#Swarajya Aug Issue Final

L E T T E R S

Whoa! I’m seeing

“What India does have, however, is a vast talent pool, both within the country and outside” – even this seems optimistic at best.

(Artificial Intelligence, Real Defence, July 2018). — Rar Afam

more and more American RW terms in Jaggi’s article (Constitutional Hindutva, July 2018). I don’t know RAJKUMAR/MINT VIA GETTY IMAGES

CORRECTION In the article, Rawat’s Robust Response (July 2018), the author’s name and profile were presented incorrectly.

The name should have read Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd), and his correct profile is: Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd), commanded 21 Corps (Strike) and the Srinagar-based 15 Corps.

A Distinguished Fellow at Vivekanand International Foundation, he is reputed to be the most experienced hand in dealing with the affairs of Jammu and Kashmir in diverse fields.

— Editor

DELHI MEDIA Good article, good articulation (Degeneration by English, July 2018). The idea of incorporating diversity in values, perspectives, local proximal issues and geographical influences in reporting would, of course, make reporting rich. This should be largely welcome, ideally, in all fields, where there is a lack of diversity. One important point is to sieve in people, who are principled, not ideo-

if it’s good or bad.

Also, kudos for taking Shashi Tharoor’s thesis head on. It’s a stupid definition, which Tharoor

logically, but with integrity and love for humanity as a whole. Further, courage to oppose should arise from love towards the subject on whom reporting is done, not based on hate.

—Divine Das I feel Indian media has stuck to its British Raj time warp days as even are the media houses. I guess their current strong tilt is more an existential necessity rather than an ideological one — they’re trying their hand at opinion-making rather than news dissemination, in my view.

— Sundar Narsimhan KINGS AND SOLDIERS Lovely piece (Kings and Sol-

diers, July 2018). Plenty of trivia and information to grasp and understand on how the early years of Indian armed forces blended both royal and professional men of great repute.

— Vishwanath Krishnamoorthy INDIC CREATIVITY I wait for the day when formal tours of restored millennium Indian temples and architecture can take place across the country.

Although not ideal, when foreigners pay to visit India’s past, Indians will also embrace their past. Yet another step in the unfolding and inevitable re-awakening of the Indic civilisation.

— JJ Jackxon

presents without any spine or skeleton to stand on. His premise that Hinduism is all “respectful” of every tradition there is, is one which gets on my nerve every time I read about it.

— Vineet Menon

AUGUST 2018

1

C O V E R

S T O R Y

16

VOL 62 ISSUE 07 EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Jaitirth Rao Manish Sabharwal Surjit S Bhalla Swapan Dasgupta EDITORIAL DIRECTOR R Jagannathan CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Prasanna Viswanathan PUBLISHER AND CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER Amarnath Govindarajan CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER N Muthuraman CREATIVE DIRECTOR Pranab Dutta EXECUTIVE EDITOR M R Subramani CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Aravindan Neelakandan, Jaideep A Prabhu, Jaideep Mazumdar, Rajeev Srinivasan, Sumati Mehrishi, Swati Goel Sharma CHIEF COPY EDITOR Ravi M G SENIOR EDITORS Arush Tandon, Arihant Pawariya SENIOR SUB EDITORS Prakhar Gupta, Srikanth Ramakrishnan, Harrshit Varma, Tushar Gupta, Harsha Bhat ASSISTANT COPY EDITORS Dhushyanthi Ravi, Karan Kamble, Shravan K Iyer DIGITAL MARKETING AND ONLINE SALES Raghu Ravi, Tejesh Murthy, Sheel Nidhi Tripathi VIDEO PRODUCTION AND GRAPHICS Jones Abraham, Dikshita Kashyap, Hari Prasanth www.swarajyamag.com

A CASE OF POOR JUDGEMENT

16

COALGATE IS NOT 2G, THANKFULLY

23

For Advertisement and Business queries: prasanna@swarajyamag.com

THE SINS OF ‘ST ANTONY’

26

KOVAI MEDIA PVT LTD 356/2, 14B Cross, 5th Main HSR, Sector 6, Bangalore, 560102 Phone No: 91 9632138005

“WHAT MORE PROOF IS NEEDED?”

30

THE NATIONAL HERALD STORY

34

WITH THE LAW ON YOUR SIDE

36

/swarajyamag /+Swarajyamag

@swarajyamag /company/swarajya

For Editorial queries: editor@swarajyamag.com For Subscription queries: subscriptions@swarajyamag.com

All rights reserved. Printed and published by Amarnath Govindarajan on behalf of Kovai Media Pvt Ltd. Printed by G. Packia Selvan at Bhagya Offset Printers, No 89/A1 [New no.

109], Chinnammal Street, Saibaba Colony, Coimbatore 641038. Published at 43 Nehru Nagar, M.D Gardens, Civil Airport Post, Kalapatti Road, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, INDIA 641014.

2

A U G U ST 2018

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

I N TH I S I S S U E

AUGUST 2018

NEW THINK

04

C H E S S

44

LET NEW TEMPLES BLOOM

MASTER OF THE 64 SQUARES

IN INDIA’S CULTURAL REJUVENATION, TEMPLES NEED TO BE LOOKED AT NOT ONLY AS SPIRITUAL CENTRES, BUT ALSO AS ENGINES OF WEALTH CREATION.

IF YOU FOLLOW INDIAN CHESS, THEN R B RAMESH NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION. IF NOT, THEN RAMESH AND HIS PUPILS MIGHT JUST CONVINCE YOU TO.

U T S A V

52 00

SEASON OF INDIC ROMANCE

A N D

LETTERS 01 CONTENTS 02 THE GHOST AND THE MACHINE 06 BHARAT NEEDS MORE OF BHARATHI 10 GURUKULAS OF THE FUTURE 12 CUSTODIANS OF TIRANGA’S FLOWING PRIDE 40 FAKE NAMES AND INVISIBILITY 49 THE SNAKE HELIX 56 HOW DEEP IS YOUR FRIED? 66 BUSTING THE HINDU TERROR MYTH 70 BOOKS 74 ARCHIVE 80

A PEEK INTO HOW THE MONSOON IS DESCRIBED IN THE RICH, VOLUMINOUS, AND PROFOUND BODY OF CLASSICAL SANSKRIT LITERATURE. VIPIN KUMAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGE AUGUST 2018

3

N E W

T H I N K

LET A 100 NEW TEMPLES BLOOM R JAGANNATHAN

A

In India’s cultural rejuvenation project, temples need to be looked at not only as spiritual centres, but also as engines of wealth creation.

PROPOSAL to construct the world’s largest religious structure, the 700-feet, 70-storey Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir, with a built-up area of 5.4 lakh square feet, has drawn the usual killjoy attentions of the National Green Tribunal. The tribunal has asked ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which has proposed the temple complex, and the Central Groundwater Authority to respond to a petition of a green activist. The activist claims the giant temple will deplete the Yamuna waterbed since it is supposed to recreate the forests of Vrindavan around the temple, complete with 12 forests spread over 28 acres.

That somebody should oppose the building of greenery and forests to prevent some kind of future water depletion problem is astounding, but that is another matter. The temple, when constructed, would not only be an architectural innovation, but also create a new hub for commercial and spiritual activity in Mathura. While nobody would want to ruin the environment for creating this marvel, the right way to deal with the challenges thrown up would be to compensate for any resultant impact through compensatory actions, including augmentation of Yamuna’s water through other means, treating waste water, etc. What one should oppose is this mindless effort to stop the construction of a temple that most Indians would be proud of.

In independent India, with the exception of the rebirth of the Som-

4

A U G U ST 2018

nath temple, there have been a few attempts at rejuvenating our temple inheritance. The Birlas went on a temple spree, and the Swaminarayan sect has been building excellent Akshardhams to take our inheritance forward. The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD), which runs the enormously rich Tirupati temples, has been expanding its footprint to some new places, but the TTD is a state-run institution, and its efforts are as mediocre as the state controlling it. There has been no path-breaking effort by it despite having all the resources to do it.

The truth is that India’s current social decadence can be partly linked to our inability to build on the architectural heritage our forefathers left for us. Indian temple architecture is unique, with interesting variations in the north, south, east and west.

But if we want cultural rejuvenation, we need to create new temples with innovative designs that marry two objectives: drawing on our rich heritage, while also experimenting with novel ideas. This is exactly what the ISKCON temple might end up doing, if built right.

As (arguably) the world’s tallest religious structure, the temple will break new ground in terms of architecture and engineering (see artist’s impression), but, equally important, it is a kind of riposte to the Abrahamic challenge in India. Churches and mosques are built not only to cater to the religious needs of the faithful, but also to send a message of power and inculcate awe in everyone

around. On the other hand, our modern temples tend to be understated.

New churches and mosques in India try and tower over the landscape so as to project power to new and future converts. It is a challenge that Hindu temples now need to meet even while retaining the spiritual flavour of the timeless temples from our golden heritage.

It is also time to debunk the myth that temples are primarily spiritual centres for the devout. Where large temples come up, the entire economy gets a boost, and a new ecosystem is created that can promote engineering, architecture, schools, health institutions, and related social and cultural activities. Temples are the future hubs for Hindu rejuvenation.

It is a pity that most Hindu temples in south India, and increasingly some in the west, are being run with state meddling. States, even those run by Bharatiya Janata Party, tend to see temples as sources of cash rather than centres of spiritual and temporal advancement. They are thus effectively killing the spirit of Hinduism.

While battles to free temples from the dead hand of state control have begun sporadically, it is equally important to create new temple towns in various parts of India that begin on a clean slate, without government involvement, and free to pursue their own paths. In this scenario, it is important to not only seek donations to build new temples, but also allow alternative and innovative modes of funding to develop.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir

WE NEED TO GET PAST OUR OLD CONFUSIONS AND SQUEAMISHNESS ENGENDERED BY COLONISED NEHRUVIAN MINDS WHO KEEP TELLING US THAT TEMPLES ARE A WASTE OF RESOURCES. THEY ARE NOT. For example, why not allow villages on the peripheries of cities to pool land and create temples as a way of not only improving the livelihoods of their residents, but also as a vehicle of caste collaboration, with every group being a co-owner in our heritage? At the other end, why not create dharmic funds to make temple-building one of their core objectives? Such funds can invest in dharmic product companies (incense sticks, religious books, cow shelters, etc) and also provide opportunities for giving investors some returns, though this cannot be the main objective. The real return ought to be psychic, the happiness that comes from giving back to society what we have gained from it.

India, especially Hindu society, needs a big idea to get over its inherent divisiveness, which can be easily exploited by forces inimical

to Hindu society. Some “modern” voices advise us to give up the Ram Temple in Ayodhya and build some hospital or school there when it is precisely a flourishing Ram Temple that will bring forth the resources to build schools, hospitals and Veda pathshalas there. Where there is a temple, there will be economic gain and growth.

We need to get past our old confusions and squeamishness engendered by colonised Nehruvian minds who keep telling us that temples are a waste of resources. They are not.

Temples are sources of cultural and economic rejuvenation – and we need a proper marriage of resources and spirituality to lift Hindu society out of its morass.

It can be argued that there are so many abandoned or dilapidated temples that ought to be our first priority. The Sri Dharmasthala Manju-

natheshwara Dharmasthana Trust is already doing great work in this regard, but we should never adopt either/or arguments when the cause is right. We need to reclaim and restore old temples as much as build new ones. Sometimes the new can exist along with the old, even in the same premises. Dharma needs both.

At this point, it is worth recalling the first line in the Chanakya sutra: Sukhasya moolam Dharmah; Dharmasya moolam arthah, which translates thus: Happiness comes from following Dharma, or right conduct, and the basis of Dharma is wealth.

There is no better way to live up to this advice than building new and interesting temples from the ground up. Dharma and economic well-being are closely related.

R Jagannathan is Editorial Director, Swarajya.

AUGUST 2018

5

T E C H N O L O G Y

THE GHOST AND THE MACHINE PRITHWIS MUKERJEE

T

Bio-hacking and mind-controlled devices will possibly allow carbon-based human intelligence to hold its own against a pure silicon-based artificial one.

HE GHOST in the Machine is a 1967 book by the noted Hungarian author, Arthur Koestler, about the mind-body problem that seeks to relate the intangible mind with a physical body. Half a century later, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the proliferation of autonomous robots, including cars, has intensified our focus in this area. Today, we seek technology that will help seamlessly connect the intangibility of knowledge, intent and desire with the physicality of a corresponding action.

A cursory glance at the technology landscape shows us multiple strands of inquiry. First, there is vanilla artificial intelligence that is focussed on digital phenomena, like imaging, handwriting and voice recognition, language translation and strategy games such as chess and Go. Extending this is vanilla robotics, which allows us to operate complicated machine tools in applications ranging from heavy manufacturing to delicate surgical procedures. Both these strands tend to come together to create autonomous devices such as self-driving cars and data-driven decision processes. These can, or are being designed to, sense a rapidly changing environment and react in a manner that helps achieve goals initially set by human programmers and then, increasingly and somewhat disconcertingly, by these nonhuman devices “themselves”.

This last narrative of autonomous robots taking on a role in the affairs of human society and replacing hu-

6

A U G U ST 2018

mans not just in low-end physical work but in complex management and administrative decisions is causing increasing angst in the general population. From initial fears of large-scale unemployment to subtle disempowerment and marginalisation of humans, popular culture is rife with fears of our robotic overlords taking over the planet.

Shining a ray of hope into this otherwise dystopian darkness are two other somewhat similar streams of technology that are becoming increasingly stronger. First is biohacking that seeks to augment human abilities. This goes beyond the mere application of mechanical devices such as levers and pulleys to raise heavy weights or servo motors and power steering that allow humans to control big machines. What bio-hackers do is that they enhance the organs to allow a human being to, say, sense ultra-violet rays. For another example, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips are placed subcutaneously to activate doors and in extreme cases, transcranial electrical shocks are used to alter the ability of the brain to respond to emergencies.

What looks like the endgame in this body-enhancement process is the fourth and final strand of technology that hooks into the human brain to determine what its intentions are.

Then it goes about executing or implementing these intentions using the non-human technology of far more powerful machines. Thus, the ghost of an intention or desire, “re-

siding” or originating in the brain is liberated from the restrictions imposed by the physical limitations of a biological body and is allowed to directly control and use the immense computational and electromechanical power of a physical machine to achieve its goals. This tight integration of the ghost and the machine, where the latter is controlled by the former through thought alone is what will possibly allow carbonbased human intelligence to hold its own against the pure silicon-based artificial intelligence that threatens to swamp it.

Controlling devices and machinery with thoughts, or rather the mind, is really not new. The concept has moved from mythology, through science fiction and has been actually realised and implemented in wheelchairs for paraplegic patients. These are unfortunate people who are paralysed from their neck downwards and there is really no cure for this condition. In the last 10 years, engineers have acquired the expertise to use electroencephalography (EEG) techniques to sense electrical signals in the brain and use this information to guide wheelchairs as per their desires and requirements. This simple Google search “http://bit.ly/eegwheelchair” will show the range and diversity of EEG wheelchair products, including some do-it-yourself ones for amateurs that are readily available or can be constructed.

But to be effective, the EEG has to be unpleasantly intrusive. Initially, implants had to be inserted through

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

ENDGAME IN THIS PROCESS IS TECHNOLOGY THAT HOOKS INTO THE HUMAN BRAIN TO DETERMINE WHAT ITS INTENTIONS ARE AND EXECUTES THEM USING NON-HUMAN TECHNOLOGY OF FAR MORE POWERFUL MACHINES. holes drilled into the cranium and connected to neurons. With time and technology, this has been simplified to the point where special purpose caps with metallic probes worn tightly on the head could also be used to serve the same purpose. In fact, some of these caps are also being used as input devices for video games and can be used to control the game. Nevertheless, the unwieldy nature of the interface makes it rather difficult to

use unless one was really, really desperate to use the technology as in the case of an unfortunate paraplegic.

This is where the whole new technology of electromyography (EMG) has made a significant breakthrough.

The key idea behind this amazing new technique is that while the brain and the nervous system may be the origin of all our thoughts and desires, the information about the same is communicated to the exter-

nal world — and devices — through motor control. When we speak, throat muscles move. When we type letters on a keyboard, move a pencil on paper or operate a switch, the muscles of our hands move. When we are happy or sad, the muscles of our face change to reflect a smile or a frown. So, the information on the intent or the desire that lies deep inside the brain and could only be accessed with EEG implants, is now

AUGUST 2018

7

T E C H N O L O G Y

BIO-HACKING GOES BEYOND MERE APPLICATION OF MECHANICAL DEVICES THAT ALLOW HUMANS TO CONTROL BIG MACHINES — IT ENHANCES THE HUMAN ORGANS THEMSELVES. accessible far more easily by something as simple as a wristband!

The CTRL-Kit is one such device.

Designed by a neuroscience company, CTRL-Lab, that is led by former Microsoft engineer Thomas Reardon, the CTRL-Kit looks like a heavy bracelet with spikes that is often worn by gangsters and their henchmen. But instead of hurting an enemy, the spikes in this bracelet press into the wearer’s skin and can pick up the electrical voltage in the motor muscles of the hand. Two simple demonstrations show the immense potential of this technology. In the first, a person starts typing on a normal keyboard and the letters appear on the screen. Then, the keyboard is removed and the person is basically drumming the table with the intention to type and the letters continue to appear on the screen. Finally,

8

A U G U ST 2018

even the motion of the fingers is stopped and the mere desire or intention to type a letter is picked up from the minute twitch in the muscle and reflected as a letter on the screen. In the second demo, the movement of a person’s hand is sensed and shown as a corresponding “virtual” hand on the screen. Obviously, the virtual hand on the screen can be replaced with a physical, mechanical robotic hand, if necessary. Making the virtual hand replicate the movement of the human hand is not difficult. One can move a finger or make a fist and the virtual hand will do the same.

The magic happens when the human does not actually move the finger, but only desires or wishes to. That is when the software takes over and by, not just detecting, but interpreting the pattern of electrical voltage on the motor muscles of the wrist, it

makes the virtual hand move a finger even though the human hand did not move it.

Talking of the shift from motion to words, AlterEgo is an earphone and headset combination developed

by Arnav Kapur at the MIT Media Lab that focusses on the muscles around the face and the jaw. When a person speaks, a normal microphone is designed to pick up the physical vibrations or movements of the air or the bones, but AlterEgo is different.

Instead of sensing movement, it senses the voltage level in the muscles that cause movement and as a result, it can pick out words that the user is silently articulating or “saying in his head”. Even when a person is only reading a text, the muscles around the head and the face have quick, imperceptible movements that “sound” out the words that he actu-

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

ally “hears” in his head. This process is known as sub-vocalisation and is the key with which AlterEgo unlocks what is going in and out of the brain when one is trying to speak.

Both CTRL-Kit and AlterEgo are a part of an ever-expanding family of wearable devices that pick up signals emanating from the brain, either through traditional EEG or the more user-friendly EMG technique and interpret them to decode what the wearer desires or intends to do or say. This interpretation and decoding process still uses the good “old fashioned” AI techniques such as artificial neural networks. Scanning through a blizzard of neurosignals, whether from EEG or EMG, and interpreting it as a specific word or movement is really no different from the kind of AI research that goes into autonomous vehicle control or face recognition, and this is perhaps going to be the biggest application of AI techniques in the years ahead.

Popular perception posits AI — and robots that it controls — as competitors to humans and native intelligence, but going forward, it is more likely than not that the two will cooperate to complete tasks that each one has difficulty in doing on its own. Structurally, or qualitatively, it is no different from a crane operator lifting a 100-tonne load or a pilot flying an aircraft at the speed of sound, but operationally, there will be a far higher degree of integration between man and machine. In effect, this means that man will now be able to evolve into a superman — with enhanced physical and mental powers.

India has already missed the bus on traditional AI. Unlike Google, Facebook, Amazon or even Alibaba and Baidu, there is no Indian company that has the volume and variety of data with which it can create the kind of AI models that shockand-awe us with their incredible sophistication. Flipkart might have

IT IS LIKELY THAT AI AND HUMANS WILL COOPERATE TO COMPLETE TASKS THAT EACH ONE HAS DIFFICULTY DOING ON ITS OWN. succeeded, but like in most Indian businesses, their owners were more interested in selling out to Walmart and enjoy their hard won cash. Now, it is almost impossible, in the winner-takes-all scenario of the internet, that any new startup that is based on social data will be able to scale up to achieve anything significant.

Man-machine interactions, on the other hand, offer a very significant but niche area, where Indian entrepreneurship can still get a toehold by leveraging the knowledge that is latent and currently languishing in our public institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the All-India Institutes of Medical Sciences. Like TeamIndus, that made a valiant, but eventually unsuccessful, private effort to plant the Tricolour on the Moon, we need

a private initiative to focus on and crack this technology. This may be the only way that India can, not just hop on to, but actually get to drive the next big technology bus.

The ghost trapped in the biological machine must be liberated so that the ghost and the digital machine, the carbon intelligence and the silicon intelligence, can work together.

This is how we will walk towards a new future at the next level of the ladder of human evolution.

Prithwis Mukherjee is an engineer by education, a programmer by passion, a teacher by profession and an imagineer by intention. After a long stint in India’s software business he has moved into academia and helps students learn how to dream, dare and deliver on tomorrow’s technopromise today.

AUGUST 2018

9

I C O N S

BHARAT NEEDS MORE OF BHARATHI BANUCHANDAR NAGARAJAN

T

As we approach a century since Subramanya Bharathi’s demise, it becomes essential to rediscover the freedom fighter, his poetry and contribution.

HERE HAVE been endless number of books, plays, essays and PhD theses on Rashtrakavi Subramanya Bharathi’s life and works. For anyone who has grown up in Tamil Nadu, every poetry competition in school will feature at least a few of his songs. His piercing, uplifting and evocative poems have been adapted in popular culture in perhaps every form. But when he passed away in 1921, only 14 people came to his funeral.

On every Independence Day, it is important to recollect the life stories of our national icons to provide inspiration to our own roles in the flow of history, however small they may be. The sacrifice of karmayogis who gave away their lives for bigger causes, often with no recognition during their own lifetimes, serve as invaluable lessons for activists. I take the help of his biography, Mahakavi Bharathiar, written beautifully and poignantly by his aide and “bhakt” Varadaraja Ramaswamy (Va Ra).

Va Ra spent almost a decade with Bharathi when he was in exile in Pondicherry (Puducherry), a French colony then, facing prosecution from the British. Va Ra gives an account of Bharathi’s life with scintillating vignettes.

A band of nationalists from Madras (Chennai) travel to attend the Congress Session in Surat in 1907.

