The link between Putin and Politkovskaya will be recalled in the divergence of scale and tone in the planned commemorations for each figure. The state channel NTV will run a documentary giving the public a “never-before-seen” peek into the life of their dear leader. Other Putinoids will hold everything from rallies to poetry readings, while towns like Rostov and Chelyabinsk will drape their thoroughfares in Putin banners. And just so you don’t think Putin has lost his virility, the Levada Center has conducted a poll that puts the sex into the sexagenarian Putin. According to the survey, 20 percent of women would “would jump at the chance” to wed Russia’s President. How fitting it all is. But make no mistake; such events are not at the behest of the Kremlin. Or so we are told. “I already said that Vladimir Putin is not a supporter of marking his birthday in public,” his press secretary, Dmitrii Peskov told reporters. “He spends his birthday among close friends and family.” Then he added, “We definitely do not encourage any kind of on air celebrations. Although some special celebration was initiated by the channels themselves, we will not approve of it.” As Jan Plamper noted in his study of the Stalin cult, such acts of disavowal amount to “immodest modesty” or “flamboyant modesty.” The leader wants his cult, but doesn’t want to appear to want it. I suspect Putin is no different in this regard.

Plans to observe Anna Politkovskaya’s murder are in stark contrast. Supporters, friends, and family will stage a small and likely solemn picket on Novopushkinskaya Square. The organizers originally wanted to have it at Pushkin Square in the center of town, but the authorities rejected the idea, saying the site will be occupied. This is not to say that Politkovskaya’s murder doesn’t have its own objects of memory. A human rights award has been named after her, two posthumous books have been published—her diary A Russian Diary (2007) and a collection of her final articles in Nothing but the Truth (2010) (published in the United States as Is Journalism Worth Dying For? (2011)—and a few films and documentaries have been produced about her work, murder, and its investigation. New memory objects are in the works.  Just this week, officials in the Czech town Karlovy Vary renamed a park in her honor. And further celluloid immortalizations are in store with a new Hollywood film about the journalist in the planning stages.

There was no love lost between Politkovskaya and Putin. In Putin’s Russia, Politkovskaya called Putin the “soul brother” of Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich on the eve of his inauguration for his second term in 2004:

“[Putin's] outlook is narrow, provincial one his rank would suggest; he has the unprepossessing personality of a lieutenant colonel who never made it to colonel, the manner of a Soviet secret policeman who habitually snoops on his colleagues. And he is vindictive: not a single political opponent has been invited to the inauguration ceremony, nor a single political party that is in any way out of step. Tomorrow . . . Akaky Akakievich Putin will strut down the red carpet of the Kremlin throne room as if he really where the boss there. Around him the polished tsarist gold will gleam, the servants will smile submissively, his comrades in arms, a choice selection from the lower ranks of the KGB who could have risen to important posts only under Putin, will swell with self-importance.”

In contrast to Politkovskaya’s hyperbole, Putin was cold, dismissive, and exact when it came to his critic. When asked for a comment on Politkovskaya’s murder, Putin said, “Yes indeed, this journalist was a harsh critic of the present authorities in Russia, but I think that journalists should know this, at least experts are well aware of this, the extent of her influence on political life in the country, in Russia, was extremely insignificant. She was known in journalistic circles, in human rights circles, in the West. I repeat, her influence on political life in Russia was minimal.” For him, Politkovskaya was merely a “woman” and a “mother,” and as far as who was the real victim of this crime, it was “Russia,” its “current government authorities,” and if that wasn’t ironic enough, those of the “Chechen Republic.” Her murder, Putin continued, “inflicts on the current authorities a far greater loss and damage than her publications.”

Politkovskaya would have hardly been surprised by Putin’s response. Yet I wonder what she would have thought about the last two years of Putin’s second term, the Medvedev interlude, and Putin’s return for a third tour. She would have likely been among those who called Medvedev a sham, and would have been unmoved by Putin’s hat-trick, or that the vast majority of Russian society passively accepted it. After all, her general assessment of Russia was incredibly dark, and she showed little hope that it would change. “Our society isn’t a society anymore,” she wrote in Russian Diary. “It is a collection of windowless, isolated concrete cells…There are thousands who together might add up to the Russian people, but the walls of our cells are impermeable.” Her prophesies about “revolution” in Russia were similarly laden with dread. “Our revolution, if it comes, will be red, because the Communists are almost the most democratic force in the country, and because it will be bloody.”

