A scientific vision—conceived to encompass the social and the natural sciences—was profoundly a part of the Indian national movement. India’s struggle for independence was not simply to free itself from British rule. It was also to build a nation that would deliver development to its people. Independence would be bitter indeed if it did not lift people out of the abject poverty into which two centuries of colonial rule sank them. This idea united different sections of the independence movement, from left leaders to Nehru, Ambedkar and Bose. They knew India needed to advance in science and technology to develop its productive forces.

The leaders of the independence movement also knew science could not be borrowed or bought. And without developing science and technology capabilities, neither industry nor agriculture could develop. Our freedom fighters understood a newly-independent nation must adopt a scientific outlook on nature and society to develop. It would help people shed the shackles of superstition—beliefs that look back rather than ahead. Looking back to a mythical golden age when India had mastered flight with the pushpaka rath, nuclear weapons with the brahmastra, or genetic engineering, would impede the creation of a new India.

A scientific temper, or a scientific outlook towards nature and society, is how we develop productive knowledge for a new future. Accepting our past would allow us to understand our actual achievements, whether in mathematics, astronomy, medicine or metallurgy, not the mythical ones emerging from the Dinanath Batra school of false history.

State planning, science and the public sector

Our national movement leaders took on two complementary tasks: planning for all Indians and fashioning a state that would develop all its resources, including human resources. The Planning Commission and its precursor, the Congress Planning Committee, took on both roles. Subhas Chandra Bose, as Congress president, set up the Planning Committee in 1938, which he asked Nehru to head. Both drew inspiration from the Soviet planned development experiments following the 1917 October Revolution. 

After independence, the Planning Commission propelled the vision of the Planning Committee to overcome the British legacy, the double burden of poverty and inequality. The national movement saw planning and the public sector as necessities, not just to regenerate industry and agriculture but redistribute the benefits of development to all sections. Its leaders wanted to develop productive forces using scientific knowledge and looked to education that advances scientific capabilities as the nation’s most significant resource.

Therefore, developing scientific and technological capabilities was a priority for the Indian state. It built the Central Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories, the five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and numerous scientific institutions. The University Grants Commission was greatly expanded to cover all universities in the First Five Year Plan. Indian capital, technocrats and industrialists, formulated the Bombay Plan, including such as JRD Tata and GD Birla, who shared the Congress leadership’s view that India needed infrastructure to develop and only the state could develop it on the scale required. Successive Five-Year plans embodied this vision.

The goal was not just to develop factories and machines but the knowledge embedded in the machines. Independent India set a goal of self-reliance or ‘Made in India’ to develop technologies. Insistence on transferring all technology to the Indian entity in any foreign partnership backed the policy. Transferring knowledge was as important as importing plants and machinery. Universities and other scientific institutions were central to India’s development plan for indigenous science and technology.

The colonial powers might have transferred political power to newly-independent countries but did not want to share technology or scientific knowledge. They believed countries like India—a part of the periphery—should confine themselves to agriculture and raw material production, leaving industrial goods to the “metropolitan” centre to produce. As a part of this policy, Western nations and/or manufacturers denied technology transfers related to manufacturing steel, turbines, boilers, pharmaceuticals, oil exploration, etc. Only when India successfully negotiated with the Soviet Union and other East European countries for technology and manufacturing plants did Western companies reluctantly agree to participate in India’s industrial development.

The Indian electricity sector, its oil and natural gas, steel and coal, atomic energy, and space sectors all emerged from this vision. If India is the world’s largest supplier of generic drugs, it is the result of CSIR laboratories (and changes to the Patents Act, 1970). The Ambanis and Mittals owe their origin to ONGC, Indian Oil, and Steel Authority of India Ltd.

India could also have become a major supplier of power plants to the world market. Unfortunately, India opened its market to western and Chinese players during the Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh governments, which aborted the possibility. BHEL, the leading power plant supplier, is now a far weaker international player than leading Chinese and South Korean companies.

The post-independence foreign policy view of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was to align with imperialist capitalist powers and not support national liberation movements. To the RSS, non-alignment and planning were two sides of the same evil socialist coin. Instead, they argued for a “holy” alliance of Christians—read ex-colonial powers and the United States—the Jews (read Zionist Israel) and Hindus on one side, against the “unholy” communists and Muslims. 

