📰 Modi unveils India’s first global bullion exchange
Move could lead to standard gold pricing in the country
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday launched the India International Bullion Exchange (IIBX), a first in the country and NSE IFSC-SGX Connect at Gandhinagar’s GIFT city, an international financial services hub set up by the Gujarat government outside the State capital.
•India is the world’s second biggest consumer of gold and the move to set up the IIBX is seen as India’s effort to bring transparency to the market for the precious metal. Moreover, setting up of IIBX could lead to standard gold pricing in the country and make it easier for small bullion dealers and jewellers to trade in the precious metal.
•India is a leading importer of the metal and imported 1,069 tonnes of gold in 2021, up from 430 tonnes a year ago. The yellow metal is tightly regulated in the country and currently only nominated banks and agencies approved by the Reserve Bank Of India can import gold and sell to dealers and jewellers across the country.
•While launching the new exchange and laying foundation stone for new projects in GIFT city, his pet project, Mr. Modi said that India is among the biggest economies in the world and is now joining the league of global financial centres like the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore.
Foundation stone laid
•He laid the foundation stone of the headquarters building of the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA), the country’s first and only IFSC in line with those in UAE, Singapore and Hong Kong.
•“Today in the 21st century, finance and technology are linked to each other. And when it comes to technology, in science and software, India has an edge and experience. Today, India alone has 40% share in real-time digital payments all over the world,” he said at the event.
•“India is one of the world’s leading economies and will become even bigger going forward; we should build institutions that can cater to our present and future roles,” the Prime Minister said.
Many eminent scholars, both local and international, have written about the Dravidian movement’s colonial origins
•The Governor of Tamil Nadu has been criticised by some for expressing his views on the Aryan-Dravidian divide. Some have gone to the extent of calling this political interference. This is unfair. Expressing one’s views on a sensitive issue cannot be construed as political interference.
•What the Governor has done through his comment, however, is disturb the popular view that former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai’s forsaking of the demand for a separate Dravidian state was only a practical compromise, and that Aryans and Dravidians continue to remain racially different people. The eminent historian, P.T. Srinivasa Iyengar, never subscribed to this view, even though he maintained that cultural differences existed between the Vedic and non-Vedic people. In Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture, he wrote, “A careful study of the Vedas… reveals the fact that Vedic culture is so redolent of the Indian soil and of the Indian atmosphere that the idea of the non-Indian origin of that culture is absurd.”
•The Governor called the Aryan-Dravidian divide a handiwork of the British, which has been criticised as toeing the Hindutva line on the issue. This criticism is also unfair because many eminent scholars, both local and international, have written about the Dravidian movement’s colonial origins. The linguistic theory, unscientific histories of racial origins, the politics of the non-Brahmin movement and the modern rationalism of the self-respect movement all have deep roots in colonial thought.
Caldwell’s philology
•One of the key early proponents of the idea of Dravidian language family as a scientific entity was Robert Caldwell, in 1856. Many may not know that 40 years before Caldwell, Francis Whyte Ellis, the Collector of Madras, had already laid the foundation for Caldwell’s theories through his writings. The American historian Thomas Trautmann writes, “Ellis’s Dravidian proof is a dissertation... [in which] we see more clearly the relation between the languages-and-nations project and the properly Orientalist scholarship of the British in India.” This “languages-and-nations project”, or tendency to link languages to nations, is, according to Trautmann, “not a matter of pure science freeing itself from the shackles of religion, as it has often been represented…[but] its deep roots are in the Bible, in the genealogy of the nations that descended from Noah and his three sons.” Even more problematic is the languages-and-race project. Trautmann says about this, “European view of race as a fundamental force of history had a deep effect on the interpretation of Indian history, and what I have called the racial theory of Indian civilization… how much text torturing is necessary to sustain the idea of the encounter of Indo-European and Dravidian languages in India as racial in character, and how false is its racially essentializing identification of civilization with whiteness and savagery with dark complexion.”