Bharathi pitches himself in the camp of Lal-Bal-Pal in the “Surat Split”.

The partition of Bengal two years ago had reinvigorated the freedom movement, with a section of “extremists”

10

A U G U ST 2018

challenging the hold of the moderates under Gopal Krishna Gokhale.

Bharathi gets an overwhelming urge to meet Bal Gangadhar Tilak. After enquiring, he learns that Tilak is near the venue of the meeting. Rain is pouring down. Bharathi finds Tilak making sure the marshy path to the venue is repaired. Bharathi is awestruck! Such a giant of a man, yet no task is too small for him! Bharathi prostrates before Tilak in the rain and just leaves.

His only meeting with Mahatma Gandhi is equally dramatic. It was 1919 and Gandhi had come to Madras to organise protests against the draconian Rowlatt Act. He was staying in C Rajagopalachari’s (Rajaji) house. Bharathi barges in one afternoon and sits right next to Gandhi. Congress stalwarts of the time, Rajaji and Sathyamoorthy, neither invite nor introduce him properly.

Bharathi goes, “Mr Gandhi, I am speaking at a gathering at Triplicane beach this evening. I invite you to be the guest of honour.” Gandhiji cites prior commitments and asks if he can postpone it to the next day. Bharathi says, “Not possible! And I will leave now. My blessings are with your new plans.” A stunned Gandhi asks Rajaji who the man was. Rajaji says, “he is our poet of Tamil Nadu”.

Bharathi’s life takes him from Tirunelveli district, where he is born, to Benaras as a 15-year-old after the death of his father. He learns Sanskrit and Hindi (note to the Dravidian chauvinists of today). He is inspired by the bravery of Sikhs and

starts sporting the turban and moustache. The Kali worship he witnesses at Benaras, his meeting with Sister Nivedita and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram deeply shape his spiritual outlook. His songs are filled with invocations to Parasakthi, his ishtadevata, to make things better for his motherland. He later learns English and even French as he believes that language should not be a hurdle to knowledge.

After a brief stint as a Tamil teacher in Madurai, he relocates to Madras to work as a journalist in nationalist newspaper Swadesa Mitran. Later, he goes on to edit the magazine India. Facing impending arrest, he moves to Pondicherry in 1908. The period in Pondicherry seems to be tumultuous and exciting.

Tumultuous, because of lack of freedom of movement, being constantly watched, publishers afraid to print his works and lasting penury. Exciting, because it was the same time Pondicherry was the home of “renegades” of the freedom movement.

Bharathi forges deep bonds with Aurobindo, who, like him, is seeking asylum in Pondicherry. Their conversations burst with spirituality, poetry and idealism. He also maintains a deep friendship with swadeshi shipping magnate VOC Pillai, whose company challenged the British companies operating from the port of Tuticorin, and hence, is destroyed.

Va Ra narrates an emotional meeting of Bharathi with firebrand revolutionary Surendranath Arya.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

EVERY INDEPENDENCE DAY, IT IS IMPORTANT TO RECOLLECT THE LIFE STORIES OF OUR NATIONAL ICONS TO PROVIDE INSPIRATION TO OUR OWN ROLES IN THE FLOW OF HISTORY. BHARATHI IS ONE SUCH ICON. Arya, an old friend, is put to rigorous imprisonment in Bellary for six years. He visits Bharathi after his release and tells his story of how he contracts leprosy in prison and only the Danish priests took care of him. He tells that he has converted to Christianity and plans to go to the US. Shaken to the core, Bharathi, while empathetic to his friend’s poignant story, pleads with him firmly to not abandon Hinduism for its few faulty practices. That Arya returns to India, re-embraces Hinduism, but ultimately ends up with E V Ramasamy, is a different story.

While he is a model nationalist in the eyes of the people, Va Ra cautions us against circumscribing him in anyway. The appeal of the brimming spirituality in his songs is universal. He believed in the immensity of human potential and the divinity in men. His collection of poems on emancipation of women can be a guide for today’s feminists.

He was a true intellectual kshatriya; not a just a gifted poet and patriotic journalist. Though he should belong to the world, paradoxically, he is perhaps the only icon Tamil Nadu needs now — open in outlook, fearless and

progressive.

Bharathi died when he was just 38, a few months after being attacked by a temple elephant that he had befriended. Friends struggled to collect money for his funeral. People woke up to his greatness only decades after he passed away. Va Ra says that even Shakespeare in his days was condescendingly referred to as “dear stealer”. Vincent van Gogh sold no paintings in his time and died a failure. Sadly, more Indians know of the stories of the Englishman and Dutchman than one of our own. Even now, not many Delhiites know or refer to the name of the road named after Bharathi, in which Khan Market is located.

A R Venkatachalapathy, author of Who Owns That Song? on Bharathi says, “comparison with Rabindranath Tagore is inevitable…

Even factoring in the Nobel prize, the comparative neglect of Bharathi is difficult to explain. It can be argued that the national elite turned a blind eye to the south, uncomfortable as they were with Tamil identity politics… And unlike the Bengali “bhadralok” intellectuals who have done a stellar job of celebrating Tagore and taking him to the larger world, the Tamil middle-class failed Bharathi”.

The hundredth death anniversary of Bharathi will be observed in 2021 and India’s seventy-fifth year of Independence, a year later. Let there be a celebration and rediscovery of Bharathi not just in Tamil Nadu but all over India, and perhaps the world.

Rashtrakavi Subramanya Bharathi pushed himself and spent his prana to compose soul-stirrers to light the conscience of the country during a difficult time. By paying homage to his life-divine and works, we would only be serving the humanist cause.

Banuchandar Nagarajan is a public policy adviser. An alumnus of Harvard University, he has worked in the World Bank, PwC

AUGUST 2018

11

INNOVATION NATION

GURUKULAS OF THE FUTURE RAJEEV SRINIVASAN

E

A synthesis of technological innovation and traditional learning methods can bring the student back into the centre of the education system.

DUCATION everywhere is going through a massive churn.

India’s education system has been particularly plagued by poor learning outcomes. But the silver lining is that this is an environment ripe for innovation, especially by freeing the system from the dirigiste grip of the bureaucracy. The recent dissolution of the University Grants Commission and the controversial ‘Institute of Eminence’ plan are causing flutters in the hidebound, existing system for tertiary education.

However, the rot starts early: in schools. They are also in need of dramatic change, and here are a few steps towards achieving excellence.

First, exploring the current system’s origin and shortcomings. Second, leveraging the advance of technology to overcome new challenges. Third, rediscovering what was good in traditional education.

In this context, His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s statement on 23 April is noteworthy and timely. “Serious discussions on how to include the ancient Indian traditions in educational system should begin. India has the capability to combine modern education with its ancient traditions to help solve problems in the world,” said the pontiff. This is a particularly prescient and insightful suggestion; for India did, at one time, have an education system that was the envy of the world: think Nalanda and Takshashila.

In addition, on 29 April, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh declared that the state will register gu-

12

A U G U ST 2018

rukulas and treat them as equivalent to mainstream schools. Some observers pooh-poohed this as obscurantism, but maybe it wasn’t such a harebrained idea, as we shall see.

It is remarkable that technological progress has made it possible – maybe even imperative – to consider elements of traditional systems, including gurukulas, from a purely practical perspective. What we have endured over the last couple of centuries is a system imposed by the imperialists, driven by their needs at the time. It’s time to revisit it.

That colonial education system was a product of the (First) Industrial Revolution. Among other things, that revolution created William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” – impersonal, soul-deadening industrial complexes that pulled people away from the agrarian life. These factories required a cohort of people who were literate, and able to follow instructions. No need for them to think, or to be creative: that was the prerogative of the small group of engineers and managers.

The very same system was imported into India, with the intent of creating drones for the empire: sepoys and coolies, the class of people which Macaulay described as “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect”. This project, we now realise, has succeeded beyond Macaulay’s wildest dreams, but at a great cost to India. The Soviet-style top-down education and research system that arose after Independence was no

better: it deadened all independent thinking. The net result is that India has steadily dropped lower in the educational sweepstakes.

There is a remarkable contrast between this system and what existed earlier. Despite much misinformation, what little primary data we have – for example through the works of Dharampal – suggests that we had a broad, humanistic educational system with significant customisation as well as practical problem-solving. Circumstantial evidence supports this, for the India of earlier eras produced outstanding innovations and intellectual property, for instance, Panini’s grammar, Madhava’s rapidly converging infinite series for pi and trigonometric functions, and the metallurgy of nano-carbon steel, known as wootz from the Tamil urukku.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution that is upon us, and especially the proliferation of computing power and artificial intelligence (AI), negates in toto the requirements of the First. We no longer need armies of drone workers toiling away, like Charlie Chaplin in Hard Times. We have real robots to run factories, and increasingly, to take over whitecollar jobs. A much-quoted Oxford study, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?” predicted that 47 per cent of all jobs today are at risk of being automated away in the next 20 years.

We can see that in practice: engineers once used slide rules and log

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

STEVENK / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS HAS MADE IT POSSIBLE – MAYBE EVEN IMPERATIVE – TO CONSIDER ELEMENTS OF TRADITIONAL SYSTEMS, INCLUDING GURUKULAS, FROM A PURELY PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE. tables, but the electronic calculator has made them superfluous. We had paper maps for navigation, but GPS and Google Maps have made them redundant. Our children still memorise vast quantities of (useless) information, which they could however look up on Google or Wikipedia in seconds. Thus, the very basis of ‘education’, the ability to memorise and regurgitate large amounts of data in examinations, is no longer a useful skill.

Furthermore, the nature of work is changing, and quite rapidly. Earlier, people used to change jobs, but now they change careers, often pursuing three or four in sequence as their interests change and opportunities arise. In addition, the half-life of knowledge is diminishing rapidly.

A computer language you learned 10

years ago is almost certainly obsolete today, and so you need to keep learning all the time, just to keep up.

Besides, the very idea of a ‘job’ is looking shaky: the comparative advantage of large firms – the reduction in transaction costs, as in the Ronald Coase theory of the firm – is being eroded as the ‘gig economy’ grows and the ‘death of distance’ is upon us.

We may instead have ‘federations’ where free agent workers come together for a specific task, complete it, and move on.

There is also a nightmare scenario: a large number of people may become permanently unemployable, as their skills are no longer useful, and will never be. The conventional wisdom is that the displaced workers could be retrained for the new types of jobs that will arise (e.g.

bank tellers displaced by ATMs were redeployed as relationship managers), but that can only go so far. The clamour for Universal Basic Income in some quarters suggests a future, where some people will in essence be surplus and useless to the workforce (historian Yuval Noah Harari expands on this in Homo Deus). The trick for each individual is to avoid that fate through choosing education wisely.

Thus, the demand-side for education is undergoing a sea change.

People will increasingly demand high-flexibility learning that enables them to come up with creative solutions to new problems at hand. That is what will get them the gigs, and enable them to make a living as free agents.

Fortunately, the supply-side is

AUGUST 2018

13

INNOVATION NATION learning material out there, available to all – the tyranny of distance is no longer a problem. With 4G bandwidth and a smartphone, most students in India have access to massive open online courses or, MOOCs, much of which are free. There is Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, TED, Wikipedia and edX and Indian equivalents; and then there is YouTube. You don’t have to enroll at a premier institution to be able to get the experience of being taught by an outstanding teacher. (Universities, of course, do have other virtues: the

THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IS UPON US, AND IT NEGATES IN TOTO, THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE FIRST. also changing, and that’s where both technology and traditional learning come into the picture. Consider the possibilities of technology. We can now envision truly customised education. A curriculum, lesson plans, tests, and self-paced learning that are most appropriate for a specific individual are now possible through the application of AI techniques.

Instead of a large classroom, where the instruction necessarily focuses on the average student, thus handicapping both the bright and the slow, each student can be taught, tested and challenged according to his/her own interests and capabilities. This requires the collection of masses of detailed data about current curricula and educational outcomes.

Then a machine learning algorithm can crunch these datasets and pro-

14

A U G U ST 2018

pose plans for future students.

In effect, the AI is acting much like the guru in a gurukula of old.

Certainly, in the idealised picture that we have, the guru could and did understand exactly what the pupils’ capabilities were because they lived with him, and could instruct them in ways that would make them best use their talents.

There are also several experiments using blockchain as a mechanism to transition from ‘vertical’ learning (where a teacher lectures to a student) to ‘horizontal’ learning (where there is significant collaboration between students as well). In collaborative learning, a student who helps others may also earn ‘credits’ on the blockchain and be able to leverage that in the job market.

In addition, there is a plethora of

value of signalling via a degree, and of peer groups.)

There are lessons to be learned from the 9 May story, heart-warming in many ways, of Sreenath, a coolie from the railway station in Ernakulam, Kerala, who qualified for the Kerala Public Service Commission.

Using the free Railwire Wi-Fi at the station, he downloaded question papers, online examination forms, and so forth. Using nothing more than his smartphone and earphones, he managed to study well enough to clear the written examinations. This is a good example of self-paced study at virtually no cost.

If impoverished Sreenath can do this, imagine what an affluent middle-class adult or child could do by diligently learning new materials from the MOOCs out there. In effect, lifelong learning is now available, and the key for us is to learn about how to learn and not to learn facts that will become obsolete.

Secondly, in the future that we can glimpse, the focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) may turn out to have been inappropriate. At least in India, STEM is seen as valuable and tangible; whereas the humanities are seen as soft, intangible and essentially useless. In fact, the ‘hard’ STEM subjects have become too abstract and removed from reality. Engineers

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

design on computers; hardly anyone does actual things with their hands.

That is seen as the job of underlings, because it will get their hands dirty.

In a way, this is diametrically opposite to the very thrust of traditional Indian education, which was focussed on the practical. The Sulbasutras of Baudhayana, from 3,000 years ago, are manuals intended for, among other things, the precise construction of fire altars. The socalled Pythagoras Theorem was also known to Baudhayana, as a practical solution to a problem, rather than a theoretical construct (as Manjul Bhargava pointed out, Indians knew the theorem and used it widely, whereas Chinese came up with a formal proof).

This bias for the practical is also something we Indians have lost somewhere. As a result we have not produced, despite writing lots of papers, a single – I repeat, a single – world-class, original idea since Independence. This is truly galling, considering that under the imperialists, we had C V Raman, J C Bose, S N Bose, and Srinivasa Ramanujan: geniuses all. It shows how badly our education system has served us.

The Maker Movement, which encourages the physical creation of things, for instance through 3-D printing, may also be an antidote for bookish learning. The other problem that has afflicted us is the preference for English. Although some have argued that English has enabled our researchers to get quickly up to speed with original work done elsewhere, it turns out that Chinese, writing in their language, have now racked up more well-referenced papers and patents than the Americans, in advanced areas of machine learning. It would be better for us to revert to our mother tongues even for technical material as in medicine or law.

For the first time, we can see a future where real-time transla-

‘HARD’ STEM SUBJECTS HAVE BECOME ABSTRACT. ENGINEERS DESIGN ON COMPUTERS, WITH HARDLY ANYONE DESIGNING THINGS WITH HANDS. tion enables people to learn in their mother tongue. If automatic translation becomes a routine, then all of a sudden it becomes easy for our mother-tongue-speaking students to understand all the material out there in MOOCs. That brings us back to the original question of what might be useful in traditional education. The curricula documented by Dharampal included grammar (vyakarana), rhetoric and logic (tarka), mathematics/astronomy (ganita), aesthetics (rasa), ethics (darshana), political science (arthashastra), and epistemology (pramana). Remarkably enough, these are subjects that will produce well-rounded individuals, the kind who can learn new things. Quite the broad humanities education, far removed from the narrow technical

education of today. The Dalai Lama was right, after all.

Of course, nobody would suggest a wholesale switch from today’s Central Board of Secondary Education syllabus overnight to a gurukula syllabus, but it appears our ancient gurus knew a thing or two that most modern teachers could well benefit from. A new education paradigm that can take the best of both systems would be perfect. It might just give India’s next generation a competitive advantage.

Rajeev Srinivasan focuses on strategy and innovation, which he worked on at Bell Labs and in Silicon Valley. He has taught innovation at several IIMs. An IIT Madras and Stanford Business School grad, he has also been a conservative columnist for 20 years.

AUGUST 2018

15

C O V E R

S T O R Y

A CASE OF POOR JUDGEMENT THERE WAS THE ‘2G SCAM’. THERE WAS CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE. AND THEN, THERE WAS THE VERDICT OF THE SPECIAL CBI COURT. INTRIGUINGLY, THE ISSUE OF CORRUPTION REMAINS. ARIHANT PAWARIYA

16

A U G U ST 2018

O

N 21 December 2017, a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court pronounced its verdict in the 2G spectrum allocation scam case. The court gave a clean chit to all the accused when, in fact, the country was expecting the opposite. It came as a rude shock to the people, that those who had in their eyes committed the biggest financial fraud in the short history of the republic, went scot-free.

It’s a fact that the spectrum licences were allotted in an arbitrary and capricious manner. The Supreme Court of India cancelling the licences and ordering the government to take the auction route is testament to this.

It is also a fact that in 2008, under A Raja, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) followed the outdated 2001 policy, going against the advice of the then prime minister, the finance minister and the law minister.

It is also a fact that DoT tweaked rules

multiple times in an ad-hoc manner that favoured certain new players, who came into existence in a very questionable manner, and who sold off stakes after getting the licences, at a huge premia, even though spectrum was the only asset they held at that time.

It is also a fact, that the bosses of these firms were business associates of some members of Raja’s family and his private secretary in the DoT. It is a fact too, that sister firms of the new telecom players that got the licences wired over Rs 200 crore to a channel owned by the daughter of A Raja’s political boss and former Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi.

How did everyone get acquitted in the face of such strong circumstantial evidence? There are mainly two reasons.

First is the poor judgement by the CBI court; and second is the not so great work done by the prosecution. But, despite all the unpreparedness of the latter, the judgement would have certainly been

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

TK KURIKAWA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

DESPITE ALL THE UNPREPAREDNESS OF THE PROSECUTION, THE JUDGEMENT WOULD HAVE CERTAINLY BEEN ‘GUILTY’ IF ONE HAD MERELY FOLLOWED THE LOGIC OF THE SUPREME COURT’S EARLIER VERDICT IN THE MATTER.

AUGUST 2018

17

C O V E R

S T O R Y

RAJA ALLOTTED SPECTRUM TO NEW PLAYERS. THESE COMPANIES ALSO TRANSFERRED RS 200 CRORE TO A TV CHANNEL OWNED BY THE FAMILY OF RAJA’S PARTY SUPREMO AT THE SAME TIME WHEN RAJA ALLOTTED THE LICENCES.

18

A U G U ST 2018

‘guilty’ if one had merely followed the logic of the Supreme Court’s earlier verdict in the matter.

THE CRIME The central issue in the case was the loss of potential revenue to the exchequer due to policies adopted by the DoT, which were changed in an arbitrary and nontransparent manner that ended up favouring a select few. One needn’t take the loss figure of Rs 1.76 lakh crore at face value. It could be way less. But the fraud happened.

That much is clear from the success of the re-auctioning of cancelled licences in 2014.

Why did the fraud happen in the first place? It happened because the auction route wasn’t taken. Why wasn’t it taken despite the then prime minister and the then finance minister exhorting Raja to do so? Because Raja didn’t want it.

Instead of focussing on how this policy decision benefited a select few, who in turn, deposited money in the bank account of friends of the one who facilitated

the whole scheme, suggestive of an indirect quid pro quo. The court discussed at great length how meticulously Raja stuck to the old policy — no matter its relevance or ramifications.

THE SMOKING GUNS What were Raja’s reasons for adopting policies that benefited the accused businessmen?

First, the prosecution alleged that the owners of DB Realty, Shahid Balwa and Vinod Goenka, and the owner of Unitech Limited, Sanjay Chandra, were familiar with Raja ever since he was the environment minister and used to meet them often at his home and office in connection with clearing their real estate projects, to which Raja obliged.

But the prosecution couldn’t prove any familiarity between Raja and Balwa, Chandra and Goenka. Aseervatham Achary, Raja’s aide in different ministries, in different roles, from 1999 to 2008, told the court that, “I saw Shahid Balwa and Vi-

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

SONU MEHTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

THE REAL ISSUE IS NOT ANNOUNCING THE CUT-OFF DATE, BUT THAT IT WAS FIRST BROUGHT FORWARD TO 1 OCTOBER, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, CHANGED TO 25 SEPTEMBER, RETROSPECTIVELY, IN OCTOBER.

nod Goenka approximately more than 20 times, in the office of the minister of environment and forests”. When Raja was asked whether he met them, he didn’t refuse outright and said, “I do not recollect specifically...”. The judge rejected the charge as the prosecution could not collect even a single appointment chart or the visitors’ register in which the meeting of the three accused (Balwa, Goenka and Chandra) with the minister could be traced. Fair enough, but wait for it.

The prosecution proved that DB Realty, through Protiviti Consulting (P) Limited, got due diligence conducted for Green House Promoters (P) Limited, a company promoted by Raja’s aide Sadhick Batcha and which had members of Raja’s family as its directors. Also, DB Realty, through its subsidiary Eterna Developers (P) Limited, paid Rs 1.25 crore to Green House Promoters (P) Limited as an advance for purchase of land, but the money was returned later. All of this shows that Raja was familiar with DB Group of Shahid

Balwa and Vinod Goenka much before.

However, Judge O P Saini ruled that “being former director of a company does not show their familiarity with Sh. A. Raja”. Regarding the Rs 1.25 crore transaction from DB Realty to Green House Promoters (P) Limited (where Raja’s relative was a director), the judge said it doesn’t prove anything and, at best, “shows an inchoate (doing something in preparation of a criminal act) transaction between the two companies”! The judge then goes further and states that “mere familiarity does not mean conspiratorial familiarity”. So, when the prosecution wasn’t able to establish familiarity, Saini took them to task for not producing any solid document, but when it established familiarity, the judge ruled that it didn’t mean conspiratorial familiarity.

Here is another smoking gun. The prosecution proved that not only the accused businessmen were familiar with Raja, but also with his private secretary R K Chandolia, who had leased out his

AUGUST 2018

19

C O V E R

S T O R Y SONU MEHTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

INSTEAD OF PROCESSING APPLICATIONS ON THE BASIS OF WHO APPLIED FIRST, THE DoT CHANGED NORMS AND DECIDED TO ISSUE SPECTRUM TO PLAYERS WHO CONFORMED TO THE TERMS OF LOIs FIRST.

