Читать книгу India after Naxalbari - Bernard D'Mello - Страница 8

Introduction

Alongside China, India has been hailed as one of the world’s most significant “emerging” economies/markets. But one might well ask: in what way has India been “emerging”? Open to the expansion of Northern multinational capital that is driven to exploit “global labor arbitrage” opportunities? Open to international financial capital in its perennial hunt for capital gains? Unlike India, it is China, with huge current account surpluses on its balance of payments, deriving mainly from export of manufactured goods, which has proved capable of setting the terms of its “economic openness” and successfully directing the accumulation process to its own national development. While China has been open to capital exploiting the global labor arbitrage opportunity it offers in the production of manufactured goods for export to Northern markets, India has been offering the same in Information Technology (IT)-enabled services. India’s international competitiveness in IT–enabled services derives from the fact that the value created by its IT workers is a multiple of what they are paid, and much of the surplus value is captured through exchange by the Northern clients of the Indian IT–enabled service-providing firms.

But despite being a successful exporter of IT–enabled services, India continues to systematically run a deficit on the current account of its balance of payments. And it has been dependent mainly on inflows of speculative capital to finance that deficit. Its foreign exchange reserves have been built up mainly because net capital inflows have been exceeding the current account deficits. India’s fiscal, monetary, and financial policies are significantly tailored to entice international financial capital and retain it, for a steady depletion of the foreign exchange reserves could possibly set off a capital flight by financial speculators, leading to quick disappearance of these reserves. After all, it doesn’t take much Northern money to push up stock-market prices, nor will it take much to generate a capital flight and a sudden collapse of those prices. The “emerging” Indian stock market can suddenly turn into a “submerging” one.

At $2,088.5 billion and $1,590 in 2015, India’s gross national income (GNI)—total domestic and foreign value-added claimed by residents—and GNI per capita are merely one-fifth of China’s. Moreover, India’s monstrous income inequality is worse than China’s. The proportion of India’s population below an international poverty line of $3.10 a day in 2011 was 68.0 percent (more than Bangladesh’s 63.0 percent figure) while the same was only 19.1 percent in China. In 2015, India’s under-five mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) and maternal mortality rate (per 100,000 live births) were 48 and 174, respectively, compared to China’s 11 and 27, respectively.

The percentage of children under age five who are stunted—a largely irreversible outcome of inadequate nutrition and repeated bouts of infection during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life—is 38.7 percent in India (higher than Bangladesh’s 36.4 percent figure) compared to 9.4 percent in China.¹ Mother India, “Yours is a sadness that / fails to comfort the children crawling over / your barren breasts,” the radical Telugu poet Cherabanda Raju would have lamented. Indeed, the percentages of India’s urban and rural populations not even able to access the minimum calorie norms of 2,100 and 2,200 calories per person per day, 65 percent and 68 percent, respectively, in 2011–12, is indicative of mass hunger. The corresponding figures in 1993–94 were 57 percent and 58.5 percent, respectively, and so there is growing mass hunger.² To give meaning to the above-mentioned development indicators in a world context, one must emphasize that in 2011, as much as 17.5 percent of the world’s population resided in India, and 19.4 percent in China.

One can go on, but the sharp differences between India and China on key indicators of development is there for all to see, and one begins to feel India’s misery. India remains among the most poverty-stricken countries of the world, with most of its population still inadequately fed, miserably clothed, wretchedly housed, poorly educated, and without access to decent medical care. Its deeply oppressive and exploitative social order is crying out for revolutionary change.

I am, however, not going to say that China did this and that, which India did not do. India gained political independence in 1947; China accomplished a popular, national, anti-semi-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution in 1949. This as a result of a protracted class struggle from 1927 to 1949 led by the Chinese Communist Party, independently of Chinese big business. This revolution succeeded in changing the class structure and social institutions to create a distinctively egalitarian society. But China’s post-Mao leadership, from the late 1970s onward, steering the same non-capitalist state, gradually, one step leading on to the other, worked to bring back capitalism in the economy, leading to an appalling maldistribution of income. With an extensive revolutionary history, however, revolutionary consciousness and motivation is unlikely to just fade away. New waves of revolution are likely to come again.

