Hey! Finally decided to use this blog for something constructive. Kian Tajbakhsh, internationally respected scholar and social scientist, cousin of my professor, and Indophile was arrested by Iranian authorities on charges of spying. He is being held at Evin Prison in Iran, without access to a lawyer or to visitors. Please take a few minutes to sign this online petition to the Iranian President for his release. He is innocent of all charges and works for the Open Society Institute in Teheran. Please do this for the protection of basic human rights and the freedom of expression.

Yesterday, I was waiting in a long queue in the cafeteria of Sciences Po, when I ran into a friend who was before me in the queue. After a minute or two of small talk and Sciences Po bashing, as is normal with all students of the dratted college, I happened to mention that I have a dissertation on Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka to complete. She looked at me, rather strangely might I add, and then asked me why I did not consider doing my dissertation on the caste system and democracy in India. I replied, in no uncertain terms, that I was not interested in the topic, adding that the much-maligned system of castes cannot be studied by one who has grown up in it. At that comment, she told me that it would be an interesting thing to write about how castes can be abolished.

Now, let me make it clear that while I am no avid supporter of the caste system in India, I do not believe it can be abolished. It exists and will continue to exist for the next 500 years. Nobody wants to get rid of it, not even the “oppressed castes” themselves. There is an increasing affirmation of one’s caste identity within the framework of Indian democracy. And, I made the mistake of actually telling Miss. Know-it-all this in the belief that she would drop the topic and concentrate on getting her low-calorie sandwich and “yaourt nature” from the counter. But no, she was not to be outdone. In an irritatingly smug voice she declared, “Mais…tu sais que le sytème des castes va à l’encontre de la démocratie en Inde. Tu te rends compte que c’est l’oppression!!”

For those poor souls who know little or no French, she was basically trying to convince me that the system was against the concept of democracy and that it was oppression of the lower castes! Hello!! But who exactly is someone from an ex-Soviet republic that has no idea of freedom, and much less of democracy, to hector me on what it means to be democratic? It was, at best, frustrating. In fact, all I felt was a sense of outrage at being told that India was not democratic. At that moment, I felt like tearing her argument apart by pointing out that her country did not even remotely resemble a democracy and that people in glass houses must not throw stones.

Aargh!! Honestly, some people believe they have exclusive sovereignty over concepts like freedom, democracy and liberty. A cursory glance at the Freedom House index of liberty in the world will reveal that India is one of the few developing countries in the world that is completely free. Also note that most countries of the ex-Soviet Union are considered not free. Need I say more? I admit that India is not the best country in the world when it concerns corruption, human development and primary education. But, to say that India is not democratic infuriates me like no other comment can. I may be wrong in saying this, but ask the man on the street in India if caste must be abolished. He/she will say no. Caste, like a family name is an identity. It is a symbol of belonging to a particular group. So much so that many people are beginning to adopt their caste names as surnames in South India. Who is a western-educated Kyrgyz student of International Relations to hector the people of India to get rid of that one symbol that gives them security? It is true that the “oppressed” castes must be given basic rights. But, to say that the system must be abolished is both unrealistic and patronising.

Let me make one thing clear. Ridding India of the problem of caste is not, as Kipling would have claimed, the white man’s burden. It is not even the black, brown or yellow man’s burden. The people of India will get rid of it when they feel that it has lost its utility and relevance in the modern world. Until then, the world would do well to step aside and let us rule ourselves the way we think fit. We elect our leaders in free and fair elections every 5 years, sometimes even more frequently. We are capable of deciding who should rule us and what the rulers should do. Like all other democracies, we have our failings. We elect people who are not worth it. We make mistakes and so find that politics is increasingly corrupt and criminalised. But, let us deal with it in our own way. Through democracy. It has served us well over the last 60 years. And I believe it will continue to do so for many decades to come. Until then, western-educated know-it-all snobs would do well to refrain from commenting on things they neither know nor understand.

The results are in. Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s right-wing, hardliner presidential candidate is on his way to the Elysée Palace to take charge as the country’s new president. The results, declared a short while ago, confirmed what psephologists have been saying since the beginning of the electoral campaign. Sarkozy won the elections with 53% of votes in the second round, compared to Ségolène Royal’s 47. What do these results signify? Where does the Parti Socialiste go from here? Royal was the first woman to come this close to be elected president of the republic in the history of France. But, what happens next? Will she rise to the occasion and succeed in revamping the party to make it more appealing to the voting masses? Or will she disappear beneath the rubble of wannabe presidents who never actually managed to do anything in life?

Analysts suggested that Sarkozy’s pro-American, capitalist stance contributed to the success of leftist candidates in the first round. From my personal experience with the French, I know that this is a country that obsesses with job security unlike any other western democracy I know. I followed the election campaign with interest, and I must say both Sarkozy and Royal were extremely convincing in their arguments. If I had not been a convinced liberal, believing in the law of the markets, I would probably have voted for Royal. However, one of the proposals in her election manifesto caught my interest. She promised to raise the minimum salary, or the SMIC as it is called here, to 1500 euros a month. That would mean a proportionate increase in all salaries, because one can obviously not raise the SMIC and leave the pay of someone who was earning a lot more than the old rate unchanged. And it left me wondering how she proposed to raise the money needed for the endeavour. But I suppose one can dream.

