From Byword- India Today (January 20)
What precisely is the difference between ridiculous and ludicrous? With their inter-changeable syllables they even sound like each other. Philology is not very helpful. One word has a root, ridicule; but there is no 'ludicre' in English. Why? Since language does not have a Pope whose word is law, we will never get an answer. My own view, that ridiculous is pathos and ludicrous is bathos, is probably no more than a literary conceit dredged up to justify the inexplicable.
Since lists are a congenital part of year-end rituals, one feels obliged to offer some sort of homage to custom. A short list of two will do: the most ridiculous, and the most ludicrous. A rummage through politics poses a problem. There is simply too much to choose from. It doesn't seem worth the effort. The harvest is so much better outside the realm of pomp, power and pretty sordid levels of corruption.
Nothing I have heard in the deathbed year of 2011 was more ridiculous than Sourav Ganguly's command to our cricket team in Australia on the "Agneepath Series": Be Fearless! After which he added a paean to his own fearlessness. That was both cheeky and thick. Long before he retired, Ganguly began to play cricket with his neck: his neck was far more agile than his bat against the rising ball. On more than one occasion Ganguly developed mysterious back aches at the sight of a green pitch on the first morning. Whenever the world's quickies were short of a laugh all they had to do was watch a video of Ganguly trying to get out of the way, and the party could begin.
Ganguly had class, but he lacked courage. No one is perfect. Virender Sehwag has courage by the bucket, and talent by the pail, but when it comes to judgment you need to measure it by a tablespoon. That is him. Take it or leave it, and we take it, happily, for the joy at Sehwag's presence far outweighs the sniffle at his departure. On the other hand if you want an example of the ludicrous, you can watch the rate at which hair is reappearing on Sehwag's head. Since we don't watch Sehwag to study the pace of hair transplants, it doesn't matter. (Incidentally, what do Australians call the Agneepath Series? Probably the XXXXpath Tests; the Xs are of course code for a fourletter word called 'fire'.)
We may have to search elsewhere, however, for the heights of ludicre (what the heck: let's coin a word for the new year) established in 2011. It is well known that Press Council Chairman Justice Markandey Katju's heart is in the right place, and his high intellect worthy of those who have achieved a place on the Supreme Court bench. But his mind does like an occasional walk in space. He has said, in his new avatar as conscience-keeper-cum-godfather of hacks, that journalists can be unread, tasteless and enjoy a bit of opium in the office. In his ideal world, cricket and Dev Anand's death do not constitute frontpage news. By such Olympian standards he has a lot of work ahead, so let us wish him a happy new year.
But his campaign for a Bharat Ratna to Mirza Ghalib and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay is ludicrous. One of my great personal regrets is insufficient knowledge of Urdu, and ignorance of Persian: the two books I would carry to the proverbial desert island are the complete works of Shakespeare and Ghalib. Ghalib's poetry is eternal, but his views did not always belong to the narrative of the modern India. Ghalib lived through 1857. He watched 23 Mughal princes being hanged and fellow Dilliwallahs being massacred by merciless British columns. Ghalib was more interested in a pension from Queen Victoria, as is evident from his diary, Dastambuy, than a war for independence. This does not diminish his poetry, but it does raise questions about his politics.
Justice Katju has read a million more books than any silly journalist, but perhaps he has not come across Joya Chaterji's masterly Bengal Divided (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He would surely have noticed a speech that Saratchandra, an undoubted literary genius, made in 1926. There isn't space for the full text, but a few sentences establish the flavour-and trust me, I am leaving out the more gruesome bits: "The truth is that if Muslims ever say they want to unite with Hindus, there is no greater hoax. The Muslims came to India to plunder it, not to establish a kingdom... Unity can only be realised among equals... 'Hindu-Muslim unity' is a bombastic slogan... Hindustan is the homeland of the Hindus." Et al. Saratchandra's India was not the India that Mahatma Gandhi lived and died for.
The past has its glories. The past has its dilemmas. The past has its mistakes. The past has its rage. Shall we reserve the Bharat Ratna for those who fought for a future in which every Indian is an equal?
Friday, January 20, 2012
City Of Wailing Walls
From Byword- India Today (January 20)
The most complex word to explain is surely normalcy. The standards of 7,000 years flutter over the beautifully-lit battlements of Jerusalem. The sun sinks; the temperature plummets; the decibels fade: it has become a city of silence. The living trip warily around the dead, who are exalted in prophets' tombs, or massed in graveyards, or echo within memory and prejudice in competitive, combative narratives.
Jerusalem is the theatre of the final judgment for Jews, who will either descend to gehenna (Arabic: jahannum) down the hill, or pass through God's gate of mercy above. Christians lament the betrayal of their saviour, Jesus, not merely by Judas, whose guilt drove him to suicide, but also by Peter, who choked whatever anguish he may have felt. They mourn the crucifixion and celebrate resurrection. Muslims glory in the ascension of Prophet Muhammad to heaven from the rock on the mount at the spot where Solomon built his great temple.
If faith was not enough, Jewish' Crusader and Arab empires have left their mark on stone. Dinner conversation creeps through the intricacies of claim and survival, possession and legitimacy, construction and decay, before it gets lost in the labyrinths of ultra orthodoxy, Salafist exclusion, aggression, response and the diminishing core of secular liberalism.
Fear, pride, bitterness and the excitable phantoms of suspicion hammer away at Jerusalem's humanists. Time has not been kind; it has created new barriers in the city famous for walls. Today's divisions, marked in cement and electricity, cut through emotions like frozen laser beams. Sunrise through a red haze over east Jerusalem brings light, but not much clarity. The horizon is lost in the Judean desert, among the Jordan hills, battlefields of a war in all its creative facets.
Within the city, a turn of a street defines the difference between the first world and third. But the first is not always a modern world. The last time I saw the Wailing Wall of the Temple, devotees mingled; this time they were separated by gender, testimony to the rising grip of ultra orthodox Jews upon the holy city. Their numbers have been estimated at some 2,40,000 in a population of 7,00,000; roughly the same number consider themselves secular Jews. The rest are largely, but not solely, Muslim Palestinians. They live in Jerusalem because they are determined never to leave. They do not, however, participate, awaiting instead another tide to shift the destiny of unborn children. A century is a mere page in a long history.
Palestinians lost their part of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. Since then, the defeated have been in search of alibis and victors have been in search of peace. If the first is delusion, then the second is destabilising. Attrition debilitates one tiny nerve a day, but eventually it leaves both sides unnerved.
Israel might be able to deal with Palestine, but how long can it deal with the world? It can't build electronic walls against London and Paris. I picked up Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper, established in 1919, just after the Balfour Declaration that set the stage for the creation of Israel in November 1948, on Tuesday, January 17, for breakfast reading. Here is a mix of the day's news. In London, Britain's Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg condemned Israeli settlements on Palestinians' land as "deliberate vandalism". In Paris the Foreign Affairs Committee of Parliament had published a report accusing Israel of using water as "a weapon serving the new apartheid". 450,000 Israeli settlers, it pointed out, used more water than 2.4 million Palestinians. Vandalism. Apartheid. These were words being used not by the Muslim Brotherhood but by friends of Israel.
The enemy, in the meantime, had switched generations. Hackers based in Saudi Arabia, with net names like Group XP and Nightmare Force, had exposed details of thousands of Israeli credit cards, blocked access temporarily to El Al, the national airline, and engineered the crash of the Tel Aviv stock exchange website. The young Arabs behind this technological warfare promised much more, even as Israel's tech-security elite scrambled to build yet more walls, this time in cyberspace. On the edit page of the same day's Haaretz, columnist Yitzhak Laor said all he needed to say in the headline over his short, sharp piece: "Arabs have never been equal under the law". Many would find such news good reason for not reading a newspaper. But there is an uplifting part of the story. Israel has a free press, guarded vigilantly by Israelis with a strong liberal conscience. It is such a welcome fact in a dictator-rich neighbourhood where a whisper has often been the only instance of free media.
Conflict is always dangerous to the survival of a liberal. But it is only when the liberal voice commands that peace will obey.
The most complex word to explain is surely normalcy. The standards of 7,000 years flutter over the beautifully-lit battlements of Jerusalem. The sun sinks; the temperature plummets; the decibels fade: it has become a city of silence. The living trip warily around the dead, who are exalted in prophets' tombs, or massed in graveyards, or echo within memory and prejudice in competitive, combative narratives.
Jerusalem is the theatre of the final judgment for Jews, who will either descend to gehenna (Arabic: jahannum) down the hill, or pass through God's gate of mercy above. Christians lament the betrayal of their saviour, Jesus, not merely by Judas, whose guilt drove him to suicide, but also by Peter, who choked whatever anguish he may have felt. They mourn the crucifixion and celebrate resurrection. Muslims glory in the ascension of Prophet Muhammad to heaven from the rock on the mount at the spot where Solomon built his great temple.
If faith was not enough, Jewish' Crusader and Arab empires have left their mark on stone. Dinner conversation creeps through the intricacies of claim and survival, possession and legitimacy, construction and decay, before it gets lost in the labyrinths of ultra orthodoxy, Salafist exclusion, aggression, response and the diminishing core of secular liberalism.
Fear, pride, bitterness and the excitable phantoms of suspicion hammer away at Jerusalem's humanists. Time has not been kind; it has created new barriers in the city famous for walls. Today's divisions, marked in cement and electricity, cut through emotions like frozen laser beams. Sunrise through a red haze over east Jerusalem brings light, but not much clarity. The horizon is lost in the Judean desert, among the Jordan hills, battlefields of a war in all its creative facets.
Within the city, a turn of a street defines the difference between the first world and third. But the first is not always a modern world. The last time I saw the Wailing Wall of the Temple, devotees mingled; this time they were separated by gender, testimony to the rising grip of ultra orthodox Jews upon the holy city. Their numbers have been estimated at some 2,40,000 in a population of 7,00,000; roughly the same number consider themselves secular Jews. The rest are largely, but not solely, Muslim Palestinians. They live in Jerusalem because they are determined never to leave. They do not, however, participate, awaiting instead another tide to shift the destiny of unborn children. A century is a mere page in a long history.
Palestinians lost their part of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. Since then, the defeated have been in search of alibis and victors have been in search of peace. If the first is delusion, then the second is destabilising. Attrition debilitates one tiny nerve a day, but eventually it leaves both sides unnerved.
Israel might be able to deal with Palestine, but how long can it deal with the world? It can't build electronic walls against London and Paris. I picked up Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper, established in 1919, just after the Balfour Declaration that set the stage for the creation of Israel in November 1948, on Tuesday, January 17, for breakfast reading. Here is a mix of the day's news. In London, Britain's Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg condemned Israeli settlements on Palestinians' land as "deliberate vandalism". In Paris the Foreign Affairs Committee of Parliament had published a report accusing Israel of using water as "a weapon serving the new apartheid". 450,000 Israeli settlers, it pointed out, used more water than 2.4 million Palestinians. Vandalism. Apartheid. These were words being used not by the Muslim Brotherhood but by friends of Israel.
The enemy, in the meantime, had switched generations. Hackers based in Saudi Arabia, with net names like Group XP and Nightmare Force, had exposed details of thousands of Israeli credit cards, blocked access temporarily to El Al, the national airline, and engineered the crash of the Tel Aviv stock exchange website. The young Arabs behind this technological warfare promised much more, even as Israel's tech-security elite scrambled to build yet more walls, this time in cyberspace. On the edit page of the same day's Haaretz, columnist Yitzhak Laor said all he needed to say in the headline over his short, sharp piece: "Arabs have never been equal under the law". Many would find such news good reason for not reading a newspaper. But there is an uplifting part of the story. Israel has a free press, guarded vigilantly by Israelis with a strong liberal conscience. It is such a welcome fact in a dictator-rich neighbourhood where a whisper has often been the only instance of free media.