Even as the Chinese and the Indians have been making their own history, they have not been able to, indeed, cannot make it as they please. The revolutionary process has been developing unevenly and more slowly in India, thwarted by its inevitable accompaniment, counterrevolution, whose principal base has been in the “overdeveloped” Indian state. India’s unfinished revolution has, nevertheless, been gathering strength and augmenting its forces against the counterrevolution. However, more recently, a major section of the latter, with a fascist ideology and a powerful, reactionary mass movement backing it, has gone on an offensive against the forces of liberal-political democracy and the left, this by using a mix of electoral politics and illegal violence to advance its goal of instituting a Hindu Rashtra (nation). To be able to write wisely about India’s present, one needs to know where India is going, for which viewing “the present as history” is a must. To understand India, it is essential to get to the roots of the poverty, the misery, the degradation, and the injustice that the majority of its people suffer. And importantly, one must comprehend, recognize, and empathize with the struggles, the unrest, and the ideas emanating from the exploitation, the oppression, and the domination that often become unbearable.

Chapter 1, titled “Naxalite! ‘Spring Thunder,’ Phase I,” begins with an account of a revolutionary armed peasant uprising in 1967 in Naxalbari, at the foot of the Himalayas. I view this rebellion as part and parcel of a (then) contemporary, worldwide impulse among radicals embracing the spirit of revolutionary humanism. It was this revolutionary struggle that inspired the creation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) in 1969. The uprising at Naxalbari stimulated insurrections in other parts of the country, and so, when Charu Mazumdar, the leader of what became the Naxalite movement, predicted in the fall of 1967 that “Naxalbari … will never die,” he was saying something about the ability of his followers to survive, continue, and expand the movement in the face of ruthless repression let loose by the Indian state. Naxalbari came to stand for the road to revolution in India, and the term “Naxalite” found a place in the lexicon of world revolution.

In chapter 2, titled “‘1968’ India as History,” I try to understand the “1968” decade—a world historic turning-point—in India where, too, revolutionary humanism came to the fore but was sought to be extinguished by extraordinary state repression. I touch upon a number of social movements besides the Naxalite revolutionary uprising—the civil liberties and democratic rights movement; the “Chipko” ecological movement; the Dalit Panther Movement of India’s Untouchables, inspired by America’s Black Panthers; the evolution of the women’s movements; militant movements of workers; and so on.

The “1968” decade was marked by brutal state repression, with the unleashing of political barbarism in a setting of unabated colonial policy. In many respects, independent India has failed to make a break from its colonial past. The ’68ers of the various social movements and the Naxalite insurgency drew their inspiration from the democratic and anti-imperialist proclivities of the many peasant uprisings before and after 1885, the year the Indian National Congress party was founded. That party, supported by Indian big business, led the national movement for independence, successfully disguising what was a class project as the national project.

I view the longer process, from colonial times to the present, in terms of a series of rebellions for justice and well-being by ordinary people that incurred the wrath of the state and were crushed by brutal repression. What followed was reform, with laws to that effect, accompanied by encouragement of a reformist strand among the political elite. The latter’s dependability was gauged by the extent to which it went in condemning the rebels/revolutionaries and expressing faith in the establishment’s will to bring about gradual, progressive change. Opportunist to the core, the political elite took advantage of the persistence of militant struggles to enhance its own bargaining power vis-à-vis the ruling classes. Its omissions and commissions guaranteed the failure or the falsity of progressive reform, and rebellions recurred, in newer forms, like the many Naxalbaris in three phases over the last fifty years. In different ways and in changed contexts, India’s “1968” is still with us, in the questions it raised about the future, and in its quest for an egalitarian, democratic India.

Chapter 2 takes a “voluntarist” view of “the present as history,” focusing on the determination and the will power of the protagonists, inspired by their respective collective memories of India’s modern past. In sharp contrast, chapter 3, titled “Unequal Development and Evolution of the Ruling Bloc,” takes a “determinist” view of “the present as history,” focusing on the ways in which history and the given conditions existing on the ground have determined what has been happening. Neither approach is radical enough without the other. The two, the “voluntarist” and the “determinist,” have to be intelligently synthesized to gain a fuller understanding of “the present as history.”

