Why Should the Bankers be made to work this Sunday?

 

I have not blogged for long now and this occurred to me this day last week. I tried logging in then and realised the blog was still alive. It was a pleasant surprise and decided I must resume blogging now. A provocation came in the past couple of days with endless text messages on my mobile and whatsapp that the bank will remain open this Sunday, September 27, 2026 to save us from the inconvenience caused by the bankers decision to go on a three day strike beginning Monday, September 28, 2026. In an age when only a few old men go to the bank branch to transact business and pulling out cash from the ATMs too has become old-fashioned with the smart phone also serving as a wallet, I am at a loss as to how the hell a few days strike by the bankers are going to inconvenience most people who have business with banks.

            Speaking for myself, I will, in the event, draw money for expenses a few days before the strike and consequent closure of banks while many others unlike me will not care whether the banks are open or closed. All of whom a strike and the closure of bank branches matters to are business-men who carry out transaction by cheques and I am not too sure if there are too many in our midst who do this. So, the texts and the whatsapp messages expressing concern for my inconvenience made no sense to me. It was just the irritation of receiving so many of those through the day and day after day and having to delete those since they will occupy all the space in my inbox and leave no space for messages that serve a purpose to me that bothered me. Things changed yesterday.

            A text message, early afternoon, showing credit of my salary for the month of September made me think. The salary for September this year ought to be credited, as the law ordains, on or before the last working day of the month: This is Wednesday, September 30, 2026. It is true that there is nothing in the law prohibiting early disbursal. But it has never happened in the past decade and half since I work in a quasi-government organization where the rule about the last working day matters. I mean never has it been that the salary was credited five days before it was due. And it certainly was an act of benevolence on the part of the Drawing and Disbursing Officer of my institution to have done his bit in easing my life and saving me of the inconvenience that the bankers were going to cause.

            A line about what is meant by the Drawing and Disbursing Officer here will be in order. This is a designated officer in a government or autonomous organization, who has the authority to draw money out of the Consolidated Funds of the Government of India within the limits of the budget allocated to the department or organization and the specific heads such as salary, travel claims, money due to vendors, contractual obligations from the organization, etc., and disburse those accordingly. The Finance Officer, a statutory position, happens to be the DDO (in short for the Drawing and Disbursing Officer) of my organization.  

            Myself as well as my DDO (my Drawing and Disbursing Officer) and all those who work in the salary section in my organization have been working only five days a week. This had been in vogue from long before I entered into service fifteen years ago. It has been the rule for a little more than four decades now: Since June 3, 1985 to be precise when the Government ordered it that way from that date. This shortening of the working week entailed working for one more hour than earlier between Mondays and Fridays and the decision was also meant to ensure saving of electricity costs in the office buildings, saving fuel on vehicles the employees used to commute and also on maintenance of the facilities in the buildings.

            Even while I do not find any data to establish the quantum of savings achieved by this, I do not dispute that it did achieve saving. Elementary Watson, as Holmes would say. Let me depend on common sense and say my DDO as well as anyone in my establishment or any government organization working today had not experienced what it means to work six days a week. We all entered our organization when it was five days a week. If this is so, why then should the bankers even have to go on strike now because the strike is to press their demand for a five day week to them too. Or is it that my DDO and many others like him had orders from their bosses to disburse the salary five days before it is due and to gather our support against the bankers?

And if only we see the demand reasonable, which I do without doubt, a small hardship, if any, should have been our own way to express our solidarity with the demand. In other words, my DDO, who too is an employee and knows what it means to have a two-day week-end instead of one, could have disbursed the salary for September 2026 in the normal course. He could have done this on that day since transactions are done electronically and we all could have, as is the normal thing we do, done our own transactions on October 1, 2026. There was hardly any hardship that was due to the strike. Instead, the banks created one scare and the employers played ball. I am only wondering if whether we will not go on strike some day and what if someone there creates this scare of a hardship then. In any case, there is merit in the point that a five day week for the bankers will help save electricity and fuel as it is in case of we the employees under the Central Government and Autonomous Organisations.

College and University teachers, after all, have been on strike in the past and secured a lot of the rights and privileges we enjoy now. And there is no way, even in the future, to preserve the rights and privileges and secure more. This is a thought that goes in my mind now and a good enough provocation to revive this blog, I suppose.    

Comprehending the convulsions in the Congress Party and comments in the media

                An intervention by Rajiv Satav in a meeting of his party MPs, late in July 2020, has stirred the placid affairs in the party once again some reactions; Satav’s demand that the party introspect its record since the time of the UPA-II has drawn criticism from insiders of the UPA-II regime. It is only natural. It is for the Congress party to resolve whether an introspection is called for and in the event decide the cut-off date; the party may even decide whether Dr. Manmohan Singh’s actions or inactions are interrogated or to put him on a pedestal for worship.

