TRAI again

Sir � The telecom regulatory authority of India has rightly challenged the Central government�s decision to put on hold proposed tariff revisions (�Trai takes on govt over phone tariffs�, March 12). The government�s dithering reflects its insincerity vis a vis economic liberalization. If the tariff recommendations are not implemented, TRAI�s credibility will be on the line. The hold up will also hamper the regulatory authority�s ability to function as the arbiter between the government, the department of telecommunications and fledgling private telecom companies. The government has revealed its vulnerability to political pressure, which can adversely affect its attempts to attract investment to infrastructure, power and insurance.

The opposition which decries the hike as anti-poor is not to be believed entirely. TRAI has recommended that calls within the range of 50 kilometres be treated as local calls. This will benefit rural consumers who usually make calls to nearby villages. Besides, the recommendations of TRAI are estimates, operators have the flexibility to fix rates for themselves. Keeping in mind the rise in the costs of most commodities, there really doesn�t seem much sense in making a hue and cry about the hike in telephone charges and rentals.

Sir � The Bharatiya Janata Party�s election manifesto and the draft discussion paper of the group on telecommunications had promised TRAI would be strengthened. All that has been done is that the regulatory authority has been packed with more and more retired bureaucrats � without the government even informing or consulting the chairman. Is TRAI a rehabilitation centre for retired government servants? The issue arising out of the Delhi high court judgement that TRAI could not concern itself with disputes between the licensor and the licensee has also not been settled.

The latest is that a senior official of the DoT, which is a party to the dispute with TRAI, has been made a member. He should be withdrawn or the chief executive officer of a competing private telecom company should also be made member. To add spice, the government could include a consumer activist. That might �strengthen� TRAI � that is, transform it into a battlefield for competing operators, contesting consumers and bewildered civil servants.

Much had been expected of the government when it approved the recommendations of the national task force on information technology which envisages affordable and ubiquitous telecom infrastructure. But investment will be forthcoming only if the TRAI is powerful and independent. Arbitrary appointments do not inspire confidence, for little is known about why a particular appointee and not anyone else was selected.

Death on the driveway

Sir � Calcutta Police must take drastic steps to curb rash driving following the accident that caused the death of the financial advisor of the Hooghly river bridge commission. Saradindu Chowdhury was run over by a speeding minibus. Suggestions on how to prevent accidents should be sought from city residents whose lives are daily at risk.

Drivers of public vehicles restrain themselves only for fear of being booked when a traffic sergeant is nearby. They become reckless the moment they realize no law enforcer is around. Installing overhead cameras on accident prone roads and junctions may help identify erring drivers. It will make drivers aware that their actions are being monitored, help crime detection and identify polluting vehicles. Huge revenue could be collected as fines. The costs of installation and maintenance of cameras could be borne by insurance companies which pay millions of rupees every year to settle road accident claims.

The police should obtain updated registration data of all vehicles and arrange for periodic and compulsory counselling by competent consultants for all professional drivers. Licensing authorities have to be more careful when issuing fresh licences and renewing old ones.

Sir � The increasing incidence of hit and run accidents in New Delhi is cause for worry. Some mishaps involve public vehicles driven by trainee drivers and even cleaners. Others are caused by rich youngsters who drive expensive cars while inebriated. In a recent case, a speeding BMW mowed down five people and critically injured two others. It was gratifying to learn the main culprit had reportedly not been allowed bail, despite the fact expensive lawyers argued his case. The compensation in this matter should depend on the status of the offenders and not that of the victims. Guidelines on safe driving issued by the courts should be stringently implemented. Strict regulations on consumption of alcohol are also a good idea.

Bashing lineup

Sir � The former Pakistani fast bowler, Sarfaraz Nawaz, has accused Sunil Gavaskar and Asif Iqbal of fixing the Mumbai test during the 1979-80 India-Pakistan series. But he has no evidence to back his fantastic claims. Perhaps jealousy led him to target Gavaskar, so long untainted by betting and matchfixing controversies. Despite retiring from international cricket, Gavaskar continues to be very popular. He is a distinguished columnist and commentator on television and has launched a cricket coaching foundation in Calcutta. Nawaz, in contrast, was soon forgotten after his retirement.

