Caught Between McCarthyism And Maoism

Alright,everybody, who can write or speak have already gone on record with their respective opinions on the Naxalite threat. I now know what Cassandra must be feeling like when the Greeks,emerged from within the wooden horse (if it doesn't make sense to you why i feel so,go through my previous posts or just forget it, it has no bearing on what follows :p ) but i will still want to share my thoughts through this post.

Naxalites did not air-drop last December,they have been operating since more than two decades in various parts of India. In fact, the word, operating, would be an understatement! For years, they have actually been ruling large swathes of territories which comprise nearly a third of the size of sovereign India's territories! Apparently,neither successive governments, nor was the Indian civil society much concerned about it. The region where the writ ran was considered far remote and in a manner, of not much consequence to the national politics. Columnist Santosh Desai explains this aspect of the problem in a much better way.

Anyway, the current situation is far too complex to be put in simplistic terms. True, there is a fissure between tribal,dalits and poor belonging to rural India and the relatively well off middle class and the elite. In fact,if the fissure continues to widen at this rate, a major disaster would be in store for us. However, it would be foolish to view this fissure as a battle-line, when one wages a war against oneself it is called suicide! But the distinction between an ordinary poor,exploited Indians and a Maoist militant shouldn't be blurred,the latter deserves to be treated as an enemy of the state ought to be.

Are the two really as entwined ? Most of the grievances of the tribal are related to acquisition of land by the government, yet it seems strange that these people would extend ideological support to a group that aims at a totalitarian state and complete state ownership of the resources. Indeed, India is too heterogeneous, too pluralistic, parliamentary democracy is best suited to it ,even the remotest groups are politically conscious enough to not allow a totalitarian regime to emerge. If at all they are found to be aligned with the Naxalites, it is mainly because the latter are seen as the only anti-establishment rallying point. The establishment on its part has shown little hesitation in tagging sundry groups as Far-Left militants. This tends to make things easy for the police in particular, arresting deemed Naxalite sympathizers and even exterminating them helps them satisfy their political masters. In some ways it is reminiscent of Sen McCarthy's policies but involving far more lives.   This over-simplification is actually far more dangerous than it may seem if we were to not ignore the fact that the situation is as complex.

These hitherto wastelands which the mainstream cared little  about have suddenly become much sought after owing to their richness in natural resources. Industrialization and mining have turned these regions into gold-mines and everyone out there wants a share of the pie. If the grapevine is to be believed, everyone from the state ministers to the worker on the ground is out to make quick bucks riding on the development wave. For instance,if a government official can make a fortune by extending favors to his/her corporate friends operating in the area, a rival contractor orchestrating a disruptive attack on site cannot be ruled out. There are plenty of similar examples where a particular attack could be personal in nature but the administration as well as the media labeling it as a Naxalite attack would only encourage similar attacks in future. Take for instance the recent detention of the Rajdhani Express in West Bengal. The government may not have done it but the media had absolutely no qualms labeling it as a terrorist attack. What now transpires is that the train was stopped by locals belonging to an organization called PCAPA (People's Committee Against Police Atrocities) whichis supported by the Maoists. A mass of three hundred people stop a train and detained the driver on knife-point, demanding the release of their leader. Is that the definition of terrorism ? This organization like many others doesn't adhere to Maoism or Communism in general. This group may have very deep grievances, it may even be hostile to the current government but from what the media says (especially print media) it cannot be said to be waging war against the Indian State.

What further compound the problem are the political games played by almost all political parties at all levels.Whether it is the ruling party, opposition or fringe parties, all of them keep stroking the fire to not only consolidate votebanks but to rake in moolah to buy votes with. Just take a look at the controversy unfolding in Karnataka now. According to the media again (ToI) ,Bellary-based mining lobby (Reddy brothers) has grown so wealthy that it now holds the Yedurappa government on ransom. One can just imagine what amount of money iron-ore and other minerals trade should be churning out to empower a few businessmen to blackmail the Karnataka government and disregard the national leadership of the BJP. The local leaders on their part have their own agendas, their share of the pie. Other players would include small-time entrepreneurs, brokers, officials, bureaucrats and of course gangsters, everyone has a role in this epic chessboard but this segment in particular sets things in motion. As for the Maoists, some of the basic tenets of the ideology, protracted war and perpetual revolution can exist only in a state of conflict,the current inequality is necessary for their existence. And while i am at it, why should i ignore the intellectuals who leave no stones unturned to declare the Indian establishment as elitist, tyrannical and apathetic towards the underprivileged people but they hardly make effort to change things. Of course whining now would help boost sale of their new books and may be, get honorary distinctions and certificates from other countries and agencies.