Unmaking the scientific vision

In stark contrast to what we built after independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has wound up the Planning Commission and replaced it with a powerless Niti Aayog with only an advisory role. It is increasingly handing higher education over to private, even foreign, universities and appointing people who lack any understanding of science or technology to run advanced institutions. It has handed over major public sector enterprises to private hands or invited foreign capital in without having to transfer technology.

The difference between Atmanirbhar Bharat and self-reliance is how they view the economy. For the Modi government, all that matters is production takes place in India. Self-reliance meant not only that the final production is local, but both knowledge and equipment required for production are indigenised. The Modi government does not recognise that people and knowledge are essential in technology development today.

Today, among the top six companies in the world by market capitalisation, five are digital monopolies. Take Apple Inc., the biggest company in the world in terms of market cap. It does not own a single factory. How does it do this? It owns the designs, software and Apple brand. Apple gets about $300 for each iPhone it sells, while Foxconn, the company that manufactures the phone, gets only about $8. This is the nature of the knowledge economy. It is not where you produce but the knowledge you have that determines winners and losers in today’s global economy. Inviting Foxconn to set shop in India adds much less to the economy than the government acknowledges. Developing people is key to the future of a country. That is why nationalism that defines itself through land and not people belongs in the past.

Unsurprisingly, despite Modi’s Make in India hype, India’s year-on-year GDP growth has been slowing significantly. Even after the second wave of Covid-19 ended, India’s estimated 2022 GDP was only 1.5% above the 2019 figure, making a mockery of claims that it will soon become a five trillion dollar economy.

For the RSS-BJP, having the “right” ideology is much more important than developing knowledge. The BJP’s contempt for knowledge might appear dangerous only to the social sciences. The way it has destroyed the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) may just be the most visible instance of its destructive approach. But this government and its plants for universities are not limited to attacking just the social sciences. Or JNU. Their attack is on knowledge itself. In institution after institution, people with no vision and little learning have been given powerful positions. It seems knowledge is secondary to the BJP. What matters is that universities indoctrinate students with the RSS-BJP ideology. 

In contrast to the decades following independence, a continuous assault on education and research institutions—and reason and science—defines the present moment. Myths and madness are masquerading as science and history, alongside flying chariots and interplanetary travel, genetics in the Mahabharata, and falsification of evolution. Or it is being superseded by the “much superior” theory of dasaavatar, as Andhra University Vice-Chancellor G Nageshwar Rao said in the 2019 edition of the Indian Science Congress. The objective today is a “nationalist” India based on religious identity. That is why its adherents need to demolish reason and history. It wants a majoritarian India, where minorities would have very few rights, an India where reason must surrender to myths old and new and where wealth and caste mean merit.

The RSS bitterly opposed planned development and the public sector and regarded them as unholy “socialism”. They wanted India left entirely to market forces and unfettered entry to global capital. The only role the state should play is to help Indian capital negotiate with foreign capital. In other words, crony capitalism is in action today. It is an invitation to global capital to exploit India’s cheap labour while getting tax breaks and subsidies, including virtually free land. It is why Modi has replaced the Planning Commission with a toothless think tank it calls Niti Aayog. It is why he is dismantling the public sector, selling it to friendly capitalists, and inviting foreign capital under the Make in India slogan. It is a journey of betrayal, from self-reliance to just Reliance!

In Hindutva’s exclusionary view of nationalism, the land is the nation. And it is the land that is pure: Savarkar’s punya-bhumi and pitru-bhumi. That is why Modi—quoting Deendayal Upadhyaya on his birth centenary in September 2016, said Muslims have to be ‘purified’ (parishkar) to be fully Indian. And yet, presumably, global capital becomes fully Indian just by coming to India!

The attacks against minorities and certain castes and communities are not aberrations. They are fundamental to how the RSS, the BJP and their front organisations think. These attacks are on the fundamental values enshrined in our Constitution, including economic democracy. The attacks are taking place when India has become as unequal as it was under the British. Or we have gone, as the French economist Thomas Piketty calls it, from British Raj to Billionaire Raj. India added forty new billionaires during the pandemic, while the income of 84% of households fell. India now has two billionaires, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, among the top ten richest men in the world, and the largest increase in global poverty anywhere in the world in the same period was also in India.

Courtesy: Newsclick

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The multi-crore ‘Statue of Unity’ project is a ‘monument for the elite’ that has extracted a heavy price from poor tribals whose homes and land stand submerged.