                The episode involving Satav, however, has become subject matter for discussion with journalists offering advice and even solutions to the party. Most of these consultants, indeed, have jumped in to attack Satav; if they are to be believed, Satav committed blasphemy. He dared to suggest that something that happened when Manmohan Singh held the reigns ought to be interrogated and judged as to whether the seeds of the party’s decline were sown then. Among them is Harish Khare (https://thewire.in/politics/the-fight-is-not-between-youngsters-and-seniors-but-of-three-gandhis-against-the-congress) who had been the Prime Minister’s media advisor.

It is not unusual for journalists to assume expertise on matters political and more so with developments within a political party. Such expertise, then, leads them turn into consultants; I must add here that consultants had emerged indispensable in anything and everything in the post-1991 era (coterminous with India embracing the Washington consensus and Manmohan Singh’s entry into the political domain). And as it is with consultants, the Congress party’s consultants too are wedded to an article of faith: The economic policy shift in July 1991 (which they call reforms) was the “bestest” (I know there is no such word in English language) thing to have happened to India and it could not have happened without Manmohan Singh around.

They will not listen to reason when pointed out that the reforms were not chosen by the regime then; that the Structural Adjustments Programme was not one of the many options but one that was thrust by the Brettenwoods institutions on India as it was done by the former colonialists on what they called the Developing Nations. Well. Consultancy assignments, by their very nature, are meant to highlight the pros of a proposition by those engaging them. In other words, they are not meant to substantiate arguments to the contrary unless their brief comes from those who seek to argue against a proposal.

                So, the demand by Rajiv Satav, an internal affair of the Congress party turning into an occasion for the consultants to get active and offer solutions raises a few questions. The questions are more justified when most of these solutions are in the nature of attacks against Rahul Gandhi. It is not my business here to put out one more prescription; and I do not wish to be included in the secret political clique or faction working for Rahul Gandhi (the cabal about which Harish Khare pointed fingers at).

                Having moved out of New Delhi almost quarter century ago and given up active journalism many years ago, I had not even heard of Satav; and as a matter of fact, I have not met Rahul Gandhi, his sister and their mother anytime. However, I have known some of those, in the party, who find Satav’s remark and demand untenable. Almost all, if not all, of them had come into the Congress party in the 1980s; some were known for having been loyal to Sanjay Gandhi and others who found themselves being liked by Rajiv Gandhi. While the Sanjay loyalists were not known for any exceptional skills in the technological or managerial sense, those who found themselves liked by Rajiv Gandhi were blessed with education from abroad or having been to the same school Rajiv did!

They did not have to work hard breathing dust and beating the heat and the cold as politicians of another generation had to. The collapse of the Janata Party and its regime in 1979 was also marked by the remnants of the Congress old-guard deserting Indira Gandhi (into the Congress-U) and Sanjay Gandhi’s followers thus became the party’s assets. Rajiv Gandhi added a few of his own to this; most of his old-school-boys did not remain with him for long. Some left the party to go elsewhere – Arun Nehru for instance- while many others quit politics for good – Arun Singh for instance. 

Among those who stayed were P.Chidambaram, Anand Sharma, Kamal Nath, Ashok Gehlot and Ahmed Patel. The party did not collapse for a while even after such of those like Arjun Singh and N.D.Tiwari tried setting up their own party; nor did the party provide space for a new crop and ended up with progenies of the satraps from another era. They all ended up profiting with the Congress party’s surprise win in 2004 and a repeat in 2009; UPA-I and II, indeed, were not due to the Congress party’s resurgence in any sense but by default. The two UPAs, then, were run by a bunch of supermanagers, to borrow a term from Thomas Piketty, a class that emerged in the 1980s; Piketty unravels the nexus between the arrival of the supermanagers, riding on claims to meritocracy and rampant inequalities in the share of national income across the world.

The point is those who were upset, within the Congress party and outside, with Rajiv Satav have their own reasons. These are like the supermanagers of the post-1980s who managed to capture such positions in the party and in the regime between 2004 and 2014 thanks to the privilege of being sons or daughters of former satraps of the party and having been able to study abroad because their parents had a lot of money and thus claim positions in the name of meritocracy as could the supermanagers.