She minced few words when it came to the opposition too. In February 2004, she rhetorically asked, “Why is it so easy in Russia to put down democratic opposition? It is something in the opposition themselves. It is not that what they are confronting is too strong, although of course that is a factor. The main thing is that the opposition lacks an unflinching determination to oppose.”  A month before her murder, her diagnosis of Russia’s democratic opposition had hardly changed: “To put it bluntly, I do not believe their democratic convictions run that deep. I don’t trust any of them, other than Kasparov, and I doubt that he will be able to move mountains on his own.”

Her assessment of her colleagues in journalism was no less caustic. In an article found on her computer after her death, presumptuously titled, “So What Am I Guilty Of?” Politkovskaya compared her peers to “koverny,” Russian circus clowns who entertained the crowd between acts. “Almost the entire generation of Russian journalists, and those sections of the mass media which have survived to date, are clowns of this kind, a Big Top of kovernys whose job it is to keep the public entertained and, if they do have to write about anything serious, then merely to tell everyone how wonderful the Pyramid of Power is in all manifestations.” She, on the other hand, refused to play the clown, and accepted the fate of pariah. “What am I guilty of? I have merely reported what I witnessed, nothing but the truth.”

This begs the question of what she might have thought about the Russia of 2012. It’s widely maintained that Russia has changed. Would Politkovskaya have changed with it? What would she have made of the New Decembrists and some of the Young Turks at their head, like Alexey Navalny and Sergei Uldaltsov? Of the protests against Putin, which during her life were never more than a few hundred people, at best, and now number in the tens of thousands? Of the political vibrancy of Runet, the centrality of blogs and Twitter, and the new crop of activist-journalists? Would she write them off as clowns? And what of Russian society? Would Politkovskaya look at all this and still see it as a tetragon of windowless, impenetrable concrete cells? Is there still even a place for Politkovskaya in today’s Russia? Where would her role be, when Chechnya and the North Caucasus in general are literally out of the Russian sight and out of the Russian mind? Sadly, thanks to three shots to the chest, and one to the head, we’ll never know.

This post was also published at Warscapes.

AUTHOR: Sean Guillory
URL: http://seansrussiablog.org and http://newbooksinrussianstudies.com
E-MAIL: sguillory1 [at] niu.edu

Almost all the TV channels gave a chronological description to this date, India’s progress from January 26, 1950 when India adopted its constitution and became a republic.

However, the positive blushes may pale into a big grin when we hear that our fifteen-year-old students who were put for the first time on a global stage and tested for their reading, math and science abilities, stood second to last, only beating Kyrgyzstan.

The results of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Secretariat’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), ranked India 72nd out of 73 countries.

The PISA results are based on data collected from some 500,000 students undergoing two hour tests conducted annually that evaluates the education systems worldwide. The tests are meant to conduct comparative analyses, across vast international contexts, of 15-year-old students for “reading, mathematical and scientific literacy.

The 2011 survey reports that China’s Shanghai province scored the highest in reading and also topped the charts in mathematics and science.

China has been on top for last several years and it seems the country’s youngsters are unbeatable and are far ahead than their counterparts.

The survey noted that more than one-quarter of Shanghai’s 15 year olds demonstrated advance mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3 per cent.

India’s participants came from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh that showcased India’s education and development, but fared miserably at the PISA test.

According to the OECD report, the average 15-year-old Indian is over 200 points behind the global topper.

Comparing scores, it’s estimated that an Indian eighth grader is at the level of a South Korean third grader in math abilities or a second-year student from Shanghai when it comes to reading skills.

In case of scientific literacy levels Tamil Nadu students had very mean score that was below the means of all OECD countries, but better than Himachal Pradesh.

According to report, in Himachal Pradesh, 11 per cent of students are estimated to have a proficiency in reading literacy that is at or above the baseline level needed to participate effectively and productively in life. It follows that 89 per cent of students in Himachal are estimated to be below that baseline level.

Experts are unsure if selecting these two states was a good idea for India to participate at the PISA programme.

Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh rank high on human development indicators among Indian states. The India Human Development Report 2011, prepared by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research (IAMR), categorized them as “median” states, putting them significantly ahead of the national average.

The fact is that not the USA, UK, France or any other developed country from Europe or America that tops the PISA list in the consecutive years but it is the Asian countries that mostly on top this standard education test. China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and UAE are far better than India.

This shows that an image of a world divided neatly into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly-educated countries is a myth. The fact is that economic development and education are not congruent to each other and the two has little in common.

There is another fallacy in this story. While national income and educational achievement are still related; the PISA result show that the two countries, India and China with similar levels of prosperity can produce very different results when it comes to the educational assessment of its school children.

