Common Cause Events

India Public Policy Network Meet --- December 13-14, 2022

Radhika Jha*

The India Public Policy Network (IPPN) along with the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad organised a two-day ‘IPPN Annual Conference 2022’ on December 13 and 14, 2022.

The event was supported by the JSW School for Public Policy, IIM Ahmedabad.

Dr Vipul Mudgal and Radhika Jha of Common Cause participated in the event as presenters for an interactive session on ‘Policy Analysis in India’.

The conference was organised on the larger theme of State Capacity. The focus of the conference was to build a deeper understanding of the role of the government in the contemporary era in both managing risks and uncertainties on the one hand and meeting citizens’ increasing expectations of the state capacity on the other. The event was an endeavour to reflect on both the conceptual and practical issues emerging from a systemic understanding of the state capacities. Some of the sub-themes around which the discussions were held are as follows:

  • What are the types and attributes of state capacity?
  • What factors determine existence and level of state capacity?
  • How can state capacity be enhanced?
  • What are the changing expectations from and challenges to state capacity?
  • How does state capacity affect policy design and outcomes?

Dr Vipul Mudgal and Radhika Jha of Common Cause presented findings from a working paper on ‘Public Policy Concerns in Indian Policing: Evidence from the SPIR Series’. The presentation, followed by a question-answer session, included findings from the SPIR series which focused on three larger areas of public policy concerns in the functioning of the Indian police: discrimination against the marginalised, use of violence by the police and the infrastructural and systemic inadequacies of the institution. The session, titled ‘Policy Analysis in India’, was chaired by Professor Azad Singh Bali, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Australian National University. The Common Cause team was invited to contribute a paper for an edited volume on State Capacities.

The conference included 44 panels on various issues pertaining to state capacity; ranging from issues such as collaborative governance, administrative backsliding, bureaucracy and good governance, to more niche subjects such as disaster management, digital transition and data regulation, public health, crime and conflict, water policy and urban policy, to name a few. The participants included renowned academics, scholars, practitioners and domain experts from across the world. The sessions included presentations of academic research papers and policy case studies on various issues within the larger thematic issue of ‘State Capacity’. The conference also included a keynote address by Karthik Muralidharan, renowned economist and academic.

Overcoming Hate: The German Experience --- December 10, 2022

Purnajyoti Guha Thakurta*

Common Cause along with the Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) hosted an interaction with Mr Harsh Mander titled Overcoming Hate: The German Experience. Mr Kamal Kant Jaswal, Common Cause President and an active CCG member welcomed Mr Mander, a former IAS officer, writer, activist and a recipient of multiple awards, presently working as the Director of the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi.

As the Richard von Weizsacker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, Germany, (from September 2021 to August 2022) Mr Mander tried to address the question, “What can we Indians learn from Germany’s transformation from hate and genocidal atrocities following the World War II?” He drew parallels between Nazi Germany and the present-day India and critically assessed Germany’s attempt to atone for the Nazi-age atrocities and the subsequent learnings to build a kind and just society.

Mr Mander started the discussion with ‘Mazhab Nahee Sikhataa Aapas Mein Bair Rakhana, a music video by Poojan Sahil, on the YouTube channel ‘Karwan-e-Mohabbat’. The song by Allama Iqbal conveys the message that religion does not teach hatred, and that the basis of violence in India is not religious differences but the propagation of hatred. Expressing his fear for India’s future, he spoke about Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘radical love’ embedded in his immense courage to fight for equal citizenship, irrespective of religions. Unfortunately, more and more people are being lured to the politics of hate, leading to tragic consequences for minorities, he said. The Hindu supremacist mind-set which fuelled Gandhi’s killing is now governing the country, he added:

“They seek that India belongs to its caste Hindus and in India, they may allow Muslims, Christians, and Dalits to live, but only as second-class citizens, in fear and always subordinate to the Hindu majority without rights.”

With growing sections of the electorate subscribing to the politics of hate, fear, and resentment, he felt that Indian leadership is legitimising bigotry and eroding the ideas of equal citizenship and fraternity. Mr Mander warned:

“The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers; it began with hate speech.”

During the discussion, he noted that despite significant historical differences, similarities are evident between the persecution of minorities in Germany in the 1930s and that of the minorities in India since 2014. He felt it vital to examine the parallels between the triumphant rise of fascism in Germany and the resistible rise of fascistic Hindu radicals in modern India. This, he felt, has led to a series of unfortunate events such as building a negative narrative against the minorities, alteration of citizenship laws, use of law and violent vigilante actions against religious practices and shrines of the minorities, renaming cities/areas and roads to erase the participation of minorities, creation of legal and social barriers of inter-faith and inter-race relations as well as ghettoisation and economic marginalisation.

The most important lesson he learnt from his readings during the fellowship is that the evil perpetrators are not only the political elite governing the country, but also everyday individuals like us. Doctors, Scientists, Social Workers participated and supported the Nazi ideology, he said and reminded the audience that people’s support for such bigotry played a significant role in the Holocaust:

“The tragedy that unfolded wasn’t simply the evil leadership of Hitler, the Holocaust happened due to the broad support of the Germans.”