 

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The spate of lynchings related to rumours of child lifting, has now affected a large part of the country with new incidents being reported every day. Clearly, this is not simply the unintended consequence of WhatsApp, as the government would have us believe. Or that some tinkering with WhatsApp, in close “consultation” with Facebook of course, by the owners of WhatsApp, will solve the problem. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s earlier initiative of regulating news portals and targeting critical news websites is now sought to be dovetailed into this narrative. Under the guise of the need to control social media, we are likely to see measures directed towards censorship of digital media and muzzling of public criticism of the government. 

What the Modi government is hiding from its people is that WhatsApp groups have been the main driver of the rumour machine of the Hindutva organisations. It has been used over the last few years to start communal riots, attack minorities, orchestrate hate against rationalists, and spread rumours on cow slaughter. This has been coupled with the complicity of the police and the state machinery, who have either filed cases against both, the perpetrators and the victims, or sometimes only against the victims. In almost all cases, the state machinery has effectively let the perpetrators go scot-free, while pursuing cases against the survivors or the victims’ families. Even today, the case against Akhlaq’s family for possession of “forbidden” meat continues with trumped up evidence.  

It is this tacit alliance of the hate mongering with the state that is leading to the sense of impunity with which the mobs are operating and dealing out “rough and ready” justice as they see it. Prejudice and hate has taken over, with the state either conniving or retreating in the face of lynch law and lynch mobs. It is not the rumour mills by themselves that cause riots or breakdown of law and order. It is the the complicity of the state with communal forces and the sectarian divisions within society, that has created the monster of lynch mobs and riots. 

Rumours are not new; they have always been circulated among people. Most of the times, they do not even create a ripple in society. They are treated just as one possible source of information that needs to be verified. Some people are more credulous, however, believing anything that they hear while others are more sceptical.

Rumours become dangerous only when society is already divided, and tensions high. It is under these conditions that rumours thrive and can and do trigger riots. The situation is spinning out of control today with mob lynchings because this government and the party in power have actively sought to divide society. It is this atmosphere of hate within which rumours act to light the fuse of mob violence.

Does social media have no role to play in such cases of mob violence? Here, it is important to distinguish between websites, social media, and group messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. While websites and social media platforms like  Facebook and Twitter are public spaces, group messaging platforms are more like private spaces. Consequently, the laws dealing with public and private spaces are different. 

Those who are operating websites or using Facebook and Twitter, have the same legal responsibilities as anybody else in a public space. Any articles or news appearing on such sites are subject to laws: from civil or criminal liability for slander, to criminal liability for inciting hate and violence. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter allow any individual to use their platform for creating their individual “sites”, even if they are not seen by the people using such platforms to be so. In effect, they are running “websites” – Facebook pages/accounts – or doing micro blogging, using Twitter. Each user has the same responsibility as any newspaper, website or anybody in the public space has, with respect to what they say or write. Facebook and Twitter are not private spaces, and any activity there, has the same responsibilities and liabilities as any activity in any other public space. 

Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are treated as intermediaries, not the owners of the content on these sites. They have what is called intermediary liabilities, under the Information Technology Act. They have the responsibility to take down offensive content once it is brought to their notice, but the primary legal responsibility for the content on Facebook pages/accounts, or Twitter handles, are of the users.

Legally, what is our responsibility if we re-tweet or share a Facebook post? Currently, the legal opinion is that by sharing or re-tweeting, we also are responsible for the opinions we are re-tweeting or sharing; just as a website or a newspaper is not free of liability for republishing what has appeared on other sites. By republishing, and for social media platforms, by sharing or re-tweeting, we carry similar responsibilities and liabilities. 

What happens in the case of WhatsApp? WhatsApp as a platform is not a public space and therefore, has to be treated as a private space. A message is like a private letter. So group messaging is like group mailing. Other group messaging platforms, for instance, are Google or Yahoo email groups. 

Any evidence that such groups are being used for any criminal activity, in this case, incitement to violence, is of course subject to laws of the land. It is incumbent on these platforms to cooperate with the law and order machinery to provide evidence in any manner that may be required. But this requires—as any search operations of the home of a suspect would—to be done under the due process of law. The IT Act and the various existing provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act, governs this space as it does any other space. Such laws differentiate between public and private spaces, and these laws can be applied to differentiate between public and private spaces on the internet as well. The rules under these acts can address any such issue and it does not require any new law. Technology, be it telephones or the internet, does not change the basic scope of the laws. 