I will rely on what Piketty and his collaborator, Abijeet Banerjee revealed about what this class of supermanagers managed to do in India; they ensured obfuscation of data on tax and this helped cover up inequalities in share of national income. Likewise, we seem to have among us a whole battery of consultants who would not want interrogation of some parts of the Congress party’s recent history when the party compromised on a whole lot of its values; the scandalous business deals involving sale of airwaves (spectrum), the way the supermanagers handled the campaign for an Ombudsman (Lok Pal) – its peak being the Baba Ramdev puppet show orchestrated by the meritocracy in the cabinet – and several such facts cannot be obfuscated if the Congress is keen on introspection.

It is no surprise that Rajiv Satav has provoked many who were ministers in the UPA-II to react. The reactions are not unnatural and do not warrant any serious attempt to seek explanation. But then, the reaction from the experts who have assumed the role of consultants and supermanagers seem to suggest a motive.  That they are upset with the choice of people with whom Rahul Gandhi has been talking in the past few months; he is talking to those who have researched and written about the problems with the inequalities in the world of capital since the 1980s and spoken straight about the need to change this course. They are ones who recommend such measures as the NREGA or the RTI, important markers of UPA-I and measures that the UPA-II simply did not emulate from.

The supermanagers had taken over the UPA-II and those who were their consultants are unhappy that Rahul Gandhi is not talking to them; and since he is not talking to them, they call him arrogant.

As for the Congress party, it may learn from its own history. The party went in to rope in meritocracy into managing its affairs in the early 1980s; it did not help the party retain its core – the poor and the marginalized – and the time-servers simply left for greener pastures. Rahul Gandhi’s cabal, if there is one at all, may help themselves from this lesson from history. Rajiv Satav, from what I learn, belongs to a generation that could have done well for itself by staying away from the Congress. The Congress party was on a course of decline by the time he turned twenty years of age; he did not study abroad; he is among those who worked their way up in the party and his point that the UPA-II is interrogated makes immense sense.   

V.Krishna Ananth (August 5, 2020)

I tried putting this, more of some kind of musings, to some publications. For some reason, they were polite but held they may not want to publish this. None of them said it is infirm, that the arguments are not in order, etc. , etc. So, putting it here, where I am the writer, editor, publisher and all.

                With the Rupee touching a high of 72.03 for a dollar, there is panic in some sections. It may be that such fall in the value of our currency against the dollar is a cause for hurt in sentiments and the news of the fall may not lead to a buoyant mood among the people.

                Well. It is important that one places on record, and records are worth some effort, that a falling rupee need not cause panic all the time when it happens. There are situations, or conditions – the term Piero Sraffa (1898-1983), among the eminent economists of the last century would insist using here – where a falling value of a nation’s currency against the dollar could cause immense benefits to its economy and must be welcome.

                So, it is important to note that issues in economics such as the value of the rupee against the dollar are dealt with by economists and are held immune from sentiments and feelings of pride and prejudice arising out of it. Let me recall that we had, in 1966, a government ordained devaluation of the rupee against the dollar.

                On June 6 that year, then Prime Minisnter Indira Gandhi ordered devaluation of the Rupee by 57 per cent; from Rs. 4.6 to a dollar to Rs. 7.5 to a dollar. Drawing flak for her decision, Indira and her associates held out that it was a decision that the government before her headed by Lal Bahadur Sastri had committed to. There was truth in it. Sastri had asked his Finance Minister then, T.T.Krishnamachari, to quit the cabinet in December 1965 before embarking to Tashkent.

                The pressure on India to devalue came from the US regime than and the grains under PL 480 to feed the people in the famine affected regions then from the US were tied with this as conditions. TTK, as he was and is known then and now had his reservations and Sastri asked him to quit in the event. TTK did leave the cabinet and Indira did express worries over the move against TTK to her friend Dorothy Norman. But then Sastri passed away in Tashkent and Indira ended up in his chair and also carried out the decision to devalue – and a pretty much steep devaluation indeed – in June 1966.

                It was only after the decision was taken and the effects of it began trickling in that Indira as well as others in her circle realised its implications were adverse in the given condition. Sraffa, whose immense contribution to economics came with his intervention that models and theories ought to be tested in the specifics of the conditions that prevailed and no sense assuming all the right conditions, was not arrived in our academia as important as he should have been then.

                Well. I must add that Sraffa is not held with the importance he deserves in the curriculum in most universities where degrees in economics are commonplace. This remains a substantial deficiency as much as is the fact that macro-economics or economic history is either not taught as full papers or is given the short shrift by including some of it in short modules in our syllabus. That, indeed, is what makes our economist end up with building models and game theories while entrusted with tasks in departments to plan and postulate.