Celebrity-bashing seems to be Nawaz�s favourite hobby, given his various allegations against several of his own former team mates. If the charges against Gavaskar are true, why did Nawaz wait 20 years to make them? Gavaskar should take his baiter to court for libel rather than indulge in verbal brawls.

Events in Kanpur have exercised a significant influence on the imagination of both contemporaries and of later generations. Satichaura Ghat and Bibighar are associated both with the fury of the rebels and the fearful vengeance of the English. Thirty years after 1857, the antagonisms born of those weeks were reenacted in the assassination of an English officer whose father had revelled in the bloody retribution. Passions still ran high on August 15, 1947 when crowds of Indians desecrated the shrine built by the British at Bibighar, and a reversal of icons followed with a bronze statue of Tantia Topi replacing the angel of the well.

Without the violence, Kanpur would probably not have merited the remembrance, not having the grand Mughal lineage that Agra, Lucknow or Delhi possessed. It began in May 1770 as a joint encampment of the troops the nawab of Awadh and the East India Company gathered to stave off a threatened attack by the Marathas. By 1801, the cantonment was known as Cawnpore; the following year it acquired an English revenue collector with police and judicial responsibilities.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee suggests that from this moment a kind of bureaucratic resistance began from among the older revenue knowing and collecting functionaries who misrepresented to the British the boundaries of villages and parganas, the exact figures and rates of collection. The suffering that resulted from wrongful assessments was evident by the 1840s, as �outsider�� Brahmin and mercantile Khattri groups acquired title to lands earlier held by Rajput Thakurs. Yet older groups were not dislodged wholesale, merely antagonized.

Mukherjee is clearly on one side of the great historiographical divide in India about the establishment and maintenance of English rule in India; he believes that English control of India was established by the sword and maintained by the deployment of terror. This enables him to depict the use of violence by rebels in 1857 as a transgression of the boundaries between power and powerlessness. Unlike the English descriptions of the rebel soldiers as fierce and unpremeditated in their violence, the author finds �discrimination�� in their targets of attack. Instead of the �straggling disorder�� that Englishmen saw in the rebel lines, the author represents this as �deliberate throwing away of regimental�� uniforms.

Hence against the covert rituals of the rebels which have entered folklore � like the appearance of chapattis at various places � were posed the overt rituals of destruction conducted by the powerful: the blowing up of rebels from the mouths of cannons and the burning of villages. These atrocities of the British were all committed, says the author, before the rebels had carried out the massacre in Kanpur. After the rebels had attacked and killed numbers of British soldiers, officers and their families, the ferocity of the rulers acquired a new and terrible edge.

But how do historians conceptualize violence? Is violence only a matter of the physical, blood and gore, wounds and scars? Isn�t violence also spiritual, pervasive and subtle in that it leaves no outward traces of its occurrence and, indeed in many cases, no traces of its victims either? The erasure of the histories of many groups can be a form of violence, often perpetrated by those who control ideas, language, performance, the skills and instruments of transmission.

Hence, it would be in the erasure of the songs and mythic verse � the �soul�� � of the rebels, that the manifestation of a subtler violence may lie. The English records are partial, and the author, while acknowledging this, has done a truly commendable job in unravelling texts which have hitherto been treated as �eyewitness�� accounts, showing the wavering nature of the narratives, tracing the routes by which one narrative merges into another English language narrative in an intertextual weaving of the �myths�� of 1857.

It is possible that there were songs, legends and poetry which in fact celebrated the rebels as moral victors. The author�s explanation of the absence of Kanpur from later oral traditions is that since the Indian nationalist movement was largely non-violent, the violence of the rebels at Kanpur in 1857 was an embarrassment which could not be celebrated in song or poem. Yet the poem about the Rani of Jhansi (with the refrain �khub larhi mardani woh to Jhansi wali rani thi�), which every schoolgoing child in north India knows, is in fact a nationalist creation. How is it that the violence of the rani was depicted as bravery, and that perpetrated by the soldiers of Kanpur was not? Is there something of a hidden agenda in celebrating the deeds of royalty and ignoring the resistance of lesser mortals?