20

A U G U ST 2018

house at C­6/39, 2nd Floor, Safdarjung Development Area, New Delhi, to Associated Hotels Private Limited, a sister concern of DB Realty Limited – the same company whose telecom arm Swan Telecom got a 2G spectrum licence.

The second reason and more clinching one is obviously the quid pro quo. DB Realty transferred Rs 200 crore to Kalaignar TV (in which Kanimozhi, daughter of Raja’s boss, has a 20 per cent stake), which the prosecution said was gratification in exchange for granting telecom licences to Swan Telecom, promoted by Balwa and Goenka, which establishes the quid pro quo. But Judge Saini said there was no evidence in the deposition of these witnesses of any conspiracy to transfer the amount of Rs 200 crore. Wait! So, the transfer is not in dispute, but the judge said it doesn’t prove any conspiracy.

Essentially, Raja allotted spectrum to new players, who were in business with a company, where Raja’s relative was a director. These new players also transferred Rs 200 crore to a TV channel owned by the family of Raja’s party supremo at

the same time as and when Raja allotted licences to these new players. What a coincidence!

SHIFTING BLAME The court didn’t hold Raja responsible for all the arbitrary decisions that were taken under his watch which benefited the accused companies. The process of award of licences adopted by the DoT was a continuous one based on priority, and fixed on the basis of date of receipt of applications.

There was no provision of a cut-off date.

It was announced, nonetheless, on 24 September 2007, and fixed as 10 October 2007, giving a window of 15 days to submit all applications. The note bears signature of A K Srivastava, the then deputy director general (access service) in DoT. Srivastava told the court that he was asked by Chandolia to stop receipt of applications on that day itself (24 September) after Unitech’s application was received. But Srivastava instead put 10 October in his proposal.

The judge ruled that since the proposal officially originated from Srivastava,

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

“this note would be attributed to Sh. A. K. Srivastava and to none else.” Fair enough.

Again, wait for it.

The real issue is not announcing the cut-off date, but that it was first brought forward to 1 October, and most importantly, changed to 25 September, retrospectively, in October – exactly what Chandolia wanted. Where did all this originate from? None other than Raja. Three drafts prepared and approved by four senior officers in the telecom department — Nitin Jain, Srivastava, Sridhara and D S Mathur – called for seeking the opinion of the solicitor general. When the file came from the minister, it was a modified draft, which had fixed 25 September as the cutoff date. Raja denied in his deposition that he suggested the date. The judge ruled that since it was discussed in the ministry, it may be considered as a proposal by the department.

It is interesting that when a proposal originates from an official in the ministry, it is considered as a proposal of that individual, but when Raja initiates the proposal, it is seen as a proposal of the department.

The perversion of the process didn’t stop here. The DoT not only changed the cut-off date but also the ‘first come, first served’ procedure. Instead of processing applications on the basis of who applied first, it changed norms and decided to issue spectrum to players, who conformed to the terms of letters of intent (LOIs) first, that is, including but not limited to paying the fees. What was the need to announce the September cut-off date, if this was the criterion to be followed? Anyone from the pool of 575 applicants, who would submit the fees and comply with LOIs first could have been given the spectrum. Instead, the applicants were whittled down to 232, first by an arbitrary cut-off date and then by the change in the ‘first come, first served’ norm.

The judge, in his order, writes that this was done after discussions within the department, and as suggested by the officers of the telecom department, and ultimately conveyed to the prime minister.

It appears that the ministry was run by officials, who were making all the decisions, conveniently benefiting some companies, which were close to Raja, who in turn just happened to affix his signature to whatever was suggested to him. He was just an innocent bystander, is the suggestion. All the while, these same officials insisted that the minister came up with the cut-off date of 25 September — not them.

THE BIG LIE To implement their distorted ‘first come, first served’ policy, R K Chandolia devised the method of four counters for the distribution of LOIs. This method resulted in a disorderly manner of priority allocation.

Instead of those who applied first, priority was given to those who could comply first with criteria which were changed arbitrarily. When this method was implemented, different companies had differences of minutes, even seconds, in compliance and this ended up benefiting the accused Swan Telecom and Unitech.

Srivastava told the court that if the ‘first come, first served basis’ policy was followed, only one counter was sufficient to issue the LOIs/responses, wherein the process would be based on date of receipt of applications in DoT. However, the court held Srivastava responsible for coming up with the new method. Srivastava said he was following Chandolia’s orders. He told the court that, on 10 January 2008, when he and his fellow officers were discussing how to go about distributing LOIs, Chandolia came to his office and conveyed to him that LOIs had to be issued on that day itself as desired by Raja, and suggested to go about it by opening four counters, to which they disagreed.

Chandolia said he never went to Srivastava’s office. Five officers — Nitin Jain, Madan Chaurasia, Sukhbir Singh, A S Verma and N M Manickam — were in Srivastava’s room when Chandolia paid a visit. And all told the court that Chandolia had indeed come to meet Srivastava that day.

It’s clear that Chandolia misled the court with a straight face. On this, Judge

IT WAS ONLY AFTER CHANDOLIA CAME WITH MARCHING ORDERS THAT THE DEPARTMENT ISSUED A PRESS RELEASE, INVITED THE APPLICANTS TO THE MINISTRY, AND ISSUED LOIs THROUGH FOUR COUNTERS — ALL IN A MATTER OF SIX HOURS.

AUGUST 2018

21

C O V E R

S T O R Y SONU MEHTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

BACK TO THE MAIN ISSUE: CORRUPTION Point by point, all the charges of conspiracy by Raja and others fell as illustrated in this piece. The issue of corruption remains. The country was defrauded. The CBI had framed charges on both conspiracy and corruption counts. While the court discussed at length the former, it completely missed the latter. This is the most shocking aspect of the judgement as the chief issue of corruption by the officials under the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA) didn’t find a mention in the 1,552-page order. Even if there was no conspiracy, the officials and the minister

ALL THE CHARGES OF CONSPIRACY BY RAJA AND OTHERS FELL. THE ISSUE OF CORRUPTION REMAINS. WHILE THE COURT DISCUSSED AT LENGTH THE FORMER, IT MISSED THE LATTER.

Arihant Pawariya is Senior Editor, Swarajya.

22

A U G U ST 2018

Saini said that none of the officers knew exactly what Chandolia and Srivastava talked about. But the accounts of five people reveal one thing – they were deliberating on how to go about the issuance of LOIs, but after Chandolia’s visit, they had to issue LOIs on that day itself and that too through the method of four counters.

Ignoring all this evidence, the judge went with the official record: four officers in access services division came up with the ‘four counter’ method because their signatures are on the document. The truth is they had no incentive to be in such a hurry to resolve LOIs on that day itself.

They were just going about processing LOIs at normal speed.

It was only after Chandolia came with marching orders that the department hastened the process, moving at lightning speed, issuing a press release, calling all applicants, inviting them to the ministry, and issuing LOIs through four counters – all in a matter of six hours!

were liable to have been jailed under the PCA, which prescribes punishment for criminal conduct by public servants, who benefit someone without public interest.

Here’s another shocker: the court dedicated only one page while dealing with one of the most serious charges against the telecom upstarts Unitech Group and Swan Telecom. Raja and others kept repeating that the reason for keeping spectrum prices low was in the interest of consumers. This facade of an argument was blown to pieces when Swan Telecom and Unitech offloaded their shares at attractive prices soon after getting the licences.

The judge, however, concluded that no rules were broken in offloading of shares or in the issue of fresh equity. This reasoning is shocking. The defence argued that the spectrum was given to these upstarts at throwaway prices for public benefit so that they don’t charge consumers much, thus benefiting the consumers. However, when they got the spectrum, they went on a wealth accumulating spree for themselves instead of focussing on public service. The court sadly focussed only on the technicality of whether they were legally allowed to offload shares in the manner they did.

Given the weight of circumstantial and other evidence, a different court could well have decided differently. The CBI and Enforcement Directorate have filed an appeal. One hopes this time the prosecution and the courts come up with better results.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

COALGATE IS NOT 2G, THANKFULLY MANY FEARED THAT SINHA COMMITTEE RECOMMENDATIONS MIGHT JUST HAVE AN ADVERSE EFFECT ON PROSECUTION IN THE ‘COALGATE’ CASES. IT IS UNLIKELY TO BE SO.

T

O TELL commercial mining companies abroad (that breed doesn’t exist in India except public sector National Mineral Development Corporation), what to expect as rules for extraction, the India government had formed a committee, under former central vigilance commissioner Pratyush Sinha.

The report of the committee has, however, turned on its head the entire premise of the coal verdict handed down by the Supreme Court in September 2014.

The Sinha committee has held that in the handing out of the coal mines, the government should not be guided by the principle of revenue maximisation. Instead, the principle should be which companies can do the best job of mining coal under the parameters the state wishes to set out.

Those parameters can include a host of objectives. The primary one, is of course, the deepest possible extraction of coal, but the ones in quick succession will be care for the environment, safety of operations, keeping costs of the coal extracted cheap, and so on.

The famous verdict by the Supreme Court in August and September 2014, in the clutch of coal cases, was clearly predi-

cated on the principle that the state had made a mistake in not maximising revenue. It held that the state held coal in the mines as one of its natural resources in a fiduciary capacity for the future generations. So, extraction of coal by a company must be allowed only after it paid the full up front price of the coal at prices comparable with what state-owned Coal India charged for its coal.

In other words, there should be auction of coal mines, the court ordered. Which is what followed. We shall revisit this theme in a moment. Can it be argued that the coal cases being investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and other agencies, are much ado about nothing (going by the logic of the Sinha committee)?

For instance, would the 39 cases filed by the CBI against numerous companies and individuals, hold? Is there scope for further cases emanating from the allotment of the coal mines to parties other than state-owned Coal India and Singareni Coal Collieries, made between 1993 and 2009? Moreover, there are several people who have already been sentenced by the CBI special court to various jail terms and have served monetary punishments. Do they get exonerated like they did in the 2G

SUBHOMOY BHATTACHARJEE

THE SINHA COMMITTEE HAS HELD THAT IN THE HANDING OUT OF THE COAL MINES, THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT BE GUIDED BY THE PRINCIPLE OF REVENUE MAXIMISATION.

AUGUST 2018

23

C O V E R

S T O R Y ARIJIT SEN/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

AFTER THE SINHA COMMITTEE REPORT, ONE CAN ARGUE THAT MINERS WHO HAVE NOT BEEN NAMED BY CBI HAD NOT ERRED IN BAGGING THE MINES, FREE.

24

A U G U ST 2018

telecom cases?

My assessment is that the CBI cases, provided the government agencies retain the energy to pursue them, will continue.

They would stand, unlike the telecom cases, because of the following reasons.

The coal cases follow a relatively simple path. Among the 214 coal blocks whose allocations the Supreme Court had cancelled, CBI and other investigative agencies picked up those cases where they deduced that money was paid in cash or in kind, to bag the allotments. There was a clear line of illegal behaviour. The cases are not about whether the state should or should not have asked for auctions before handing over the rights to mine those coal blocks.

This is an important differentiator for the coal cases with the 2G cases. In the telecom sector, the CBI had alleged a loss of Rs 30,984 crore to the exchequer made by the Department of Telecommunications in the allocation of the 122 licences. This was based on a Supreme Court order of February 2012. The CBI also alleged that

the then telecom minister A Raja had received illegal gratification for favours shown by him to some of the operators, who got the licences. But in December last year, CBI Special Court Judge O P Saini held the charge-sheet did not hold water.

Stretching the argument backward, it can be deduced the state had not erred in handing out the airwaves cheap. The culpability of the minister and his officers follow only if it is held that they should not have allotted the airwaves for a song.

The coal cases, however, stand on a different pedestal. There were clearly too many bidders for the mines. True, the blocks were being given away, free. If it was also the case that all the bidders could be allotted a block, then the cases do get diluted. It wasn’t so. As I wrote in India’s Coal Story, in the year 2005, there were 728 applications in response to an advertisement for 20 blocks. Next year, there were 1,422 applicants for just 38 coal blocks.

“There was a veritable rush to get a coal block”.

There were no rules to decide who

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

DANIEL BEREHULAK /GETTY IMAGES

would make the cut. The firms had to demonstrate two things to qualify for an allocation: one, they had to show that they needed the coal as fuel for their downstream steel, sponge iron, power, cement plant or even a washery (to this end, many applicants put up fictional plants).

Two, their needs were unlikely to be fulfilled by Coal India or Singareni Collieries through coal linkages. In addition, since coal prices in the open market were rising at the same time as part of the global commodities boom, there was a clear incentive to rig the system.

So, while genuine parties played fair and square, several entities went about creating a fictitious end use or also resorted to old-fashioned bribes to swing the decision in their favour. Some of them did both. No matter how the Sinha committee verdict is interpreted by Minister for Coal, Piyush Goyal, these shenanigans are unlikely to pass muster as normal business practices.

In the CBI case diaries, the cases registered against such entrepreneurs can be broadly divided into two sets. The first pertains to the period, 1993 to 2005 and includes 45 coal blocks. The second is for allocations from 2005 to 2009, when the system of allocation of coal blocks was scrapped, and includes 169 allotments.

Together, there were the 214 allocations, which the Supreme Court had cancelled.

In January this year, the CBI informed the court that it had completed investigation into 22 of the 45 cases in the first set and held them as kosher. In the other 16 cases, the investigations are alive, which means prima facie, that cases have been filed against those allotments. The CBI is still making heavy wind in bringing to a close the cases related to allotments made since 2005. This bunch is more numerous.

Since all of these cases are monitored by the Supreme Court, the agencies have to file periodic reports of how far the cases have progressed. They are taking time to wind through the Indian judicial system as a bench headed by Justice Madan Lokur has also noted.

Aside from these coal cases, there is

the related issue of penalty, which every miner, state or privately owned, has had to pay to the government. The Sinha committee has clearly repudiated the principle of auction, going ahead. It instead asks for a two-stage bidding to select a miner for a coal block. Yet, it does not ask the government to revisit the past decisions.

Based on the principle set by the Sinha committee, one can argue that miners who have not been named by CBI had not erred in bagging the mines, free. In fact, it can be argued further that the penalty they all had to pay retrospectively might need to be revisited. If the objective of the state is not to enrich itself, there is no reason to ask a miner, to pay up for the amount of the coal in the block he held, whether it was extracted or not. The contract with the state only made him responsible to dig out coal efficiently from the mine he had been allotted and cart those to the intended beneficiaries. If he has done that, he has fulfilled his terms of the contract.

Again, since the Sinha committee has not made retrospective suggestion, one suspects those penalties would stay.

THE COAL CASES ARE ABOUT A CLEAR LINE OF ILLEGAL BEHAVIOUR AND NOT ABOUT WHETHER THE STATE SHOULD OR SHOULD NOT HAVE ASKED FOR AUCTIONS BEFORE ALLOCATING THE BLOCKS.

Subhomoy Bhattacharjee has over 22 years of experience in journalism. His areas of interest include public policy, especially those in finance, energy and urban issue.

AUGUST 2018

25

C O V E R

S T O R Y

THE SINS OF ‘ST ANTONY’ A K ANTONY WAS HERALDED AS ‘MR CLEAN’ OF THE UPA REGIME. BUT, BEHIND THE SEEMINGLY SPOTLESS IMAGE, LAY A SERIES OF CRISES THAT HE LED THE DEFENCE MINISTRY INTO. PRAKHAR GUPTA

DURING ANTONY’S TENURE, THE JOKE DOING THE ROUNDS WAS THAT THE MINISTER TOOK A DECISION PROMPTLY ONLY WHEN HE WAS OFFERED A CHOICE BETWEEN TEA AND COFFEE.

26

A U G U ST 2018

D

URING Arackaparambil Kurien Antony’s seven-and-ahalf-year tenure, the longestever for an Indian defence minister, a joke was popular among analysts and journalists covering the security beat: the minister took a decision promptly only when he was offered a choice between tea and coffee.

Of course, this was said in jest. But given what went on at the Defence Ministry under Antony’s watch, this is not very far from the truth. Antony took over as defence minister from Pranab Mukherjee in October 2006, two years after the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to office. As one of Sonia Gandhi’s closest confidants, he was tasked with preventing a Bofors on the UPA. For Antony, a staunch party loyalist, who was brought back into the Congress fold — after he quit in the late 1970s — by Rajiv Gandhi, Pakistan was not the first victim of the Bofors guns, the Gandhis were. The last time the Gandhis had absolute control over the party and the government, the Bofors scandal had taken it away.

His image of ‘Mr Clean’ of Indian politics, which the media in Kerala had built meticulously for decades, came in handy for the Congress and the Gandhis. However, it was this image that proved disastrous for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the three sword arms of the Indian military. With all Antony’s focus on the longevity of his clean image and preventing another Bofors, the ministry and the

armed forces lurched from one crisis to another during his tenure.

The worst of these crises struck in 2011, when the then chief of the Indian Army, General V K Singh, filed a statutory complaint at the MoD on the issue of his official date of birth in the army’s records. The voluminous statutory complaint sent to the MoD, the first ever by a serving chief of the 1.3 million strong force, exposed the deep fissures between the army and the government during Antony’s tenure. Antony, however, allowed the situation to worsen to a point where Singh moved the Supreme Court. On the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in June 2012, just days after Singh retired as army chief, Antony called his actions “nuisance”.

This wasn’t the only time Antony allowed civil-military relations to hit rock bottom. In 2013, Antony forced the army to retract its statement on the brutal killing and beheading of five Indian soldiers along the Line of Control by the Pakistan Army, leaving the force incensed. After the incident came to light, the Northern Command of the army had issued a statement saying a Border Action Team of the Pakistan Army had carried out the attack. For reasons that remain unknown to most, Antony appeared in the Parliament the following day, claiming “20 heavilyarmed terrorists along with persons in Pakistani Army uniform” were involved in the attack.

In February 2014, Indian Navy chief De-

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

AJAY AGGARWAL/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

vendra Kumar Joshi resigned taking moral responsibility for a series of accidents, which had occurred during his tenure. In the past, and even under the UPA, chiefs of the three services and other senior officers were convinced not to resign when they offered to. In 2006, when Mukherjee was defence minister, the then navy chief Arun Prakash had offered to resign after the ‘War Room Leak’ scandal. Despite the fact that Prakash’s nephew was involved in the scandal, a far more serious issue,

his offer to resign was firmly rejected.

Vice-Admiral Sureesh Mehta, deputy chief of naval staff and the officer directly in charge of the War Room, also continued to serve. Moreover, accidents were not unique to the navy. By some accounts, at least 28 planes and 14 helicopters of the Indian Air Force had crashed since 2011.

Despite these facts, Antony hardly made any effort to convince the navy chief not to resign. To many, including those in the armed forces, it appeared as though the

THROUGH HIS TENURE, THERE WERE TIMES WHEN ANTONY APPEARED MORE CONCERNED ABOUT THE SURVIVAL OF THE GOVERNMENT THAN NATIONAL INTEREST AND SECURITY.

AUGUST 2018

27

C O V E R

S T O R Y

ACCORDING TO THE PARLIAMENTARY STANDING COMMITTEE ON DEFENCE, THERE WAS A “STEADY DECLINE” IN THE NUMBER OF CONTRACTS SIGNED IN THE 2007-08 TO 2011-12 PERIOD.

28

A U G U ST 2018

minister and the bureaucrats had found someone to blame for the accidents.

There were also times when Antony appeared more concerned about the survival of the government than national interest and security.

In 2007, when the Left parties — sympathetic to China — threatened to launch an agitation against the Indian Navy’s plans to hold Exercise Malabar with the United States in the Bay of Bengal, Antony chose to secure his party’s interests and not the country’s. Concerned that the protests by Left parties supporting the government in New Delhi would bring the fissures out in open, Antony recalled a senior officer and questioned the navy’s decision to hold the exercise in the Bay of Bengal. His logic: why hold the war game in the Bay of Bengal when the coast which it is named after, Malabar, lies in his home state of Kerala?

The same year, Antony again appeared supportive of the Left when it protested against the proposed civil nuclear agreement with the US. His line: the Congress should not sacrifice the alliance with the Left parties for the nuclear deal as it may need the bloc’s support after the next Lok Sabha polls.

Antony’s tenure was marked by slow acquisitions of equipment, cancellation of contracts and whimsical blacklisting of contractors, even on the ground of suspicion of kickbacks and association with a company that has been debarred. And while this may suggest that Antony successfully tamed corruption, the conclusion is far from the truth. While Antony did manage to prevent a Bofors on the UPA, he failed to stem corruption altogether. These cases come to mind: One, the AgustaWestland helicopter scam. In 2010, the UPA government entered into a contract for 12 choppers worth Rs 3,600 crore from the Italy-based AgustaWestland to carry the prime minister, the president and other VVIPs. Despite alarm bells on kickbacks and allegations of corruption as early as 2009, Antony — known for blacklisting firms over tiniest suspicion — chose not to act until a court in Italy ordered the arrest of Finmeccani-

ca (of which AgustaWestland is a whollyowned subsidiary) chairman, Giuseppe Orsi, and AgustaWestland chief executive officer Bruno Spagnolini on charges that they paid bribes to secure the deal.

Two, the Tatra trucks scandal. In 2012, then army chief General V K Singh had revealed that he was offered a Rs 14 crore bribe to clear the purchase of 1,600 Tatra trucks in September 2010. Not only was Antony informed about the bribe offer by Singh, but he also received a letter from Ghulam Nabi Azad, a senior Congress party colleague and then health minister, requesting action on the issue on behalf of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi as early as October 2009. However, Antony claimed in Parliament that he did not act because a ‘written complaint’ wasn’t made.

Three, the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) scandal. In a missile deal worth Rs 10,000 crore, signed just days before the 2009 general elections were announced, the Congress-led UPA government agreed to pay 6 per cent of the total cost — Rs 600 crore — as “business charges” to IAI. The

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

WHEN HE LEFT OFFICE IN 2014, ANTONY HAD NO CHARGES OF CORRUPTION LEVELLED AGAINST HIM. DID THIS COME AT A COST OF ENDANGERING INDIA’S SECURITY?

deal, with this unprecedented charge, passed through the Cabinet Committee on Security without Antony raising an eyebrow.

There was a clear pattern in all these cases. Even when he was aware of possible scams and scandals in the ministry, Antony remained quiet.

What explains Antony’s inaction? Most have arrived at the conclusion that he was inept. Can a politician, who has managed to build a clean image — unlike most senior members in his party — even as he successfully climbed the political ladder over a career spanning four decades, be inept? It is highly unlikely.

However, it could be his desire to maintain the image of ‘Mr Clean’, apart from preventing another Bofors, that explains his inaction. The cancellation of contracts, slow movement on new deals and preemptive blacklisting of contractors based on suspicion were the symptoms of his urge to come out clean at whatever cost. Fewer the deals signed, lesser the chances of his ministry being implicated.