 Caught between radical Leftist militants, overzealous cops and paramilitary forces, greedy corporates, young entrepreneurs, unscrupulous officials,politicians and local leaders, it is the tribals,dalits and the poor in general from these regions who now are in a very unenviable situation. As the Maoist writ run supreme in these regions they cannot but co-operate with the Naxalites. The administration has never bothered to either provide basic facilities (people still die of starvation in tribal regions of Orissa ) that every Indian is entitled to, nor has it attempted to take back the control of the areas from the Naxalites.

Now imagine, the guns falling silent, peace returning to the region and the media and the civil society having a very clear view of what is going on in these remote areas! One doesn't have to be exceptionally intelligent to guess who loses the maximum in such a scenario ;) Of course, the tribal, indigenous people suffer in either case.

Update: (16th Nov)

Feel like Cassandra yet again :P


Details of the illegal mining and money-laundering scam with ex CM of Jharkhand as the focal point vindicates several contentions mentioned above. To begin with, the scam involves a whopping amount of more than Rs.4000 crores! That is a huge amount of money, no matter which corner of the world you are in, for a poor state like Jharkhand,this simply unimaginable wealth. No wonder then Koda was one of those rare independent representatives who were appointed as the Chief Minister of a state.One can imagine the sort of money that illegal mining must generate and the socio-political fallout resulting from it.

Another key contention that stands vindicated is the involvement of a number of players from diverse backgrounds and including the governmental officals, corporate and the Maoists among others. The ToI has actually provided the profit-sharing ratio based on the statements of Koda aide. According to this break-up the Maoists got 20%-30% per truck,the politicians got 10% lakhs per acre, the businessmen had a share of about 50% while the bureaucrats got paid 10%-15% of the share. The report further implicates several important but unnamed politicians and businessmen and i belive it when it hints that this is only the tip of the iceberg.


Reference
McCarthyism :  politically motivated practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. It is derived from the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy who led the crack-down against Communists, communist sympathizers and anyone who was deemed to have a soft corner for Communism 


Interesting Links

• John Robb's post on how Bandh is used as a 4G guerrilla warfare tactic to cause system disruption
• The Bandh by Shlok vaidya
  

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Will Twitter Go Down With The Waves

Twitter has been down for more than 2 hours,the last tweets on my time-line reflect panic as one would expect from the passengers of a ship as it goes down with the waves! Well, i haven't got a Google Wave account yet, the analogy is partly coincidental :p

Was i surprised? Not at all! This is not the first time that the micro-blogging site has gone down, since past few months,outages have become a regular affair and most likely will continue for a while. No! I don't mean to say that the guys at Twitter are not smart enough, indeed, it would be foolish to say that for guys who came up with such a brilliant concept such as Twitter. The only speculation that can be made is the probability that the issue lies deeper than it seems to us.

Outages are not specific to Twitter alone, most popular services including Google, Gmail and Facebook have had their blues too. It is an irony of fate that the very participatory nature of the Social Web is also the factor that takes it down often. For instance, the Internet traffic generated by Michael Jackson's death was much more than the servers were prepared for; it seems that most of the people in the world decided to use the Web to find more information about MJ, unprecedented numbers of requests coming in was interpreted as a DDoS attack by Google which then went into emergency mode. However, other Social Web sites such as Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace and Twitter of course are far more open, consequently they could not balance the load and crashed.