Chapter 3 tries to throw light on the principal characteristics of India’s underdeveloped capitalism and the process of dependent and unequal development, steered, during the last six to seven decades, by an Indian big business–state–multinational capitalist ruling bloc. The chapter traces the evolution of India from a petty-commodity, tribute-paying social formation in the seventeenth century to Company–State Raj (rule) and the switch from “Old” to “New” colonialism in the nineteenth century, metamorphosing gradually into imperialist domination in the Leninist sense as that century drew to a close. The process leads on to a blossoming of Indian big business during the two wars and the inter-war period in the twentieth century. Following political independence in 1947, an ambivalent, integrated industrial development unfolds, especially from 1957 onward, leading on to the present twenty-first-century high-point of Indian big business, the multinationals, and Northern speculative financial capital in command, together shaping economic outcomes.

The colonial state was “overdeveloped” in relation to the economic base in terms of its powers of control and regulation, and the bureaucracy, the military, and the polity in independent India had a vested interest in continuity rather than change on this score. So also the services sector of the colonial economy relative to the physical commodity–producing sectors, even though, at independence, the primary sector remained dominant in terms of its contribution to India’s gross domestic product and livelihoods. But, it was a matter of time, in independent India, when a bloated services sector relative to the primary and secondary sectors would become a systemic necessity, essential for the realization of the surplus generated in the latter sectors. This was because vast numbers of people got left out of the development that was supposed to accompany the growth of modern industry and there was no way by which agriculture could have ever reabsorbed them. The historical roots of both the contemporary huge reserve army of labor relative to the active army of wage labor and the huge mass of petty-commodity producers of goods and services as part of this labor reserve must be located in “the drain” of part of the surplus of the economy—siphoning this out without any quid pro quo—and in the process of de-proto-industrialization during the colonial period.

Chapter 4, titled “Naxalite! ‘Spring Thunder,’ Phase II,” basically shows how a significant section of the Naxalites, in the period 1978–2003, take Mao’s dictum that a people’s war “can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them” seriously in their practice. They build a worker–peasant alliance. They set up women’s organizations and link them with the peasants’ and workers’ organizations so that both men and women get joint titles to the occupied lands that are distributed among poor and landless labor households. They assign great importance to the caste question, for caste defines the culture of exploitation in the Indian countryside. And, they build village militias and armed guerrilla squads, which gradually coalesce into a people’s guerrilla army in the face of full-scale counterinsurgency operations launched by the Indian state.

Chapter 5, titled “India’s ‘1989’—‘Financial Aristocracy’ and Government à Bon Marché,” covers the “1989” period—another world historic turning-point—in India, a sharp reactionary counterpoint to “1968,” leading to monstrous income and wealth inequality and the emergence of a financial aristocracy. The latter gets its additional wealth more from pocketing the already available wealth of others, including public/state wealth, than from the appropriation of surplus value (and the surplus product) in production. Poor peasants and tribal forest dwellers, their habitats and environments violently and catastrophically uprooted in the course of capitalist growth of modern industry and infrastructure, have been left with no alternative but to either passively accept their relegation to irrelevance or to actively resist.

Rosa Luxemburg defined imperialism as “the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open for the non-capitalist environment”³ within a capitalist country’s own borders and beyond, through militarism and war. In this respect, one senses continuity vis-à-vis the colonial period, evident in the ongoing penetration of Indian big business and the MNCs into the tribal areas of central and eastern India, and the Indian state’s engagement in a “war against its own people” as part of the land, mineral, and other natural-resource grabs over there.

I try to throw light on the state’s handover of scarce natural-resource and other public assets cheap to Indian big business and multinationals, assets that are then commoditized, and become the source of capital gains. I attempt to unravel, in the specific context of the natural-resource grabs in the tribal areas of central and eastern India, what drives the economic process, and brings on the unbridled greed of the financial aristocracy, the political violence, the contests for political power, the fraud, the looting, the incapacity to recognize the value of older, nature-revering cultures, and the resistance of the victims, led by the Maoists. In short, I endeavor to understand what brings on the “imperialist” onslaught—in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense of the term—of the Indian state and big business, within India’s own borders, against their own people.