•How far politics has overtaken science and history is clear from the fact the one can hardly find mainstream criticism of Caldwell’s philology today. Just a decade after Caldwell’s work was published, Charles E. Grover of the Royal Asiatic Society wrote in his famous work on Tamil folk songs, “[about] the true character of the language and linguistic progress made since the publication of Dr. Caldwell’s book, it may be noted that the learned Doctor gives an appendix containing a considerable number of Dravidian words which he asserts to be Scythian… It is now known that every word in this list is distinctly Aryan.”
Colonial masters
•It was works of missionaries like Caldwell and G.U. Pope that British authorities exploited for political needs. As Director of The Hindu Publishing Group, N. Ram notes in a paper in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1979, influenced by these works, “the brutally repressive Governor”, Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, looked at the non-Brahmins during his 1868 address to the graduates of the University of Madras and said, “you are of pure Dravidian race” and “I should like to see the pre-Sanskrit element amongst you asserting itself more”.
•The eminent Cambridge historian, David Washbrook, identified the roots of Dravidian or non-Brahmin politics not in historic fault lines that were supposedly plaguing Tamil society but in “the novel types of government and politics which developed under the British in the early years of the present century.” According to Washbrook, it was the centralisation of bureaucracy in late 19th century Madras that led to fear among British civilians of “caste cliques” which could now control not only the districts but the entire province. So, the policy had to be ‘divide and rule’. That important leaders of the non-Brahmin movement were influenced either by colonial inheritance or narrow interests is best illustrated by Rajmohan Gandhi’s description of one of its founders, T.M. Nair, “entering politics as a congressman…holding brahmins responsible for an electoral reverse… he left the congress and became one of SILF’s founders… always found in western attire, a practice yet to spread among south Indian men. In a series of articles…he argued that British authority had kept India united” and “tried to convince Montagu that the Home Rule league was financed by German money.”
To the modern paradigm
•Scholars like Ashis Nandy have for long highlighted the importance of unclear and overlapping identities in pre-modern India as sources of tolerance. Washbrook gave concrete examples and concluded as follows: “In his manual on Coimbatore district… F. A. Nicholson freely admitted his inability to separate ‘true’ Gounder Vellalas from the hosts of rich peasants who had adopted or were adopting Gounder ceremonies, dress and customs. In the census of 1891, Sir Harold Stuart noted the ability of the Nairs of Malabar to absorb immigrants… in a single generation without apparent friction… Similarly, Thurston recorded a famous Tamil proverb which describes the regular generational flow between the Maravar, Aghumudayar and Vellala castes. In more recent work, S. A. Barnett has suggested the diverse origins of those presently filling the category of Thondamandala Vellala… In these conditions, in which sub-regional varnas were so amorphous, the politics of caste confrontation were rare and circumscribed.” In fact, in his famous Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Edgar Thurston said, “admissions to the Paraiyan caste from higher castes sometimes occur.”
•With modern rationalism came the need to enumerate and categorise. And with Western-style nationalism came the need to identify enemies. When one of the movement’s great literary figures wrote in praise of Tamil, he also had to include a death wish for the “Aryan language”. Many neutral observers have noticed parallels between Dravidian politics and other chauvinistic ideologies. Yet one does not see the same criticism of its ideology in mainstream intellectual circles as is normally reserved for other nationalist ideologies.
📰 We need to protect whistle blowers
Ignoring the fact that Right to Information users are facing death for keeping democracy alive is a threat to democracy itself
•“Words, words, words” was Hamlet’s reply to Polonius’ question, “What do you read, my lord?” That is what our Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, is being reduced to. The Centre for Law and Democracy classifies it among the top five laws in the world. The RTI empowers us to participate in the policymaking process, by providing access to information relating to the functioning of all public authorities. Ordinary citizens have used the law to make public authorities accountable and transparent in their functioning. In fact, the law has been used extensively by a cross section of citizens including activists, lawyers, bureaucrats, researchers, journalists and most importantly, ordinary folk. They all have been asking simple questions and pursuing answers on the use of public funds, and unearthing corruption of all kinds from the Panchayat level right up to Parliament. The widespread understanding and use of the RTI is a shining example of a participatory democracy in spite of our current realities.
The killing of activists
•Unfortunately, the dangerous underside of the RTI is manifesting itself through violent reactions from entrenched interests and powerful lobbies. Since the implementation of the Act, some 100 RTI activists across the country have been killed and several are harassed on a daily basis. This is a reality of one of the strongest laws for democratic accountability that we must systematically address through strong legal and institutional safeguards.