                Sraffa, if invoked in June 1966, may have helped the regime then to exercise caution; for the condition in 1966 was that we as a nation were not big exporters and hence such steep devaluation of the Rupee was going to deny us the advantage that it would have to us by way of a substantive increase in the Rupee earnings of our own industries that produced/manufactured for exports. In other words, devaluation of the nation’s currency against the dollar would facilitate higher earnings to the nation in Rupee terms and thus incentivize manufacture for export and cause an expansion of production/manufacture.

                This, indeed, is why I had stated at the outset that the Rupee falling against the dollar need not and shall not be seen through the prism of sentiment or pride as did such men like Chetan Bhagat or the likes of him in the past. Well. They all were deprived of reading such eminent thinkers like Sraffa and the blame should lie at the doors of those who taught them in prestigious institutions that the IITs and the IIMs are. I guess that Bhagat went to both these institutions (going by the fictions that he published and those that ended up bestsellers) and yet has had no clue to economics or many other disciplines of importance in the making of a complete man! No issues.

                Meanwhile, there were two such instances, both within days between each, in 1991. The then Government, however, brought it with some structural changes in the trade policy; from a highly restricted norm hitherto the trade policy regime was adjusted to allow tradable EXIM scrips allowing exporters to import 30 per cent of the value of their exports. The global system then was buoyant and a devalued Rupee was not a bad scheme where exports from India would grow and with the altered trade regime it helped growth in some sectors.

                There were sensible people who warned that the buoyancy was only a bubble and that bubbles, as is the norm, will burst one day or another. Such of those were condemned as nay-sayers then and there are some who continue to wish things do not go wrong this way. The devotees of global capitalism continued to hold that things are not bad and that India was on the spring board to bounce back. 

                The low that was witnessed in the value of the Rupee since then was a bad idea only from the sentimental point of thinking and not that bad insofar as economics was concerned. Sraffa, again, helped realise that we gained out of a condition where we as a nation found market for our goods in other countries. This, indeed, was the boom that we witnessed in the 1990s and was celebrated as a success story here, there and everywhere. However, conditions, that Sraffa would insist, changed across the world sometimes in 2006.

                The sub-prime crisis in the US and the slowdown since then in the ‘developed’ world was for all to see but many refused to see. The point is the Rupee falling is a a consequence of yet another ‘condition’ and it makes sense to call Sraffa (though he died in 1983, his works are available to us) to underscore the contingency that determine the success and the failure of every model in economics. In other words, it warrants suggestions from economists trained in the ‘macro’ aspect of the discipline to be sought rather than let models to prevail.

The plain and simple truth that economics and history teaches us is that there is no magic wand that could have put the rupee on the high vis a vis the dollar. The crisis that was looming post-the sub-prime crisis called for considered response and there was no way a messiah could do the wonder.

The Emergency (1975-77) and the undeclared Emergency Now

The arrest of five prominent persons last Tuesday and the raids the same day on premises of many others has brought back the Emergency of 1975-77 into the discourse. From those who recall the dark times that India experienced 43 years ago (and they all happen to be past sixty years of age) to many who had only heard stories of those bad days from their teachers or elders at home trying to imagine that part of our recent past with images from the present.

                It is, apart from the eeriness that the arrests have spread across the country, an occasion to historicise the emergency once again. This has been done earlier and it makes sense to attempt it once again. History, as Benedito Croce put it, is an engagement with the past from the concerns of the present when he held that all history is contemporary history. The emergency (1975-77) is certainly an important marker in the short history of our Constitutional Democracy and it is not incorrect to invoke the past to explain the present.

                The 19 months during the Emergency (June 25, 1975 – March 21, 1977) was a period when the police could arrest anyone from anywhere, put them in jail for as long as they wanted. In one year after the Emergency was proclaimed, Amnesty International, had recorded that as many as 1,10,000 persons were arrested and detained in the jails across the country.  This included as many as 153 journalists held in the various jails by then. The point to stress here is that most of the 1,10,000 persons held in prisons were held there without any charges against them and most of them also spent as long as 19 months in jail  without charges.

                 This is where one could make sense of the expression ‘undeclared emergency’ now in vogue from some quarters to describe the present. During the Emergency, it was not necessary for the Inspector in-charge of a police station to labour hard and produce a charge-sheet with documents to prove before putting someone in jail for an indefinite period.  Let me stress here that the UAPA, a preventive detention law, lets the police to detain someone in jail for six months even before making out a charge-sheet and that is what the Pune police is trying to do now.