Chapter 6, titled “‘The Near and the Far’—India’s Rotten Liberal–Political Democracy,” argues that capitalism in India is incompatible with liberal-political democracy if the latter is understood as governance in accordance with the will of the people. Liberal-political democracy is, however, seldom viewed in this way. Rather, and correctly, it is identified with free competition among two or more political parties for votes and political office, the counterpart of free competition for profits in capitalism’s economic sphere. But, just as, in reality, oligopoly and market power rule in the economic sphere, so, in the political realm, the party that commands the most money and naked power is most likely to be voted into office.

Political rights are invariably violated in situations where bourgeois private property rights are threatened. India’s liberal-political democracy requires the violence of the oppressed to be pressurized to deliver justice. The main reason why India’s liberal-political democracy is rotten is because the process of capitalist development from colonial times to the present has essentially been a conservative modernization from above. And the caste system and discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, and religion have, so far, inhibited any stable, long-lasting unity of the oppressed and the exploited aimed at progressive modernization from below. This shackling of modernization from below, accompanied by severe state repression when a section of the oppressed unite and resist, has, so far, worked to deny the Maoist revolutionary movement, and indeed all progressive movements, evolution in accordance with their inner logic.

In chapter 7, titled “Maoist! ‘Spring Thunder,’ Phase III,” I look at the Maoist revolutionary movement in the period 2004–2013, now with a significant guerrilla army in place, but yet grappling with the predicament of not being able to develop in accordance with its inner logic. The revolutionary movement suffers a major setback in the province of Andhra Pradesh (now split up into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh) when the ongoing counterinsurgency operations of the state manage to “hunt down” many of the main Maoist leaders. But the movement proves resilient in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh province despite the unleashing of a state-backed, state-armed private vigilante force, and later, a centrally-coordinated, massive deployment of central and provincial armed police forces, that came to be known as “Operation Green Hunt.” A very promising spread of the revolutionary movement in parts of Jangalmahal—the tribal blocks in West Midnapore, Purulia, and Bankura districts in the province of West Bengal—however, suffers defeat. At the heart of phase III of the Maoist revolutionary movement is unrelenting resistance to “imperialism,” the latter, as understood in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense of the term. I round off my presentation of fifty years of the Naxalite/Maoist movement with an explanation of the persistence of revolutionary mobilization and my understanding of where the movement is going.

Chapter 8, titled “‘Rotten at the Heart’—the ‘Secular State,’” deals with the abysmal failure of the Indian state to abide by its duty to safeguard individual and corporate “freedom of religion,” to treat individuals as citizens with human rights irrespective of their religious affiliations, to not identify itself with any particular religion, and to not promote or interfere with any religion, thus separating itself from religion. I look at three major communal-hate pogroms, Delhi 1984, Bombay 1993, and Gujarat 2002, to pinpoint three grave “omissions and commissions” of the executive of the Indian state. One, powerful sections of the executive of the Indian state encouraged its law-and-order machinery to turn a blind eye to the terrible mass crimes that were being committed under its very nose. Two, they considered the perpetrators of these crimes to be “patriots” and those who wanted to bring these xenophobic liquidators to book as “betrayers of the nation.” Three, they demanded of the public prosecutors and the investigative agencies that they protect the “patriots” accused of committing the terrible crimes. I also focus attention on the fact that the country’s two major national political parties, the Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, acted in a manner prejudicial to interreligious harmony, and engaged in unlawful activity with the intent of causing harm to particular religious communities.

Chapter 9, titled “‘Little Man, What Now?’—In the Wake of Semi-Fascist and Sub-Imperialist Tendencies,” discerns a semi-fascist regime in the making following the assumption into office of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014. I also trace the emergence of India as a nascent sub-imperialist power. In trying to conceptualize semi-fascism, I search for clues from historical fascism, even as I caution against permanently fixing the meaning of fascism based on its historical forms in Germany and Italy. Semi-fascism in the making in India encompasses an “authoritarian-democratic” regime and a sub-imperialist power, with the regime maintaining a close nexus with big business, nurturing and supporting the Hindutva-nationalist movement to the extent of being complicit in its criminal acts, and insisting on controlling its “necessary” enemies through the use of terror.

