THE ZOMI AND THEIR COUNTRY
The Zomi Tribes : Southern Zomi
The Southern Zomi includes the Asho, the people of Kanpetlet, Patletwa and Matupi areas such as Chinbok, Chinme, Chinbon, Khumi, Khami, Mro, and Matu. The Asho (or the plains’ Chin) are found to have been geographically concentrated in such locations as Thayetmo, Insein, Minbu, Prome, Aunglam, Akyab, Sandoway, Syrian and Cape of Morton in the plains of Burma. Among the Southern Zomi, the Khyang and Chaungtha in Paletwa district of the Chin State have old relationships with the Arakan, like that of the Old Kuki to Manipur and Tripura.
The Zomi Tribes : Central Zomi
The Central Zomi includes the Falams, the Hakas, the Thantlang, the Maras (Lakhers), the Lushei, the Hmars, the Zahaus, the Hualngou, the Khuanglis, the Tlasun, the Laizou, the Bawmzou, the Zoukhuas, the Tawrs, the Zoutung, the Ngentes, the Kneltes, the Fanais, etc. They are found to have been geographically concentrated in such locations as Northern Arakan District, the Pokokku Hills, the Central portion of Chin State (all in Burma), Mizoram, Tripura Hills and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The old Kuki groups of the anthropological and linguistic literatures like Bete (Biate), Halam, Chote (Purum), Hrangkhol, Ngente, Aimol, Kom, Anal, Chiru, Mayon, Monsang, Koireng, Tarau, etc. also belong to the Central Zomi tribes whereas the Vaiphei and the Gangte belong to the Northern group.
The Zomi Tribes : Northern Zomi
The Northern Zomi constitutes the Galte (Ralte), Gangte, Paite, Sihzang, Simte, Tedim, Vaiphei, Thadou, Zoute, etc. They are found to have been geographically concentrated in such locations as the Tonzang district, the Tedim district (both in Burma), the north-east of Mizoram, the Naga Hills, the Somra Tracts, the Hkamti district, the Kale-Kabaw valley and the North Cachar Hills and Karbi Anglong districts of Assam. The Northern Zomi’s socio-cultural system is basically complex but despite important structural distinctions, they have closer affinity to the Central Zomi, rather than to the Southern tribes.
In Manipur, as many as 21 tribes are listed as Scheduled tribes in the 1956 Tribe Reorganisation viz, Aimol, Anal, Chiru, Chothe, Gangte, Hmar, Koireng, Kom, Lamkang, Maring, Mizo, Monsang, Moyon, Paite, Purum, Ralte, Simte, Suihte (Sukte), Thadou, Vaiphei, Zo. Even at present, the Mate, Kharam, Chongthu, Tarao and the Enpai are applying for recognition as a tribe in Manipur. All these tribes, inspite of minor dialectical differences, belongs to the same linguistic family, sharing common customs, culture, folktales, folksongs, passing through similar historical process, are descendents of common ancestor, Zo and inhabiting contiguous areas.
It may be noted that the Anal, Lamkang, Maring, Monsang and Moyon tribes in Manipur are ethnologically and historically the Zo descendants, however politically they are inclined to calling themselves Naga due to weak centripetal political movement among the Zomi in the past.
The Zomi tribes inhabiting the Tripura state of India are the Molsom, Langrong, Chongrai, Bong, Kaipeng, Hrangkhawl, Ruankhum, Darlong, Lushei, Rangchan, Paite/Paitu, Namte, Mizel, Lantei, Laifang, Fun, Khephong, Khareng, Balte, Jantei, and Hajango.
In Bangladesh, about seven Zo tribes can be identified viz; the Bawmzo, Asho, Khami or Khumi, Kuki, Lushei, Mosho and Pankhu.
Almost all the tribes inhabiting the Chin State in Burma and Mizoram state in India belong to Zo racial groups.
Ethnologically, the above named tribes belong to Zomi group because their progenitor is Zo. The close ethnicity is proved by the peculiarity that though variations in dialects exist, the Zomi - unlike other tribes - can converse with one another in their respective dialects with 70% comprehension. Thus the chain of their relationship is circumscribed not only by geographical bounds, but more often by racial unity.
A more detailed study into Zomi languages was made in 1931 and 44 (forty four) separate dialects were recorded as belonging to Kuki-Chin (Zomi) group.
As per the memorandum submitted to the British Government on April 22, 1947 by the Mizo Union, 47 (forty seven) major Zomi tribes were included, viz Aimol, Anal, Bawng, Baite, Bawngzo, Chiru, Chawhte, Chawrai, Chongthu, Chongthu, Darlawng, Dawn, Fanai, Hmar, Hrangkhawl, Hnamte, Kaihpen, Khumi, Khiang, Khiangte, Khawlhring, Kawm, Lushei, Lakher, Langrong, Mualthum, Miria, Ngente, Paite, Pawi, Purum, Pangkhua, Pangte, Pante, Pawite, Ralte, Renthlei, Thadou, Tarau, Tikhup, Tloanglau, Tlau, Vangchhia, Vaiphei, Zoute, Zawngte and Gangte.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Archaeological Remains
Archaeological Remains
Archaeological evidences also have clearly pointed out the settlement of the Zomi in the plains of Burma. In 1971, S.B. Khamtinzamvungh had discovered beads from necklace, remnants of copper belts, and pieces of smoking pipes, made of copper, etc. from Sabani village in the present Sagang Division of Burma. All these articles are quite identical with the articles used by the Zomi. From this finding, it can also be deduced that the Zomi had their settlement in the plain areas of Burma.
Evidence of ancient manufacture of beads of fossilized wood called Chin Padi or Zomi beads which were discovered in 1904 near the pale-walled city of Wate, suggests that there were trends of communication between the Zomi and the Pagan Burmans.
The Burmese too recognized the settlement of Zomi in the plain areas. Some sort of social intercourse developed between the Zomi and the Burmese. King Alaungpaya of Ava (1044-1287 AD) even established a separate army of Zomis and called the areas where the Zomi had made their settlements as Zou country or Yaw country. Yaw was derived from Zo.
Archaeological evidences also have clearly pointed out the settlement of the Zomi in the plains of Burma. In 1971, S.B. Khamtinzamvungh had discovered beads from necklace, remnants of copper belts, and pieces of smoking pipes, made of copper, etc. from Sabani village in the present Sagang Division of Burma. All these articles are quite identical with the articles used by the Zomi. From this finding, it can also be deduced that the Zomi had their settlement in the plain areas of Burma.
Evidence of ancient manufacture of beads of fossilized wood called Chin Padi or Zomi beads which were discovered in 1904 near the pale-walled city of Wate, suggests that there were trends of communication between the Zomi and the Pagan Burmans.
The Burmese too recognized the settlement of Zomi in the plain areas. Some sort of social intercourse developed between the Zomi and the Burmese. King Alaungpaya of Ava (1044-1287 AD) even established a separate army of Zomis and called the areas where the Zomi had made their settlements as Zou country or Yaw country. Yaw was derived from Zo.
Traditional Political System of Zomi
Traditional Political System
The Zomi had efficient system of administration and discipline as a distinct group governed by their traditional laws, customs and organizations. The traditional political system is based on kinship structure that revolves round the concept of chieftainship and that of territorial jurisdiction over which its authority is wielded, and that the village is the highest political unit. Each village had its own government, and a chief or a headman functioned as administrator for the village. Generally, the duty and power of the Chief or village headman was similar among all Zomi tribes.
The village Chief, locally called ‘Lal’ or ‘Hausa/Haosa’ or ‘Uk’, enjoyed hereditary rights and exercised political, judicial, legislative and executive powers. He controlled, to varying degrees, the daily lives of the people. He enjoyed the rights to order death penalty or give pardon; right over lands, right to seize property of the villagers, right to tax traders, etc. Some of his privileges include – six tins-full of paddy from every household, the left fore-leg of any animal killed (called ‘Buhsun-Saliang’), one-tenth of the amount of salt collected, share of wild honey collected, share of fish caught, free labour in constructing his house, etc. Such is the power and privileges of the Chief that they are called “the Lord of the Soil” by the British. Carey and Tuck wrote thus:
“The position of the Chief in regard to the people is very similar to that of a Feudal Baron. The Chief is ‘Lord of the Soil’ and his freemen hold it as his tenants and pay him tithes, and he accepts tribute.”
As the Chief was the Lord of the Soil, he enjoyed absolute power; however his functioning is more democratic than autocratic in form. In his manifold functions and responsibilities as a ruler, the Chief was assisted by a Council of Elders, known in Zomi as ‘Khawnbawl Upa’ or ‘Upa’, the number of which was determined by the number of houses in the village. It was the collective responsibilities of the ‘Upa’ to protect the life and property of the villages, to frame the general policy of making allotment of village lands for cultivation; and to administer justice according to the customary laws. Moreover, the villagers had a liberty to leave any autocratic Chief and migrate to another village. This acted as a ‘check and balance’ on the Chief and his Councils who were bound by customary laws. Therefore, the office of Chieftainship has its power based on the proper interpretation of the customary law and enforcement of culture and tradition through the Chief. Apart from the Village Council there are Siampu (Priest), Tangkou/Tlangau, Siiksek (blacksmith), etc who assisted the Chief in his administration and functioning.
Zomi Chieftainship was hereditary. From clan to clan the custom differed as to whether the youngest or eldest son inherited the office of the father. The chief’s sons, other than the one who inherits his father’s chieftainship, on attaining marriageable age were assigned another village in which he exercised independent authority, but paid tribute to the parent village. Each clan has a hierarchical order of Chieftainship with the senior-most linear chief as head of the Chiefs among a particular clan. This shows that Chieftainship among the Zomi has a broad-based federal structure. A good example can be seen in Falam area. At the time the British conquered the Zomi, Falam had developed itself into the most powerful of Chieftainships in Zo country. They had done this through development of a political organization comparable to democratic types of government found in the western world. The people enjoyed equal rights and freedom, and even Chiefship was open to all. Carey and Tuck remarks as,
“Unity in strength is a Falam motto, and therefore every quarter of the village is represented in discussion on all matters connected with the tribe and village.”
When Zoland came under British control, the Zomi Chieftainships were recognized, and the British did not interfere with the Chiefs’ powers and functions. Village organization and local authorities were left as they were. Today the institution of Chieftainship continues to exist with all its rights and privileges in the hill areas of Manipur whereas it was replaced by Village Council with nominal Chiefship in Mizoram and Chin State.
Beside Chieftainship, there were other common bonds and practices in Zomi society. In fact, the Zomi have always practiced a form of socialism within their communities. This form of unique socialism is called ‘Tlawmngaihna’ in Lushai dialect, which means ‘love of less’. It implies the capacity for hard work, bravery, endurance, generosity, kindness and selflessness. Zomi forefathers emphasized this value of action to their progeny and today it continues in the form of ‘philanthropic organisations’ e.g. Hmar Youth Association, Kuki Khanglai Lawmpi, Young Mizo Association, Zomi Youth Association, … The spirit of philanthropism existed among the Zomi, even before it was christened into an organisation/association, in the form of ‘Zawlbuk/Haam’ where all bachelors in the village spent the night in a particular place. This unique institution is as old as the village itself.
The Zomi had efficient system of administration and discipline as a distinct group governed by their traditional laws, customs and organizations. The traditional political system is based on kinship structure that revolves round the concept of chieftainship and that of territorial jurisdiction over which its authority is wielded, and that the village is the highest political unit. Each village had its own government, and a chief or a headman functioned as administrator for the village. Generally, the duty and power of the Chief or village headman was similar among all Zomi tribes.
The village Chief, locally called ‘Lal’ or ‘Hausa/Haosa’ or ‘Uk’, enjoyed hereditary rights and exercised political, judicial, legislative and executive powers. He controlled, to varying degrees, the daily lives of the people. He enjoyed the rights to order death penalty or give pardon; right over lands, right to seize property of the villagers, right to tax traders, etc. Some of his privileges include – six tins-full of paddy from every household, the left fore-leg of any animal killed (called ‘Buhsun-Saliang’), one-tenth of the amount of salt collected, share of wild honey collected, share of fish caught, free labour in constructing his house, etc. Such is the power and privileges of the Chief that they are called “the Lord of the Soil” by the British. Carey and Tuck wrote thus:
“The position of the Chief in regard to the people is very similar to that of a Feudal Baron. The Chief is ‘Lord of the Soil’ and his freemen hold it as his tenants and pay him tithes, and he accepts tribute.”
As the Chief was the Lord of the Soil, he enjoyed absolute power; however his functioning is more democratic than autocratic in form. In his manifold functions and responsibilities as a ruler, the Chief was assisted by a Council of Elders, known in Zomi as ‘Khawnbawl Upa’ or ‘Upa’, the number of which was determined by the number of houses in the village. It was the collective responsibilities of the ‘Upa’ to protect the life and property of the villages, to frame the general policy of making allotment of village lands for cultivation; and to administer justice according to the customary laws. Moreover, the villagers had a liberty to leave any autocratic Chief and migrate to another village. This acted as a ‘check and balance’ on the Chief and his Councils who were bound by customary laws. Therefore, the office of Chieftainship has its power based on the proper interpretation of the customary law and enforcement of culture and tradition through the Chief. Apart from the Village Council there are Siampu (Priest), Tangkou/Tlangau, Siiksek (blacksmith), etc who assisted the Chief in his administration and functioning.
Zomi Chieftainship was hereditary. From clan to clan the custom differed as to whether the youngest or eldest son inherited the office of the father. The chief’s sons, other than the one who inherits his father’s chieftainship, on attaining marriageable age were assigned another village in which he exercised independent authority, but paid tribute to the parent village. Each clan has a hierarchical order of Chieftainship with the senior-most linear chief as head of the Chiefs among a particular clan. This shows that Chieftainship among the Zomi has a broad-based federal structure. A good example can be seen in Falam area. At the time the British conquered the Zomi, Falam had developed itself into the most powerful of Chieftainships in Zo country. They had done this through development of a political organization comparable to democratic types of government found in the western world. The people enjoyed equal rights and freedom, and even Chiefship was open to all. Carey and Tuck remarks as,
“Unity in strength is a Falam motto, and therefore every quarter of the village is represented in discussion on all matters connected with the tribe and village.”
When Zoland came under British control, the Zomi Chieftainships were recognized, and the British did not interfere with the Chiefs’ powers and functions. Village organization and local authorities were left as they were. Today the institution of Chieftainship continues to exist with all its rights and privileges in the hill areas of Manipur whereas it was replaced by Village Council with nominal Chiefship in Mizoram and Chin State.
Beside Chieftainship, there were other common bonds and practices in Zomi society. In fact, the Zomi have always practiced a form of socialism within their communities. This form of unique socialism is called ‘Tlawmngaihna’ in Lushai dialect, which means ‘love of less’. It implies the capacity for hard work, bravery, endurance, generosity, kindness and selflessness. Zomi forefathers emphasized this value of action to their progeny and today it continues in the form of ‘philanthropic organisations’ e.g. Hmar Youth Association, Kuki Khanglai Lawmpi, Young Mizo Association, Zomi Youth Association, … The spirit of philanthropism existed among the Zomi, even before it was christened into an organisation/association, in the form of ‘Zawlbuk/Haam’ where all bachelors in the village spent the night in a particular place. This unique institution is as old as the village itself.
Early History & Migration of Zomi
Early History & Migration
The early history of the Zomi is obscure, shrouded in myths and legends. In the absence of written documents, it is extremely difficult to trace their early history. However, through historical, linguistics, archaeological findings, and ethnic relationships, it is now accepted that they belong to the Tibeto-Burman. Thus their movements can only be studied and identified in terms of the general movements of the Tibeto-Burman tribes. Like the other tribes of the Indo-Burma frontier areas, the Zomi too could have originated from China.
The area which lies between the upper course of the Yangtze Kiang and the Hwang Ho Rivers are believed to be the original home of these people. S. K. Chatterji also makes an attempt to identify the area of the “North-West China, between the head waters of the Hwang Ho and the Yangtze Kiang Rivers” as the origin of the Sino-Tibetan migration into India and Burma. Dr. Grierson wrote “…tradition and comparative physiology agree in pointing to North-Western China between the upper course of the Yangtze Kiang and of the Hwang Ho as the original home of the Tibeto-China race, to which the Tibeto-Burman and the Siamese-Chinese groups belong”. Though acceptable because of lack of any other plausible explanation, the original home of the Zomi remain indeterminate. But still it is quite obscure to know when and how they were originated from this place.
It is claimed that the Zomi is one of the oldest groups of people who settled in Burma. Regarding the pattern of their historical movements, the theory advanced by F. K. Lehman quoted below is worthwhile to note –
“Ethnic and linguistic differentiation certainly existed at an early period. The ancestor of the Chin and of the Burmans must have been distinct from each other even before they first appeared in Burma. Undoubtedly, these various ancestral groups were descended in part from groups immigrating into Burma, starting about the Christian era. But it is also probable that some of these groups were in Burma in the remote past, long before the date indicated by any present historical evidence”.
There is, however, no doubt that the Zomi had entered into Burma in different waves along with other groups of people. This argument is supported by folklores, oral tradition and legends. They came into this region by different routes. Some groups had gone up into the Tibetan plateau to the north while other groups moved into Burma in three waves. The First people who migrated from China were the Mon-Khmer races, and the second wave was that of the Tibeto-Burman races which consist of the Zomi, the Burmese, Lolo, Kachin, etc. The third wave was that of the Tai-Chinese consisting of Shan, Siamese, Karen, etc. The Mon-Khmer group moved first from Central Asia and entered into the Indo-Chinese peninsula. They mainly moved southwards following the Mekong Valley as far south as into Kampuchea and Thailand, whence by a lateral westward movement they reached Burma.
