Caste, Politics and Reservation - Part I

Caste based politics is not new to TN, or for that fact for India. The more we say we are casteless, religion neutral secular country, the more we practice casteism. Even in this century, even in this IT age. The popular matrimony sites advertise - database of "x" no of castes, "y" no of communities .....and so on. And we are replete with all kinds of "sangams" (associations) who are supposed to take care of their respective castes and in few cases their respective political parties too.

The story of PMK in TN is too well known to be documented - PMK "graduated" to the most-sought-after political ally (usually for different parties in different elections) from its earlier roots of Vanniyar sangam. They are particularly strong in Northern and part of western districts of TN. Even after some of the most politically opportunistic alliance switching - its political base remained intact and whenever major political parties aligned with it, it got benefited.

Few other caste based parties also tried this route albeit with little success. Most of them remained as "letter pad" parties and used it so called power to bargain with political parties for one or two seats or for nothing (but settled for some cash.)

Most of us say we detest caste based politics, but we dont know from where these guys gain strength and confidence. It is particularly depressing to know that even well known Cinema starts (Karthik, Vivek and now Sarathkumar to name a few) tries to use (exploit) the youth of their caste to promote their benefits. (To be fair to him, Vivek is no longer in the forefront of his caste "sangam", Karthik has made a mockery of a Once-a-Nationalist-party into a caste based outfit and Sarathkumar in a none-too-subtle way is wooing his community people with his political outfit, ironically named with "equality")

Representatives of mainstream political parties also play their own caste games especially on micro level which largely gets unnoticed by the mainstream media or at best ignored.

The main demands of these caste based outfits is for more job opportunities and more educational opportunities (read exclusive reservation) for their community. With TN being one of the "advanced and mature" states in "social equality" (whatever it means) not much tinkering can be done in the existing reservation formula (though PMK was able to extract a significant % in the pretext of MBC). As a result most of the caste based political parties doesn't seem to do much actually to the upliftment or welfare of their community people. Instead it remains as a fringe political force and mostly militant in its way in dealing with the other communities, especially with the oppressed classes (in their region). This trend is particularly disturbing as this has caused the affected parties to join or form an outfit of their own (again with their own caste affiliations). The emergence of PB and VCK in the northern districts and PT in the southern districts is an indication for this (PB - Puthiya Bharatham, VCK - Viduthalai chirruthaigal, PT- Puthiya Tamizhagam ).

As though all this is not enough, TN is witnessing the next wave in the heady cocktail of caste and politics - the emergence of a political outfit for Kongu Vellalars, known as Gounders and the FEBAS, the Federation of Brahmin association of South India.

More on this on the next posting ...

Is English necessary for a nations development ?

If I have to answer this in one word its a BIG NO. Since there are lot of ifs & buts and assumptions associated with it - will elaborate a little bit.

First, why NO ? To guage a nations development - language is not a metric or criteria - industrialization, education, standard of living are some of the metrics. With respect to this if you see the G-5, G-7, G-8 or G-20 group of countries - majority of the countries (in each group) are non-English countries. In fact English as a native language is only for a handful of countries - UK, USA, Australia, Canada, New zealand South Africa and few others.

Countries like Germany, Russia, Japan, China, France,Italy, India etc .. are all world's advanced economies and no way they can say the development (or the non-development) is because of English. For Engineering, the benchmark is Germany, for quality the bench mark is Japanese, for cost effective - China, Taiwan, worlds sweetest language - Italian, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil - opinions differ, but not English ....So English is not a differentiating factor. No doubt English is established itself as a language of business and to an extent language of technology. But it doesn't mean that English alone can bring prosperity or growth to a nation. It is a good second language. Thats it.

With respect to Indian situation vis-a-vis English - ONE BIG MYTH that is created and being circulated - English is the reason for our (recent) growth and success. Nothing can be far from truth. In fact this (misguided) over-dependence on English is actually holding us back on the development. People will argue that the IT, ITS, ITES ($) revenues are all because of English. My personal opinion on this is it is nothing but a glorified clerical service and bodyshopping. What we earn on this is peanuts when compared to what we could have. The problem is we dont have any IP/Patent/Invention. We dont invest/develop worldclass products. Germany built SAP. Japs created SONY. We dont have a world class BRAND (yet). To build that you dont need English. You need native intelligence. Which we have. But which is blurred because of dependence on English.

