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Published on 6 Comments on Hindus do eat beef

Lalu Prasad Yadav's candid remark on #beef eating "Even Hindus eat #beef" appears to have shocked Sushil Kumar #Modi, and he's asking Sonia Gandhi and Nitish Kumar for explanations, as though there is something difficult to comprehend about a four word sentence.

While the #BJP is busy rewriting #history and and science and textbooks to studiously insert belief everywhere and anywhere, and undermining organizations of learning by installing carefully mediocre (read incompetent) people to key positions, surely the supposed gatekeepers are not unaware of the fact that Hindus can and do eat beef.

I personally know several Brahmins who have eaten beef. I know plenty of Hindus abroad who eat beef. My first taste of beef was a can of corned beef on a trek - brought along by someone whose father was a senior leader of a BJP affiliate party. That too a girl. And this is the Brahmins. The supposed vegetarians, all mentioned so far. Plenty of non-vegetarian friends eat beef. In my late teens and early twenties, I went to the bhendi bazaar almost religiously every Friday, to pick up cheap and interesting things - particularly art materials. One of the #Hindu friends on the group - a CKP - a meat eating #caste considered very upper caste and equals of Brahmins was a total beef fan. If he went to Bhendi bazaar, it was impossible to get him out without eating beef in one of the restaurants there - I forget the name now. I have had beef several times with him, though at that point I was mostly a vegetarian and lived in a Brahmin society, so these experiences came largely in the company of other meat eaters - not just beef, even chicken or other meat.

Kerala BJP leader Surendran enjoying parotta and beef
Kerala BJP leader Surendran enjoying parotta and beef
Over the years, I have heard of countless Hindus eating beef. Perhaps Sushil Kumar Modi is not aware, but there are photos of BJP leaders eating beef as well. In Kerala. In 2013, BJP Tribal leader Devlal Dugga sacrificed a cow to a tribal deity in his native village of Khadka in Narayanpur district of Chattisgarh - against the wishes of local villagers and in a place where animal sacrifices had been banned. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, BJP leader in #Kashmir - Khurshid Ahmed Malik (probably not Hindu unless gharwapsied) threw a beef party protesting the beef ban in Jammu and Kashmir and invited Hindus and Muslims. In 2012, dalits organized a beef eating festival in protest of a beef ban imposed on the college campus at Osmania University. ABVP activists even gatecrashed and got violent there, so it isn't as though BJP didn't know. If you look at the campaign page of the beef and pork eating campaign at JNU, you will notice that most of the profiles listed sound Hindu.

Beef is happily eaten in the northeast tribes, in West Bengal. Countless Hindus have openly stated on various social #media that they do eat beef in the last few days. Like waving "hello! Hindu here. Eats beef."

And this is hardly a new thing.

Here's Savarkar for you.

When humanitarian interests are not served and in fact harmed by the cow and when humanism is shamed, self-defeating extreme cow protection should be rejected…(Samagra Savarkar vangmaya, Vol. 3, p.341)

This is Vivekananda:

If we did not eat beef and mutton, there would be no butchers. Eating meat is only allowable for people who do very hard work, and who are not going to be Bhaktas; but if you are going to be Bhaktas, you should avoid meat.

The Brahmins at one time ate beef and married Sudras. [A] calf was killed to please a guest. Sudras cooked for Brahmins.[Source]

There was a time in this very #India when, without eating beef, no Brahmin could remain a Brahmin; you read in the Vedas how, when a Sannyasin, a king, or a great man came into a house, the best bullock was killed; how in time it was found that as we were an agricultural race, killing the best bulls meant annihilation of the race. Therefore the practice was stopped, and a voice was raised against the killing of cows.[Source]

Vivekananda is even alleged to have eaten beef himself (though he has also given contradictory quotes claiming no Hindu eats beef - worth a separate article to examine what he said and to which audience).