                The Emergency and the arrests then could be challenged, at least in the early days of the dark times, by resort to petitions seeking a writ of habeas corpus. This liberty, however, was short-lived and the penal transfer of as many as 16 High Court judges, in a short span of six weeks, in June-July 1976 rendered this remedy useless; all those who were transferred, to High Courts far away from where they were, happened to be those who ordered the writs of habeas corpus for admission. The Supreme Court, in its 4:1 verdict on the case (ADM Jabalpore vs. S.K.Shukla), killed whatever liberty was left and rendered the oppressive state into a constitutional entity. It ought to be added here that the Constitution (44^th Amendment) Act, 1978 restored a semblance of democracy into the constitutional scheme that makes another emergency as a mirror image of the one in 1975-77 impossible.

                Well.  In the event of another emergency declared the liberty of moving a writ of habeas corpus will remain (unlike in the past) and this is conditional upon lawyers, who value the constitution, remaining free in that event. During the Emergency of 1975-77 too many lawyers who stood up against the regime, some of those like Ram Jethmalani also had resolutions moved and passed in the Bar, were not arrested. No one then nor anyone hitherto has attempted to ascertain why they were not arrested. Let this not detain us here because such immunity is no longer there for members of the Bar in recent times; and lawyers who spoke up have been arrested and one of them was also subjected to physical intimidation in his own chamber in the Supreme Court sometime ago.

                Let me now come to the most important aspect of the Emergency (1975-77) and try rest my case that the present is far more dangerous to the democratic polity than was the one earlier. And this has to do with the media now and the press then.  The Emergency regime then resorted to Constitutional provisions (Article 352 and consequently Article 358 and 359) to ensure that arrests and detention for an indefinite period is well within the legal frame of the context as well as provisions to restrict the free decimation of news of those arrests; pre-publication censorship was a legal resort then and the press, by and large, went silent on those. A few among the newspapers even went a step further to justify and celebrate such arrests as necessary but most of the newspapers simply went silent.

                This, indeed, is not the same now. Even without such formal notifications and orders that all news ought to be published only after it is scanned and cleared by the censors, we now are witness to a loud campaign in the media, particularly the TV channels, calling those arrested as accused (notwithstanding that the criminal law warrants a charge-sheet and commencement of the trial as the stage when someone is called the accused) and even present those who raise questions of law as culpable in the crime. This, indeed, is what makes the present far more inimical to Constitutional Democracy than during the emergency of 1975-77.

                There may, certainly, be some exceptions but then the rule seems to be where the media is bending over its back to paint the arrests as necessary. There appears to be a stage having come where the Constitution (44^th Amendment) Act, 1978, a landmark that Constitutional scholars hold as a moment when the Constitutional scheme and the Democracy it guarantees was restored, was far less and insignificant before a political class that is committed to destroy democracy. I stress the Constitution (44^th Amendment) Act, 1978 as a marker because it was an instance, the most important I should insist, among the many steps after the Emergency to put the nation back on the tracks towards a democracy.

                Hence I see the present as a context to historicise the Emergency and hold that the lessons, one thought were learnt, are far less and too little. The media, particularly the TV channels, are now not merely crawling (as L.K.Advani famously accused them of doing then when they were asked to bend) but pushing each other out in the scramble to defend acts of desperation. Indira Gandhi’s desperation in 1975, a few years after she won the hearts of the people and vanquished all those who opposed her in 1971, led to the Emergency. There appears a parallel.

Decoding Bhima Koregaon, Nationalisms and History

                The violence orchestrated against the participants in the anniversary celebrations of the defeat of the Peshwas at Bhima-Koregaon this new-year eve, even while showing the desperate attempts by the votaries of upper caste domination of society, has also brought to the fore a debate on the use and abuse of history as a political weapon. All history, as Benedito Croce put it, is contemporary history; contemporary as in looking at the past from the concerns of the present and not as much as recent past. This, certainly is what history is capable of being and none, not even those who confuse history with chronicles, can wish away the use of history as a weapon.

                Thus, the defeat of the Peshwas, whose rule was marked by exploitation of the peasantry as was the case with the Moghuls who ruled the region before, by the forces commanded by the British and the foot soldiers consisted the Mahars, 200 years ago has now turned into a political weapon and the terrain happens to be the idea of the national. It is possible to read the events at Bhima-Koregaon in multiple ways. A plain reading of the battle in 1799 must lead to mere statements of facts: That an army, on behalf of the English East India Company, commanded by Englishmen gathered the Mahars, who had fought battles for other rulers earlier, defeated the army commanded by the Peshwa king and thus brought the region too under the company’s dominance.

                Historians, however, have not stopped there. Raising the question as to the what is it that led to the East India Company, a band of merchants who obtained exclusive rights to engage in trade with India (by an Act of English Parliament in 1600), waging battles and turning rulers, they located the answer in the transition in England in the 150 years after 1600. It was evident, by way of verifiable evidence, that from being traders in goods from the East and the Americas, Great Britain began to transform into an industrial nation and most importantly as manufacturers of textiles. The Industrial Revolution in England led to what historians have understood as colonialism and distinct from colonization. The two may have similarities and yet mark distinct developments in history.