Conflict is always dangerous to the survival of a liberal. But it is only when the liberal voice commands that peace will obey.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Toxic circle in deadly triangle
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (January 15)
Pakistan's first coup was led by a civilian. When the bureaucrat-turned-Governor General Ghulam Mohammad arbitrarily dismissed Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin on 17 April 1953 he was a little apprehensive about intervention by Queen Elizabeth II of Britain. He had reasons to be worried, because Pakistan was still a Dominion State, and the Queen was legal monarch of the Dominion. Pakistan became fully independent when it adopted a democratic Constitution on 2 March 1956, but it never got the chance to become a democracy because General Ayub Khan stepped in through a military coup before an election could be held. What is curious is that 56 years later its civilian rulers still look abroad for help in a crisis.
Read more...
Pakistan's first coup was led by a civilian. When the bureaucrat-turned-Governor General Ghulam Mohammad arbitrarily dismissed Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin on 17 April 1953 he was a little apprehensive about intervention by Queen Elizabeth II of Britain. He had reasons to be worried, because Pakistan was still a Dominion State, and the Queen was legal monarch of the Dominion. Pakistan became fully independent when it adopted a democratic Constitution on 2 March 1956, but it never got the chance to become a democracy because General Ayub Khan stepped in through a military coup before an election could be held. What is curious is that 56 years later its civilian rulers still look abroad for help in a crisis.
Read more...
Friday, January 13, 2012
Bedside manners
From Byword- India Today (January 13)
The much-married diva Elizabeth Taylor had an unanswerable riposte for a pesky reporter after one of her husbands, Mike Todd, went up to the Great Hollywood in the Sky. "Mike's dead," she said, "what do you want me to do, sleep alone?"
Elizabeth Taylor should be formally recognised as the defining icon of contemporary Indian politics. True love has its limits. Romance is nice, but not essential to fill a bed. What do you expect political parties to do when a partner is dead or departed? In practical terms, the second is worse than the first, just as a divorcee has more problems than a widow.
Alliances do not come apart for tactical reasons. They disintegrate over strategic interests. In Bengal, Mamata Banerjee and Congress are not squabbling. They are preparing for the inevitable battle for the same space. Both Mamata and Congress know that the Left Front will need a decade in Bengal before it can revive, but that there is an election due in another four years. The Congress will be Mamata's principal opposition in the next Assembly elections. For the Congress, the Trinamool Congress is an usurper and a maverick intervention in what should have been a natural return to power for the Congress.
The Congress lost Bengal in stages, through a two-step alliance between a breakaway Congress faction and the Left. Its first manifestation, in the 1967 elections, was the United Front. It took ten turbulent years, including a bloody Naxalite insurrection and the Emergency, for the Left Front to emerge as the natural ruling force of Bengal in 1977. While there is no certainty in politics, it is possible that Congress will mount a similar two-stage assault on Mamata Banerjee, which means an initial alliance with the Left in the next Assembly polls. Mamata Banerjee is certainly worried about such a possibility, not least because it makes sense for those determined to dislodge her at any cost.
Congress and Left are not in a hurry because time is always on the side of Opposition. Mamata Banerjee is in a hurry for precisely the same reason. She has to maximise her strength at the peak of her popularity. There is after all only one direction in which you can travel from a peak, downwards. Mamata Banerjee has a vested interest in a mid-term poll, because she (along with Jayalalithaa) is certain to make huge gains from a Parliament election. She could easily have 30 or even more MPs if polls were held this year, with commanding Cabinet portfolios in the next Central government. Some of the butter salesmen in her entourage might even be encouraging dreams about the Prime Minister's gaddi.
Ideally, Congress would have wanted Mamata Banerjee to merge her party into the national organisation, but the Lady of Calcutta has tasted independence, always dear to a Bengali's temperament. Conversely, the patterns emerging out of Uttar Pradesh suggest a slow transition that fructify into a Congress-Samajwadi Party alliance that could, in a few years, lead to merger. Congress is not as hopeless in UP as it is in Bihar, but nor is it a natural claimant for power. It needs some bulk infusion of ground presence, in addition to its high-flyer leaders. SP provides that. There are no serious ideological differences between the two parties, given that ideology has shrivelled into a corpse anyway.
SP faces one serious problem, however. For nearly half a century UP has been a rewarding playground for fractious parties. The reasons are slowly becoming irrelevant. UP's political consciousness, shaped by the freedom movement, as a bulwark of nationalism and natural home of prime ministers, will reassert itself, and sooner rather than later. The next general elections could well be the last in which regional parties get any mileage; after that the state will gravitate between the Congress and the BJP. Regional leaders will have to choose in order to survive. The appetite for separate identity will fade once the vote begins to wither.
Mulayam Singh Yadav was weaned by Dr Ram Manohar Lohia's socialist, anti-Congress thesis. His son and heir Akhilesh wears the party red cap but has no real interest in such baggage. Mulayam is a child of the Hindi movement of the 1960s. Akhilesh is a child of the English movement that has been such a remarkable fact of the last two decades in India. The British Raj has been replaced, after an uncertain gap of a few decades, by an English Raj. Its powerful bureaucrats in media have already discovered, to their delight, that Akhilesh is "one of us". The English-centric Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav make comfortable partners, and might wonder why they are contesting on separate symbols, and for the same Muslim vote, by a general election in 2019.
Both in the contrivance of Hollywood and the simulation of politics, marriage is a pact held together by convenience.
The much-married diva Elizabeth Taylor had an unanswerable riposte for a pesky reporter after one of her husbands, Mike Todd, went up to the Great Hollywood in the Sky. "Mike's dead," she said, "what do you want me to do, sleep alone?"
Elizabeth Taylor should be formally recognised as the defining icon of contemporary Indian politics. True love has its limits. Romance is nice, but not essential to fill a bed. What do you expect political parties to do when a partner is dead or departed? In practical terms, the second is worse than the first, just as a divorcee has more problems than a widow.
Alliances do not come apart for tactical reasons. They disintegrate over strategic interests. In Bengal, Mamata Banerjee and Congress are not squabbling. They are preparing for the inevitable battle for the same space. Both Mamata and Congress know that the Left Front will need a decade in Bengal before it can revive, but that there is an election due in another four years. The Congress will be Mamata's principal opposition in the next Assembly elections. For the Congress, the Trinamool Congress is an usurper and a maverick intervention in what should have been a natural return to power for the Congress.
The Congress lost Bengal in stages, through a two-step alliance between a breakaway Congress faction and the Left. Its first manifestation, in the 1967 elections, was the United Front. It took ten turbulent years, including a bloody Naxalite insurrection and the Emergency, for the Left Front to emerge as the natural ruling force of Bengal in 1977. While there is no certainty in politics, it is possible that Congress will mount a similar two-stage assault on Mamata Banerjee, which means an initial alliance with the Left in the next Assembly polls. Mamata Banerjee is certainly worried about such a possibility, not least because it makes sense for those determined to dislodge her at any cost.
Congress and Left are not in a hurry because time is always on the side of Opposition. Mamata Banerjee is in a hurry for precisely the same reason. She has to maximise her strength at the peak of her popularity. There is after all only one direction in which you can travel from a peak, downwards. Mamata Banerjee has a vested interest in a mid-term poll, because she (along with Jayalalithaa) is certain to make huge gains from a Parliament election. She could easily have 30 or even more MPs if polls were held this year, with commanding Cabinet portfolios in the next Central government. Some of the butter salesmen in her entourage might even be encouraging dreams about the Prime Minister's gaddi.
Ideally, Congress would have wanted Mamata Banerjee to merge her party into the national organisation, but the Lady of Calcutta has tasted independence, always dear to a Bengali's temperament. Conversely, the patterns emerging out of Uttar Pradesh suggest a slow transition that fructify into a Congress-Samajwadi Party alliance that could, in a few years, lead to merger. Congress is not as hopeless in UP as it is in Bihar, but nor is it a natural claimant for power. It needs some bulk infusion of ground presence, in addition to its high-flyer leaders. SP provides that. There are no serious ideological differences between the two parties, given that ideology has shrivelled into a corpse anyway.
SP faces one serious problem, however. For nearly half a century UP has been a rewarding playground for fractious parties. The reasons are slowly becoming irrelevant. UP's political consciousness, shaped by the freedom movement, as a bulwark of nationalism and natural home of prime ministers, will reassert itself, and sooner rather than later. The next general elections could well be the last in which regional parties get any mileage; after that the state will gravitate between the Congress and the BJP. Regional leaders will have to choose in order to survive. The appetite for separate identity will fade once the vote begins to wither.
Mulayam Singh Yadav was weaned by Dr Ram Manohar Lohia's socialist, anti-Congress thesis. His son and heir Akhilesh wears the party red cap but has no real interest in such baggage. Mulayam is a child of the Hindi movement of the 1960s. Akhilesh is a child of the English movement that has been such a remarkable fact of the last two decades in India. The British Raj has been replaced, after an uncertain gap of a few decades, by an English Raj. Its powerful bureaucrats in media have already discovered, to their delight, that Akhilesh is "one of us". The English-centric Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav make comfortable partners, and might wonder why they are contesting on separate symbols, and for the same Muslim vote, by a general election in 2019.
Both in the contrivance of Hollywood and the simulation of politics, marriage is a pact held together by convenience.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Overtake, and die happily ever after
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (January 8)
Philosophers use deconstruction as an academic tool to understand intention or deceit behind words. In India, deconstruction is a highway epidemic. We construct a beautiful road with World Bank or Japanese funds, and then deconstruct it, bit by bit, pothole by pothole, entirely with Indian ingenuity. Indians never need foreign aid to destroy. This is totally within the Indian range of core competence.
Read more...
Philosophers use deconstruction as an academic tool to understand intention or deceit behind words. In India, deconstruction is a highway epidemic. We construct a beautiful road with World Bank or Japanese funds, and then deconstruct it, bit by bit, pothole by pothole, entirely with Indian ingenuity. Indians never need foreign aid to destroy. This is totally within the Indian range of core competence.
Read more...
Sunday, January 01, 2012
On the Record
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (January 1)
The principal difference between an "off the record" and "on the record" conversation with a politician is that the former is likely to be much closer to the truth. Off-the-record does not mean outside-the-discourse; after all, the best way to keep anything to yourself is to remain silent. When a politician chooses to talk without attribution, it only means he, or indeed she, is sending a message with an in-built denial clause. Off-the-record is a means of placing frustration and anger into public play. This is par for the course, and far more fun than the carefully chosen phrases of official fudge.
Read more...
The principal difference between an "off the record" and "on the record" conversation with a politician is that the former is likely to be much closer to the truth. Off-the-record does not mean outside-the-discourse; after all, the best way to keep anything to yourself is to remain silent. When a politician chooses to talk without attribution, it only means he, or indeed she, is sending a message with an in-built denial clause. Off-the-record is a means of placing frustration and anger into public play. This is par for the course, and far more fun than the carefully chosen phrases of official fudge.
Read more...
Sunday, December 25, 2011
The world of Maya
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (December 25)
That formidable number cruncher of the Mayan civilisation who, 5,125 years ago, initiated a calendar which decided, without much by way of explanation, that its last date would be 21 December 2012, had one distinct advantage over any contemporary astrologer. He isn't around to find out whether he was right.
So will the world end in a little less than 12 months?
Read more...
That formidable number cruncher of the Mayan civilisation who, 5,125 years ago, initiated a calendar which decided, without much by way of explanation, that its last date would be 21 December 2012, had one distinct advantage over any contemporary astrologer. He isn't around to find out whether he was right.
So will the world end in a little less than 12 months?
Read more...
Friday, December 23, 2011
Different Strokes
From Byword- India Today (December 23)
Dear Doctor Dubai:
You are a very busy man, Doc, as anyone who commands the sole confidence of the President of Pakistan must surely be, so I hesitate to waste your time over a niggle. But this niggle just won't go away. On December 6, President Asif Ali Zardari unexpectedly left his country ostensibly in search of your care in Dubai. Zardari returned to Pakistan on December 19 amid intense speculation that he would disappear again, this time for a more generous absence. It seems, therefore, that the fate of a nation hangs on a niggle.
