Society

Do BJP and Congress women voters have different attitudes?

This article in Mint has a chart showing that “female supporters of the Congress held views different from not only BJP supporters, but also from male supporters of the Congress”, i.e. while women BJP voters are only mildly more liberal than male BJP voters, female INC voters are very liberal as compared to their male counterparts.

I suspect that something else is at play here. If you look at the second chart, BJP supporters are over 40% of the population, while Congress supporters are closer to 10%. At 40%, the law of large numbers starts kicking in – the views of the BJP-supporting women are closer to that of the general population of women.

With Congress-supporting women, I suspect, a kind of self-selection kicks in. Think of how people engage politically. It could be in one of three ways:

  1. Passive supporters of a party – i.e. you support a party because everyone around you, your family, friends and community does. It is just the default and you don’t think much of it. For example, if you ask any of my relatives, Brahmins from the strongly BJP supporting area of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada, the answer, be it from men or women, would be BJP.
  2. Active supporters – i.e. they deeply engage with the party and its views. They may have strong political views which they express either online or offline, and they may be politically active in their community.
  3. Not engaged politically. They may not identify with political party, and their vote is purely transactional.

Now, the BJP has achieved pole position in Indian politics. When you have 40% support, it is inevitable that a greater proportion of your supporters are “passive supporters” – i.e. entire families and communities support the BJP. Supporting the BJP is just a thing you do, a part of your identity, not an active, engaged choice. With the Congress, on the other hand, given that it has so little support, chances are that a higher proportion of those who support it are people who are actively engaged.

To be clear, I am not claiming that BJP supporters are less engaged. If you look at absolute numbers, you will find a greater number of active, committed BJP supporters than Congress supporters. I am only talking of the proportion of passive supporters within a party’s voter base. This has to go up as a party’s base increases. Back when the BJP was a niche party struggling to break through, it would have had a higher proportion of engaged supporters. Now, the proportion will be lower even though the absolute number is higher.

So the Congress supporters would be self-selected to be more politically engaged. This would be true for both men and women. Now, it is possible that women who are more politically engaged will give more “liberal” answers to questions related to freedom of women, and this is true for BJP as well as Congress supporters. I mean, if you are a woman party worker, how strongly are you going to agree to the statement “Men make better leaders than women”? If you are politically engaged, you are probably used to speaking your mind. How likely is it that you will agree with the statement that women should follow their husband’s views and listen to them?

In other words, I suspect that the difference between the women supporters of the BJP and the Congress is actually the difference in views between less and more politically committed women, and when you correct for that, the gap may go away, at least on these questions – i.e. questions involving women’s freedom and directly relevant to their lives. I strongly doubt that this is a case of political preferences determining conservative or liberal attitudes or vice versa.

The South Indian Relationship Chart

I mentioned in my last post that you can explain familial relationships in Kannada using a 2×3 matrix that I wanted to draw some day. The truth is that it is actually a 2xn matrix which I have wanted to draw since childhood. Now that I have reached middle age and in any case the end of the world is near, I have decided that it is not a good idea to delay this any further. So here is the matrix and the explanation.

The matrix has 2 columns, and I have depicted 3 rows, but as each row represents a generation, there are an infinite number of rows. I have numbered the rows 1, 2, and 3, but there will be rows before and after as well.

To use this matrix, first, you place yourself on it. Then you follow 2 simple rules to find the co-ordinates of anyone related to you. Which box they fall in will tell you how they are related to you. This relationship is unambiguous as long as certain (impractical) conditions are satisfied.

The two rules are:

  1. If a person is in a block, his or her father will be in the block immediately above, and vice versa. For example if you are in A2, your father will be in A1. Conversely, if you are male, your children will be in A3.
  2. If a person is in column A, his or her spouse will be in column B of the same row. So if you are in A2, your wife or husband is in B2.

By applying the above two rules iteratively, you can locate any of your relatives. Once you find the block they should be in, look at the legend. Depending on whether their gender and relative age (relative to whom, will be explained further) their relationship with you will be clear. There are some special cases which are also explained.

Let’s see how this works using a few examples.