Sure, this sounds outrageous. But numbers tell the same story. According to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence, there was a “steady decline” in the number of contracts signed in the 2007-08 to 2011-12 period. Only 84 defence contracts were signed in 2007-08, 61 in 2008-09, 49 in 2009-10, 50 in 2010-11 and 52 in 2011-12, the committee’s report says.

The number of deals, as the report shows, started declining soon after Antony took over.

Antony’s inaction, in effect, was a strategy camouflaged as administrative ineptness. And at all times, his clean image came to the rescue.

When he left office in 2014, amid a barrage of allegations of corruption against the UPA government, Antony had no charges of corruption against him. He had largely succeeded in coming out clean from the ministry most prone to allegations of corruption and also managed to prevent a Bofors on the UPA. Did it come at a cost of endangering India’s security?

Prakhar Gupta is Senior SubEditor, Swarajya.

AUGUST 2018

29

C O V E R

S T O R Y

“What More Proof Is Needed? These Are Open And Shut Cases” We wouldn’t be knowing about the 2G scam, the Aircel-Maxis scam, or the National Herald scam, as we do, if not for J GOPIKRISHNAN. As early as the December of 2008, he had written for The Pioneer reports which would expose the 2G scam. Then, four years later in 2012, it were his reports which described the details of the AircelMaxis scam, in which former finance and home minister, P Chidambaram, and his son, Karti, are accused. In

30

A U G U ST 2018

the same year, he would also be the one chronicling the particulars of the National Herald scam where the list of accused includes Congress president Rahul Gandhi, and the former Congress president, Sonia Gandhi.

Since the time he first wrote about them, Gopikrishnan continues to closely track the prosecution in these cases. In an exclusive interview with Swarajya, he spoke about the quality

of prosecution for the high profile corruption cases, the judgement of the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in the 2G scam, the attempts to sabotage investigations, the probability of Karti and P Chidambaram being prosecuted, the attitude of the Indian public towards corruption of political leaders and much more.

Excerpts:

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

Given the exoneration of all accused in the 2G scam, and P Chidambaram earlier, and also the exoneration of Dayanidhi Maran in the BSNL case in the lower court (now resent for a trial by the High Court — all cases we believed were open and shut cases — do you feel that the CBI and judicial system are unable to prosecute the powerful successfully?

The acquittal by the trial court judge, O P Saini, in the 2G scam case involving former telecom minister A Raja, and Kanimozhi, is a bad judgment and is a black chapter in the history of the judiciary. How did Judge Saini, who framed charges against all the accused and sought answers to around 1,800 questions from them, come out with a such a judgement? There are many things being said about it. Anyway, the CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) have approached the Delhi High Court (HC) seeking speedy justice after Saini’s judgment. This was an open and shut case with a clear proof of a money trail. Somehow, the judge could not see it. Let us hope the Delhi High Court does justice.

Obviously, there was carelessness on behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in appointing Mukul Rohatgi as Attorney General; Rohatgi had earlier represented one of the accused parties in the 2G case. This sent a wrong message. And so did the role of former CBI director Ranjit Sinha and his successor Anil Sinha. Ranjit Sinha was meeting many of the accused at midnight at his home and one wonders what he was trying to achieve. Anil Sinha failed to guide CBI officers properly by not charge-sheeting Chidambaram in the Aircel-Maxis case, which ultimately led to the discharge of the Maran brothers. The CBI started acting only after Alok Verma became director. Meanwhile, Special Director Rakesh Asthana also seemed to

be dawdling over the Aircel-Maxis case. The probe was revived thanks to ED’s bold Investigating Officer, Rajeshwar Singh. He attached Karti’s bank accounts and charge-sheeted Karti by detailing Chidambaram’s role in the Aircel-Maxis case. But we have seen how people in the government hunted Rajeshwar Singh. The Finance Ministry in October 2014 even went so far as to say that there was no need for Rajeshwar Singh’s service as the Aircel-Maxis case was over. These things show how a compromised system and corporations work together, whoever is in power.

Only thing I can say is all this can be prevented only by alert and vigilant

to protect the compromised. Look at the Aircel-Maxis case, the AirAsia frauds and the Jet-Etihad illegalities.

See the government’s stand in the courts. The worst was the current Finance Secretary Hasmukh Adhia providing a questionable Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) report against Singh, who had raided Chidambaram’s home and exposed his family’s assets in 14 countries and their 21 illegal accounts. This was exposed in January 2016. Pioneer published the details of his assets in February 2016. What did the Finance Ministry under Arun Jaitley do? Nothing. This was a case which clearly warranted a probe under

“How did Judge Saini, who framed charges against all the accused and sought answers to around 1,800 questions from them, come out with a such a judgement?” citizens.

Is it about poor investigations by the CBI or is the system compromised in some way?

I don’t believe in blaming officers. It is the system which controls them, forces them, arm twists them to toe its line. Those who don’t fall in line are hunted down by these mighty corrupt people. For example, CBI’s joint director, Ashok Tewari, was shunted out to his home state’s transport corporation in December 2014 after he summoned Chidambaram. Remember, this happened when Narendra Modi is Prime Minister. Look at the cases still being pursued by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy. Even now the government advocates oppose him in court. This shows that the system closes ranks

the Black Money Act. These people hushed up the findings of ED and Income Tax Department (I-T) for more than a year. The related documents were made public by Subramanian Swamy in March 2017 and the PM ordered a probe under the Black Money Act on Swamy’s complaint.

Even after the PM’s order, people in the Finance Ministry again delayed initiating prosecution although it finally happened in 2018. These delays provided the Chidambaram family the opportunity to approach the courts for bail.

Rajeshwar Singh’s promotion happened only after court orders and even now, his last promotion is pending for the past eight months. But we have seen promotion orders issued at midnight for people like CBI

AUGUST 2018

31

C O V E R

S T O R Y

Special Director Rakesh Asthana.

Asthana’s name was blocked by none other than the CBI Director when he flagged corruption charges against the former, including an allegation of accepting a bribe of Rs 3.8 crore from a company called Sterling Biotech, which is said to be closely associated with Congress leader Ahmed Patel. Let me repeat — the problem is at the top levels. The lower level problems can be rectified by good leadership.

It took almost 18-20 years for the Jayalalithaa corruption case to reach a conclusion, but even here the high court reversed a carefully argued judgement of the trial court. Though Jaya’s death ended the case against her, V K Sasikala was convicted. In Bihar, Lalu

ing in courts and crying and doing theatrics in support of corrupt leaders. Our mindset has to change. We go by power and money. They should change their mindset.

ON THE CASES AGAINST KARTI CHIDAMBARAM AND P CHIDAMBARAM When it comes to the cases against P Chidambaram and his son, Karti, there is a series of questions that come to mind: — In S Gurumurthy’s investigations into Karti’s Advantage Strategic Consulting and Ausbridge, one has noted that ownership of these companies has been transferred to friends of Karti. Do we know what were the underlying assets of these companies at the time of transfer? And is anything known about the consideration

“What is worse is that some people in the government tried their best to save Chidambaram, even in the face of such strong evidence”.

Prasad Yadav has been convicted in four cases. But politically, no party seems to pay any political price for corruption, even when their leaders are convicted. What does this say about Indians’ attitude to corruption?

These cases got delayed in judiciary too. But the problem is with the notso-strong prosecution. How can we blame prosecutors and investigators when the people elect governments controlled by Lalu Yadav and Jayalalithaa on many occasions? People also have a responsibility. Sadly in India, people are concerned about their rights and not at all about doing their duties. They elect these people by taking money or looking at their caste. Look at the crowd land-

32

A U G U ST 2018

for this transfer?

— Wouldn’t the price for these transfers establish that the company was transferred without adequate consideration?

— In another story, it has been established that the transfer of advance to Karti’s friends was accompanied by these friends making a will to transfer the company to Karti’s daughter. Is this fact alone not enough to establish the nexus and benami ownership?

— In the Vasan Eye Care case, it seems Karti’s company got the shares cheap and then sold it for a huge premium, but no motive is given for why the promoters would want to favour Karti.

Is there a link we do not know

about?

— While Karti is obviously the person directly involved in the benami ownership of Advantage, is P Chidambaram involved directly in any way?

The joint raid of the ED and I-T proved that most of the money was flown through Advantage’s Singapore-based subsidiary. Gurumurthy’s article exposed how benami directors of Karti’s firm were forced to execute wills. The Chidambaram family acted in close concert considering the execution of wills by the directors in the companies controlled by them. All the companies were controlled by Karti in many covert ways. But the execution of wills by benami directors was quite unheard of. This is somewhat like a mafia operation. When you look at the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) approvals by Chidambaram, many beneficiary firms paid money to Karti-controlled firms as ‘consultancy fee’. The finance minister’s son accepting consultancy fee from the firms that got approvals from the father is a clear case for investigation under the Prevention of Corruption Act. Karti’s Advantage was having shares in Vasan Eye Care and now the ED has slapped a Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) notice in that case. In Pioneer, we had published the names of 63 big firms which had a financial trail leading to Karti-linked firms.

What is worse is that some people in the government tried their best to save Chidambaram, even in the face of such strong evidence. Credit goes to CBI Director Alok Verma and Additional Director A K Sharma for chargesheeting Chidambaram and Karti on 19 July in the Aircel-Maxis scam. Chidambaram used all forces to block this. For two years, a special director was trying to spike the case.

Whether it is Aircel-Maxis case

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

SUSHIL KUMAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

or INX Media, the weakest link in the case is to establish a nexus between payments made to Advantage and the decisions of the FIPB and Chidambaram. Isn’t it entirely possible, given how courts have thrown out the 2G case, that this nexus is tough to establish?

Not weakest link. The direct and conclusive link of money trail is established by the ED. In both cases, Karti’s firm Advantage and Chess Management has taken direct money from both Maxis and INX Media.

What more proof is needed? These are open and shut cases under the Prevention of Corruption Act. Direct bank transfer is made from Maxis and INX Media to Karti’s firm following his father Chidambaram approving the FIPB files. If this not a proof, nothing is a proof. I think not all judges will ignore the kickback of Rs 200 crore to Kanimozhi-controlled Kalaignar TV from Swan Telecomlinked firms after Raja allotted telecom licences.

The ED case of laundering is also tough to establish, since there are companies in Mauritius etc involved. The government has so far been unable to link external transactions and their linkages to domestic companies – the money trail so to speak. It seems impossible to get to the bottom of the money trail when foreign entities are involved due to lack of cooperation from that jurisdiction.

Your comment.

No need of cooperation from Mauritius. The ED has proved with documents that money reached Karti’s firm. That is more than enough. Everything else is a narrative pushed by Chidambaram’s cronies in the media which would be used by him and his son during their defence arguments. These things are ample proof for honest judges. Now we have seen how the Madras High Court quashed

“ED has proved with documents that money reached Karti’s firm. That is more than enough. Everything else is a narrative pushed by Chidambaram’s cronies”. the dishonest discharge by the trial court of the Maran brothers. This shows that there are many honest judges.

Given that the entire Congress ecosystem is backing Chidambaram in his case involving Karti, is it possible that some of the funds involved may be party funds?

Why else should a Congress party want to stand four-square behind him?

I don’t think politicians indulge in corruption for party funds. Corruption is for their personal wealth creation. Not for party funds. For party work, funds can be collected very easily. The rest are excuses for corruption. Some unscrupulous guys even stole from party funds.

The government has plans to set up 12 special courts to fast track cases against politicians. Will this in any way impact the case against Karti and his father?

Fast-track courts are fine. The lagging creates space for fixing. But I do think that when it comes to high profile cases, it would not be easy to conclude the hearing in one or two years as all options of arguments, counter arguments, evidence etc., would be But the fact of the matter is that explored. the percentage of corrupt or pliable judges is very very low compared Is corruption in the judiciary to a any other system,low be itprosecution politics or factor behind bureaucracy, etc.politicians?

Very, few of success ratespolice against the corrupt are in judiciary.

MajorThere are corrupt judges also.

No ity areabout very judicious. doubt it. But we have different tiers to challenge the decisions.

AUGUST 2018

33

C O V E R

S T O R Y

THE NATIONAL IT IS THE ONLY ‘SCAM’ IN WHICH THE NEHRU-GANDHIS ARE DIRECTLY ACCUSED. HERE IS A SUMMARY OF THE NATIONAL HERALD CASE AS IT STANDS IN THE COURT TODAY.

N

34

ATIONAL HERALD was a white elephant from the outset. When the newspaper remained closed for three years, less than a decade after its launch in 1938, Jawaharlal Nehru declared at a gathering of its employees in Lucknow, “Humein banyagiri nahi aayi (We do not know how to do business)”. At another event, just years away from being India’s first prime minister, he said, “I will not let the National Herald close down even if I have to sell Anand Bhavan (his family home in Allahabad)”.

But little did Nehru know that, instead of using its own resources to save the iconic newspaper and preserve it as part of India’s independence movement, his family will usurp the assets of National Herald.

In 2010, the Congress transferred the loan to a newly-floated company called Young Indian (YI) for a partly payment of Rs 50 lakh. While 76 per cent of the shareholding of Young Indian is with Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, the remaining 24 per cent vests in Congress leaders Motilal Vora, Oscar Fernandes, Sam Pitroda and Suman Dubey.

After the loan was transferred, AJL owed the debt to Young Indian.

In lieu of the debt, AJL allotted a large number of its shares, nearly 99 per cent, to Young Indian. With this, Young Indian, in which the Gandhis hold a majority stake, ended up owning AJL and its prime real estate. The deal left the Gandhis in control of properties belonging to AJL and its shareholders spread across the country.

BACKGROUND Despite attempts by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi to revive it, the circulation and finances of the National Herald dropped over the decades, resulting in it being shut in 2008 with a debt of Rs 90 crore.

As a result, the Associated Journals Limited (AJL) — which published the newspaper — in effect became a real estate firm with properties worth thousands of crore in Delhi, Indore, Lucknow and Mumbai.

The debt, which was owed to the Congress party, had resulted from interest-free loans worth Rs 90.25 crore given by the party to the ailing company.

SWAMY’S CASE AGAINST THE GANDHIS In 2013, Subramanian Swamy filed a complaint against the Gandhis, accusing them of conspiring to cheat and misappropriate funds. He has alleged that the Gandhis have “fraudulently acquired properties of the AJL in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and other places”. The properties, he says, are worth Rs 2,000 crore.

Apart from the Gandhis, Swamy has also named Congress treasurer Motilal Vora, general secretary Oscar Fernandes, journalist Suman Dubey and technocrat Sam Pitroda in the case.

Swamy has argued that AJL’s Rs

A U G U ST 2018

90 crore loan could have been easily paid through AJL’s assets, but no effort was made to do that. His line: against properties worth Rs 2,000 crore, AJL has a limited liability of just Rs 90 crore.

He has said that the AJL was given an interest-free loan by the Congress, which was not repaid, which is a violation of Section 269T of Income Tax Act 1961. Moreover, he says, a political party cannot engage in commercial financial transactions, including giving or receiving loans, as it is a non-profit entity.

He argues that the loan given to AJL was “illegal” as it had been taken from party funds.

Swamy has also accused the Gandhis of criminal breach of trust in the acquisition. Over 1,050 shareholders of AJL, he says, were not consulted before the move.

He has also objected to the use of properties belonging to AJL for commercial purposes, citing the example of Herald House in Delhi, which used to serve as the National Herald’s office, having been rented out.

WHAT HAS THE COURT SAID? In June 2014, a magistrate’s court in Delhi ordered the Gandhis and the other senior Congress leaders named in the complaint to appear before it to answer allegations that they had illegally used party funds for the newspaper. However, the Congress leaders, through an appeal in the Delhi High Court, se-

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

HERALD STORY

PANKAJ NANGIA/INDIA TODAY GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

cured a stay on the lower court’s summon until all parties in the case had been heard.

After a series of hearings, the Delhi High Court in December 2015 rejected the appeal filed by the Gandhis seeking quashing of the charges. The court summoned the Congress leaders to answer the allegations against them. On appearing, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Vora, Fernandes and Dubey were granted bail by the court.

The Metropolitan Magistrate, while summoning the Gandhis, had said that from the complaint and the evidence so far, “it appears that YI was in fact created as a sham or a cloak to convert public money to personal use”.

If this was not damaging enough for the Congress, the Delhi High Court, during the hearing in the case, observed it has “no hesitation” in saying that the “modus operandi adopted by petitioners (Gandhis and other Congress leaders) in taking control of AJL via the special purpose vehicle, particularly when the main persons in the Congress, AJL and YI are the same, evidences a criminal intent”.

HOW IS THE CONGRESS DEFENDING ITSELF? In their defence, the Gandhis have said that Young Indian is a not-forprofit entity, created for charity.

Therefore, it can’t be charged for illegal profiteering.

The Congress has also claimed that no shareholder has been defrauded. Moreover, it has said that it had informed or consulted the shareholders about the transfer of equity to Young Indian, who “approved” the move “unanimously”.

However, this claim fell flat when former law minister Shanti Bhushan claimed — as a shareholder in AJL — that the takeover by Young Indian was “wholly illegal”. The facts that AJL was incorporated as a public company and was not a personal property of Nehru, who started it with the support of about 5,000 freedom fighters, complicates the situation for the Congress. The Gandhis are yet to come up with a convincing explanation.

AUGUST 2018

35

C O V E R

S T O R Y

WITH THE LAW ON YOUR SIDE CONGRESS’ ACTS OF CORRUPTION AND ITS REGIMES THRIVE ON A FAVOURABLE INSTITUTIONAL ECOSYSTEM, AT THE HEART OF WHICH LIES THE PARTY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE JUDICIARY. PRATYASHA RATH

I

T WAS 30 April 1976 and newspapers in India had either turned silent on will or had been censored into almost silence. So, one often had to rely on international newspapers to get an understanding of what was unfolding in the country. On that eventful day, the New York Times (NYT) in its editorial saluted the efforts of an unlikely hero – a judge who NYT said deserved his own monument for upholding the Constitution and the rule of law, even though it meant sacrificing his own career. This Supreme Court judge in question was Justice H R Khanna and the case in question was ADM Jabalpur Vs Shivkant Shukla.

The memorial never came, but Justice Khanna’s brave dissent laid bare the way in which the Indian National Congress manipulated and trampled upon the independence of the judiciary. From the days of the Emergency to the present day, the Congress continues with its track record of impairing the independence of the courts.

So what tactics has the Congress used in the past few decades to make the judiciary pliable to its interests? The party’s approach can be summed up in three points.

1. Make way for the people who are loyal to you, and those who would continue to be loyal, to make their way up to the highest position.

In 1973, veteran leader Jai Prakash Narayan (JP) wrote a letter to the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, express-

36

A U G U ST 2018

ing his deep concern with the way three senior judges were superseded to make Justice A N Ray the Chief Justice of India (CJI). It is important to note that the three senior judges had ruled against the government in the Kesavananda Bharati case, which allowed the judiciary to strike down any amendment that would alter the ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution. This was the cause of immense embarrassment for the government and the Congress realised that any of the three judges in the highest position would be difficult to work with. But Justice Ray had dissented against the majority verdict. Therefore, they made way for Ray to be made the CJI. JP, in his letter, wondered aloud and summed up the concerns of the nation by asking the prime minister whether the idea behind all of it was to make the Chief Justice ‘a creature of the government of the day’. In fact, that was the very idea.

The ministers of the government even used the argument that the ‘philosophy and outlook of the judges’ should be taken into consideration when deciding on their elevation. Indira Gandhi had herself lauded the decision of promoting Justice Ray by saying that he was a judge who had recognised the ‘winds of change’.

2. Judges who are not supportive of positions of the Congress party to face impediments in their career.

The first strategy can only be implemented if it is in conjunction with the second strategy of pulling down the

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

THE INDIA TODAY GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

judges, who are not compliant with the Congress party and its whims. This could be through stalling promotions of senior judges, such as the case cited above, or it could be through major steps, such as initiating impeachment proceedings, like in the recent tirade against CJI Dipak Misra.

Each of these strategies seems to germinate in the period of the Emergency. For instance, during the Emergency, nine high courts across India had ruled against arbitrary detention under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act. The Congress party did not take this affront lying down. In all, 18 judges who delivered verdicts against the government

were transferred. A two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court had ruled that veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar could not be arbitrarily detained. One of the judges, Additional Justice Aggarwal, was to be made a permanent judge soon. He was transferred to a sessions judge position.

The reason behind it was all too familiar.

The Congress argued that Intelligence Bureau reports suggested that Justice Aggarwal was a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh man and hence, his candidature was not deemed fit. The other judge was transferred from Delhi to Assam.

The most significant use of this strategy was seen in the way Justice H R Khan-

INDIRA GANDHI HAD LAUDED THE DECISION OF PROMOTING JUSTICE RAY BY SAYING THAT HE WAS A JUDGE WHO HAD RECOGNISED THE ‘WINDS OF CHANGE’.

AUGUST 2018

37

C O V E R

S T O R Y PANKAJ NANGIA/INDIA TODAY GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

whose favourable verdict on the 1984 Sikh pogrom saved the party from more embarrassment.

From plum positions in party institutions to constitutional posts to Padma awards, the loyal judges have always been celebrated for their service to the party in such critical times. Justice Beg was first made the CJI, sidelining Justice Khanna and after retirement, was made the director of the National Herald Group of the Congress. But, that is not where it ended.

In 1988, the Rajiv Gandhi government recognised the contributions of Justice Beg during the Congress-imposed Emergency

JUSTICE BEG WAS FIRST MADE THE CJI SIDELINING JUSTICE KHANNA AND AFTER RETIREMENT WAS MADE THE DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL HERALD GROUP OF THE CONGRESS. IN 1988, A PADMA VIBHUSHAN FOLLOWED.

Pratyasha Rath is a consultant working in the social development and political sector.

38

A U G U ST 2018

na was treated for his dissent note in the ADM Jabalpur case. Justice Khanna was second in line to the CJI post in terms of seniority but was bypassed for Justice M H Beg. He resigned from the bench and his act of courage meant an end to his legal career.

3. Defend your ‘almost political’ appointees in the judiciary and based on their performance, celebrate them, when the time is opportune.

From journalists to judges, from actors to activists, the Congress party has known how to demand loyalty and how to reward it. This is not just a signal for others in the days to come but also a means to pack more institutions with tried and tested political appointees. Most of the judges elevated due to the benevolent considerations of the Congress immediately delivered in terms of verdicts. Like A N Ray and M H Beg on the ADM Jabalpur case.