Simply put, any WhatApp group that is used for inciting violence and creating riots, needs to be investigated. If there is evidence of inciting violence and riots, the persons concerned—who have either posted or forwarded such incitements to violence—are criminally liable for their acts. Facebook, as the owners of the WhatApp platform, have the responsibility of cooperating with the law and order authorities following the procedures laid down under various acts, and prima facie evidence that a crime has been committed using their platform. 

Why then, the talk of new procedures to deal with mob violence and WhatsApp? The police have refused to act as an impartial law and order agency, in cases of mob violence and communal riots or when dalits have been attacked by mobs. It is not the absence of legal instruments or police powers, but the complicity of the state machinery with such violence, that the culprits roam free. In UP, this has worsened under the Adityanath Government, where criminal cases against those involved in riots, are now being sought to be withdrawn. It is not the weakness of the law against new technology that is the root of the problem, it is the unwillingness of the law and order machinery to act against criminals.

Arguing that digital platforms such as WhatsApp make investigations difficult under existing law is completely bogus. Yes, mass communications or group messaging is faster and has a wider reach because of new technologies and digital platforms. Yes, communications of all kinds—-from what we eat, to our political opinions and spreading peace or hatred—has become much easier with smart phones and the internet. But, tracking or securing evidence is also easier now. The messages remain on the cell phones, it is known who or which groups are circulating them, and even video evidence is available in most cases. 

One could argue that the police are helpless against a large mob, or a large mob gathers quickly due to the new technologies. But why are the police helpless to act after the incident against the culprits? Can the Modi government – the Prime Minister and the Home Minister – explain, why in spite of all the evidence circulating in the public sphere, including videos of such violence, very few have been punished? Or why cases are filed against the victims and their families?  

The primary issue in the rise of mob violence and lynchings is the connivance, at worst, and abdication of the state and its law and order machinery against hate crimes and spreading hate, at best. Assassination of rationalists and mob lynchings are the consequences of such connivance and abdication. It is not the laws that are failing us. It is the keepers of laws – the law and order machinery – who are failing us.

First Published on News Click

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(Both these photographs are from the Daily Mail , dated April 14)  

With the Syrian missile attacks being declared as a one-of-action by the US, the immediate threat of further escalation has receded. The catch is in the premise of the strike: it was a punitive action by France, UK and the US – FUKUS – in response to Assad government’s alleged chemical attack on Ghouta. This means that if the strike was indeed engineered by Jaish al Islam, or al Qaeda lite—as has been claimed by the Syrian and Russian governments—the promise of such a response from the US/NATO will act as an incentive for rebels to stage similar chemical attacks. A collision course between the Russian-China-Iranian and NATO has now been set, with the control of the future in the hands of the ISIS, al Qaeda and similar forces. 

Russia has made clear that any future attack will have major consequences, and also has promised to arm the Syrian forces with more advanced S-300 and S-400 anti-missile batteries to stop any such strikes. 

There are three questions that need to be addressed. One is whether the Russians were informed of the impending strikes and targets. Second is the number of sites targeted by the US. The third is, how many missiles were interdicted by the Syrian anti-missile batteries, and if indeed 60 per cent of missiles were shot down, how could Syrian air defence, which is of Soviet vintage, i.e. pre 1990’s, be so effective? 

We will deal with the allegations of Syria’s chemical weapons use separately. For all, who follow what is happening in Syria, it is beyond belief that the Assad government, which is clearly winning the war against the US and its “rebels”, should use chemical weapons at this juncture. This is even less believable, when we see that the Ghouta rebels were on the verge of surrendering their arms in lieu of a safe passage. Why would Syrian government forces take such a step, which would not only have international repercussions, but also invite the US to intervene? That too, specifically after Trump’s statement that he wanted to withdraw all US troops from Syria . 

If we go by who has benefitted from the crime of the use of chemical weapons, it is certainly the rebels; or the proxy warriors for the US and its allies. If indeed chemical weapons were really used, and the Ghouta incident is just not a video production by the White Helmets, the group funded and trained by British intelligence . 

The US and its allies launched – according to the briefing given by General Kenneth McKenzie, the Director of the Joint Staff – 105 missiles. All the missiles performed as planned, and hit three targets, one in Damascus and two in Homs. All the three are supposed to be chemical weapon development or storage sites. 

The Russians and Syrians have contested the claims that only three sites were attacked, and said that a number of other targets such as Damascus airport, and critical installations were also attacked, but these missiles were brought down by the Syrian air defence.  

