Hubble’s observations. At the moment of the big bang all the matter in the present universe was lumped together into a region of infinite density and zero volume. A singularity. This is a point where all physical laws break down. It becomes impossible for us then, to decide how the universe began because there simply are no laws that we can make use of at the singularity. Even the total mass that was present in the singularity need not be present in the present universe as the law of conservation of mass does not hold at the moment of the big bang. General relativity hence claimed that science would never discover how the universe began.
The classical theories of physics therefore laid open the possibility for a God. That for the universe to evolve in the manner in which it actually did, there would have to be something external to the universe to decide upon how the universe and life began. This need for God in the classical approach was the reason why religious leaders were quick to accept the big bang and singularity.

The classical approach of general relativity however fails at the level of the atom or at small distances as it does not take into account the uncertainty principle. The quantum mechanical approach, the more refined one, however has proved that the universe is a self contained system that does not require an external agency to decide the state of affairs here. Quantum mechanics introduces the concept of imaginary time. (If real time can be represented by the x- axis of a graph, with the positive direction marking the future and the negative direction the past, then imaginary time lies on the perpendicular y- axis). The three directions in space and imaginary time constitute what is called Euclidean space-time.
The no boundary proposal of quantum mechanics proposes that Euclidean space is finite in extent but has no boundaries. Much like the surface of the earth which is finite but has no boundaries. If it had one, we would fall off the surface. The no boundary proposal implies that there would be no singularities in the Euclidean space. Thus there is no point where the laws of science breaks down in imaginary time and the beginnings of the universe could still be pondered over. Knowing the state of the universe in imaginary time makes it possible to predict the state of the universe in real time. Singularities and the big bang would still occur in real time but only as determined by imaginary time. The no boundary proposal henceforth establishes that the universe is a self contained system. The way the universe began in real time would be determined by the state of the universe in imaginary time. The universe began as a single point, an ordinary point of
space-time, not a singularity. The singularity occurs only in real time.

The subsequent expansion after the big bang was in such a manner that, it made life possible. All living things are based on chains of carbon atoms, (not the silicon or sand as implied by the biblical concept) carbon being the only element in the periodic table to possess the property of catenation.
The universe at the moment of the big bang was so hot that matter existed only in the form of protons and neutrons. A minute after the big bang the universe cooled to about a billion degrees centigrade to form the simplest hydrogen atoms. Which explains the abundance of hydrogen in the universe. Further cooling ensured that collisions of neutrons and protons formed helium.
Certain parts of the universe were cooler than others and they collapsed under the influence of gravity to form galaxies and stars. These stars were hotter than the sun and the resulting nuclear fusions ensured the formation of the heavier elements including carbon, oxygen, iron, nitrogen and phosphorous. The cooling of these stars enabled the bonding of these atoms in various patterns to form various molecules, that included amino acids and proteins.
The formation of the DNA, was a significant step in the evolution of life. The remarkable property of DNA is that it is self replicating. The nucleic acids present in the DNA chains can unwind and combine with a similar strand of nucleic acids to form two DNA molecules. This was enough for the earliest forms of life: the viruses. (Some scientists do not classify viruses as living beings, rather place them on the border line dividing the living and the non-living world)
The biological processes of evolution and natural selection ensured the arrival of multicellular organisms and later the fishes, reptiles and the mammals. But in the case of humans, evolution entered a critical stage when we developed the ability to encode information in the form of language, particularly written language.
This marked the beginning of an era where information could be handed down from generation to generation externally in the form of books and not just through the genes. Infact, the amount of information that has been encoded in books is billions of times larger than in the human DNA. The human DNA has around 30,000 genes and a good number of them are redundant or inactive genes. It has been estimated that the human genome records 100 million bits of information, in contrast a university library records about
1 trillion bits of information.
Not only can information be recorded externally, the ability to bring about changes in the information stored in books is of great significance. The information stored in genes on the other hand is quite rigid. We share 99% of our genes with apes, 85% with dogs and 50% with fruit flies. The time that was taken for a 1% change in genes from apes to humans took several million years. The speed at which we can alter the information in books is quite evidently, billion of times faster than in the DNA.
This perhaps explains why there has been no recordable change in the human DNA in the last ten thousand years of human history. The need for evolution through genes does not exist anymore.