And others like Justice Ranganath Misra,

and awarded him the Padma Vibhushan.

Justice Ranganath Misra was another judge, who found favour with the Congress party. As the one-person task force to look into the 1984 Sikh pogrom, he could only find lapses by the police and no direct links to the party in any of the deaths and riot situations. This was a major relief for the Rajiv Gandhi government and the rewards came in quick succession and lasted long. It started with the post of the CJI and then the chairmanship of the maiden National Human Rights Commission, followed by the chairmanship of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities and then the National Commission for SCs and STs. Not to forget, a Rajya Sabha seat in the year 2004.

In a rather strange chain of events, the Congress, a couple of months back, retraced its steps of co-option and control in the judiciary and tried to impeach the CJI, Dipak Misra, who is incidentally a nephew of Ranganath Misra. The message was clear like it has been in the instances highlighted above. If the line of the Congress party is not toed, there will be consequences. There was also a signal like earlier. If the line of the Congress party is toed, there will be rewards. From the Emergency, till date, the Congress has tried to game the judiciary and has brazenly eroded its independence. Suddenly, it has woken up to concerns of judicial independence and feels like ‘enough is enough’. This realisation of righteousness is 45 years too late.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

CO LOURS

O F

I N D I A

CUSTODIANS OF TIRANGA’S FLOWING PRIDE WOMEN AT KARNATAKA KHADI GRAMODYOGA SAMYUKTA SANGHA (KKGSS) IN HUBLI CONTINUE TO SHAPE THE TRADITION OF MAKING THE TRICOLOUR. HARSHA BHATT

40

A U G U ST 2018

F

OR A culture that has festivals throughout the year, no season is less special. Having been a predominantly agrarian one, celebrations are aplenty at this time of the year, when every fortnight is a festival.

The crimson skies reflect the redness of the earth that blushes to the pampering of the monsoon, even as the dancing green stalks against the sky painted with hues of white and blue soothe every eye that sight them. This is when the nation, too, is painted in these shades as it gears to celebrate democracy — to celebrate the birth of the largest democracy of the world.

Come August, every traffic signal has vendors splashing the tricolour onto the window panes of vehicles that await the green signal. At least for a day, the entire nation feels a sense of greatness as the world witnesses the tricolour unfold at the Red Fort.

As flowers shower with the unveiling of the tricolour that flutters with pride against the mighty sky, women in a tiny suburb of a town in Karnataka feel the pride that a mother feels when her child does her proud. The tricolour that announces the might and greatness of this nation to the world, is the handiwork of these women. They painstakingly turn

yards of kora (plain ) cloth into the Indian National Flag.

Annapoorna Kote, supervisor at the all women’s unit at the Karnataka Khadi Gramodyoga Samyukta Sangha (KKGSS) in Hubli, says, “that pride is something different. That feeling is something different. We may never leave this town, but our tricolour is fluttering high around the world.”

Theirs is the job of creating with utmost care and undivided attention, the tricolour. It is no easy task. From the smallest defect in the flag, from the fastness of the colour, to the strength of yarn, to the thread count, all amount to a serious punishable offence. Any error in its creation is liable for a fine or imprisonment or both as per the provisions of the Flag Code of India 2002.

“Which is why it is an all-women team, as the eye for detail and patience and dedication that is needed is not what many men can boast of,” adds Kote, who has been at the flag-making unit since it began the task in 2005. “There had been men who joined, but then, at times, one is needed to undo the entire stitching. Since the thread used is thicker than the ones used normally, every single stitch has to be undone one stitch at a time. You cannot rip it apart,” she explains during our tour

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

FROM THE SMALLEST DEFECT IN THE FLAG, FROM THE FASTNESS OF THE COLOUR, TO THE STRENGTH OF YARN, TO THE THREAD COUNT, ALL AMOUNTS TO A SERIOUS PUNISHABLE OFFENCE.

of KKGSS Bangera in Hubli.

This is the only unit that manufactures the tricolour as prescribed and sanctioned by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), entirely handwoven and every thread hand spun.

Be it in the tiny government school in a village, in the hinterlands, or at embassies across the world, or the tiny flag that flutters on government vehicles to the flag that embraces the bodies of our slain soldiers — the tricolour is made here.

The women at the unit spend over seven hours each day cutting, screen printing, curing, stitching and toggling the tiranga (tricolour).

THE BIRTH OF A FLAG: STAGES OF PRODUCTION The fabric for the cloth is manufac-

tured as per BIS specifications at the unit in Bagalkot. The cotton is hand spun and later woven into two different types of cloth — the bunting cloth used to make the three panels and the duck cloth used for the sleeve attachment. These two sets of fabric reach Hubli and undergo the following stages where it transforms into the flag.

Bleaching and dyeing: The bunting cloth undergoes dying for the two colours and bleaching for white. This is the only process that involves heavy machinery.

Printing the chakra: Every chakra is screen printed manually. Chakras of specific sizes have to be printed on respective panels of white. While the most sold one, the 2x3”, takes just two women for the task, the largest one takes around eight women to print one chakra onto one strip

AUGUST 2018

41

COLOURS

O F

ONE CYCLE OF PRODUCTION TAKES AROUND 15 DAYS. IT’S NO SIMPLE TASK, YET, SOME OF THE WOMEN WHO HAVE WORKED HERE HAVE BEEN AT THE CENTRE SINCE THE FLAG-MAKING BEGAN.

42

A U G U ST 2018

I N D I A

of white. The women jointly place the strip of white between the frames of the screen, taking care not to soil the rest of the portion with the ink. Then, they run the ink spreader on it, turn it over, repeat the process, open the frame, take the white strip off the frame and clip it onto a string to dry.

The largest frame, which is used for the 14 by 21 flag, is a mammoth one and printing one chakra takes eight women to lift the frame and turn it around. “It is no mean feat, since lifting the wet frame and turning it around needs not just strength, but also utmost care to not just ensure the chakra is printed, but also that the rest of the fabric isn’t soiled,” she says.

CURING: The chakra printed panels are stacked and processed through the curing machines.

STITCHING: Special thread which meets the BIS specifications with the colour matching those of the panels is used to stitch the panels together and a sleeve that holds the three together.

TOGGLING: The cord that will run through the sleeve is spliced and a toggle attached to it which is then positioned at the top corner of the saffron panel. Once toggled, the sleeve is stitched again so that the rope that has been inserted doesn’t move. Extra threads, if any, are trimmed.

IRONING AND FOLDING: Two women then sort each flag, steam iron it stiff and fold it. The folding, too, has to follow a pattern that ensures the green panel stays on top so that the white panel isn’t soiled and the saffron one doesn’t fade due to exposure.

PACKING: The folded flags are stacked in top bundles, tied by ropes and moved to the godown, from where they are then dispatched as ordered.

One cycle of production takes around 15 days. It’s no simple task, yet, some of the women who have worked here have been at the centre since the flag-making began. The supervisor, Kote, ensures the flag is perfect.

Secretary of KKGSS, Shivananda

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

THE WOMEN GET PAID PER PIECE, THE TOGGLING BEING PAID RS 12 PER PIECE, AND WOMEN WHO STITCH GET PAID ACCORDING TO THE SIZE OF THE FLAG, FROM RS 9 FOR THE SMALL TABLE FLAGS TO RS 300 FOR THE LARGEST ONE.

Mathapati, heads the women’s team. He has spent three decades in the process of making the flag. Having started as a spinning instructor in Bagalkot, he has spent three decades supervising every aspect of the process. Remembering the man behind it all, Venkatesh Magadi, he says, “it was he who envisioned this here. He gave his own land to set up the khadi centre, and until his death, strived to do all he could for khadi,” The bust of Magadi and his wife greets visitors to the unit office.

The godown stores the flags, khadi fabric and garments that are distributed to the khadi bhavans across the country. “It is the largest storehouse of khadi,” he explains.

SIZE AND PRICE The flag that sees the highest sales is the 3x2” while the least number of pieces produced are of the 21x14”. There are very few pieces of the largest size produced, which are flown at just three locations in the country — at the Naragunda fort in Gadag, the Gwalior fort, and at the Raigad

fort. The unit sees an annual sale of flags worth Rs 2 crore (annual sale for 2017-2018 was worth Rs 2,170,235). The last financial year saw a sale of 26,334 flags of various sizes. While only 30-50 pieces of the largest flag are produced annually, the 3x2”, which costs Rs 715 per flag, accounts for 60 per cent of the total sales. The price of the largest flag is Rs 17,800. The car flag costs the least at Rs 170.

Silently, on their laps, rests the tricolour, as the women go about their work, from 10 am to 6 pm, each day. The women get paid per piece, the toggling being paid Rs 12 per piece, and women who stitch get paid according to the size of the flag, from Rs 9 for the small table flags to Rs 300 for the largest one.

At the unit, every person involved in the making of the tiranga flashes a smile.

Every smile, clearly, has pride written on it. It is pride laced with immense responsibility, for they give birth to that which has a hundred crore people rise and say “Jai Hind!”

Harsha Bhatt is senior subeditor, Swarajya.

AUGUST 2018

43

CHESS

A GURU TO HELP MASTER THE 64 SQUARES IF YOU FOLLOW INDIAN CHESS, THEN R B RAMESH NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION. IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW INDIAN CHESS, THEN RAMESH AND HIS PUPILS MIGHT JUST CONVINCE YOU TO. M R SUBRAMANI

44

A U G U ST 2018

W

HEN THE Indian team for the 2014 Chess Olympiad was announced, many were surprised. This was because it comprised inexperienced players such as M R Lalith Babu, B Adhiban, S P Sethuraman along with the somewhat experienced Parimarjan Negi and K Sasikiran. Barring Negi and Sasikiran, the others had never taken part in an Olympiad before. Still, India went on to win the bronze medal at the Tromso event in Norway, ahead of chess powerhouse Russia.

India had to encounter almost all the top chess-playing nations in their campaign. At one point in time, it had earned 6/6 points, though eventually it finished third. The players hardly lost any game, earning respect from the top players.

The next year at World Youth and Cadets Chess Championships 2015 in Greece, India bagged five gold medals with all of the winners hailing from Chennai and the Chess Gurukul Academy.

A common factor to both is R B Ramesh, who was the Olympiad team coach and is the founder of Chess Gurukul Academy.

A grandmaster himself and winner of the 2002 British Chess Championship and the 2007 Commonwealth Championship,

Ramesh is more in the news now after India’s 12-year-old sensation R Praggnanandhaa became the world’s second-youngest chess grandmaster.

Ramesh is an unsung hero among Indian coaches, says a national chess player, who has watched his progress from when he was in his teens. “He has produced 40-50 world champions in different age categories and still, he hasn’t got the Dronacharya Award, which one chess coach got for just getting a player win the Asian chess women championship,” says the player, on condition of anonymity.

Ramesh isn’t looking to make quick bucks. Ask Aravindh Chithambaram, who comes from an underprivileged background but is willing to go the extra mile to succeed in the game. Ramesh brought him from Chennai and is training him without charging anything. He has also got him sponsors.

“Ramesh has got a table to play table tennis for his wards. It’s another thing that his young son has begun to do well in table tennis. The guru has taught his wards yoga, all out of his own interest,” says the player.

The chess guru was his famed down-toearth self when Swarajya caught up with him.

Despite his busy schedule including ac-

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

companying Praggnanandhaa to a chess tournament in Spain, Ramesh took time out to respond to our queries on his journey so far as a coach.

For Ramesh, it all began at the age of 12 in 1988, when he started playing chess after Viswanathan Anand became a grandmaster. “Back then, chess was just a pursuit of passion. I did not have any coach to learn from. It was more of trial and error and learning from a few chess books we could gain access to,” he says.

Two events changed the course of his life and turned him into a coach. The first one came sometime in 1992-93, when after winning a tournament at Sangli in Maharashtra, he played and lost against a 10-year-old girl in a tournament in Chennai. It upset Ramesh so much that he withdrew from the tournament. Five years later, the girl’s parents approached him to coach her. He readily agreed as he thought it would help him earn some money. In 1999, the girl, Aarthie Ramaswamy,

who later became his wife, won the World Under-18 Championship in Spain. He realised that he could become a teacher of chess. The second was his own experience of having to suffer due to lack of a coach.

“One primary motivation for me to become a chess coach was that I felt there are many players out there who could benefit from the experience and knowledge players from our generation possessed,” says Ramesh.

But he is quick to sound a note of caution. “I was playing chess merely because I liked to play it and a victory over the opponent gave some kind of satisfaction and accomplishment”. According to the Chess Gurukul Academy chief, who quit his job with Indian Oil Corporation, some parents today decide that their children should play chess and become world champion. He says, “they don’t take into account their children’s talent or the lack of it, working ability, learning capacity, passion or lack of it for chess. They think

TWO EVENTS CHANGED THE COURSE OF HIS LIFE AND TURNED HIM INTO A COACH. THE FIRST ONE CAME SOMETIME IN 1992-93, WHEN AFTER WINNING A TOURNAMENT IN MAHARASHTRA, HE PLAYED AND LOST AGAINST A 10-YEAROLD GIRL IN A TOURNAMENT IN CHENNAI.

AUGUST 2018

45

CHESS

RAMESH POINTS OUT THE MANY AVOIDABLE MISTAKES THAT YOUNG PLAYERS MAKE. THESE MISTAKES, HE BELIEVES, ARE AVOIDABLE WITH PROPER APPROACH AND KNOWLEDGE. THIS APPROACH HAD ONCE DRAWN CRITICISM FROM A EUROPEAN COACH.

46

A U G U ST 2018

if their children are given proper infrastructure and opportunities, they can achieve anything. For some parents, it is an ego issue. They want their children not to lose.” He adds, “I have personally seen many children getting affected as a result of such an approach and it is sad to really see them go through all this.” He believes that a young mind needs time and space to evolve. “Some weaknesses take much longer to be overcome… if we expect children to meet our expectations all the time, it has a damaging effect on the child’s personality in the long run,” Ramesh adds.

This is where a role of a good chess coach is crucial. “To be a good chess coach or a teacher, one needs a variety of qualities. First and foremost is the passion for the subject. We should feel the yearning to share what we know with the younger generation and make them better in all aspects of the game, make them better than what we are,” he says. “We have made many mistakes, done things we should not have and paid the price. Most importantly, learnt our lessons the hard way,” Ramesh points out the many avoidable

mistakes that young players make. These mistakes, he believes, are avoidable with proper approach and knowledge.

This approach had once drawn criticism from a European coach, who asked Ramesh not to teach everything he knew since he could soon run out of ideas to teach. “I endeavour to teach everything I know and keep updating my knowledge and skills to meet the demands of our students. We should not withhold anything and go the extra mile to help the students,” he says.

Ramesh finds the age of computer, internet and analytics changing the world of chess, especially the training methods.

“In the former Soviet Union, chess had state patronage, a lot of funding was available and a good system that took roots and evolved. The emphasis was on studying and learning from past masters, preference to understanding endgames over brutal calculation power,” he adds.

“Humans have benefited a lot by working with computers, they defend better than before, and calculation standards have rapidly risen. Earlier, information

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu

was available only in Russian language but since the breakup of Soviet Union, their grandmasters have travelled to other countries, and knowledge has become more accessible to people in the West.

Asia has benefited in this process,” he adds.

However, there is a downside to the use of technology. “Human touch, creativity has suffered a little bit. Analytical engines show fantastic, creative ideas and we humans are trying to imitate them in our games. Players might think twice before embarking on a creative but risky idea because they could be scared over the thought that computers might refute them easily,” says Ramesh.

How do coaches like him spot talent and nurture it? It isn’t tough if “we look for right things”, he says. “Talented kids usually come up with moves that confront critical elements of the position. They are confident, don’t hesitate too much to take decision, sense what is going on well and have a good capacity to learn things that are taught to them. They are passionate and have good concentration”.

LOGICAL DECISIONMAKING, TIME MANAGEMENT DURING GAME, HANDLING LOSSES, LEARNING FROM CRITICISM, HANDLING PRESSURE ON THEIR OWN ACCORD ARE AS IMPORTANT AS THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF THE GAME.

According to the chess guru once a talented child is identified, he or she should be taught to play for long-term objectives than short-term gains. Logical decisionmaking, time management during game, handling losses, learning from criticism, handling pressure on their own accord are as important as the technical aspects of the game.

Ramesh is rather philosophical about his way of coaching. “Results are like a shadow and the effort is ourselves.

Shadow should follow a person; similarly results should follow effort,” he says.

Neither winning is good nor losing is bad – they are just happenings, he believes.

“Losing or winning are both learning experiences and as such every game, every tournament is important and an opportunity to learn,” he sums up.

That brings us to the topic of the latest sensation, Praggnanandhaa. “We simply did not focus on making the grandmaster norm but tried to focus on improving constantly… We tried our best to shield Praggnanandhaa by limiting his exposure to media during competitions and it helped

AUGUST 2018

47

CHESS IGORS2 / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

RAMESH IS ALSO KNOWN FOR HIS COMMENTARY SKILLS. DURING THE 2013 WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIPS AT CHENNAI BETWEEN VISHWANATHAN ANAND AND MAGNUS CARLSEN, HIS COMMENTARY DREW RAVE REVIEWS.

M R Subramani is Executive Editor, Swarajya.

48

A U G U ST 2018

to an extent,” Ramesh says. Besides, the kid himself is hard-working, being extremely good at learning by himself, putting in his own efforts. “Praggnanandhaa’s parents, his previous coach Thiagu, his sponsors and his school Velammal, all played their role well,” the coach says.

Ramesh says Indian chess has a bright future. After the bronze medal at the 2014 Chess Olympiad, other countries have begun to respect India’s strength. “We have more than 50 grandmasters and it’s getting better by the day. Many are taking to the game at a very young age and are becoming world beaters. Notable besides Praggnanandhaa are Nihal Sarin, Gukesh, Divya Deshmukh, Rakshitha Ravi, Raunak, Aditya Mittal, and many other kids, who are torch-bearers for the future,” he adds.

Ramesh also interacts with players, who aren’t his students, to get different perspectives. “People handle same issues in a different way, and for a coach, it is important to have a wide variety of solutions,” he says. He tells us that he used to interact with an Iranian player in tournaments. This led to an emotional or intellectual bond. “Glad to know he has crossed 2,600 (in ELO rating) recently”.

The 2,600 rating is a milestone in a player’s career. “It shows one has arrived on the chess scene. The next big challenge

is to get to 2,700 which is an elite category so to say,” Ramesh says. Motivation to achieve more, nerves to handle pressure, depth in opening operation and invitation to participate in strong-closed events are challenges a player has to overcome post2,600 levels.

The Chess Gurukul Academy founder works predominantly with Indian players as he wants the country to become a chess superpower. He also works online with players from Australia, US, Africa, UK and China too. “Learning has no boundaries and it is an enriching experience to work with players from different backgrounds,” he adds.

Ramesh is also known for is his commentary skills. During the 2013 World Chess Championships between Vishwanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen, his commentary drew rave reviews. Currently, it is not his cup of tea. “My heart is in coaching. Probably in future, I will branch out to other areas,” he says.

Ramesh lives with his family in Chennai. His wife Aarthie, a woman grandmaster, plays a chess tournament or two when she gets time. His 12-year-old daughter Varsha is showing interest in chess and has begun working hard on it. His sevenyear-old son Karthik loves table tennis and, found pretty good for his age, is undergoing professional training.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

AUTHORS

FAKE NAMES AND INVISIBILITY WRITING UNDER A FAKE NAME CONCEALS ANOTHER PERSONALITY, A SECRET ONE, WHICH CAN TAKE ON A LIFE AND IDENTITY OF ITS OWN UNDER THIS NEW NAME.

M

Y FRIEND has a compelling story. It is his story.

He is so scared of his wife, that when he wrote a book he published it under a fake name. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the book became a bestseller.

And now, it has got the attention of moviemakers, who are keen to put it on screen.

The author is convinced that if his wife comes to know of the real person behind the book, it would land him in a divorce, immediately. There are some not-so-pleasant things about his in-laws there. Until this day, his wife does not know about the book’s real author. Probably, she has not even heard of the book either. Thankfully, the author has a watertight agreement with the publisher.

And this is not made up. This is a real story. But I can’t disclose more.

Well, there are many other reasons why writers publish books with fake names or pseudonyms, as they are popularly called. Stephen King used the pseudonym Richard Bachman. When he released his book Thinner, he even included a fake jacket photo. The photo is claimed to have been taken by his wife, Claudia Inez Bachman. The actual subject of the photo is Richard Manuel, the insurance agent of Kirby McCauley, who was King’s literary agent. I was lucky to find this much-sought-after edition, with the fake jacket photo of Bachman. King was prolific, often completing two to three novels a year. So, when publishers felt that readers

might not buy more than one book from an author in a year, he published his overflow of material as Bachman, as a way out.

When the novel Primary Colors came out, all that was known about the author was that he simply called himself/herself as ‘Anonymous’. This was a brilliant marketing strategy, making the reader doubly curious. If the author had used a pseudonym, it would not have been as effective as ‘Anonymous’. While it had been a common practice in ancient days for literary works to be simply published under ‘anonymous’, no one in modern literary history had tried it. The author of Primary Colors was the first. The book describes the first Bill and Hillary Clinton campaign in a thinly disguised fictional form and exposes the Clintons as willing to go to any length to win, including covering up Bill’s scandals.

Primary Colors was an overnight bestseller. It became a movie with John Travolta as Bill and Emma Thompson as Hillary. Many in Washington praised it as an accurate portrait of a political campaign. Who was the author who seemed to know so much about the Clintons? The first suspect was Joe Klein, a well-known political columnist. Using quantitative stylometric analysis, and comparing his handwriting with the hand used in the manuscript, the results pointed to Klein, who first denied it, but eventually admitted that he was the author of Primary Colors.

Writing under a nom de plume conceals

V R FEROSE

AUGUST 2018

49

AUTHORS want to be famous. He disliked fame and attention, and being known. He liked to be left alone. “My constant aim,” he said, “is to remain, personally, unknown to the world”. How many authors would say that today, when fame is what everyone seeks?

The answer is slightly surprising. There is at least one — Elena Ferrante. Ferrante, as most literary readers know, is the acclaimed Italian author of the four-part series starting with My Brilliant Friend. Her wish was to remain anonymous — and her many fans respected that — added to the aura of mystery around her. It didn’t stay that way for long though. As we know, an

another personality, a secret one which can take on a life of its own under this new name. Writing on this theme, author Carmela Ciuraru notes, “many writers have been lonely outsiders, which is why inhabiting another self offers an intimacy that seems otherwise unobtainable. In the absence of real-life companionship, the pseudonymous entity can serve as a confidant, keeper of secrets, and a protective shield… a pseudonym may give a writer the necessary distance to speak honestly, but it can just as easily provide a licence to lie. Anything is possible. It allows a writer to produce a work of serious literature, or one that is simply a guilty pleasure.”

