Exchange Exchange
Of Thee I Singh San Francisco I would like to point out some elementary factual errors in Martha Nussbaum’s review of Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of Mahatma Gandhi, “Gandhi and South Africa” [Oct. 31]. In it she compares India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to Gandhi. Nussbaum thinks Singh’s “dignified behavior” must “make Americans wonder how he ever could have won an election.” However, Singh is a member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of Parliament, similar to the British House of Lords), where people are nominated, not elected. In fact, the only time he contested for the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament), he was unable to win the seat. Nussbaum also claims that Singh, along with Sonia Gandhi, “has refocused political energy on the plight of the poorest, devising the Rural Employment Guarantee and the new Right to Food program.” This is the same Singh who is the architect of India’s neoliberal reforms, which have, since the 1990s, devastated India’s countryside, resulting in massive agrarian distress. Public hospitals have never been in sorrier shape, while swanky private hospitals catering to foreigners and rich Indians are mushrooming. Nussbaum’s claim that Singh and Sonia Gandhi devised the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is also misleading. As Arundhati Roy points out in her excellent book Field Notes on Democracy: “Ironically the NREGA only made it through parliament because of pressure brought to bear on the UPA [United Progressive Alliance] government by the Left Front, and it must be said, by Sonia Gandhi. It was passed despite tremendous resistance from the mandarins of the free market within the Congress Party.” Although NREGA is considered a revolutionary act, it is simply crumbs the state throws to the masses, who are up in arms all over India, for all the devastation the act has caused. SANJEEV MAHAJAN Nussbaum Replies Chicago I am grateful for Sanjeev Mahajan’s views about the Congress Party, which of course are shared by many of its opponents. At the time of the 2008 election, Manmohan Singh had been named as the person who would be prime minister should Congress win a majority, and he campaigned with that understanding (and he was sitting prime minister). So voters knew that a vote for Congress was a vote for him to continue in that office. They voted; the party won; he continued as prime minister. That, to me, is an obvious sense of winning an election. As for the NREGA: Mahajan does not dispute that it is a laudable achievement; he only claims that it was supported by the left parties as well as Congress. However, the record shows that India’s poor are ill advised, at least today, to rely on the left parties. In West Bengal, the CPI-M (the leading left party) went to defeat this year after years of failure to deliver a reasonable level of health, education or employment; and that party’s compromises with corporate investors, resisted by local peasants, provoked ugly assaults by the CPI-M’s cadres, who shot unarmed peasants in the back (see my “Violence on the Left: Nandigram and the Communists of West Bengal,” Dissent, Spring 2008). I do not say this to praise the new (post-CPI-M) Bengal government, which surely has little to commend it. My point is that the left has not fulfilled its promises to the poor, while Congress, on the national level, has actually crafted and passed a major program, both admirable and practical. This program, as I said, was crafted by Jean Drèze, in collaboration with Sonia Gandhi. I admire Arundhati Roy’s skill as a writer and her moral intensity; but her nonfiction writings are highly polemical and should not be one’s only source of information for such matters. MARTHA NUSSBAUM We apologize for clipping the T off letter-writer James M. Voigt’s name [“Letters,” Nov. 28].
Nov 21, 2011 / Our Readers and Martha C. Nussbaum
How the Movies Saved My Life How the Movies Saved My Life
Seeing the world in black and white (with subtitles).
Nov 17, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Tom Engelhardt
Newt’s Surge Newt’s Surge
The pundits all can confidently speak Of Gingrich as the flavor of the week. The people who want anyone but Mitt Now say, in desperation, Newt is it. Yes, Newt’s astute—a crafty wheeler-dealer. His baggage, though, would fill an eighteen-wheeler— Affairs and ethics problems and, to boot, His mouth is something often off he’ll shoot. And if he’s scratched because he lacks decorum? What happens then? Get ready, Rick Santorum.
Nov 17, 2011 / Column / Calvin Trillin
Hemispheric Disturbances: On Michael Gazzaniga Hemispheric Disturbances: On Michael Gazzaniga
If our brains act according to the causal laws governing all matter, in what sense can we be said to be free?
Nov 16, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Cathy Gere
Blue Ridge: Streams Are Roaring Blue Ridge: Streams Are Roaring
Morning in the shade of a persimmon tree. Later, downstream below a hornbeam. A shy man hollers from across the valley. Every other rhododendron flower holds a tiny bee, just the way each macaroni shell in pasta e fagioli eventually holds a bean. A little Italian goes well up here. Latin, too&emdash;castanea, ruficapilla, caroliniana: Paroles: Dogwood calls the catbirds. Black cherry calls the blue.
Nov 16, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Merrill Gilfillan
Shelf Life Shelf Life
José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia, Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York.
Nov 16, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Akiva Gottlieb
Restless in Oslo: On Ida Ekblad and Edvard Munch Restless in Oslo: On Ida Ekblad and Edvard Munch
An obscure dissatisfaction, a sense that no formal solution works for long, is shared by the art of Ida Ekblad and Edvard Munch.
Nov 16, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky
Starting out in Seattle: On Jonathan Raban Starting out in Seattle: On Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Raban has made a persona out of the self that feels nowhere at home.
Nov 16, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick
The Pundits Contemplate Herman Cain The Pundits Contemplate Herman Cain
I We’ve spent a month of this campaign In trying daily to explain The steady rise of Herman Cain. Through willingness to risk a strain In every muscle of the brain, We’ve laid out all we think germane To help the public ascertain Why Cain consistently can gain (Despite, some charge, a moral stain) Support that doesn’t seem to wane, No matter how we all complain That thinking voters might ordain For Cain a four-year White House reign Is truly—to be blunt—insane. II So far, our work has been in vain.
Nov 10, 2011 / Column / Calvin Trillin
Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile
Returning to Chile decades after Allende’s death, I was no longer a soldier of the revolution. What changed?
Nov 9, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Ariel Dorfman