This puts us in a very awkward situation. The brain, which is our tool to process this information has evolved only as per the Darwinian time-scale. Thus we are only better off than our cave men ancestors in the fact that we possess information in the form of books externally. The aggressive instincts of cave men such as subjugating or killing other men, taking their women and food, jealousy, anger, hatred, ambition etc are still conspicuous in us. We are far more ahead in terms of the knowledge we possess than what Darwinian evolution permits us to be. We will then have to place our hopes on genetic engineering and other ways to alter the human genome to make us more intelligent and to control our aggressive instincts. The dangers to our survival such as the green house effect, over population etc are looming over us and we need to be more intelligent to counter them.
Let us hope that these forms of life will explore ways to inhabit new regions of the universe to prevent a catastrophic end to the human race. Let us also hope that the rich-poor divide does not serve as the
pre-requisite for who becomes more intelligent and who misses the bus. The redemption of the human race can be meaningful only if it is universal and comprehensive.

The search for a meaning to life thus stands incomplete. We can only sum up the discoveries till date and present the most updated views on the same. But the fact that science has been descending in complexity presents us with new hopes. The future and fate of the universe, though not in our hands, are nevertheless totally comprehensible.

The End

Examining Reservation

(An examination of the history, need and controversies regarding the implementation of reservation.)

Caste and caste based politics has been the bane of Indian society. The ruling and elitist classes in all societies have always found some means or the other to maintain the large part of the population as impoverished and suppressed. In the west it was race and colour of the skin, in India it was caste. Kerala was one of the worst affected states of caste sectarianism, evident from the words of Swami Vivekananda who described Kerala as a ‘lunatic asylum’ on seeing the plight of the untouchables.
The origin of the caste system and caste discrimination in India has its beginnings from the time of the Aryan invasion. The light skinned Aryans looked down upon the local dark skinned population. Organized religion in the hands of the affluent classes has always backed the need for this discrimination. The Vedas state that the Brahmins were born from the head, the kshatriyas from the hands, the Vaishyas from the thighs and the Shudras from the feet of the Brahma.
Christianity is also severely immersed in racism. Though the largest share of the Christian population comes from the Africas there has not been a single black pope in all these years. 70% of Indian Christians are Dalits but it is the rest 30% that control the church’s administrative reforms. Out of the 156 Bishops in the catholic community only 6 belong to the lower caste. The Nasrani Christians, who are the descendents of the first Brahmins to convert to Christianity, form the upper caste. They are found in Kerala and are the most influential among the Christian sects and the positions of bishops are to this day entitled to them.
Among the Muslims of India too, a strong caste system persists, the community being divided into two sects namely the Ashraff Muslims, who have a superior position owing to their foreign ancestry, and the Ajlaf Muslims who are of indigenous origin. Certain sections of the ulemas support the caste system and have provided it with religious sanctity. The Ajlaf Muslims have been discriminated against since the time of the Mughals and even denied their fundamental rights of education.
The upper classes denied all forms of knowledge to the untouchables; throwing them into a world of darkness and ignorance. The ‘Manu Smrithi’ dictates that a Shudra who even accidentally hears a Sanskrit word is to be punished by molten iron being poured into his ears.

It is in the light of this background, that ‘historically and educationally backward societies’ are identified and means of their upliftment, sought.







Nehru and Ambedkar on reservation.
The French thinker Andre Malraux once asked Nehru what the greatest difficulty he faced after independence was. With not a moment of hesitation the prime minister replied, ‘creating a just state by just means, perhaps too, creating a secular state in a religious country”. As a humanist and democrat Nehru had rooted for the system of positive reservation to be enacted in India in favor of the historically and socially oppressed societies .But like other members of the constituent assembly, that framed the constitution he wanted the same to be in force for only around a decade. During which time, he wanted the power of the state to be deployed to alleviate poverty, reduce illiteracy, accelerate economic reforms and bring about land reforms that would enable the underdogs of our society to access education, health services and government jobs.