The limiting factor is - our higher education not being in ones mother tongue. Even - to understand the concepts - one has to be proficient in a foreign language (English) and then master the subject - this is pretty difficult for somebody who is switching to English Medium at the college level. The creative ability of one diminishes if he/she is forced to think in another language.

Also, on the English/British education system - its again a forced one on us (by British and Christian missionaries). My personal opinion on this is - it creates very good clerks and followers (and restricts creative thinking). It is to the credit of our native intelligence (common sense?) that we were able to overcome most of its limitations and be able to grow.

Before the English/British style education we had the Gurukul style of schooling. It will be another topic/debate on the merits and demerits of it. The one good thing I could think of the present (English/British) education system is it helped to eradicate few social barriers. But at what cost ? At the cost of our Mother Tongue(s).....which I feel is very costly .....

It is a pity that our medium of instruction has to be in English (a foreign language) instead of our Mother tongue. This in spite of being one of the advanced civilizations in the world - be it architectural wonders (Tanjore temples), engineering feats (Kallanai dam) or in medicine, literature etc. For almost two to three generations and more as a nation/state we have to endure this ignominy and the worst thing is we take pride in it. The slow death of our Mother tongues is an unpardonable sin we are doing to our forefathers, culture and civilization.

We are going to have one generation of people (are already we have ?) who is neither proficient in English (but they think they are good at it) nor good at their own mother tongue (for which they are proud of (!)) and have little or no knowledge of their nations main language.

Conflict of Interest and the right behaviour ...

Almost an endangered species in the morality, even the most refined individuals at times find it difficult to behave correctly when any conflict of interest arises. Few examples (on how to handle it) which comes to my mind immediately are :

1. During our college days, EEE HOD is our controller of examinations (or equivalent to that). So happened his son (our immediate junior) is also the student of the college. I remember him not entering the examination hall whenever his son wrote the exams. May be he is legally bound - but morally that set an good example.

2. P.Chidamabaram, initially when offered the textiles industry ministry apparently declined because his friends and family had lots of interests in the textile business and he felt a conflict of interest may arise.

There are lots of unwritten rules on how the professionals should behave when it comes to handling the conflict of interest - especially the likes of lawyers, auditors, doctors etc. Above all, Media is supposed to behave without any conflict of interest - i.e without any affiliation to any political party, business, religion and more than that - reporting news as news and not "opinions".

Though there are slight deviations here and there, print media more or less behaved/behaving in a professional manner. Advent of electronic media and the profileration of news channels changed this - instead of news we started to hear Rajdeep Sardesai opinion's, Barkha Dutt's opinions. To be fair to them though they went overboard in the news reporting, never any ulterior motives were suspected or alluded (again there were some doubts in the behind-the-camera-scandal-exposures about the intention and the timings).

But it all pales into insignificance when compared to the behaviour of the major cable channels in Tamilnadu. Due to their political affinities, the default behaviour and the reporting of SUN and Jaya TV are only on the expected lines ...nothing extraordinary expected from them ...though in "ideal conditions" if they behaved differently (neutrally) from their political affiliations it would have been great. I guess nobody bothered and not even other media found it worth to "advise" them to toe the unofficial media dharma (of being neutral in reporting). And infact during election time they almost behaved as an official news channel of the respective political parties rather than a general media serving the public.

Not only in politics, even in film reviews and promotions, the political partiality was obvious. Thotti Jaya and Sachien - two reasonably decent movies was blacked out in SUN channels (because the producer Dhanu was from MDMK).

The arrival of Kalignar TV and the increasing interest of the heir apparents (Kalanidhi Maran/Dayanidhi Maran, Udhaiyanidhi Stalin, Dayanidhi Azhagiri all own film production or film distribution uints) of the TN's first political family in the film production and the film distribution business has further aggravated the situation and what we are witnessing is anarchy and sometimes bordering to comical too. Average movies like Kadhalil Vizhundehen, Dindugal Sarathy was promoted to dizzying heights in SUN channel. Varanam Ayuiram is ignored in SUN, while Padikadhavan is ignored in Kalignar. Both Kalignar and SUN ignored "Kadhalna Summa Illa" - a movie produced by Raj TV group (Infact, this movie a remake of the Telugu hit Gamyam is one of the better movies of the pongal release).

When the politics and cinema of a whole state is controlled (or likely to be controlled) by a Single Family ....hmmmm .....let us see what the future beholds for "Tamizhagam" ....