The Tibeto-Burman wave, which includes the Zomi, moved south-westward, on the line of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin (Tuikang) and disbursed along the mountainous regions of the Indo-Burma areas and of Burma on its western side. Regarding the north southward migrations, Prof. F. K. Lehman wrote:
"Historical linguistics, archaeology, and racial relationships definitely indicate the ancestors of these various peoples did indeed come from the North… history shows, however, that both hills and plain peoples have moved about within the general region of South-West China and Southeast Asia over considerable distances for many centuries until recent past”.
With regard to the Zomi, it is mentioned that they had migrated from the north to the southern valley areas of the Chindwin River, and then stopped by the Bay of Bengal before turning to the north again. Carey and Tuck are also of the same opinion. And when they reached the plains of Burma they were divided into several groups. One group moved towards the areas lying between the Chindwin and Irrawaddy rivers. The other groups moved towards the south and the west of Chindwin via Hukawang valley, Zou country and Arakan before 1000 A.D. the last immigrants were perhaps the Lushei and Hmar ancestors who, according to Pu K. Zawla, came to the Chindwin belt around 996 A.D. According to their local tradition, the first known settlement of the Hmar tribes was the Shan Village (Shan Khua) where they came in contact with the Shans as borne out by folk songs like the one quoted below:
“Ka pa lam thak a tha’n dang,
Sinlung lam thak aw a tha’n dang;
Shan khua ah thapo in vang…..
(My father’s step were remarkably good,
Sinlung’s steps were remarkably good;
Tens are the good men in Shan village….)
According to legendary sources, right from the early historical period the Zomi made their settlement in the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin valleys. After their kingdom was destroyed by the Chinese, they crossed the Chindwin and settled in the area of Kale-Kabaw-Myitha-Yaw Valleys and Panduang Hills. They made a permanent settlement in the valley areas of the river which they called ‘Tuikang’ – white water. But later the Burmese called the river ‘Chindwin’ (Cin/Chin=Burmese name for Zomi; Dwin = valley or region) and the name stuck through British acceptance.
Another theory based on folktales and legends claim that the Zomi had founded a kingdom called “Pugam” and its capital was Pagan. According to Chinese writers, this kingdom was situated between two and three hundred li (1 li = ½ kilometer) to the south-west of Yung-Chiang, a border state of China, on the north and northeast Nanchao (Thai) states of Upper Burma and Northern Siam; on the north and north-east of the Cheula (Kamboja), and to the east the seas (Gulf of Marteban) to the south (Cambodia). The Burmese and Chinese called this place “Piao-khua”.
It is said that the Zomi ancestors had settled there since 484 B.C. Fan Ch’o, a historian-turned-diplomat of the Tang dynasty, who was the author of “Man-Shu” (Story of Nanchao), 863 A.D. had identified the Chindwin river as “Mi-no-Chiang” (Chiang means River). He also mentioned the existence of three kingdoms in the ninth century A. D. They were Mino, Min-Ch’en and P’iao. Prof. Luce tried to identify the “Mi-Ch’en” (Zomi) as the ‘Man Kingdom of Kyontu’, a Burmese area situated near Waw qt, the old mouth of Pegu river, about 20 miles northeast of Pegu and P’iao with the Pyu or Pu Kingdom at Halin town in Shwabo area in Burma. Regarding Mino, it was, with Zo kingdom, situated near the Chindwin River. As Sir J. C. Scott remarks,
“Probably they (the Zomi) may be taken to be a presentiment of the Pagan Burman before he acquired Buddhism. It is also undisputed that the Thet or Sak, of Thara Keltara, who moved from to found and start the Burmese race as we know, are a Chin clan”.
The Asho Zomi tradition says that the original name of Pagan was “Pugam” which literally means country or Kingdom of our ancestors. (Pu=ancestors/forefathers; gam= kingdom/country). But, unfortunately, it has come to be written as “Pugan” in Burmese. Yet “Pugam”, “Pugan” and “Pagan” are not Burmese words. They are Zomi words. Moreover, Mount Popa also is simply “Pupa Mual”, a word or term absent in the Burmese vocabulary. This undeniable fact has been approved as true by the Burmese Socialist Programme Party Research office, Rangoon. Apart from this tradition, the Zomi of Yaw country in the Pakokku District also claims that they had come from Pupa (Popa) hills.
The Zomi folksongs give the picture of their settlement, prosperity and the civilization that evolved in the plains of Burma until the hand of Tartars (Mongols) struck them in the last part of the 13th century A.D. Dr. Francis Mason also mentioned that the Zomi had established an independent state in the Upper Chindwin areas. The observation about the establishment of a kingdom is clearly evident by the terms “Kumpi”, “Mang”, and “Leng” which are equivalent to Kingship.
However, their prosperity did not last long. They were destroyed by the Mongols. Lt. Trant wrote:
“The interlopers disposed their king and put many of their chieftains to death; they obligated the others to seek for refuge in flight…with them went some members of the royal family, but in course of time, and from deaths and changes of residence, all traces of them were lost and they know not whether any of the royal blood exists or not”.
The early history of the Zomi is obscure, shrouded in myths and legends. In the absence of written documents, it is extremely difficult to trace their early history. However, through historical, linguistics, archaeological findings, and ethnic relationships, it is now accepted that they belong to the Tibeto-Burman. Thus their movements can only be studied and identified in terms of the general movements of the Tibeto-Burman tribes. Like the other tribes of the Indo-Burma frontier areas, the Zomi too could have originated from China.
The area which lies between the upper course of the Yangtze Kiang and the Hwang Ho Rivers are believed to be the original home of these people. S. K. Chatterji also makes an attempt to identify the area of the “North-West China, between the head waters of the Hwang Ho and the Yangtze Kiang Rivers” as the origin of the Sino-Tibetan migration into India and Burma. Dr. Grierson wrote “…tradition and comparative physiology agree in pointing to North-Western China between the upper course of the Yangtze Kiang and of the Hwang Ho as the original home of the Tibeto-China race, to which the Tibeto-Burman and the Siamese-Chinese groups belong”. Though acceptable because of lack of any other plausible explanation, the original home of the Zomi remain indeterminate. But still it is quite obscure to know when and how they were originated from this place.
It is claimed that the Zomi is one of the oldest groups of people who settled in Burma. Regarding the pattern of their historical movements, the theory advanced by F. K. Lehman quoted below is worthwhile to note –
“Ethnic and linguistic differentiation certainly existed at an early period. The ancestor of the Chin and of the Burmans must have been distinct from each other even before they first appeared in Burma. Undoubtedly, these various ancestral groups were descended in part from groups immigrating into Burma, starting about the Christian era. But it is also probable that some of these groups were in Burma in the remote past, long before the date indicated by any present historical evidence”.
There is, however, no doubt that the Zomi had entered into Burma in different waves along with other groups of people. This argument is supported by folklores, oral tradition and legends. They came into this region by different routes. Some groups had gone up into the Tibetan plateau to the north while other groups moved into Burma in three waves. The First people who migrated from China were the Mon-Khmer races, and the second wave was that of the Tibeto-Burman races which consist of the Zomi, the Burmese, Lolo, Kachin, etc. The third wave was that of the Tai-Chinese consisting of Shan, Siamese, Karen, etc. The Mon-Khmer group moved first from Central Asia and entered into the Indo-Chinese peninsula. They mainly moved southwards following the Mekong Valley as far south as into Kampuchea and Thailand, whence by a lateral westward movement they reached Burma.
The Tibeto-Burman wave, which includes the Zomi, moved south-westward, on the line of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin (Tuikang) and disbursed along the mountainous regions of the Indo-Burma areas and of Burma on its western side. Regarding the north southward migrations, Prof. F. K. Lehman wrote:
"Historical linguistics, archaeology, and racial relationships definitely indicate the ancestors of these various peoples did indeed come from the North… history shows, however, that both hills and plain peoples have moved about within the general region of South-West China and Southeast Asia over considerable distances for many centuries until recent past”.
With regard to the Zomi, it is mentioned that they had migrated from the north to the southern valley areas of the Chindwin River, and then stopped by the Bay of Bengal before turning to the north again. Carey and Tuck are also of the same opinion. And when they reached the plains of Burma they were divided into several groups. One group moved towards the areas lying between the Chindwin and Irrawaddy rivers. The other groups moved towards the south and the west of Chindwin via Hukawang valley, Zou country and Arakan before 1000 A.D. the last immigrants were perhaps the Lushei and Hmar ancestors who, according to Pu K. Zawla, came to the Chindwin belt around 996 A.D. According to their local tradition, the first known settlement of the Hmar tribes was the Shan Village (Shan Khua) where they came in contact with the Shans as borne out by folk songs like the one quoted below:
“Ka pa lam thak a tha’n dang,
Sinlung lam thak aw a tha’n dang;
Shan khua ah thapo in vang…..
(My father’s step were remarkably good,
Sinlung’s steps were remarkably good;
Tens are the good men in Shan village….)
According to legendary sources, right from the early historical period the Zomi made their settlement in the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin valleys. After their kingdom was destroyed by the Chinese, they crossed the Chindwin and settled in the area of Kale-Kabaw-Myitha-Yaw Valleys and Panduang Hills. They made a permanent settlement in the valley areas of the river which they called ‘Tuikang’ – white water. But later the Burmese called the river ‘Chindwin’ (Cin/Chin=Burmese name for Zomi; Dwin = valley or region) and the name stuck through British acceptance.
Another theory based on folktales and legends claim that the Zomi had founded a kingdom called “Pugam” and its capital was Pagan. According to Chinese writers, this kingdom was situated between two and three hundred li (1 li = ½ kilometer) to the south-west of Yung-Chiang, a border state of China, on the north and northeast Nanchao (Thai) states of Upper Burma and Northern Siam; on the north and north-east of the Cheula (Kamboja), and to the east the seas (Gulf of Marteban) to the south (Cambodia). The Burmese and Chinese called this place “Piao-khua”.
It is said that the Zomi ancestors had settled there since 484 B.C. Fan Ch’o, a historian-turned-diplomat of the Tang dynasty, who was the author of “Man-Shu” (Story of Nanchao), 863 A.D. had identified the Chindwin river as “Mi-no-Chiang” (Chiang means River). He also mentioned the existence of three kingdoms in the ninth century A. D. They were Mino, Min-Ch’en and P’iao. Prof. Luce tried to identify the “Mi-Ch’en” (Zomi) as the ‘Man Kingdom of Kyontu’, a Burmese area situated near Waw qt, the old mouth of Pegu river, about 20 miles northeast of Pegu and P’iao with the Pyu or Pu Kingdom at Halin town in Shwabo area in Burma. Regarding Mino, it was, with Zo kingdom, situated near the Chindwin River. As Sir J. C. Scott remarks,
“Probably they (the Zomi) may be taken to be a presentiment of the Pagan Burman before he acquired Buddhism. It is also undisputed that the Thet or Sak, of Thara Keltara, who moved from to found and start the Burmese race as we know, are a Chin clan”.
The Asho Zomi tradition says that the original name of Pagan was “Pugam” which literally means country or Kingdom of our ancestors. (Pu=ancestors/forefathers; gam= kingdom/country). But, unfortunately, it has come to be written as “Pugan” in Burmese. Yet “Pugam”, “Pugan” and “Pagan” are not Burmese words. They are Zomi words. Moreover, Mount Popa also is simply “Pupa Mual”, a word or term absent in the Burmese vocabulary. This undeniable fact has been approved as true by the Burmese Socialist Programme Party Research office, Rangoon. Apart from this tradition, the Zomi of Yaw country in the Pakokku District also claims that they had come from Pupa (Popa) hills.
The Zomi folksongs give the picture of their settlement, prosperity and the civilization that evolved in the plains of Burma until the hand of Tartars (Mongols) struck them in the last part of the 13th century A.D. Dr. Francis Mason also mentioned that the Zomi had established an independent state in the Upper Chindwin areas. The observation about the establishment of a kingdom is clearly evident by the terms “Kumpi”, “Mang”, and “Leng” which are equivalent to Kingship.
However, their prosperity did not last long. They were destroyed by the Mongols. Lt. Trant wrote:
“The interlopers disposed their king and put many of their chieftains to death; they obligated the others to seek for refuge in flight…with them went some members of the royal family, but in course of time, and from deaths and changes of residence, all traces of them were lost and they know not whether any of the royal blood exists or not”.
HISTORY: Who are the Zomi?
HISTORY
Who are the Zomi?
The term 'Zomi' meaning, 'Zo People' is derived from the generic name 'Zo', the progenitor of the Zomi. In the past they were little known by this racial nomenclature. They were known by the non-tribal plain peoples of Burma, Bangladesh and India as Chin, Kuki, or Lushai. Subsequently the British employed these terms to christen those 'wild hill tribes' living in the 'un-administered area', and was subsequently legalised to be the names for the newly adopted subjects by Queen Victoria of England. However, they called themselves Zomi since time immemorial. They are Zomi not because they live in the highlands or hills, but are Zomi and called themselves Zomi because they are the descendants of their great great ancestor, 'Zo'.
In this regards, F.K. Lehman, Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Illinois (USA), who had done extensive study on the Chin of Burma, said:
'No single Chin word has explicit reference to all the peoples we customarily call Chin, but all - or nearly all of the peoples have a special word for themselves and those of their congeners with whom they are in regular contact. This word is almost always a variant form of a single root, which appears as Zo, Yo, Ysou, Shou and the like.'
Relating to this generic name, Fan-Cho a diplomat of the Tang dynasty of China, mentioned in 862 AD a Kingdom in the Chindwin Valley 'whose Princes and Chiefs were called Shou (Zo)' . In 1783, Father Vincentius Sangermano in his book, 'A Description of the Burmese Empire' described them as, "a petty nation called JO (JAW)" Sir Henry Yule, as early as 1508 mentioned about the YO country the location of which was "west of the mouth of the Kyen-dwen (Chindwin) the interior of Doab, between the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin, from Mout-Shabo upwards and the whole of the hill country east and north-east of the capital, towards the Ruby-mines, the upper course of Hyitnge, and the Chinese frontier" . Rev. Howard Malcolm also testified thus, "The YAW (ZO) is on the lower waters of the Khyendiwen (Chindwin) not far from Ava. The district is sometimes called YO or JO".
Another early use of the name ZO with reference to the Zomi (Kuki-Chin-Lushai), the first on the Lushai Hills side which till then was a terra incognito, was by Col. T.H. Lewin, the first white man to know the inhabitants of Lushai Hills (Mizoram). He wrote that he came to know, during the Lushai Expedition of 1871-72 that, 'the generic name of the whole nation is Dzo' Dr. Francis Buchanan also wrote of Zomi and Zomi language , while Captain Pemberton mentioned Zo or Jo in his 'Reports on the Eastern Frontiers of British India, 1835'. The fact that the Zomi were known as ZOU or YO or YAW, before their society evolved into clan based organisation and lineage segmentation, was pointed out by Dr. G.A. Grierson in his survey, thus,
'The name (Kuki and Chin) is not used by the tribes themselves, who use titles such as ZOU or YO or CHO'.
Rev Sukte T. Hau Go, a former lecturer of Mandalay University (Burma) also shared the same view,
"Zomi is the correct original historical name of our people, from the Naga hill to the Bay of Bengal. To the north of Tedim, the Thadous and other tribes call themselves Yo; in Falam, Laizo. The Tedim people call themselves Zo; the Lushais, Mizo; in Haka, Zotung, Zophei, Zokhua. In Gangaw area Zo is pronounced as YAW, in Mindat Jo or CHO; and in Paletwa Khomi. In Prome, Thayetmyo, Sandoway and Bassein areas they call themselves A-Sho. So, inspite of slight variations Zomi is our original historical national name ".
Regarding the truth of Zomi as the racial designation of the so-called Kuki-Chin people, U Thein Re Myint, a well known Burmese Writer, who knew Chin history, perhaps better than the Chin themselves remarks:
'Even though these tribes of people, who are called Chin, do not necessarily protest their name, their original name is, in fact, Zomi '.
Two British administrators, Bertram S. Carey and H.N. Tuck who place Zo people under modern system of administration record as thus:
'Those of the Kuki tribes which we designate as "Chins" do not recognise that name……they call themselves YO (ZO)…and YO (ZO) is the general name by which the Chins call their race'
Another European writer, Sir J. George Scott also claimed that, the Zomi never called themselves by such names as Kuki or Chin or Lushai. He wrote:
'The names like Kuki and Chin are not national, and have been given to them by their neighbours. Like others, the people do not accept the name given by the Burmese and ourselves; they do not call themselves Chins, and they equally flout the name of Kuki which their Assamese neighbours use. They call themselves Zhou or Shu and in other parts Yo or Lai.
It is, therefore, no wonder that Zomi use the term Zo, Zou, Zhou, Chou, Shou, Yo, Jo, Yaw, Shu, etc in their speech and poetic language as Zo-Vontawi, Zo-lei, Zogam or Zoram, Zo-tui, Zo-fa, etc; in naming geographical names such as Zotlang, Zopui, Zobawks; and in some of the clan names like Zophei, Zotung, Zokhua, Laizo, Bawmzo, Zote, etc. All these have a common derivation from the generic name, "ZO". It is also because of this fact that scholars like Dr. Vum Kho Hau, Prof. Laldena, Dr. Vum Son, Dr. Tualchin Neihsial, Dr. H. Kamkhenthang, Dr. Mangkhosat Kipgen, Cap. Sing Khaw Khai, Dr. J. M. Paupu, Pu K. Zawla, Pu R. Vanlawma, B. Langthanliana, Dr. V. Lunghnema, Dr. Hawlngam Haokip, Pu L. S. Gangte, Pu T. Gougin, Pu Thang Khan Gin Ngaihte, Rev. S. Prim Vaiphei, Rev. Khup Za Go, Pu L. Keivom, Rev. S. T. Hau Go, Dr. Khen Za Sian, Prof. Thang Za Tuan, Rev. Sing Ling etc. concluded that ZO is the ancestor of the Zo people (Zomi).