So, either an organization claiming to speak about Hindus is ignorant about Hindus, or it pretends to call everyone it can lay its hands on as Hindus, but in the end will only recognize its core upper caste cartel as real Hindus. BJP has to decide whether beef eating castes and tribes it claims under Hinduism are Hindu or not. It has to decide whether the Buddhists it calls Hindu are Hindu or not. If yes, then Hindus most certainly eat beef. If not, they must stop lying in election campaigns and propaganda about the holy cow and Hindu Rashtra. Though of course, Sushil Kumar Modi may not think of beef-eating dalits as Hindus, given how his name was implicated in support to murderers of dalits from the Ranvir Sena. Surely a son of #Hindutva wouldn't endorse #murder of Hindus like some invading Mughal?

Surely the messiahs of Hindus wouldn't do the most harm to Hindus with beef bans?

Because, even Savarkar had the nature of upper caste zealotry nailed, and himself being atheist and uneasy with #superstition and had explicitly said:

…When humanitarian interests are not served and in fact harmed by the cow and when humanism is shamed, self-defeating extreme cow protection should be rejected…(Samagra Savarkar vangmaya, Vol. 3, p.341)

Ring any bells about Dadri and zealot leaders recommending murder on national television?

But then that is exactly what BJP is doing, no? Creating an artificial "truth" of Hinduism, that excludes non-upper-caste practices and herds everyone into following the "dharma" their leaders are best at defining for everyone - with carrot and stick?

Regardless, at least at this date, it cannot be denied that Hindus do eat beef, which BJP is trying its hardest to deny and prevent. One wonders why, if BJP is supposedly pro-Hindu. One wonders why BJP claims to care about Hindus at all, when its agenda is Hindutva, affiliates of which are happy to #attack Hindus who don't conform to their zealot agenda for India. When the poison fed by nationalists and their profiteering hits the roof so bad that retired veterans are assaulted by state controlled #police, and BJP leader's son incites a murder by lynching with a manufactured accusation of beef eating - against the family of an Air Force warrior of India, where the Air Force chief is moving the family threatened by the murderous rage unleashed by BJP's insanity to its own secure base to protect them.

You can wake up one who is sleeping, not one who pretends to sleep. You can reason with one conflicted over information, not ones seeking to interpret anything and everything and photoshop where not available to incite civil war in a country they pretend to love. Where they report to an organization giving open calls to people to have arms in their home. When there is massive political profit to be reaped from threatening the safety of people and winning #elections by polarizing the greater number of people in a direction you represent, what is the small sacrifice of truth, safety, life?

Is that not the plan? To raze India to the ground and build a Hindu Rashtra on its carcass?

What does it matter that fundamental rights be overruled, bitter hatred be spawned among communities, violence warp Hindu minds till they think of nothing beyond hostility to Muslims. What does it matter? Riots win elections. That is all that matters to abject greed. BJP leaders will be unable to see Hindus who eat beef. They will redefine Hindus, attack them as "not real Hindus" or "anti-Hindus", recommend murders for "secularists", anything, everything to avoid that four word sentence Lalu Prasad Yadav threw out. "Even Hindus eat beef."

It is true.

Published on Leave a comment on Will somebody please impeach Manipur Chief Justice LK Mohapatra for corruption?

7 April 2015, India: OK, here’s a question: Can you and I make a profit of about Rs 90 lakh by selling a plot of government land before it is transferred to us? Can we sell it to a known crook and swindler at the height of his career? Answer: If we are common people, then no. But if we are high court judges, then yes, we can not only do it, but we can also be elevated to the position of a Chief Justice! Come, let us learn from Justice Laxmi Kanta Mohapatra, Chief Justice Of Manipur, how it is done.

Like all our High Court and Supreme Court judges, Justice Laxmi Kanta Mohapatra (http://hcmimphal.nic.in/judges.html) is immune to the laws of the land. When he was a High Court judge in Odisha, Mr. Mohapatra accepted a bribe of about Rs 90 lakh through a shady land deal with a chit-fund fraudster named Pradeep Sethy (http://tinyurl.com/pradeep-sethy), whose Artha Tatwa Chit Fund scam in Odisha was estimated by Supreme Court to be Rs 4,600 crore – roughly twice the size of the infamous Saradha scam in West Bengal. (Others put it at Rs 20,000 crore.) In this unusual sale of land, the Cuttack Development Authority actively cooperated with Justice Mohapatra. In connection with this same land transaction, Advocate General Ashok Mohanty was arrested last year (http://tinyurl.com/AG-ashok-Mohanty), but Laxmi Kanta Mohapatra -- then the Acting Chief Justice of Manipur High Court -- went on to be elevated to Chief Justice on 10th July 2014, well after the scandal became well-known in the public domain and the media! Isey kehte hain Independence Of Judiciary!