The cruise missiles were launched by three US ships, one US submarine, and aircrafts. The aircrafts used were US B-1B strategic bombers, French Rafaeles and British Tornadoes. From the routes of the missiles, and the airports from which the aircrafts took off, it is clear that Turkey, Qatar, Gulf Emirates and Jordan have cooperated with the US and its allies. Turkey, used to a number of flip flops on Syria, again executed another flop ; they announced that their cooperation with the US forces in carrying out strikes was due to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. 
The Joint Chief of Staff of US Armed Forces General Dunford, in his press conference with General Mathis, the US Secretary of Defence, held that the US did not “ … do any coordination with Russia on these strikes, and neither did we pre-notify them”. Answering a specific question, General Dunford said that only “the normal deconfliction of the airspace” information was shared with the Russians. 

Is this simply Orwellian doublespeak, meaning that the only difference between “deconfiction information” and “sharing information regarding strikes” is the information on specific targets? The rest is the same, meaning the Russians would have known well in advance when the strikes would take place, from where they would originate and the air path that would be followed. From this, the targets – or at least the broad areas being targeted would be easy to deduce. 

There is evidence that the Russians did inform the Syrians of the impending strikes five hours before they took place. The Russians and the Syrians pulled out men and materials from possible strike sites. That would explain why the only casualties in this high visibility exercise are three Syrians being wounded, and three buildings and two bunkers being demolished.

The site Sic Semper Tyrannis say s:
Russia was told where we were going to strike. Russia in turn warned the Syrians. Both the Syrians and the Russians evacuated key personnel and equipment from the target sites. Any claim by the United States that we caused devastating damage or destroyed essential capabilities is total fantasy.

The Dunford and Mathis briefing also talked about how every missile hit its target. The above article continues on how many of the 105 missiles hit their targets:

The second issue concerns the imagined success of the U.S. TLAM strike. Before General Mattis (retired) approached the podium Friday night, he knew full well that a significant number of the inbound missiles had been shot down inside Syria…The Russians and Syrians were not lying when they claimed to have downed more than 70 of the U.S., UK and French missiles.

The Russians and the Syrians have said that the bulk of the missiles – more than 70 – were shot down by the anti-missiles defences of the Syrian forces. Most were shot down by missiles using 1970’s Soviet technology. For those who believe in the technical superiority of the west, which includes Indian defence “experts”, this must be an unwelcome shock. 

The US has also released pictures of the strikes. Such pictures are available from satellite imagery as well. Again, defence experts seem to concur that the amount of damage – three buildings and two bunkers – do not amount to more than a 100 missiles hitting such targets. 

The US has also claimed that this time, they were targetting chemical weapon production and storage sites, not the delivery systems. There are pictures of people without any protective clothing and masks looking at or wandering around such bombed “chemical weapon” sites. We give below pictures, carried by UK’s Daily Mail , of the Barzah Research Centre in Damascus, struck by missiles on Saturday morning, and photographed a few hours later.

If indeed this was a chemical weapons site, such pictures, with people going about without any protection, is unbelievable. Similar pictures are also available for the other two sites near Homs that were hit.  All these indicate that Syrians are right when they say these are not functioning chemical weapons sites.

The Syrians have said that these sites were dismantled as chemical weapon manufacture or storage sites in 2013. OPCW has verified periodically that these facilities are no longer in operation. Therefore, the story that the US and its allies are presenting to the world of the Assad government still continuing its chemical weapons program has no basis. At least on the basis of any evidence that the US and its allies have been able to produce.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in
 

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Slowly, but surely, the story of the peopling of South Asia is being unravelled, using genetic data and their analysis. The latest in this series, is a preprint of a paper by David Reich, Vagheesh Narasimbhan and others in biological archives, The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia in www.biorxiv.org . Biologists, following mathematicians and physicists, are now uploading their papers before they are refereed and published in journals, making important results available much earlier.

The major findings in Reich-Narasimbhan paper is that it confirms the Eurasian Steppes ancestry as a component in the Indian population, dating it to about 2,000-1,200 BCE (Before Current Epoch). This is very much in line with the other evidence – both archaeological and linguistic, which posited similar dates. What is striking and new in this paper, is the importance of Iranian farmer genetic component in South Asia, which predates the steppes ancestry considerably. This should not have been logically unexpected. We know that the first evidence of agriculture in South Asia has been found in Mehrgarh 9,000 years back – a clear indication of its coming across the Bolan Pass from Iran. Obviously, agriculturalists and agriculture moved together, as they did in different parts of the world.

