In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...

This story dates back to 1992. I lived in Hyderabad in those days, and would use the weekends to discover the twin cities and their hinterland. Back then, the Golconda Fort was a bit of trek, but I had heard paeans sung to its grandeur so it was a matter of time before I landed up there. As I climbed up to the main citadel through a succession of concentric battlements, I stopped abruptly when I saw a young lady diligently carving her name or initials into the ancient wall. And snapped. "Utro neeche, ye kya ho raha hai?" Without pausing for breath, she responds, "Tere baap ka hai kya?" "Hai, ab utar nahi to kuchh ulta seedha ho jaega". By now, my voice must have gone up a few decibels, attracting the attention of others nearby. The girl slinked off.

Vandalism is vandalism, whether it is Taliban fundamentalists pointing their artillery howitzers at the magnificent, serene Bamiyan Buddha or a stupid girl carving her name into ancient ramparts. Vandals are sterile, mindless trolls, who believe that violating and destroying what someone else built with love and toil, will immortalise them, and erase the memory of the original builder.

An act of monstrous vandalism is unfolding, at this very moment, in the national capital. A glorious, 3 km long, arrow straight boulevard, formally designated the Central Vista, which connects that great Victorian pile, the Rashtrapati Bhavan to the National Stadium, running right through the India Gate and the Amar Jawan Jyoti, India's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and around which, Sir Edwin Lutyens laid out the imperial capital of British India, is in the cross-hairs of this grotesque, hideous attack.

Our overlords, for they no longer see themselves as merely temporary, democratically elected, incumbents who would, in time, have to relinquish charge and pass the baton, but fancy themselves as founders of a thousand year reich, have decided to take a giant wrecking ball to the Central Vista.

A huge swathe of land on either side of the Rajpath, which is the modest amount of macadamised road a mere two lanes in width, running the length of the Central Vista, has, for a century, been a public commons. For generations of Dilliwalas, it has been a place for paddle boating in the long, reflecting pools, morning walks and late night ice-cream sorties to the green tubelit Sardarji Di Gaddis. The Central Vista was designed to emphatically denote the power and grandeur of the Raj. It segued, effortlessly, into the living heart of the Republic of India. If its great sandstone buildings denote solidity and endurance, its endless acres of turf, gnarled old trees, pools and fountains create a haven of peace and calm where brows uncrease and stress falls away.

A bureaucratic decision, rushed through when the country's attention is on combating the COVID-19 pandemic, and one which would be of a piece with despots of the Chinese, North Korean or Russian regimes, has changed land use of this entire, beautiful commons and appropriated it for building a brand new Xanadu for our brand new Kubla Khans.

Unsurprisingly, all pretense of democratic, consultative process, has been dispensed with, in arriving at this decision, purportedly in the interest of speed and decisiveness. It doesn't stop there. As the government of the day completely abdicates its responsibility for protecting hundreds of million migrant labourers, petty traders, small business owners, blue-collar workers, and their dependents from imminent economic devastation, and offers nothing except hollow homilies to help them to survive and build back their lives, these new age Neros and Marie Antoinettes have set aside Rs. TWENTY THOUSAND CRORES, for funding their Forbidden City. That's money from the Consolidated Fund of India. Money that you, I and every other Indian voluntarily handed over to the government, in the form of direct and indirect taxes. Money which was meant to be held in trust and spent for pursuing the greatest good of the greatest number.

Catastrophes are the despot's best friend. They provide cover fire for unspeakably grotesque, unapologetically egregious, self-aggrandisement.

One day, in decades to come, we shall look back and wonder how we remained mute spectators as the new empire vivisected and dismembered one of the grandest, most beautiful cityscapes not merely in our country, but in the entire world.

Right now, though, cry a quiet tear, for yourself, and for the generations who will follow you. Our Bamiyan Buddha moment is at hand.

Salary. Payable when able?

By now you have probably heard of multiple instances of people's salaries being partially docked, or postponed in full or part, as an immediate consequence of the COVID-19 lockdown.

Step back and think about what messages are implicit in this situation.