One however wonders about the dynamics of how this particular elevation happened. Did somebody bribe the members of the Supreme Court collegium on behalf of the hon’ble Mr Mohapatra? Or did one of the collegium judges highly recommend Mr Mohapatra as, relatively speaking, the cleanest judge available for the position of CJ of Manipur? Did this brother judge convincingly argue that a little bit of shady dealings, stamp duty evasion and money-laundering should be considered acceptable among the brotherhood of judges? Or was it the collegium’s considered decision that, since Justice Mohapatra was only exploiting well-known legal loopholes in Odisha's Stamp Act and other laws, it was legally acceptable?

(For the record, the government of Odisha was in the habit of making such discretionary land allocations to high court judges and others. This facility was widely known and exploited for years by VVIPs. (Read http://tinyurl.com/Odisha-land-allotments. After this scandal, in December 2014, the government seems to have decided to mend its ways (http://tinyurl.com/Odisha-cancels-allotments). RTI Activist Jayanta Kumar Das, in his Letter Petition (http://tinyurl.com/Jayanta-Das-Letter2CJI) to Chief Justice of India on 18th March 2015, presented a blow-by-blow account of Justice Laxmi Kanta Mohapatra's wrongdoings, with supporting evidence, and is awaiting some action. Tall hopes? Maybe. Wait and watch.

HIGHLIGHTS:

  1. On 11.10.2006, in his capacity of a judge of Odisha High Court, Laxmikanta Mohapatra applied for a government plot in Markata Nagar to Cuttack Development Authority (CDA). Within seven months, CDA allotted a 4000 square foot plot in Sector-11 in Bidanasi project area, Cuttack) and instructed him to pay Rs 9.8 lakhs. Having an ancestral property in Cuttack district (Stoney Road, Post- Candinichowk, P.S- Lal Bag, Dist – Cuttack), Mr Mohapatra was actually not eligible to get a government plot from CDA. So, his letter was evasively worded, stating that neither he nor his family owned land at Markata Nagar. After taking possession in July 2007, lthough the allotted plot was not yet transferred in his name, Laxmikanta Mohapatra proceeded to build a double storied building on the allotted plot. Read documents: http://tinyurl.com/Judge-gets-land
  2. within four years of the allotment of government land to him, Justice Laxmikanta Mohapatra transferred the possession of this plot for a consideration of Rs one crore. The land was "sold" by means of a simple affidavit on ten-rupees stamp paper to Pradeep Kumar Sethy, the chit-fund baron. The mode of payment was not mentioned (Cheque? Cash? Any other means? Who knows?) The affidavit said, “I have taken over the possession of the plot on 23.7.2007 and lease deed has not been executed in my fabour (sic!) till date. The plot is double storied building is existing on the plot”. As Justice Laxmi Kanta Mohapatra was not the owner of this plot, he had no right to execute and register a sale deed or to transfers this plot in favour of any party. Indeed, no law in India or in Odisha empowers anybody to transfer or sell a property to any party by means of a mere affidavit… but that is precisely what this learned judge did! Read http://tinyurl.com/Sethy-buys-from-Judge

By means of this unlawful transaction, Justice Laxmikanta Mohapatra enabled chit fund operator Pradeep Kumar Sethy to do him an undue favour of about Rs 90 lakh. Simultaneously, the honourable judge broke the law to avoid paying at least Rs 5 lakhs stamp duty and registration. And last but not least, this person who is now Chief Justice of Manipur committed offences of money-laundering by accepting and creating black money from the chit fund operator – possibly in order to provide him some undue favours.