Who are the Zomi?
The term 'Zomi' meaning, 'Zo People' is derived from the generic name 'Zo', the progenitor of the Zomi. In the past they were little known by this racial nomenclature. They were known by the non-tribal plain peoples of Burma, Bangladesh and India as Chin, Kuki, or Lushai. Subsequently the British employed these terms to christen those 'wild hill tribes' living in the 'un-administered area', and was subsequently legalised to be the names for the newly adopted subjects by Queen Victoria of England. However, they called themselves Zomi since time immemorial. They are Zomi not because they live in the highlands or hills, but are Zomi and called themselves Zomi because they are the descendants of their great great ancestor, 'Zo'.
In this regards, F.K. Lehman, Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Illinois (USA), who had done extensive study on the Chin of Burma, said:
'No single Chin word has explicit reference to all the peoples we customarily call Chin, but all - or nearly all of the peoples have a special word for themselves and those of their congeners with whom they are in regular contact. This word is almost always a variant form of a single root, which appears as Zo, Yo, Ysou, Shou and the like.'
Relating to this generic name, Fan-Cho a diplomat of the Tang dynasty of China, mentioned in 862 AD a Kingdom in the Chindwin Valley 'whose Princes and Chiefs were called Shou (Zo)' . In 1783, Father Vincentius Sangermano in his book, 'A Description of the Burmese Empire' described them as, "a petty nation called JO (JAW)" Sir Henry Yule, as early as 1508 mentioned about the YO country the location of which was "west of the mouth of the Kyen-dwen (Chindwin) the interior of Doab, between the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin, from Mout-Shabo upwards and the whole of the hill country east and north-east of the capital, towards the Ruby-mines, the upper course of Hyitnge, and the Chinese frontier" . Rev. Howard Malcolm also testified thus, "The YAW (ZO) is on the lower waters of the Khyendiwen (Chindwin) not far from Ava. The district is sometimes called YO or JO".
Another early use of the name ZO with reference to the Zomi (Kuki-Chin-Lushai), the first on the Lushai Hills side which till then was a terra incognito, was by Col. T.H. Lewin, the first white man to know the inhabitants of Lushai Hills (Mizoram). He wrote that he came to know, during the Lushai Expedition of 1871-72 that, 'the generic name of the whole nation is Dzo' Dr. Francis Buchanan also wrote of Zomi and Zomi language , while Captain Pemberton mentioned Zo or Jo in his 'Reports on the Eastern Frontiers of British India, 1835'. The fact that the Zomi were known as ZOU or YO or YAW, before their society evolved into clan based organisation and lineage segmentation, was pointed out by Dr. G.A. Grierson in his survey, thus,
'The name (Kuki and Chin) is not used by the tribes themselves, who use titles such as ZOU or YO or CHO'.
Rev Sukte T. Hau Go, a former lecturer of Mandalay University (Burma) also shared the same view,
"Zomi is the correct original historical name of our people, from the Naga hill to the Bay of Bengal. To the north of Tedim, the Thadous and other tribes call themselves Yo; in Falam, Laizo. The Tedim people call themselves Zo; the Lushais, Mizo; in Haka, Zotung, Zophei, Zokhua. In Gangaw area Zo is pronounced as YAW, in Mindat Jo or CHO; and in Paletwa Khomi. In Prome, Thayetmyo, Sandoway and Bassein areas they call themselves A-Sho. So, inspite of slight variations Zomi is our original historical national name ".
Regarding the truth of Zomi as the racial designation of the so-called Kuki-Chin people, U Thein Re Myint, a well known Burmese Writer, who knew Chin history, perhaps better than the Chin themselves remarks:
'Even though these tribes of people, who are called Chin, do not necessarily protest their name, their original name is, in fact, Zomi '.
Two British administrators, Bertram S. Carey and H.N. Tuck who place Zo people under modern system of administration record as thus:
'Those of the Kuki tribes which we designate as "Chins" do not recognise that name……they call themselves YO (ZO)…and YO (ZO) is the general name by which the Chins call their race'
Another European writer, Sir J. George Scott also claimed that, the Zomi never called themselves by such names as Kuki or Chin or Lushai. He wrote:
'The names like Kuki and Chin are not national, and have been given to them by their neighbours. Like others, the people do not accept the name given by the Burmese and ourselves; they do not call themselves Chins, and they equally flout the name of Kuki which their Assamese neighbours use. They call themselves Zhou or Shu and in other parts Yo or Lai.
It is, therefore, no wonder that Zomi use the term Zo, Zou, Zhou, Chou, Shou, Yo, Jo, Yaw, Shu, etc in their speech and poetic language as Zo-Vontawi, Zo-lei, Zogam or Zoram, Zo-tui, Zo-fa, etc; in naming geographical names such as Zotlang, Zopui, Zobawks; and in some of the clan names like Zophei, Zotung, Zokhua, Laizo, Bawmzo, Zote, etc. All these have a common derivation from the generic name, "ZO". It is also because of this fact that scholars like Dr. Vum Kho Hau, Prof. Laldena, Dr. Vum Son, Dr. Tualchin Neihsial, Dr. H. Kamkhenthang, Dr. Mangkhosat Kipgen, Cap. Sing Khaw Khai, Dr. J. M. Paupu, Pu K. Zawla, Pu R. Vanlawma, B. Langthanliana, Dr. V. Lunghnema, Dr. Hawlngam Haokip, Pu L. S. Gangte, Pu T. Gougin, Pu Thang Khan Gin Ngaihte, Rev. S. Prim Vaiphei, Rev. Khup Za Go, Pu L. Keivom, Rev. S. T. Hau Go, Dr. Khen Za Sian, Prof. Thang Za Tuan, Rev. Sing Ling etc. concluded that ZO is the ancestor of the Zo people (Zomi).
Saturday, September 8, 2007
SOME BASIC FACTS ABOUT INDIA’S POLITICAL,
SOME BASIC FACTS ABOUT INDIA’S POLITICAL,SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
by George Mathew
Director, Institute of Social Science New Delhi
Introduction
India has a sub-continental dimension, covering an area of 32,87,263 sq.km, with a population of 846.30 million as on 1 March 1991. According to the 1993 estimate India’s population is 896,567,000. The annual population growth rate for 1980-93 was 2.0%. The second most populous country in the world, India is the home of 16% of the world’s population and accounts for 2.42% of the total world area. The population of India as recorded at each decennial census from 1901 onward has grown steadily except during 1911-21 when it showed a decline. In absolute terms, the country’s population has increased by 161.12 million during the decade 1981-91, which is ten times the population of Australia and more than twice that of Germany.
An encouraging feature is the decline in the growth rate of population which marginally decreased from 24.66% in 1971-81 to 23.85% during 1981-91.
India comprises 25 states and seven union territories (see map). In most states the population growth rate declined during the decade. However, seven states and three union territories, which account for one-third of the country’s population, recorded an increase in the growth rate. Nagaland registered the highest growth rate of 56.86% while Kerala, the lowest rate of 13.98 %. Uttar Pradesh continues to be the largest state, population-wise, with 16.44% of the people, followed by Bihar comprising 10.21% of the country’s population.
Bombay metro is the most populated city with an urban population of 12.60 million, followed by Calcutta with 11.02 million, Delhi with 9.42 million and Madras with 5.42 million. The population density (inhabitants per sq.km.) has gone up from 216 in 1981 to 273 persons in 1993.
Other important facts (1991) are:
Crude Birth rate
30.5
Crude Death rate
10.2
Infant Mortality rate
91.0
1980
1993
Population age 0 to 5
29%
25%
Population age 6 to 14
38%
34%
Percentage of
Urban population to total population
26.00
1981
1991
Percentage of
total workers to total population
36.70
37.68
Percentage of
male workers
52.62
52.56
Percentage of
female workers
19.67
22.73
1980
1993
Daily newspapers, copies per 1000
21
32
Radio receivers
per 1000 inhabitants
38
79
1980
1990
Television receivers
per 1000 inhabitants
4
32
Declining Sex Ratio
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Indian census is the decline in the female proportion of the population. The sex ratio (number of females per 1000 males) in India has been generally adverse to women. The ratio has also declined over the years except in the decade 1971 to 1981 when it slightly improved from 927 to 934. In 1991, it fell again to 927 per thousand males. The state of Kerala, known for its high physical quality of life like high literacy and with near more than one-fifth of its population Christians, presents a sharply different picture as the sex ratio is 1036 females per 1000 males. The inhuman neglect of girl child and discrimination against women account for this abnormal trend.
Political
India has a functioning democracy, the largest in the world. More than 500 million people – 18 years and above – out of its 844 million (1991) elected members of the Lower House of the Parliament in the latest general elections held in May and June 1991. Fifty-three per cent voters exercised their franchise in the latest elections. The percentage, though, was considered to be the lowest ever in the history of Indian elections. Higher levels of people’s participation has been a hallmark of Indian elections. For the last 44 years since Independence, democratic elections have been a regular feature in this country.
The political ethos today in India is rooted in the long years of the National Movement for Independence. India’s first organized attempt to overthrow British colonial power was in 1857 but it took the shape of a mass movement or mass struggle in the early decades of the present century. It permeated all levels of social life. Political education became part of Indian life through cultural organisations, educational institutions, reform movements, caste and communal associations and, above all, the plurality of parties, their ideologies, and media. Literature, art, theatre, etc. grew around the themes of nationalism and democracy. It is not wrong to say that today India is an “intensely political land and politics is in the people’s bloodstream.” Competing ideologies and parties attempt through all available means to educate the masses on issues affecting them, not only on the eve of elections but even at other times. In India there will be an election every year at one or another place, state or local level, if not a by-election to the Parliament. Each general election is a near social revolution in its magnitude and sweep. The discussions and de-bates are not confined to local issues; they are analysed in public meetings, from a national and international perspective. People know that their collective future is determined by the political process and that they have a stake in it. This means not indifference but active participation in elections.
India is one of the biggest functioning democracy in the world. But superimposed on a feudal social framework unexposed to real democratic traditions the people find it difficult to make a real success of their newly found democratic praxis. Once charismatic leaders like Pandit Nehru who practised democratic principles were removed the weakness of this democracy surfaced. The ruling party which ruled most of the time has degenerated.
A situation that has been developing in the recent past causing concern for the future of democracy is that of tensions and violence during campaigning and voting – in some regions to the extent of impeding the electoral process. In the 1991 elections more than 200 people lost their lives in election-related violence. This has resulted in politics and politicians being shown in a bad light, as well as a decline in political standards.
The institutions of democracy – parties, press (media), parliament, judiciary and local self-governments – create political awareness and therefore these institutions have to be nurtured and carefully protected by all democratic societies. India has had ups and downs in this vital area but on the whole there has been a fair amount of public awareness and protests whenever political expediency tried to subvert the institutions of democracy. The late Mrs. Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister attempted in her own way to bend these institutions to suit her interests but the people of India asserted their democratic rights and have continued to do so whenever they have felt that there have been subtle or not so subtle attempts at manipulation.
Perhaps the potential danger to India democracy is the tendency to mix religion with politics. Hindus constitute 82.63% of India’s population. This majority religious community is not homogeneous but constituted of many hierarchically placed castes and tribes. Some of them may not even identify themselves as Hindus. In the last few elections Hindu upper caste symbols were evoked by one of the political parties, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its front organisations to gain power. As a result, from an average 11% vote that this party used to get, it garnered 24% of the votes in the 1991 elections to the Parliament. This trend, if continued, can pose a threat to India’s secular character, minorities, and democracy itself. When religion and politics mix in the name of protecting a majority religious community’s interests, then fascism is not far away.
However, the 1993 November elections to four State Assemblies have demonstrated that peoples of India do not approve extreme right-wing Hindutva to come to power. The BJP lost its hold oil three out of four States it ruled from 1991-92.
The recent 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment has given constitutional status to local bodies below and at the District Level, known as panchayats. There will be about 500 district level, 5000 Block (middle level) and 2,30,000 village panchayats within the next one year. 2600000 elected members will take office from 1994, out of which 80,0000 will be women (one-third seats are reserved for women).
Literacy
For the purpose of census a person is deemed as literate if he or she can read and write any language with understanding. The literacy rate in the country, excluding J&K, is 52.21% (64.13 for males and 39.29 for females). The pupil – teacher ratio at primary level in 1980 was 45 and it has risen to 47 in 1990. The percentage of female teachers at primary level in 1980 was 27% and in 1990 it rose slightly to 28%.
The National Policy on Education (NPE) adopted in 1986 and updated in 1992 constitutes a landmark in the Indian educational policy. Having recognised the problem of working children, NPE proposes to tackle it with a programme of non-formal education as an integral part of a strategy to provide basic education for all. There are an estimated 153 million Indian children between the ages of 6 and 14 years. The age specific enrollment ratio is estimated to be 80%. Yet, there are still over 28 million out-of-school children in the 6-14 age-group, over 14 million of whom according to official estimates are working children. The drop out rate is also high: nearly half the children who enter class 1 drop out before reaching class V and two-thirds before class VIII. The target population of the National Literacy Movement (NLM) are the 121 million illiterates in the 15 to 35 age-group. With all these India can still claim the “dubious distinction” of leading the world in the number of illiterates.
Human Rights
The Indian sub-continent has been the scene of numerous ethnic and political conflicts. To quell unrest, India has unfortunately resorted to the enactment of laws at both national and state levels which contradict the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the Government of India is a signatory. The National Security Act (NSA), the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TDAPA), the Disturbed Areas Act (DAA) and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) are of particular concern in this respect. In the states of Kashmir, Punjab, North East and Andhra Pradesh, the Government of India is engaged in paramilitary operations which have involved arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, destruction of citizen’s properties, extra-judicial executions and deaths in police and army custody.
The Indian Government was under pressure to do something about its human rights policies and record. The pressure, explicitly and implicitly, took the form of the Government of India being told by International Aid Agencies that unless there was some positive evidence to show that it was doing something about human rights, India would not be entitled to economic and financial aid and support.
In 1992, the Government of India made a proposal to establish a Human Rights Commission and the Parliament passed the bill to constitute the National Commission on Human Rights in 1993.
The human rights and civil liberties movement in the country which is strong and active, is highly critical of the way the Human Rights Commission was established as they saw in it a move to appease international organisations, institutions and powerful lobbies abroad.
Minorities
Hindus, the religious majority in India, comprise 82.6% of the population of our country. Muslims are the largest religious minority. Though Muslims constitute only 11.4% of India’s population their absolute number, 92 million, makes them the second largest national population in the world. Christians, numbering 16.2 million form 2.4%, Sikhs 2.0%, Buddhists 0.7% and others including unclassified persons constitute 0.4%. To evaluate the efficacy of various safeguards in the Constitution for the protection of the religious minorities and to make recommendations to ensure effective implementation and enforcement of all the safeguards and the laws, a Minorities Commission was set up in January 1978.
Lower Castes And Tribals
The caste system is unique to India. The 82.6% Hindus (except the tribals) are hierarchically divided into castes on the basis of purity pollution principle and division of labour by ascription. The move to do away with the caste system in the independent India has met with little or no success. On the contrary, caste identi-ties have been strengthened and play an important part in bargaining in the political and economic spheres. The assertion of rights by the once op-pressed castes in recent years has resulted in brutal suppression and conflicts bordering on caste wars. India’s 51.6 million tribals (7.8% of the total population), are considered part of the Hindu population. Although the country has excellent laws to protect the rights of the tribals, the development path embarked upon by India, that has involved the construction of large dams, super thermal power plants, large-scale mining etc., has uprooted them without adequate measures for their rehabilitation, resulting in their economic and cultural impoverishment. India has 104.7 million (15.8%) lower castes commonly known as Scheduled Castes.
Child Labour
Varying estimates abound as to the number of working children in India. According to the 1981 census, work is defined as “participation in any economically productive activity.” Main workers are those who have worked for the major part of the year preceding the date of enumeration and whose main activity has been in either cultivation or as agricultural labourers or in household industry or in other work. Marginal workers are those who have done some work but cannot be classified as main workers. According to the 1981 census, there were 13.59 million working children in India. The National Sample Survey revealed that there were 17.36 million working children in India. Using another yardstick, the Operations Research Group comes to the following conclusions:
A working child is that child who was enumerated during the survey as a child within 5 to 15 age bracket and who is at remunerative work, may be paid or unpaid, and busy any hour of the day within or out-side the family... estimated working children in our country are around 44.0 million. Out of these about 21.0% are in urban areas and the rest are rural based.
While the census definition appears to be unreasonably restrictive since it is unwilling to recognise that children play a very important economic role, even if it is not directly productive, the ORG figures seem closer to reality and underline the enormity of the problem.
Article 24 of the Indian Constitution prohibits children below the age of fourteen from working in any factory, mine or other hazardous job. Yet, children are routinely found employed in mines, on construction sites and in factories in carpet weaving, beedi making, gem industry and so on. Article 39 of the Directive Principles of State Policy directs the states to ensure just and humane conditions of work. The Child Labour Regulation Act, the Factories Act and other industrial legislations do exist according to which the present situation of child labour is not in consonance with the dignity of a child.
While India’s child labour laws prohibit children from being employed in factories and mines, where wages are high, their provisions do not apply to cottage industries, restaurants, households and the agriculture sector, where wages are low. In fact, the agricultural sector stands out as the biggest single employer of child labour in India.