• Top Managements of organisations, under implicit, or possibly explicit, instructions from their investors, are moving to mitigate impairment of the financial health of the enterprise.
• One group of creditors, who are currently in no position to insist on their credit being honoured, is employees. The economy was already in deep trouble even before the pandemic hit; when all revenue gets turned off as abruptly as it has, for over a month, and counting, the outcomes worsen by orders of magnitude. They will, in the event, take any punishment which comes their way.
• Managements have, therefore, chosen to attack this statutory obligation with a sledgehammer. Redundancies are rising rapidly, and even those employees who survive the culling, are worse off than they were, just last month.
• Needless to say, while employees' incomes are shrinking, or vanishing, their multiple obligations won't. A home mortgage will, at best, permit a temporary moratorium of maintaining monthly installments, but at a punitive cost in terms of increased interest in the near future. Education, healthcare, energy, household provisions, transfers to support the extended family and so on will not pause, merely because the salary does.

It shocks me, that this assault on employees' compensation has drawn as little anger, revulsion and condemnation as it has.

The contemptuous indifference to the economic, and indeed physical and mental, well-being of employees, at a time when it is more fragile than it has been in my memory, (which goes back to the 1970s, I should add), is freighted with many messages, some of which I shall try to unpack and decode.

• The only voice, which counts at the corporate decision making table, is the investor's voice. His/her ROI must be protected, no matter what else is thrown under the bus to ensure it. This is not surprising. Anyone familiar with the role of incentives in decision making will know that the financial interest of most top management teams is bound, inextricably, with shareholder returns. All the other stuff about caring capitalism is just, well, stuff.
• The entire idea, that equity investment in a business is in the nature of risk capital, which will burgeon when the business enjoys fair climes and favourable winds, and wither when it faces adversities, is a fiction, an oft-repeated fiction which sounds credible exactly because it is repeated so often. Investors, particularly, all sorts of institutional investors, refuse to even contemplate capital attrition, much less allow it, fully cognizant of what it may imply for other participants in the organisational value-chain. Did you notice my refusal to use the popular word, 'stakeholders', and resorting, instead, to an elliptical phrase? 'Stakeholders' has a heartwarmingly broad sweep. The moment the proverbial hits the fan, the only stake which must be, is, privileged is Big Capital.
• The State will offer plenty of lip sympathy to struggling employees, and even appear to raise a disapproving eyebrow or two at errant employers who beleaguer employees. This will be accompanied by little or no legislative or executive action, either to proscribe such actions, or to mitigate the suffering of employees at the receiving end. Managements and investors understand this well, given that here too, a system of incentives, called electoral bonds, or other such virtuous-sounding names, is at work behind the veil.
• Investors in equity become entitled, in perpetuity, to returns on their investment, either in the form of capital appreciation or distributed profits (dividends). Employees must justify their presence on the payroll every day that they spend on it. Employees sign up to a salary which grows in accordance with the company's reward system. Now, it turns out, that there was a force majeur clause, presumably inscribed in invisible ink, which qualified their salary itself. In effect, employers can work, with impunity, on the assumption that salary is not even payable when able but payable IF able.

Thomas Piketty and several other economists and thinkers have been warning us about the ever widening chasm between an ever-shrinking global elite and all the rest of us grunts. COVID-19 has underscored, for hundreds of million employees around the world, how tenuous their lease on their salary really is.

We are just over a week away from International Workers' Day, marked on May 1 every year. Most readers are likely unaware of the history which led to this observance. It commemorates a massive strike in Chicago on this day, back in 1886, which led to the US-wide adoption, over the following decades, of the 8-hour workday. The issues, 134 years ago, pertained to just conditions of employment for the working man. In 2020, the employment contract itself seems to have turned into a flimsy, fragile parchment which might, at any moment, turn to dust.

A few hundred million livelihoods may be devastated over the very near future, but hedge fund partners will not be surrendering multimillion-buck bonuses any time soon.

Preaching to the converted

An interesting issue came up in a conversation with a dear friend . "You always take a polarised position on politics which does not help you bring new people around to your way of thinking. The world has a lot of undecided people, who are looking for a persuasive argument, which will help them pick one side over another, but your polemics turn them away". And further. . "If you are truly objective and rational, you will be able to see that the people you oppose also do some good. If you acknowledge it before getting into your critical commentary, you will sound more credible to those who straddle the fence, and perhaps, even bring some of them around to your positions". Culminating in this. "There will be more elections in future and the undecided will really be the deciding vote. If you can bring around even a few people to your point-of-view, it might help make the difference between victor and vanquished".