Cuttack Development Authority aided and abetted this unlawful transaction. It transferred this plot in the name of Sri Pradeep Kumar Sethy vide its Letter No.8098/CDA/Dated 23.4.2011 based on Justice Laxmikanta Mohapatra’s affidavit and a request letter written by Pradeep Sethy.

  1. Meanwhile, lakhs of people in Odisha started raising their voice against Artha Tatwa Chit Fund Company, its Chief Managing Director Pradeep Sethy and other directors for the nonpayment of their matured fixed deposits in different branch offices of the company. Anticipating his arrest, Pradeep Sethy approached the Advocate General of Orissa High Court Sri Ashok Mohanty for an undue favour, and a deal was struck.

Barely one and a half years after the land was transferred in his name, Pradeep Sethy made another affidavit dated 03.10.2012 transferring the land plot for a consideration of Rs 1,00,01,000/- (Rupees One Crore and One Thousand) only. Again, the mode of payment was not mentioned (Cheque? Cash?). This affidavit suggests, as CBI mentions in its chargesheet, that Advocate General Ashok entered into this transaction as a consideration for giving undue favours in Orissa high Court. Read http://tinyurl.com/Sethy-sells-to-AG

  1. A case was registered against Pradeep Sethyand his staff by Balasore Town Police for cheating innocent investors (Balasore Town P.S. Case No. 352 of 2012 dated 06.10.2012, U/S 420/506/34 I.P.C etc). Pradeep Sethy applied for anticipatory bail before Odisha High Court, on 09.10.2012 (Annexure- 21). Thanks to Advocate General Ashok Mohanty, this anticipatory bail was allowed. Pradeep Sethy and all his associates were released on anticipatory bail without production of the case diary on 18.10.2012.
  2. Soon afterwards, Cuttack Development Authority took steps to ensure that the bribe paid to Ashok Mohanty reached him, i.e. the transfer of the land to Ashok Mohanty, who was possibly anxious that the land plot may be seized by the authorities, along with other assets belonging to Sethy. So, by a form-letter dated 8th February 2013, it summoned Sethy to appear in person on the same day between 2 and 4 pm with necessary documents for signature verification and verification of his identity. It is not know by what mode this letter was delivered, and so one may presume that an urgent hand-delivery was made, possibly by the Advocate General himself! Read http://tinyurl.com/CDA-writes-to-Sethy
  3. In its preliminary charge sheet in the Artha Tatwa Chit Fund Scam Case, CBI states that the consideration of Rs one crore to Justice Laxmi Kanta Mohapatra came out of misappropriated funds from the Artha Tatwa company accounts. It says, "As per records, accused P.K. Sethy had purchased said building from Justice L.K. Mohapatra for consideration of Rs. 1,00,00,000/- during April, 2011 out of the money flown from the accounts of AT Group and later, transferred the said plot to Asok Mohanty." You may read the relevant paragraphs of the CBI chargesheet here: http://tinyurl.com/CBI-chargesheet-Artha-Tatwa
  4. The CBI chargesheet says: "Investigation disclosed that accused Asok Mohanty was the Advocate General of Odisha during the period from June, 2009 to September, 2014. He had purchased a building located at plot No. 11-3B/1332, Category-B, measuring 4000 sqft in sector -11, Bidanashi, Cuttack from the accused Pradeep Kumar Sethy. As per records, accused P.K. Sethy had purchased said building from Justice L.K. Mohapatra for consideration of Rs. 1,00,00,000/- during April, 2011 out of the money flown from the accounts of AT Group and later, transferred the said plot to Asok Mohanty. Though the sale transaction was shown to be of Rs 1,01,00,000/- but in fact an amount of Rs. 70,00,000/- only has been paid by accused Asok Mohanty to accused P.K. Sethy. During the course of investigation two money receipts were seized from the official premises of accused Asok Mohanty indicating the payment of Rs. 1,01,00,000/- towards consideration. The said money receipts bear forged signatures of accused Pradeep Kumar Sethy. During the relevant period of time i.e. during October, 2012, when the above transaction took place, agitations were going on in Odisha against the accused Pradeep Kumar Sethy and against AT Group by the depositors which is evident by registration of the 1st FIR against the AT Group on 06.10.2013 following which the accused P.K.Sethy had moved an anticipatory bail petitions before the Hon'ble high Court on 09.10.2012 and during the relevant time the present accused AG entered into a criminal conspiracy with the said Pradeep Kumar Sethy and in furtherance thereof extended his hospitality towards the accused P.K.Sethy as a result of which the anticipatory bail was granted to the accused P.K.Sethy on 18.09.2012. During the course of investigation, two separate agreements for sale of the said plots were recovered/seized from the possession of accused Asok Mohanty. In the said two agreements, the consideration agreed upon was Rs One Crore and One Lakh which is contrary to the consideration mentioned in the affidavit dt. 03.10.2012 submitted to the Cuttack Development Authority for transfer of ownership of the said property. It may be mentioned here that in the said affidavit dt. 03.10.2012, the consideration amount is mentioned as Rs. One Crore and One Thousand. Thus, it is clear that the accused Asok Mohanty misappropriated the remaining amount of Rs. 31 lakhs that he was supposed to pay to the accused Pradeep Kumar Sethy."
  5. Significantly, CBI was able to investigate the role of Advocate General Asok Mohanty... but do they have the authority or the mandate to investigate the role played by Justice LK Mohapatra? No. And therefore, one is left wondering whether Justice Mohapatra's role was as innocuous as the CBI chargesheet makes it out to be!