In India, it is primarily female children who maintain the household in both rural and urban areas by undertaking non-productive activities like caring for younger siblings, cooking, cleaning, washing and fetching water. Parents are thus able to go out and work as wage labour because the household work is done by their children, especially daughters.
The bias against the female child is both the cause and the effect of relegating her to such a role in contrast to the more productive type of work that the male child is typically engaged in.
Though a large number of female children assist their mothers in a variety of home based industries, they largely remain outside the ambit of the child labour law for it relates only to those children working outside their homes in work-shops, factories, etc.
The existence of bonded labour in India has been recognised for long. Despite progressive legislation, it is not uncommon in parts of the country for parents to pledge their children to employers – in both the agricultural and urban unorganised sectors – against loans taken with the understanding that the child will work throughout its life for a pittance. Appallingly, many children when adults buy their freedom by offering their offspring in exchange.
Economic Situation
Indian economic situation today presents a kaleidoscopic picture that conveys hopes to some and frustrations to many.
At the time of Independence the expectations were raised very high. The early Five-Year Plans fully reflected it. There was a perspective of high growth, full employment, reduction of poverty and above all a socialist pattern of society based on distributive justice and equality of opportunity. The socialist pattern, clearly not a dogmatic variety sought to give the “commanding heights” to the public sector and control the private sector so as to serve social goals. A series of controls of production, prices, imports, physical control to direct scarce and essential commodities, location of industries, development of backward areas, etc. have been introduced. Unfortunately, this led to a controlled regime that bred inefficiency and corruption. While Thatcherism and Reagonism gained popularity in the West and capitalist world increasingly took to an era of liberalization and globalization, India too gradually welcomed liberalization. But that, in turn, led to heavy borrowing to finance increased the imports. Borrowing was easier than taxation and politically more popular. Total external debt increased from 20.6 billion in 1980 to 71.6 billion in 1991 — a 248% increase as against 71% increase in GNP. As on March 31, 1993 the official figure of debt is $93 billion as against 83.5 billion for China. No wonder net flow of funds is turning negative. By June 1991, the foreign exchange resources were pushed down to a nadir, not enough to meet even 10 days imports for a big country of the size of India. India’s credit rating which was on A+, fell to a B. The country also found it difficult to meet her debt service obligations. It was at this juncture that the IMF-World Bank inspired structural adjustment policies were clamped down on India.
The Industrial Policy Statement of July 22, l 991 which came close on heels of the announcement of the new economic reform, a policy towards greater decontrol and delicensing was announced. The role of public sector has been reduced and the number of industries exclusively under public sector was reduced to just 8. A regime of privatisation has been started in full force.
It is to be noted that Indian industry has over the years developed a highly diversified structure, considerable entrepreneurship and a vastly expanded capital market. This was in no small measure due to the autonomous and self-reliant path India has pursued over the years.
India has also built up a stable agricultural sector. Today, she has become self-sufficient in food grains. But except in Kerala land reforms were not implemented. The rural sector remains highly skewed and hierarchical.
Now the pertinent question is whether the regime of liberalization, globalization and privatisation will help the country achieve the cherished goals for which it fought the British? The answer is a firm no. The comprador business interests and the large middle class and upper echelons of society welcome the change as heralding a new world order. The WTO which will be in place from July 1, 1995, will usher in a global capitalist world order dictated more by considerations of profit. This will undermine the nation-State’s efforts to help the marginalised, poor and the needy without entitlements to participate in the market. Already the style of development has done the damage. The country’s economy has been hijacked by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and business people. Indians are now part of what they call “emerging nations” with freedom for international capital to operate in India while millions of small man categories are denied of credit. International financial community is finding India an attractive place for investment. From the near-zero situation today’s fore amounts to $17 billion. This is an all-time high and is expected to grow. It shows that inter alia foreign investors are prepared to park their hinds in India. Now really India faces what some economists call a Dutch disease. While this surges ahead the two questions need be answered. First, are the increase in financial capital improving production or are we ushering a casino economy? Second, do the financial reforms help the credit needs of vulnerable sections of society? The answers are clearly in the negative.
The sum and substance of what is said is that the new reforms are targeted towards the 250 and odd million people who only can be part of the market friendly regime. For a country with over 870 million population the question is can we leave the rest of 600 and above to the mercies of the market. The trickle down theory is totally irrelevant.
In India, by government’s own admission, 42% of its population is below poverty line (those who cannot afford a daily intake of 2100 calorie), nearly one-fifth of the total urban population, or 20.1%, is poor. Independent scholars, however, estimate the incidence of urban poverty to be around 37 percent. The most disturbing feature of these official and independent estimates relates to the figures on the absolute number of urban poor. While official estimates show that there has been a significant decline in the number of urban poor from 47.3 million to 41.7 million between 1982 to 1988, independent estimates indicate just the opposite trend, an increase in the absolute number of persons in absolute poverty, from 69.2 million to 77 million for the same period. Experts apprehend that the discouraging trend pertaining to the growth of absolute numbers of urban poor in India has accelerated after the introduction of the economic reform process since the 1990s. It is estimated that during 1991-92, the first year of the adjustment and stabilization process of the Indian economy, there has been an overall increase of 10.7 million in the number of poor in the country, of which 2.6 million has taken place in urban areas.
The New Economic Policy (NEP)
The Government has undertaken sweeping economic changes since July 1991 that at best services the interest of merely the tiny, privileged minority. Under pressure from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the internal lobbies the trend is to integrate the economy into the global market ignoring local, political, economic conditions and cultural backgrounds. India is compelled to start from an unequal situation. The opening up policy undermines self-reliance, in the long term pursuit of independent development path. Fears are expressed whether it will even affect the nation’s sovereignty and independence. The NEP has resulted in devaluation of rupee, inflation, rise in prices of essential commodities, cuts on education, health and social welfare. The government for all practical purposes is withdrawing from its responsibility of providing social security and welfare to the poor.
Implications Of GATT
The overall tendency will be towards expansion of agri-business enterprises and bringing more land under export oriented cash crops at the expense of subsistence agriculture. This will lead to larger concentration of land at the top and swelling of the ranks of landless agricultural labour.
This is a direct onslaught on the impoverished masses. The traditional knowledge systems about seeds, live stock and agriculture as well as soil re-generation and water management will be destroyed.
The NEP and the GATT has political implications too. The elected representative and the entire parliamentary process may lose its power to represent the people’s grievances. Democratic rights face abridgment with talk of moratorium on protest, struggles and strikes. Workers and union rights will be curtailed to suit the regiments of TNCs and local industrialists with amendments of labour laws. The military and paramilitary are being strengthened to control and suppress people’s organised struggles.
There is sigh of hope in the protest movements gathering momentum against the NEP and GATT. There are groups and articulate sections of intelligentsia thinking of alternative economic policies which have generated considerable interest throughout the country.
Environment
At the time of India’s Independence, our priority was the provision of the basic human needs of food, fuel, shelter, health, employment, etc. This was also reflected in the Five Year Plans. In the early 70s problems related to environment began to receive the direct attention of the central government. Nearly 10 years later, in 1980, the Department of Environment was set up. From 1985, there is a full fledged Ministry of Environment and Forests to serve as the focal point in the administrative structure for the planning, promotion and coordination of environmental and forestry programmes.
Environmental protection and ecological balance are essential to ensure that development is sustainable in the long run. Environmental problems in India can be broadly classified as (i) those arising as negative effects of the very process of development, and (ii) those arising from conditions of poverty and underdevelopment.
The Environment (Protection) Act 1986, is a landmark legislation as it empowers the Central Government to take all necessary measures for protection of the environment and to plan and execute a nation-wide programme for prevention, control and abatement of environmental pollution, including laying down standards for discharge of environmental pollutants and for quality of environment. It aims at plugging the loopholes in the other related acts.
The Ministry of Environment and Forests announced a National Policy for Abatement of Pollution in 1992, according to which the key elements for pollution prevention are adoption of best available clean and feasible technologies rather than end-pipe treatment. This implies serious consideration of production process changes which involve significant improvement in energy and water conservation.
Under the same policy, 17 categories of heavily polluting and environmentally critical industries have been identified for introduction of pollution control measures through economic and policy instruments on a priority basis. The industries are cement, thermal power plants, distilleries, sugar, fertilizers, oil refineries, among others.
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has identified 13 grossly sly polluted stretches of rivers Sabarmati, Subernarekha, Godavari, Krishna, Indus (tributaries), Sutlej, Ganga (tributaries), Yamuna, and a few others to formulate short-term result oriented programmes.
The Environment Ministry has identified 19 critically polluted areas in the country which need special attention as regards pollution control. These include Vapi (Gujarat), Singrauli (Uttar Pradesh), Korba (Madhya Pradesh), Talcher (Orissa), Howrah (West Bengal), Chembur (Maharashtra), Najafgarh (Delhi), among others.
Sixty per cent of air pollution in India is due to emissions of vehicles moving on the roads network. Although traffic density and petrol and oil consumption are not high as compared with those in the developed countries, the rate of pollutant emission per vehicle in India is 35% higher than that in the USA on account of poor maintenance of vehicles and roads, lack of traffic planning, a high proportion of old, overused vehicles, crowded highways and a large proportion of two and three wheelers.
The objective of all development is to enhance the economic and general well-being of the people so that their standard and quality of living can be improved. It is imperative to incorporate environmental aspects in development projects right at the inception stage, to prevent the erosion and contamination of the resource base itself. Environmental Impact Assessment (ElA), which was introduced in the country in 1978, is a handy tool to assess the environmental compatibility of the development projects in terms of their location, suitability of technology, efficiency in resource utilization and recycling etc. At present ElAs are done for almost all major projects including thermal power, mining, river valley, industries, atomic power, new towns, communication projects etc. Projects which are sensitive and located in already environmentally degraded areas and those which are central government projects costing over Rs.200 million, are also subject to EIA.
Forests are a renewable source and contribute substantially to economic development. They also play a major role in enhancing the quality of the environment. India has an area of 75.23 million hectares notified as forests, of which 40.6 million hectares is classified as re-served and 21.5 million hectare is protected forests. About 19.47% of the total geographical area of the country is under actual forest cover.
Priority areas are: (a) Conservation of bio-diversity including forests, marine life, and mountain ecosystems; (b) Conservation of soil and moisture and prevention of pollution of water sources; (c) Control of industrial pollution and wastes; (d) Access to clean technologies; (e) Tackling urban environmental issues (safe drinking water, sanitation facilities and garbage disposal); (f) Strengthening environmental education, training, awareness and resource management; (g) Alternative energy plan.
In spite of government regulations environmental degradation is going on because of extreme poverty of the people and politician-official-busines/industry nexus.
Social Security
Social security has been listed in the Concurrent List of the Constitution signifying the responsibility of both the Centre and the States in this sphere. The task of providing meaningful social security continues to be challenging in view of financial as well as operational constraints, high incidence of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and the large size of unorganized/informal sector.
The permanent social security benefits provided through legislative measures like Workmen’s Compensation Act, Employees State Insurance Act, Employees Provident Fund & Miscellaneous Provisions Act, Maternity Benefit Act, and Payment of Gratuity Act, etc. cater to mainly organised urban labour comprising less than 10% of the total labour force. Most of the States/UTs have pension schemes for the old and disabled, but due to eligibility criteria of income and age, only about 9% of old-age population gets the benefit of pension. In the last few years, group insurance schemes for landless agricultural labourers, life insurance scheme for Integrated Rural Development Programme (lRDP) beneficiaries and group insurance for certain categories of workers belonging to weaker sections of the society have been introduced. The coverage under permanent social security measures, however, continues to be small.
Emphasis is, therefore, being given to transitory measures of social security. These include special employment and anti-poverty programmes, welfare programmes for development of women, children, weaker sections of the society, handicapped and disabled persons, Public Distribution System for supply of essential commodities at low prices, and subsidised education and basic health care. The National Renewal Fund has been established to fund schemes for compensation, retraining and redeployment of workers affected by economic restructuring.
Rural Poor
More and more areas under the cultivation of food crops have now been planted with export oriented cash crops. This has led to non-availability of food leading to starvation and hunger among the rural poor. With drastic reduction in subsidies, majority of the poor cannot afford to purchase food grains from the open market. The government schemes to help the poor, for instance, IRDP have declined from Rs. 3.4 million in 1989-90 to Rs. 2 million in 1992-93. The employment generated under the JRY (Jawahar Rozgar Yojana) also declined from 864 million man-days in l989-90 to 778 million man-days in 1992-93. In both, the decline was pronounced during the period of SAP, the years 1991-92 and 1992-93.
The logic of liberalization prevalent in the industrial sector holds true also for the agricultural sector. In the name of efficiency small farmers are gradually driven out of agriculture by big farmers and agribusinesses. This has become a major area of concern especially in relation to the question of food security which is critical in a country where a third of the population lives below the poverty line. The gross area under food grains cultivation came down from 127.7 million hectares in 1988-89 to 126.8 million hectares in 1991-92. As against this, cultivated area under cash crops has shown magnificent increase during same period. This trend towards commercialization will only intensify with the export-or-perish principles being now vigorously pursued under SAP. Further, a disturbing trend is observed in terms of the per capita availability of food grains which declined from 494.5 grams per day in 1989 to 476.4 grams in 1992.
Moreover such averages of macro statistics reveal little about food security at the threshold level. Growing food stocks and availability are meaningless if households lack the purchasing power or resources to ensure an adequate nutritional intake. Further, security at household level may reveal nothing about intra-household distribution of food, which by convention discriminate against women. Clearly then, the notion of food security must be considered in terms that reach beyond a simple stock-taking of government storage facilities.
Besides, the government is amending the land ceiling laws to provide easy access of MNCs to penetrate the agricultural and food processing industries. Number of legislations and regulations to protect the small and marginal farmers and agricultural workers remain on paper and unimplemented with the meagre benefits of the measures being siphoned away by big farmers and farm-lords.
The export-drive will lead to further inequalities in land ownership. Small land owners, without the means to shift production to more profitable export crops will have no option then but to sell off their lands and become landless labourers. Employment opportunities are minimum in the export-crops, the sector being highly capital intensive. This will lead to massive unemployment, mass migration, disruption of family and family life, child labour and intensified exploitation of women. Thus, the globalization of agriculture leads to the demise of rural life and society.
Urban Poor
During the decade of the ‘80s there has been considerable shrinkage in employment opportunities. The rate of growth of employment has been decreasing every year during the decade. The later half, 1987 to 1990 has actually witnessed negative growth rate in employment in the private sector and the rate in public sector was only around 1.5%. The official figures based on registration in employment exchanges underes-timate the severity of unemployment and under the liberalized process of economic competition, the industry will begin to retrench workers which was not so easy even in the recent past. Along with the “exit policy” that is sought to be implemented, employees will be forced to choose between unemployment and a lower wage rate. Moreover with the full adoption of market economy in Indian conditions where labour supply exceeds demand, the real wages will be compressed by 30-40% of the present level. Unskilled labour with very low bargaining power because of its unorganised character and poverty will hit the hardest.
Since the last couple of years a new phenomenon of employees resorting to employment of contract and casual workers is noticed. This has led to further drop in the strength work of the permanent work force. According to one assessment out of a total of 300 million in the work force, nearly 270 million persons work as casual or contract workers or self-employed.
The shrinkage of job opportunities in rural areas forces growing migration of rural people and thus to an increase in urban population — from 29 million in the ‘60s to 56 million in the ‘80s.
The situation has led to a perceptible increase in indebtedness of the rural poor. In the absence of institutional mechanism local issuers advance money to the toilers at rates as high as l00% and use goons to recover interest and capital with criminal intermediation and even torture. This is one factor which leads to the almost all-pervasive criminalisation of the city.
The criminalisation is now also a political phenomenon. The external reactionary forces are based upon criminal terror which permeates both the work sites and the residential areas. The subsequent erosion of democratic institutions is capitalised upon by forces of religious fundamentalism and communalism who receive no mean aid from the policy paralysis on socio-cultural issues of the Central and State governments.
Women are, of course, the special victims of this abysmal urban conditions. The shrinking job market renders them unemployed. They then fall into the trap of the highly exploitative contract labour system. Self-employment schemes have been more or less uniform failures. These have not led to the empowerment of women but only pushed them into the money economy on the most adverse terms. The current spurt in globalisation and liberalisation will further depress their incomes, intensify their exploitation and deteriorate their workshop conditions.
This, obviously, leads to deterioration of living standards and conditions. Health already vulnerable due to malnutrition, hard work and violence suffers even more. Commercialisation of health services deprives them of even the minimum relief.
Women are also targets of dubious and hazardous population control technologies, once again heavily pushed by the international financial institutions. Cynically the authorities use them as guinea pigs and play havoc with their bodies, minds and lives.
The helplessness on the one hand and the rampant consumerism and commercialisation on the other propels many women into prostitution. Not only are they demanded thus but put in bondage, subjected to violence and ultimately smitten with STDs and AIDS.
In the last two decades, most rapidly growing cities have become the symbols of unequal development. These islands of prosperity deny the urban poor even the basic right to shelter. As a result, they are forced to live on pavements, railway tracks etc. Under pressure to release urban land for non-housing purposes or for expensive residential complexes, the State responds with demolition and eviction of the urban poor from their dwellings. The threat of eviction is an ever-present danger with guarantee to alternative site almost non-existent.