•Bihar is turning out to be one of the most dangerous States for RTI activists despite being one of the earliest promoters of the law. The State ranks first in the number of deaths of RTI users. As many as 20 RTI users have lost their lives since 2010 in different districts across Bihar. In 2018, six RTI users were killed for seeking information related to the functioning of public programmes and institutions. These brutal murders have not only raised an urgent question of the protection of people engaging with the system to seek accountability, but also of the state’s responsibility to provide legal assistance, time-bound grievance redressal, compensation, and dignified access to justice to the families of those killed.
•Earlier this month, civil society organisations organised a public hearing in Patna where families of the ‘whistle blowers’ disclosed that the whistle blowers had been working on issues of public importance and interest, exposing irregularities and corruption, pursuing transparency in the functioning of the Public Distribution System, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Anganwadi centers, housing schemes, illegally operating health clinics and so on. They had been requesting information that should have been mandatorily disclosed to the public under Section 4 of the RTI Act. Family members at the hearing also questioned the abdication of responsibility by the State government in assisting them to get justice in each case. After all, the whistle blowers were performing a basic civic duty of public vigilance that the government should encourage and initiate timely action on. The killing of RTI users and the intimidation of their family as they struggle for justice, in Bihar and other parts of the country, are reflective of the lack of action by the government and collusion of the police with powerful vested interests to deny, if not subvert, justice.
A new framework
•We are living in a time where the government denies the existence of casualties emanating from its acts of omission and commission. This has prompted civil society to maintain lists of persons who lost their lives on account of demonetisation, COVID-19 and now RTI, so that the lives of the people, particularly the poor, are not remembered merely as numbers. We need to move beyond maintaining a count. We need to advocate for and move towards creating a socio-legal system that recognises RTI users under attack as human right defenders and build a framework that facilitates and protects them in their attempt to pursue issues of public interest. Otherwise, words in the RTI legislation will ring hollow.
•There can be multiple components to such a framework, and it is time State governments take the lead without waiting for the Central government to set an example. First, State governments must direct law-enforcement agencies to expeditiously and in a time-bound manner complete investigations in all cases where RTI users are harassed. This must include making proactive efforts to provide adequate compensation to the victim’s family.
•Second, available evidence clearly shows that the information requested by the murdered RTI users was information that should have been mandatorily disclosed in the public domain under Section 4 of the RTI Act. Therefore, the State governments must take immediate efforts to institutionalise proactive disclosure of actionable information. Is this possible? Rajasthan has taken the lead in active disclosure. Its Jan Soochna portal subsequently followed by Karnataka’s Mahiti Kanaja are outstanding examples of practical ways of mandatory disclosure.
•Third, in all cases of threats, attacks or killings of RTI users, the State Information Commission must immediately direct the relevant public authorities to disclose and publicise all the questions raised and the answers given to the user. Giving wide publicity to such information may potentially act as a deterrent against attacks on RTI users, as perpetrators get the message that rather than covering up the matter, any attack would invite even greater public scrutiny.
Effective legislation
•Last, there is an urgent need to enact an effective legislation to protect whistle blowers. In 2016, a Supreme Court bench of Justice T.S. Thakur and Justice A.K. Sikri came down heavily on the Union government for its reluctance in notify the Whistle Blowers Protection Act of 2014, but unfortunately to no avail. The Supreme Court observed that there was an “absolute vacuum” which could not be allowed to go on. The Central government was called upon to decide on a specific time frame to establish an administrative set-up to protect whistle blowers. The court recognised that the concept of a whistle blower is a global phenomenon and has become a reality. It cannot be wished away. Words, words, words that have no effect on the Central government. Eight years have gone by and the proposed Act has not been notified.
•Given this reality, State governments, such as those of Bihar and Maharashtra, which have recorded the highest number of murders of RTI activists, must introduce their own mechanisms for protecting whistle blowers by enacting at least a State-level whistle blower protection law. Ignoring the plight of RTI users facing death for keeping our democracy alive is a threat to democracy itself.