Final outcome:

  • Lakhs of citizens of Odisha – swindled. Money not yet recovered
  • Chit fund swindler Pradeep Sethy – arrested & chargesheeted by CBI.
  • Advocate General Asok Mohanty – ditto… and he lost his job.
  • Odisha High Court Judge Laxmi Kanta Mohapatra – got to keep Rs 90 lakhs that came from the savings of chit fund investors… and he was elevated to the position of Chief Justice of Manipur after the scandal.

Will somebody please rap the Supreme Court collegium on the knuckles for this decision, and impeach this honourable Chief Justice of Manipur? If this is not done, one worries that before his scheduled retirement on 10th June 2016 upon attaining the age of 62, the SC collegium (or Judicial Appointments Commission) may elevate him to the exalted status of a Supreme Court Judge, or even, who knows? Chief Justice of India? You can never tell.

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Published on 1 Comment on Farmer distress in Gujarat. Farmer suicides and more.

One should never underestimate the power of denial. Modi suporters are comparing Gujarat with Maharashtra (unbeaten champ of farmer suicides) and claiming that Gujarat does not have a problem. Wait a minute. Not so fast. Being better than the worst is hardly leader material. If it were a classroom (compulsive associations from ranking - left over trauma from the education system), better than the worst student often doesn't even pass. So let us take a look at the situation.

The argument is that farmer suicides are not as bad as Maharashtra. I'm not even going to try and debate that. For a state to get as bad as Maharashtra gets they would have to completely stop caring about farmers.... like Maharashtra does (and the population is larger too). My question is, are farmers doing well in Gujarat?

To begin with, let us be clear that there are farmer suicides in Gujarat. This is the NCRB data. (Data for 2013 is not out yet)

YearFarmer suicides reported
2001594
2002570
2003581
2004523
2005615
2006487
2007317
2008526
2009588
2010523
2011578
2012564

On the face of it, the numbers of farmer suicides in Gujarat appear to be somewhat constant. Beginning at 594 in 2001 going as high as 615 in 2005 and dropping to 317 in 2007 to finally 564 in 2012 according to latest available data. If we look at it mathematically, Gujarat achieved a drop of 30 suicides from the 2001 number. It may not have been a dramatic drop, but it ain't the end of the world either.

But wait. Gujarat lost almost a fifth (18% - lest someone accuse me of exaggerating) of its farmer population between 2001 and 2011.

YearCultivators
20015802681
20114746956
 Difference−1055725
 % of original−18%

So we are basically seeing similar numbers of suicides in a drastically decreased population size.

But wait. This is not all.