My conceptualization of sub-imperialism draws from the ideas of the Brazilian radical scholar Ruy Mauro Marini. I emphasize India’s strategic alliance as a junior partner with U.S. imperialism, but with the privilege of prior consultation with Washington in matters of common concern in South Asia. I draw attention to the global face of Indian big business with its own multinational companies; state-led infrastructural projects in South Asia; super-exploitation of those who produce the surplus value and the surplus product; and the escalation of militarism with Washington as New Delhi’s “Major Defense Partner.” I emphasize the regional geopolitical–military dimension of Indian sub-imperialism. I also draw attention to the importance of the notions of Akhand Bharat—undivided India, geographically as it existed prior to Partition in 1947—and “Greater India” in defining the nation’s geographical borders and ideological frontiers, respectively. I suggest that India’s semi-peripheral status and its sub-imperialism are conducive to semi-fascism. And I include as an integral part of this sub-imperialism, the teaming up of the Indian state and big business, Indian and multinational, driven by the dynamic of “accumulation by dispossession,” to advance their power, their influence, and their mutual interests in the “non-capitalist areas”⁴ within the country, where all this is utterly disruptive and traumatic for the victims who are left with no other option but to uncompromisingly resist.

Where then is India going? Will what remains of India’s continuing “1968” bring twenty-first-century “New Democracy” to the collective agenda? Or will the ongoing regression of “1989” lead the way to full-blown semi-fascism and sub-imperialism?

Chapter 10, “History, Memory, and Dreams—Reimagining ‘New Democracy,’” as its title indicates, senses the need to re-imagine and state up-front what kind of “New Democracy” the united front against the sub-imperialist-capitalist order needs to institute upon coming to power in the course of a national, popular, democratic, anti-imperialist, anti-semi-feudal revolution in India. The sub-imperialist-capitalist order and present-day Indian society have proved to be totally incompatible with democracy when the latter is understood in terms of its basic principles and aspirations—liberty, equality, and comradeship (fraternity is not the appropriate word now).

While keeping in place its historic legacy, “New Democracy” needs to be re-imagined as part of a truly democratic, human needs–based “political transition period” on the long road to a communitarian basis for socialism. Taking the perspective of the “small voices” of “the present as history,” and in empathy with those voices, I relook at the classic peasant question and the agenda of radical land reform and conceptualize the contemporary peasant question in terms of a series of peasant questions. I also stress the need for an interim program to first win the political battle against Hindutva-nationalism and semi-fascism.

But, more importantly, and in the light of the core political question that I pose in this book, semi-peripheral underdevelopment or revolution, I re-imagine the revolutionary horizon of India’s Maoists, hoping that my scholarly doggedness and their political efforts might converge. Seventy years have gone by since India’s independence, and my analysis (and conviction) is that capitalist development will not be able to overcome underdevelopment—mass poverty, misery, and degradation stemming from super-exploitation, oppression, and domination; technological backwardness; and economic dependence. Behind the affluence and luxury of the few lies the poverty and misery of the many. Behind the apparent civilization of the few lies the degradation of the many. From the latter half of the 1950s onward, the process of unequal development has led to a transition from peripheral underdevelopment to semi-peripheral underdevelopment. This is evident in the greatly enhanced power of the Indian state and the burgeoning wealth of Indian big business, but with the extreme backwardness of the periphery remaining in large parts of the country. There are definite limits to development in a semi-peripheral underdeveloped country like India, its sub-imperialism notwithstanding.

I’d like to say a few words about my analytical approach to the subject matter of the book. When I started work on the book I was not sure of the most fruitful approach, so I indulged in a bit of trial and error, and retained what I thought best. Reality, I was convinced, is fluid and ever-changing, and so one’s definitions, concepts, and framework must be open-ended and capable of being adapted and applied in different contexts and periods. It is hardly the case that the political and ideological superstructure is always tightly circumscribed by the economic base. One must be open to empirical evidence. In this light, I sense that in an underdeveloped capitalist system like that of India’s, the economic structure is not as much the autonomous sub-system it usually is in a developed capitalist system. But, of course, I view India as part of the capitalist world-system, operating within the framework and constraints of that system. And I am convinced that the truth of the “center” is, more often than not, revealed in the “periphery” and “semi-periphery” of the capitalist world-system.

