पृष्ठ

शुक्रवार, 26 मार्च 2021

Indigenizing Political Theories

Political theories are important. They help people to comprehend, conceptualize, and operationalize political processes systematically, which in turn make their living better. In our case, most of the political theories we use have Western origins, which is the case with other parts of the world as well. There has been a clamour for indigenizing the political theory, a sub-discipline of political science concerning theories. This is something of a wrong persuasion.
 
India has a long tradition of political theorisation, but after getting independence, it relied heavily on Western theories and institutions to situate itself in the comity of nations. In fact, the global order itself was a Western architecture and shaped the rest of the world as per the design.

What about Indianising political theory? In fact, quite a good number of Indians have theorised quite distinctly and made their mark globally. Their theories indeed contain a lot of Indianness.

Notwithstanding all these seminal interventions in the field of political theory, the Indians feel their presence is not mainstream and if some of them are in the mainstream, they hardly represent India but the same orientalism they started by decrying. Hence the clamour for indigenisation.

In fact, the geographical origins of ideas are irrelevant if we take into consideration how does an idea serve humanity. The Westerners theorised the processes intensely and coherently and the resultant theories and institutions rule the world. It is not as if they brewed ideas with racial flavour or geographical spicing. They were only rigorous in accounting for their experiences.

In fact, what we need is not indigenising theory but to theorise well and by doing so we will not theorise only for ourselves but for the world as a whole. It is only a matter of quality. The richness and complexities of our experiences occasion greater scope for greater ideas. For that, we need something very banal - rooted educational institutions.

NIraj Kumar Jha

गुरुवार, 18 मार्च 2021

बैंकिंग सेवा का #नागरीकरण*

नियति और नियंताओं का आभार कि बैंकिंग सेवा नागरीकरण की दिशा में अग्रसर है । उद्योग और वाणिज्य सरकार के कार्यक्षेत्र में नहीं आते हैं, यह सभ्य समाजों की स्थापित समझ है । अन्य के साथ बैंकिंग सेवा का सरकारीकरण बोलशेविक संक्रमण का परिणाम था, जिससे आज के भारत का जागरूक और गरिमायुक्त नागरिकसमाज मुक्त होने की स्थिति में है । इससे न मात्र उपभोक्ताओं का लाभ होगा बल्कि सेवियों के सम्मान और प्रतिदान में भी भारी बढ़ोतरी होगी ।

* सरकारी उद्योग-धंधों का नागरिक स्वामित्व में अंतरण की प्रक्रिया की संज्ञा के रूप में 'निजीकरण' शब्द का प्रयोग मेरी समझ से उचित नहीं है । प्रत्येक उद्यम लोक-उद्यम होता है, भले ही पारिभाषिक रूप से उसका स्वामित्व कुछ भी हो । मैं 'निजीकरण' के स्थान पर 'नागरीकरण' शब्द प्रयोग कर रहा हूँ, जो मुझे उपयुक्त लगता है, और मैं ऐसा प्रस्तावित भी करता हूँ ।

नीरज कुमार झा

रविवार, 14 मार्च 2021

The Tyranny of Language

Of all the tyrannies, the worst tyranny is that of a language. A single idiom or a single expression may survive generations of women and men and may dictate life in such a way that the most tyrants would envy to ensure their sway like that. At another level, expressions frozen in time endlessly produce tyrants. We must be very careful about powerful expressions, in particular, about lasting expressions.

There are some examples:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”

“State is the march of God on Earth.”

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Niraj Kumar Jha

गुरुवार, 4 मार्च 2021

Civilization

The government-owned businesses were very tragic economic anomalies. These anomalies are being removed now, and the de-governmentalization trends today. The process is termed 'privatization,' but one can see that the term is not compatible with the idea it seeks to convey. The very nature of capital, personal money deployed for gainful provisioning and servicing of the society, is social. The deployment of personal money in the economy brings people into a very fulfilling association. The easier and the less taxed the process, the wealthier and happier are the folks. And, as such a company gets its status changed from being government holding to the civil* ownership, the process may be called civilization. The word civilization must be assigned this good and human good meaning, and the meaning is hardly different from its original meaning. One needs to distinguish a civilization from primitivism to know that the proposed extra meaning does not bring any variance to the effect of the word.

*civ·il (sĭv′əl)
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or befitting a citizen or citizens: civil duties.


Niraj Kumar Jha