Authorities fail to realise that the urban poor are an integral part of urban society and they have to play a key role in maintaining the informal economy of most of the metropolises, a major contribution which goes unrecognised. In this sector too privatization and monetization has made its impact. People are lured into the logic of privatization schemes by the promise of security of tenure. Often this leads to the eviction of the poor in favour of schemes for high and middle income sections. The promise of alternative accommodation under “sites-and-services” schemes becomes meaningless as people under the pressure of inflation and unemployment are unable to repay loan installments. This is all the more true as the alternative sites are invariably far away from places where people have their livelihood, (where they can work as domestic workers or petty vendors, recycle waste, ply rickshaws, etc.) As the Jawahar Rojgar Yajana scheme has been cut by 38%, loans for self-employment are also not easy. Under economic pressure people will sell their right to accommodation and again squat elsewhere illegally.
Conclusion
“The Asian miracles,” or “the Asian tigers” and the “emerging economies” phenomena, are all indicative of the new economic development taking place in Asia. This rapid economic development in several parts of Asia has brought with it new problems as well as possibilities.
It is clear that market-based economic policies, alone, cannot create conditions to eliminate poverty and unemployment. In fact, the inequalities created by market forces and their distortions will worsen existing social crises in parts of Asia. In other words, country experiences in Asia show that growth alone cannot and will not solve the problems of poverty and unemployment without state intervention.
The tendency of several Asian countries to incur large expenditures on defence during the Cold War period must give way to diverting those resources to social sectors. Mahbubul Haq has summed it up succinctly: “It is time for the politicians and the generals to interpret national security not just for their land but for their people. Not just territorial security but human security.” At the same time, the post-Cold War scenario must not give space for economic conflict or economic warfare resulting in the domination of one economy over the other.
In Asia, social justice for the deprived sections – minorities, women, oppressed castes, indigenous people – is the priority. If appropriate actions are not taken the gap between the burgeoning middle class, with its consumerist values, and the poor will continue to widen. There is an urgent need for the rich and affluent to reorient their life styles and consumption patterns because the available resources of Asia are not enough to sustain these high consumption levels of a few.
by George Mathew
Director, Institute of Social Science New Delhi
Introduction
India has a sub-continental dimension, covering an area of 32,87,263 sq.km, with a population of 846.30 million as on 1 March 1991. According to the 1993 estimate India’s population is 896,567,000. The annual population growth rate for 1980-93 was 2.0%. The second most populous country in the world, India is the home of 16% of the world’s population and accounts for 2.42% of the total world area. The population of India as recorded at each decennial census from 1901 onward has grown steadily except during 1911-21 when it showed a decline. In absolute terms, the country’s population has increased by 161.12 million during the decade 1981-91, which is ten times the population of Australia and more than twice that of Germany.
An encouraging feature is the decline in the growth rate of population which marginally decreased from 24.66% in 1971-81 to 23.85% during 1981-91.
India comprises 25 states and seven union territories (see map). In most states the population growth rate declined during the decade. However, seven states and three union territories, which account for one-third of the country’s population, recorded an increase in the growth rate. Nagaland registered the highest growth rate of 56.86% while Kerala, the lowest rate of 13.98 %. Uttar Pradesh continues to be the largest state, population-wise, with 16.44% of the people, followed by Bihar comprising 10.21% of the country’s population.
Bombay metro is the most populated city with an urban population of 12.60 million, followed by Calcutta with 11.02 million, Delhi with 9.42 million and Madras with 5.42 million. The population density (inhabitants per sq.km.) has gone up from 216 in 1981 to 273 persons in 1993.
Other important facts (1991) are:
Crude Birth rate
30.5
Crude Death rate
10.2
Infant Mortality rate
91.0
1980
1993
Population age 0 to 5
29%
25%
Population age 6 to 14
38%
34%
Percentage of
Urban population to total population
26.00
1981
1991
Percentage of
total workers to total population
36.70
37.68
Percentage of
male workers
52.62
52.56
Percentage of
female workers
19.67
22.73
1980
1993
Daily newspapers, copies per 1000
21
32
Radio receivers
per 1000 inhabitants
38
79
1980
1990
Television receivers
per 1000 inhabitants
4
32
Declining Sex Ratio
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Indian census is the decline in the female proportion of the population. The sex ratio (number of females per 1000 males) in India has been generally adverse to women. The ratio has also declined over the years except in the decade 1971 to 1981 when it slightly improved from 927 to 934. In 1991, it fell again to 927 per thousand males. The state of Kerala, known for its high physical quality of life like high literacy and with near more than one-fifth of its population Christians, presents a sharply different picture as the sex ratio is 1036 females per 1000 males. The inhuman neglect of girl child and discrimination against women account for this abnormal trend.
Political
India has a functioning democracy, the largest in the world. More than 500 million people – 18 years and above – out of its 844 million (1991) elected members of the Lower House of the Parliament in the latest general elections held in May and June 1991. Fifty-three per cent voters exercised their franchise in the latest elections. The percentage, though, was considered to be the lowest ever in the history of Indian elections. Higher levels of people’s participation has been a hallmark of Indian elections. For the last 44 years since Independence, democratic elections have been a regular feature in this country.
The political ethos today in India is rooted in the long years of the National Movement for Independence. India’s first organized attempt to overthrow British colonial power was in 1857 but it took the shape of a mass movement or mass struggle in the early decades of the present century. It permeated all levels of social life. Political education became part of Indian life through cultural organisations, educational institutions, reform movements, caste and communal associations and, above all, the plurality of parties, their ideologies, and media. Literature, art, theatre, etc. grew around the themes of nationalism and democracy. It is not wrong to say that today India is an “intensely political land and politics is in the people’s bloodstream.” Competing ideologies and parties attempt through all available means to educate the masses on issues affecting them, not only on the eve of elections but even at other times. In India there will be an election every year at one or another place, state or local level, if not a by-election to the Parliament. Each general election is a near social revolution in its magnitude and sweep. The discussions and de-bates are not confined to local issues; they are analysed in public meetings, from a national and international perspective. People know that their collective future is determined by the political process and that they have a stake in it. This means not indifference but active participation in elections.
India is one of the biggest functioning democracy in the world. But superimposed on a feudal social framework unexposed to real democratic traditions the people find it difficult to make a real success of their newly found democratic praxis. Once charismatic leaders like Pandit Nehru who practised democratic principles were removed the weakness of this democracy surfaced. The ruling party which ruled most of the time has degenerated.
A situation that has been developing in the recent past causing concern for the future of democracy is that of tensions and violence during campaigning and voting – in some regions to the extent of impeding the electoral process. In the 1991 elections more than 200 people lost their lives in election-related violence. This has resulted in politics and politicians being shown in a bad light, as well as a decline in political standards.
The institutions of democracy – parties, press (media), parliament, judiciary and local self-governments – create political awareness and therefore these institutions have to be nurtured and carefully protected by all democratic societies. India has had ups and downs in this vital area but on the whole there has been a fair amount of public awareness and protests whenever political expediency tried to subvert the institutions of democracy. The late Mrs. Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister attempted in her own way to bend these institutions to suit her interests but the people of India asserted their democratic rights and have continued to do so whenever they have felt that there have been subtle or not so subtle attempts at manipulation.
Perhaps the potential danger to India democracy is the tendency to mix religion with politics. Hindus constitute 82.63% of India’s population. This majority religious community is not homogeneous but constituted of many hierarchically placed castes and tribes. Some of them may not even identify themselves as Hindus. In the last few elections Hindu upper caste symbols were evoked by one of the political parties, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its front organisations to gain power. As a result, from an average 11% vote that this party used to get, it garnered 24% of the votes in the 1991 elections to the Parliament. This trend, if continued, can pose a threat to India’s secular character, minorities, and democracy itself. When religion and politics mix in the name of protecting a majority religious community’s interests, then fascism is not far away.
However, the 1993 November elections to four State Assemblies have demonstrated that peoples of India do not approve extreme right-wing Hindutva to come to power. The BJP lost its hold oil three out of four States it ruled from 1991-92.
The recent 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment has given constitutional status to local bodies below and at the District Level, known as panchayats. There will be about 500 district level, 5000 Block (middle level) and 2,30,000 village panchayats within the next one year. 2600000 elected members will take office from 1994, out of which 80,0000 will be women (one-third seats are reserved for women).
Literacy
For the purpose of census a person is deemed as literate if he or she can read and write any language with understanding. The literacy rate in the country, excluding J&K, is 52.21% (64.13 for males and 39.29 for females). The pupil – teacher ratio at primary level in 1980 was 45 and it has risen to 47 in 1990. The percentage of female teachers at primary level in 1980 was 27% and in 1990 it rose slightly to 28%.
The National Policy on Education (NPE) adopted in 1986 and updated in 1992 constitutes a landmark in the Indian educational policy. Having recognised the problem of working children, NPE proposes to tackle it with a programme of non-formal education as an integral part of a strategy to provide basic education for all. There are an estimated 153 million Indian children between the ages of 6 and 14 years. The age specific enrollment ratio is estimated to be 80%. Yet, there are still over 28 million out-of-school children in the 6-14 age-group, over 14 million of whom according to official estimates are working children. The drop out rate is also high: nearly half the children who enter class 1 drop out before reaching class V and two-thirds before class VIII. The target population of the National Literacy Movement (NLM) are the 121 million illiterates in the 15 to 35 age-group. With all these India can still claim the “dubious distinction” of leading the world in the number of illiterates.
Human Rights
The Indian sub-continent has been the scene of numerous ethnic and political conflicts. To quell unrest, India has unfortunately resorted to the enactment of laws at both national and state levels which contradict the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the Government of India is a signatory. The National Security Act (NSA), the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TDAPA), the Disturbed Areas Act (DAA) and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) are of particular concern in this respect. In the states of Kashmir, Punjab, North East and Andhra Pradesh, the Government of India is engaged in paramilitary operations which have involved arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, destruction of citizen’s properties, extra-judicial executions and deaths in police and army custody.
The Indian Government was under pressure to do something about its human rights policies and record. The pressure, explicitly and implicitly, took the form of the Government of India being told by International Aid Agencies that unless there was some positive evidence to show that it was doing something about human rights, India would not be entitled to economic and financial aid and support.
In 1992, the Government of India made a proposal to establish a Human Rights Commission and the Parliament passed the bill to constitute the National Commission on Human Rights in 1993.
The human rights and civil liberties movement in the country which is strong and active, is highly critical of the way the Human Rights Commission was established as they saw in it a move to appease international organisations, institutions and powerful lobbies abroad.
Minorities
Hindus, the religious majority in India, comprise 82.6% of the population of our country. Muslims are the largest religious minority. Though Muslims constitute only 11.4% of India’s population their absolute number, 92 million, makes them the second largest national population in the world. Christians, numbering 16.2 million form 2.4%, Sikhs 2.0%, Buddhists 0.7% and others including unclassified persons constitute 0.4%. To evaluate the efficacy of various safeguards in the Constitution for the protection of the religious minorities and to make recommendations to ensure effective implementation and enforcement of all the safeguards and the laws, a Minorities Commission was set up in January 1978.
Lower Castes And Tribals
The caste system is unique to India. The 82.6% Hindus (except the tribals) are hierarchically divided into castes on the basis of purity pollution principle and division of labour by ascription. The move to do away with the caste system in the independent India has met with little or no success. On the contrary, caste identi-ties have been strengthened and play an important part in bargaining in the political and economic spheres. The assertion of rights by the once op-pressed castes in recent years has resulted in brutal suppression and conflicts bordering on caste wars. India’s 51.6 million tribals (7.8% of the total population), are considered part of the Hindu population. Although the country has excellent laws to protect the rights of the tribals, the development path embarked upon by India, that has involved the construction of large dams, super thermal power plants, large-scale mining etc., has uprooted them without adequate measures for their rehabilitation, resulting in their economic and cultural impoverishment. India has 104.7 million (15.8%) lower castes commonly known as Scheduled Castes.
Child Labour
Varying estimates abound as to the number of working children in India. According to the 1981 census, work is defined as “participation in any economically productive activity.” Main workers are those who have worked for the major part of the year preceding the date of enumeration and whose main activity has been in either cultivation or as agricultural labourers or in household industry or in other work. Marginal workers are those who have done some work but cannot be classified as main workers. According to the 1981 census, there were 13.59 million working children in India. The National Sample Survey revealed that there were 17.36 million working children in India. Using another yardstick, the Operations Research Group comes to the following conclusions:
A working child is that child who was enumerated during the survey as a child within 5 to 15 age bracket and who is at remunerative work, may be paid or unpaid, and busy any hour of the day within or out-side the family... estimated working children in our country are around 44.0 million. Out of these about 21.0% are in urban areas and the rest are rural based.
While the census definition appears to be unreasonably restrictive since it is unwilling to recognise that children play a very important economic role, even if it is not directly productive, the ORG figures seem closer to reality and underline the enormity of the problem.
Article 24 of the Indian Constitution prohibits children below the age of fourteen from working in any factory, mine or other hazardous job. Yet, children are routinely found employed in mines, on construction sites and in factories in carpet weaving, beedi making, gem industry and so on. Article 39 of the Directive Principles of State Policy directs the states to ensure just and humane conditions of work. The Child Labour Regulation Act, the Factories Act and other industrial legislations do exist according to which the present situation of child labour is not in consonance with the dignity of a child.
While India’s child labour laws prohibit children from being employed in factories and mines, where wages are high, their provisions do not apply to cottage industries, restaurants, households and the agriculture sector, where wages are low. In fact, the agricultural sector stands out as the biggest single employer of child labour in India.
In India, it is primarily female children who maintain the household in both rural and urban areas by undertaking non-productive activities like caring for younger siblings, cooking, cleaning, washing and fetching water. Parents are thus able to go out and work as wage labour because the household work is done by their children, especially daughters.
The bias against the female child is both the cause and the effect of relegating her to such a role in contrast to the more productive type of work that the male child is typically engaged in.
Though a large number of female children assist their mothers in a variety of home based industries, they largely remain outside the ambit of the child labour law for it relates only to those children working outside their homes in work-shops, factories, etc.
The existence of bonded labour in India has been recognised for long. Despite progressive legislation, it is not uncommon in parts of the country for parents to pledge their children to employers – in both the agricultural and urban unorganised sectors – against loans taken with the understanding that the child will work throughout its life for a pittance. Appallingly, many children when adults buy their freedom by offering their offspring in exchange.
Economic Situation
Indian economic situation today presents a kaleidoscopic picture that conveys hopes to some and frustrations to many.
At the time of Independence the expectations were raised very high. The early Five-Year Plans fully reflected it. There was a perspective of high growth, full employment, reduction of poverty and above all a socialist pattern of society based on distributive justice and equality of opportunity. The socialist pattern, clearly not a dogmatic variety sought to give the “commanding heights” to the public sector and control the private sector so as to serve social goals. A series of controls of production, prices, imports, physical control to direct scarce and essential commodities, location of industries, development of backward areas, etc. have been introduced. Unfortunately, this led to a controlled regime that bred inefficiency and corruption. While Thatcherism and Reagonism gained popularity in the West and capitalist world increasingly took to an era of liberalization and globalization, India too gradually welcomed liberalization. But that, in turn, led to heavy borrowing to finance increased the imports. Borrowing was easier than taxation and politically more popular. Total external debt increased from 20.6 billion in 1980 to 71.6 billion in 1991 — a 248% increase as against 71% increase in GNP. As on March 31, 1993 the official figure of debt is $93 billion as against 83.5 billion for China. No wonder net flow of funds is turning negative. By June 1991, the foreign exchange resources were pushed down to a nadir, not enough to meet even 10 days imports for a big country of the size of India. India’s credit rating which was on A+, fell to a B. The country also found it difficult to meet her debt service obligations. It was at this juncture that the IMF-World Bank inspired structural adjustment policies were clamped down on India.
The Industrial Policy Statement of July 22, l 991 which came close on heels of the announcement of the new economic reform, a policy towards greater decontrol and delicensing was announced. The role of public sector has been reduced and the number of industries exclusively under public sector was reduced to just 8. A regime of privatisation has been started in full force.
It is to be noted that Indian industry has over the years developed a highly diversified structure, considerable entrepreneurship and a vastly expanded capital market. This was in no small measure due to the autonomous and self-reliant path India has pursued over the years.
India has also built up a stable agricultural sector. Today, she has become self-sufficient in food grains. But except in Kerala land reforms were not implemented. The rural sector remains highly skewed and hierarchical.
Now the pertinent question is whether the regime of liberalization, globalization and privatisation will help the country achieve the cherished goals for which it fought the British? The answer is a firm no. The comprador business interests and the large middle class and upper echelons of society welcome the change as heralding a new world order. The WTO which will be in place from July 1, 1995, will usher in a global capitalist world order dictated more by considerations of profit. This will undermine the nation-State’s efforts to help the marginalised, poor and the needy without entitlements to participate in the market. Already the style of development has done the damage. The country’s economy has been hijacked by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and business people. Indians are now part of what they call “emerging nations” with freedom for international capital to operate in India while millions of small man categories are denied of credit. International financial community is finding India an attractive place for investment. From the near-zero situation today’s fore amounts to $17 billion. This is an all-time high and is expected to grow. It shows that inter alia foreign investors are prepared to park their hinds in India. Now really India faces what some economists call a Dutch disease. While this surges ahead the two questions need be answered. First, are the increase in financial capital improving production or are we ushering a casino economy? Second, do the financial reforms help the credit needs of vulnerable sections of society? The answers are clearly in the negative.
The sum and substance of what is said is that the new reforms are targeted towards the 250 and odd million people who only can be part of the market friendly regime. For a country with over 870 million population the question is can we leave the rest of 600 and above to the mercies of the market. The trickle down theory is totally irrelevant.
