OPEN Magazine 10 February 2014

The new saffron high command

Newly minted political parties in the run-up to elections 2014

RS 35 1 0 f e b r u a r y 2 0 14

INSIDE Dangers of the Section 377 judgment l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

e v e r y

w e e k

C A P I TA L P U N I S H M E N T

LIFE GETS A LONG ROPE What the Supreme Court judgment commuting 15 death sentences at one go foretells

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor Manu Joseph managing Editors Rajesh Jha, PR Ramesh Deputy Editor Aresh Shirali Features and Sports Editor Akshay

Sawai

Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

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Volume 6 Issue 5 For the week 4—10 February 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover illustration

Anirban Ghosh

10 february 2014

Saumya

The insensitivity on display of the railway authorities is chilling (‘Blood on the Tracks’, 27 January 2014). I am yet to see any senior official of these railways interacting with the press and reassuring the people of any safety measures contemplated by them. In fact, they are not bothered by such accidents happening daily.

These are being written off as mere statistics. Even the media is guilty of tolerating this indifference. Our TV channels are busy with TRPs for political discourse.

Not one channel has called the Railway Minister, GM, DRM or any other railway official to question this brazen indifference and Not one TV channel apathy. Has the CM of has called the Railway Maharashtra nothing to Minister, GM, DRM say? He is Chief Minister of the state in whose or any other railway capital city people have official to question this to risk their lives while brazen apathy going to work. Shouldn’t the media question him too? We haven’t heard from him at all. For a change, sack the GM of the Central Railways, on the tracks of which both the recent accidents mentioned in your article took place, and I am sure things will finally start falling in line.

Otherwise, all these officials in high positions —including the CM of Maharashtra—will keep taking the Mumbai commuter for granted.  letter of the week Assure Them Their Dignity

the article, ‘Whores and Lovers’ (3 February 2014), provides a glimpse of a dark side of society where human emotions are crushed every moment. What to talk about rights, these sex workers are not even considered one of us.

Desolate, these sex workers are a product of the carnal desire of all those who condemn them once out of their rooms.

The stories of Bharti, Puja, Seema and countless others in the profession present the ugly side of prostitution.

Abandoned by their parents and society, they are condemned to lives of suffering.

Ending this business of sex workers is a dream never to be accomplished, but the least that could be done by the

Government and self-help groups is to provide them recognition. Educate them and teach them about a life of dignity—which we, as human beings, are entitled to live. The exploitation of sex workers needs to be curbed.  R ohit Sachdeva

In Support of Krishna

i am not alone in coming out in public support of TM Krishna’s creative efforts to take Carnatic music in new directions (‘The Argumentative Musician’, 3 February 2014). This is purely my opinion, but I strongly believe that the stuffy air of the old concert ambience is being ventilated by an influx of fresh ideas so that our great music continues to evolve and take

new forms. Not all creative ideas take root, nor does their fragrance last a long time, but to shut them off is to deny Carnatic music the benefit of their creative impact. Let us all bask in the diversity of new thinking from all our artistes as they engage us with their creativity. Bravo, TMK, your music will endure.  Ram Ramaprasad

krishna has always worn his heart on his sleeve, whether he is singing or speaking. It takes courage-of-conviction to challenge the status quo. He is absolutely right about a musician’s need to be true to music first and also about the necessity of an immersive audience. It is only then that music will grow—from the perspective of creativity as well as the experience of listening.

God bless Krishna, and hope he continues to perform for art’s sake, taking carnatic music to a higher aesthetic level..  Subbu Iyer

Our Braveheart Mothers

every responsible citizen feels indebted to soldiers fighting for the country and protecting its people. But we seldom consider the role of those bravehearts’ families. The article, ‘The bravery of a soldier’s Mother’ (3 February 2014), clearly tells us that it requires no less courage for a mother not to cry for her martyred son and instead inspire others to join the Army.

The article also reminds us that we, as ordinary people, need to look beyond the apparent and the obvious.  Rashmi Pahade

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The Mary Roy Style of Activism my way

Arundhati Roy’s mother, who has a history of feisty public engagement, has joined the AAP

K o t t a y a m “Everyone has a right to demonstrate. You spent two days in jail in support of the Narmada struggle.”

This was what Mary Roy said to her daughter, writer-activist Arundhati Roy, when the latter expressed scepticism about Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s street protests.

At the age of 80, Mary Roy has just joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), but this is not her first tryst with public life. In 1984, she challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916 under 10 february 2014

which daughters in the Syrian Christian community were not entitled to equal rights to ancestral property. The 1986 verdict in her favour instantly made her a target for both community leaders and politicians relying on Christian votes.

Roy’s house is on the campus of the Corpus Christi school she founded in Kottayam.

Visitors are greeted by a strange sight at the entrance: in the verandah, there is the foundation stone of a bio-manure unit and crematorium.

It was laid in 1996 by the then

state PWD minister. Keeping it there is Roy’s protest against a garbage dump near the school.

It is also a reminder of how neither the bio manure unit nor crematorium was ever built by the government. Roy says, “This stone, laid by the minister, was left untouched over the years. I brought it here. I want every visitor to my house to see it and know the negligence of the government”.

“I want to see an alternative in politics,” says Roy on why she joined the AAP. “So far, the Congress, BJP and Left have

proved to be failures in bringing about change.” Though Roy defends Kejriwal’s recent actions, she doesn’t think it was a good idea for a chief minister to personally take to the streets. “He has a right to do what he did, it would have been better if someone else had led the protest,” she says.