  1. If you are in A2, your father is in A1. Your siblings, being children of the same father, will be in the same block as you, i.e. A2. So they will be called aNNa, tamma, akka or tangi, depending on whether they are your elder or younger brother or sister.
  2. You are in A2, your father in A1. Your mother, being your father’s wife, is in B1. Because she is your mother and it’s a special case, she’ll be called Amma.
  3. Your father’s siblings will all be in the same box as he is. So his brothers will be either doDDappa or chikkappa to you depending on whether they are older or younger than your father Their wives will be in box B1 and will be doDDamma or chikkamma depending on whose wives they are.
  4. Your mother is also in B1, so her sisters are also doDDamma or chikkamma depending on whether they are older or younger than she. Their husbands are also doDDappa or chikkappa depending on whose husband they are. (I think it won’t matter here whether they are older or younger than your father)
  5. The children of all people in #3 and #4 will be in the same box as you, and therefore will have the same relationship to you as your siblings do – aNNa, tamma, akka or tangi, depending on their gender, and age relative to you.
  6. Your father’s sister, being his sibling, will be in the same box as he. In her case, her relative age doesn’t matter. She will always be called atthe. Similarly, your mother’s brother will always be called mAma (or mAva). A mAva’s wife will also be called atthe and an atthe’s husband will be called mAva, by rule #2.
  7. You are in A2, your spouse is in B2. His or her father is therefore in B1, and will be a mAva to you, and his wife will be in A1, atthe to you.
  8. If you are in block A2, your mother’s brother’s children will be in B2, as will your father’s sister’s children. They will all be bhAva or maiduna, attige or nAdini, depending on whether they are older or younger than you. If you end up marrying one of them, special case rules apply and she’s your henDathi or ganDa depending on gender.
  9. Likewise, if you are in A2, your spouse is in B2, and his or her siblings will also be bhAva or maiduna, attige or nAdini. Here, the age is considered relative to your spouse rather than to yourself. So your wife’s elder sister will be attige even if she is younger than you, and your husband’s younger brother will be maiduna even if he’s older than you.
  10. The rules for maga, magaLu, aLiya and sose are self-explanatory. I have created 2 charts, one to refer to if you are male and another if female, but this is only for convenience and in fact, there is no material difference between the two. If you are male, your children will show up in the block immediately below yours while if you are female, your children will show up in the block below your husband’s.
  11. Your grandparents are all ajja or ajji – there are no special relationships such as naana or daada, unlike Hindi. Grandchildren are all mommakkaLu.

Using these rules, you can place anyone who is related to you by blood or marriage in the matrix. I mentioned in my last post that I worked out that my maternal uncle’s wife’s brother would be chikkappa to me. Applying the rules should make it clear how it works. I (A2) → MAva (B1) → Atthe (B2) → her brother (B2). In B2, male and younger than my father, therefore chikkappa.

This works in every case as long as a simple rule is followed – if marriages happen between A and B of the same row only. This means no inter-generational marriages and no marrying someone in the same box as you are. These rules, to be clear, are not enforced beyond a certain point. For one thing, in South India, there is also a tradition of women marrying their maternal uncles. This matrix breaks down in this case. For another, there are unusual ways in which this rule can be broken. For example, person A’s wife’s brother marries B. Person A’s brother C marries B’s sister D. This is a perfectly normal marriage between two people not related by blood, but according to the rules, C and D would fall in the same box. So while there is no prohibition on this marriage, this anomaly would definitely be noted in the “hey this is interesting” sense. That is because Kannadigas have a mental image of the matrix I have depicted when they use language.

What went wrong with Game of Thrones

Long back, during Doordarshan’s golden era, I watched an episode of a TV series, one those where every episode was a short story. This particular episode told the story  of a novelist who was getting his novel serialized in a magazine. A fan of the novelist comes to meet him and begins discussions about turning this novel into a TV series (or movie, I don’t remember which). As the discussion progresses, it turns out that she is particularly interested in the fate of one particular character and is distraught to learn from the novelist that she was going to die. She pleads with the novelist, asking for the character’s life to be saved, but the novelist refuses, saying “It is not I who is killing her. It’s the logic of the story that is!” The fan and the novelist have more meetings where she continues to implore him to change the course of his story, till finally the novelist relents. He tells her that he had found a way to save his character’s life, but the story would have to be crafted in a particular way and that the producers of the show would have to promise not to deviate from the script. She gladly accedes to the request. The twist at the end was that it turned out that the TV series was just a ruse. In reality, the fan was so interested in the character arc because the character’s story was magically getting turned into the story of her own life, and she naturally did not want to die. 