In India, by government’s own admission, 42% of its population is below poverty line (those who cannot afford a daily intake of 2100 calorie), nearly one-fifth of the total urban population, or 20.1%, is poor. Independent scholars, however, estimate the incidence of urban poverty to be around 37 percent. The most disturbing feature of these official and independent estimates relates to the figures on the absolute number of urban poor. While official estimates show that there has been a significant decline in the number of urban poor from 47.3 million to 41.7 million between 1982 to 1988, independent estimates indicate just the opposite trend, an increase in the absolute number of persons in absolute poverty, from 69.2 million to 77 million for the same period. Experts apprehend that the discouraging trend pertaining to the growth of absolute numbers of urban poor in India has accelerated after the introduction of the economic reform process since the 1990s. It is estimated that during 1991-92, the first year of the adjustment and stabilization process of the Indian economy, there has been an overall increase of 10.7 million in the number of poor in the country, of which 2.6 million has taken place in urban areas.
The New Economic Policy (NEP)
The Government has undertaken sweeping economic changes since July 1991 that at best services the interest of merely the tiny, privileged minority. Under pressure from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the internal lobbies the trend is to integrate the economy into the global market ignoring local, political, economic conditions and cultural backgrounds. India is compelled to start from an unequal situation. The opening up policy undermines self-reliance, in the long term pursuit of independent development path. Fears are expressed whether it will even affect the nation’s sovereignty and independence. The NEP has resulted in devaluation of rupee, inflation, rise in prices of essential commodities, cuts on education, health and social welfare. The government for all practical purposes is withdrawing from its responsibility of providing social security and welfare to the poor.
Implications Of GATT
The overall tendency will be towards expansion of agri-business enterprises and bringing more land under export oriented cash crops at the expense of subsistence agriculture. This will lead to larger concentration of land at the top and swelling of the ranks of landless agricultural labour.
This is a direct onslaught on the impoverished masses. The traditional knowledge systems about seeds, live stock and agriculture as well as soil re-generation and water management will be destroyed.
The NEP and the GATT has political implications too. The elected representative and the entire parliamentary process may lose its power to represent the people’s grievances. Democratic rights face abridgment with talk of moratorium on protest, struggles and strikes. Workers and union rights will be curtailed to suit the regiments of TNCs and local industrialists with amendments of labour laws. The military and paramilitary are being strengthened to control and suppress people’s organised struggles.
There is sigh of hope in the protest movements gathering momentum against the NEP and GATT. There are groups and articulate sections of intelligentsia thinking of alternative economic policies which have generated considerable interest throughout the country.
Environment
At the time of India’s Independence, our priority was the provision of the basic human needs of food, fuel, shelter, health, employment, etc. This was also reflected in the Five Year Plans. In the early 70s problems related to environment began to receive the direct attention of the central government. Nearly 10 years later, in 1980, the Department of Environment was set up. From 1985, there is a full fledged Ministry of Environment and Forests to serve as the focal point in the administrative structure for the planning, promotion and coordination of environmental and forestry programmes.
Environmental protection and ecological balance are essential to ensure that development is sustainable in the long run. Environmental problems in India can be broadly classified as (i) those arising as negative effects of the very process of development, and (ii) those arising from conditions of poverty and underdevelopment.
The Environment (Protection) Act 1986, is a landmark legislation as it empowers the Central Government to take all necessary measures for protection of the environment and to plan and execute a nation-wide programme for prevention, control and abatement of environmental pollution, including laying down standards for discharge of environmental pollutants and for quality of environment. It aims at plugging the loopholes in the other related acts.
The Ministry of Environment and Forests announced a National Policy for Abatement of Pollution in 1992, according to which the key elements for pollution prevention are adoption of best available clean and feasible technologies rather than end-pipe treatment. This implies serious consideration of production process changes which involve significant improvement in energy and water conservation.
Under the same policy, 17 categories of heavily polluting and environmentally critical industries have been identified for introduction of pollution control measures through economic and policy instruments on a priority basis. The industries are cement, thermal power plants, distilleries, sugar, fertilizers, oil refineries, among others.
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has identified 13 grossly sly polluted stretches of rivers Sabarmati, Subernarekha, Godavari, Krishna, Indus (tributaries), Sutlej, Ganga (tributaries), Yamuna, and a few others to formulate short-term result oriented programmes.
The Environment Ministry has identified 19 critically polluted areas in the country which need special attention as regards pollution control. These include Vapi (Gujarat), Singrauli (Uttar Pradesh), Korba (Madhya Pradesh), Talcher (Orissa), Howrah (West Bengal), Chembur (Maharashtra), Najafgarh (Delhi), among others.
Sixty per cent of air pollution in India is due to emissions of vehicles moving on the roads network. Although traffic density and petrol and oil consumption are not high as compared with those in the developed countries, the rate of pollutant emission per vehicle in India is 35% higher than that in the USA on account of poor maintenance of vehicles and roads, lack of traffic planning, a high proportion of old, overused vehicles, crowded highways and a large proportion of two and three wheelers.
The objective of all development is to enhance the economic and general well-being of the people so that their standard and quality of living can be improved. It is imperative to incorporate environmental aspects in development projects right at the inception stage, to prevent the erosion and contamination of the resource base itself. Environmental Impact Assessment (ElA), which was introduced in the country in 1978, is a handy tool to assess the environmental compatibility of the development projects in terms of their location, suitability of technology, efficiency in resource utilization and recycling etc. At present ElAs are done for almost all major projects including thermal power, mining, river valley, industries, atomic power, new towns, communication projects etc. Projects which are sensitive and located in already environmentally degraded areas and those which are central government projects costing over Rs.200 million, are also subject to EIA.
Forests are a renewable source and contribute substantially to economic development. They also play a major role in enhancing the quality of the environment. India has an area of 75.23 million hectares notified as forests, of which 40.6 million hectares is classified as re-served and 21.5 million hectare is protected forests. About 19.47% of the total geographical area of the country is under actual forest cover.
Priority areas are: (a) Conservation of bio-diversity including forests, marine life, and mountain ecosystems; (b) Conservation of soil and moisture and prevention of pollution of water sources; (c) Control of industrial pollution and wastes; (d) Access to clean technologies; (e) Tackling urban environmental issues (safe drinking water, sanitation facilities and garbage disposal); (f) Strengthening environmental education, training, awareness and resource management; (g) Alternative energy plan.
In spite of government regulations environmental degradation is going on because of extreme poverty of the people and politician-official-busines/industry nexus.
Social Security
Social security has been listed in the Concurrent List of the Constitution signifying the responsibility of both the Centre and the States in this sphere. The task of providing meaningful social security continues to be challenging in view of financial as well as operational constraints, high incidence of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and the large size of unorganized/informal sector.
The permanent social security benefits provided through legislative measures like Workmen’s Compensation Act, Employees State Insurance Act, Employees Provident Fund & Miscellaneous Provisions Act, Maternity Benefit Act, and Payment of Gratuity Act, etc. cater to mainly organised urban labour comprising less than 10% of the total labour force. Most of the States/UTs have pension schemes for the old and disabled, but due to eligibility criteria of income and age, only about 9% of old-age population gets the benefit of pension. In the last few years, group insurance schemes for landless agricultural labourers, life insurance scheme for Integrated Rural Development Programme (lRDP) beneficiaries and group insurance for certain categories of workers belonging to weaker sections of the society have been introduced. The coverage under permanent social security measures, however, continues to be small.
Emphasis is, therefore, being given to transitory measures of social security. These include special employment and anti-poverty programmes, welfare programmes for development of women, children, weaker sections of the society, handicapped and disabled persons, Public Distribution System for supply of essential commodities at low prices, and subsidised education and basic health care. The National Renewal Fund has been established to fund schemes for compensation, retraining and redeployment of workers affected by economic restructuring.
Rural Poor
More and more areas under the cultivation of food crops have now been planted with export oriented cash crops. This has led to non-availability of food leading to starvation and hunger among the rural poor. With drastic reduction in subsidies, majority of the poor cannot afford to purchase food grains from the open market. The government schemes to help the poor, for instance, IRDP have declined from Rs. 3.4 million in 1989-90 to Rs. 2 million in 1992-93. The employment generated under the JRY (Jawahar Rozgar Yojana) also declined from 864 million man-days in l989-90 to 778 million man-days in 1992-93. In both, the decline was pronounced during the period of SAP, the years 1991-92 and 1992-93.
The logic of liberalization prevalent in the industrial sector holds true also for the agricultural sector. In the name of efficiency small farmers are gradually driven out of agriculture by big farmers and agribusinesses. This has become a major area of concern especially in relation to the question of food security which is critical in a country where a third of the population lives below the poverty line. The gross area under food grains cultivation came down from 127.7 million hectares in 1988-89 to 126.8 million hectares in 1991-92. As against this, cultivated area under cash crops has shown magnificent increase during same period. This trend towards commercialization will only intensify with the export-or-perish principles being now vigorously pursued under SAP. Further, a disturbing trend is observed in terms of the per capita availability of food grains which declined from 494.5 grams per day in 1989 to 476.4 grams in 1992.
Moreover such averages of macro statistics reveal little about food security at the threshold level. Growing food stocks and availability are meaningless if households lack the purchasing power or resources to ensure an adequate nutritional intake. Further, security at household level may reveal nothing about intra-household distribution of food, which by convention discriminate against women. Clearly then, the notion of food security must be considered in terms that reach beyond a simple stock-taking of government storage facilities.
Besides, the government is amending the land ceiling laws to provide easy access of MNCs to penetrate the agricultural and food processing industries. Number of legislations and regulations to protect the small and marginal farmers and agricultural workers remain on paper and unimplemented with the meagre benefits of the measures being siphoned away by big farmers and farm-lords.
The export-drive will lead to further inequalities in land ownership. Small land owners, without the means to shift production to more profitable export crops will have no option then but to sell off their lands and become landless labourers. Employment opportunities are minimum in the export-crops, the sector being highly capital intensive. This will lead to massive unemployment, mass migration, disruption of family and family life, child labour and intensified exploitation of women. Thus, the globalization of agriculture leads to the demise of rural life and society.
Urban Poor
During the decade of the ‘80s there has been considerable shrinkage in employment opportunities. The rate of growth of employment has been decreasing every year during the decade. The later half, 1987 to 1990 has actually witnessed negative growth rate in employment in the private sector and the rate in public sector was only around 1.5%. The official figures based on registration in employment exchanges underes-timate the severity of unemployment and under the liberalized process of economic competition, the industry will begin to retrench workers which was not so easy even in the recent past. Along with the “exit policy” that is sought to be implemented, employees will be forced to choose between unemployment and a lower wage rate. Moreover with the full adoption of market economy in Indian conditions where labour supply exceeds demand, the real wages will be compressed by 30-40% of the present level. Unskilled labour with very low bargaining power because of its unorganised character and poverty will hit the hardest.
Since the last couple of years a new phenomenon of employees resorting to employment of contract and casual workers is noticed. This has led to further drop in the strength work of the permanent work force. According to one assessment out of a total of 300 million in the work force, nearly 270 million persons work as casual or contract workers or self-employed.
The shrinkage of job opportunities in rural areas forces growing migration of rural people and thus to an increase in urban population — from 29 million in the ‘60s to 56 million in the ‘80s.
The situation has led to a perceptible increase in indebtedness of the rural poor. In the absence of institutional mechanism local issuers advance money to the toilers at rates as high as l00% and use goons to recover interest and capital with criminal intermediation and even torture. This is one factor which leads to the almost all-pervasive criminalisation of the city.
The criminalisation is now also a political phenomenon. The external reactionary forces are based upon criminal terror which permeates both the work sites and the residential areas. The subsequent erosion of democratic institutions is capitalised upon by forces of religious fundamentalism and communalism who receive no mean aid from the policy paralysis on socio-cultural issues of the Central and State governments.
Women are, of course, the special victims of this abysmal urban conditions. The shrinking job market renders them unemployed. They then fall into the trap of the highly exploitative contract labour system. Self-employment schemes have been more or less uniform failures. These have not led to the empowerment of women but only pushed them into the money economy on the most adverse terms. The current spurt in globalisation and liberalisation will further depress their incomes, intensify their exploitation and deteriorate their workshop conditions.
This, obviously, leads to deterioration of living standards and conditions. Health already vulnerable due to malnutrition, hard work and violence suffers even more. Commercialisation of health services deprives them of even the minimum relief.
Women are also targets of dubious and hazardous population control technologies, once again heavily pushed by the international financial institutions. Cynically the authorities use them as guinea pigs and play havoc with their bodies, minds and lives.
The helplessness on the one hand and the rampant consumerism and commercialisation on the other propels many women into prostitution. Not only are they demanded thus but put in bondage, subjected to violence and ultimately smitten with STDs and AIDS.
In the last two decades, most rapidly growing cities have become the symbols of unequal development. These islands of prosperity deny the urban poor even the basic right to shelter. As a result, they are forced to live on pavements, railway tracks etc. Under pressure to release urban land for non-housing purposes or for expensive residential complexes, the State responds with demolition and eviction of the urban poor from their dwellings. The threat of eviction is an ever-present danger with guarantee to alternative site almost non-existent.
Authorities fail to realise that the urban poor are an integral part of urban society and they have to play a key role in maintaining the informal economy of most of the metropolises, a major contribution which goes unrecognised. In this sector too privatization and monetization has made its impact. People are lured into the logic of privatization schemes by the promise of security of tenure. Often this leads to the eviction of the poor in favour of schemes for high and middle income sections. The promise of alternative accommodation under “sites-and-services” schemes becomes meaningless as people under the pressure of inflation and unemployment are unable to repay loan installments. This is all the more true as the alternative sites are invariably far away from places where people have their livelihood, (where they can work as domestic workers or petty vendors, recycle waste, ply rickshaws, etc.) As the Jawahar Rojgar Yajana scheme has been cut by 38%, loans for self-employment are also not easy. Under economic pressure people will sell their right to accommodation and again squat elsewhere illegally.
Conclusion
“The Asian miracles,” or “the Asian tigers” and the “emerging economies” phenomena, are all indicative of the new economic development taking place in Asia. This rapid economic development in several parts of Asia has brought with it new problems as well as possibilities.
It is clear that market-based economic policies, alone, cannot create conditions to eliminate poverty and unemployment. In fact, the inequalities created by market forces and their distortions will worsen existing social crises in parts of Asia. In other words, country experiences in Asia show that growth alone cannot and will not solve the problems of poverty and unemployment without state intervention.
The tendency of several Asian countries to incur large expenditures on defence during the Cold War period must give way to diverting those resources to social sectors. Mahbubul Haq has summed it up succinctly: “It is time for the politicians and the generals to interpret national security not just for their land but for their people. Not just territorial security but human security.” At the same time, the post-Cold War scenario must not give space for economic conflict or economic warfare resulting in the domination of one economy over the other.
In Asia, social justice for the deprived sections – minorities, women, oppressed castes, indigenous people – is the priority. If appropriate actions are not taken the gap between the burgeoning middle class, with its consumerist values, and the poor will continue to widen. There is an urgent need for the rich and affluent to reorient their life styles and consumption patterns because the available resources of Asia are not enough to sustain these high consumption levels of a few.
ONE CHINESE CHRISTIAN’S VIEW OF GOD
ONE CHINESE CHRISTIAN’S VIEW OF GOD
by K.H. Ting
Bishop K.H. Ting is President of the China Christian Council. Bishop Ting presented this
paper in the Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines on the occasion of the conferral of the Doctor in Theology (honoris causa) degree in November 1993 by the Union
Theological Seminary, Dasmaninas, Curiste, Philippines.
First of all I want to thank Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines and the President of the Seminary for the honor you give the church in China and to me personally. J trust that what you do today will result in a closer relationship between our two peoples and our two churches. We in China have a high evaluation of the witness of the Christians in the Philippines to Jesus Christ, calling people’s attention to human worth as children of God and to democracy as the mandate of history in accordance to the will of God. We, the church in China, have much to learn from our fellow Christians in the Philippines. Thank you also for the invitation to address this distinguished group of church leaders, professors and students. This is a good opportunity for me to bring the warm greetings of your fellow Christians in China. Let me also thank the President for the kind exaggerations in his citations.
I would like to speak to you on how more and more Chinese Christians, and I as one of them, have come to think of God as Love, as the only possible way to think of God at all. Perhaps I do not need to say that what I have to tell you is not so much for the instruction of Philippine Christians as a report to you on how we in China are trying to help our constituencies to grow into a more mature spirituality with a vision of God intellectually honest, spiritually edifying and morally challenging.
Let me begin by telling you something about myself. I was born into a family in which the grandfather on my mother’s side was an Anglican priest. I received the larger part of my formal education in China. My career in the church can be simply divided into two periods. The first period was in working among students through the Student Christian Movement, first in China, then in Canada and then on the international scene. The second period has been with theological education and religious studies in China, centering in Nanjing Theological Seminary and Nanjing University. Both of these periods are important to me in my theological formation and reorientation.
I would like to help you to see right away where I stand on your theological map. After the great social and political turmoil, called the Cultural Revolution, which cut off my theological and intellectual communication with the outside world for over ten years, I found upon resuming my international contacts three Western schools of thought most consonant with the fumblings and gropings of Chinese Christian intellectuals: liberation theology, writings in one way or another influenced by process philosophy, and the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin. This you will find understandable given not only the theme of change passed down from influential ancient Chinese classics, but also the motif of liberation and all the dynamism and zigzags of change and reform China has been going through.
My early training made me think of God largely in terms of his omnipotence, his power, his might, his self-sufficiency, his self-containment, his changelessness. Yes, in terms of his love too, but love was not God’s supreme attribute and was often overshadowed by his righteousness, his severity, his anger, his judgment and his arbitrariness.
The vicissitudes of all these years have moved me to a spirituality which affirms Christ’s place in God’s whole creative process and sees the kind of love embodied in Jesus in the four Gospels as the nature of God. Love is at the back of God’s whole creative process. Today, when I say Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, I mainly think of him as the revealer of God’s love. From struggling with the question of Jesus’ divinity and Godlikeness I have moved to the Christlikeness of God. Love becomes for me God’s number one attribute.