So couldn't they build the service keeping load balancing in mind? This question is complex too, the Web is evolving at such a rapid pace that it is no longer possible to follow the traditional model where even the tiniest detail has gone through analysis and validation before the development has actually begun. Most of the popular service providers of the day are widely used for features some of which had not even been foreseen when the service was built for the first time. Adding newer features to existing applications is a continuous process that is conceived of and implemented in response to changing paradigms. Quick adaptation and innovation-on-demand is what drove their growth and has enabled them to change the way we use the Internet now.

Keeping the above scenario in mind, it is easier to understand why Web 2.0 websites often face scalability issues. Most of them had started up targeting a small segment of users, with plans to upscale operations on a future date. But as the service becomes popular and the user base increases exponentially, 
 too many requests lead to bottlenecks that make the system defunct for a period of time. There are technical reasons of course, I have come across quite a large number of papers blaming Ruby on Rails, the framework on which Twitter was built. This aspect cannot be refuted absolutely when one considers the fact that this framework has not been proven on large-scale application development.  Facebook has addressed this issue by migrating the background code, it also has a limit on the number of friends a user can add. But there has to be something more than the weakness of the development framework.

One of the reasons that i love Twitter for is the fact that there is no restrictions apart from the 140 characters per tweet limit and the model itself. Unlike IMs or Social Networks, Twitter delivers messages from multiple users to multiple users. This makes every user a center of information propagation or many-to-many messaging system yet the server remains centralized, so as the number of users increase the processes increase exponentially since every user follows an unspecified number of users and is in turn followed by other users. i am not aware of the business logic or algorithm used by it but can understand that it must be efficient enough to handle all those transaction most of the time. However, the frequent outages suggest that something at the fundamental layer needs a re-look at.

As i said in the beginning i do not have a Google Wave account yet but from what i have read and seen in the Developer Conference preview video, the architecture is more inclined towards being a distributed one rather than being centralized. i wonder if the folks at Twitter have looked in that direction, if the server is unable to handle the load now, waves of users are just starting to migrate to Twitter. Read: Has Cattlegate Opened The Floodgate?

Also read : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/

P.S.: Inviting my friend netgenre to write a guest article on data marshaling in the above context

Update
 Recently i came across (through Twitter, of course) a excellent article at High Scalability which offers to explain the different factors responsible for the scalability issue of most social media sites. i found the part on Pull-on-Demand vs Push-on-Demand approaches quite interesting. In the first approach, which  is followed by Facebook ( according to the same article), the service queries all your friends,fetches their updates and changes and provides them to you at one place. So if you have 1000 friends, it makes 1000 queries to show your friends update. So with every new user or even connection the number of queries to execute rises exponentially.
 In contrast, Push-on-Demand approach deals with updates in a different manner. Rather than waiting for queries,.it pushes the data to friends right when it is changed! The user no longer needs to pull data, since it is already there when s/he logs in. Of course this model is not without drawbacks but that is beyond the current scope.
But more importantly, which model does Twitter use ? 
i am not sure, but most likely it uses a hybrid of both model...Just a guess right now ;)

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The N00B's Guide To Twitterverse

Picking up the thread from the last post, I will try to demystify the basics of Twitter for the benefit of the complete N00B. Here is how twitter works and the meanings of the terms that baffle you the first time you start using it.

Twitter Jargon

Tweet - The only question that drives Twitter is "What are you doing?" and a Tweet is a response to that question. If you are into social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut or even a Skype or GTalk user, you must already know what the status message means. But unlike the other services, the status message on Twitter i.e. the Tweet is not a passive message but the medium of communication or the counter-part of the IM you send to your chat buddy. However, a Tweet is generally visible universally unless, of course you have blocked a person. A Tweet can be of 140 character length only, which could be one of the reasons why Tweets travel faster than anything else i know of.


Handle - Username, this is important as it is likely to become your identity on Twitter, for example my Twitter handle is danishctc. You can find my profile on twitter by simply typing http://twitter.com/danishctc in the location bar or your browser. You can also reply me or mention it by simply prefixing my handle with the @ (at) symbol : @danishctc

DP - Stands for display picture or avatar. It is highly recommended that you put up your own picture as DP.