A shy, gifted mathematician from Oxford called Rev Charles Dodgson wrote Alice in Wonderland under the name of Lewis Carroll. His motive was that he did not

50

A U G U ST 2018

Italian journalist, using financial records and stylistic records, identified Ferrante as being Anita Raja, a translator. Her fans were upset, and the journalist faced a lot of backlash.

In another instance, we see that readers, too, can conspire with authors to sustain a “fake name”. J K Rowling’s reason for writing her adult thriller as Robert Galbraith was twofold. One, to attempt something different from Harry Potter, she had to assume for herself a different name simply because it gave her the freedom and artistic licence to explore a new genre. The second reason was more personal. She wanted to see if her book would succeed on its own terms and not because it came from the pen of J K Rowling.

Lars Kepler is the pseudonym of the husband and wife team of Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril, authors of the Joona Linna series. With six installments to date, the series has sold 12 million copies in 40 languages.

The Ahndorils were established writers before they adopted the pen name Lars Kepler, and have each published several acclaimed novels. In their name, ‘Lars’ is a homage to the Swedish crime fiction author Stieg Larsson, as he inspired the duo to start writing crime fiction. ‘Kepler’ comes from the German scientist Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who solved one of his time’s greatest mysteries: it was his calculations of the planets’ orbits that paved the way for Newton’s theses about gravity.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

STEPHEN KING USED THE PSEUDONYM RICHARD BACHMAN WHEN HE RELEASED HIS BOOK THINNER. NOT ONLY THAT, HE EVEN INCLUDED A FAKE JACKET PHOTO.

For the Ahndoril spouses, the pseudonym was a method for writing together without limitations, while the secrecy around it stemmed from a desire to let Lars Kepler stand on his own two legs, and have his books assessed without prejudice.

In my collection, I have the first edition of The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, and perhaps more interestingly, a signed first of Joseph Anton. Salman Rushdie, though writing about his experience here, chose to use a fictional name because it would allow him to explore his subject freely and more inventively. Patricia Highsmith wrote some books under a nom de plume to explore lesbian fiction, something that was not so easy to tackle during her time. O Henry, too, was a pen name, since the man behind those famous short stories with a twist did not want anyone to know he had a criminal record and had spent time in jail.

Another interesting aspect to pen names is when a franchise is passed off as

being the work of one author only. Namely, the adventure stories from Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and Nick Carter. There was no Carolyn Keene or Franklin Dixon or Carter – different writers took up writing installments of these books to make extra cash. Here, in India, as we know, it is very common for male fiction writers in regional languages to publish under their wives’ names. And in turn, when a woman wrote, she assumed a male name.

This psychology behind the latter is why people like Rowling let it appear that the author behind the book could be a man, and thus, somehow, more acceptable.

The artist, Pat Steir, says, “the self is like a bug. Every time you smack it, it moves to another place.” How true. Most often, a writer takes on a fake name because it feels closest to who they are as a person. That is, the pseudonym they choose, is expressive of their personality. The poet, Pessoa, who took on multiple pen names once said, “to pretend is to know oneself.”

Based in Palo Alto, V R Ferose is SVP & Head of Globalization Services at SAP SE. He is a Board Member of Specialist People Foundation. He founded the India Inclusion Foundation, which seeks to mainstream India’s inclusion discussion, and conducts the India Inclusion Summit and Inclusion Fellowships. In 2012, the World Economic Forum named him a ‘Young Global Leader’. In March 2017, he was conferred the AUCD award for his pathbreaking ‘Autism at Work’ initiative.

Ferose has co-authored Gifted, a best-seller on people with disabilities.

AUGUST 2018

51

UTSAV

THE SEASON OF INDIC ROMANCE A PEEK INTO HOW THE MONSOON IS DESCRIBED IN THE RICH, VOLUMINOUS, AND PROFOUND BODY OF CLASSICAL SANSKRIT LITERATURE. SUMEDHA VERMA OJHA

52

A U G U ST 2018

T

HE RAINS are upon us. Monsoon, varsha or praavrish is one of the six seasons or ritus of the year which fall into two sets of three. Shishira, vasant and grishm are part of the uttarayana, the time of taking in, while varsha, sharad and hemant form the dakshinayana, which is the time of release or visarga, dominated by the moon, soft, juicy, and invigorating.

It is the shringara rasa that finds its acme during this time. To appreciate this season of love, we need to understand the concepts of ritu, rasa, shringara and the close relationship of the psyche to nature in the Indic way of life.

It is an Indic peculiarity that life and philosophy are closely integrated and intertwined with nature. Emotions are understood, articulated, and expressed through nature and the changing seasons.

Ritu carries the sense of the correct time for certain actions. So, what is varsha ritu good for, what actions provide for the satisfaction and feeding of deep human emotions in this season?

Vasant is predominantly associated with shringara rasa but varsha is not far behind either.

Although this is not an exposition on aesthetics, but just a trip through the season of love and romance, a short and simple digression is in order to improve our understanding of varsha ritu and its many moods of love.

Rasa includes both the artistic process

of production and the aesthetic process of enjoyment. It is the objective embodiment of the first which creates the second. It is an essence of the universe.

All of us have deep instincts of thought, action and experience, which generate impressions unique to us called samskaras.

These samskaras are organised around emotions; the sthayi or permanent emotions are the nava rasas, the nine basic emotions — shringara, hasya, karun, veera, bhayanak, bibhatsya, adbhuta, shanta and raudra.

Certain stimuli are needed to cause these emotional responses which are called vibhavas. These are characters or situations which determine and define the complex feelings which arise within us. These can be poetry, music, art, paintings, flowers, and other aspects of nature.

Shringara is the queen of rasas. The meanings of these two words, rasa, and shringara are many. For now, suffice it to consider them in the context of seasons and emotions, as we are doing here.

Shringara is love, longing and desire, often within the locus of sexual love, separation and unfaithfulness. It can also be vatsalya or love for a child and sometimes bhakti, as explained by different commentators.

The literal meaning of shringara is horn or peak, it is the peak or climax of delight borne out of deep feelings aroused and supported by many vibhavas, the manifestation of the season being one of them. Varsha is the season when thoughts

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

TO APPRECIATE THIS SEASON OF LOVE, WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPTS OF RITU, RASA, SHRINGARA AND THE CLOSE RELATIONSHIP OF PSYCHE TO NATURE IN THE INDIC WAY OF LIFE.

AUGUST 2018

53

U T S A V IN THE INDIC LITERARY TRADITION, VARSHA IS THE SEASON WHEN THOUGHTS TURN TO LOVE AND LONGING AND EMOTIONS RELATING TO THE BELOVED SURGE.

turn to love and longing and emotions relating to the beloved surge.

Given the visceral relation of nature and the Indic psyche, it is natural that the season, which affects the atmosphere, temperature, plants, animals, the beauty of rivers and ponds, woods and fields, influences and stimulates these feelings in the most comprehensive way possible.

Whether we look at literature in Sanskrit or Prakrit or Maithili or Tamil or Telugu, the Meghadutam or the Gatha Saptasai, the Purananuru or Vidyapati’s love poetry, the delicate but strong skeins which wrap nature together with emotions and the central part played by the latter stand out in terms of significance.

In this introduction to shringara and ritu we will concentrate on poetry, specifically on Sanskrit poetry. From the vast repertoire, only the smallest flavour can be provided in this brief article.

The world and our perception of it

54

A U G U ST 2018

changes with the advent of the rains, and different emotions fill the air when specific festivals, dress, and food make us enjoy this particular time of the year. At the centre of it all is love and romance with its twin flavours of sambhoga or the meeting of lovers, and that of separation or vipralambha which is made unbearable by the nature of the season.

There is a veritable cornucopia of riches to choose from when looking for ritu kavya in Sanskrit. I will restrict myself to a few examples. The Ramayana of Valmiki is so often thought of as part of the sacred scriptures of Hinduism that its heart as a pillar of Indic civilisation — an exposition of how society, culture, history, geography, people, flora and fauna weave into each other and become that delicate Indrajaal that we recognise as Indic — is forgotten or ignored.

All the seasons find a place in this work but it is in the Kishkindha Kaand that var-

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

Pradyumna, son of Devi Rukmini and Shri Krishna, and Prabhavati; Kama and Rati in a different incarnation. This is the acme of sambhoga shringara. Pradyumna describes the season to his love, the pleasure of their union reflected in the unfolding of the rains; each protean change in the aspect of the rivers, their sandbanks, trees and plants, the clouds and moon, the saras, chakravaka and kokila birds, the kutaja, kakubha and kandali flowers find a parallel in Prabhavati, who he sees before him and are reflected in her alluring and enticing form.

The Ritusamharam describes the

sha ritu comes into its own in an emotive and stunning exposition of the vipralambha shringara.

Shri Rama, separated from his beloved Sita, laments for her on the banks of the Lake Pampa. The earth, freshly washed by rain and wind; the trees, glistening; the clouds, dark and heavy with water; and the lightning, sharp, heighten the emotion of love and longing. At this time, Rama remembers their time together, as every aspect of nature reminds him of her grace and how she would run into his arms at the white gleam of lightning and the roll of thunder. His agony becomes unbearable and his brother Lakshman has to console and cajole him out of his deep sorrow. It is notable, however, that even in the grip of sorrow, the beauty of the season does not fail to strike Shri Rama; the loss of his beloved is framed by the lushness of the season.

The Harivamsha has the story of

different seasons of the year, but love beckons during the monsoon. Samagato ghanagamah kaamijanpriyah priye — ‘monsoon, dear to those in love’ — is the way the naayak introduces this season to his naayika. It has Kalidasa’s signature connect with nature, his use of sublime upmas (which do not bear up well under translation). There seems to be the lingering influence of Valmiki on this composition.

I must end with the thunderous crescendo of varsha in ritu kavya with Kalidasa’s Meghadutam.

It is impossible for my humble hand to convey the journey of the megha or monsoon cloud as it moves from the lonely yaksha on his mountain peak in Ramtek towards Alkapuri on Mount Kailasa. It is about the sweep of the monsoon across India taking in all the sights and sounds below. The description of people, places, geography, history, men, women, flora, fauna is unparalleled and must be read to be appreciated. Love for the land showers from the words as the skies open up and the clouds discharge their burden during shravan. The love of the yaksha for his virahini wife is a metaphor for the love of the water for the land as it cascades, gushes, showers and flows in gay abandon.

To know the monsoon is to know India, to love the monsoon is to love India, the soft and warm embrace of the lover and the beloved.

THE DESCRIPTION OF PEOPLE, PLACES, GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, MEN, WOMEN, FLORA, FAUNA IN KALIDASA’S MEGHADUTAM IS UNPARALLELED AND MUST BE READ TO BE APPRECIATED.

After two decades in the Indian Revenue Service, Sumedha Verma Ojha now follows her passion, ancient India; writing and speaking across the world on ancient Indian history, society, women, religion and the epics.

AUGUST 2018

55

U T S A V

THE SNAKE HELIX MORE THAN OUR REPTILIAN COUSINS IN THE PHYLOGENETIC TREE, AND A COMMON THEME IN MANY TRADITIONS, SERPENTS AND THEIR EVOLVING VENERATION CONTINUE TO FASCINATE. ARAVINDAN NEELAKANDAN

56

A U G U ST 2018

T

HE MONSOON in India brings out the snakes. They have a primordial relation to humans. Every human culture has feared the snakes and has equally admired them. The venom is only one aspect of the animal. Its ability to renew its skin along with its deadly venom has combined in the snake the symbols of life and death. Evolutionary psychologists point out that the snakes provided a vital selection pressure in the emergence of modern human species. So the deep fascination was old when human civilisation was young. When humanity entered the agricultural age, along with the celestial cycles, the cycles of monsoon also became important. The skin-renewing cycle of the snake now became the symbol of earthbased fertility. The ecological significance of snakes soon became a part of common knowledge. The farming cultures further observed the fact that the monsoons, which are the life support for agricultural civilisations, also brought out the snakes.

In India, which has had an unhindered evolution and diversification of natural religion and earth-based spiritual traditions, the snakes have become an integral part of the culture. All our deities are associated with the serpent. On the fifth day of the monsoon month Srvana, we celebrate Naga Panchami, where we worship serpents. They are now more than our reptilian cousins in the phylogenetic tree. They shape our human age both on the outer and the inner realms.

Say ‘serpent’ and two conflicting imageries come before our minds. In one, the serpent is energy, a mysterious energy, related to earth and to human consciousness, and in the other, the serpent is the

arch enemy of humanity. The first imagery is, of course, related to kundalini and the second, to the Christian theological view of the Hebrew Bible. In between are the various shades of colours present in the hood of the serpent.

There is a need to emphasise the subtle difference between the snake and the serpent. Anthropologist Balaji Mundkur points out that while the snake is ‘a mere zoological entity’, ‘serpent opens up vast metaphorical possibilities’. Similarly, the terms ‘naga’ and ‘sarpa’, though both are related to the snake, and are used for quite a long time interchangeably, have a difference. Bibek Debroy, economist and Indologist, while discussing the difference, says that the sarpas and nagas seem to be differentiated in two ways. One is that nagas can assume human forms and they have separate geographical habitations.

Serpents have always fascinated humanity. They have been as venerated and worshipped by humanity as they have been feared and despised. In most human cultures, these two sets of responses have run concurrently. In natural religions across the world, the serpent veneration has been well integrated into their cultures and societies. When religions of expansionist monotheism encountered these native religions, they mapped the serpent veneration to their own negative mythology of the serpent and characterised it as a worship of the devil.

In the native religions of which the only remaining living one is Hinduism, serpents symbolise both earth energy and sex energy as well as the pathway through which the process of self-realisation takes place. This tradition can be glimpsed today in certain Western traditions like

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

PRATIK CHORGE/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

Kabbalah and in what remains of the native American religion. However, if one is to understand the complete nature of serpent veneration and witness its evolution through the millennia, then one needs to look towards India. It is a living, vibrant tradition here.

The relation between serpent and the quest for knowledge and immortality, which is seen in ancient natural religions, include the vedic forms, the substratum on which tantric traditions evolved in India. Though it has also manifested in the mystic traditions of the West like Jewish Kabbalah and Hermetic traditions, this evolution has been totally unhindered in Indian tradition than anywhere else. Particularly in Christendom, they were subjected to severe persecution and driven to the margins. Today, the well-known tantra which relates the goddess with the serpent has very deep origins.

KNOWLEDGE AND IMMORTALITY: SERPENTS IN VEDIC TRADITION Archeologist M C Joshi had pointed out in his 2012 paper on the origins of tantra that the then recent excavations in the Bannu district of Pakistan had brought out female figurines “showing affiliations with a snake goddess” dated 4000 to 3500 BCE. Then, in the excavations carried out in Harappan sites, particularly in the Gumla Valley of the North-West Frontier region of Pakistan, the number of snake goddess figurines obtained dated to a period not less than 2500 BCE, which made archaeologist A H Dani call it as ‘serpent worshippers culture’.

In vedic literature, agni is considered as the ‘furious serpent’ (RV I.79.1).

And Soma is likened to the serpent “Ahi crawling out of his old skin” (RV 9.86.44).

Satapatha Brahmana declares Veda itself as sarpa-vidhya or serpent knowledge

ANTHROPOLOGIST BALAJI MUNDKUR POINTS OUT THAT WHILE THE SNAKE IS “A MERE ZOOLOGICAL ENTITY”, “SERPENT OPENS UP VAST METAPHORICAL POSSIBILITIES”.

AUGUST 2018

57

U T S A V

IN VALMIKI’S

RAMAYANA, HANUMAN ENCOUNTERS SURASA THE MOTHER OF NAGAS (NAGAMATA ) AS HE FLIES OVER THE OCEAN IN SEARCH OF SITA.

58

A U G U ST 2018

(13.4.3.9).

In a detailed study of the hymns and stories related to Soma ritual, Ananda Coomeraswamy sees Apala, the daughter of the sun, appearing “in the likeness of a serpent and that the ritual itself represents shape-changing” and the result is that “the complexion of the goddess or snake shines as bright as the sun”. Here, the daughter of the sun goes through the solar wheel and sheds her scaly skin for the solar skin (siirya-tvacam – RV 8.91.)

In Valmiki’s Ramayana, Hanuman encounters Surasa the mother of nagas (Nagamata) as he flies over the ocean in search of Sita. We are told that Surasa could take any form she likes and none could cross the ocean zone where she resides without entering her mouth. Hanuman fulfils her obligation intelligently and is blessed by her. She is addressed by Hanuman respectfully as Dakshayani, the daughter of Daksha. She is, thus, also the sister of Sati. While Sati-Shiva marriage

led to a bitter rivalry between Shiva and her father, Surasa was given in marriage to Kashyapa along with 12 of his other daughters. And this included both Kadru and Vinata.

In Mahabharata as well as in the puranas, Kadru gives birth to a thousand serpents, who in turn become the forefathers of all the serpents in the world, while Vinata who was tricked into slavery by Kadru and her sons, gave birth to Garuda, the arch-enemy of serpents, and Aruna, the charioteer of the sun. The serpents demanded that the nectar of immortality belonging to the devas be brought to them and Garuda had to oblige, and yet deceived them through a trick. A few drops of nectar fell on the durba grass (desmostachya bipinnata). When the snakes tried to lick it in vain, the grass made their tongues forked. This whole ithihasic and puranic narrative relates back to the Rig Vedic hymns, where the falcon is the Soma thief.

Mahabharata also describes the nectar

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

pot being placed on a wheel guarded by the serpents. Here, Garuda battles the celestial serpents and takes away the nectar for terrestrial serpents only to deceive the latter later. The wheel and the serpents relate to the vedic Apala, who goes through the solar wheel.

In Bhagavad Gita, Krishna declares that among the sarpas he is Vasuki and among the nagas he is Ananta (BG: 10:2829). Debroy points out that both Vasuki and Ananta are brothers – sons of Kadru.

So, one has to conclude that even though sarpas and nagas are distinct categories, they are related, diversifying from a common origin.

The relation between the serpent and the quest for immortality also appear in the distant epic of Gilgamesh. In this oldest epic recorded in cuneiform writing almost 4,000 years ago, the hero battles animals and gets to the plant of immortality, only to be deprived of it by the serpents.

A Harappan seal relates the hero battling the animals to the Gilgamesh seal (but in the Indic way by including an elephant) while also showing a solar wheel. In the Hebrew Bible, the serpent beguiles Eve into eating the ‘fruit of knowledge’ with the promise of immortality, leading to the exile of humans from the Garden of Eden – a kind of alienation from the rest of the biological realm.

The one common theme that runs through all these traditions is the association of the serpent with a secret, sacred knowledge of immortality. Later, this connection between serpent, knowledge and immortality would be explored in all their richness by the Indian civilisation, even as they got destroyed or marginalised in other cultures.

SERPENTS IN BUDDHISM The nagas are perceived by Buddhism ambiguously. Mahavagga’s Pali Vinaya text says Buddha refused ordination to a naga. In an unusually harsh tone, he tells the nagas that they are incapable of spiritual growth in his dhamma and only if they practise fasting on certain days in their next birth they would be born as humans after which they could be admitted

into the sangha. After the naga leaves, Buddha cautions his disciples against the nagas saying that the serpents that take human form should not be admitted into the sangha. This is despite the fact that it was naga king Muchalinda, who provided protection to Buddha when he was meditating.

Slowly, Buddhism came to accept the nagas only after they were subjugated and accepted the dhamma. For example, Apalala, the serpent king being threatened by Indra and then being accepted by Buddha, is depicted in the stone reliefs of Nagarjunakonda. Yet, the Buddhist perception of nagas as inferior beings persisted well into later centuries. In a quasi-historical legend about the Ramagrama Stupa, it is said that the serpent guardian of the lake near the stupa, which contained the sacred relic of Buddha, appeared before emperor Ashoka when he tried to take and relocate the relic, and stopped him. The serpent told Ashoka that because of his evil karma he had received the inferior body of the naga, and now by offering service to Buddha, he has cleansed himself of the evil karma. Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang informs us that at the spot where the naga emerged from the lake, an inscription describing the above incident was placed.

In later Buddhism, the Garuda-serpent animosity is portrayed dramatically and they are brought into harmony by Buddhist principles. This is shown in the famous Sanskrit drama Nagananda of emperor Harsha (seventh century CE), where a Vidyadara prince with Buddhist virtues gives his own life in the place of a serpent to Garuda, who had made a contract with the serpent king that every day a naga would be sacrificed for Garuda.

The prince is none other than Bodhisattva Jimutavahana.

Blending vedic and Buddhist religion, emperor Harsha gives a puranic dimension by invoking Goddess Gowri in the last scene blessing all the dramatis personae and Garuda bringing back the nectar and reviving all the dead nagas. In the play, Harsha shows the religious affinity

IN LATER BUDDHISM, THE GARUDA-SERPENT ANIMOSITY IS PORTRAYED DRAMATICALLY AND THEY ARE BROUGHT INTO HARMONY

BY BUDDHIST PRINCIPLES.

AUGUST 2018

59

U T S A V MANY INDOLOGISTS HAVE SUGGESTED THAT THE HARAPPAN SEAL SHOWING TWO SERPENT FIGURES, ONE MALE AND ANOTHER FEMALE, WORSHIPPING A CENTRAL FIGURE SEATED IN YOGIC POSTURE MIGHT BE PARSHVA THE TWENTY-THIRD TIRTHANKARA OF JAINISM.

60

A U G U ST 2018

of nagas not as Buddhists but as Saivaites.

This may point to a historical fact that the nagas were Shiva worshippers which could have been also the reason for the initial castigation of nagas by Buddha.

The Chinese Buddhism has the very popular legend of the ‘white snake’ where the Buddhist monk Fahai banishes the white snake princess, who falls in love with the human Xu Xian. In the popular account of the tale, however, the sympathy is with the snake maiden and the Buddhist monk is an imposter. In Jataka literature, Bodhisattva has three serpent births. Here, the nagas are often shown as helpless beings threatened by humans as well as Garuda. In later tantric Buddhism, we see the emergence of Janguli, the serpent goddess. As old as the Buddha and adorned with a serpent head crown, serpent earrings (sarpakundalas) and serpent waist ornament (sarpa-mekhala) she also became the folk goddess worshipped against snakebite. If a follower of Buddha hears or recites her mantra he or she is protected from snake bites for seven years. The name Janguli means goddess of the forest and she is green in colour.