Ambedkar, father of the Indian constitution and chairman of the constituent assembly; believed that reservations should be time bound and in the due course of time eliminate all caste prejudices so that the reservation system itself can be done away with.

The Kaka Kalekar committee, appointed by the Nehru government in 1955, recommended reservation of 15% of seats for SCs and 7.5% for STs in education and civil services which was embodied in the constitution

THE MANDAL COMMISION

The Janata party that assumed office in 1979 established a commission to determine the educationally and socially backward communities in the country under parliamentarian Bindeshwari Pratap Mandal. The aim of the commission was to redress caste discrimination prevalent in the country.
.The Mandal commission identified the backward classes in the country by adopting three types of indicators namely social, economic and educational.

SOCIAL: Castes where a large part of the population depend on manual labour, where the average age of marriage was less than 17 and the percentage of employed females was atleast 25% below the state average was classified as backward.

EDUCATIONAL: Those castes where the number of children attending or dropping out of school or never attended school was more than 25% below the state average were placed in the category of educationally backward communities.

ECONOMIC: Indicators such as households having assets less than 25% of the state average, access to drinking water and those taking consumption loans were used to determine the status of various castes.




Recommendations and findings
“Today we have performed the ritualistic immersion of a historic document”
-B.P. Mandal

The Mandal commission identified over 3700 castes as backward and recommended an additional 27% hike in reservations from the existing 22.5% which would take the total reservation seats to 49.5%. The commission also reported that 52% of the population was backward on the basis of the indicators it had chosen.
The proposed reservation was to be implemented in all public sector institutions, nationalized banks, and those private institutions that had acquired financial assistance from the government in any form and also all central and state universities and colleges. Although educational reforms did not fall in the preview of the commission it did recommend the following measures to increase literacy rates in the country.

1) An intensive time-bound programme for adult education should be launched in selected pockets with high concentration of OBC population;

2) Residential schools should be set up in these areas for backward class students to provide a climate specially conducive to serious studies. All facilities in these schools including board and lodging should be provided free of cost to attract students from poor and backward homes;

3) Separate hostels for OBC students with above facilities will have to be provided;

4) Vocational training was considered imperative

The commission also noted that there should be fundamental changes in the land tenure system and patterns of production through systematic land reforms.
The need to create institutions that would financially assist village artisans of the backward communities to set up their own small scale industries was also emphasized as a prerequisite if the recommendations were to have a permanent impact.

Shortcomings of the Mandal commission..
The Mandal commission appears to be a very amateur report as seemingly non venial errors have crept into the report.

1. The list of OBC categories prepared by the report is startling. An astonishing number of communities have been placed in this category.
For e.g. the community Urao, in West Bengal, has been listed as an OBC, but this community is already listed by the state government as ST under a slightly different name, Oraon. The report if implemented as such, will entitle Urao’s to double reservation.
And this is not the only community, where ambiguity in spelling has been overlooked. The commission has listed several communities like the Kherwar, Bhotia, Brijia etc as backward but these are already present in the ST list of the Bengal state govt under the names of Kharwar, Bhutia and Birijia respectively.
It startles the lay man, how a committee acting with constitutional authority could have overlooked such details.

2. Not only alternative spellings of STs have been listed as OBCs, but some communities have been listed twice in the list.

3. Various tribes living in the north east states have been listed in the OBC list of west Bengal. This can only be the act of an infertile brain and raises doubts as to whether any real survey was conducted at all.

4. Totally incomprehensible is the inclusion of the Taga tribe in the list of OBCs of Haryana. The Taga is actually a forward caste. With the general trend of Sanskritising caste names, the Tagas adopted a new name, Tyagis .In the remote areas of Haryana, the Tyagi’s are still called Taga’s and they have been included as OBCs.