When the policies do not care for farmers, and the focus is on profiteering at the cost of the people, a new kind of "science" mushrooms up. It is called "Creative statistics". Or is it art? Whatever it is, it most certainly should be a post-graduation specialty, since it seems to be a very lucrative field.

It is not easy defending pro-corporation and anti-farmer policies year after year. Some kind of damage control is needed to show that farmers are harmed as less as possible. Leading GDP state and national farmer suicide champ Maharashtra achieves this by recording as farmer suicides only farmers who own land in their own name. So, the 45 year old son of an 80 year old agricultural land owner, who does all the farming and risks all the debt and commits suicide when all fails.... is not a farmer suicide. The farmer who takes land on rent, suffers loss and can't reply debt or pay dues and commits suicide.... is not a farmer suicide. The brother who helps his brother in the field and both suffer losses and he commits suicide is.... you get the idea. When there was outrage over this brazen fudging of farmer distress, Maharashtra started recording ‘Farmer’s relatives suicides,’ or “non-genuine” suicides. That didn't dent their winning streak.

Chattisgarh had more than 7,500 farmer suicides between 2006 and 2010, averaging 1,567 per year. 18,375 farm suicides between 2001-10. In 2011 they "fixed" it by declaring ZERO farmer suicides, and "4" for 2012. West Bengal averaged 951 farmer suicides per year between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, it did the clever thing and did not submit any data. Mamata Banerjee declared on TV channels that farmer suicides were a Maoist conspiracy.

Gujarat doesn't do something this obvious and the "presidential style" of election politics isn't the only thing it copies from the United States. It reports the suicides reported as suicides transparently. Only.... there is no compensation for farmer suicides, while accidental deaths of farmers get one lakh compensation declared by a benevolent state under the Janta Juth Accident Insurance Scheme. It doesn't take much genius to guess how the death gets reported, particularly if the suicide was because of debt. Sometimes police record it as an accident even if it is a suicide, and farmer's families have fought battles in courts to set the record straight.

Bharatsinh R Jhala was a citizen nominee for RTI Awards 2009 for his tenacious investigations into farmer deaths in Gujarat. He revealed that a total of 6055 farmers were shown to have died in accidents, out of which only 1909 of the farmer households had managed to get insurance claims (under Krishi Bima Yojana) passed after these accidental deaths. One also wonders how 6055 farmers can die in accidents without alarm.

Considering that a large part of farmer distress is also in losing agriculture land in the name of "development", it is anyone's guess if the development hit farmer gets recognized as a farmer if he commits suicide once his land is sold to the state - and he no longer farms.

But this is speculation. Gujarat state dismisses such news or questions as "politically motivated".

“Every time someone commits suicide in a village, Congress workers rush to the home of the deceased and persuade his family to sign a paper saying their family member had committed suicide because of crop failure,” ~ Babu Bokharia

Apparently massive farmer deaths in accidents is not so abnormal for a ("high risk" ?) profession like farming. I imagine crops eat farmers who don't put enough fertilizers or something in large numbers in Gujarat. But a farmer committing suicide? Impossible.

What cannot be denied is furious farmers renewing their agitation against the Gujarat state to retain control of their fertile land that produces export quality wheat.

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Published on 3 Comments on Colonialism-in-the-Mind by Gouranga Chattopadhyay – Part 7

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || Part 5 || Part 6 || Part 7

Being a foreign power, the British did not trust the colonized people. Therefore many checks were introduced, mostly unnecessarily. This practice also continues today. This leads to a huge amount of paper work, in addition to every government form (and those of semi-government organizations as well) asking (as mentioned earlier) the names of father/husband/guardians of individuals, as though all adult Indians are in fact less than adults and need someone else to be responsible for his/her behaviour. I have been told by a number of senior managers/officers in the public sector industry and government that the amount of money, for example, that is spent to check possible cheating on medical bills is far greater than the amount of money that could be cheated, given the ceiling on such expense.