This relates her to vedic tradition of Aranyani who is the goddess of the forest and “mother of the world of green” (RV. 10.146.6).

SERPENT AND JAINISM The relation between the serpent veneration and Jainism is often considered a very old one. Many Indologists have suggested that the Harappan seal showing two serpent figures, one male and another female, worshipping a central figure seated in yogic posture might be Parshva the twenty-third Tirthankara of Jainism. In Jain tradition, the snake is the symbol of Parshva, who is also called Panibhushan (the one adorned by snakes). When the mother of Tirthankara was pregnant, she saw a snake by her side, and hence the name Parshva. When in deep meditation, Parshva was attacked by Meghamalin, an asura, who created a thunderstorm.

When heavy lightning and thunderstorm attacked the meditating Tirthankara, serpent Dharanendra provided protection

by spreading his seven hoods while the serpent queen Padmavati also shielded Parshva. However, the period of Parshvanatha is estimated to be eighth century BCE. The seal, which shows a remarkable similarity to the later Jain iconography of Parshva, worshipped by the serpents precedes Parshva by almost 1,200 years.

The cobra protecting the hero soon became an archetype in India’s collective psyche. Later, in Sikhism, a cobra would emerge from under the ground and would protect Guru Nanak from the sun by spreading its hood while he was sleeping. This would bear witness to his divine nature. Similarly, in the chronicles of Rajasthan, the great warrior Rana Sangha would be protected by cobra while he was sleeping.

SERPENT AND COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY The colonial anthropology saw the nagas or the serpent people mentioned in Hindu texts as the autochthonous people of India conquered by the Aryans. Even as he rejected the Aryan invasion theory, Dr B R Ambedkar popularised the idea that the nagas were the original people of India and associated them with Buddhism.

Today, this has become a part of the political discourse in the country. This colonial idea has been refuted as early as 1926 by Indologist Jean Philippe Vogel. In his authoritative work Indian Serpentlore: Or, The Nagas in Hindu Legend and Art, he pointed out that “the mythic snake-kings bear names which almost invariably are not Dravidian but purely Aryan”. Further, there are instances given in Buddhist lore, where Buddha confronted, subdued and converted nagas. While Indra battled Vrtra the dragon-serpent, he was also the guardian of nagas, according to both Mahabharata and Buddhist texts.

Rama himself comes from the lineage of the naga princess Narmada, who married his ancestor Purukutsa. Kusa, the son of Rama, also married Kumudvati. Ramayana informs us that there was also enmity between Ravana and nagas.

Ravana invaded the naga capital Bhogavati and abducted the wife of naga king

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

ISHITA CHADHA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Takshaka. He also vanquished the great naga, Vasuki. If one insists on reading the Ramayana as an ethnic narrative considering nagas as the aborigines, then it is Rama, who emerges as the protector of the aborigines and Ravana becomes the aggressor. In Mahabharata, Indra did not hesitate to battle his own god-son Arjuna and Krishna for protecting the naga lineage. Later, when the descendant of Pandavas, king Janamejeya started a sacrifice to eliminate the serpents, Indra was offering shelter to the naga king. The depiction of nagas as the aborigines fighting against the so-called Aryans simply fails to be substantiated at every point. It is just a suave rendering of the more explicitly pseudoscientific claim that nagas are shape-shifting anunakki aliens.

SERPENT: DEMOCRATISATION OF DIVINE KNOWLEDGE IN HINDUISM The historical continuity, geographical spread and sustained evolution of the serpent veneration tradition in India with all its complexities and inter-relations are

unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

Edward Dimock and A K Ramanujan connect the serpent and fertility goddess through “a Tamilian belief that snakes seek out pots in the summertime because they are cool” and go on to “speculate about the possible relationships between these facts and the very ancient beliefs in the pot of poison and the pot of soma, the panacea”.

The worship of snakes in popular Hinduism is mainly associated with the goddess though by tradition every deity is related to the snake. A popular devotional hymn to the goddess in Tamil composed in 1977 makes this association clear: You are the sister of the one who sleeps on the serpent You are the consort of one who wears serpent Your very form is the serpent.

Contrary to the popular academic perception, Hinduism specialises in democratic dissemination of highly esoteric wisdom. The serpent symbolism, which

IN MAHABHARATA, INDRA DID NOT HESITATE TO BATTLE HIS OWN GOD-SON ARJUNA AND KRISHNA FOR PROTECTING THE NAGA LINEAGE.

AUGUST 2018

61

U T S A V

THE EARLIEST GANESHA TERRACOTTA FIGURINE OBTAINED FROM VEERAPURA OF ANDHRA PRADESH SHOWS HIM AS WEARING A SNAKE FOR HIS SACRED THREAD.

62

A U G U ST 2018

represents such esoteric concepts like kundalini, nada-mula prakrithi (primordial vibration of creation and primordial nature) etc, are made available to all sections and strata of the society. The serpent coiling around the drum, which symbolises cosmic creation, can be seen in every village temple built for goddesses. The intertwined serpent images permeate the entire living space of India. In every town and village road, one can encounter these images.

The earliest Ganesha terracotta figurine obtained from Veerapura of Andhra Pradesh shows him as wearing a snake for his sacred thread. In Vinayagar Agaval (tenth century CE) attributed to Tamil poetess Avaiyaar, Ganesha is associated with the awakening of kundalini in the form of a snake. Snake is also associated with Subrahmanya or Muruga. Sri Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi of Kanchi points out that while in Tamil Nadu, Muruga is worshiped as his spear itself, in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, he is

worshiped in the form of a serpent. This is because the spear represents knowledge as well as energy (shakti) which is kundalini, and hence both non-human iconography of Muruga involves spear or serpent. Muthuswami Dikishitar, a nineteenth century poet-composer and one of the musical trinities, in his hymn calls Muruga or Skanda as the one, who also called both Vasuki and Taskaha as the two cosmic serpents. Adi Sankara composed his famous hymn to Subramanya in the snake metre or bujanga, the Kanchi Acharya points out. In the puranic imagery, the cosmic serpent Vasuki is used to churn the celestial ocean. In the burning of Tripuras by Shiva, Vasuki was used as the bow string while the Meru Mountain or Axis Mundi became the bow.

In Sri Lalita Sahasranama, the serpent energy kundalini is likened to the lotus stalk. The lotus stalk is shown in Hindu iconography as the umbilical cord emanating from the navel of Vishnu and Shiva. In the case of the former – Brahma

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

unfolding the physical universe is in the lotus. In the latter, the goddess herself is in the lotus as the infinite manifestation of consciousness. These imageries underline the umbilical cord-lotus stalk connection. Umbilical cord is also associated with the serpent goddess. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, studying the evolution of the goddess image, consider the serpentine form of the umbilical cord connecting the mother and child, a “universal and evocative image of relationship” as an important catalysis in the evolution of imagery of the serpent goddess.

In fact, sixteenth century work Satchakra Nirupana, speaks of kundalini as “fine as the fibre of the lotus-stalk” with “shining snake-like form”.

The serpent thus becomes in India through both puranic literature and allpervading iconography, the democratiser of what is in other parts of the world esoteric mystic knowledge.

SERPENT AND KABBALAH While in Christian rendering of Hebrew Bible, the serpent becomes the quintessential evil, the image of the serpent in the dominant mystical stream of Judaism, Kabbalah is much more complicated and as in all human cultures, ambiguous towards the serpent. The seven chakras of kundalini path and the 10 Sefirot (10 emanations of divine energy) in the ‘tree of life’ have remarkable similarities. Another Jewish mystical school Merkava (circa first century CE) had the practitioner passing through six chambers (hekhalot) to at last the ‘Throne of Glory’ in the seventh. The way of climbing above the tree of life in Kabbalah is also known as the ‘serpent path’.

SERPENT AND MODERN SCIENCE Modern science, particularly evolutionary biology, in trying to explain why the serpent forms such a fascinating integral part of human inner realm, could have stumbled upon one of the important factors that had driven our evolution.

Evolutionary biologist E O Wilson points out that we are not repelled but are also fascinated by them so much so that they “appear most often in dreams, and, des-

ignated as mystical serpents, in religious symbolism”. Wilson sees in this a “chain of biophilic evolution”. The concept of biophilia is the synthesis of Wilson. Writing in 1994, he says that though the empirical evidence for it is rather ‘thin’, he considers “an innate biophilia” as the “foundation... for an enduring conservation ethic”.

In 2011, anthropologist and animal cognition scientist Lynne Isbell in her work broadens the scope of the synthesis of Wilson, though she seems to be unaware of the relation her work has for the concept of Wilson. Pointing out to the fact that “those primates that have never coexisted with venomous snakes” never developed “the excellent vision and large brains found in those primates that have always coexisted with venomous snakes”, she sees the appearance of snakes as “a particularly powerful selective pressure that favored expansion of the visual sense” which only those primates that had “a diet of fruits or nectar from flowers in that arboreal milieu could afford” as it happened at the cost of our sense of smell.

After all, the association of serpent and soma (nectar = a diet of fruits or nectar from flowers) may be grounded in some very distant evolutionary reality. It may also explain at least in a speculative way the reason for the ambiguous imagery of the serpent – both as a danger and as a symbol of life, immortality and knowledge. While Isbell concentrates only on the phobia, we evolved for snakes and how snakes could have acted as selection forces in effecting human evolution itself, Wilson has looked at both fear and fascination. If and when Isbell’s thesis gets further validation, biophilia we have for the snakes will get further validation from our own evolutionary past.

Serpent symbolism itself has played an important role in the development of modern science. In about 1890, the alchemical symbol Ouroboros – the serpent swallowing its own tail – appeared in a lucid dream before the chemist August Kekule leading him to solve the problem of the molecular structure of benzene. If this was a sym-

IN ABOUT 1890, THE ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL OUROBOROS – THE SERPENT SWALLOWING ITS OWN TAIL – APPEARED IN A LUCID DREAM BEFORE THE CHEMIST AUGUST KEKULE LEADING HIM TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF THE MOLECULAR STRUCTURE OF BENZENE.

AUGUST 2018

63

U T S A V IN HIS FIELD GUIDE FOR THE COMMON INDIAN SNAKES, SNAKE-MAN OF INDIA, PADMA SRI ROMULUS WHITAKER, HAS DOCUMENTED THESE PREVALENT MISCONCEPTIONS AND SUPERSTITIONS ABOUT SNAKES.

Aravindan Neelakandan is Contributing Editor at Swarajya.

64

A U G U ST 2018

bol emerging from the unconscious, the same symbol would be used consciously by neuro-scientists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana for their concept of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is a concept that can play a key role in explaining the process of evolution as well as emergence of the self. It resonates with the Indian concept of swayambu. In fact, in Indian serpent veneration, the worship of the anthill is veneration of the autopoiesis-swayambu phenomenon.

Anthropologist Jerome Narby in his controversial bestseller The Cosmic Serpent (1999) studies the ayahuasca visions, the shamanic oral traditions and compares notes with the discoveries of modern molecular biology. Shamanic voyages through ayahuasca, according to Narby, somehow touch a reality that resonates with the serpentine form of DNA molecules themselves. It is not that shamans know about the DNA but that the serpent visions ayahuasca and shamanic rituals together create an access to a form that is an archetype of the least common molecular basis of all life on this planet. Though speculative, this opens up extraordinary avenues to examine the potentials of our own psyche.

SERPENT AND ECOLOGY In India, the unhindered evolution of serpent veneration has led to a unique evolution of human-serpent relations. Of course, quite a lot of misconceptions and superstitions have also developed regarding the snakes. In his field guide for the common Indian snakes, snake-man of India, Padma Shri Romulus Whitaker has documented these prevalent misconceptions and superstitions about snakes. This is because of the confusion of the psychic archetype of the serpent with the actual zoological snakes. At the same time, serpent veneration can also be turned into a good educational and conservation tool.

A very good example is provided by Whitaker in the same field guide.

Here, he explains how the farmers of Bittis Shirala in Maharashtra capture and worship “several hundred cobras, along with rat snakes and banded racers”.

These snakes are kept in earthen pots and carefully handled during the two-day festival and then released unharmed. Whitaker states that “it is education to see the confidence and snake-handling skill of these ordinary farmers” because they believe that they were given protection from snakebite by a guru. This is another instance of biophilia Wilson described.

Yet another instance of biophilia is the phenomenon of sarpakavu in Kerala. This is the tradition of dedicating one seventh of the land as sarpakavu or serpent forest.

These forests are venerated as abodes of the serpent deities and considered as under their protection. Mostly, these forests became repository of medicinal plants.

At community level, Irulas, a Scheduled Tribe community in Tamil Nadu, show how serpent veneration and bio-ecological knowledge of snakes can be productively combined. Before colonisation and subsequent lop-sided development made them vulnerable and marginalised, they were the custodians of temple forest consisting mainly of madhuca longifolia or Indian butter tree, particularly attached to Shiva temples. Irulas are not only adept at capturing snakes but also have a very good knowledge of herbs related to capturing snakes and healing snakebites. They have empathy for both snakes and humans. However, the knowledge they have, and the peculiar ecosystem of snake-Irulas, is fast disappearing without getting integrated into the larger knowledge system.

Thus biophilia catalysed by the serpent imagery, also leads to what Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Næss (19122009) called ‘ecosophy’, which in turn was grounded in the non-dualist traditions of Spinoza and Vedanta.

Such is the multi-dimensioned serpent veneration that has evolved in India; a unique model for how to integrate our fears and fascination with an animal that is dangerous and useful and whose imagery transcends both the depths of the unconscious and reaches into the images of the primordial skies. Not to mention our own DNA.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

UTSAV

HOW DEEP IS YOUR FRIED? IS IT REALLY AN INDIAN KITCHEN UNLESS IT HAS WITNESSED BATTER-WRAPPED VEGETABLES BEING DUNKED DEEP INTO THE HEART OF A CAULDRON CONTAINING HEATED OIL? RATNA RAJAIAH

66

A U G U ST 2018

Y

OU KNOW, I am freshly out of watching Sacred Games, which means I tend to swear a lot. Stuff that would make even Tara Bai’s teeth curl.

So, when someone said French fries to me and when someone else muttered Kentucky Fried Chicken, my reactions were in a manner that would make only Ganesh Gaitonde or Bunty not blush.

What I mean to say is pshaw to Frenchwench and Kentucky-fentucky. If there’s anyone who knows their fries, it’s us Indians. Because, it’s not the French or the Americans, but we Indians who understand that frying — and not just any old namby-pamby shallow frying, but deepoil frying when things scuba dive down, down, and deeper down into cauldrons of boiling golden oil, then gently bob up, showing off their now crisply, freshly gold-brown-glistening selves — is as primeval as itching.

And that’s because deep frying is a tribute to rain.

And there is no race on earth more in love with rain than we Indians.

For us, it’s a god, a goddess, maybe even a gaggle of deities (it’s not for nothing that the lord of the devas also happens to be the god of thunder and rain). It’s the stuff that wins elections and decides whether the Sensex and your Moody’s credit rating will go up or down. It’s a headiness that is better than anything you quaff in a pub. It inspires music composers, especially filmi ones, to compose thousands of

rhim-jhim ke tarane. Ragas are dedicated to it (does anyone know which came first – Raag Malhar or rain?). And will someone please research to see if the maximum number of babies conceived are during the monsoons? And when the babies thus born are girls, it’s what we name them after.

Varsha. Varshini. Barkha. Amaya.

Sraboni.

And in the kitchen, rain is what inspires us to fry. Deep fry.

Think about it. After months of sweltering and sweating and swearing at a searing, unforgiving, unblinking sun, when the clouds finally spread to cover the sun’s blazing gaze and the first raindrops fall ‘plippity-plop’ and soak the poor, gasping, dried, and old earth to make it smell like moist, rich fruit cake, that is when millions of Indians suddenly hear... no, not Raag Megh Malhar, but the unmistakable sound of something sizzling. Actually, it’s not a sizzle. Sizzlers sizzle, the silly things. This is more of a ‘blub-blib-blib-blisssh-blub-blib-blisssshblisssh-blissssh’.

The sound of deep frying.

Pakoras. Maybe bhajiyas. Or, perhaps, bondas.

Naturally, as a people who speak 122 languages, 234 mother tongues and godalone-knows-how-many dialects, we don’t stop at this noble but tiny trio (though I’ll have you know that each of the three is a universe in itself with hundreds of stars, like the Bengali pakoras made out of the

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

leaves of the parijata tree and the Kannadiga green chilli pakoras, so beloved that we grow a special chilli for it called bajji mennasinakai. Like breadfruit and sweet potato bhajiyas and urad dal bondas so crisp, so round, so large and so full of promise to explode in your bowl of hot sambar into a crispy-squishy-laced-withcoconut-pieces-and-peppercorns mess that in my part of the woods, they are often called ‘super-bomb bondas’).

What I mean to say is that almost anything is grist to the Indian kadai (cauldron). So, we make chips out of jackfruit and elephant yam (French fries? Really?

Yawn), chiwda out of cornflakes (take that, Kellogg’s), sev out of potato, pooris out of ripe bananas and vadas out of raw ones. And papads (I won’t even begin to tell you what sandige is and how many va-

rieties, except that it often has pumpkin in it) out of everything, including kanji (rice gruel). Our fasting foods are sabudana vadas. In fact, the world’s first doughnut was not sweet but savoury – a medu vada (But all vadas don’t have a hole in the middle, just as all south Indians are not Madrasis). We deep fry everything from onions to okra, and since it’s mandatory to put in a mention for the carnivores amongst us, also anything that once moved (and fried Bombay duck, dear Kentucky fried firangis, is not a bird but a fish and we fry chicken too, but first eat Amritsari macchi and then let’s talk).

We do all kinds of things to batter and dough – stuff them, coat things with them, dip things into them, dribble them through slotted spoons, press them through extruders and wheedle-knead

RAIN IS THE STUFF THAT WINS ELECTIONS AND DECIDES WHETHER THE SENSEX AND YOUR MOODY’S CREDIT RATING WILL GO UP OR DOWN. AND IN THE KITCHEN, IT INSPIRES US TO FRY. DEEP FRY.

AUGUST 2018

67

U T S A V

WE MAKE CHIPS OUT OF JACKFRUIT AND ELEPHANT YAM, CHIWDA OUT OF CORNFLAKES, SEV OUT OF POTATO, POORIS OUT OF RIPE BANANAS AND VADAS OUT OF RAW ONES.

68

A U G U ST 2018

them into shapes that are more numerous than the dialects we speak, all to be finally deep fried in a bharjanapatra... oops, sorry, I mean in a kadai.

We deep fry things so deeply that they stay as fried as the day they were fried till you cross the Atlantic – by boat – and back. We puff things up so that they almost fly away – with you to the moon. We crisp up things so that only the outside is crunchy, but the inside remains as soft as god-bless-our-deep-fried Indian hearts.

We fry things to such a flakiness that a mere lover’s sigh will make them crumble or waft away like dandelion seeds.

Ice melts in the mouths of the rest of the world. In Indians’ mouths, it is our mums’ homemade chakli. Or chiroti. Or murukku. Or mathri. Or boondi. Or balushahi.

Or shankarpoli. Or samosa. Or jalebi.

You get my drift.

And dear idiot-air-fryer makers (and celebs who endorse it) – don’t you know that we can teach you a few things about how to deep fry where the oil is like Santa

Claus – we know it visited us but only because we can see the hint-est trace of it.

All this because we have been frying things for a very, very long time. To put a figure to it, for 5,000 years at least (copper frying pans were found in Harappa and we were deep frying things in pure ghee when the Rig Veda was being written). Or to put it another way, we first figured out how to extract oil from sesame seeds so long ago that the Tamil word for sesame, ‘enn’ or ‘ell’ (‘yellu’ in Kannada), became the generic word for oil – ‘ennai’ – in both Tamil and Kannada (similarly, the Hindi and Sanskrit word for oil –‘tel’ or ‘taila’ – comes from the Sanskrit ‘tila’ for sesame).

And we didn’t stop at sesame. Sushrutha, the sage of Ayurveda, listed 60 oilseeds, and Kautilya four more. And, meanwhile, someone, somewhere, invented the tadka (vagaar, chaunk, phodni, thaalithal, thalimpu, oggarne); that spitting, sputtering, hissing-hot melange of spices and herbs deep frying in hot oil (or better still, ghee) that will transform the most hideous hag

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

NILA NEWSOM / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

INDIANS CAN TEACH YOU A FEW THINGS ABOUT HOW TO DEEP FRY WHERE THE OIL IS LIKE SANTA CLAUS – WE KNOW IT VISITED US BUT ONLY BECAUSE WE CAN SEE THE HINT-EST TRACE OF IT

of a dal into a Menaka fit for any Vishwamitra.

In fact, as the centuries flew past, like so many fried poha flakes, frying, and therefore oil, became such an indispensable and important part of Indian cooking, that by the sixth century BCE, not only did we have oil pressing machines (Panini mentions a ‘talia peshana yantra’), but also an entire class of people who were professional oil pressers.

There are many versions of the story of how they came to be, mostly related to Lord Shiva. My favourite is that since Shiva wanted an oil massage, he created a man from his sweat and ordered him to be an oil presser.

In Karnataka, these oil pressers were called ganigars, the word derived from the Kannada word for oil press or ‘gana’.

And if you go to a place called Ganigarpete (translates to the market of oil pressers) in old Bengaluru, you will still see a giant stone ‘gana’ standing in front of the Cheluvarayaswamy temple, reverently

covered in turmeric. In Andhra Pradesh, the community is called Gandla, in Tamil Nadu, Vaniya Chettiars and elsewhere in India, Teli (naturally). But I was saving for the last what it is called in Gujarat for a very special reason. Because I wanted to say “phooey” to the likes of Mani Shankar Aiyar, who turned up their brown sahib noses at Narendra Modi’s past as a chaiwala. Which he was as a boy, as was his father. But his family belongs to the Modh-Ghanchi community who are – yes, you guessed it right – the community of oil pressers in Gujarat!

What does that prove? Well just that, yes, I’m a fan girl, as deeply as we Indians are ‘fan people’ of rain and things deep fried.

But the final word on how deep-fried our love is for things deep-fried is in a Sanskrit word.

Sneha.

Meaning love.

But also meaning oil.

Enough said.

(With thanks to K T Achaya and his magnificent treatise Indian Food: A Historical Companion, my food bible without which I wouldn’t have written so much about food as I have) Ratna Rajaiah is an author and a columnist. She lives and cooks in Mysore.