                This transformation, indeed, was evident sometimes in the 1750s and historians have thus seen and established a connection between this and the fact that the Battle of Plassey was fought in 1757. The rest is history and it includes the battle at Bhima-Koregaon between the English-commanded army consisting the Mahars and the Peshwas, representing the pre-modern and pre-colonial. Neither is it possible to argue then that the Mahars represented the colonial order nor is it sensible to shout that the Peshwas were anti-colonial. The point is that such concepts as imperialism, colonialism and nationalism were not understood then, as they are now.

                The concept of imperialism, for instance, was first understood by J.A.Hobson in 1901 (incidentally the same year as Dadhabhai Naoroji came up with his thesis). And social scientists began grappling with the idea of the nation and nationalism only a couple of decades before Hobson arrived with his book titled Imperialism. Ernst Renan explained nations as an exercise in everyday plebiscite as late as in 1882. In other words, neither did anyone even think of such ideas as imperialism and nationalism in 1799 when the battle was fought.

                This is where the debate that is now raging over the violence against those who assembled to observe the 200^th anniversary of the Battle of 1799 in terms of nation, nationalism and anti-nationals ought to be contested. While the detractors of the celebrations, desperate in a democratic republican order guided by one-man-one-vote to retain their hold over the institutions of power were certainly guilty of un-constitutional acts and ought to be dealt with in that manner, those who have taken upon themselves the mantle of speaking for the event – Umar Khalid, Jignesh Mewani and such others with them from the intelligentsia and a section of historians too – are clearly guilty of abusing history as a political weapon.

                It ought to be stated that invoking or attributing to the British commanders and the Mahar foot-soldiers any revolutionary consciousness – whether in the social or in the economic sense of the term – is as un-historical as do the other side who describe the Peshwa rulers as nationalist. The science of history indeed teaches us against such inventions and fabrication. The battle of 1799, indeed, belongs to the same league as the revolt of 1857, when the rulers and chieftains rose against the British to save their privileges as rulers and ended up resurrecting Bahadur Shah Zafar as the emperor. The idea of nationalism in general and that emerged in India in particular fall in a distinct category that is modern and anti-monarchy.

                Let me conclude this citing one of the wonderful historians whose 1876 work on the Paris Commune continues to be read to this day, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, to support this point: ‘Whosoever invents false revolutionary legends for the people, amuses them with lyrical tales, is no less guilty than a geographer who draws up misleading maps for navigators’.  In other words, give the discipline of history its due and desist from abusing it. History, indeed, is a weapon.     

Here is a brilliant write up on free speech and resistance in the US of 1930s... so relevant to our own times here....


 The Bridgeport Herald Wages an Important Free Speech Fight

                                                                                                                                          by Andy Piascik

 

Rarely has an American play met with the kind of government opposition that Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty faced in 1935. Mayors and police departments forbade the staging of the play in a number of cities and stopped performances mid-play in others. Audience and cast members were arrested for protesting police actions. Locally, the Bridgeport Sunday Herald rallied to the cause of the play after it was banned in New Haven and thus played an important and honorable role in defending free speech.

Clifford Odets was 28 years old and a member of the left-wing, New York-based Group Theatre ensemble when he wrote Waiting for Lefty. (1) It was the first of his plays to be staged when it opened in a Group production at the Civic Repertory Theater on West 14^th Street in Manhattan on January 5, 1935. (2) Among those in the cast were Odets, Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb. (3)

Waiting for Lefty is often described as a play about a strike of New York taxicab drivers. While it is that, it’s more a penetrating look at the lives of a group of people who happen to be cab drivers as they cope with poverty and related personal, family and relationship problems at the low point of the Great Depression. The cabbies do discuss going on strike, and they also struggle with the risks involved, one of which is the fact that their union is controlled by racketeers violently opposed to any kind of independent labor action.

The drama in Waiting for Lefty was straight out of the front pages of newspapers throughout the country and thus resonated with audiences. In the months leading up to the play’s opening, there had been general strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo. Workers were organizing in great numbers and left-wing parties and organizations were stronger than in many years.

