Dr. Binayak Sen’s New Year Message from Jail

My warmest greetings to all friends in the MFC, and best wishes for 2009.

As an Indian child of parents from the territory that is now Bangladesh, displacement was a lived reality for me  from my childhood, as it was  for millions of other children of my generation. But then, in so many ways, the history of the last 500 years (1492 is a useful reference date), is the history of successive waves of displacement- either as displacement from as in the case of the native Americans, or displacement to, as in the case of slave labour from Africa or India.  A particularly gruesome episode is being played out before our eyes in Palestine. The NBA brought the issue of displacement into the mainstream of Indian public discourse. In Chhattisgarh, seasonal migration provides an example of large scale displacement, and a particularly iconic experience was watching a young migrant mother lying on the floor of a train while her  baby slowly dehydrated  from gastroenteritis. The Salwa Judum in Bastar has displaced huge numbers of people at gunpoint, and over 100,000 people have been pushed over the border into Andhra Pradesh.

In China today, 100 million people are in the process of being displaced by the Three gorges dam and other projects. As usual, in India, we go one better. The redoubtable Prof Swaminathan has chaired a committee that has concluded that Indian agriculture can accommodate at most a third of its population in agriculture, as opposed to half as at present.. The difference is a small matter of 200 million people.

Displacement is about the sequestration of privileged access to resources and need not always involve a geographical reference. Thus, the chronic nutritional deprivation from which half our children and a third of our adults suffer can be regarded as a special form of displacement. What displacement invariably does entail is the ruthless cutting  short of the micro evolutionary process involved in any instance of  eco adaptation, involving chemical or physical factors as in Bhopal, or the social environment as in south Bastar.

That’s enough. Too bad I can’t take part. All the best for your deliberations. Choose your politics before your politics chooses you.

Paul Krugman on Sanjay Gupta

Those who saw America’s far right collectively gasp and panic when Michael Moore unleashed “Sicko” on the profiteering Health Management Organisations, corporate hospitals and pharmaceutical companies will no doubt remember CNN’s attempt to rubbish the documentary. Leading that charge on behalf of the network was Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Here is economist Paul Krugman, a keen analyst of America’s health crisis, on the appointment of Sanjay Gupta as the US Surgeon-General. Krugman makes clear that he deplores the way Gupta went about that particular assignment.

Meanwhile, those who have not watched “Sicko” should do so at the earliest. Please arrange screenings for family and friends. It will serve as a kind of weather warning for Indians who are rushing into a health insurance storm, which is bound to be far worse than what has struck America.