RT: Retweet is nothing but the same tweet being posted again by another user. There could be many reasons for doing this but the most common ones are- the person liked the particular tweet and would like to share it with her/his followers  and the original Tweet is kept to make sure that the response is seen in the context. To retweet, you can copy the whole tweet along with the original tweeterer's handle (prefix the @ (at) symbol to the handle ) and type RT right at the beginning. (Most clients make this easy, explained here just to make sure)

Screenshot of my convo with de3p , pushkarbhatt
Replies/Mentions: these are tweets by other users who have either replied,addressed or mentioned your handle. A handle prefixed by @(at) symbol is treated by Twitter as a tweet meant for that particular person and shows up on his timeline; for example- "danishctc: @anandmisra hi"

DM: Direct message, visible only to the recipient. Normally, all clients have a functionality to let you send direct messages to your friends but you can send dm by simply typing the character D before the handle.
Example:
"danishctc: D anandmisra this a dm"

Friends - Twitter is people-driven, if you want to harness its power then you have to follow people whose updates you would want see. You could start following people in the suggested list that Twitter displays when you sign up or celebrities you already know ( for example Shashi Tharoor, Celina Jaitly, Gul Panag) but it is important that you find other like-minded users to make your tweeting productive. As with so many services, Twitter can also import your contact list from other accounts and suggest your pre-existing contacts that are already on Twitter. To follow them you can go to their profile page and click on the link "Follow" (Note:  Following a large number of people in a very short time is seen suspiciously by Twitter since spam bots seem to follow a similar pattern, trying interacting as much as possible )

Followers - These are people who are following your updates. They are important from your point of view since they are your main audience as well as customer-base.

Favorites- If you find a particular tweet interesting and dont want to lose it in the melee, you can add it to your favorites. To add a Tweet to favorites, click on the star icon, the Tweet can now be found in the  favorite section of your Twitter profile.


 One of the major advantages of Twitter is the fact that it is not limited to a single client, single domain or even single device. I prefer tweeting from mobile rather than the desktop.

The original interface for interaction was Twitter.com and continues to be so since that is where you manage your account and set preferences. This is also the site you should be using if you are a new user.However, this interface lacks certain features for more advanced users but this is aptly compensated by numerous third-party clients.

Clients- There are plenty of clients avaible, download the one which meets your expection. On desktop/laptop, i find Tweetdeck the best, followed by Twhirl and Seesmic. Firefox add-on, Twitter Fox is another client that i find myself using a lot. On mobile (i use Nokia N95 8GB), Gravity comes across as the client with best features but i have also used Fring and Twibble for tweeting.
There also some very cool web-based clients that you should check out: http://dabr.co.uk and http://slandr.com 

Update - Thanks to Softykid for reminding me about Snaptu, a mobile client that i had heard a lot about yet  never got to installing it. But now that i have done it, it is strongly recommended that you try it out :)

P.S.: Thats it for now, hope someone finds it useful coz i didn't get much pleasure compiling it! not my kinda thing ;)

The Twitter Song 

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Has Cattlegate Opened The Floodgate ?

Holy Cow! Shashi Tharoor's single tweet has taken Twitter to every nook and corner of India. Now, even the most obstinate bull squatting in the middle of the vegetable market wants to know what Twitter is all about. Of course the cows let loose by their owners to graze in Indian streets are equally curious even if they are not mooing it. Indeed, a lot of people are signing up on Twitter, a vast number intend to do it in near future. But I am a bit skeptical, if most of the people have an understanding on what Twitter is and how it should be used.

I have posted some of my own experiences here

There some facts and opinions that I should mention before proceeding further. I think all Internet users who are not on Twitter can be broadly categorized into 3 categories. The first category includes people who use the Web minimally, their professional as well as personal agenda doesn't allow them to explore the social aspect of Web. As such the whole social media debate is irrelevant to them, at times they are indistinguishable from machines .