Next comes Sarkozy. With his promise to tighten immigration rules, fight economic stagnation and ensure better pay for longer hours, he caught the imagination of many people in the country. The promise to tighten immigration rules and make regularisation of illegal migrants more difficult certainly strikes fear in the heart of many an immigrant, illegal or not. Unpleasant reminders of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his campaign of La France pour les français, and its similarity to the Sarkozy agenda is scary to most people. However, I cannot but support his endeavour to abolish the ridiculous 35-hour work week law established by Martine Aubry in 1998. To me, it is inconceivable that the Indian government promulgate a law establishing a cap on working hours. In such matters, the law of the markets should apply. At the very least, the law should be flexible. If I want to work more to earn more money, I should be able to without my employer cribbing about having to pay more for every hour beyond the 35^th hour.

Anyway, these are just the rants of an obsessed libertarian who firmly believes that the government must govern because that’s its job, while letting the markets peacefully generate wealth. Many of the French would disagree. But hey, we live in a democracy. And dissent is healthy!

I had my first class with Christophe Jaffrelot, the ultra-famous India specialist of Sciences Po on Thursday. The first thing that struck me in the class was the utter lack of participation. Indeed, it is not Jaffrelot’s fault that the students did not ask him any questions. What drew my attention was the fact that throughout the 2 hour-long class, students listened with rapt attention to every word he uttered, not daring to iterrupt once, not daring to question his evidently extensive knowledge on the Indian freedom struggle. I, for one, was not exactly the most impressed. While his knowledge of the freedom struggle is certainly extensive, it does not exceed that of a masters student in Indian history. I do not know how many people I must be scandalising by saying what I am, but I do know that studying India requires much more than just knowledge of its history.

This brings me to the topic of the day. Why was India alone is choosing democracy as the form of government when the tens of other newly-independent countries wavered between democracy and autocracy throughout their independent history? Is it the will of the INC? What is it that makes democracy tick in India? The answers provided by Jaffrelot were unsatisfactory, to put it mildly. He claimed that there was an internalisation of democracy in the psyche of the people that led to the successful establishment of a democratic regime in post-colonial India. I do not object to the theory per se, but the western attitude that assumes that democracy is an import from the west and a colonial legacy does disturb me quite a bit.

Jaffrelot, for all his expert knowledge on India, seems to ridicule Indian claims that democracy was indeed practised for centuries before the coming of the Turks. He claims it is an attempt to make something inherently foreign more acceptable to the people of the land. Whether India has any semblance of democracy or not in the pre-colonial era is open to question. I do not claim to be an expert in Indian history, but there is archeological evidence of the ballot in many parts of the Chola kingdom of the 10th and 11th centuries AD. In addition, the concept of non-monarchical, republican governments existed in ancient India well before the advent of modern democracy in Europe. For evidence, go to http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/muhlberger/histdem/indiadem.htm.

This paper by Steve Muhlberger, Associate Professor of History, Nipissing University, is revealing and unbiased. He is not Indian and has no personal interest in claiming that India did indeed have republics before the Europeans discovered it. While I admit that the republics are not really democracies in the modern sense of the word, it does by no means, diminish the importance of its existence in Ancient India. If only Kshatriya men were allowed to participate in the village councils in India, only the landed and rich feudal lords were allowed to vote in elections in all of Europe until the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed, a cursory glance at the history of France, supposedly the mother of democracy, will reveal the blatant and violent repression of the rights of the landless labour class until the French Revolution of 1789. Even after the Revolution, France underwent periods of violent and brutal regime changes until the establishment of the fifth republic at the end of the Second World War. This history is, by no means, a shameful one. It merely shows that every country needs time to grow and mature into a full-fledged democracy based on the respect of human rights and on universal adult franchise.

Faulting India for having a system that resembled democracy only remotely by modern standards is not only unjust, but also reflects the double standards of the occidentals. I am perhaps scathing in my criticism of western attitudes but I find it appalling that anything that does not conform to the Europe-centred conception of a Westphalian nation-state is automatically rejected as worthless. While studying the political institutions of a country, one must take into account its cultural heritage and local traditions before passing a value judgement on its history. I do not deny that the caste system is a bad thing. But, to say that Indian Republics were not democracies because they allowed only male members of the Kshatriya caste to participate is unfair. It would do good for western analysts to remember that India is one of the few countries that chose to become a democracy without even stopping to consider other forms of government. It would also do to remember that the most liberal western democracies have never had women heads of state. The United States is a case in point. Nor have these democracies ever had a member of a minority assume positions of power and importance, the Afro-Americans in the US and Arab immigrants in Europe. On the other hand, India has elected both women and minorities to responsible positions in government.

To conclude, I think the western world would do a lot better if they just stopped being so judgemental about another’s culture and heritage. After all, all that belongs to the west is not necessarily good, just as all that is third-world is not necessarily bad.