5. The affluent Anglo-Indians have been listed in the OBC list of Kerala for seemingly no reason.

Protests against the implementation of the Mandal report.
It was the V.P. Singh ministry in1989 that decided to implement the Mandal commission report, a decade after it was completed. The decision sparked unprecedented protests across the country from the student community and disruption of normal functioning of all major universities and colleges ensued.
A scar in the face of the country’s history was the self immolation of Rajiv Goswami (1990), a student of Delhi University, protesting against the attempt to implement the Mandal report. Goswami’s action sparked a series of self immolations in protest against the reservation policy.
The protests ultimately led to the resignation of Prime Minister V.P. Singh.


RECENT CONTROVERSY

The Minister for human resource development Arjun Singh, on April 5, 2006 stated that his ministry intended to implement the Mandal commission report.
Apprehensions that the minister was playing caste politics prior to the state assembly elections in Kerala, W.Bengal, Tamilnadu, Pondicherry and Assam cannot be dismissed.
The implementation of the report would result in a 27.5% reservation of seats for OBCs in all government institutions and institutes of national importance like the IITs and IIMs.
It was immediately argued that this would work against merit.
Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh made his own suggestion that corporate leaders should take steps to blend their commitment to excellence with commitment to social equity.
The confederation of Indian industries (CII) and FICCI (federation of Indian chamber of commerce and industry) replied in the negative.



The left’s stand.
The left parties led by the CPI (M) were among the first to back the decision of the central government. Reinstating their long standing demand for the same.
Pointing out that the system of capitation fee prevalent in many institutions was infact a reservation for the rich, the left parties observed that merit became an issue of debate only when it came to providing historically oppressed communities, access to education.
Education has for long been afflicted by its perennial quest to balance the eternal triangle quality, quantity and equity.
As economist Prabhat Patnaik pointed out in a talk hosted at the Jawaharlal Nehru university, there is a tendency among the elite to arrogate powers to decide on the policy of discrimination rather than leaving it to the state. The support of the faculty of elite institutions shows that they value institutional merit – understood in terms of their global standing - rather than individual merit. A tendency to disconnect institutional merit from empathizing with ordinary people seems to be a characteristic of anti reservation agitations.

Youth for equality
The protests against Arjun Singh’s decision to implement reservation of seats to OBCs in central institutions was spearheaded by the ‘youth for equality’ movement. Following the ministers decision, the students of the university college of medical sciences, new Delhi met at the boys hostel there and formed the organization, christened ‘youth for equality’.
Soon they were joined by like minded friends from all over the country studying in IITs, IIMs and various colleges of art, medicine, law and science.
Within a month of its formation on April 5th, the movement had already organized a mass rally at the Ramila grounds in Delhi( the rally attracted a mass crowd and the speakers at the venue included former IITM director P.V.Indireshan, Navjot Singh Sidhu, and former secretary general of the lok sabha subhash kashyap). There was also an attempt at self immolation staged by a misguided youth, that attracted media persons. The layman was left to ponder: From where do they get their funds?
Common sense dictates only one possible answer, they are financed by the corporate sector, greedy for undue profits, for which they will not hesitate to ignore social interests
The involvement of the corporate sector became more and more obvious in the succeeding days as the website of the YFE announced the launching of their unit in the united states!!!. As the elitist , neo liberal, pro-globalisation character of the movement became more pronounced the role of corporate money no longer needed to be doubted.
The events of the anti reservation protests found wide media coverage.