While it was a lot simpler for Germans to pinpoint the locus of evil in Hitler over the years, it was much more difficult to examine the same within their society. He found unawareness of the genocide as a weak justification because the concentration camps were located right on the outskirts of large towns. Historians believe that the resistance to Hitler’s government was less than 1% which is why it’s crucial to highlight that:

“Hitler was not defeated by the German people, but he was beaten by foreign allied armies.”

He said that even though the remaining 99% were not all Nazi supporters, they were guilty of silence. Examining the reason for their silence, he said that many used fear as an excuse, but the sad fact was that most of the Germans were indifferent because they were not directly affected by the Holocaust. If anything, Germans massively profited from acquiring land, getting better business and employment opportunities, cheaper resources, etc.

The present day Germany, Mander said, has moved away from this. Not only have they built monuments and initiated projects that reflect acceptance of duty, atonement and remorse as a nation, they have also included modules in schools which teach children about diversity and pluralism to combat anti-Semitism. He also shared a quote by the philosopher Susan Neiman,

“A nation that erects a monument of shame for the evils of its history in its most prominent space is a nation not afraid to confront its failures”.

Despite Germany’s attempts to rebuild itself by opening its doors to millions of migrants, several issues persist, Mr Mander pointed out. Although, on the one hand, they are fighting against anti-Semitism, they still remain ignorant of the other minorities. The Germans established a hierarchy of lives to be grieved in which Jews were prioritised but they have forgotten the atrocities committed against the disabled and the people of the nomadic tribes who were oppressed. He said that the members of the LGBTQ+ community continue to be criminalised. The acceptance of diversity of colour, race and religion is still a significant concern in today’s Germany, Mr Mander added.

There are lessons that Germany may take from India as well, Mr Mander observed. Firstly, India’s idea of equal belonging ensures that we accept, respect, and learn from each other. Secondly, India’s secularism without conditionality doesn’t require the denial of one’s faith but gives equal respect to every faith. Thirdly, the Gandhian values and principles that hate cannot be fought with hate. And lastly, as per the Indian Constitution the presence of a social contract based on fraternity or ‘Bandhuta’, which promotes empathy and care, irrespective of the various classification of identity like religion, gender, etc. He said:

“People at all times remain vulnerable to the dangers of being drawn into the politics of resentment, suspicion, and frenzied hate”. He quoted a German pastor, who said: “No country, no culture, no religion is immune to falling into the abyss that we fell in Nazi Germany, and once it begins there will always be people who shut down their conscience and side with the strong man.”

The event ended with an interactive session with the offline and online audience on issues around the widespread growth of hate worldwide, the use of fear psychosis, the role of religious leaders, as well as the role of social media today in the spread of hatred. Mr Mander said that the social media platforms were merely offering tools for spreading hatred and were not themselves causing hate. He reiterated the need for kindness, solidarity and fraternity to fight the civilisational battle against hate:

“The opposite of love is not hate but is indifference”.

Turmoil In Punjab --- December 11, 2022

Mohd Aasif*

The sixth Delhi Poetry Festival 2022, which took place at the India Habitat Centre in the second week of December, organised a book discussion on the recently released book, Turmoil in Punjab: Before and After Blue Star: An Insider’s Account. The well-attended event was conducted as a conversation between the author, Mr Ramesh Inder Singh, IAS (Retd), who worked as the Collector of Amritsar during the Army action at the Golden Temple in 1984, and the Common Cause director Dr Vipul Mudgal who was a journalist in Punjab in the eighties. The lively conversation dealt with the questions surrounding the mistakes made by the military, government and politicians and if the operation could have been avoided or handled better.

Being part of the poetry festival, the dialogue aptly started with Dr Mudgal reciting a few couplets of Urdu and Punjabi poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Surjit Paatar, depicting their viewpoints about hope and despair in the face of changing realities. Coming straight to the point, the author started with the planning aspect of the operation Blue Star with a claim that it was ill-planned from the word go. He felt it neither presented the correct feelings of the masses, nor cared for the sentiments of the Sikh community

Mr Singh talked about the role played by Pakistan, power plays back home, and the murky politics of the then leaders in New Delhi and Chandigarh. Talking about the role of our hostile neighbour, Mr Singh said that a foreign country could not have succeeded in its conspiracies unless the conditions were ripe for that. Pakistan, in his opinion, managed to sow the seeds of communal divide and that the demand for the creation of Khalistan was not a popular demand of the Sikh masses.

Talking about the role of the media, Dr Mudgal said that the media censorship during the operation was a grave mistake, since it chocked the conventional channels of communication and created parallel, word of mouth network of rumours. Mr Singh, pointed out that even after it was confirmed that the controversial hardliner Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was indeed killed in the operation, Pakistani TV showed him alive through old videos to create confusion and unrest.

Answering a question about Operation Black Thunder, the second operation of the security forces at the Golden Temple in the late eighties, the author gave a graphic description of the temple’s desecration and sacrilege by the militants. Answering questions from the audience, Mr Singh said while the police and the security forces indulged in excesses and human rights violations, the

Aasif

militants too cannot be given a clean chit because they killed innocent civilians in the name of their cause.


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October December 2022