Where do political positions come from? From what I have seen so far, there is a considerable amount of politics which gets passed down in families. A lot of it has to do with community or religious affiliations. This legacy is already in place before a child gets into her teens. Those kids who were heckling the nanis and dadis of Shaheen Bagh with 'goli maro' slogans, or rioting at Chand Bagh, accompanied their fathers and uncles to the protest site. They have been blooded in a particular ideology and it is unlikely that they will change their minds any time soon. My father, who never explicitly aligned himself with a particular party, leaned to the Left, and if I identify as a democratic socialist, it is because of our countless conversations about political power, how it is distributed, what it does to the lives of people, and whether it is possible to reset its inequitable distribution.

Political positions are guided by self-interest. This may be related to religion, economic status, social class, specific or generic anxieties about people or things, assessment of the balance between primacy of the individual/collective and so on. Even the most altruistic or 'virtue-signalling' positions are likely underpinned in self-interest (though this warrants a separate post). What are my positions?

• I abhor and accept no compromises with: gender-disparity and misogyny, racism, casteism, religious phobias (Antisemitism, Islamophobia), sectarianism, communalism, stratospheric disparities of income and wealth and government policies which encourage them, totalitarianism, majoritarianism, extra-judicial vigilantism. And so on.
• I endorse and promote: freedom of thought and expression (including religious thought and expression), equality of status and opportunity, fraternity of all peoples across the world, economic justice and system of progressive personal taxes, a durable and comprehensive social safety net, independent judiciary, competent and autonomous institutions, scientific temperament and intellectual curiosity, free and fearless news media, affirmative action for the physically, socially or economically disadvantaged. And so on.

My writing about these issues is, therefore, an act of political activism. What does political activism seek to achieve?

1. Political activism is intended to organise individuals into collectives. The Mahatma, Madiba, Dr. King and Velupillai Prabhakaran sensed that there was far wider support for the causes they espoused than was visible, particularly to their particular adversary. Their actions were designed to galvanise people to action and each action snowballed their movement. Their message to their people was of resistance to a malign overlord. Their strategy was to show them that they were not alone in their frustration and pain; that while an individual could be muzzled or snuffed out, the collective was impossible to mute. They worked as the glue which fused individuals into great movements.
2. Political activism clarifies hazy, unarticulated frustrations into cogent ideas of dissent and resistance. Stated differently, political activism gives vocabulary and grammar to what was incipient and repressed. Greta Thunberg can't possibly be the first person of her generation to agonise over the ravaging of the biosphere by insatiable human greed, but she became the catalyst for a global movement by speaking her mind.
3. Political activism creates a litmus test, parsing those for and against a viewpoint. When Mr. Modi called for his allies to prefix their SocMed identities with "chowkidar", he set up a binary; there was no middle ground. In addition, he gave them an honorific which they shared with the greatest in the land. Gandhi's Khadi, Lenin's red scarves and Trump's MAGA hats are all shibboleths. These days, a cursory look at the comments below any SocMed post, particularly one with a political colour, divide neatly into pro and anti. 

What, then, about the 'undecided people' who triggered this post?

Go back and read what I abhor and what I endorse. People who claim to be undecided about: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, freedom of speech and expression, scientific temperament or independent media; are really people who represent views at complete odds with mine. People, in essence, who are waiting for the moment when their views will sound less horrible because the Overton Window has moved that way. They are fellow-travelers of everything which I oppose. And it's a waste of my energy and time to try to bring them around.

India, and the world at large, has ceded huge ground to sectarian demagogues with totalitarian ambitions. Remarkably, their positions enjoy widespread support and even a scintilla of dissent is squelched by the armies of vicious trolls at their beck and call.

In such a time, the task for a small voice like mine is to give  some vocabulary to those struggling to find it, to contribute to the glue which will coalesce them into a meaningful opposition, to shake out hypocrisy and sanctimony. The grand consensus doesn't need my approbation to validate itself. Those who feel cold, lonely and lost because they are apparently railing against what everyone else worships, though? They need to hear encouragement; to gather around, make common cause, fight on, no matter how daunting the odds.

My time and effort is best spent preaching to the converted.

p.s. A young reader who read the first draft drew my attention to this essay which highlights very similar themes in the context of white people's views of racism.