Reaction from the IITs
The fact that the institutes of excellence in higher education such as the IITs and the medical colleges of Delhi served as the nerve centers of the anti-reservation protests speaks volumes of the biased mind set in their campuses. The IIT, faculty and students alike, have never had a good history of responding to social issues, let alone those concerning the student community in the rest of the country.
The nature of these protests indicates how the corporate powers have succeeded in making them one of the most right minded campuses in the country. A brute majority of the IITians find employment abroad or serve the interests of the private sector leaving the government little or nothing to benefit from the vast resources spent.
Besides, no real breakthroughs in our understanding of science has come from these institutes. They are more concerned with catering to the needs of the private businesses that fund them. (Small changes in the design that will help multinationals sell their products in the Indian market etc.)
The de linking of state funding from the research sector has accelerated a plummeting of the quality of research and discoveries that benefit humanity as a whole are now a rarity. Further, the standard of research in the pure sciences has assumed alarming devaluation as businesses fund only product base research.
The aloofness of the state to fund university level research is part of a wider agenda of capitalist domination of the third world in the globalization era.
As the Ambani –Birla commission observes “education is not a public good but a private good”
The early 20th century witnessed an explosion of scientific discoveries from men passionate about science and committed to nothing more than the cause of ‘the discovery of the underlying forces of nature’. They were funded and promoted by the state by offering them posts of professors and research scholars.
In the post globalization era however the need for the de linking of scientific research from the universities was felt by international businesses to allot more attention and resources to product based research and marketing methodologies. Since then and till date, activity in the scientific arena is dormant.
IIT and IIM administrators therefore owe more to corporate and multinational businesses than to the common man, thus denying the fruits of scientific knowledge and human progress to a vast population.

Forceful state interference in IITs / IIMs
The issue of allotting quotas in centers of excellence has been accompanied by the argument that forceful interference by the government is against the spirit of autonomy enjoyed by these institutions, vital for their growth.
A careful study of the history of the functioning of these institutions show that, it was not as much the government that interfered, as it was the IIT administration that forced the interference.
A splendid e.g. of this was the refusal of the IITs to increase their intake for nearly two decades and ultimately the government was forced to issue an order telling them to double the same in five years starting from 1990. Had our citadels of learning been more responsive to the needs of the society they would have embarked on a project to increase their intake by 2-3% every year rather than swallow the bitter pill forced on them.

It is illogical to argue that the state should give these institutes funds from the tax payers money and then close its eyes on how they function.




AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

The United States in the early 20th century was in no better a state than India of the 19th century as far as social reforms were concerned. Discrimination against the blacks were rampant and protected by law. Separate schooling for the whites and blacks was universal, seats in public transport, parks and enjoyment rides was fully reserved for the whites. The murder of Emmet Till, a black teenager in 1955, and the acts of the Ku Klux Klan speaks volumes of the extent of racism and provides one of the greatest examples of man’s atrocities against man.
It was only as late as in 1963 that the demands of the civil rights movement was recognized and life long dreams of philanthropists such as Martin Luther king junior
materialised. The cause of the blacks in the birthplace of modern democracy gained world wide sympathy. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech in Washington, as he addressed a mass rally pressing for an end to racial discrimination has been recorded as among the most moving speeches in history. “I have a dream” he spoke, “ that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood…….”
It was President Lyndon Johnson who in 1965 enacted an executive order(Civil Rights Legislation) bringing into force reservations for blacks in universities, colleges and in public/private sector jobs. A system known as affirmative action.

Affirmative action in education.
Affirmative action is a form of positive discrimination, the term coined by President Lyndon Johnson. It involves a policy of giving preferences to certain under represented groups. In the United States the most prominent action of affirmative action centers on admission to educational institutions. Race, ethnicity, gender, native language, geographical origin, social class, parental education, etc are the criterion. This system has found to be beneficial to African-Americans, women and Hispanics. Different universities have different norms for admissions. Studies on the most popular private universities reveal that they implement affirmative action by admitting students after giving additional points above their SAT scores. The number of additional points are based on the category they belong to.
Blacks having the lowest share in education are given an additional +230 SAT points, Hispanics +180 points and athletes +200 points. Asian Americans on the other hand, are given ‘-50’ points owing to their higher level of competence.