The paper deals with both Central and South Asia, and there is indeed a continuum that we need to look at to get the complete picture of Eurasian migrations. However, we are restricting the discussion here to its implications for South Asia.

The paper postulates that the Indus Valley Civilisation would have consisted of a mixture of ancient hunter gatherer South Asian population and the neolithic farmers coming from Iran. It is this population that acted as a bridge in creating the Ancient North Indian and the South Indian populations, with the North Indian population having a greater steppe component than the South Asian population, but both with significant Iranian farmer ancestral genetic component.

This large international group of scholars spanning the continents, looked at both ancient DNA and DNA from current populations. The ancient DNA has been extracted from a number of burial sites from three broad regions: Iran and the southern part of Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, which authors call Turan), from the western-central steppes and northern forest zone encompassing present day Kazakhstan and Russia, and from Swat Valley in northern Pakistan (“South Asia”). Unfortunately, the ancient DNA from Rakhigiri, which has been dated to be around 4,600 years old, has yet to be published; therefore we do not have ancient DNA of the Indus Valley people in these samples. The Swat Valley samples are after the entry of the steppe population, therefore carry their signature as well.

The evidence of the ancient DNA has been co-analysed with genome-wide data from present-day individuals from 246 ethnographically distinct groups in South Asia. This analysis consists of both statistical analysis and creating models of population mixing – admixture models – using older DNA, possible mutation rates, etc. The researchers then choose the models of mixing that approximate most closely to the population distribution that we see today.

What the Reich-Narasimhan paper shows is that the earlier Reich paper (we are calling this the earlier Reich paper as he was the lead author of this paper) postulate of Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and Ancestral South Indian (ASI) populations need to be modified. What we have instead, is a South Asian hunter gatherer population – called by Reich-Narasimhan as Ancient Ancestral South Asian (AASI) population, and then the two pulsed migrations. One pulse that originates around 5,000 years ago from Iran – the Iranian farming population. This creates what Reich-Narasimhan call the Indus Periphery population in North West South Asia. These probably – though not explicitly stated – are the Indus Valley civilisation people. At any rate, the authors seem to use this population group as a proxy for the Indus Valley people. This Indus Periphery population then mixes with the AASI population over the next 1,000-1,500 years to create the Ancestral South Indian (ASI) population.

The second pulse is the entry of the Eurasian Steppes people from Central Asia into India, carrying central Asian genetic markers. This mixes with the existing Ancestral South Indian population, creating the Ancestral North Indian (ANI) population. Its markers are found in higher proportion in the North Indian Brahmin and Bhumihar populations than in other communities. The existing South Asian population is the result of mixing in various degrees between the ANI and ASI populations.

Of course, different research groups could come up with different models of how the people carrying these genetic markers – of the ancient hunter gatherers, the Iranian farmers, and the steppe people – have migrated within India and have mixed together. What is unlikely to be disproven is that the current Indian population carries these distinct genetic components of the Iranian farmers or Eurasian Steppes people. Or to prove the hypothesis that the there was a large dispersion from India to Central and West Asia, and then to Europe – Out of India hypothesis – as the Hindutva ideologues would have us believe. The picture of Anatolian and Iranian farmers spreading slowly across Eurasia, followed by the Eurasian Steppes people spreading West – towards Europe, and South – towards West Asia and South Asia, is far too complete to be overturned.

The story of the spread of the steppes people from Kurgan/Yamna culture s – the area between Caspian and Black Sea – has drawn far more attention than that of the farmers from the West Asia. Part of this is clearly the fascination of both Europeans and North Indians with the origin of their languages. It is the Yamna people, who were the original proto Indo-European language speakers and carried it West, towards Europe, and South, towards Central, West and South Asia.

The story of the spread of agriculturalists however, is equally compelling. It shows that the postulate of demic expansion – agriculturists marching across the globe along with agriculture – while mixing with the original hunter gatherer populations was not wrong. This is the march of wheat and barley from Anatolia and Iran, across Europe, Central Asia and South Asia. They just got this expansion, which happened much earlier than the expansion of the steppes people, wrong in terms of language. The demic expansion did not carry the Indo European language with them. This was done by the steppes people.

This, of course, leaves out the other demic expansion that is linked to rice. In India, it has impacted eastern India. Reich-Narasimhan paper has relatively less to say about this, a gap which needs to be filled to have a more complete picture of the peopling of South Asia.

An important conclusion that can be drawn from this paper, is that the study of history has to contend with pulsed events – events accompanying rapid change – as well as slower changes. That history is not just simply a story of gradual changes; changes occur slowly, interspersed with rapid changes.