I am fascinated by what Alfred North Whitehead says towards the end of his Process and Reality about what he calls the “Galilean vision” in which God is perceived as a being loving, creating, educating, persuading and expecting human responses. When the Western world accepted Christianity, he says, Caesar conquered. Let me quote:
The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly... But the deeper idolatry of fashioning God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God the attributes which be-longed exclusively to Caesar.
Whitehead laments over the fact that, in so much of Christianity, God is conceived in terms of “the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover.” China, of course, has no lack of our own autocratic rulers in whose image various Chinese religions have fashioned their God. But it is the all-encompassing love at the heart of reality, sharing the joys and the sufferings of the created order, and moving the world towards greater coherence and greater love, that Christ reveals.
Let me help you locate me in your socio-political map too. My conviction in God as love and my conviction in socialism as the path China is to take strengthen each other. Socialism is love organized for the masses of the people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European state power has had its effect on me, but has not shattered my conviction that, for China, neither feudalism, nor colonialism, nor capitalism is acceptable as an alternative to the social system we call socialism with Chinese characteristics which, in forty years has enabled twelve hundred million human beings to live more decently and gives us ground to hope that they can live still more decently by the end of the century. A longer view of history tells us that socialism is not an accident or a mishap that can now be erased. Socialism has only had a very short history. It has no charted course and no model to copy. While I am quite upset by many of the things done in the name of socialism, I still think socialism is a good name to describe the road for Chinese society that avoids the pitfalls of feudalism, colonialism, and capitalism all of which China has experienced and found disappointing. It is a road that liberates and develops the country’s productive power to an un-precedented extent, thus improving the people’s material livelihood, cultural level and self-respect.
We attach our hope to socialism not so much because we know exactly in detail what the socialist way is, but because we are fed up by all the other choices open to us. What is common in these other choices is the large scale of private ownership of the means of production and the unfair distribution of wealth, requiring the masses of the people to bear the cost by enduring endless suffering. People in that state cannot easily recognize God as love. We look for a corrective to all social systems which believe that the nastiest of men and women with the nastiest self-interest will work for the benefit of the masses of the people. What is called for is a brake to the un-bridled search for private profit. The failure of the Soviet Union which was just one experiment in social planning has done nothing to improve the attractiveness of feudalism, colonialism and capitalism. It is quite unthinkable that China is now to switch itself away from its socialist path and return to the old ways. I do believe that, with the gradual rise in economic and educational level, we can expect an increase of democracy in this socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Does the advocacy of atheism affect my support of socialism? No, it does not. I look at both atheists and ourselves as half-completed products in God’s creative process and that we are all becoming. There are atheists who are sincerely devoted to efforts to fashion a more humane society. Their cry against God is really a cry in favor of humanity. Their atheism is worthy of our sympathy in so far as it is a rejection of the false notions of God we religious people propagate. Who is the God they have in mind when they deny his existence? It is the tyrannical Jupiter who chains Prometheus to a cliff because he does good for humanity, or the ruthless underworld King Yen in Chinese popular religion who sends out emissaries to fetch people to be thrown in everlasting hell fire as punishment for their misdeeds. Atheistic humanism is actually one form of human seeking after God without its own knowing it, and can be our ally as it can help greatly to salvage authentic faith. We can join forces with humanitarians of many sorts to oppose the idolatry in those views of God that diminish human dignity and block human liberation. Some of my friends abroad are surprised that I sometimes speak as highly as I do of certain atheists and communists. There is a part of me as a Christian which utters a hearty “Amen” to what they advocate, a part of me that refuses to rebuke them, but rather warms to them and wants to work with them against forces we both want to combat, even though we get our orders in doing certain things together from different chains of command.
The New Testament is the source of our knowledge about Jesus Christ and through him about God. The record is fragmentary and does not give us as complete a picture of the person as we like to have. But two portraits are unmistakable:
(1) Jesus the great lover of men and women.
He tells us about the father who believes in the prodigal son and waits for his return, about the shepherd who has his ninety-nine sheep in the fold and yet cannot bear to lose one that is missing. We see a Jesus who weeps with those who suffer and rejoices with those who rejoice, a Jesus who refuses to condemn a person who has gone astray but protects her, a Jesus who has loved his friends and loves them to the end, one who tells his friends, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.” This Jesus introduces a new scale of things in which Sabbath rules are subordinate to human needs. The picture we get of him in the New Testament touches the chord in all that is best in human nature: the lonely man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his outpouring of love and sympathy, his suffering and agony, his tender words on the cross, and the final victory over ruthless power. He lived and died as one who loves, a true lover.
(2) Jesus the Cosmic Christ.
He is not just the crucified one on the cross, the only image that has meaning to many Christians. He is the one who sustains the universe by his word of power. His is the primacy over all creation. He exists before all things, and all things are held together in him. He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. In him all things were created, things visible and in-visible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers. It is not that God carried his work of creation for six days and then stopped and ceded its control to the successful rebellion of Satan, and then the redeemer came into the world to rescue some individuals out of it to be returned to God, leaving all others to eternal damnation. As creativity is inexhaustible and creation a long, on-going process, Christ has been and is with God, in all the creative work in the universe to this day. He has to do with creation just as much as he has to do with redemption. Redemption is a part of God’s ongoing work of making a world of his design. The New Testament does not allow us to think that God is the creator and not the redeemer, and Christ is the redeemer and not the creator.
Now the essence of Christianity is the appeal to the person of Christ as revelation of the nature of God. When these two portraits of Jesus, Jesus the lover of men and women and Jesus the Christ in whom all things are created, are put together, we come to know God whom Christ reveals as the Cosmic-Lover, or Creator-Lover.
It is unfortunate that this is not the God many Christians in China, and I suppose, elsewhere know to be God.
The most commonly recognized attributes of God are his almightiness, his omnipresence, his omniscience, his severity, his unrelenting judgment of non-believers. We talk of love as an attribute of God too, but his love seems to be very arbitrary and enjoyed only by a few who are specially selected, or who please God in special ways. To the others, God is essentially a punisher-rewarder, a being hard to please. Hence, fear of God’s displeasure is the mark of much that goes under the name of Christianity.
I was brought up in a Christianity very much like that. We went to church every Sunday to curry God’s favor. If there was illness within the family, it was God’s punishment for some hidden sin. When I went to be a theological student to prepare myself for the ministry of the church, the common notion in the family and in church circles was that such an act of dedication would win God’s pleasure and bring health and well being to myself and my family.
Today, as I move about the Chinese church at its grassroots, I find that this is still the level of spirituality many are at. In some villages as many as half of the Christians became Christians when there was illness on the part of some family members who supposedly got healed when Christians came to pray and drive out the evil spirits. Many Christians at the grass-roots enjoy “testimony meetings” in which anybody can speak. At such meetings a common pattern emerges: some misfortune happens to a person, he or she searches for his or her sin or sins; after identifying the sin or sins and confessing to God and much praying, God moves away the misfortune. On the other hand, misfortune lingers and intensifies for those who are hard-hearted and do not repent, culminating in unending suffering and death in the family.
Holding on to this image of God is accompanied by a spirituality of acquisition and utilitarianism. We give God praises and honor and get, in return, health, wealth, protection from catastrophe in this life and eternal bliss in heaven. It is highly ironic that, while Christ was laughed at for his ability to save others but not himself, so many of his followers are only eager to save themselves by getting on the church as Noah’s Ark without a faith that concerns itself with the welfare of the people outside.
The image of God we find here is essentially what Whitehead calls that of the “ruling Caesar” with all his power over human fate. It is so far from the Christ we have come to know, to love and to adore as we read the four Gospels, with all his tenderness and rejection of power and coercion over men and women.
To say that God is love is to affirm God as the Cosmic Lover and to see love as the force directing God’s ever continuing work of creation, redemption and sanctification. Love is the supreme attribute of God, above all other attributes and subordinating them all. Christians make Christlike love the definition of God, the motivation in all God’s work of creation in nature and history. It is first of all in the ongoing process of creation that we are to see the supreme expression of God’s love. It is not a mark of higher religion to discern God’s love in terms of personal fortunes and misfortunes. God looks forward to and is working towards the emergence of a commonwealth of human beings who, out of their free will, choose to be co-creators with him of goodness, truth and beauty and of all things of value to God and to humanity. God’s love does not coerce. It works through education, persuasion, transfiguration and sanctification. In God’s creative process the world and all of us are thus far half-made products. Through this process men and women are being transformed from obedience to arbitrary commands to willing acceptance of the invitation of love, i.e. transferred from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
We have been trained to think of God largely in terms of superior power which can either crush us or make us powerful. This is often a projection and legitimation of our power-hungry, exploitative, monopolistic social structures and attitudes. But, in the New Testament, God’s power comes out of weakness and he exercises sovereignty through crosses, not through conquests. We must not fashion God in the image of Egyptian, Persian, Roman and Chinese potentates, thereby giving to God the attributes which belong exclusively to Pharaoh, Caesar and their like. We need to relegate to the side all those attributes such as his absolute power, his absolute knowledge, his absolute changelessness, his absolute dominion, his arbitrariness and intolerance, imposed on God as a reflection of an absolutization of human beings’ own cravings, especially those of male human beings. These attributes need to be deabsolutized and subordinated to God’s supreme attribute of love.
God is no cosmic tyrant who forces obedience. He lures, invites and waits for free responses and does not resort to scolding and reprimanding. That is why we in China find the Gospels’ analogy of transformation of seeds and the growth of plants and trees in air, rain and sun more appealing than the image of the sheep which are constantly treated with rod and staff. God is the will to fellowship, not the will to power. We want to depart from a severe and intimidating God, a bulldozer God, who is not the Chrislike God the four Gospels lure us to want to believe in. We like the image of God in Hosea 11:4, of one who secures us with reins, leads us with bonds of love, lifts us like a little child to the parent’s cheek, and bends down to feed us. When I was a theological student, I wrestled with the problem of Christ’s two natures, ending up with his divinity. Today, it seems to me that to confess that Christ is Godlike is not half so important as to affirm that God is Christlike and that Christlike love is the way God runs the cosmos.
You have seen that, in affirming love as the supreme attribute of God, I have relegated his omnipotence and omniscience to the second place. We cannot think of God in his self-contained existence, in abstraction from the world, but in terms of his creative activity in the world. He works in his creation tirelessly and inexhaustibly to bring about the realization of the potentialities which he has implanted there. God in his love craves for the emergence in the universe of persons whom he can have fellowship with. Fellowship implies freedom. Human enjoyment of this freedom implies God’s respect for human choices and therefore the curtailment of his own omnipotence. In so far as human beings have the right to make choices, including wrong choices, and in so far as God respects this right, God does not have a pre-knowledge of how a person will exercise his or her freedom or right to make choices. Thus, God’s omniscience is also relativized. By permitting freedom to his creatures and accepting their misuse of it, God can bring about results more attainable than in any other way. The possibility of disobedience is the price of liberty, and liberty is the condition of selfhood and selfhood the preliminary to fellowship.
There is a popular Chinese movie condemning feudalism in which a young woman’s fiance has died but she is still compelled to marry into the family as daughter-in-law. After the tearful wedding she enters the bridal chamber, only to find a five-foot long trunk of a tree on the bed. She is expected to live the rest of her life with that log as her husband. How can she have fellowship and communion with such a non-person?
God being love, more and more of us are seeing that the father figure is not necessarily the only or the best analogy for characterizing him. For centuries and to this day, in China anyway, what is taken for granted in the father is his severity, and in the mother her loving kindness. In fact, the proper Chinese way to refer to one’s own father in polite conversation is the “severe one in my family,” while “the loving one in my family” is reserved for the mother. We all know of fathers of whom love is hardly an attribute. There are Biblical passages which show no hesitation in using the image of the mother to indicate how God loves. In Isaiah 66 and 49, God says: “As a mother comforts her son, so shall I myself comfort you,” and “Can a woman forget the infant of her breast, or a mother the child of her womb? But should even these forget, I shall never forget you.” And in Psalm 131, the Psalmist says, “I am calm and quiet like a weaned child clinging to its mother.” Thus, to say that God has the attributes of the father is not to say he does not have the attributes of the mother.
To assert the cosmic dimension of Christ’s role and to ascertain God as the Cosmic Lover does not mean that everything that happens in nature and history is God’s work and design. Many things are happening that contradict God’s loving kindness and are harmful to the welfare of the world. Creation is a long process yet incomplete and, as Paul insists, imperfect and subject to frustration, especially as it involves the making of free human beings who are not slaves but children of God. A world still in the making must be one in which ugliness and devilry have their place. Events all over the world are telling us how tortuous the way is towards the perfect community of free, loving children of God, and how dear a price in suffering God and human beings have to pay for every inch 6f progress towards that goal.
That God is the great lover working out his purpose for the world brings in its train an understanding of all reality not as being so much as becoming. It gives us hope for history and beyond. We have no idea as to how the end of history as we know it will come about, but can be sure it will be the triumph of love and grace.
We receive great consolation in reading Romans 5:15-17 where a comparison is made between the effect upon the world of Christ’s grace and Adam’s fall. There Paul speaks of the infinitely greater impact of Christ on humanity than that of Adam, using such expressions as “much more,” “vastly exceeding,” “in far greater measure,” and “out of all proportion.” We are elated and get a sense of liberation upon reading this. The Incarnation profoundly affects human and cosmic life in all its aspects. It is inconceivable that any area of human endeavor should be permanently affected by Adam’s fall and unaffected by grace. Too often, Christians make the effect of Adam’s fall universal while limiting Christ’s grace only to the few who profess a belief in him. It really amounts to saying that the Incarnation of the Son of God has made less of an impact on humanity than the fall of Adam. But this is not a view that can go along with the vision of God whose name is love and whose concern is to bring about through redemption, education and sanctification a humanity that will reach perfection as free, intelligent and voluntary co-creators with God.
The way from alpha to omega is not always a straight line, but love accompanies the pilgrims. “The Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” in Dante’s great words, becomes a Love which brings meaning to human existence and hence redeems men and women from triviality, frustration, cheapness and lovelessness. We do not have to through tortuous ways, but we remember Christ’s words: “A woman in labor is in pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets her anguish in her joy that a child has been born in the world.” We see the darkness that appears before dawn as well as the dawn that will surely arrive after darkness. As is so well said in Psalm 30: “Tears may linger at nightfall, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” This view of nature, history and ourselves as becoming instills life with meaning and direction. This is essentially a long-ranged and forward-looking worldview. Tielhard de Chardin makes a moving prophecy when he says, “Someday, after we have mastered the wind, the waves, the tide and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love; and then for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.” I also like the cosmology and view of history Lu Shun, the greatest modern Chinese writer, presents so beautifully:
Myriads of beautiful people and beautiful deeds weave a heavenly tapestry, moving like tens of thousands of flying stars, spreading far and wide, even to infinity. Things and their reflections dissolve, flicker, expand, melt into each other, but then draw back, approaching a semblance of their original selves. Their edges are variable as those of summer clouds, shot through with sunlight, emitting flames the colour of mercury. All things without exception mesh and intervene into a fabric, ever lively, ever unfolding.
Christians as a little flock are heartened by the vision of Christ leading the whole creation towards the goal of unity in God. In this saving work of his, all human movements of progress, liberation, democracy, humanization and love are joined. The church is important as a place where Christ is explicitly known, confessed, adored and preached. The world needs the church’s gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace. But God’s saving work is not coterminous with the boundary of the church. It has the whole cosmos as its arena. As Vatican II says, “Many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside the visible structure of the church and so the helps necessary for salvation are always and everywhere available to all who are obedient to the dictates of conscience.” I like to think that, if these elements are arcs of a circle, Christ is the perfect round in whom they will all be completed, fulfilled and united.
In spite of the darkness human beings in many parts of the world find themselves in, there have always been courageous souls with their firm belief in the final triumph of God’s grace. I like to close with a few inspiring lines left us by Victor Hugo:
Will the future ever arrive? – Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pinpoint, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it; nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
Human beings are fumbling and groping for a faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. We all see in a mirror, dimly. This address tells you where I am, and where many of my fellow-Christians in China are, that is, the sort of spirituality the Holy Spirit is guiding us to in our pilgrimage. I will want to be open to any help that enables further growth in understanding.
by K.H. Ting
Bishop K.H. Ting is President of the China Christian Council. Bishop Ting presented this
paper in the Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines on the occasion of the conferral of the Doctor in Theology (honoris causa) degree in November 1993 by the Union
Theological Seminary, Dasmaninas, Curiste, Philippines.
First of all I want to thank Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines and the President of the Seminary for the honor you give the church in China and to me personally. J trust that what you do today will result in a closer relationship between our two peoples and our two churches. We in China have a high evaluation of the witness of the Christians in the Philippines to Jesus Christ, calling people’s attention to human worth as children of God and to democracy as the mandate of history in accordance to the will of God. We, the church in China, have much to learn from our fellow Christians in the Philippines. Thank you also for the invitation to address this distinguished group of church leaders, professors and students. This is a good opportunity for me to bring the warm greetings of your fellow Christians in China. Let me also thank the President for the kind exaggerations in his citations.
I would like to speak to you on how more and more Chinese Christians, and I as one of them, have come to think of God as Love, as the only possible way to think of God at all. Perhaps I do not need to say that what I have to tell you is not so much for the instruction of Philippine Christians as a report to you on how we in China are trying to help our constituencies to grow into a more mature spirituality with a vision of God intellectually honest, spiritually edifying and morally challenging.
