Articles by Rahul

On Education Guarantee Scheme in Madhya Pradesh Rahul GOPALAKRISHNAN and Sharma (G and S) have made tall claims in favour of the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) being run by the government of Madhya Pradesh (GOMP) (EPW, September 26, 1998). They assert that this scheme has gone a long way towards universalising primary education in tribal areas at a very low cost without compromising on quality, while at the same time empowering local communities to demand and get education for their children. The reality, however, is considerably more dismal and so the record needs to be set straight so as to ensure that the poor tribals of Madhya Pradesh (MP) are not short-changed by a typically publicity hungry administration.

As modern development threatens to displace tribal populations from their last fastness in the hills and forests, they have begun all over the world to fight for survival using modern means and methods. This synthesis of the traditional and the modern holds promise of survival not only for them but for humanity as a whole. The historical experience of the bhil tribals of Alirajpur in Madhya Pradesh and their organised resurgence in recent times may have pointers for the evaluation of a modern theory and practice of ecological ethics.

Congress politicians during British rule. Not being a liberal democrat, I do not attach much importance to the charade of representative politics that the British enacted in the central provinces and refuse to characterise the political climate there as having been more progressive than in the princely states. The very fact that the princes and the Congress politicians got together after independence to pursue patently anti-people policies by putting to use the experience of repressive governance gained under British tutelage proves that there was not much of a difference between them. CJ quotes me partially where I talk about upper class Congress politicians from Chhattisgarh being traditionally dominant in state politics as a consequence of their experience from British times, while ignoring the lengthy discussion that follows about their subsequent marginalisation to being reduced to being almost nonentities today. The 1996 Lok Sabha elections have as never before brought out the resurgence that has been taking place among the oppressed classes in Madhya Pradesh over the past decade and the progressive decline of the degenerate princes and sundry other upper classes. My analysis of the voting behaviour across the last few elections since 1984 according to my "map" of Madhya Pradesh in my later article clearly brings out this development. In the circumstances I fail to understand why CJ wants to persist with the traditional division of Madhya Pradesh which reflects to obsolete reality of a bygone reactionary era instead of creating a new one in tune with the aspirations of the masses many of whom would be only too happy to sec it breaking up into smaller states.

Portents of the 1996 Election Results from Madhya Pradesh Rahul The contradictions that arise in a poor country like India with its vast diversity due to uneven dependent capitalist development are difficult to reconcile within a bourgeois parliamentary set-up and this led to two parallel developments from the late 1960s onwards. On the one hand, more and more people have chosen extra-parliamentary violent and non-violent channels of political activity and on the other there has been a trend towards coalition politics within the parliamentary system itself With time these features have become more and more prominent with both extra- parliamentary political activity and coalition politics on the rise.

In Search of Our Ecological Roots The burgeoning struggles around natural resources have generated a groundswell of debate in political and academic circles which has established the validity of social science research from an ecological angle. The need today is to evolve a framework and eventually establish the guiding principles of an ecological historiography and praxis.