Issues of politics and culture have always been critical in reframing the rewriting of the past, whether in the 19th century or in the late 20th. Perhaps this is equally true of historians who do not wish to differentiate between the different strata and ranks within the �rebels��, seeing them as united in their actions and intentions, and also ignore the multilayered character of even �rulers�� themselves. It may of course have been that violence served to erase the heterogeneity of both, but we still need to rethink the issue of how definitions of �violence��, �rebellion�� and of �rulership�� have also been created, and bequeathed to historians.

Readers of the now famous series of historical essays called Subaltern Studies might well wonder if the collective has spawned a new religion. Detractors of Ranajit Guha, the original mastermind of the series, equate his erudition with papal infallibility. They will be disappointed by the subtitle of Sathianathan Clarke�s book.

Clarke has done a very interesting study of the Paraiyars of South India as a specific community of Dalits with special reference to their Indo-Christian outlook. He explores their communal identity through a single icon: the drum. This artefact has been creatively constructed by the author as a text of resistance and emancipatory theology. Clarke�s objective seems to be, in part, to uncover the system that underlies the use of the drum. Abstraction from the surface concreteness of a simple musical instrument is done by relating it to a diversity of social processes.

The drum is projected as an agent of the divine power both to strive against the cooptive inclinations of dominant caste Hinduism and to empower the shared sentiments of the Paraiyar community. Symbolism is construed through the book as the product of a special �mode of thought�� (marginalization and social disarticulation of the Paraiyars) with particular functional properties (using the drum as a protective coating).

This book begins with a comprehensive discussion on theology as deeprooted in the Indian soil. Introducing the reader to Indo-Christian ideas, the book gradually unfolds the religious life of the Paraiyars: first from a historical perspective and then with an integrated study of their culture.

Clarke shows the way the drum acts as a cohesive agent and brings together the Dalit communities of south India. On the question of Christian liberation theology, the emphasis is on the power of symbols as cultural products, and on the organizing principles for unstructured feelings and thoughts. In exploring the complex ways meanings within a social discourse are conveyed, the author even tries to translate the drum as Christ.

Whenever professional theologists have tried to systematize beliefs, their ideas seemed curiously distant from the everyday religion of people. Clarke, a priest of the Church of South India, has escaped this considerably in his writing. The distinction between folk religion and an official theological religion is made thin in the book. This shows that what seems to matter above all in religion is human action.

Religions do try to explain the inexplicable, but they more often render perfectly explainable things arcane. Religions make everyday matters and objects sacred, creating out of the whole cloth beings and forces that are beyond common sense understanding; religions invent mysteries. The book repeatedly takes into account these culturally constructed aspects of the life of the Paraiyars and relates them to a world of invented symbolism, shifting images and transient feelings.

India�s Financial Policy analyzes issues relating to the money market, financial sector regulation, exchange rate policy and the debate on capital account convertibility. It also focusses on monetary policy developments under R.N. Malhotra and C. Rangarajan. Divided into 11 parts and 50 chapters, it comprises articles published in 1997 in Business Standard.

In the first part, S.S. Tarapore argues that a rising inflation rate imposes substantial economic costs on society while a stable price environment enhances the capacity of monetary policy to fight cyclical weaknesses: it is the best contribution monetary policy can make to growth.

Tarapore counters the accusation that the Reserve Bank of India was �monetarist��. He distinguishes tight monetary policy from monetarism and argues that the RBI�s performance would never fit the label �monetarist��. �There is much merit in a gradual but determined approach towards inflation control. Once a system is put in place on a trial run in 1997-98, a formal parliamentary mandate on inflation for, say, a three year period (1998-99 to 2001-02) could be obtained. The inflation mandate could be an average of 3-6 per cent with a centre point of 4.5 per cent. A medium term inflation target is desirable as monetary policy is effective only with a lag.��

Tarapore says that in the emerging monetary scenario an active interest rate policy is imperative. Monetary authorities should not hesitate to move interest rates both ways. Since April 1997, the RBI has made a conscious effort to link a number of interest rates to the bank rate. In June 1997 it used the bank rate to signal a lowering of the structure of interest rates.