Doc, all you have told us is that Zardari had "stroke-like symptoms". This carefully mysterious formulation has left us a trifle confused and a bit thirsty for more information. Every stroke may have stroke-like symptoms, but every symptom does not, it seems, owe its origin to a stroke.
So, Doc, was it a stroke or not a stroke? If it was a stroke, where did it strike? If it was merely "stroke-like" then you could perhaps let us know what it was like.
Please don't take this personally, Doc. But was there anything specific in those "symptoms" that required treatment in Dubai and only from your capable hands and doubtless brilliant mind? Are there no doctors in Islamabad, or Lahore, or Karachi, capable of dealing with dislikeable symptoms? One asks because nasty wags in Pakistan and despicable rumour-mongers in India are thoughtlessly spreading the idea that the President of Pakistan does not trust any hospital in Pakistan, and is terrified of being poisoned or some such. This cannot be true, of course, for if a President cannot trust his own people then he has no right to continue in office. But loathsome western journalists have even reported that Zardari was "recuperating at his home in Dubai" after, apparently, you sorted out those malicious symptoms. If Islamabad isn't safe even for some much-needed recuperation by its President, then you are up a creek without a paddle, isn't it?
Your medical knowledge is vast, Doc, so perhaps you could enlighten us on this one, without, I hope, violating the Hippocratic oath. Is it possible for a President to get a stroke from a memorandum?
I am referring of course to the memo passed on to the Pentagon by a Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, allegedly on behalf of Zardari's ambassador to Washington Hussain Haqqani, begging American generals to avert a possible coup in Islamabad. Haqqani, predictably, denied authorship but the memo was so toxic that Haqqani has disappeared into a coma. His resignation on November 22 did nothing to impede the rampaging infection of the memo. Haqqani is not a diplomat, by profession or temperament; he was and is star yes-man in the Zardari court. His appointment to Washington was a graceand-favour gift from Zardari. Add two and two and you get the contemporary Pakistan crisis.
Zardari ran but could not hide. His government fired shots in the air, insisting that Parliament, press, and its friends in Lahore and across the world would never tolerate another coup. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was not particularly impressed by bluster. Instead, the army chief showed that his grasp of politics and the comparative power of his country's institutions was more astute than civilians had bargained for. The army petitioned the Supreme Court to investigate the origins of memo which "unsuccessfully attempted to lower the morale of the Pakistan Army". Very smart: the memo was a failure, but its intentions were treasonable. If the Supreme Court after due process can find someone higher up the civilian command chain guilty, then Zardari is pincered. This would, in effect, become the most legitimate coup in Pakistan's history. Kayani could recover his own, and the army's, prestige by refusing to occupy the consequent vacant space, and letting a general election find the next president and prime minister.
Zardari recognises a crossroads by instinct. On the night of Friday the 16th, Kayani had a threehour meeting with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, an unusually long chat for peacetime palavers. Within 48 hours Zardari was back to his residence in Pakistan from his home in Dubai. Never imagine that a scapegoat cannot hear the sound of sharpening knives; indeed, the fever of his imagination raises decibels. When a military-political commentator like Lt Gen Talat Masood (retired) states deadpan that civilian and military leaderships are on a collision course, Zardari doesn't need any advice on who will be in the middle of that collision. At the age of 56, a hospital bed in Dubai, with recuperation facilities nearby, must be immensely preferable to years in a damp Attock prison, even if it is on the banks of a brisk Indus within breathtaking view of the Himalayas.
So you see, Doc, how vital those "stroke-like symptoms" are? Do reply when you find a minute.
Dear Doctor Dubai:
You are a very busy man, Doc, as anyone who commands the sole confidence of the President of Pakistan must surely be, so I hesitate to waste your time over a niggle. But this niggle just won't go away. On December 6, President Asif Ali Zardari unexpectedly left his country ostensibly in search of your care in Dubai. Zardari returned to Pakistan on December 19 amid intense speculation that he would disappear again, this time for a more generous absence. It seems, therefore, that the fate of a nation hangs on a niggle.
Doc, all you have told us is that Zardari had "stroke-like symptoms". This carefully mysterious formulation has left us a trifle confused and a bit thirsty for more information. Every stroke may have stroke-like symptoms, but every symptom does not, it seems, owe its origin to a stroke.
So, Doc, was it a stroke or not a stroke? If it was a stroke, where did it strike? If it was merely "stroke-like" then you could perhaps let us know what it was like.
Please don't take this personally, Doc. But was there anything specific in those "symptoms" that required treatment in Dubai and only from your capable hands and doubtless brilliant mind? Are there no doctors in Islamabad, or Lahore, or Karachi, capable of dealing with dislikeable symptoms? One asks because nasty wags in Pakistan and despicable rumour-mongers in India are thoughtlessly spreading the idea that the President of Pakistan does not trust any hospital in Pakistan, and is terrified of being poisoned or some such. This cannot be true, of course, for if a President cannot trust his own people then he has no right to continue in office. But loathsome western journalists have even reported that Zardari was "recuperating at his home in Dubai" after, apparently, you sorted out those malicious symptoms. If Islamabad isn't safe even for some much-needed recuperation by its President, then you are up a creek without a paddle, isn't it?
Your medical knowledge is vast, Doc, so perhaps you could enlighten us on this one, without, I hope, violating the Hippocratic oath. Is it possible for a President to get a stroke from a memorandum?
I am referring of course to the memo passed on to the Pentagon by a Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, allegedly on behalf of Zardari's ambassador to Washington Hussain Haqqani, begging American generals to avert a possible coup in Islamabad. Haqqani, predictably, denied authorship but the memo was so toxic that Haqqani has disappeared into a coma. His resignation on November 22 did nothing to impede the rampaging infection of the memo. Haqqani is not a diplomat, by profession or temperament; he was and is star yes-man in the Zardari court. His appointment to Washington was a graceand-favour gift from Zardari. Add two and two and you get the contemporary Pakistan crisis.
Zardari ran but could not hide. His government fired shots in the air, insisting that Parliament, press, and its friends in Lahore and across the world would never tolerate another coup. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was not particularly impressed by bluster. Instead, the army chief showed that his grasp of politics and the comparative power of his country's institutions was more astute than civilians had bargained for. The army petitioned the Supreme Court to investigate the origins of memo which "unsuccessfully attempted to lower the morale of the Pakistan Army". Very smart: the memo was a failure, but its intentions were treasonable. If the Supreme Court after due process can find someone higher up the civilian command chain guilty, then Zardari is pincered. This would, in effect, become the most legitimate coup in Pakistan's history. Kayani could recover his own, and the army's, prestige by refusing to occupy the consequent vacant space, and letting a general election find the next president and prime minister.
Zardari recognises a crossroads by instinct. On the night of Friday the 16th, Kayani had a threehour meeting with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, an unusually long chat for peacetime palavers. Within 48 hours Zardari was back to his residence in Pakistan from his home in Dubai. Never imagine that a scapegoat cannot hear the sound of sharpening knives; indeed, the fever of his imagination raises decibels. When a military-political commentator like Lt Gen Talat Masood (retired) states deadpan that civilian and military leaderships are on a collision course, Zardari doesn't need any advice on who will be in the middle of that collision. At the age of 56, a hospital bed in Dubai, with recuperation facilities nearby, must be immensely preferable to years in a damp Attock prison, even if it is on the banks of a brisk Indus within breathtaking view of the Himalayas.
So you see, Doc, how vital those "stroke-like symptoms" are? Do reply when you find a minute.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Gathering power of moral snowflakes
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (December 18)
You can create a Lokpal, but how do you change India?
Anna Hazare's movement has been among the most important developments since Jayaprakash Narayan's stirring leadership in the 1970s marked the second phase of that long historic process known as minting a nation out of a country. Anna's breathtaking contribution is that he has forced us to recognise that there is cancer in the body politic and that it is entering a terminal stage. He has withstood threat, pressure and inducement, including temptations aimed toward both ego and bank balance. He has insisted with courage and conviction that we find a doctor and fund a hospital that will begin to address this national disease. Both are essential, since there can be no forward movement until we identify and institutionalise those who can heal the patient. But diagnosis, however brilliant, is not a cure; it is only the beginning of a process. The next step, if anything, is harder.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
How do you censor a teashop?
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (December 11)
Friday, December 09, 2011
Death takes no prisoners
From Byword- India Today (December 9)
Dev Anand hated death as intensely as he loathed the consequences of time. Age itself was an unbearable coffin; and in some unfathomable way he believed that death could be postponed indefinitely. He thought of death as some kind of personal defeat, and defeat did not enter his vocabulary. He might falter, but never fail. For a six-decade superstar life does not imitate art so much as become an art form.
His movies always had a happy ending, and there was no way he was going to deny himself the same privilege off screen. He was not quite a Peter Pan, the child who froze time, but he remained rooted in his Twenties, unable or unwilling to step beyond a bracket that distilled the exuberance of existence into love, sex, success and adulation.
But a body does not have the flexibility of the imagination, and Dev Anand chose to wrap his neck in flowing scarves to curtain the tell-tale desolation of skin stretching away from flesh. He could hardly hide his face, but a miracle occurred each time I met him. The years visibly peeled off, through his eyes, driven out gradual layer by layer by the dazzle of his smile and the mystique of memory as conversation crept inevitably back into the past. There was nowhere else to go. The past was the only golden age, and if gold needed constant burnishing to glisten, it would get all the massage it required. In that exultant narrative, Dev Anand was both his name, a God of Joy, as well as Kama Dev, God of Love; the two were indistinguishable.
The one startling variation in a resplendent career was Guide. The film had very little to do with its origins in R.K. Narayan's book; Dev and his brilliant younger brother Vijay, who directed the best of Dev's oeuvre, threw it out of the window and made their own movie. Guide's Rosie, played exquisitely by Waheeda Rehman, was not mere rebellion, but a revolution that injected gender independence into the consciousness of an India still wandering through the fog of social norms.
Guide is also the only film in which Dev Anand dies. But this death was a strategic manoeuvre. He resurrects triumphantly as eternal truth, beyond the tragedy of time. No ghost has ever been so handsome.
While Dilip Kumar made a lachrymose fortune as part of his public persona obligations, and Raj Kapoor evolved from saving his trousers in Awara to saving the nation in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, Dev Anand stayed faithful to an insouciant street smile, whether in Baazi's cheap gambling dens, or amid diamonds in Jewel Thief. He seemed ambivalent about smart theft; his loyalties were securely with law and order, but there was always a faint suggestion that his heart belonged to the panache of sophisticated crime.
Dev Anand was 42 when Guide was released in 1965. He solved his unacknowledged midlife crisis with style. He created the 1960s look with a sequence of memorable hits: Kala Bazar, Hum Dono, Bombai ka Babu, Asli Naqli, Tere Ghar ke Saamne, Guide, Jewel Thief, Johny Mera Naam, Tere Mere Sapne and Hare Rama Hare Krishna. He was the Sixties. His high collar shirts, exotic hats and ankle-length corduroys ended the baggies era. His heroines were a cast from heaven: Waheeda Rehman, Nanda, Sadhana, Suchitra Sen, Nutan, Vyajayantimala, Hema Malini and finally the only woman who broke his heart because she went over to Raj Kapoor for a role in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Zeenat Aman. As he grew older, his girlfriends became younger. He had broken so many hearts it was but fair that someone should break his at least once.
When history is written, as it should be, the tipping point will be a subject of legitimate debate. When did the decline begin? His hand, it is true, began to go limp from the wrist in Kala Bazar (1960), but that remained no more than a personal oddity even when his pistol in Jewel Thief notoriously pointed 45 degrees south instead of straight at villains. The ebb began with Gambler, offered to a shocked public in 1971: Dev Anand had a straight handlebar moustache that Groucho Marx would have shunned. The icon of charisma had lost it. By the 1980s his films were nothing more than a tawdry list of embarrassments. But, to use a phrase that has never seemed more appropriate, it was "Never say die".
Dev Anand had the rare ability to make a stranger seem a friend, and a friend feel irreplaceable. Anyone who entered his aura returned with at least an anecdote. Alas, now that there is no one to contradict them, stories about personal encounters with Dev Anand will both magnify and multiply. But that is how a life becomes a legend.