This brings to another presupposition can India aspire to compete with China for Asian supremacy, when the stark reality is its educational standard is way below the expectation to meet Chinese standards.

According to the census 2011, India has 74.04 per cent total literacy (82.12 % males and 65.46 % females). It’s a proud moment for a country which has started from 20 per cent national literacy rate in 1950 and now racing towards 100 per cent target.

However, when we put our proud achievement to the global test then the fact that comes to hunt us as bad dreams is the poor educational standard of the country.

Prior to this participation in 2003, students from Indian states of Orissa and Rajasthan took a similar test called “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)” and produced similar results. TIMSS is another standardized international test.

The 2003 TIMSS study ranked India at 46 among 51 countries. Indian students’ score was 392 versus average of 467 for the group. These results were contained in a Harvard University report titled “India Shining and Bharat Drowning”.

In the second most populous nation on the planet, with the second biggest educational system in the world, it seems that the preferred way to bring clarity to a massive, murky educational landscape would be to let statistics paint the picture cleanly and efficiently.

However, to keep the subject in perspective the Indian context is so complex, so multi-dimensional, that trying to understand its depth merely through a numbered tale is not just silly, but detrimental to our ability to work on fixing what’s wrong.

The two-hour tests cutting across vast socio-economic, linguistic, and ethnic divides tell us little of the context-specific literacy practices from those areas.

There are many discrepancies in the test itself that were disadvantaging for the Indian students. In many ways it actually did not really comprehend the actual knowledge of our students.

What we end up then are overbroad characterizations of how poorly Indian education is doing, on the basis of large-scale data collection that doesn’t tell what’s actually going on in the classrooms.

This isn’t to say that PISA is useless and the data is sheer garbage. The statistics definitely tells us some hard facts about our own educational system. Clearly, India have to ramp up its efforts and get serious about what goes on in its schools as better educational outcomes are a strong predictor for future economic growth.

AUTHOR: Mujtaba Syed
URL: http://mujtabas-musings.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: syedalimujtaba [at] yahoo.com

Nontsikelelo Albertina Sisulu (21 October 1918 - 2 June 2011)

On- by-one, the apartheid fighters are passing on and according to Nelson Mandela in his speech to Nontsikelelo Albertino, the wife of Walter Sisulu, he could imagine Albertino meeting other comrades who had gone before her like her husband, former anti-apartheid politician Oliver Tambo and former activist Helen Joseph.

Indeed, that would be a great celestial reunion as they would rejoice that in their lifetime they succeeded in fighting a course they believed in and they equally won.

Albertina Sisulu died aged 92 as he watched TV at home last Thursday night.

After the end of apartheid, she was elected to the first democratic parliament in1994 but after serving for four years, she retired.

Albertina a nurse and a midwife served as the deputy president of the ANC Women’s League and participated in the formation of the United Democratic Front, the 1956 anti-pass march to the Union Buildings and the launch of the Freedom Charter.

She was called, “Mother of the Nation” because of a maternal characteristics she developed early in life and brought to bear throughout the fight against apartheid. At a young age, her mother was sickly and being the eldest of eight girls, she took over the responsibility of catering for her siblings and this sacrifice made her stay two years behind in school as she had to drop often to take up employments.

The leadership qualities and maternal instincts she developed thereof underlined the respect she earned during the struggle.

She excelled at school in cultural and sporting activities and displayed headship skills at an early age when she was chosen as head girl in standard five.

After some years of excellent high school performance and even scholarship to college, she graduated and later met Walter Sisulu, a lawyer in 1941 while working at Johannesburg General Hospital as nurse when the later was a young political activist.

During their marriage in in 1944 Nelson Mandela was the best man.

Her husband, who died in 2003, spent 25 years in custody on Robben Island together with Nelson Mandela. She was successively in and out of jail for her political activities despite this, she continued to resist apartheid.

The fight against apartheid is the highest struggle by African nationalists after that of independence but it was more spirited than the later.

Looking at the continent now, it seems not as if the nationalists had ever succeeded against such past phenomena that looked very overbearing. Why, because poverty and several other pandemics are still endemic on the continent and poor governance is still here with us.

If Africa must move ahead and conquer these, we need a renewed patriotism by some younger minds to fight off, poverty and even neo-colonialism with the same vigour with which Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, the Sisulus brawled against apartheid and colonialism.

Let us not rest on our oars thinking that the war is over because, there are more wars to be fought than the ones that have been fought.

AUTHOR: Paul Ohia
URL: www.paulohia.blog.com and www.paulohia.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: paulohia [at] yahoo.co.uk