In a country like India, politics dominates over economics more than in the developed capitalist countries. This is because—as Joan Robinson and John Eatwell put it in a heterodox economics textbook, An Introduction to Modern Economics—economic policy has been involved with the type of society that is emerging. “Is development intended to aim primarily at feeding the people and overcoming the grossest misery, or is it primarily to make room for a prosperous middle class, or to defend the privileges of [capital and] landed property?”⁵ I came to studying economics after an exposure to science and engineering, and found the division of labor and the specializations in the social sciences a hindrance and detrimental to attaining a comprehensive understanding of the problems I sought to investigate. To be meaningful, social analysis must not partition real-world phenomena into separate economic, political, and sociological domains.

My approach in this book is interdisciplinary, with a historical perspective throughout, and I focus on the class struggle, even as I try not to lose sight of caste, which, with the persistence of its very slowly moving structure over the longue durée, continues to significantly define the culture of exploitation and oppression in India. This book draws on existing knowledge and analysis from “the library” and “the field,” and puts them together in new and different ways, to raise questions and offer some conclusions which, hopefully, might help other writers to advance their own researches on India. If there are a few rich insights, these eye-openers might inevitably be accompanied by strands of incredible blindness. My intellectual debts will be found in the text and the endnotes, but, as regards the conceptual and analytical framework, I must mention, in particular, the influence of Samir Amin, Hamza Alavi, Ranajit Guha, Nirmal K. Chandra, Paul A. Baran, Paul M. Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Ruy Mauro Marini, Immanuel Wallerstein, Barrington Moore, Jr., Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong. At the heart of this book is a comprehension of “the present as history”—the way Paul M Sweezy understood this important intellectual task—for the present is still at hand and so we have the power to shape it and influence its outcome.

Without the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency and the other progressive movements that were kindled in the ’68 period, capitalism in India would have by now turned barbaric. Revolution didn’t happen but it forced reform; one can think of what it takes to grab a chunk of meat from the mouth of a tiger. A word or two about the spirit of the revolutionaries is then called for. They have been the architects of the revolutionary process that has being developing, albeit slowly and unevenly. I have, metaphorically, put myself in their shoes to feel their rage, fury, revulsion, and moral indignation directed against the powers-that-be, their empathy and compassion toward the oppressed, both in the face of the terror and the inhumanity of the counterrevolution … A refusal to remain silent and unmoved in the face of the myriad injustices and indignities the poor are made to suffer … The fetters of intuitive self-preservation thrown to the winds … Ready to fight on in the face of impossible odds … There’s always the satisfaction of having fought courageously and conscientiously for a better world. India’s underdevelopment is guaranteed to bring such people back into the political arena; stubborn individuals, they’ll constantly be reborn; indeed, some of them might just refuse to die. They’re bent upon doing what they promise to do—their deeds in harmony with their words. I take recourse to citing stanzas of Naxalite poetry to convey the feelings and emotions.

But as regards the Maoist strategy of “protracted people’s war,” the hard reality on this score is that all they have after fifty years is a relatively small guerrilla army of the poor, operating on the margins of Indian society. So they need to take serious stock of the impasse of this strategy when the movement is confronted with India’s overdeveloped state, particularly the state’s repressive apparatus, which is backed by a coercive legal structure and is endorsed by a colonial value system. The Indian state has been aggressively working to wipe out the movement by all available means, fair or foul, violating with impunity Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Protocol II, relating to non-international armed conflict, and even conventional civil and political rights. The cycle of repression, resistance, and further repression seems endless.

I nevertheless grasp the significance of the Maoist movement, and provide both a romantic eulogy and a critical analysis of it. This anti-systemic movement has been holding the Indian banner for a relatively egalitarian and a relatively democratic world high over a fairly long period. Viewed historically in terms of its antecedents from the mid-nineteenth century onward, even though it has been defeated many times, it has, nevertheless, always made a comeback and never given up the fight. Its more recent record has however been blurred and smeared by what can only be described as a hysterical form of anti-Maoism. Hopefully, India’s unfinished history might just set that record straight. On my part, I refuse to sit on the fence and observe both sides dispassionately. Warts and all, one needs to combine partisanship with scrupulously temperate observation. I remain critically optimistic.