Dev Anand hated death as intensely as he loathed the consequences of time. Age itself was an unbearable coffin; and in some unfathomable way he believed that death could be postponed indefinitely. He thought of death as some kind of personal defeat, and defeat did not enter his vocabulary. He might falter, but never fail. For a six-decade superstar life does not imitate art so much as become an art form.
His movies always had a happy ending, and there was no way he was going to deny himself the same privilege off screen. He was not quite a Peter Pan, the child who froze time, but he remained rooted in his Twenties, unable or unwilling to step beyond a bracket that distilled the exuberance of existence into love, sex, success and adulation.
But a body does not have the flexibility of the imagination, and Dev Anand chose to wrap his neck in flowing scarves to curtain the tell-tale desolation of skin stretching away from flesh. He could hardly hide his face, but a miracle occurred each time I met him. The years visibly peeled off, through his eyes, driven out gradual layer by layer by the dazzle of his smile and the mystique of memory as conversation crept inevitably back into the past. There was nowhere else to go. The past was the only golden age, and if gold needed constant burnishing to glisten, it would get all the massage it required. In that exultant narrative, Dev Anand was both his name, a God of Joy, as well as Kama Dev, God of Love; the two were indistinguishable.
The one startling variation in a resplendent career was Guide. The film had very little to do with its origins in R.K. Narayan's book; Dev and his brilliant younger brother Vijay, who directed the best of Dev's oeuvre, threw it out of the window and made their own movie. Guide's Rosie, played exquisitely by Waheeda Rehman, was not mere rebellion, but a revolution that injected gender independence into the consciousness of an India still wandering through the fog of social norms.
Guide is also the only film in which Dev Anand dies. But this death was a strategic manoeuvre. He resurrects triumphantly as eternal truth, beyond the tragedy of time. No ghost has ever been so handsome.
While Dilip Kumar made a lachrymose fortune as part of his public persona obligations, and Raj Kapoor evolved from saving his trousers in Awara to saving the nation in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, Dev Anand stayed faithful to an insouciant street smile, whether in Baazi's cheap gambling dens, or amid diamonds in Jewel Thief. He seemed ambivalent about smart theft; his loyalties were securely with law and order, but there was always a faint suggestion that his heart belonged to the panache of sophisticated crime.
Dev Anand was 42 when Guide was released in 1965. He solved his unacknowledged midlife crisis with style. He created the 1960s look with a sequence of memorable hits: Kala Bazar, Hum Dono, Bombai ka Babu, Asli Naqli, Tere Ghar ke Saamne, Guide, Jewel Thief, Johny Mera Naam, Tere Mere Sapne and Hare Rama Hare Krishna. He was the Sixties. His high collar shirts, exotic hats and ankle-length corduroys ended the baggies era. His heroines were a cast from heaven: Waheeda Rehman, Nanda, Sadhana, Suchitra Sen, Nutan, Vyajayantimala, Hema Malini and finally the only woman who broke his heart because she went over to Raj Kapoor for a role in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Zeenat Aman. As he grew older, his girlfriends became younger. He had broken so many hearts it was but fair that someone should break his at least once.
When history is written, as it should be, the tipping point will be a subject of legitimate debate. When did the decline begin? His hand, it is true, began to go limp from the wrist in Kala Bazar (1960), but that remained no more than a personal oddity even when his pistol in Jewel Thief notoriously pointed 45 degrees south instead of straight at villains. The ebb began with Gambler, offered to a shocked public in 1971: Dev Anand had a straight handlebar moustache that Groucho Marx would have shunned. The icon of charisma had lost it. By the 1980s his films were nothing more than a tawdry list of embarrassments. But, to use a phrase that has never seemed more appropriate, it was "Never say die".
Dev Anand had the rare ability to make a stranger seem a friend, and a friend feel irreplaceable. Anyone who entered his aura returned with at least an anecdote. Alas, now that there is no one to contradict them, stories about personal encounters with Dev Anand will both magnify and multiply. But that is how a life becomes a legend.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
The 5-point Political Reform Programme
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (December 4)
Friday, December 02, 2011
Chaos Theory, UPA Style
From Byword- India Today (December 2)
The decision on FDI in retail has been so clumsy that there is a counterintuitive theory to suggest that it must be secretly brilliant. There is always a good case to be made for chaos as an alternative to coma.
The Delhi variation of the chaos theory is persuasive, if you happen to belong to the innermost ring of the many concentric circles of power that constitute the capital of India. Thus travels the logic: the decision was taken during a Parliament session to deliberately provoke Opposition parties into hostility. A shut Parliament is good for a government without answers on contentious problems from the statehood of Telangana to the state of Anna Hazare. Add low economic growth (the rate has slipped to 6.9 per cent) and high inflation, and you have enough to keep Opposition hungry in Parliament. FDI successfully deflected the primary focus of a session during which BJP, with able help from Subramanian Swamy on the outside and former telecom minister A. Raja on the inside, hoped to whittle down Home Minister P. Chidambaram. The Almighty has turned an attentive ear to Chidambaram's prayers.
The corruption debate had only one side; a hapless Government under relentless attack. Foreign investment has at least two sides. Government can always claim that it will create jobs, help farmers and bring down prices-who's to check? These are projections drawn in smoke against a 10-year horizon, by which time most of today's leaders will be irrelevant. The helpful bit for the establishment is the existence of a mall class which hopes to turn India into America before the next general election, or at least within its lifetime. So, even if Rahul Gandhi takes a hammering in Uttar Pradesh next year, as his resident intellectual Jairam Ramesh seems to have whispered at the Cabinet meeting where the FDI decision was taken, the Youth Congress can always be sure of a warm welcome at any mall pub.
Pity, you can never be equally certain about what will come into the House with the storm you induce. There was never any danger to survival, since this Cabinet decision did not need confirmation by a vote in Parliament. This was a ruckus problem, not a mortality matter. The Congress was confident of being able to manage an aggregated Opposition. It was taken aback by a disaggregated Government. The leader of the House, Pranab Mukherjee, expected turbulence from Bengal, for he is familiar with Mamata Banerjee's style.
But Dr Manmohan Singh and his finance minister were thrown aback by the DMK's sudden discovery of spine. Sometimes injury can be good for your political health, and DMK has decided that it is not going to take its wounds lying down. Its strategy for Sonia Gandhi is borrowed from Mahatma Gandhi: it has begun a non-cooperation movement. It does not, as yet, demand independence from upa, but it wants a sort of Dominion status. It will make life as difficult as it can without seeking separation. The hurt at Kanimozhi's long imprisonment is apparent; in DMK eyes this was betrayal. Some insiders are livid; they are hinting that 2G money was shared in equitable proportions but DMK was left alone to twist in the wind.
If the Prime Minister was surprised by his allies, he must have been startled by the revolt over FDI within the Congress triggered by the leftish Defence Minister A.K. Antony. This was more than local political manoeuvring for while Antony fell silent, Ramesh Chennithala from Kerala and Sanjay Singh from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh decided that this would be a useful banner to unfold.
Denied the foreground, Anna Hazare flickered in and out of the screen from the background. Perhaps it is time to check out a seeming paradox.
The Anna Hazare movement is over, but it is not dead. It is over because it has completed its historic work. It is alive because it has successfully convinced Indians that corruption is the enemy they must destroy in order that the nation might survive. Some smug ministers imagine that Hazare's demand for radical change was maverick theatre, that the last scene has been played out and its impact can be erased by procrastination given the proverbial limitations of public memory. Memory might be fickle, but anger is not. Corruption has touched the national gut because it has corroded the body. Corruption is pervasive and persistent. Corruption is not sectarian. Retail FDI may enrage 10 per cent and enthuse a different 10 per cent, but bribery is the loathsome price 80 per cent pay to the 20 per cent with power.
In the immediate future, Anna Hazare might overplay his hand. He might even invite a few jeers. But the next general election will be a burial ground for anyone who thinks Anna Hazare's movement has lost its life.
The decision on FDI in retail has been so clumsy that there is a counterintuitive theory to suggest that it must be secretly brilliant. There is always a good case to be made for chaos as an alternative to coma.
The Delhi variation of the chaos theory is persuasive, if you happen to belong to the innermost ring of the many concentric circles of power that constitute the capital of India. Thus travels the logic: the decision was taken during a Parliament session to deliberately provoke Opposition parties into hostility. A shut Parliament is good for a government without answers on contentious problems from the statehood of Telangana to the state of Anna Hazare. Add low economic growth (the rate has slipped to 6.9 per cent) and high inflation, and you have enough to keep Opposition hungry in Parliament. FDI successfully deflected the primary focus of a session during which BJP, with able help from Subramanian Swamy on the outside and former telecom minister A. Raja on the inside, hoped to whittle down Home Minister P. Chidambaram. The Almighty has turned an attentive ear to Chidambaram's prayers.
The corruption debate had only one side; a hapless Government under relentless attack. Foreign investment has at least two sides. Government can always claim that it will create jobs, help farmers and bring down prices-who's to check? These are projections drawn in smoke against a 10-year horizon, by which time most of today's leaders will be irrelevant. The helpful bit for the establishment is the existence of a mall class which hopes to turn India into America before the next general election, or at least within its lifetime. So, even if Rahul Gandhi takes a hammering in Uttar Pradesh next year, as his resident intellectual Jairam Ramesh seems to have whispered at the Cabinet meeting where the FDI decision was taken, the Youth Congress can always be sure of a warm welcome at any mall pub.
Pity, you can never be equally certain about what will come into the House with the storm you induce. There was never any danger to survival, since this Cabinet decision did not need confirmation by a vote in Parliament. This was a ruckus problem, not a mortality matter. The Congress was confident of being able to manage an aggregated Opposition. It was taken aback by a disaggregated Government. The leader of the House, Pranab Mukherjee, expected turbulence from Bengal, for he is familiar with Mamata Banerjee's style.
But Dr Manmohan Singh and his finance minister were thrown aback by the DMK's sudden discovery of spine. Sometimes injury can be good for your political health, and DMK has decided that it is not going to take its wounds lying down. Its strategy for Sonia Gandhi is borrowed from Mahatma Gandhi: it has begun a non-cooperation movement. It does not, as yet, demand independence from upa, but it wants a sort of Dominion status. It will make life as difficult as it can without seeking separation. The hurt at Kanimozhi's long imprisonment is apparent; in DMK eyes this was betrayal. Some insiders are livid; they are hinting that 2G money was shared in equitable proportions but DMK was left alone to twist in the wind.
If the Prime Minister was surprised by his allies, he must have been startled by the revolt over FDI within the Congress triggered by the leftish Defence Minister A.K. Antony. This was more than local political manoeuvring for while Antony fell silent, Ramesh Chennithala from Kerala and Sanjay Singh from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh decided that this would be a useful banner to unfold.
Denied the foreground, Anna Hazare flickered in and out of the screen from the background. Perhaps it is time to check out a seeming paradox.
The Anna Hazare movement is over, but it is not dead. It is over because it has completed its historic work. It is alive because it has successfully convinced Indians that corruption is the enemy they must destroy in order that the nation might survive. Some smug ministers imagine that Hazare's demand for radical change was maverick theatre, that the last scene has been played out and its impact can be erased by procrastination given the proverbial limitations of public memory. Memory might be fickle, but anger is not. Corruption has touched the national gut because it has corroded the body. Corruption is pervasive and persistent. Corruption is not sectarian. Retail FDI may enrage 10 per cent and enthuse a different 10 per cent, but bribery is the loathsome price 80 per cent pay to the 20 per cent with power.
In the immediate future, Anna Hazare might overplay his hand. He might even invite a few jeers. But the next general election will be a burial ground for anyone who thinks Anna Hazare's movement has lost its life.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Charge of the old guard
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (November 27)
Friday, November 25, 2011
Pakistan's Toxic Brotherhood
From Byword- India Today (November 25)
Pakistan's President Asif Zardari's sins could fill a few volumes during a lean publishing season, but he has one compelling virtue, all the more impressive for being so rare in politics. He stands by his friends.