Waiting for Lefty’s run at the Civic was such a rousing success that it moved to Broadway in June, 1935. Because of great demand and in keeping with their philosophy of making plays easily accessible to the poor and working classes, Odets and the Group took the unusual step of approving productions throughout the country before the play’s Broadway premiere. In no time, labor unions and cultural organizations began staging Waiting for Lefty in dozens of cities and towns. Among them was a production by the New Haven John Reed Club’s Unity Players at Yale University’s University Theatre. (4)       

In at least six cities including Philadelphia, Boston and Newark, city officials either shut productions down after performances had begun or forced cancellation of performances before they could be staged. In Newark, the play was stopped in mid-performance and a number of audience members who protested were arrested. The stated reason in some cases was that the play was “Communist propaganda” and “un-American.” In Boston, profanity -- use of the word “God-damn” was specifically cited – was the pretext.

The production in New Haven, meanwhile, won the George Pierce Baker Cup for first prize in the Yale’s annual Drama Tournament on April 11th. In response to the wildly enthusiastic reception, the Unity Players booked space at Commercial High School for additional performances. Several days before the first scheduled show, however, the New Haven Board of Education rescinded the agreement and Police Chief Philip Smith declared that the play was not to be performed anywhere in the city on the grounds that it was “blasphemous and indecent.” He added that anyone attempting to do so would be arrested.

The Unity Players brought together the American Civil Liberties Union, community organizations, and students and faculty from Yale, among others, and formed the New Haven Anti-Censoring Committee. They held rallies and meetings demanding that the city allow the play to be staged but Smith did not budge. Then the Bridgeport Sunday Herald got involved.

Founded in 1805 and located at 200 Lafayette Boulevard, the Herald’s motto was “No Fear, No Favor – The People’s Paper.” The paper first reported on the controversy in New Haven on the front page of its April 14^th edition. In that same issue, it ran a glowing review across three pages of the New York production of Waiting for Lefty by Leonardo Da Bence. In the April 21^st edition, in response to the continuing ban in New Haven, the Herald’s editors printed the play in its entirety. Also included was a lengthy introduction that included criticisms of Chief Smith and that concluded that the Herald’s intention was to give “its readers an opportunity to judge for themselves.”

Though based in Bridgeport, the Herald had influence well beyond the city. It published editions and special sections for areas throughout the state including a New Haven edition that was available on newsstands in that city. (5) Among its criticisms of New Haven officials, the Herald noted that the city had granted space to an avowedly fascist organization for a meeting at a public school simultaneous to the banning of Waiting for Lefty.

In its edition of May 5th, the Herald reported the results of a poll of readers in which it stated that respondents in favor of the staging of Waiting for Lefty in New Haven outnumbered those who supported the ban by 10 to 1. The Herald regularly featured a Letters to the Editor section that often extended over several pages and one letter from Allen Touometoftosky began as follows: “Long live the militant, truthful Bridgeport HERALD! Long live ‘Waiting for Lefty!’” 

With the groundswell of protest growing, Chief Smith and the City of New Haven finally relented. The Unity Players were allowed to reserve the Little Theatre on Lincoln Street several blocks from Yale and performances of Waiting for Lefty began there on the evening of May 9^th. The play was received much as it was around the country by enthusiastic full houses, without incident or further police interference. (6)

While Waiting for Lefty has never been revived on Broadway, it remains popular in local theaters and union halls. It has played many times in Connecticut over the last 72 years including a production by The Connecticut Repertory Theater that ran earlier this year in Storrs. When the play was most recently done in New Haven in 2012 by the New Haven Theater Company, some newspaper commentary recalled the controversy of 1935. (7)   

The Bridgeport Herald, meanwhile, published until 1974. It is remembered with a degree of fondness by older Bridgeporters and was the subject as recently as 2015 of a panel at the Fairfield Museum and History Center. (8) It should also be remembered for the important role it played in a free speech fight 82 years ago.

                                                                  Thanks to Danielle Reay of Yale University for research assistance

1.Clifford Odets (1906-63) was best-known for his plays Awake and Sing (1935) and Golden Boy (1937), in addition to Waiting for Lefty. He also wrote a number of Hollywood screenplays, most notably None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). The lead character in the Coen brothers’ 1991 movie Barton Fink was inspired in part by Odets.

2. Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940 (1990) by Wendy Smith is the best account of the story of the Group Theatre. The Group also had deep Connecticut ties; see, for example, my article The Hills of Connecticut: Where Theatre and Life Became One posted, among other places at http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/01/the-hills-of-connecticut-where-theatre-and-life-became-one/

3.Among the Group’s members were actors Phoebe Brand (1907-2004) and Morris Carnovsky (1897-1992), who married and lived for many years in Easton. Though neither appeared in Waiting for Lefty, both had distinguished theater and film careers interrupted by many years of being blacklisted because of their political affiliations. Carnovsky in particular was a long-time fixture on Broadway and at the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.  