Outcome of affirmative action
Studies relating to affirmative action, have shown that blacks admitted under affirmative action have high dropout rates and rank at the bottom after one year of studies. A study by Richard S Sander suggests that there would be an increase by 8% in the number of black lawyers if affirmative action is ended in law schools, as this would encourage black students to enter less prestigious law schools where their standard is at par with that of their classmates. The study also pointed out that the graduation rates among blacks is a meager 41% compared to the 73% graduation rate of whites.
Affirmative action and class stratification.
The American experience tells us of the limits of identity politics and group rights. Affirmative action has been accompanied by the denial of the basic rights of education, health and jobs to millions of poor blacks and whites as well, benefiting only the elite category of the former. It can only be concluded that positive discrimination in favor of the blacks has created a substantial black middle class but it has also created a desperately poor and deeply alienated black middle class. As collateral damage, a large mass of whites simmering with the anger of the opportunities denied to them has also emerged. The civil rights movement of the 1960s only aimed at an end to racial discrimination, however it was soon realized that something more than a good will statement was needed to bring the blacks to the forefront of the economy and nullify the effect of years of discrimination.
AA has been implemented in the predominant private sector of the USA and has enabled many blacks to make inroads into the corporate world. As an example, Lockhead Martin employs 124,000 people of which 21% have entered through affirmative action.
But the sad part of the story is that, half a century of AA has divided the black community itself into an ‘aristocracy’ comprising the black elites and professionals and a ‘ghettocracy’ of poor blacks doing low earning jobs(transcription and call center jobs). This have gone from bad to worse for the latter after outsourcing of jobs off-shore became rampant.
The black community that survived slavery and fought the civil rights movement together is today sharply divided across class lines. The middle class blacks have begun to ape the middle class whites and look down upon the low class blacks.
Sharply divided on racial lines, and facing a poor white community bitter against the blacks for their plight, these poor blacks are unable to build a solidarity with the low class whites. The rich therefore stand united but the poor in each community suffer alone.
‘Affirmative action is therefore color conscious but class blind.’

Demand for affirmative action in India.
The private and corporate sectors have vehemently opposed reservations in the private sector in the style envisaged by the Mandal commission. They however, have proposed a plan similar to that of affirmative action. The main proponent of this type of caste redressal is industrialist Rahul Bajaj. The manner of AA they propose is such that there should be no mandatory implementation of quotas but corporates and private firms must ensure that a certain percentage of their work force belongs to the minority community. And this percentage should be left to the firm or the corporation to decide.
This replicates the American model where big businesses have found that racial diversity actually enhances diversity of ideas within the company.
It is obvious that the offer by Indian corporates to do the same is nothing more than something that will benefit their own businesses.

They also present a toothless picture of affirmative action and try to highlight only the examples of the middle class blacks keeping in the dark facts on the class divide in American society bred by affirmative action. This is nothing more than a form of window dressing.
It appears that the Indian businesses are deliberately trying to create a strata of middle class Dalits, that shall soon cut off from the remaining sections of the community and identify themselves with the cause of business profits.


An analysis of the reservation law enacted by the parliament.

The parliament, displaying rare unanimity, enacted the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in admissions) Bill in the winter session of the parliament,2006 to provide legal backing to the system of reservations and to extend the same for the OBC category in central government institutions . The demand by the BJP to extend the reservation to minority institutions was disregarded, as was the Communist party’s suggestion to exclude the creamy layer from the purview of the law.
The necessity of legal backing arose, following the Supreme court verdict in the PA Inamdar V/s state of Maharashtra case that reservations in private, unaided institutions was unconstitutional. Ironically though, the central legislation has excluded private unaided institutions along with minority institutions from its ambit. The explanation offered by the government being that , a separate Bill exclusively for unaided institutions will be brought forward.

The Bill that was tabled on the last day of the monsoon session of the parliament and later discussed in the winter session, reflects many of the concessions that the Union cabinet had to give into, in the wake of protests from vested interests.
The law is therefore, very much dissimilar from the initially proposed 93rd amendment .

The drafting of the bill.
Human resource minister Arjun Singh’s announcement that a central legislation to implement the Mandal commission report was being proposed, was followed by high drama in various parts of the country especially the national capital.
The government in January 2006 proposed the 93rd constitutional amendment act before parliament. The amendment was aimed at providing reservation to OBCs in all institutions -aided and unaided alike-to the extent of 27%.
The play nor the playmakers did not withdraw from their public expression of dissent until an Oversight committee headed by M. Veerappa Moily was appointed to monitor the government program. The committee was aimed at assessing the feasibility of developing new infrastructure so that the total intake capacity of central institutions could be elevated and the general category seats would not have to sink.