I remember being fascinated by the idea that the story of a novel is not something that the novelist creates or controls, but something that has a life of its own. I remembered this story in the context of Game of Thrones because it struck me that the essential problem with the series was that there was really no way to end it in a  satisfactory way. 

Game of Thrones is the Mahabharata of Kali Yuga. It is said that the Mahabharata, unlike the Ramayana, prefers realism to idealism. Characters have grey areas, make and morally ambiguous choices. In the Ramayana, Good triumphs over Evil and the story ends in Rama Rajya. The Mahabharata culminates in a great war and the end of the epic marks the beginning of the Age of Kali. This denouement is logical, because unlike in a simple story where good triumphs over evil, in the real world, it is difficult to tie up all the loose ends and come to a tidy conclusion.  There are actually no endings in the real world. A victory in one battle leads to a reaction from someone somewhere. Kill one person and someone from his clan is out there plotting revenge. Get all people in a room and agree on something, and at least one person goes out from the room intending to break the agreement as soon soon as he is in a position to do so. 

Game of Thrones exceeds the Mahabharata in its realism, as befits an epic set in Kali Yuga. It is morally ambiguous. Good people die because of their goodness. Ned Stark got killed because he did the honourable thing. Rob Stark got killed because he married for love. These morally ambiguous events added to the complexity of the story, which branched off in many different directions, making it tougher and tougher to bring them all together. But if Game of Thrones is the Mahabharata of our age, the end of the story must also end Kali Yuga. After the cycle of four yugas is complete, Krta (or Satya) Yuga, the first yuga where righteousness prevails must begin again. The complete inability of the showrunners (and I suspect, Martin as well) to direct the arc of the story towards this ending where Kali Yuga ends and Truth and Righteousness prevails at the end leads me to suspect that the end of Kali Yuga is still far away. 

While the series had many themes and failed to bring any of them to a satisfactory conclusion, the one theme that was of most interest to me was Danerys’ desire to “break the wheel”.  I am not sure how many people noticed the parallel between her desire and Joffrey’s outburst back in season 2 or 3, where, in a conversation with his mother, he expressed frustration that he had to work on the painstaking task of building alliances with all the lords of Westeros if he wanted to assemble an army. It was all so primitive, he exclaimed. Why couldn’t he have an army of his own, answerable only to him? 

The answer to Joffrey’s question is that the medieval economy did not allow such a setup. A medieval monarch faced two choices about where to maintain his army. Should he keep it close, in the capital, or should it be distributed throughout the kingdom? If he opted for the former, maintaining control over the periphery would be difficult. If he chose the latter, given the tyranny of distance in medieval times, maintaining effective central command over the army was difficult. He would have to distribute command by giving autonomy to local leaders. But the latter option meant that the soldiers would be loyal to the local leaders, not to him. 

Modern states maintain large standing armies. A medieval state that tried to maintain a large standing army would face famine because moving young men off farm to the army meant that the fields lay fallow – this would be especially true if it kept this standing army concentrated at some place for purposes of control. A modern state needs a much smaller proportion of its population in agriculture . It can also, because of modern weaponry, maintain a monopoly on use of force with a much smaller and more centralized army.  

For a medieval state, maintaining effective monopoly on use of force was pretty much impossible.  Other than the limit on size of the army, entry barriers to someone else raising an army were non-existent. Raising a modern army requires sophisticated machine guns, tanks and other artillery. In modern day India, if someone began to acquire such weaponry, the state would notice pretty quickly. In a medieval state, if someone decided to acquire spears, bows and arrows and cannon, there’s a good chance that they’d be able to do it without the state noticing.  

If medieval states did not have monopoly on the use of force, how did they maintain political stability? For most part, they did not. There was always palace intrigue, rebellion brewing in the peripheral regions or a foreign invasion going on. To the extent that stability existed, it was built and maintained by the king negotiating coalitions with the various lords and satraps throughout the kingdom. It was the need to do this that so frustrated Joffrey. The need to maintain these coalitions constrained the medieval monarch, preventing him from turning into an absolute ruler.