Cynics might snipe that this is because he has so few of them. But friendship is always an elastic commodity when you reach a pedestal. There is also, for starters, nothing personal about it.
Perhaps the reigning Pak authority on fair-weather friendship is Husain Haqqani, the man who has lost his grace-and-favour job as Zardari's envoy to the United States. Haqqani has never wasted time on sentiment in a career remarkable for cross-party acrobatics. He started out as an activist of the Jamaat-e-Islami in the student politics of Karachi University and found a benevolent godfather in the late General Zia-ul-Haq, the despot who hanged his bete noire Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Zia propelled Haqqani into the lower orbit of establishment. The establishment never recovered.
Haqqani slid as easily into Nawaz Sharif's groove as he did into Benazir Bhutto's. The Bhuttos seemed unfazed by his association with Zia. No matter who rose to the top, Haqqani rose with him or her. He was one of the great marvels of meritocratic sycophancy. The second, it should be stressed, would have been impossible without the first.
Such sensational careerism paused when the army returned to power after Pervez Musharraf's coup in 1998. It paused but did not halt. Haqqani retreated to that familiar hiding place of reluctant exiles, the American academic world. Washington is both sharp and generous in its human investments. This one turned productive when Haqqani became ambassador to the US. The shrewd Haqqani had placed his own bets on the Bhuttos when in exile. The restoration was marred by the tragedy of Benazir's assassination but Zardari proved a reliable mentor when he became the luckiest President in Pakistan's turbulent history.
Haqqani's moment should have lasted at least as long as Zardari's. But both became complacent. They forgot, or thought they could sidestep, the classic faultline in the earthquake zone known as Pakistan's power structure, the permanent conflict between civilian and military forces.
When the Pakistan Army draws a line in Islamabad, it does not write on sand. Haqqani lost his cushy job because he thought his wiles could trump the army as Zardari's term began to wind down. He appealed for help to the one institution he considered superior to Pakistan's army, the Pentagon. It was an astonishing example of stupidity on the part of someone with a reputation for being clever.
The issue is no longer whether Haqqani was guilty of treason, but whether Zardari is complicit. Zardari could hardly be unaware of the limits of civilian authority. His own and his family history should be sufficient guide. Even as President, he was forced to give Pakistani Army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani an unprecedented three-year extension. He did not do so willingly. He has now watched helplessly as the isi welcomed Haqqani to Islamabad with an interrogation. The big question now is: how much time does Zardari have left?
Kayani is aware that a coup will not get the domestic or international support necessary for a veneer of legitimacy. Neither can he be sure of support from the Supreme Court. Why risk a shot in the dark when his target is so vulnerable in daylight? It makes much more sense for Kayani to use the army's influence to force an early general election. After these elections, Zardari and Haqqani can bond again in New York as retirement benefits in Islamabad come with toxic conditions.
Fear of uncertainty is less than half the story in Pakistan. An increasing number of influential Pakistanis are being driven abroad by the certainty of fundamentalist violence and the danger to their lives. Najam Sethi, the well-known journalist, now edits his Lahore-based newspaper from America. He is on the hit list of those who killed the former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer. Sherry Rehman, named as Haqqani's replacement, will be far safer in Washington than Karachi. She has courageously championed the cause of minorities being persecuted by fundamentalists. The palpable fear among the thin crust which remains sane and liberal in an increasingly beleaguered nation is not fear of Talibanisation in next door Afghanistan but the Talibanisation of Pakistan.
How many times can you become a refugee in two generations?
Pakistan's President Asif Zardari's sins could fill a few volumes during a lean publishing season, but he has one compelling virtue, all the more impressive for being so rare in politics. He stands by his friends.
Cynics might snipe that this is because he has so few of them. But friendship is always an elastic commodity when you reach a pedestal. There is also, for starters, nothing personal about it.
Perhaps the reigning Pak authority on fair-weather friendship is Husain Haqqani, the man who has lost his grace-and-favour job as Zardari's envoy to the United States. Haqqani has never wasted time on sentiment in a career remarkable for cross-party acrobatics. He started out as an activist of the Jamaat-e-Islami in the student politics of Karachi University and found a benevolent godfather in the late General Zia-ul-Haq, the despot who hanged his bete noire Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Zia propelled Haqqani into the lower orbit of establishment. The establishment never recovered.
Haqqani slid as easily into Nawaz Sharif's groove as he did into Benazir Bhutto's. The Bhuttos seemed unfazed by his association with Zia. No matter who rose to the top, Haqqani rose with him or her. He was one of the great marvels of meritocratic sycophancy. The second, it should be stressed, would have been impossible without the first.
Such sensational careerism paused when the army returned to power after Pervez Musharraf's coup in 1998. It paused but did not halt. Haqqani retreated to that familiar hiding place of reluctant exiles, the American academic world. Washington is both sharp and generous in its human investments. This one turned productive when Haqqani became ambassador to the US. The shrewd Haqqani had placed his own bets on the Bhuttos when in exile. The restoration was marred by the tragedy of Benazir's assassination but Zardari proved a reliable mentor when he became the luckiest President in Pakistan's turbulent history.
Haqqani's moment should have lasted at least as long as Zardari's. But both became complacent. They forgot, or thought they could sidestep, the classic faultline in the earthquake zone known as Pakistan's power structure, the permanent conflict between civilian and military forces.
When the Pakistan Army draws a line in Islamabad, it does not write on sand. Haqqani lost his cushy job because he thought his wiles could trump the army as Zardari's term began to wind down. He appealed for help to the one institution he considered superior to Pakistan's army, the Pentagon. It was an astonishing example of stupidity on the part of someone with a reputation for being clever.
The issue is no longer whether Haqqani was guilty of treason, but whether Zardari is complicit. Zardari could hardly be unaware of the limits of civilian authority. His own and his family history should be sufficient guide. Even as President, he was forced to give Pakistani Army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani an unprecedented three-year extension. He did not do so willingly. He has now watched helplessly as the isi welcomed Haqqani to Islamabad with an interrogation. The big question now is: how much time does Zardari have left?
Kayani is aware that a coup will not get the domestic or international support necessary for a veneer of legitimacy. Neither can he be sure of support from the Supreme Court. Why risk a shot in the dark when his target is so vulnerable in daylight? It makes much more sense for Kayani to use the army's influence to force an early general election. After these elections, Zardari and Haqqani can bond again in New York as retirement benefits in Islamabad come with toxic conditions.
Fear of uncertainty is less than half the story in Pakistan. An increasing number of influential Pakistanis are being driven abroad by the certainty of fundamentalist violence and the danger to their lives. Najam Sethi, the well-known journalist, now edits his Lahore-based newspaper from America. He is on the hit list of those who killed the former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer. Sherry Rehman, named as Haqqani's replacement, will be far safer in Washington than Karachi. She has courageously championed the cause of minorities being persecuted by fundamentalists. The palpable fear among the thin crust which remains sane and liberal in an increasingly beleaguered nation is not fear of Talibanisation in next door Afghanistan but the Talibanisation of Pakistan.
How many times can you become a refugee in two generations?
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Curious Gamble of Rahul Gandhi
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (November 20)
Friday, November 18, 2011
A Gandhian Paradox
From Byword- India Today (November 18)
The Nehru-Gandhis seem to have a soft spot for grandfathers. When Rajiv Gandhi posed for India Today at the launch of his public career to establish a public image, he ignored Jawaharlal Nehru's trademark red rose on a khaddar sherwani, and slung a Kashmiri shawl over the shoulder in the manner of Motilal Nehru, the aesthete barrister who forswore a lucrative practice and elite lifestyle to become a Gandhian exactly 92 years ago. When Rahul Gandhi launched his first independent responsibility campaign on November 14, at Phulpur, for Uttar Pradesh, he revived Jawaharlal Nehru rather than Rajiv Gandhi. Jawaharlal was born on November 14, 1889; and Phulpur was his constituency in the first general elections. November 14 is also celebrated as Children's Day.
If Rajiv's preference was iconic, Rahul's choice is political. His electoral persona is being shaped. The foundation remains true to character: an edgy on-and-off stubble and rolled-up kurta sleeves designed to swoop up campuses and cricket fans. This is layered by a patina of left-of-centre rhetoric aimed at the poor who are beginning to feel a bit ripped off by the trickle-down theory that is the standing rationale for economic reforms, which were envisaged, with minimum fuss, by Rajiv Gandhi, but have become synonymous with P.V. Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh. In the Rahul calculus, eternal youth plus dynastic charisma plus poverty politics equals hundred-plus seats in Uttar Pradesh.
Nehru became a socialist long before he had to fight an election. Rahul Gandhi's speechwriters tend towards American Ivy League academic glamour for intellectual inspiration. Here is something they could use the next time Rahul Gandhi goes to Phulpur. His grandfather was elected president of the Congress for the first time in December 1929, at the Lahore session, which, under his pressure, adopted the historic Purna Swaraj (full freedom, rather than mere dominion rule) resolution. Discussing his convictions, Nehru told delegates: "I must frankly confess that I am a socialist and a republican and no believer in kings and princes, or in the order which produces the modern kings of industry, who have greater power over the fortunes of men than even the kings of old, and whose methods are as predatory as those of the old feudal aristocracy."
During his first campaign, for the 1937 elections, Nehru was assertive enough-or brash, as his critics might put it-to claim that the socialism he had injected had visibly strengthened Congress. He said in Mumbai on May 20, 1936, "If the Congress has grown stronger, it is because I raised the issue of socialism." It was at the very least an audacious assertion in the shadow of a Mahatma who had converted Congress from a lawyers' forum into a mass movement. Gandhi knew the art of the gentle rebuke. He told the 1942 AICC session, after the Quit India resolution, "In Jawaharlal's scheme of free India, no privileges or privileged classes have a place. Jawaharlal considers all property to be state-owned. He wants planned economy... He likes to fly, I don't. I have kept a place for the princes and the zemindars in the India that I envisage."
Gandhi wanted his heir to understand him, just as he sought to understand his heir, but that socialist gulf was never bridged. Nehru got his Planning Commission in free India, but the Mahatma was more perceptive. The princes and zemindars are still with us, not to mention modern kings of industry, quite a few of them in Congress, possibly queueing up to polish Rahul's Nehruvian sentences. Such are the paradoxes of politics.
If a creed has to work, it must carry the weight of conviction, not just the frippery of an electoral tactic. Is Rahul Gandhi indulging in ritual appeasement, or is he seeding the climate for economic policies that he will implement when he becomes prime minister? Has he thought through a simple proposition: social justice is essential to social stability, but what precisely does it mean in 2011 and 2012? Surely it cannot mean what it did in 1929 and 1937. How do you reconcile the needs of the impoverished with the demands of an expanding middle class? The relevance of any idea is determined by objective reality. India is no longer a colony; it is still cursed with poverty but not crushed by famine and helplessness.
Rahul Gandhi's slogan for UP is a curious defensive feint disguised as an aggressive jab: Hum jawab denge. It is the sort of phrase that looks more convincing in an advertising agency than a village teashop. Is it a subliminal plea by a new leader, eager to answer questions that no one has yet asked? Maybe we could begin with a simple one: has Rahul Gandhi thought through a philosophy for the future? Rahul Gandhi likes to fly, but to where?
The Nehru-Gandhis seem to have a soft spot for grandfathers. When Rajiv Gandhi posed for India Today at the launch of his public career to establish a public image, he ignored Jawaharlal Nehru's trademark red rose on a khaddar sherwani, and slung a Kashmiri shawl over the shoulder in the manner of Motilal Nehru, the aesthete barrister who forswore a lucrative practice and elite lifestyle to become a Gandhian exactly 92 years ago. When Rahul Gandhi launched his first independent responsibility campaign on November 14, at Phulpur, for Uttar Pradesh, he revived Jawaharlal Nehru rather than Rajiv Gandhi. Jawaharlal was born on November 14, 1889; and Phulpur was his constituency in the first general elections. November 14 is also celebrated as Children's Day.