The Educational Institutions Bill (Reservation in admissions),2006 is thus an outcome of the recommendations of the oversight committee.





SHORTCOMINGS OF THE BILL.

How much ever the drafters of the bill might herald it as the salvation of society’s underdogs, there is ample room for scepticism. The very differences between the proposed 93rd constitutional amendment and the final law makes it evident that elite sections backed by corporate finance have snatched away various concessions.
The very fact that the law is not meant for private unaided institutes speaks volumes on its biased nature. The reason provided for the exclusion being that the government will not be able to cope with the rising protests of students.

Now how does one deal with such levels of lunacy? The protests were clearly an extraneous issue that ought not to have guided the drafting of a law.

1.Cut-off marks:
While the decision of the central government to expand the intake in all central institutions by 54%, to prevent a fall in the general category seats, remains a remarkable achievement, the final outcome of the decision is likely to prove adverse to the purpose of reservation.
The respective institutions have been accorded the power to determine the threshold of admissions commensurate with their level of excellence. The oversight committee is therefore, not in agreement with the need for a relaxation in cut-off marks to go alongside with reservation.
Reservation without relaxation in cut-off marks, is bound to lead to unfilled seats and unlike in the public services where unfilled posts are carried over to the next year, unfilled seats in educational institutions will be filled by the general category.
The purpose of reservation stands to be foiled by a rigid posture on the threshold marks, born out of an irrational concern for institutional merit.

2.Right to differ implementation of the Law for three years:
In view of the need to develop greater infrastructure, to meet the demand for greater number of students, the respective institutions have been bestowed upon the right to differ the implementation of the law for another three years. This amounts to an expenditure of Rs. 16,563 crores .
Again the need to increase the intake cannot be questioned as there is a definite need to make higher education more accessible to the common man. But to link the expansion of seats to the implementation of reservation appears unjust.
Apart from the fact that opportunities to weaker sections of the society will be denied during the initial years, linking expansion of seats with reservation has never happened before. In the various state government run institutions, the implementation of reservation was not accompanied by an increase in intake. How the central institutions are different is a question that requires a legitimate answer.
To delay the implementation of reservation for three years in the name of expanding opportunities is unreasonable and the two must be implemented parallely but independently.

The above mentioned facts read together, implies that these elite institutions can snatch funds in the name of furthering intake, insist on irrational cut-off marks, keep the seats unfilled and pass it onto the general category students.

3. Failure to identify alternative methods for intake expansion
The oversight committee has failed to identify any other method to increase the intake into elite institutions, apart from an expensive development of infrastructure.
In an article in Economic and Political Weekly , a senior faculty member of IIM, Ahmedabad, Ramesh Gupta, has argued that quality is a matter of perception and depends on the parameters one uses to measure it. Parameters could be those that are acceptable to or valued by Wall Street recruiters or the ones that would be acceptable for managing the best Indian companies, he says. Increasingly, he says, training at the IIMs is at variance with what is required by domestic companies except for a few.
Making a micro-analysis of the requirements of IIM, Ahmedabad, he says it can increase the intake for its Post-Graduate Programme in Management substantially by better utilisation of its physical infrastructure, better faculty time management by restructuring programmes and active faculty recruitment in deficit areas, and by defining its priorities more sharply.
National Professor in Management and founder-director of IIM, Bangalore, N.S. Ramaswamy, has in a note to the Oversight Committee, maintained that the faculty in all the IIMs contribute just about half the number of hours of work they are supposed to put in as per a decision taken by the faculty four decades ago. He has suggested that the work of evaluation and preparation of course material be delegated to teaching assistants and research assistants, thus making more time available to the faculty for teaching.
4. The law is inapplicable to Minority Educational Institutions(MEIs).