The more successful states embedded these constraints into customs and traditions that carried on over generations – Game of Thrones was at its best when it depicted this delicate balance in Westeros. The formalization of these customs and traditions, the codification of them in writing (for example, via the Magna Carta), was one of the ways in which democracy began.   

But while medieval kings were not absolute rulers, the economic and social conditions of those times did not actually permit an evolution to real democracy. In a parliamentary system, we know the challenges of having to build coalitions and and governing with the support of many small parties. Imagine having to do that, but with the difference that those parties are not accountable to the people and have armies of their own.  Your attempt to govern for the benefit of the people will be hampered by the fact that your coalition partners want absolute rule over their own jagirs and may want you to run the government for their benefit rather than their subjects’. Your attempt to bring about the rule of law will be stymied by the fact that the government is constrained, not by laws, but by balance of power, and as the balance changes, your coalition partners will want to renegotiate the rules. 

 So here is the paradox. The journey towards democracy may begin with the codification of customs and traditions that constrained kings, but to actually achieve a modern democracy, you need a centralized army with the ability to exercise monopoly over power. One way to achieve democracy is to evolve towards it, slowly changing the rules towards greater and greater participation of the people. The other way, which was Danerys’ preferred way, was to break the wheel – to bring about revolutionary change that blows away the existing power structures in the kingdom. It did help that she had access to the three dragons that, through their awesome firepower, would be able to subdue any opposition to their monopoly. But if you seize power by destroying the existing power structures, you have also destroyed the customary constraints on the autocrat’s power, and now what will stop the military monopoly from sliding into tyranny? 

It is clear that Game of Thrones wanted to conclude the series by coming out in favour of evolutionary over revolutionary social change, but because of the incompetence of the writers and because the showrunners were in a hurry to end the series, they went about it in the dumbest way possible. The worst scene of the worst episode of the worst season of the series is the one that takes place at the dragon pit after Jon Snow has killed Danerys Targaryen. There, the lords and ladies  have gathered to elect the new monarch, and Sam Tarly rather timidly suggests broadening the franchise to include commoners. His suggestion is scoffed at, with the gathered lords arguing that they might as well include dogs in the vote. Quite clearly, this was meant to signal that the socio-techno-economic conditions of the time did not permit a drastic transition to full liberal democracy. 

But the point about evolutionary change is that each step in the evolution needs to be sustainable, possibly over many generations till conditions are ripe for the next steps. The finale of Thrones was a masterclass in papering over the obvious cracks. The surviving dragon, has for some reason, flown away to an unknown location, conveniently doing away with the problem of civilian control of dragonry. But how is this new setup supposed to maintain political stability in its absence? The capital has been destroyed, most of the army has been killed, the military force that conquered the kingdom has been pensioned off, and the one person who is a competent military commander has been sent off to guard against a non-existent threat. Worst of all, the kingdom has installed as ruler a philosopher king who is more philosopher than king, and the philosophy in question being more of the mystic variety than of the kind that will provide guidance in this world. At least, if at the end it had been revealed that Bran the broken intended to use his warging abilities to exercise surveillance over the entire kingdom and use his information asymmetry as power, the series would have been slightly salvaged, but this ending is an unmitigated disaster. 

It’s quite clear that the producers of the series knew that the ending was stupid and that they were airbrushing visuals of loose ends from the picture – Yara Greyjoy, for example, makes some noises about she being still loyal to her old queen, and before she could set out to lead a rebellion to extract vengeance, she is asked to shut up, presumably because the producers were in a hurry to end the series.  This hurry has been visible right from season 6, when they started using their their various dei ex machina to eliminate the complexities in the story. Till that season, all the unexpected twists – the death of Ned Stark, the Red Wedding or the poisoning of Joffrey – had increased the complexity in the story. But when Cersei blew up the Great Sept using wildfire – yes, it led to Olenna Tyrell plotting revenge and joining Danerys, but you have to wonder about the High Sparrow and the Faith Militant. Was there no fallout from eliminating them? Did they not have a following in Kings Landing? Did killing them all not cause any kind of unrest?  In the same season, Dany uses her dragons to burn the slavers’ ships and destroys their fleet. No fallout from that? No one left to plot revenge?  

