Ejaz Hussain

A practising Certified Financial Planner- CFP. Passion- coaching people for their financial happiness. Happy to be agnostic

[Alpha Mindset @AlphaMindset1x]

The illusion of happiness.

[Ananda Kumar Dr @AnandNodal]

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[மாதொருபாகன் @maathorubhagan]

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[We Dravidians @WeDravidians]

The States' Man: Karunanidhi’s unsung contributions to Indian federalism
V GEETHA
15 August 2018

“Under our constitutional system, no single entity can claim superiority,” Muthuvel Karunanidhi, then the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, wrote in The Hindu on 15 August 2007. “Sovereignty does not lie in any one institution or in any one wing of the government. The power of governance is distributed in several organs and institutions … Even if we assume that the Centre has been given a certain dominance over the States, that dominance should be used strictly for the purpose intended, not for oblique purposes.”

At the time Karunanidhi wrote the article, his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government was in its second year of office and enjoyed cordial relations with the Congress and the Left parties at the local and national levels. Even so, it opposed a move by the central government—via a resolution passed in the Tamil Nadu assembly—to transfer to the Union List the subject of “Panchayati Raj,” which until then was on the State List. Around the same time, the DMK government passed a resolution in the assembly to enable the use of Tamil in the Madras High Court. The party attempted to utilise its good offices with the Congress leadership to return to and strengthen federalism, a principle that remained dear to Karunanidhi, in spite of the twisted outcomes that attended a realisation of the idea. (The centre disallowed the use of Tamil in the high court, though it could be used in the lower courts.) His arguments for federalism spanned several registers, of politics and law, of economic planning and development, of Tamil linguistic pride and Dravidian nationalism.

Karunanidhi’s sense of Tamil culture was shaped by the historiographical debates of the early twentieth century—in particular, by the views of those who upheld the distinctive claims of Tamil culture and civilisation. Drawing on the corpus of poems known as the Sangam texts, as well as Jaina and Buddhist literature, antiquarians as well as popular writers of the time argued that ancient Tamil culture did not know varna divisions and owed nothing to the Aryan-Brahmin civilisation, highlighting its secular aspects. Throughout his life, Karunanidhi would reference these texts: for instance, he cast the Thirukkural, a fourth-century Jaina text known for its gnomic wisdom, as a veritable icon of Tamilness. To this day, buses run by the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation, which was created when Karunanidhi’s government nationalised transport services in 1967, feature verses from the Kural. A gigantic statue of Thiruvalluvar, author of the Kural, was erected in Kanyakumari, as if to rival the commemorative presence of Vivekananda that marks that landscape. These marks of Tamil culture may be read as public reminders of the avowedly “secular” tradition of Tamil rational and ethical thought.

With respect to political federalism, the most important influence on Karunanidhi has undoubtedly been his mentor, CN Annadurai, who in turn, owed his understanding in this instance to EV Ramasamy, better known as Periyar. From the late 1920s, Periyar and his followers argued against the idea of India, as being both untenable and impossible, given caste divisions and Brahmin intellectual and political dominance. While the former did not allow a shared polity and society, the latter ensured that national claims would remain partisan ones, calculated to preserve and perpetuate upper-caste dominance. In the 1940s, this critique morphed into a rigorous examination of what came to be termed the Brahmin-Bania core of Indian nationalism. Periyar and the Dravidar Kazhagam, a party that he founded out of the older Non-Brahmin Justice party, were vociferous in arguing that unless caste-based iniquities were addressed, Indian independence would usher in “Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan” and not a modern republic. As an alternative, Periyar outlined his case for a sovereign Dravidian nation that would be free of Brahmin hegemony and Bania control.

Like many others of his generation, Karunanidhi was excited by this call for a sovereign Dravida Nadu. It spoke to the linguistic pride and pleasure of young men, schooled in the anti-Hindi protests of the late 1930s. They were aware that the issue at hand was political—it had to be actioned not only on the streets and but also in the legislature. The moment for such a politics arrived, when a generation of enthusiastic Self-Respecters—followers of Periyar’s Self Respect movement—broke away from the Dravidar Kazhagam, which did not contest elections, to form the DMK in 1949. In time, Karunanidhi would emerge as the new party’s main spokesperson, but in the 1950s, he was one among many bright young men, who took to asserting the cause of Tamil autonomy within the Union of India. The political literature of the time examines the idea of federalism from several points of view, often drawing from global examples.

Karunanidhi’s own writing blended the claims of what has been described as “cultural nationalism” with astute political and constitutional arguments.
In the 1960s, Tamil Nadu witnessed another round of anti-Hindi politics as well as symbolic campaigns against the authority of the union government.

Karunanidhi emerged as the veritable face of these energetic protests, flamboyant, heroic and politically astute. When the DMK took office in 1967, he was inducted into the cabinet, and eventually became chief minister in 1969. One of the first things he did was to set up the Rajamannar Committee to examine centre-state relations.

At the same time, the question of power could not be ignored. Federalism was not only desirable as an ideal, it was also useful as a bargaining point to secure state interests with parties at the centre.