4.The John Reed Clubs were named after the American journalist and revolutionary John Reed (1887-1920) best known for his eyewitness account from Russia in 1917 Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed is the subject of the 1981 movie Reds.

5.Because of the involvement of the Bridgeport-based Herald in advocating for the showing of Waiting for Lefty, some accounts mistakenly refer to the controversy as having occurred in Bridgeport rather than New Haven.

6.Also featured during Waiting for Lefty’s run at the Little Theatre were modern dance performances by Miriam Blecher (1912-79) and Jane Dudley (1912-2001). Dudley in particular was a trailblazer of modern dance who featured themes of social protest in her work. She was for many years a leading force in the New Dance Group and a teacher at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

7.See, for example: http://scribblers.us/nhtj/?p=2675

8. http://patch.com/connecticut/westport/museum-after-dark-remembering-bridgeport-herald-0

The controversy surrounding Waiting for Lefty is covered in a number of books including Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (2009) by John Houchin; Banned Plays: Censorship Histories of 125 Stage Dramas (2004) by Dawn B. Sova; and Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (2002) edited by Derek Jones.

Bridgeport native Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author whose novel In Motion was recently published by Sunshine Publishing (www.sunshinepublishing.org). He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.

V.Krishna Ananth (Inventing Traditions and Orchestrating ‘Protests’)

 

                The mobilisation in the streets now witnessed in Chennai and elsewhere in Tamil Nadu demanding that the Supreme Court’s interim order against conduct of jallikattu is anything but ‘protest’. The ‘crowds’ are orchestrated by the ‘leaders’ (some of them pulling strings from behind the scenes) is happening when the agrarian crisis is claiming lives across the state. That the regime in Tamil Nadu is behind this orchestration is something that needs very little evidence. And in the event, the record of the state administration in dealing with protest demonstrations against its indifference to the farm crisis, where protesters are detained in a routine fashion while letting disruptions in arterial roads in the state capital is proof that the demonstrations are not spontaneous in any sense.

                One is reminded of the manner in which elected representatives and public servants let people immolate themselves after the then Chief Minister, late J.Jayalalithaa, was sent to jail some months ago. This is also no different from the pogroms that were allowed by the police in Delhi and other towns in October-November 1984 or across Gujarat in February-March 2002. The point is that such vulgar display of arrogance and murderous streak by mobs are inimical to democracy and history is replete with experience where the rulers plan and orchestrate such expressions where it suits them.

                The street shows across Tamil Nadu now are also inimical to democracy for another reason; that this is done in defence of tradition and culture. The business of jallikattu, which is known to have its sponsors from among the thevar community (to which the Chief Minister O.Panneerselvam and the ruling AIADMK general secretary V.K.Sasikala belong to), is not too different from the vulgar games that were played in the amphitheater in ancient Rome. It used to be where well-bred slaves were thrown into the arena to fight with each other and the victor was ordered by the nobles to kill the one whom he overpowered in the fight; legend has it that Spartacus was not killed by his fellow slave who was then killed by the nobles in the arena. The episode is symbolic of the earliest of the revolts against slavery and Spartacus the earliest rebel.

                The Roman ‘tradition’ where slaves were denied of human rights is indeed what makes historians challenge the notion that Rome was a Republic. The French Revolution of 1789 and its call for liberty, equality and fraternity, that led the path to modernity was not condemned by sensible men and women of having been against tradition. Indeed, it made the world a better place where people challenged such brutalities peddled in the name of tradition as inhuman and barbaric. This indeed is what ought to be done with jallikattu as well. Instead, those who owe their allegiance to the Constitution (particularly the leaders of the various political parties, both elected and the losers in the various elections) are now engaged in inventing traditions rather than interrogating them.

                Condoning such acts amounts to the same as such perversion as celebrating sati (that barbarous practice of throwing the widow into the funeral pyre of her dead husband) or infant marriage or  untouchability in the name of tradition.

                Meanwhile, the point at issue here is not merely about animal rights, which for some reason is that being articulated in the discourse now. Jallikattu involves the rights of human beings, sometimes well-bred by the elite in our times to fight and tame the bulls and in that sense as it was done by the nobles in the Roman amphitheaters. Ernest Hemmingway brings this out in his passionate narrative of the bull fight ‘tradition’ in Spain in his ‘Death in the Afternoon’ where matadors and bulls are bred to die and make others happy! It is time that the vulgarity in the name of protest in Chennai and elsewhere is brought to an end and the Constitutional scheme is preserved. And if the State Government drags its feet here, Article 356 of the Constitution is indeed meant to be invoked in such occasions and contexts.

(EOM)