AUGUST 2018

69

BOOK EXTRACT

BUSTING THE HINDU TERROR MYTH R V S MANI

HINDU TERROR: INSIDER ACCOUNT OF MINISTRY OF HOME AFFAIRS 2006-2010 R V S MANI VITASTA PUBLISHING PVT. LTD. 220 PAGES RS 309

A recent book by a former bureaucrat in the Ministry of Home Affairs reveals how the UPA government tried to manufacture a narrative of Hindu terror.

ON 20 JULY 2010, then prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh hosted a lunch in which US ambassador Timothy Roemer asked Rahul Gandhi about ‘Lashkar-e-Taiba’s activities in the region and its immediate threat to India’. WikiLeaks cables reveal that Gandhi responded by saying that ‘the bigger threat may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups’.

It was not just a casual comment by a leader then considered the prime minister in-waiting. By 2010, a lot of work — overseen by senior members of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) administration — had gone into constructing the ‘saffron/ Hindu’ terror myth. R V S Mani, former under-secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs, in his new book Hindu Terror (2018) takes the reader on a detailed tour of the processes and mechanisms through which the strongmen in the UPA government created this formidable narrative.

Excerpt: HINDU TERROR & NIA If anyone recapitulates the investigation history of NIA through 2009-2010, it was all about introducing a new nonexistent ‘Hindu Terrorism’ concept. In every case assigned to NIA — from the Samjhauta Express Blasts, Malegaon to Ajmer Sharif — they overlooked the first set of evidences and replaced it with evidences supporting the Hindu Terror narrative.

The first major virgin case on which NIA claimed success is the case of some law & order disturbance between the par-

70

A U G U ST 2018

ticipants in a rally on Diwali day in 2009, in which the Hindu Jagran Manch and Sanathan Sansthan [sic] were the participants. On 16.10.09, it was Diwali eve and a Narakasur effigy competition was held near the Shantadurga temple at SancoaleVerna in Goa. The case report said, the accused persons and ‘other persons known and unknown’ conspired together to plant IEDs at the places of effigy competitions as they were against such competition and as part of their conspiracy, the above said group planted IEDs in a vehicle which was parked on the road near the Shantadurga temple on the night of 16.10.2009. Subsequently the vehicle was located and the bomb was diffused by the Verna police station.

NIA termed it ‘a case of Hindu Terrorism’.

I have heard a lot of debates on national media channels and people speaking for and against the existence of any Hindu Terror. But many people do not know of the dots and those who know, fail to join the dots.

It was amply clear that under the garb of new initiatives, the new Home Minister had pulled wool over the nation’s eyes.

They were not his initiatives. For example a separate NIA-like mechanism had already been ordered by the apex court and the Administrative Reforms Commission in its VIIIth report titled ‘Combating Terrorism’ before Chidambaram’s tenure as Home Minister began. The federal agency — which he said was long due and endeared himself to the Supreme Court

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

SHEKHAR YADAV/INDIA TODAY GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

— the NIA was actually used by the new Home Minister as an instrument to propagate a narrative of Hindu Terror, Saffron Terror etc. The lack of transparency in appointment of its first and second Directors General was very evident.

DAVID COLEMAN HEADLEY At a distance of nearly a decade, the ‘evidence’ called ‘David Coleman Headley’ seems mythical. In popular memory, only the two differently coloured eyes remain.

And we in India’s security establishments know that there are not only two versions of the Headley story but several and Internal Security certainly does not know which is closest to the truth.

The NIA played a vital part in interro-

gation of the man known to international media and security establishments as David Coleman Headley (born as Daood Sayed Gilani in Washington).

A man called Tahawwur Hussain Rana was a Pakistani Canadian resident of Chicago, USA who was an immigration service businessman and a former military physician. In 2011, he was convicted of providing support to the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and of allegedly plotting an attack on the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. At the trial of Rana, an alleged co-conspirator, David Headley gave detailed information about the participation of Pakistan’s Directorate of InterServices Intelligence (ISI) in carrying out the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.

MANI’S BOOK NAMES AND SHAMES PEOPLE. IT MUST BE TRANSLATED INTO OTHER INDIAN LANGUAGES, AND ITS CONTENTS MUST BE DEBATED, INVESTIGATED, AND ACTED UPON.

AUGUST 2018

71

BOOK EXTRACT BHASKAR PAUL/INDIA TODAY GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

MANI REVEALS THAT THERE IS A STRONG INDICATION THAT THERE WAS AN ATTEMPT TO PORTRAY THE 26/11 MUMBAI ATTACKS AS THE WORK OF THE SO-CALLED HINDU TERROR GROUPS.

72

A U G U ST 2018

Headley was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport while he was attempting to travel to Pakistan on 9 October 2009.

US authorities gave Indian investigators, ie, the then NIA, direct access to Headley. NIA was the investigating agency for terror cases in India. According to a report in the Economic Times, Meera Shankar, the then Indian ambassador to the US called on Union Home Minister P Chidambaram to discuss the agenda for his meeting (in September 2009) with US Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano. She (Shankar) said: The Rana trial is going on and Headley is the key witness. The revelations coming out from the trial are shedding new light on the full details of the (26/11) conspiracy.

Since his guilty plea, Headley has cooperated with US and Indian authorities and

given information about his associates.

On 24 January 2013, a US federal court in Chicago sentenced Headley to 35 years in prison for his role in the Mumbai attacks.

The interrogation report of David Headley was submitted as a part of the ‘tour’ report of the investigating team, that is the NIA, then led by Inspector General Behara. The NIA submitted the ‘tour’ report to the Home Minister, P Chidambaram. The Home Minister’s office is reported to have excised portions of the Headley testimony to NIA. From custody in the USA, Headley later deposed in ‘in camera’ proceeding in the Abu Jundal case in India.

During the online part of the trial in the Jundal case, Headley apparently said that Muzzamil Bhat (a key Kashmiri military asset of the LeT, according to the FBI) had told him that Muzzamil had played an

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

important role in recruiting Ishrat Jahan and Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Mohammad Sheikh as fidayeen. According to Headley, Muzzamil also claimed that he had been instrumental in their being assigned the task of eliminating the then Chief Minister of Gujarat (Narendra Modi) and another prominent leader of Gujarat (Amit Shah). This part of the Headley testimony was soon available in the public domain.

A vital letter, which was found filed in one of the several litigations in the Jundal case, is the letter of Daniel Clegg, the then Legal Attache in the US Embassy in Delhi.

He had expressly assured India of total cooperation of the US government in access to David Headley for questioning.

However, the then Indian government, including I recall, the then Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde (2012-2014), pedalled a public lie that the US government had been resisting any further access to David Headley. Often, NIA documentation was offered to the media as proof. Several years later, the then NIA, under the UPA regime, was accused of excising vital portions of the Headley testimony for tendering before the courts. However, the security establishment knew that the NIA had submitted a full ‘tour report’ containing the full Headley testimony to Home Minister Chidambaram.

A very pertinent point is to what extent was Headley’s interrogation excised? By admission, the references to Ishrat Jahan as ‘a botched mission’ has been revealed in the Abu Jundal trial.

May be, the portion defining film-maker Rahul Bhatt’s role in assisting David Headley in carrying out the recce of the Taj and Trident Hotels in [sic] 26 November 2008 too was excised for the courts.

The nation wants to know how is it that a person who accompanies Headley on a recce — takes detailed rounds of Mumbai city — claims innocence, saying that he was not aware of what Headley was up to?

Also why should Rahul’s father pedal influence and write to the Union Home Minister? Since the son was innocent and had no idea of what Headley, his companion, was up to, they could have consulted a

lawyer, got a statement recorded with any judicial authority under relevant sections of the Criminal Procedure Code and got him exonerated in the public eye.

One more important aspect of Headley’s statement was the ‘Kasab tradeoff ’.

In the statement before the trial court in the Abu Jundal case, Headley had reportedly hinted that there were attempts to take hostage some persons — possibly a Director-level person/s from India’s security establishments — to be traded off with Ajmal Kasab by the ISI. This testimony was also a part of Headley’s NIA interrogation which got edited out from official records.

Attempts to take hostage some Israelis and trade them for Ajmal Kasab’s release was revealed in Headley’s statement before the court in the Jundal case in March 2016. However, way back in 2009, immediately after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, there were whispers amongst the security and intelligence community that there would be attempts to take Indian government officials hostage and trade them off for Ajmal Kasab’s release. This was a purely internal security assessment about Indian officials. People like P K Mishra, then Director (IS), were on high alert, moving about within Delhi police cover. The NIA was very much aware of this. Was there a line of questioning by the NIA team which interrogated Headley in Chicago in 2009? What was the specific line of questioning? Was there any input from the interrogation with Headley on a possible tradeoff ? Was it also a part of the answers which were excised?

For purely public consumption, most of the ‘dossier diplomacy’ started only after 7th January 2009. Before that, possibly, I was one of the alternative ‘target officials’ whose ‘botched up’ attempt to take hostage had already happened. Was some collaboration in existence between some top Indian political entity with Pakistani establishments? Was it a case of overplaying and recalibration? We do not know.

“INDIAN GOVERNMENT, INCLUDING I RECALL, THE THEN HOME MINISTER SUSHIL KUMAR SHINDE (2012-2014), PEDALLED A PUBLIC LIE THAT THE US GOVERNMENT HAD BEEN RESISTING ANY FURTHER ACCESS TO DAVID HEADLEY.”

R V S Mani is former under-secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs.

AUGUST 2018

73

WHEN VICTIMHOOD IS THE NEW HONOUR JYOTIRMAYA TRIPATHY

THE RISE OF VICTIMHOOD CULTURE: MICROAGGRESSIONS, SAFE SPACES, AND THE NEW CULTURE WARS BRADLEY CAMPBELL AND JASON MANNING PALGRAVE MACMILLAN 278 PAGES RS 2,114

74

A U G U ST 2018

A new book on the rise of a victimhood culture in America is a brave, scarce, and valuable project in academic honesty.

CALLING THIS book courageous is an understatement, which no doubt the book is, but more than that, it as an experiment outside prevailing discourses. Identifying the symptoms of the illness of contemporary times and naming them is no mean task and the authors announce the beginning of a possible wave of writing that is not debilitated by political correctness and academic dishonesty. The freshness of the narrative is infectious, factual details and illustrations unignorable, and the theoretical foundation substantive, which together contribute to a powerful statement such as the present book that is so very real, yet rare. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning will be remembered as prophets of this new wave for long.

MICROAGGRESSIONS AND WHAT THEY MEAN The book introduces us to the rise of a culture in the US, where aggression and oppression are imagined as pervasive.

But unlike the periods gone by, the present time is characterised by a climate, where aggression by the privileged is subtle and almost invisible, which devalues the culturally different. In most cases though, such acts are unintended or are casual remarks that may communicate some sort of slight or insult. The proponents of a victimhood culture believe that such behaviour betrays the power of one group over another, and that is precisely the essence of microaggression – its invisibility to the perpetrator. Examples can be as innocuous an observation as ‘you are so articulate’ (addressed to a non-English-

speaking person) or ‘where are you from?’ (to a coloured person), staring at gays and lesbians expressing affection in public or even complimenting a woman’s shoe.

All these confine the receivers/targets to their place of origin, limit them to their race/ethnicity/gender and do not allow them to transcend those barriers.

Yet ironically, on other occasions these sites (such as race) are projected as the foundation of one’s being and offer a reason for affirmative action. Moreover, yesteryears’ normal is today’s deviation, that is to say, being White or heterosexual or English-speaking is seen as the problem today. This leads to a scenario, where everything uttered has the potential to offend somebody. In conservative circles, such victims and their advocates are seen as cry bullies – bullies masquerading as babies, aggressors as victims, and elites as subalterns. The whole institutional and popular cultural complex, including the media, contributes and subscribes to this thinking. Not surprisingly, such mentality often gets bolstered and theoretically justified by the socially-conscious university professors and students, and in the process subverts the very foundation on which such attitude finds justification, i.e. constitutional democracy.

Thus, such mentality is a deeply flawed and contradictory enterprise, promoting ideas while dismantling the foundation which legitimates those ideas.

Quite predictably, large sections of media often fuel an anti-democratic mentality and create a doomsday scenario for America following Donald Trump’s vic-

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

books MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

tory (as in the slogan ‘Not My President’).

This is not unlike a flurry of news reports about violence against minorities that included alleged rapes of nuns and vandalisation of church property after Narendra Modi came to office in India’s parliamentary elections. In most cases, they were found to be false or had nothing to do with the party in office. Maybe this victimhood culture reflects the absence of real problems (poverty, illiteracy, ethnic violence, warfare, etc) and hence the need for the invention of imaginary problems that can contain people with power and privilege.

Since modern democracies have created all possible institutions to address the real problems, universities and such spaces have found their relevance in pseudo problems such as microaggression.

Microaggression, the authors tell us, is a moralistic behaviour, an act of defining right and wrong, and a holier than thou attitude. This is reported mostly from a

“culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display a high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to authorities and other third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance”. This is reflective of the contemporary culture and differs from two earlier modes of thinking: cultures of honour and cultures of dignity. In the former, people are sensitive to being snubbed and are reactive to insult; being a victim does not invite sympathy. In the latter, people have moved away from what they believe are the relics of honour culture, prefer to ignore insults or choose to address them in a mature and non-hysterical way.

The victimhood culture pits itself against the culture of dignity by exaggerating microaggressions.

In honour cultures, reputation is nonnegotiable and it is cowardice not to respond to insults; in fact it may be seen as

THE BOOK INTRODUCES US TO THE RISE OF A CULTURE IN THE US, WHERE AGGRESSION AND OPPRESSION ARE IMAGINED AS PERVASIVE.

AUGUST 2018

75

B O O K S ROMAN BABAKIN / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

WITH MODERN DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS WORKING TO ADDRESS THE REAL PROBLEMS, UNIVERSITIES HAVE FOUND THEIR RELEVANCE IN PSEUDO PROBLEMS LIKE MICROAGGRESSION.

a moral failing. This culture thrives in places where legal authority is weak or nonexistent. As state authority expands and the rule of law is enforced, honour culture makes way for culture of dignity.

The authors, however, warn us that honour culture still survives in most of the Arab world and some pockets in the West.

However, the prevailing culture in Western democracies is that of dignity; people are less touchy and are willing to shrug off minor insults. In the event of conflicts, such cultures prefer nonviolent actions such as talk, negotiation and compromise; here tolerance or even a thick skin are seen as social virtues.

ENTER VICTIMHOOD CULTURE Everything changes the moment we encounter the victimhood culture, which is characterised by the perceived and

76

A U G U ST 2018

exaggerated feeling of inequality and marginality, to be seen in microaggressions directed at the culturally different.

This culture does not believe in ignoring insults; rather, it encourages its visibility for public sympathy and action. It rejects the dignity culture’s division of physical violence from verbal ones, and thus partially resembles honour culture. But when honour culture recommends direct confrontation rather than crying for help, the latter thrives on telling the whole world. In honour culture, victimhood is not to be exhibited, but negated through direct action by making the aggressor pay for it, in direct physical confrontation or through invite to a duel. While being similar to honour culture in being sensitive to insult, victimhood culture also resembles dignity culture in its willingness to appeal to authorities. Yet, it differs from both in

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

FRANZ12 / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

highlighting rather than downplaying the complainant’s victimhood.

The ubiquity of this culture is most visible in universities, the most diverse of spaces and most prone to encounters of cultural difference and misunderstanding. Even corporate houses have started following university models in initiating awareness programmes to avoid hurting others and also in providing safe spaces, where victims can be counselled and detraumatised. Surprising or even laughable as it may sound, there is an unending expansion of phrases in capturing novel ways of being hurt as in ‘sweat shaming’ (like ‘slut shaming’) or cultural appropriation when an event to celebrate a different culture can be misunderstood as its cooption. This is accompanied by an appeal to authorities and the public at large to not just take action, but also to publicise the incident and create a wave of invisible sympathisers.

At times, universities come under pressure from student groups and cancel events to preempt any unpleasant situation (as when DePaul University cancelled Ben Shapiro’s event or when in Yale, a couple of professors were forced to resign after a controversy around Halloween costumes). It should not surprise us that these demands are made by those who often stand for freedom of speech.

Close parallels can be found in India when filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri was attacked in Jadavpur University or when Anupam Kher was denied permission to screen his movie at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Some sort of moral status is ascribed to suffering and victimisation in select cases. The authors, however, do not highlight how the privileged students and faculty appropriate victims’ experience and articulate them to further their interests.

Here, victimhood is a status, because it is some sort of capital (like Bourdieu’s cultural capital), which can be exchanged for sympathy and thus is advantageous to the victims and their spokespersons. Victimhood thus is both reward and punishment and there lies the contradiction. As the authors argue, “the same progressive

activists who campaign against microaggressions might also call for the banning of conservative speakers... where progressive ideas can go unchallenged”. Thus the demand for diversity and its celebration leads to homogeneity, where everything undesirable can be banished. The authors tell us how universities in the US are producing a one-dimensional understanding of diversity and tolerance, and how only 12 per cent of professors declare themselves to be politically conservative. This is not very different in India.

PREVAILING CULTURE IN WESTERN DEMOCRACIES IS THAT OF DIGNITY; PEOPLE ARE LESS TOUCHY AND ARE WILLING TO SHRUG OFF MINOR INSULTS.

THE BOOK’S UNIVERSALITY AND WHAT IS UNSAID A striking feature of the book is its transferability from being an indictment of contemporary American academic culture to being a reference point to understand the ways of our politically-conscious world,

AUGUST 2018

77

B O O K S gressions of the socially conservative.

Maybe the authors could have engaged a little more with other such political spaces (in Europe or India) to see if the global intellectual order is going through some sort of crisis or how this culture of victimhood reworks the earlier culture of honour and its penchant for confrontation. Similarly, the expression ‘culture of victimhood’ is an ascribed category, but the advocates of this culture may see themselves as fighters for dignity, as in Taylor’s telling phrase ‘politics of recognition’ (something which the authors did not engage with). Too many illustrations

THE BOOK MAY WELL APPEAR AS AN ELEGY WRITTEN ON INDIA’S PRESENT ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT.

78

A U G U ST 2018

more pronounced in post-industrial democracies. As a framework, the book can neatly fit into the contemporary Indian context and may appear as an elegy written on India’s present academic/intellectual environment. Thus, the book is as much about India as about America, as universal as it is particular, and as reflective of academic climate as social and political moralities. The timing of the book could not have been more appropriate, when the politically-conscious academic world imagines itself as ‘endangered’ at the time of Trump and fancies itself as the last hope for mankind. Interestingly, the sense of vulnerability is matched by a saviour-like zeal combined with inexplicable aggression, something that is pitted against the perceived ubiquitous microag-

from American campuses, while substantiating the argument, limit the strength of the book as a template. Another issue that could have been dealt with is a proper historicisation of the shift from honour to victimhood and the socio-economic conditions that created them. Though touched upon in the text, the authors did not engage with the academic elites and their tutelage of the new generation victims; that is to say, the constructed nature of such culture. Also, the distinction between the subalterns (experiential) and their spokespersons (representational) has not been brought out clearly.

However, it is understood that the authors are primarily concerned about an American problem in its contemporary manifestations and the possible social meaning it conveys. The ‘unsaid’ part of the book is not due to the poverty of the thesis or the authors’ inability to make a convincing case, but because of the present reviewer’s expectations of a meta narrative. Regardless of its American contours, when the authors speak of competitive victimhood, or scholarship as activism, or teaching as indoctrination, they ring a bell and echo the hidden transcripts of Indian universities. Fortunately, the book ends with a note of hope that heterodoxy in opinions will make a comeback, and that the future will not be like the present.

Jyotirmaya Tripathy is a Chennai-based commentator and cultural critic.

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07

Photo: Lalit Verma

The Pondy Lit Fest 2018

This festival, revolving around Bharat Shakti, aims at showcasing high quality sessions on topics of literary, cultural, social, artistic, and political importance, with outstanding participants and thought-leaders.

ABHIJIT IYER MITRA

MICHEL DANINO

Specialist in defence and foreign policy

Author, Historian, Professor.

ABHIJIT MAJUMDER

NANDINI SEN GUPTA

Chief Editor at Asianet Network Pvt. Ltd.

Pondicherry based journalist and Author of historical fiction.

AMISH TRIPATHI

PALLAVI JOSHI

Indian Author. Shiva Trilogy and other bestselling books.

Indian Film and Television Artist.

DR. ANAND RANGANATHAN

Advisor to Manipur Chief Minister, Author

Associate Professor JNU, Consulting Editor Swarajya

DR. ANIL MENON Global Head, Cisco Smart +Connected Communities Business

ARAVINDAN NEELAKANTHAN Co-author, Breaking India

BIBEK DEBROY Chairman, Economic Advisory Council to PM and not Member, NITI Aayog.

R JAGANNATHAN

RAJAT SETHI

DR. SAMPADANANDA MISHRA Director, Sri Aurobindo Foundation for Indian Culture (SAFIC)

SHUBHRASTHA

MAKARAND R PARANJAPE Poet, Professor JNU, Public Intellectual.

SMITA BAROOAH Addictions Therapist, Writer, Fine Arts Photographer.

DR. SOMDATTA SINGH Serial Entrepreneur Member WEP – NITI Aayog

MANOJ DAS

DR. SWAPAN DASGUPTA

Award-winning writer

Eminent Journalist and President Nominated Rajya Sabha MP

MEENAKSHI JAIN Senior Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Member of Governing Council Indian Council of Historical Research.

Smriti Z Irani

Union Cabinet Minister of Textiles

Dr. Kiran Bedi

Lt Governor of Puducherry IPS Retd and Author

V. Narayanasamy Chief Minister of Puducherry

SANJEEV SANYAL Principal Economic Advisor to the Government of India , Historian, Urban Planner.

Political Strategist, Print Columnist and Television debater, Author

KIRAN VYAS

”

Festival graced by

Vice Chancellor, Central University of Orissa, Koraput

Editorial Director, Swarajya

Founder, Creator and Director at Tapovan Open University of Yoga and Ayurveda, Author

it has attracted guarantees a visibility and a quality of association that cannot be missed.

SACHIDANAND MOHANTY

KANCHAN GUPTA Writer, Senior Columnist.

“

The sheer uniqueness of the event, the originality and character of the host city and the scale and quality of guests

Dates: Inauguration: 17th August Events: 18th and 19th August Venues: Alliance Francaise, Maison Colombani, Coromandel Cafe, Sri Aurobindo Society

VIVEK AGNIHOTRI

facebook.com/pondylitfest

Filmmaker, Author

@pondylitfest

pondylitfest@gmail.com

www.pondylitfest.com

ARCHI VE

80

A U G U ST 2018

V O L U M E 62 I S S U E 07