This committee presented recommendations of a far-reaching nature, which have since remained central to the DMK’s vision of a federal India. Its most important recommendation was to set up an inter-state council, comprising chief ministers of all states, equally represented, with the prime minister as chairperson.

The council was to function like a watchdog, to ensure, that the union government did not interfere with what was essentially a demand for shared sovereignty. The committee also recommended devolution of more taxes to the states through the setting up of an impartial and independent Finance Commission to disburse grants-in-aid; and the transfer of a number of items from the Concurrent and Central Lists to the State List. Karunanidhi had Murasoli Maran summarise the committee report in crisp and communicative Tamil for wide dissemination.

Recalling that report in the 2007 article Karunanidhi noted that, in 1989, when the United Front government under VP Singh took office, it acted on the recommendations and set up the inter-state council in 1990. This was possible, he observed, because for the first time regional parties were part of the union government, a practice that has since continued in one form or another. For him, this development signified the onset of a more representative politics. Nevertheless, he was not sanguine about its long-term prospects. Sharing of power was one thing, but what about the sharing of sovereignty?

At the same time, the question of power could not be ignored. Federalism was not only desirable as an ideal, it was also useful as a bargaining point to secure state interests with parties at the centre. This was something that Annadurai had made clear in a speech to the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly, when he asked the ruling Congress to consider the DMK as “sappers and miners” who had made the case for a federal polity and thereby cleared the way for the state government to demand better growth prospects for Tamil Nadu. Karunanidhi went several steps further. He carried the battle into the union government—forging electoral alliances with the Congress, and offering strategic support, when required, to ensure fulfilment of key DMK demands.

This eminently pragmatic approach, problematic at the best of times, reached its limits in 1999. In order to save his government from J Jayalalithaa’s machinations, Karunanidhi assented to an alliance with the BJP, a party whose politics and ideology went against everything the DMK stood for. Sadly, this alliance continued through the terrible months of 2002, when BJP-ruled Gujarat burned and thousands of Muslims were killed. Karunanidhi is believed to have regretted that decision later—no doubt, he saw the limits to pragmatic reason, and the importance of keeping alive an expansive vision of federalism.

A crucial aspect of such a vision has been political decorum: Karunanidhi was exemplary in his conduct towards fellow chief ministers. With his southern compatriots for instance he continued to negotiate over contentious issues, such as the Cauvery problem with Karnataka, the Mullaperiyar dam in Kerala and the sharing of Krishna waters in Andhra Pradesh. He also made sure that he remained in conversation with others, notably those who were as invested in federalism, such as the chief ministers of West Bengal.

Karunanidhi’s writings helped make Tamil a marker of a secularism that was as much cultural as it was constitutional. It is another matter that this putative Tamilness has not made for equal and just relationships in economic and social realms: Dalit assertion for instance has been met with hatred and violence on the part of the dominant castes. The other danger is that “Tamilness” could morph into a convenient fiction: the AIADMK’s J Jayalalithaa sought to embody this attribute in her person, as if she were a lone warrior out to protect state autonomy in the face of the union government’s machinations. It is clear though that she deployed it to mask a self-serving politics, underwritten by endless corruption and open support for crony capitalism.

Be that as it may, the question is whether Karunanidhi’s vision of federalism will continue to animate his followers. Not much can be expected from the ruling AIADMK—in order to remain in office, its leaders have openly chosen to accept the BJP’s protection and at a time when that party is bent on centralising authority, be it in the realm of education or taxation or even legislation. In this context, it becomes all the more important to foreground the democratic aspects of the federal idea. Even if this does not mature in the state of Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi’s vision and legacy are open to claimants elsewhere.
https://t.co/5oWWhc09z3

[Suresh Sambandam @sureshsambandam]

https://t.co/PPa2nnKqst

[Latha Venkatesh @latha_venkatesh]

This brought tears to my eyes. May his tribe increase!

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Life is too short to worry about little things.

Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing, and do not let people bring you down.

Study, think, create, and grow. Teach yourself and teach others.

—Professor Richard Feynman

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

She was rejected 15 times, dismissed as unruly, and largely written out of the conversation. Then the science proved she was right — and changed everything we thought we knew about life itself.

In 1966, a twenty-eight-year-old biologist named Lynn Margulis sat down and wrote a paper that contradicted one of the most fundamental assumptions in all of science.

She was not a tenured professor. She was not working at a prestigious research institution. She was a young mother of two, recently divorced, completing her PhD while raising her sons largely on her own. The scientific establishment had no particular category for her and no particular interest in what she was proposing.

She proposed it anyway.
Her idea was this: that the story of evolution told through competition and conquest was incomplete. That somewhere in the deep history of life on Earth — billions of years ago, long before anything with a spine had appeared — something had happened that was not a battle but a merger. Two separate organisms, each unable to survive alone, had come together and become something neither could have been independently.

The mitochondria in every one of your cells — the structures that convert food into energy, the engine that powers every thought you are having right now — were once free-living bacteria. They did not evolve gradually inside cells. They moved in. They formed a partnership so deep and so permanent that over billions of years they became indistinguishable from the cell itself.