The other conclusion is that language of the conquest, and the language of civilisation can be different. The Indo European speakers spread their language, through conquest, a conquest made possible by their domestication of the horse, and their mobility. It is their mobility that allowed them to dominate over such large areas. The influx of pastoral people – with new weapons and mobility – have overturned many settled agricultural communities in history. We saw this with the rise of Turkic tribes – the Ottoman Empire, and the Mongols ruling over most of the Eurasian land mass as well. Both of them took over much bigger populations, with far more advanced civilisations. We should not therefore be surprised by similar events happening in more ancient times.

For the historians, there should be a sigh of relief. The painstaking work that they have done with archaeological and textual evidence is very close to the new genomic evidence. And it may yet help us provide pointers in deciphering the Indus Valley script, as we now know the possible relatives that we should look at.

Science is very cruel to myths and illusions. For those, who confuse civilisation with “Aryans” have to live with the historical truth that the “Aryan” Vedic speakers were pastoral people and did not build the Indus Valley civilisation. Nor are they the original inhabitants of South Asia. They were just one among many of the late movers from the North West, who came to India using either the Bolan or the Khyber Pass. Genomics should now finally settle the question of who are the Indo Aryan language speakers, just one branch of the Eurasian Steppe population.
 

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Post the Channel 4 exposé, the debate in India is heating up, with the BJP and the Congress trading charges on the role of Cambridge Analytica in their respective election strategies. Interestingly, one of the directors of Cambridge Analytica’s Indian partner, Ovleno Business Intelligence, has claimed in LinkedIn – as tweeted by Srinivas Jain – that they helped BJP win elections in India, including its Mission +272, or the 2014 elections. The BJP has also used a huge number of WhatApp groups to spread its campaign message including Fake News. Pratik Sinha’s AltNews.in has repeatedly exposed such fake news on its site. In spite of such exposures, the BJP’s IT Cell continues with the same strategy.  How much of this strategy is their own development, and how much is due to the tutelage of Cambridge Analytica?

In the Channel 4 exposé, one of the Cambridge Analytica top executives explains how it sets up “independent” companies or works with contractors in other countries to distance itself from their work. Is Ovleno Business Intelligence, run by the JD(U) leader KC Tyagi’s son, a similar entity? Is the creation of Election Bonds, and hiding all political funding from the people, a part of funding the BJP’s big data exercise?

Newsclick sources tell us that the BJP ran a big data project in Tripura, in which it correlated booth level data of all the voters with their identities. These identities were used to micro-target messages, each profile of voters receiving a different message. The micro-targetting methods outlined by Cambridge Analytica in the Channel videos sound eerily similar to BJP’s electoral strategies. A coincidence?

How did Cambridge Analytica get access to 50 million Facebook profiles? Facebook had allowed a research project in Cambridge University to run an app on Facebook for generating psychometric profiles. While 270,000 filled up their questionnaire, the app had hidden code which allowed it to harvest the data of all their friends who had their privacy settings open. While this is not data hacking, and therefore not illegal, strictly speaking, it was definitely well beyond what Facebook thought they were doing. Neither does Facebook come of well, as they not only made no attempt to protect their users, but also made very little effort to see that this data was not misused. This is the core data that Cambridge University used to create profiles of the voters in the US which they could use to swing the US elections.

Channel 4’s exposé shows that Cambridge Analytica worked on a number of elections, including those in Kenya, Eastern Europe and Nepal. Its toolkit included not only micro-targeting using psychological profiles of people, but also old fashioned dirty tricks: entrapment; “honeypot ” using Ukrainian girls; and so on.

The leading executives caught on camera exposing Cambridge Analytica’s methods to a supposedly wealthy Sri Lankan, are Alexander Nix, their chief executive, Mark Turnbull,  the head of their political division, and Alexander Tayler, their chief data scientist. While Nix has been suspended by the Board of Analytica, Alexander Tayler, the key person behind its data analytics and micro-targeting – and also caught on camera offering to fix the Sri Lankan elections – has now taken over as chief executive from Nix. So the personnel may change, but the regime continues.

Meanwhile,  markets punished Facebook for its loss of 50 million US user profiles to Cambridge Analytica with #DeleteFacebook trending on twitter. Its shares sank by 9% – a loss of $ 50 billion –  before recovering partially. Mark Zuckerberg, so prompt to speak on issues such as Free Basics, has gone into hibernation on this matter.