Part three examines how a stable money market can be developed. Part four focusses on regulation/supervision of weak banks. Part five deals with non-bank finance companies. The author says there should be a common regulatory framework for banks and financial institutions; it should be considered a fundamental prerequisite for financial institutions to operate as universal banks.

Part six discusses macromanagement and the monetary impact of fiscal operations. Part seven highlights the policy adopted by the government in September 1992 to permit foreign institutional investors to invest in India. It also covers the issue of non-resident deposit schemes and examines how they can be revamped.

In the second half of 1995-96, there was considerable volatility in the Indian foreign exchange market and the RBI had actively intervened. In part eight of the book, the author discusses whether such intervention was desirable. He analyzes the literature on the subject and says that a policy of greater transparency with respect to intervention and the forward liability would by itself enable the authorities to evolve a better mix of policy measures. According to him, since the cost of intervention becomes known, it will become easier to adopt a mix of policy measures for devising an optimal exchange rate policy.

Part nine presents a package of measures for capital account convertibility by April 1, 2000. Part 10 sums up the monetary policy of two former RBI governors, R.N. Malhotra and C. Rangarajan, particularly their endeavours to bring about financial sector reform in the Indian economy.

This book once again proves 19th century Bengal remains a potent time warp for historians, its facets opening up to new and radical interpretations. Indira Chowdhury�s project is not very ambitious though. She seeks to delve into the �self-image of frailty� that the Bengali babu was afflicted with as an adjunct to the colonial stereotypes of the �manly Englishman� and �effeminate Bengali�. The stereotype, she argues, produced multiple icons that helped the Bengali bhadralok reclaim his history, regain his manhood, propel nationalism and spawn a homogenized modern Indian identity whose oppressive weight the nation is still having to bear.

The problem with the delineation of the 19th century icons lies in the fact that most have been worked on exhaustively. Therefore for the most part, Chowdhury ends up sounding familiar. In an overview, the conclusion that the shikhshita bhadralok was creating a discourse of history through the narrative of legends, myths and fables, by identifying with the valour and Aryanness of Marathas and Rajputs, by alienating the Muslims as mlechhas, would not seem too insightful.

Crucial to the politics of the culture of the period were women. Chowdhury explains how women became central to the project of the rediscovery of manhood, but does not satisfactorily explain why. She believes the �recharacterization� of women was a response to official and missionary allegations of the shallow ethical qualities of Hindu women. But the painting of the picture of sati-Sabitri had to do more than that.

Western education turned the babus into servile clerks, British legislation took away their landed status and quite alarmingly, crept into the privacy of their antahpur. Confused and defeated, the Bengali bhadralok turned for solace to the confines of home that now became the domain of his undisputed sway. Women came to bodily represent this autonomous zone. Hence the emphasis on their purity, their chastity, their satitva.

Chowdhury concentrates on the icon that came to represent these qualities. Sati-Sabitri represented the chaste Hindu woman with her unqualified ability to sacrifice and to suffer. It was on Sabitri that the image of the shahadharmini was modelled who with her right mix of education and qualities would keep the man where he belonged.

Chowdhury�s project of frailty is probably best explored in the image of the Bharat Mata. The �magnetism of this new goddess�, she argues, lay not in her chastity and moral strength, but in her �empowerment� through the icon of Queen Victoria. The latter�s resemblance with Indian womanhood through her femininity, affection, compassion, her motherhood might explain the queen�s curious invocation in the nationalist enterprise, even in peasant revolts.

This in a way reflected her assimilation into a benevolent mother figure that could be conveniently transposed with that of Durga or the Bharat Mata. But to argue such transposition necessarily �empowered� the image of the Bharat Mata is to stretch the point. For it is doubtful if the frail image of the mata ever actually got �replaced� by the self-reliant image of Queen Victoria.

The exploration of the perception of an alternative manliness in sanyas is probably the most redeeming part of the book. Chowdhury�s discussion of Swami Vivekananda, who iconized this manhood, is brilliant. The icon of the sanyasi in saffron, disciplining his procreative capacity for the service of the nation, Vivekananda consciously created informed Bengal�s history long after the fires of nationalism had died down.