Adult Indians as individuals also demonstrate this ‘non-adult’ assumption. If trains run late, daily passengers squat on the track and disrupt the entire railway operation in that sector. It stems from some kind of a covert assumption that the powers that be actually do not care for the people and therefore the only way they can be made to take steps to remove people’s difficulties is by disrupting administration. This kind of behaviour also seems to be based on the unconscious assumption, illustrated earlier, that there is an unexamined belief in an alien power governing the country even though they are people’s representatives

It is an open question as to what extent these people’s representatives – those who get elected to the parliament and the various state legislatures – also unconsciously act as though they are aliens with power to rule over the country’s population.

The impact of the colonial hangover manifested in terms of adolescent behaviour, and its opposite, treating adult Indians as adolescents by the powers that be can be seen in everyday life if one cares to reflect upon one’s experience.

There are regular media reports of people, for example, attacking employees and breaking up furniture and machinery in electricity supplying sub-stations if there is a failure in electrical supply during an important cricket match that was being shown live in a television channel; attacking hospital employees and breaking up equipment if one believes that a patient has died due to negligence and so on. The assumption that there is no legal recourse to set them right could also be true to a great extent, perhaps because the powers that be also feel that they are, in fact, ruling aliens. And the prize here goes to Kolkata, earlier known as Calcutta. All over West Bengal college students (who are all adults) and sometimes their parents (who pay the fees) run amok destroying college properties to force the authorities to dilute the standard of intellectual content in Kolkata. In addition, educated and moneyed people who drive four-wheelers and two-wheelers not only break traffic laws whenever they are in a hurry, but also start a serenade of motor horns every time there is a traffic jam and also, as soon as the traffic signal turns green. It is a phenomenon of not even adolescent behaviour, but infantile behaviour. It is the greedy child’s show of temper tantrum at its inability to postpone gratification.

Like the greedy child interprets adult behaviour as ‘getting away with their gratification’, in Kolkata the adults who actually get away with their gratification are the police, the army, many government officers and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. Their vehicles routinely break traffic laws with impunity by driving up one way streets in the wrong direction, parking vehicles in no parking areas and sometimes even driving on the wrong side of the road to avoid a traffic jam when they have a red light attached to the car – a phenomenon that one Kolkata based newspaper had termed ‘the red menace’.

Then Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, perhaps leads the rest of the state in taking law unto itself. Whoever has the contextual power, as the legacy of its colonial history where those who had contextual power i.e., the colonial masters, whether they were Greeks, Turks, Pathans, Mughals or British rulers, has scant regard for laws of their own making when it comes to their self-interest.

During the British colonial era, a great Maharashtrian leader of freedom fight had said ‘What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow’ to highlight Bengal’s contribution to the struggle for independence. If that saying becomes true once again, the Republic of India may come in for a lot of rough weather. One has to read one’s daily newspaper thoroughly in order to look at some of the evidence of that scattered all over India.

References

For a comprehensive bibliography of K. P. Chattopadhyay’s publications see Essays in Social Anthropolog y, Kshitish Prasad Chattopadhyay, with an Introduction by Andre Beteille, K. P. Bagchi & Company, Calcutta and New Delhi, 1994, P.549-556.

Bion, W. R. Experiences in Groups and other papers, Tavistock Publications, London, 1962.

Chattopadhyay, Gouranga P. Managing Unconscious Process: The Family, the Organisation and Beyond, Chapter 2, Eureka Publishers, Calcutta, 1998.

Chattopadhyay Gouranga P. ‘Invader in the Mind.’ The Economic Times, VII, 137 & 138, Bombay,
Delhi and Calcutta, 1981.

Chaudhuri, Sukanta ‘From enclave to empire’, The Telegraph, November 5, 2009, Calcutta, 8.

Mitra, Ashok ‘Cutting the Corner’, The Telegraph, March 30, 2009, Kolkata.

Paramahamsa Niranjanananda, Yoga Darshan: Vision of the Yoga Upanishads, Sri Panchadashnam Alakh
Bara, Deoghar, Bihar, India, 1993.Colonialism-in-the-Mind

Biographical Note

Gouranga Chattopadhyay is Emeritus Professor of HR of the Academy of Human Resources, Ahmedabad and an independent OD consultant, executive coach and personal counsellor. He can be contacted at gipisi2@gmail.com.