Jyoti Basu criticises Sonia Gandhi!
Will Prakash Karat lad behind?

He takes on the Maoist rebels for the woes of West Bengal!
Do these persons understand rural India? Rural realities?

Zilla Parishads are a must to end the British days-type exploitation
and oppression of the people by the government machinery.

Change the names of the Collectors and tahsildars!
Abolish the tahsildar offices!

Peoples must be delivered services at their doorsteps!
We have to recognise the need for more number of institutional safeguards for enlarging the autonomy and freedoms of the people at the grass roots.

We have just to see how much people still suffer whenever they go to a local hospital or a local revenue office. Not to speak of the number of institutions that operates at the district and talk levels.

There are first the old British day legacies, the district collector and his subordinates, the district revenue officer(DRO),the revenue divisional officer(RDO, the tahsildars and the village-level revenue collecting humble but still very powerful fellows.
The life for the villagers is still very cumbersome, they have to contend everyday with the local government officials.

Add to the old British legacy officialdom, the newly created panchayat raj institutions, the 33 per cent reservation to women and the quota of seats for the SC/ST candidates in the panchayat.

Speaking from our local direct knowledge and experience from Tamil Nadu, supposed to be an advanced state in terms of education, health and even the level of socio-economic advances, we see still today some of the worst types of British days’ exploitation of the common man.
Even if we take the local taluk office, we see the worst type of exploitation. There is always a crowd of people waiting for sundry jobs, from the very poor and the weak to the supposed very powerful and influential local party heavyweights.

he DMK took power, the situation was the worst. The tahsildar considered he the very source of all power.

After some 40 years of the DMK/ADMK rule, what is the situation?
Yes, there has been progress in many areas. Yet, as per our latest experiences and encounters, we see there is still a pathetic side to the grass roots democracy. Corruption is the very root of the situation! Nothing moves without bribes and bribes take various forms!

Yes, the tahsildar is the very root of this high degree of arbitrary power. Power to deny justice at the whim of a very low level official who is still holding to his undefined limits to his power.

No registration of land documents can take place without what is locally called “patta book”. This title for the land is denied owing to some very ingenious reasons. Land document registration can’t take place and there is almost a standstill at the local levels. The sight of green towel wearing local farmer’s leaders and activists only adds poignancy to the tragedy.

The village officer’s posts were abolished by the late MGR in a fit of anger one fine day. But then he couldn’t foresee the monster’s true dimensions! Yes, the DMK was also the first to abolish the much-touted Revenue Board! But the regional party is not a great party with any serious ideology. So, its economic and administrative acumen was thin and the result is that the much oppressive colonial day practices the regimes couldn’t reform or recast.
So, there is this continuing oppression.

One sad legacy of the panchayat raj is that except in Karnataka, we see the panchayat raj is again has come to mean, as in West Bengal or Kerala, either the dominance of the local party fellows or as in TN there is still the oppression of the revenue dept on the panchayat raj and the result is that the power is still concentrated at the state-level secretariat. With the result, we see even the minimum powers have to exercise only from the state headquarters.

The block development official also had become a cog in the machine of the district collector who under the current realities is a much harassed official, hard pressed for time, to receive the visiting local ministers and others and hardly has any time to concentrate on the development of the district’s various development targets.
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The painful thoughts of the British empire syndrome

The Raj Syndrome by Suhash Chakravarty,Rupa,2007 pp 400. Revisiting 1857 Myth,Memory,History,Rolli Books,2007 Leonard Woolf A Life by Victoria Glendinning London,2006,pp 526

The thoughts here all raise highly emotional and highly controversial thoughts and throw up conflicting images as I look at India as a country and people who had been badly treated by  the march of history, if I can say so, by enslaving it, all through the last two hundred years and more.

These three  books are in a way inter-connected.

They came into my hands without any planned purchase. They in a surprising manner contributed to enlightening my understanding of an underlying theme that shapes my intellectual beliefs and political outlook today.

First the Moghul conquest, then the British  Empire and the result today is people whose mental make-up, their very national character is yet to  be clearly defined and understood by the people themselves.