If Rajiv's preference was iconic, Rahul's choice is political. His electoral persona is being shaped. The foundation remains true to character: an edgy on-and-off stubble and rolled-up kurta sleeves designed to swoop up campuses and cricket fans. This is layered by a patina of left-of-centre rhetoric aimed at the poor who are beginning to feel a bit ripped off by the trickle-down theory that is the standing rationale for economic reforms, which were envisaged, with minimum fuss, by Rajiv Gandhi, but have become synonymous with P.V. Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh. In the Rahul calculus, eternal youth plus dynastic charisma plus poverty politics equals hundred-plus seats in Uttar Pradesh.
Nehru became a socialist long before he had to fight an election. Rahul Gandhi's speechwriters tend towards American Ivy League academic glamour for intellectual inspiration. Here is something they could use the next time Rahul Gandhi goes to Phulpur. His grandfather was elected president of the Congress for the first time in December 1929, at the Lahore session, which, under his pressure, adopted the historic Purna Swaraj (full freedom, rather than mere dominion rule) resolution. Discussing his convictions, Nehru told delegates: "I must frankly confess that I am a socialist and a republican and no believer in kings and princes, or in the order which produces the modern kings of industry, who have greater power over the fortunes of men than even the kings of old, and whose methods are as predatory as those of the old feudal aristocracy."
During his first campaign, for the 1937 elections, Nehru was assertive enough-or brash, as his critics might put it-to claim that the socialism he had injected had visibly strengthened Congress. He said in Mumbai on May 20, 1936, "If the Congress has grown stronger, it is because I raised the issue of socialism." It was at the very least an audacious assertion in the shadow of a Mahatma who had converted Congress from a lawyers' forum into a mass movement. Gandhi knew the art of the gentle rebuke. He told the 1942 AICC session, after the Quit India resolution, "In Jawaharlal's scheme of free India, no privileges or privileged classes have a place. Jawaharlal considers all property to be state-owned. He wants planned economy... He likes to fly, I don't. I have kept a place for the princes and the zemindars in the India that I envisage."
Gandhi wanted his heir to understand him, just as he sought to understand his heir, but that socialist gulf was never bridged. Nehru got his Planning Commission in free India, but the Mahatma was more perceptive. The princes and zemindars are still with us, not to mention modern kings of industry, quite a few of them in Congress, possibly queueing up to polish Rahul's Nehruvian sentences. Such are the paradoxes of politics.
If a creed has to work, it must carry the weight of conviction, not just the frippery of an electoral tactic. Is Rahul Gandhi indulging in ritual appeasement, or is he seeding the climate for economic policies that he will implement when he becomes prime minister? Has he thought through a simple proposition: social justice is essential to social stability, but what precisely does it mean in 2011 and 2012? Surely it cannot mean what it did in 1929 and 1937. How do you reconcile the needs of the impoverished with the demands of an expanding middle class? The relevance of any idea is determined by objective reality. India is no longer a colony; it is still cursed with poverty but not crushed by famine and helplessness.
Rahul Gandhi's slogan for UP is a curious defensive feint disguised as an aggressive jab: Hum jawab denge. It is the sort of phrase that looks more convincing in an advertising agency than a village teashop. Is it a subliminal plea by a new leader, eager to answer questions that no one has yet asked? Maybe we could begin with a simple one: has Rahul Gandhi thought through a philosophy for the future? Rahul Gandhi likes to fly, but to where?
Sunday, November 13, 2011
A soft hiss from the Mamata balloon
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (November 13)
Friday, November 11, 2011
Beware of Dust Storms
From Byword- India Today (November 11)
Hazrat-e-buddhu bhi Gandhi ke saath hain
Zarra-e-khaq hain magar aandhi ke saath hain
There is little justice in translation. Akbar Allahabadi, the iconic 19th-20th century satirist, would have been especially amused at any transition of his Urdu into English. How do you convey to an alien culture that Hazrat, an honoured title for a holy man, can also become an acerbic appendage for any holier-than-thou hypocrite? I hope this transliteration will serve: Even the Honourable Ass is with Gandhi; He may be a mere speck of ash, but he is with an aandhi (storm).
Allahabadi wrote this during Gandhi's first great mass movement, for swaraj, between 1919 and 1922, the wonder of its age. An astonished British Raj watched the Muslim clergy, led by Imam-e-Hind Maulana Azad and Maulana Abdul Bari, gladly cede leadership of its Khilafat jihad to a frail Gujarati Bania. For a century the British had played off Hindu against Muslim with the impunity of an umpire who can change the rules to suit his decision. Communal violence lay at the deadly edge of this game. As the perceptive Jinnah told the viceroy Lord Chelmsford in 1918, "I know very well that in the Indian states you hardly ever hear of any Hindu-Muslim riots." (We should make a comparative study of riots under British rule and Indian princely states part of our curriculum).
For those three shining years, Gandhi inspired the magnificent power of Hindu-Muslim unity. His call for swaraj rose from a welter of intermeshed whispers to a storm that shook the impregnable oak of British rule till it trembled like a leaf. But an aandhi does not pick and choose each speck of dust that collectively turns it into a historic force. It diminishes differences of character or ideology, and eases contradictions because it is propelled by a single purpose that is far higher than individual or sectarian interest. And so the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind mobilised Muslims for Gandhi while the Hindu Mahasabha worked its field since both wanted India's liberation from colonial rule.
All mass movements have this ability to step over internal hurdles. The CPI(M) was on the left flank of the anti-Emergency upsurge between 1975 and 1977 and Jana Sangh on the right, and neither saw the other as a problem for their larger cause. In 1989, after at least two years of coordination in Parliament, the CPI(M) and BJP not only supported the minority government of V.P. Singh but ate weekly dinners with their Prime Minister while Singh said grace with as much grace as he could muster. No one called Singh communal; at least no one in his senses did. The Bofors bribery scandal had created space for competing ideologies to cultivate common ground, and control an election that catapulted V.P. Singh to the job he coveted: Prime Minister.
So did this mean that everyone in Singh's Cabinet possessed a certificate of honesty from Mother Teresa? I could name half a dozen ministers who took money with one hand and another six who raked it in with both. Every campaign is a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly; even Khilafat leaders like the famous Ali brothers, Muhammad and Shaukat, were accused of putting their hands in the donation till in the name of expenses. Did this matter to the people? If it did, then it mattered far less than the common cause.
Those who believe they can dilute Anna Hazare's impact through pinpricks at his associates understand neither him nor India. He does not really have associates; he has an issue, corruption. He would have remained a fringe figure if this cancer had not aroused the doctor in him. He does not run a political party. He does not aspire to become President or Prime Minister. It is immaterial what stand he took on the Babri mosque, as some Urdu newspapers have been inspired to write in the hope of deflecting Muslim sentiment away from him. He is not the guardian of secularism, or whatever passes for it currently. It makes absolutely no difference whether there is saffron in his audience or green. It is immaterial whether there is a cat watching him or a queen; he wants both to be honest with public money. The controversies over his core team, or outer ring, or the net on his periphery are unimportant to the voter, who is only interested in a cure that will keep this cancer in remission.
The establishment believes that it can deflect Anna Hazare by generating contempt for some Hazrate-Buddhu among the specks of dust. Waste of time. Anger against corruption rages in bursts, and then falls silent. A tree will tell you that the only way to survive a hurricane is to bend. We shall soon learn if Delhi understands nature, and human nature.
Hazrat-e-buddhu bhi Gandhi ke saath hain
Zarra-e-khaq hain magar aandhi ke saath hain
There is little justice in translation. Akbar Allahabadi, the iconic 19th-20th century satirist, would have been especially amused at any transition of his Urdu into English. How do you convey to an alien culture that Hazrat, an honoured title for a holy man, can also become an acerbic appendage for any holier-than-thou hypocrite? I hope this transliteration will serve: Even the Honourable Ass is with Gandhi; He may be a mere speck of ash, but he is with an aandhi (storm).
Allahabadi wrote this during Gandhi's first great mass movement, for swaraj, between 1919 and 1922, the wonder of its age. An astonished British Raj watched the Muslim clergy, led by Imam-e-Hind Maulana Azad and Maulana Abdul Bari, gladly cede leadership of its Khilafat jihad to a frail Gujarati Bania. For a century the British had played off Hindu against Muslim with the impunity of an umpire who can change the rules to suit his decision. Communal violence lay at the deadly edge of this game. As the perceptive Jinnah told the viceroy Lord Chelmsford in 1918, "I know very well that in the Indian states you hardly ever hear of any Hindu-Muslim riots." (We should make a comparative study of riots under British rule and Indian princely states part of our curriculum).
For those three shining years, Gandhi inspired the magnificent power of Hindu-Muslim unity. His call for swaraj rose from a welter of intermeshed whispers to a storm that shook the impregnable oak of British rule till it trembled like a leaf. But an aandhi does not pick and choose each speck of dust that collectively turns it into a historic force. It diminishes differences of character or ideology, and eases contradictions because it is propelled by a single purpose that is far higher than individual or sectarian interest. And so the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind mobilised Muslims for Gandhi while the Hindu Mahasabha worked its field since both wanted India's liberation from colonial rule.
All mass movements have this ability to step over internal hurdles. The CPI(M) was on the left flank of the anti-Emergency upsurge between 1975 and 1977 and Jana Sangh on the right, and neither saw the other as a problem for their larger cause. In 1989, after at least two years of coordination in Parliament, the CPI(M) and BJP not only supported the minority government of V.P. Singh but ate weekly dinners with their Prime Minister while Singh said grace with as much grace as he could muster. No one called Singh communal; at least no one in his senses did. The Bofors bribery scandal had created space for competing ideologies to cultivate common ground, and control an election that catapulted V.P. Singh to the job he coveted: Prime Minister.
So did this mean that everyone in Singh's Cabinet possessed a certificate of honesty from Mother Teresa? I could name half a dozen ministers who took money with one hand and another six who raked it in with both. Every campaign is a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly; even Khilafat leaders like the famous Ali brothers, Muhammad and Shaukat, were accused of putting their hands in the donation till in the name of expenses. Did this matter to the people? If it did, then it mattered far less than the common cause.
Those who believe they can dilute Anna Hazare's impact through pinpricks at his associates understand neither him nor India. He does not really have associates; he has an issue, corruption. He would have remained a fringe figure if this cancer had not aroused the doctor in him. He does not run a political party. He does not aspire to become President or Prime Minister. It is immaterial what stand he took on the Babri mosque, as some Urdu newspapers have been inspired to write in the hope of deflecting Muslim sentiment away from him. He is not the guardian of secularism, or whatever passes for it currently. It makes absolutely no difference whether there is saffron in his audience or green. It is immaterial whether there is a cat watching him or a queen; he wants both to be honest with public money. The controversies over his core team, or outer ring, or the net on his periphery are unimportant to the voter, who is only interested in a cure that will keep this cancer in remission.
The establishment believes that it can deflect Anna Hazare by generating contempt for some Hazrate-Buddhu among the specks of dust. Waste of time. Anger against corruption rages in bursts, and then falls silent. A tree will tell you that the only way to survive a hurricane is to bend. We shall soon learn if Delhi understands nature, and human nature.
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Don’t tell, don’t know
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (November 6)
Is "lower middle class" sufficient mitigation for crime? Justice Jeremy Cooke of London's Southwark Crown Court was not being unkind when he took origin into consideration awarding 19-year-old Mohammad Amir a kinder sentence than his teammates Mohammad Asif, a regular of the Pakistan cricket team, whose career had been punctured but not quite flattened by controversy, and Salman Butt, senior enough to be named captain.
Friday, November 04, 2011
A Word About History
From Byword- India Today (November 4)
A rare October snowstorm along the edge of the Atlantic can be the best of times and the worst of times. The trees along the highway between Philadelphia and New York put on their winter make-up of white-bright talcum while the low sky broods with grey intensity. The snowflakes are deceptive. They fall like tossed cotton but carry the power of heavy metal when bound into ice. One icepack fell on the roof of our sedan from a girder of a bridge with the clang of a rock, startling the driver whose principal virtue so far had been an unblemished Punjab-origin optimism. The snowstorm stretched a two-hour drive to a disconcerting four.