Stating that MEIs already provide for reservations to SC and ST categories, and that they are safeguarded by the sacred provisions of article 30(1) of the constitution, the law has exempted minority run institutes from implementing the law.
However it must be scrutinised whether the government has done enough to monitor the conditions of the students and applicants in these institutes,(Regarding the procedures for admissions and exorbitant fees charged) without which, any other measure in the name of guarding the sanctity of the constitution would prove futile.


THE CREAMY LAYER ISSUE

The concept of creamy layer and the term itself was first introduced in the landmark judgment of the supreme court in the Indira Sawhney case of 1992. The apex court in reply to the petitioners, who had challenged the V.P Singh ministry’s decision to reserve 27% seats to OBCs, arguing that there was an elite class among the designated OBCs who were just as advanced socially, educationally and economically, ruled that the government should exclude this elite class of OBCs or the ‘creamy layer’ from the purview of reservation.
The court also added that the judgment was applicable only to the OBCs and there was no need for a corresponding action in the case of SCs and STs for whom the verdict was totally irrelevant.

This was needless to say a U turn from the observations of Justice Chinappa Reddy in the Vasanth Kumar case. An excerpt from his verdict reads,

"... .One must, however, enter a caveat to the criticism that the benefits of reservation are often snatched away by the top creamy layer of backward class or caste. That a few of the seats and posts reserved for backward classes are snatched away by the more fortunate among them is not to say that reservation is not necessary. This is bound to happen in a competitive society such as ours. Are not the unreserved seats and posts snatched away, in the same way, by the top creamy layers amongst them on the same principle of merit on which the non-reserved seats are taken away by the top layers of society? How can it be bad if reserved seats and posts are snatched away by the creamy layer of backward classes, if such snatching away of unreserved posts by the top creamy layer of society itself is not bad?"

On October 19th 2006, the supreme court once again deviated from its verdict on the Indira Shawney case when a five member bench declared in the M. Nagaraj v/s Union of India case, that the concept of creamy layer be extended to SCs and STs as well.
The verdict in the Indira Shawney case involved an interpretation of article 16, clause 4 of the Indian constitution.
That backwardness of a class meant group backwardness and not individual backwardness was generally agreed . The presence of a few economically forward members in a generally backward caste, does not suggest that the class itself is forward. ‘A lone swallow does not make a summer.’ The final verdict by the court in the Indira Sawhney case construed that Article 16(4) can rise to its meaning only when socially advanced members are excluded from a backward class and the government was given a four month deadline to identify and evolve the criterion (on the basis of income or extent of holdings) to identify the creamy layer.

The findings of the Narasimha Rao government appointed committee, to examine the criterion for creamy layers had ascertained that in the case of SCs and STs it was not mere economic status but untouchability that should be taken as the decisive factor to determine the eligibility for reservation.
The ruling in the M. Nagaraj case therefore raises a legitimate apprehension as to what changes had taken place in the social conditions since the Indira Sawhney verdict, so that the concept of creamy layer be extended to SCs and STs as well.

Whether the verdict can be considered as direction to parliament to impose the criterion of creamy layer, remains to be seen, as debates on the interpretation of article 16(4) have yet to cease and the ambiguity in the verdict has paved the way for a direct conflict between the judiciary and legislature.
CONCLUDING REMARKS

This essay aims atleast in part, to establish primarily that reservation is a necessity in the Indian context and in the light of a long history of a class divided society.

Secondly it must also be recognized that the Mandal proposals are nearly three decades old and will have to be revisited and its shortcomings dealt with. The haste shown by political parties to implement nothing but the Mandal report is simply because they are more concerned with quick action rather than long term goals.
A new commission to enquire into the conditions of the minorities will have to be established. The findings of the Sachar committee must also, be taken into consideration.

Affirmative action in the western model, creates class divides and if we are sincere to our goal of creating a classless society we must realize that the method will fall short in achieving the ‘annihilation of caste’ and caste prejudices.

The Central educational institutions Bill is bound to prove to be a failure in achieving the proclaimed aim of justice for the Dalits and is nothing more than a palliative cure , that fails to address the crux of the issue.

THE END