The raj syndrome raises an important intellectual issue  that is widely noticed for long by many and yet no one systematic thesis has evolved yet.As far as I know.

The  raj syndrome is about how we Indians came under the occupation of the British traders who came to establish trade links and step by step they went on to conquer the whole continent and established control over the affairs of the left-over Mughal empire.The story is told in so many volumes of writing and for so long that we almost lost control over our own imagination of the whole  deeply-ingrained attitudes and our own mindsets,when it comes to knowing our own Indian identity.

Prof.Chakravarti has done a good job and we all owe something to him for highlighting this particular theme in the form of a book.While Nirad choudhary reading the same I was reminded of another Bengali babu, the more cantankerous Nirad babu, who in his own inimitable way had done the negative job of reminding Indians of everything that is good in us we owed to the British occupation!

I often used to wonder for I have spent some years at Santiniketan, that for every Nirad Choudhury,there must at least be another one hundred unknown Nirad babus, when it comes to learning, the bookworms the average educated Bengali of my generation used to be. I am not sure the situation now, but I should assume that the average middle class Bengali household is at least educated for over three or even four enerations, if we take the Raja Ram Mohan Roy years as the starting point.
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What Mr.Sharad Pawar is doing?
Where the PM’s expertise?

Do these gentlemen and the hon’ble lady or ladies care for the poor and the rural people?
Now, everyone in the government and outside knows that there is a food-prices-driven inflation and there is an element of helplessness and a lot of desparation. Rightly so.
So long there was this fairly high growth rate and Mr.Chidambaram stuck to his one-track policy reform. Promote everything and everybody, be it Reliance or the Tatars who do this dirty job of growing the economy by buying companies or bringing in new investments and where there is an open filed and you enter there and make the most of it.

That is how the so–called 9 per cent growth was achieved. Put in simply, it was the growth that saw almost an unregulated monopoly capitalism having its field day. If you are not a doctrinaire socialist or an equity-morality-driven purist, then it is okey, this 9 per cent growth and India as a success story!

Now, the growth rate had dipped somewhat to 8 plus and inflation is raging still, Mr.Chidambaram’s economics had fallen flat and the honble “Doc” is also invisible lately, now caught in the T.R.Baalu mess and the maze of the DMK threat perceptions!
Yes, this is economics and politics for you!
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High Constitutional Authorities devalued!
All Constitutional proprieties bypassed!

All for whom? In whose interest? Such questions come at once when we see how steadily and unmistakably our great Constitution is being subverted from inside the very system.

Prime Minister downsized and almost insulted by his senior colleagues! We have reached a stage in our political evolution that now ,under Sonia Gandhi’s ;leadership of the Congress party and the UPA alliance as it is being “managed” there are every indication that very soon India might learn to live with some basic distortions and even in the process we might even change the basic structure of our Constitution. Such is the rapid downhill we are going.

Take certain examples. The Prime Minister is being insulted and of course it is for him to stomach the insults if it suits him well. One can understand an Opposition leader, L.K.Advani called him the “weakest Prime Minister Independent India  had had”. This is of course is not an insult as such. In a democracy, the Opposition has the right to criticise and comment on the government. But this is the extreme  criticism, questioning the very office of the Prime Minister as somewhat illegitimate. There are also sound reasons. First, the Prime Minister was never elected properly to the Lok Sabha. He should have got himself elected even after he became the Prime Minister. This, he didn’t do. Neither the party that chose him thought it fit. May be, as there rumours, the party didn’t want the Prime Minister become stronger than what he is capable of. So, the party chose to keep the PM as an unelected man, even though the Pm didn’t improve his image by declaring in so many ways that he got “elected” to the Rajya Sabha from Assam! In fact, this “election” is a bogus manipulation, everyone knows it and the very way the PM explained his legitimacy by showing the payments of rent and electricity bills and always keeping them in his “pocket” made him an object of some ridicule. But then the Pm didn’t see himself as a ridiculed person. That is Manmohan Singh’s strengths and limitations!
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