A book is a good companion for bad weather. It helps split the personality. Half of me was engrossed in the anxious beauty of the storm while the other half flirted with facts about the first millennium in a splendid tome called Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present.
History roams on many routes to the past, but a pretty good way to navigate is through the story of words. The next time you are bahadur enough to ask your naukar-chakar to buy subzi at inflationary prices from the bazaar, and then give it to the bawarchi to cook, remember that each of the italicised words came to India from the silken route between China, Central Asia and Persia in the 13th and 14th centuries. Time, however, has altered the inflexion of meaning, and not for the better. During the supposedly stratified age of Mongol emperors and hordes, noker and chakar were warriors of the finest professional pedigree, and part of the protective ring around the ruler. It was a military aristocracy based on ability not birth; the chakar was a symbol of courage who looked upon "death as returning home". In our allegedly democratic times, naukar-chakar have been reduced to menial whipping boys.
Chingiz Khan's nokers were close enough to be considered friends, and formed the core of his imperial bodyguard known as kesig. This team took responsibility for all aspects of his security, including protection from poison. The baurchi was the steward with special responsibility for the kitchen, one of the select braves or baaturs. The current incarnation of these terms, bawarchi and bahadur, is less than heroic, conjuring images of a chap wearing a lungi in Calcutta or a puny doorman in Mumbai. Khubilai Khan, the grandest of the Mongol-Chinese emperors, had 12,000 such bodyguards. Marco Polo reports that the Khan had gifted each one with 13 robes in different colours, and estimated that the lot would have needed over a million yards of silk.
Evolution is rarely in a hurry; the meaning took its time to change in India. As horseback conquerors settled down to become a comfortable ruling class, their court acquired the flab of sedentary power, and the ethics of older class and caste systems. Work had once lifted your status, now status became graded into cemented categories. Anyone in the ruler's service became, well, a servant. The British added a contemptuous dimension to inherited hierarchies. They allotted the Mughal imperial court dress to cooks and attendants, and imposed their three-piece suits and neckties on the compradors that they co-opted into the second and third tiers of their Raj. Go to any Brown Sahib club in Delhi for confirmatory evidence. The Indian middle class, which has become the new ruling community in our post-independence democracy, has adopted the superiority-complex of feudal and coloniser without the former's generosity or the latter's efficiency.
American boys 50 years ago would dream of becoming cops who chased and killed robbers. There are no cops in America today. They are all police officers. It stands to reason. If you sit in an office, you are an officer. Train drivers are called engineers, and when American politicians talk of their middle class they mean precisely those who were yesterday's blue collars. Language is a gauge of social esteem, and respect begins with self-respect. India is too large and complex to fit into any single dimension, but one senses that our country is being jolted out of traditional mental shackles which defined a place for the poor on the outskirts of both the geographical and mental space by the young who will not accept shibboleths or assumptions of the past.
The unprecedented uproar over the Rs. 32-a-day poverty line is evidence. Economists were surprised because they had not changed their societal calculators in five decades. This quiet revolution is not led by those below the poverty line, but by those who will not accept a minimalist definition of poverty. The new Indian demands more accurate mirrors and more ambitious horizons. Dalit replaced the previous term for those who had once been outcast. In 10 years naukar will either rise back to its Mongol meaning, or disappear from those Indian languages which use the word.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Through the looking glass ceiling
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 30)
How much anger do you need to smash a glass ceiling?
A glass ceiling became the symbol of discrimination during the struggle for women's rights in western democracies. By the 1970s women had moved out of the stereotype steno pool into the infested rivulets of middle management, but there was no further room for upward mobility. An invisible ceiling prevented them from entering the boardroom. No rules prevented entry. It just did not happen.
Read more...Friday, October 28, 2011
Arabian Knights
From Byword- India Today (October 28)
The Arab Spring is a rebellion on the cusp of becoming a revolution. It started as a sudden uprising ten months ago in Tunisia. Last Sunday it took its first stride into the future when Tunisia held its first free elections. The last time Tunisians "voted", in 1994, intelligence agents checked ballots and arrested those who had not stamped the ballot in favour of their preferred dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. On October 23, thousands of candidates from 80 political parties sought a place in the new Constituent Assembly.
A revolution, as has been famously observed, is not a tea party; a rebellion even less so. Peaceful transition in Tunisia and war in neighbouring Libya illustrate an old fact: it is up to the ancien regime to determine the difference. Ben Ali understood that he had cheated his people long enough, and disappeared into exile with his pot of gold. Libyans would have given Muammar Gaddafi gold enough, and his retinue of nurses plus an Italian football team for his vicious sons, as farewell gifts if they had left quietly. Instead the megalomaniac Gaddafi decided that Libyans were rats who should be exterminated.
I am surprised that anyone is surprised at the manner of Gaddafi's death. What did we expect the rebels to do? Offer Gaddafi buttered scones and an airline ticket to Geneva while the clock struck four at Grantchester? Lenin understood the dangerous romance of nostalgia fanned by dispossessed elites, particularly the media, and their ability to idolise false memory. He knew the halo of death can obscure the obvious and did not waste much sympathy on the Romanovs. Libyans had none for the despotic, avaricious family that turned a nation's resources into personal wealth, ruled by decree and terror and tortured anyone who opposed them till its dying day.
There is always some distance between a first step and destination but if Tunisia's election becomes a moment of true liberation it will shape the contours of the 21st century. Exactly a hundred years ago, a group of army officers known as the Young Turks launched the mid-eastern Muslim world's first search for modernity on the deathbed of the Ottoman empire, but history dumped this opportunity into the blood-soaked dustbin of the First World War.
This movement reinvented itself, under Mustafa Kemal, as a Turkish resurrection. The Arab territories of the Caliphate relapsed into feudal neo-colonisation or, later, into the mirage of officer sultans who promised socialism and justice but delivered tyranny. Gaddafi was Libya's version of this corrosive delusion.
It is entirely in order that the party expected to win Tunisia's polls, Ennahda, offers Turkey as its role model. Its leader Rachid al-Ghannouchi, is clear about his vision: a durable, plural democracy which protects minorities and promises women equality in education and employment and the freedom to wear or reject a head scarf if they so choose to. This, naturally, is sufficient to invite the appendage "moderate Islamist", as if that were a vaguely acceptable but not quite desirable sort of crime. I await the day when the great liberal newspapers of Europe and America call the Christian Democrats "moderate Christists" or America's Republican Party a "Biblicist Planet Coalition".
The Arab future will be rough, as freedom also enables the release of poisons in the storehouse of the defeated establishments. Egypt has already witnessed violence against Coptic Christians. But communal riots continued in India after freedom without derailing the nation's commitment to democracy. It took a century to reach from the Young Turks to Election Sunday; it will take perhaps a decade for the democratic revolution to become durable.
History is not an even story. A lifetime may deserve nothing more than a footnote, and a year that energises an epoch could require many volumes to comprehend. The last year has been a stirring chapter but the book is still being written. Dictators need paid chroniclers. Tunisia's narrative belongs to 30-year-old Amin Ghouba who told The New York Times on polling day: "Today is the day of independence. Today we got our freedom and our dignity from the simple act of voting."
Democracy is dignity.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
The Shield of Higher Cause
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 23)
When Julian Assange, father of WikiLeaks, makes a viral enemy of a potential friend, he always does so in the name of a Higher Cause. Such mavericks are necessary in an age where information has become a frontline weapon.
Friday, October 21, 2011
An Alibi Called Secrecy
From Byword- India Today (October 21)
Secrecy in government can be both dangerous and essential. The difference lies in the cause: secrecy is criminal when it veils misdeeds, and honourable when it protects the national interest. Unfortunately, only politicians in office can make that call. Their primary impetus does not drive them towards transparency. They are far more adept at justifying self-interest with some rant about national duty. Patriotism used to be the last resort of the scoundrel; these days it is generally a first preference.
The debate on the Right to Information (RTI) is caught in this warp. Governments argue that in certain circumstances they are duty-bound to shade the truth, or even lie. We understand that. We also understand when that privilege is exploited. Every nation permits flexibility in the lie-line during times of war, for instance; but even in the fog of high patriotism we condone the evasions of a warrior but punish the falsehoods of a warmonger. The scars of George Bush and Tony Blair, who lied to drag their countries into war with Iraq, will not heal in their lifetime.
Dr Manmohan Singh's Government is not engaged in any war, except with itself; but fractious civil war tends to encourage the temptation of censorship. It has quite deliberately started a public debate on RTI, albeit with the usual feints and side-trips into blind alleys, aimed at amendments which will curb access to documents. Privately, this administration is convinced that RTI has degenerated into a licentious free-for-all.
If we want to understand why, then the correct question to ask is 'why now?'
Dr Singh did not inherit RTI. He can claim parentage of this legislation. He placed it among his more noteworthy achievements during the campaign for the 2009 general election, and doubtless won at least a few additional votes. During his first term, Dr Singh was perfectly content with RTI. Why has it become a problem two years into the second term? RTI procedures have not become any more liberal, although activists have become sharper and more sophisticated, blocking loopholes before they can be used to escape disclosure. The difference between the RTI triumphalism during UPA 1 and RTI nervousness during UPA 2 is fairly simple. Before 2009 Dr Singh felt he had nothing to hide. That confidence has melted with the disclosure of malfeasance by his ministers on an industrial scale. A series of self-inflicted wounds has shredded credibility, with RTI inflicting most of the injury. Corruption is the source of these wounds, making them gangrenous. The nationwide symbols of corruption are the Commonwealth Games and 2G spectrum sales. In both cases files obtained through RTI not only broke the story wide open but also sabotaged the possibility of any cover-up.
When governments seek to set the record straight, a question must follow: who set the record crooked? Before RTI it was far easier to blame media for distortion. But when media has in its possession a true copy of original files, then the whistle of the blower sounds more authentic than the convoluted explanations of a minister. Our parliamentary system has a nuanced approach to lies: any minister caught lying to the House is expected to resign, but a minister who can avoid the truth is considered clever and competent. RTI leaves ministers bereft of such protection.
Dr Singh's Government is showing all the symptoms of "secondtermitis", a wasting disease that can turn fatal. Most governments thrive after election; it is rather more difficult to survive re-election. Even the great Jawaharlal Nehru began to wobble after re-election in 1957. The peace pedestal on which he had constructed his international persona began to crumble on the China front by 1959 and collapsed during the 1962 war. At first glance Mrs Indira Gandhi's case seems an exception, for nothing could go wrong at the beginning of her second term in 1971. But by 1973, nothing could go right. Her third term, between 1980 and 1984, drifted on the acrid smoke of mistakes and violence, ending in the tragedy of her martyrdom.
Governments which are re-elected atrophy in the squeeze between high expectations and complacent delivery. They also begin to believe the illusion that opposition is dead. Nothing dies in a democracy.
Public life has more than one meaning in a democracy; it is not only about the management of public affairs, but also public in its process. The shelter of privacy is accorded to only a few subjects, notably defence. In other areas of governance, secrecy is an alibi, not a solution, and alibis do not even buy you much time at the contemporary exchange rate. Dr Singh no longer has a government to gain by whittling RTI, but he still has a reputation to lose.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Media needs some immediate attention
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 16)
I can't quite determine which part of the story made me laugh, and which brought on tears, when I learnt that some zealous functionaries had passed around envelopes with Rs 500 notes to journalists in Satna who had been summoned to report on L.K. Advani's anti-corruption campaign. It was not Mr Advani's fault; he was victim of a prevailing system. However, as pitfalls go this was a bit of a crater dip.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Brothers In Arms
From Byword- India Today (October 14)
Brotherhood is a moveable feast. The Abrahamic faiths have always been cynical about its virtues. Cain, first child of the first family, dispatched Abel and then artfully asked the Almighty, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Cain was never a likely candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, but he could have become, in a contemporary incarnation, a cold strategic warrior, much sought after by think-tanks. Abel the Good Boy merely confirmed that decency is an invitation to murder.