Then there are people who think Twitter is just another way of wasting one's time that could be utilized for creating artificial intelligence or achieve major breakthrough in stem cell research. However, you won't find them doing either, instead, you can find them participating in Orkut. Socialization, interaction, collaboration to them means going through photo-albums of this cute chick they came across in the friend list of another friend's friend. The main activity would include sending persistent add requests, leaving flashy images,ASCII art or corny scraps in Hinglish or broken English or do stuff that require little or no intellect. People belonging to this category, who think that the phenomenal growth of twitter userbase, eminent personalities and biggest organizations and almost every website extending tweeting functionality, is because of a social media hype and
who are convinced that Twitter is a waste of time should strictly continue with Orkut, Twitter would be an incompatible medium since the latter requires intellect!

However, there is the third category of users who do not doubt the utility of Twitter but are still not using it because they don't fully understand it or it has not worked for them. Indeed,there is not a single social website that one can join up and start enjoying or get results from day one. How effective social networking sites turn out depends on how well the user has created her network. This is especially true with Twitter since there are no photo albums of users, no social games or "which movie character you are" quizzes (well, there are mechanisms to share images, files etc but they are not integral part of the architecture.) . In other words, your experience on Twitter depends totally upon how you interact with other users (Tweeps). If used properly, it opens a completely new world of options, from real-time news to reaching out to targeting customers/audience and getting the most relevant answer to your questions. The potential is immense! In my follow-up post, I will try to compose a guide for beginners.

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Engaging The Red Dragon

This post is a continuation of a Twitter conversation  (not more than 2 to 3 tweets) i had with two of India's hottest and intelligent females, @gulpanag and @CelinaJaitly ,on the string of incursions into Indian territory by the Chinese forces.

Every time China flexes its muscle,we Indians go on an overdrive speculating everything from minor skirmishes to nuclear exchange. Strange as it may sound, this behaviour is quite expected. After all, India has never had a coherent China policy,starting from Nehru himself. However, as has been opined by most intellectuals, it is imperative that we come out of the shadow of  the 1962 aggression, but that does not mean that we close our eyes to the reality. To find a reasonable solution, we need to identify the problem first, something that is not very actively done in case of Sino-Indian relations. 

The genesis of India-China rivalry lies in a very fundamental law of physics which says that two masses cannot occupy the same space! As two biggest powers in the region it is but natural that they have vested interest in the neighborhood. It is not a question of ethics or morality but one of political compulsions.This stems more from the instinct of self-preservation rather than aggression, after all, the balance of power in the region is closely related to how well they have maintained their spheres of influence. Any two big powers would end up in similar circumstance but in the case of China and India, even if their deemed spheres of influence are too common to trigger conflict of interest, their distinct political ideologies further compound the equation.

This is very different from India- Pakistan rivalry, which is based far more sentiments than on pragmatism. This is one of the reason why the Chinese threat is almost always underplayed,it is very unlikely to whip up passion at the grassroots level.

These factors together make Sino-Indian conflict particularly complex, but how does one engage the Red Dragon?
 

Among the lessons learnt in last 50 years,an important one is that while China forced India to pull out of Pakistan in 1965 ( Apparently, Indian forces marching towards Lahore were called off after China mobilized troops on the border and asked India to stop the war on Pakistan ¹ ) , it was much restrained in 1971 war, which came shortly after Porkharan-I. It is apparent that like all good communist dictatorships, the Peoples Republic of China understands the language of force. By force i mean deterrence and not applied force, the latter is unthinkable in present times.

But there are sufficient indications to believe that the Communist regime plays the game by the rule (the reference here is to games theory ) But the only game that China has really mastered, is the zero-sum game, as is evident from not only the 62 war but also from the Korean war and the Sino-Soviet conflict. It is also a game that India has not been a very good player of. Quite likely China's recent transgressions are its way of expressing displeasure at India's decision to allow Dalai Lama visit Arunachal Pradesh but then lack of appropriate response from India would be construed as weakness by any rational player. Both the states are mature enough to realize that armed conflict or even an escalation of rhetoric would be highly detrimental to the pace of development going on in their respective countries. But knowing  China, these incidences are likely to continue more vigorously if India continues  if India does not respond appropriately.       

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