She called the theory endosymbiosis. She called the process symbiogenesis. What she was really saying was that cooperation, not just competition, was one of the engines of evolution — that life's greatest leaps forward had sometimes come not from one organism defeating another, but from two organisms becoming one.

Fifteen scientific journals rejected the paper before it was published in 1967.
Fifteen.

To understand what she was working against, you need to understand the scientific culture of the 1960s. Neo-Darwinism — the synthesis of Darwin's evolution with Mendelian genetics — was the reigning framework, and it was defended with the particular intensity of a field that had recently achieved hard-won consensus. The idea that a bacterium had simply moved inside another cell and stayed there, permanently, was considered not just wrong but somewhat absurd. Evolution happened through random mutation and natural selection, slowly, over generations. Not through dramatic mergers. Not through cooperation.

The reviewers who rejected her paper used words like speculative and insufficiently rigorous. One described the idea as the sort of thing that was interesting to think about but impossible to prove.

She was also described, more than once, as unruly.
It was the specific word that followed women who challenged scientific consensus — not wrong, not misguided, but unruly, as though the problem were her manner rather than her method.

She had been exceptional from the beginning in ways that made people uncomfortable. Born Lynn Petra Alexander in Chicago on March 5, 1938, she entered the University of Chicago at sixteen — intellectually restless, reading at a level that outpaced her coursework, drawn to the questions at the edges of what science had settled. At nineteen she married a young astronomer named Carl Sagan, who would go on to become one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. She would later say, without particular bitterness, that during their marriage she was primarily considered someone's wife rather than someone in her own right.

They divorced in 1964. She raised their sons — including Dorion Sagan, who would become her longtime collaborator — while completing her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. She did the work that would change biology while managing the entire domestic architecture of a life that offered her very little structural support.

When molecular biology caught up with her theory in the 1970s — when DNA sequencing technology became sophisticated enough to actually test what she had proposed — the results were unambiguous. Mitochondria contained their own DNA. That DNA was bacterial. The evidence was not suggestive. It was definitive.

The fifteen journals that had rejected her paper were now looking at proof.

The scientific establishment did what establishments eventually do when reality forces their hand — it incorporated her theory, celebrated it as a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology, and credited her in terms that ranged from gracious to slightly grudging depending on who was doing the crediting. E.O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, called her the most successful synthetic thinker in modern biology. Richard Dawkins — who disagreed with her on multiple other scientific questions — praised her sheer courage in holding to the endosymbiotic theory through years of institutional resistance until the evidence made denial impossible.

Science magazine, the most prestigious journal in American science, called her science's unruly earth mother.
They still couldn't let go of the word.

She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. She received the National Medal of Science in 1999 from President Clinton — the highest scientific honor the United States government bestows. She collaborated with British scientist James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis — the provocative and still-debated theory that Earth itself, its atmosphere and oceans and living systems, functions as a single self-regulating organism maintaining the conditions necessary for life. It was another idea that the mainstream received with raised eyebrows, and another idea that has proven more durable than its critics expected.

She wrote books with her son Dorion that translated complex scientific concepts for general readers — believing that science belonged to everyone and that the story of life was too extraordinary to be locked inside academic journals. She co-founded a publishing imprint. She taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for decades and trained a generation of scientists who carried her framework into fields she never lived to see it reach.

She died on November 22, 2011, from a hemorrhagic stroke. She was seventy-three years old.

What she left behind was a redrawn map of life itself.
Every complex cell on Earth — every cell in your body, every cell in every plant, every cell in every animal that has ever lived — is a collaboration. It contains within it the descendants of bacteria that chose, billions of years ago, to stop competing and start cooperating. The boundary between self and other is not where we thought it was. It never was.

Lynn Margulis saw that when almost no one else did.
Fifteen journals said no.

The universe had been saying yes for two billion years.

[Ejaz Hussain @eajaz_h]

@LiveLawIndia Creamy layer should be applicable to all the reserved category communities. SC, ST AND OBC. Socially and economically if one has moved upwards, why should they get Reservations. Let those who have not moved up get the opportunity

[Ejaz Hussain @eajaz_h]

@suryaxavier1 @Kaali67800508 What nonsense is this. It’s just to show that Muslims are given cabinet berths only Now. Religion is good at your home not in Administration and office. This is a wrong precedence. The civil society should strongly condemn this act

[Ejaz Hussain @eajaz_h]

@DrSharmila15 Madam, his agenda was to keep DMK out of power, not BJP gaining in the long run. If you weaken Dravidian parties BJP will fight only one party TVK . And anyways @VCKofficial_ will be vanished by then. All the youth including Dalit youth are now with TVK.

[Ejaz Hussain @eajaz_h]

@VCKofficial_TN @thirumaofficial Sir I think you lost a big chance of becoming CM, and I think you are losing your cadre day by day. Youngsters are not going to come to you even dalit youth are not going to come. They are with Vijay sir
Power attracts everyone and you lost the opportunity

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

“You can do everything right and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”