Let me begin by telling you something about myself. I was born into a family in which the grandfather on my mother’s side was an Anglican priest. I received the larger part of my formal education in China. My career in the church can be simply divided into two periods. The first period was in working among students through the Student Christian Movement, first in China, then in Canada and then on the international scene. The second period has been with theological education and religious studies in China, centering in Nanjing Theological Seminary and Nanjing University. Both of these periods are important to me in my theological formation and reorientation.
I would like to help you to see right away where I stand on your theological map. After the great social and political turmoil, called the Cultural Revolution, which cut off my theological and intellectual communication with the outside world for over ten years, I found upon resuming my international contacts three Western schools of thought most consonant with the fumblings and gropings of Chinese Christian intellectuals: liberation theology, writings in one way or another influenced by process philosophy, and the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin. This you will find understandable given not only the theme of change passed down from influential ancient Chinese classics, but also the motif of liberation and all the dynamism and zigzags of change and reform China has been going through.
My early training made me think of God largely in terms of his omnipotence, his power, his might, his self-sufficiency, his self-containment, his changelessness. Yes, in terms of his love too, but love was not God’s supreme attribute and was often overshadowed by his righteousness, his severity, his anger, his judgment and his arbitrariness.
The vicissitudes of all these years have moved me to a spirituality which affirms Christ’s place in God’s whole creative process and sees the kind of love embodied in Jesus in the four Gospels as the nature of God. Love is at the back of God’s whole creative process. Today, when I say Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, I mainly think of him as the revealer of God’s love. From struggling with the question of Jesus’ divinity and Godlikeness I have moved to the Christlikeness of God. Love becomes for me God’s number one attribute.
I am fascinated by what Alfred North Whitehead says towards the end of his Process and Reality about what he calls the “Galilean vision” in which God is perceived as a being loving, creating, educating, persuading and expecting human responses. When the Western world accepted Christianity, he says, Caesar conquered. Let me quote:
The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly... But the deeper idolatry of fashioning God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God the attributes which be-longed exclusively to Caesar.
Whitehead laments over the fact that, in so much of Christianity, God is conceived in terms of “the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover.” China, of course, has no lack of our own autocratic rulers in whose image various Chinese religions have fashioned their God. But it is the all-encompassing love at the heart of reality, sharing the joys and the sufferings of the created order, and moving the world towards greater coherence and greater love, that Christ reveals.
Let me help you locate me in your socio-political map too. My conviction in God as love and my conviction in socialism as the path China is to take strengthen each other. Socialism is love organized for the masses of the people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European state power has had its effect on me, but has not shattered my conviction that, for China, neither feudalism, nor colonialism, nor capitalism is acceptable as an alternative to the social system we call socialism with Chinese characteristics which, in forty years has enabled twelve hundred million human beings to live more decently and gives us ground to hope that they can live still more decently by the end of the century. A longer view of history tells us that socialism is not an accident or a mishap that can now be erased. Socialism has only had a very short history. It has no charted course and no model to copy. While I am quite upset by many of the things done in the name of socialism, I still think socialism is a good name to describe the road for Chinese society that avoids the pitfalls of feudalism, colonialism, and capitalism all of which China has experienced and found disappointing. It is a road that liberates and develops the country’s productive power to an un-precedented extent, thus improving the people’s material livelihood, cultural level and self-respect.
We attach our hope to socialism not so much because we know exactly in detail what the socialist way is, but because we are fed up by all the other choices open to us. What is common in these other choices is the large scale of private ownership of the means of production and the unfair distribution of wealth, requiring the masses of the people to bear the cost by enduring endless suffering. People in that state cannot easily recognize God as love. We look for a corrective to all social systems which believe that the nastiest of men and women with the nastiest self-interest will work for the benefit of the masses of the people. What is called for is a brake to the un-bridled search for private profit. The failure of the Soviet Union which was just one experiment in social planning has done nothing to improve the attractiveness of feudalism, colonialism and capitalism. It is quite unthinkable that China is now to switch itself away from its socialist path and return to the old ways. I do believe that, with the gradual rise in economic and educational level, we can expect an increase of democracy in this socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Does the advocacy of atheism affect my support of socialism? No, it does not. I look at both atheists and ourselves as half-completed products in God’s creative process and that we are all becoming. There are atheists who are sincerely devoted to efforts to fashion a more humane society. Their cry against God is really a cry in favor of humanity. Their atheism is worthy of our sympathy in so far as it is a rejection of the false notions of God we religious people propagate. Who is the God they have in mind when they deny his existence? It is the tyrannical Jupiter who chains Prometheus to a cliff because he does good for humanity, or the ruthless underworld King Yen in Chinese popular religion who sends out emissaries to fetch people to be thrown in everlasting hell fire as punishment for their misdeeds. Atheistic humanism is actually one form of human seeking after God without its own knowing it, and can be our ally as it can help greatly to salvage authentic faith. We can join forces with humanitarians of many sorts to oppose the idolatry in those views of God that diminish human dignity and block human liberation. Some of my friends abroad are surprised that I sometimes speak as highly as I do of certain atheists and communists. There is a part of me as a Christian which utters a hearty “Amen” to what they advocate, a part of me that refuses to rebuke them, but rather warms to them and wants to work with them against forces we both want to combat, even though we get our orders in doing certain things together from different chains of command.
The New Testament is the source of our knowledge about Jesus Christ and through him about God. The record is fragmentary and does not give us as complete a picture of the person as we like to have. But two portraits are unmistakable:
(1) Jesus the great lover of men and women.
He tells us about the father who believes in the prodigal son and waits for his return, about the shepherd who has his ninety-nine sheep in the fold and yet cannot bear to lose one that is missing. We see a Jesus who weeps with those who suffer and rejoices with those who rejoice, a Jesus who refuses to condemn a person who has gone astray but protects her, a Jesus who has loved his friends and loves them to the end, one who tells his friends, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.” This Jesus introduces a new scale of things in which Sabbath rules are subordinate to human needs. The picture we get of him in the New Testament touches the chord in all that is best in human nature: the lonely man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his outpouring of love and sympathy, his suffering and agony, his tender words on the cross, and the final victory over ruthless power. He lived and died as one who loves, a true lover.
(2) Jesus the Cosmic Christ.
He is not just the crucified one on the cross, the only image that has meaning to many Christians. He is the one who sustains the universe by his word of power. His is the primacy over all creation. He exists before all things, and all things are held together in him. He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. In him all things were created, things visible and in-visible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers. It is not that God carried his work of creation for six days and then stopped and ceded its control to the successful rebellion of Satan, and then the redeemer came into the world to rescue some individuals out of it to be returned to God, leaving all others to eternal damnation. As creativity is inexhaustible and creation a long, on-going process, Christ has been and is with God, in all the creative work in the universe to this day. He has to do with creation just as much as he has to do with redemption. Redemption is a part of God’s ongoing work of making a world of his design. The New Testament does not allow us to think that God is the creator and not the redeemer, and Christ is the redeemer and not the creator.
Now the essence of Christianity is the appeal to the person of Christ as revelation of the nature of God. When these two portraits of Jesus, Jesus the lover of men and women and Jesus the Christ in whom all things are created, are put together, we come to know God whom Christ reveals as the Cosmic-Lover, or Creator-Lover.
It is unfortunate that this is not the God many Christians in China, and I suppose, elsewhere know to be God.
The most commonly recognized attributes of God are his almightiness, his omnipresence, his omniscience, his severity, his unrelenting judgment of non-believers. We talk of love as an attribute of God too, but his love seems to be very arbitrary and enjoyed only by a few who are specially selected, or who please God in special ways. To the others, God is essentially a punisher-rewarder, a being hard to please. Hence, fear of God’s displeasure is the mark of much that goes under the name of Christianity.
I was brought up in a Christianity very much like that. We went to church every Sunday to curry God’s favor. If there was illness within the family, it was God’s punishment for some hidden sin. When I went to be a theological student to prepare myself for the ministry of the church, the common notion in the family and in church circles was that such an act of dedication would win God’s pleasure and bring health and well being to myself and my family.
Today, as I move about the Chinese church at its grassroots, I find that this is still the level of spirituality many are at. In some villages as many as half of the Christians became Christians when there was illness on the part of some family members who supposedly got healed when Christians came to pray and drive out the evil spirits. Many Christians at the grass-roots enjoy “testimony meetings” in which anybody can speak. At such meetings a common pattern emerges: some misfortune happens to a person, he or she searches for his or her sin or sins; after identifying the sin or sins and confessing to God and much praying, God moves away the misfortune. On the other hand, misfortune lingers and intensifies for those who are hard-hearted and do not repent, culminating in unending suffering and death in the family.
Holding on to this image of God is accompanied by a spirituality of acquisition and utilitarianism. We give God praises and honor and get, in return, health, wealth, protection from catastrophe in this life and eternal bliss in heaven. It is highly ironic that, while Christ was laughed at for his ability to save others but not himself, so many of his followers are only eager to save themselves by getting on the church as Noah’s Ark without a faith that concerns itself with the welfare of the people outside.
The image of God we find here is essentially what Whitehead calls that of the “ruling Caesar” with all his power over human fate. It is so far from the Christ we have come to know, to love and to adore as we read the four Gospels, with all his tenderness and rejection of power and coercion over men and women.
To say that God is love is to affirm God as the Cosmic Lover and to see love as the force directing God’s ever continuing work of creation, redemption and sanctification. Love is the supreme attribute of God, above all other attributes and subordinating them all. Christians make Christlike love the definition of God, the motivation in all God’s work of creation in nature and history. It is first of all in the ongoing process of creation that we are to see the supreme expression of God’s love. It is not a mark of higher religion to discern God’s love in terms of personal fortunes and misfortunes. God looks forward to and is working towards the emergence of a commonwealth of human beings who, out of their free will, choose to be co-creators with him of goodness, truth and beauty and of all things of value to God and to humanity. God’s love does not coerce. It works through education, persuasion, transfiguration and sanctification. In God’s creative process the world and all of us are thus far half-made products. Through this process men and women are being transformed from obedience to arbitrary commands to willing acceptance of the invitation of love, i.e. transferred from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
We have been trained to think of God largely in terms of superior power which can either crush us or make us powerful. This is often a projection and legitimation of our power-hungry, exploitative, monopolistic social structures and attitudes. But, in the New Testament, God’s power comes out of weakness and he exercises sovereignty through crosses, not through conquests. We must not fashion God in the image of Egyptian, Persian, Roman and Chinese potentates, thereby giving to God the attributes which belong exclusively to Pharaoh, Caesar and their like. We need to relegate to the side all those attributes such as his absolute power, his absolute knowledge, his absolute changelessness, his absolute dominion, his arbitrariness and intolerance, imposed on God as a reflection of an absolutization of human beings’ own cravings, especially those of male human beings. These attributes need to be deabsolutized and subordinated to God’s supreme attribute of love.
God is no cosmic tyrant who forces obedience. He lures, invites and waits for free responses and does not resort to scolding and reprimanding. That is why we in China find the Gospels’ analogy of transformation of seeds and the growth of plants and trees in air, rain and sun more appealing than the image of the sheep which are constantly treated with rod and staff. God is the will to fellowship, not the will to power. We want to depart from a severe and intimidating God, a bulldozer God, who is not the Chrislike God the four Gospels lure us to want to believe in. We like the image of God in Hosea 11:4, of one who secures us with reins, leads us with bonds of love, lifts us like a little child to the parent’s cheek, and bends down to feed us. When I was a theological student, I wrestled with the problem of Christ’s two natures, ending up with his divinity. Today, it seems to me that to confess that Christ is Godlike is not half so important as to affirm that God is Christlike and that Christlike love is the way God runs the cosmos.
You have seen that, in affirming love as the supreme attribute of God, I have relegated his omnipotence and omniscience to the second place. We cannot think of God in his self-contained existence, in abstraction from the world, but in terms of his creative activity in the world. He works in his creation tirelessly and inexhaustibly to bring about the realization of the potentialities which he has implanted there. God in his love craves for the emergence in the universe of persons whom he can have fellowship with. Fellowship implies freedom. Human enjoyment of this freedom implies God’s respect for human choices and therefore the curtailment of his own omnipotence. In so far as human beings have the right to make choices, including wrong choices, and in so far as God respects this right, God does not have a pre-knowledge of how a person will exercise his or her freedom or right to make choices. Thus, God’s omniscience is also relativized. By permitting freedom to his creatures and accepting their misuse of it, God can bring about results more attainable than in any other way. The possibility of disobedience is the price of liberty, and liberty is the condition of selfhood and selfhood the preliminary to fellowship.
There is a popular Chinese movie condemning feudalism in which a young woman’s fiance has died but she is still compelled to marry into the family as daughter-in-law. After the tearful wedding she enters the bridal chamber, only to find a five-foot long trunk of a tree on the bed. She is expected to live the rest of her life with that log as her husband. How can she have fellowship and communion with such a non-person?
God being love, more and more of us are seeing that the father figure is not necessarily the only or the best analogy for characterizing him. For centuries and to this day, in China anyway, what is taken for granted in the father is his severity, and in the mother her loving kindness. In fact, the proper Chinese way to refer to one’s own father in polite conversation is the “severe one in my family,” while “the loving one in my family” is reserved for the mother. We all know of fathers of whom love is hardly an attribute. There are Biblical passages which show no hesitation in using the image of the mother to indicate how God loves. In Isaiah 66 and 49, God says: “As a mother comforts her son, so shall I myself comfort you,” and “Can a woman forget the infant of her breast, or a mother the child of her womb? But should even these forget, I shall never forget you.” And in Psalm 131, the Psalmist says, “I am calm and quiet like a weaned child clinging to its mother.” Thus, to say that God has the attributes of the father is not to say he does not have the attributes of the mother.
To assert the cosmic dimension of Christ’s role and to ascertain God as the Cosmic Lover does not mean that everything that happens in nature and history is God’s work and design. Many things are happening that contradict God’s loving kindness and are harmful to the welfare of the world. Creation is a long process yet incomplete and, as Paul insists, imperfect and subject to frustration, especially as it involves the making of free human beings who are not slaves but children of God. A world still in the making must be one in which ugliness and devilry have their place. Events all over the world are telling us how tortuous the way is towards the perfect community of free, loving children of God, and how dear a price in suffering God and human beings have to pay for every inch 6f progress towards that goal.
That God is the great lover working out his purpose for the world brings in its train an understanding of all reality not as being so much as becoming. It gives us hope for history and beyond. We have no idea as to how the end of history as we know it will come about, but can be sure it will be the triumph of love and grace.
We receive great consolation in reading Romans 5:15-17 where a comparison is made between the effect upon the world of Christ’s grace and Adam’s fall. There Paul speaks of the infinitely greater impact of Christ on humanity than that of Adam, using such expressions as “much more,” “vastly exceeding,” “in far greater measure,” and “out of all proportion.” We are elated and get a sense of liberation upon reading this. The Incarnation profoundly affects human and cosmic life in all its aspects. It is inconceivable that any area of human endeavor should be permanently affected by Adam’s fall and unaffected by grace. Too often, Christians make the effect of Adam’s fall universal while limiting Christ’s grace only to the few who profess a belief in him. It really amounts to saying that the Incarnation of the Son of God has made less of an impact on humanity than the fall of Adam. But this is not a view that can go along with the vision of God whose name is love and whose concern is to bring about through redemption, education and sanctification a humanity that will reach perfection as free, intelligent and voluntary co-creators with God.
The way from alpha to omega is not always a straight line, but love accompanies the pilgrims. “The Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” in Dante’s great words, becomes a Love which brings meaning to human existence and hence redeems men and women from triviality, frustration, cheapness and lovelessness. We do not have to through tortuous ways, but we remember Christ’s words: “A woman in labor is in pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets her anguish in her joy that a child has been born in the world.” We see the darkness that appears before dawn as well as the dawn that will surely arrive after darkness. As is so well said in Psalm 30: “Tears may linger at nightfall, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” This view of nature, history and ourselves as becoming instills life with meaning and direction. This is essentially a long-ranged and forward-looking worldview. Tielhard de Chardin makes a moving prophecy when he says, “Someday, after we have mastered the wind, the waves, the tide and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love; and then for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.” I also like the cosmology and view of history Lu Shun, the greatest modern Chinese writer, presents so beautifully:
Myriads of beautiful people and beautiful deeds weave a heavenly tapestry, moving like tens of thousands of flying stars, spreading far and wide, even to infinity. Things and their reflections dissolve, flicker, expand, melt into each other, but then draw back, approaching a semblance of their original selves. Their edges are variable as those of summer clouds, shot through with sunlight, emitting flames the colour of mercury. All things without exception mesh and intervene into a fabric, ever lively, ever unfolding.
Christians as a little flock are heartened by the vision of Christ leading the whole creation towards the goal of unity in God. In this saving work of his, all human movements of progress, liberation, democracy, humanization and love are joined. The church is important as a place where Christ is explicitly known, confessed, adored and preached. The world needs the church’s gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace. But God’s saving work is not coterminous with the boundary of the church. It has the whole cosmos as its arena. As Vatican II says, “Many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside the visible structure of the church and so the helps necessary for salvation are always and everywhere available to all who are obedient to the dictates of conscience.” I like to think that, if these elements are arcs of a circle, Christ is the perfect round in whom they will all be completed, fulfilled and united.
In spite of the darkness human beings in many parts of the world find themselves in, there have always been courageous souls with their firm belief in the final triumph of God’s grace. I like to close with a few inspiring lines left us by Victor Hugo:
Will the future ever arrive? – Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pinpoint, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it; nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
Human beings are fumbling and groping for a faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. We all see in a mirror, dimly. This address tells you where I am, and where many of my fellow-Christians in China are, that is, the sort of spirituality the Holy Spirit is guiding us to in our pilgrimage. I will want to be open to any help that enables further growth in understanding.
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