The long term issues of micro-targeting using big data and false news are not going to go away by punishing Cambridge Analytica for breaching elections laws, or Facebook for its lax privacy and data security. The problems lie much deeper. Research recently published in Science shows that false news travels faster, deeper and wider than true news. This, coupled with the amount of data we generate, not just in Facebook but through our digital footprints on the internet, endangers not only future elections, but also our future. It is only a matter of time before we see more Cambridge Analyticas tapping into our deepest fears and our prejudices. Welcome to the post-truth world of Modi and Trump, and our march into barbarity, led by our ablest tech minds.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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Image courtesy Leftword Books

Keeping in mind the context of 20^th century socialism and its limitations, that the command economy was the consequence of a production technology that privileged economies of scale and therefore, vertical and horizontal integration. When we come to the 21st century, we have to build our new emancipatory model of 21^st century socialism. For this to happen, we have to envision the socialist system of production in the 21^st century.

Without such an emancipatory model of socialism, we would limit our imagination in the fight against capitalism. No system falls because of all the problems of such a system. Even in physics or natural sciences, no theory gets overthrown by its contradictions; it gets overthrown only when a new theory addresses those contradictions and resolves them. Similarly, we have to construct a vision of the socialist system – that can, as a system of production, express itself in different ways, even within the womb of the neoliberal capitalism.

And this vision must be effectively communicated to the people.
To build such a vision, we need to probe the nascent forms of socialist production. This calls for a critical examination of what capitalism is doing to production. If capitalism can de-skill technology, break up and fragment the work place, is it possible for us to bring intellect workers, say those who produce designs for Apple, together with the manual workers who manufacture Apple products? Can we get that knowledge that exists with intellect workers; and combine it with the existing small-scale production – who produce a whole lot of goods in either a petty commodity production mode, or as ancillaries to the major brand names? Can we get them together to build a different system of production within the existing structure? Can we weaken capitalism’s control over knowledge and over brands? Can we start fighting all these today – and not wait till we seize state power?

Our earlier slogan was “Think global, fight local”. This is not enough today. We have to think global, but we also have to fight globally. We cannot fight the capitalist system at one place; that place can be abandoned by the capitalist for another. Capital has become, in some sense, footloose, because it owns the intellectual property, the designs, the software, the distribution system, the brand name. It does not care where its products are manufactured. Apple can abandon Foxconn and go to somebody else, located in a completely different place, with very little loss. Foxconn, merely manufactures the Apple products. Not surprisingly, of the iPhone price ¹, Apple’s profits are 58.5 per cent, Foxconn’s 14.3 per cent profit, while the workers are paid, as wages, only 1.8 per cent of the iPhone price. Apple can offer high wages to a small number of intellect workers who produce the designs and the software, while the bulk of the workers producing the actual phone are paid a pittance.

Can the Left fight Apple not simply by organizing workers but building smartphones through producers’ cooperatives that bring together intellect workers and the workers who make the phones? With free software movements and peer-to-peer production movements, this is possible today. Can the Left and the local governments that may be under its sway, lead such efforts?

This is not to argue that the workers’ cooperatives will gradually replace capitalism without the need of seizing state power. My argument here is that we need to think about how to combine our socialist vision of the future – the kind of production system, the kind of distribution, the kind of ownership – and begin demonstrating parts of these here and now². We can then provide a platform for local Left governments, give them certain tasks of building and demonstrating proto-socialist alternatives, even within the existing constraints. Otherwise, Left governments have the danger of becoming merely better caretakers of the capitalist system than the capitalist parties themselves. We may not have all the answers, but we need to start thinking on how we can built an alternative system of production, and start, experimenting on it today.

Repeated capitalist crisis is integral to capitalism: it will continue to be there as long as capitalism exists. As long as capitalism is not overthrown, it will always get over its crisis by expanding in different ways, finding new commodities; at the current moment, it finds personal data as the new commodity; it expands continuously into new dimensions, through dispossessions, through enclosure of the commons, and so on. Unless we have an alternative system in place, at least in our imagination, capitalism cannot be overthrown. Our task is to see how to overthrow capitalism, but that cannot be done unless we combine it with an emancipatory vision of our socialism and our socialist imagination. This is how we should remember the October Revolution, not through empty homage but by rebuilding our revolutionary vision.

Prabir Purkayastha is the chief editor of Newsclick.

This is an excerpt from Red October: The Russian Revolution and the Communist Horizon, edited by Vijay Prashad, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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