Evidently, the showrunners were incompetent at plotting the course of the series when unmoored from George R R Martin’s guidance. But Martin himself has been unable to finish writing his books, and while he is good at fleshing out the complexity of the real world, I don’t see any evidence that he has the ability to resolve the complexity and bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion. Which is just as well. A satisfactory conclusion to the series will bring about the end of the cycle of the four yugas, result in Pralaya, and the start of a new cycle. I don’t think we are ready for that yet.  

Tipping Point

I am rather amused to hear opinions that argue that tipping to waiters is an act of generosity, and a barometer for how we treat those less fortunate than we are.

From a first order economic perspective, tipping shouldn’t matter. What you are willing to pay at the restaurant table depends on the economics of dining, and what the restaurateur pays his staff depends on the vagaries of the labour market.

 An economist would point out that a tip comes out of your pocket as much as the rest of the  bill does, and if you are in a society where a 15% or 20% tip is customary, you will factor that into your dining decisions. In other words, when deciding whether to eat out or not, or when deciding whether to eat at a particular place or not, you should mentally translate an expected bill of Rs1,000 to Rs1,200 ( assuming a 20% tip) and decide on that basis.

 Likewise, when a waiter’s salary is negotiated, the tips that he can expect must surely be taken into account. How can it not be? A restaurateur  will certainly tell a candidate for the post of waiter: “Look, your official salary is X, but you can expect tips of Y per month, so your take home is actually X+Y.”

 So, at first glance, it must seem that the custom of tipping should make no difference. If there were to exist two cities that were identical in all respects except  that Stingy City has a culture that tips 5% and Generous City has a culture that tips 20%, the menu prices and waiter salaries in the two cities must adjust themselves so that diners pay out approximately the same amount to the restaurant and the waiters take home around the same amount in both cities.

 As I have taken care to mention, all this is the first order perspective. What about when we look more closely? This is where things get a little more interesting.

 Suppose that you have a culture where tipping up to 20%  is customary, but any tip in the range of 0 to 20 is acceptable, depending on how much you think you can afford, and how much you liked the service. What will happen then?

 First, from the perspective of economics, this increases flexibility, which is a good thing. One of the biggest problems that economies face is that wages and prices are rigid. Actually, it is worse than that – wages are rigid downwards (i.e. it is difficult to reduce wages) while prices aren’t very rigid, but to the extent that they are, they are rigid upwards – i.e. it is difficult to raise prices. This makes it difficult for economies to get out of a downturn, because you can’t reduce people’s salaries when faced with reducing profits. So you hold on to employees, and when you can’t do that, you lay them off (or if labour laws make it difficult to do even that, you struggle for a bit and close down the company)

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Missing the Point

Gaurav responds to a couple of my posts on democracy. He misses the point in both.

He claims that my argument that democracy provides stability for the rulers is incorrect, and cites the examples of Bhutto and Allende. Both were democratically elected and both were deposed and killed. These are puzzling counterexamples. It should have been clear from my posts that I do not classify a country as democratic just because it manages to elect its leaders in free elections once in a while. There is a great deal of truth in the statement that for a country to be  considered democratic, the test is not its first election, but the second.  To hold one election is easy. To hold the second one requires a significant amount of “infrastructure” in terms of cultural acceptance of orderly transition of power, a free press, a neutral military, etc. The coups that deposed Bhutto and Allende tell us that their countries were not democratic – by definition.

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Ambani Fights Inflation

As I have explained earlier, concentration of wealth at the very top is an excellent way to cut inflation. Mukesh Ambani has done his bit to fight inflation by building an expensive house.  Those who are decrying this as an example of conspicuous consumption are missing the point. If, instead of  building an expensive house, Ambani had distributed the money as salaries to Reliance employees or as profits to shareholders, the money would have chased goods that the poor also consume. By keeping the money for himself, he has caused a reduction in prices. The consumption of the super-rich is different from that of the rich and the middle-class.  As long as the super-rich spend money on status-goods and as long as their money goes to other super-rich people – such as when they pay M F Hussain for a painting, or Hafeez Contractor to design their house, it keeps money out of circulation from the general economy. The super-rich should, as a social obligation, take utmost care to ensure that their money circulates among themselves and does not leak out.

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