On October 4 Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai described Pakistan as a "twin brother" just hours after he signed up on a strategic relationship with India. Was Karzai encouraged by the fact that Afghanistan and Pakistan are locked in a property dispute across the Durand Line? Friends do not have ownership claims; brothers do.
Brotherhood was also on the mind of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad when, within the same week, he telephoned Karzai to say that "enemies never want to see friendship and brotherhood in the region and we should do our best to bring hearts and thoughts closer to each other." Ahmedinejad tends to talk like a Persian poet of the inferior sort; his point was not very subtle. He wants the three Islamic "brothers" Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to make common cause against "enemy" America. I am not totally sure that Karzai, who has just lost his real younger brother Ahmed Wali to a Taliban bomb in Kandahar, believes he has the same enemies as Ahmedinejad or Asif Zardari.
On October 12, India signed agreements with "maritime neighbour" Vietnam to deepen strategic ties, and, in a rebuff to China, continue oil exploration in the South China Sea. Vietnam is the only country in four decades to have silenced China on the battlefield, forcing Beijing to withdraw from its territory after a 17-day war in 1979. Vietnam did not defeat France and America in order to succumb to China.
International diplomacy is a layered mechanism. Every bilateral purpose leaves a bit of space for potential crosspurpose. Peacetime manoeuvres are often far more intricate than straight-line confrontations of nations in conflict: foreign policy is the art of establishing advantage without the self-injurious risk of forcing a war. The patterns emerging from Iran to Japan are fascinating, perhaps because they are volatile. Primary needs intersect with parallel initiatives, linked by self-interest when they cannot be held together by logic.
Ahmedinejad is testing the possibility of a "Muslim alliance" of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan as the dominant influence between the Caucasus and China, stretching down to the Indian border in Punjab. This does not necessarily mean that Iran would be hostile to India, but Delhi has no role in this "Muslim consolidation". Pakistan might get more "strategic space" against India, but become vulnerable to American pressure and Chinese worry; China fears secessionist Islamism in Sinkiang. India's response is ethnic outreach to Afghan Tajiks, who resent the domination of Pushtuns. India's strategic intervention is largely about training Tajik soldiers for war against Pushtun-dominated Taliban, a variation of the Northern Alliance strategy when India financed anti-Taliban forces before America returned to lead them into Kabul after 9/11.
India has one significant advantage. It has no brothers in a region overloaded with faith-fierce siblings. Nehru tried brotherhood in the Fifties, and we all know what Comrade Mao thought of it. Today, emotion has been squeezed out of Indian policy, making it leaner and hopefully a bit meaner. Even at the height of Indo-Soviet amity in 1971, Delhi side-stepped Brother Brezhnev's bear hug. The cool Vajpayee-Singh cultivation of America is bearing reward now, nudging ahead quiet partnerships. There is virtual understanding between India, Vietnam, Japan and the US in the blow-hot-blow-cold relationship with China. They are drawing a line on water.
In 1962, America was ready to send air force squadrons with bombs and pilots to the Himalayas. The key question since 1962 has been: Which nation will support India in a second India-China conflict? The answer is emerging in the Indian Ocean and Pacific.
As the wealth of the world begins to rotate back to resource-hungry Asia, confrontation and cooperation will be calibrated by both long-term perceptions and immediate needs. We will learn, over the next decade, which nations have understood the tilt of history. Fervour is not conducive to comprehension; far better to be cool. Delhi is getting good at cool.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Seen, obscene and unseen
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 9)
Wealth is far easier to recognise than poverty. Wealth is either seen or obscene; poverty remains largely unseen. Poverty of the worst kind is hidden in those parts of India — or indeed the world — where it is outside the provenance of government, and beyond the interest of individuals and institutions who fuel the engines of modern life, like business concerns or bureaucracy or media. Those of a liberal persuasion do feel the occasional moral twinge at the passing sight of near-starvation, but poverty does not appear on any balance sheet, liberal or conservative. The cure for liberal guilt is aversion. We take our eyes off the hungry. We leave the responsibility to government.
Friday, October 07, 2011
Salt On Poverty's Wounds
From Byword- India Today (October 7)
There are three ways in which a journalist gets a headline right: deep thought, instinct, and good luck. Of the three, instinct might prove to be the most reliable, since it does not permit space for doubt. The favourite word used by media to describe the cessation of hostilities between Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and former finance minister P. Chidambaram, at a particularly volatile moment in their war, was "truce". Spot on.
The Oxford dictionary defines "truce" with its usual pithy perfection: "An agreement between enemies or opponents to stop fighting for an agreed period of time." A truce does not signify the end of war, and it isn't. Congress President Sonia Gandhi would of course like this truce to last at least till the next general election, or the installation of her son Rahul Gandhi as successor to Dr Manmohan Singh, whichever comes earlier. Both the contestants might be irrelevant to a Rahul regime, Pranab because he wants to retire, and Chidambaram because he is now too controversial. But the Pranab-Chidambaram ceasefire, negotiated through multi-tier back channels with a finesse that nations might envy, was held together by a band-aid rather than a bandage. It was always a veneer, and it crumbled within days.
The artillery of Delhi's intra-party wars is disinformation; the battlefield is mostly newsprint; the first casualties are bureaucrats, particularly those under consideration for some choice posting. There is an old Indian saying from the feudal days: when you want to destroy a king, first kill his parrot. That is the fate of officials close to ministers; they get trapped in poison weeds planted by the opposition. As in any war, the circumference of damage is inevitably far larger than the circle of target. Institutions get battered, as much as individuals. When critical ministries like finance and home are involved, government becomes dysfunctional. This is not sniper fire, this is civil war, symptom of a much more serious malaise.
Stability in power is not merely an attribute of numbers, and levels of support in the legislature. An American president does not need a majority in the Senate, but Barack Obama's mooring has come unhinged. There is no threat to Dr Manmohan Singh's tenure yet, but his coalition has lost its centre of gravity. Its majority is sustained by the compulsion to postpone accountability, although in a democracy this cannot be an indefinite luxury. Survival may be certain, but governance becomes uncertain. When a government loses discipline and direction, it can inflict self-damage in the most curious, if revealing, ways.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, to offer the most recent instance, has poured salt upon poverty's wounds with a fervour that the electorate will remember long after feuds fade into the subconscious. His economists must have done the math: calculated the minimal calorie requirements for survival, costed it and emerged with the now infamous Rs. 32 definition of daily urban need. Statistics are a trap in an insensitive mind. They may be necessary for policy, but they must be refurbished by the human touch in politics. Here is a statistic that Montek Singh Ahluwalia might consider worth a thought or two. He lives in the most exclusive residential zone of India, or perhaps Asia, in one of the string of multi-acre palaces built for the elite of the ruling class in Lutyens' Delhi. If the Government ever thought of selling Ahluwalia's bungalow, it would fetch Rs. 400 crore or more. Economists in the Planning Commission have computers which can count and divide. They would calculate that every blade of grass in Ahluwalia's expansive, grace-and-favour residence is worth more than Rs. 32.
Politicians who live in similar palaces are at least accountable at election time, and know that the price of callousness is defeat. Ahluwalia is where he is because of only one vote, the Prime Minister's. Dr Manmohan Singh is a generous employer. Ahluwalia's sole penance was to appear pseudo-contrite on a friendly television channel. The remark will prove more expensive to the party which hired him.
General Jack Jacob, our living hero of the Bangladesh war, told me of a cockney ditty British soldiers under his command would sing during the Second World War. It's the rich wot gets the pleasure, It's the poor wot tikes the blame, It's the same the whole world over, Isn't it a bloody shime!
Within months of victory in this great world war, these impoverished cockneys threw out Winston Churchill, the genius who saved his nation, in an election that became an avalanche, because they were tired of taking the blame while the nabobs drank champagne. Democracy hath no fury like the poor scorned.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
The certainty of uncertainty
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 2)
The Congress is suffering from the hammer blows of ambition on the anvil of power. The BJP has a splitting headache in expectation of power. The first is serious. The second is silly.
Friday, September 30, 2011
An enemy in common
From Byword- India Today (September 30)
America," Jinnah told author-photographer Margaret Bourke-White just one month after partition in 1947, "needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America." The shadow of Russia muted the claim from pompous to possible. Jinnah always understood the power of an enemy far better than the value of a friend. America, he believed, would buy into the Soviet threat, and Pakistan use it as a decoy to obtain arms for what Jinnah believed would be an existentialist war with India.
Bourke-White remarked, perceptively, while recording the conversation in her book Halfway to Freedom: "Jinnah's most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been playing off opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy." Pakistan, which abandoned Jinnah's domestic philosophy of a secular Muslim state very quickly, and without remorse, has been more faithful to Jinnah's foreign policy.
Jawaharlal Nehru, reflecting the philosophy of India's freedom movement, set India's foreign policy by a different compass: the search for common friends rather than enemies in common. He dismissed alliances as neo-colonisation. His idealism could bubble to levels unacceptable to his more sceptical colleagues, many of whom accused Nehru privately of dangerous naivete only to be proved publicly right during the 1962 China war.
American foreign policy, shaped by the life-and-death drama of a world war against fascism, quickly followed by another against Communism, understood the impulse of nationalism but was deeply suspicious of any internationalism that blurred the difference between 'good' and 'evil', as Washington defined the terms. Neutrality was almost as grave a crime as hostility. Wartime sensibilities stretched to accommodate any kind of government if it remained onside in the confrontation with the Soviets. The greater threat obviated the problem of lesser evils like dictatorship in the range of allies. To be fair, the Communist bloc was hardly a shining example of democracy, or even social justice; it was equally cynical and less productive to boot. In any case, Washington was at ease with either democrat or dictator in Pakistan as long as both were Cold Warriors.
Much has been written about the impact on India of the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather less about the consequences for Pakistan. The over-extended celebrations of the US-Pak victory in Afghanistan drowned out an obvious reality: friends become as irrelevant as enemies at the end of war. America's alliance with western Europe would quite likely have dissipated after 1945 had the ideological-military challenge from Russia not kept them together. Jinnah had wisely predicted that Soviet Union would force America to befriend Pakistan. But that wisdom was co-terminus with the existence of the Soviet Union.
Geopolitics is a variable science; geography may not change, but politics does. America and Pakistan have drifted into virtual conflict which both governments were loath to acknowledge for different reasons. The Mujahideen who declared war on America, a long list of militias including al Qaeda, continue to treat Pakistan as a sanctuary, a fortress from which they hit America, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere. The Pakistan army offers terrorists succour and space in pursuit of a "patriotic" agenda, as a strike force against India and any government in Kabul that refuses to accept Pakistani hegemony in Afghanistan. The Pak military establishment is not particularly unhappy when America bleeds in Afghanistan.
For a long while Washington refused to read the evidence, or pretended it was satisfied with patently manufactured excuses. The Pentagon has swallowed its anger for a decade, in the belief that even a duplicitous Pak army is better than an openly hostile Pak army. It even kept quiet when Pak soldiers ambushed American officers and men on May 14, 2007 at a place called Teri Mangal after a tripartite meeting with Afghans. An American major was killed, and three other officers wounded; the Black Hawk in which they escaped was described as "blood-soaked".
But fiction has become difficult to sustain after the discovery and death of Osama bin Laden. On September 22 Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, put this duplicity on record when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that anti-American terrorists, responsible for 77 US casualties in one truck bomb strike alone, were a "strategic arm" of the ISI. It was a week in which Barack Obama could not find the time to meet Pakistan's Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani. Gilani canceled his trip to New York. Islamabad is scrambling to reorganise with its usual mix of bluster, sulk and SOS to old friends. It will have to come to terms with a radical shift in the strategic environment. India and America now have an enemy in common-the terrorist with a base in Pakistan.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 25)
In the loneliness of the small town where I was born, and the shuttered years of boarding school, dream was a five-letter word called Tiger. Mansur Ali Khan's magic transcended the supreme piffle that passed for cricket commentary when radio, with a glowing green eye in the right hand corner, was our primary passport to Test cricket.
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