Roy does not want to disclose Arundhati’s take on her joining the AAP. “We are two different independent individuals. She has her own political views and I have mine,” Roy says. n Shahina KK

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arvind yadav/hindustan times/getty images

small world

14

contents 6

30

20

segregation

Separate is never equal

bjp

12

The new saffron high command

26

angle

An ominously ignored omen

comment

The new sexual extremism

cover story

Life gets a long rope

elections

Unusual political parties

‘There is no transparency in the operations of the power sector’

Person of the Week sanjay nirupam

Mumbai North Congress MP Sanjay Nirupam is agitating against a disparity in city and suburb power tariffs haima deshpande

L

ast week, Sanjay Nirupam,

Congress MP from the Mumbai North constituency, took on Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Energy, demanding that the tariff be reduced for the 2,600,000 consumers it provides power to in his constituency. Nirupam sat on an indefinite hunger strike in front of the Reliance Energy office, but no official from the energy provider met him; it was the Congress-NCP led state government that intervened. He called off his fast after three days on assurances from Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan.

Nirupam is angry at the state’s decision to intervene and pocket the losses Reliance Energy will face in the event of a reduction in power tariff for his constituency. He has given the government two weeks to meet his demand. Else, he threatens ‘other methods’. Nirupam is well aware that his struggle against the company will not be easy, as there are many who want to see him fail.

4 open

olar ar/s in u t turk p r av

I have been agitating against Reliance Energy for

is

Hunger strikes by politicians seem to be in vogue.

Why yours?

some time now. But all doors were closed.

So I had to adopt other means to make the company take notice of our demand.

So did the company take cognisance of your hunger strike?

No one from Reliance Energy came to meet us or talk to us. Instead, the state government came to find out the reason for my protest. The company did not promise us anything. But Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan gave assurances that some action on tariff reduction will be taken in a couple of days.

Why did you call off your fast despite no concrete decision on your demand?

When you belong to the ruling party and the head of that party intervenes, what do you do? I wrote to the Chief Minister that, like [in] Delhi, power bills must be reduced in Mumbai too. He has responded positively and promised action by next week.

But this will be a subsidy. The government will pay for Reliance’s losses. I cannot understand why the government alone should bear the entire loss. Reliance should also share the burden. This is not my personal fight. It is the fight of 26-lakh consumers who avail of the company’s electricity.

What happens if there is no action? Will you ask people to stop paying electricity bills?

I will adopt other means of protest if the demands are not met. I will never ask people to stop paying electricity bills. I have no moral right to tell the people so.

Even if I do, I hope they do not listen to me. In Mumbai and its suburban areas, the number of those who do not pay bills is a small number. This city has a culture of people paying for services they get.

Should there be an audit of power discoms?

Definitely. After the privatisation of the power sector, the government does not have a role to play there. Hence there is no transparency in the operations of this sector. There is definitely a nexus between the regulator (Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission) and the distributor companies. The people have a right to know the reasons for an increase in power tariff. Reliance Energy supplies power to 90 per cent of suburban Mumbai consumers. It is almost 30 per cent [more] costly than Tata Power, the other distributor.

Why the disparity in power tariffs for Mumbai city and its suburban areas?

The government must re-look at the Electricity Act post privatisation. There has to be a uniform tariff system for the city and for suburban areas. The service providers have become dictators. The regulatory [body] is just [not] doing enough. Presently this body only seems to be thinking of the profits of [private] power companies. n 10 february 2014

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46

passing through

Damon Hill

b books

50

Michael Sandel on market morality

c

life & letters

cinema

54

Drink in Peace

■

Ra j Th

ay acker

■

f o r for instigating his party

workers to vandalise toll booths in Mumbai and around Pune MNS leader Raj Thackeray has for some time been targeting Maharashtra’s Congress-NCP government for allowing the continuance of toll charges on roads and bridges even after the cost of infrastructure has been recovered. But this week, Thackeray took his grouse to another level. In a

Jimmy Shergill: the underdog

speech in Navi Mumbai on Republic Day, he said, “I am ordering my workers to ensure that no toll tax is charged at any booth in Maharashtra. If anyone asks for toll tax, then phod dijiye, pitiye (attack them, thrash them), whatever be the consequences.” After the speech, party workers ransacked several toll booths between Mumbai and Thane. MNS workers were caught hurling stones at the Bandra-Worli Sea Link toll booth on Tuesday, breaking the window glass of a passing car.

Why Thackeray should ratchet up the issue now is no mystery. Elections are approaching and violence always gets eyeballs. His party was founded on the basis of hate and violence against migrants. He needs new issues to keep his party members charged up and toll collection seems a good one. n

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

63

Kareena can’t wait

After accusing the media of taking money from Narendra Modi while being questioned on the Khirki midnight raid, Delhi law Minister Somnath Bharti apologised r u bb e r a n d g l u e

“How much money were you paid by Modiji... All the allegations made against me are wrong, and this is being orchestrated by the BJP. They are trying to defame me, and I am going to take them to the court” —Somnath Bharti to reporters, 25 January 2014

turn

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of

p

‘I did not mean that. I apologise if the remarks have hurt anyone.

I did not want to say what is being misinterpreted by everyone although, if anyone has been hurt by my statement, I apologise for that” —Somnath Bharti In a statement of apology, 25 January 2014

around

150 Pandits Go Missing in the US It s e e m s Sangeeta Richards wasn’t the only one in a hurry to disappear in America. According to IANS, over 150 Indian teenagers who were brought to the country from across villages in North India to be trained as vedic pandits have gone missing over the last one year. The pandits were to be trained at the two centres set up by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who is known for transcendental meditation. As many as 1,050 young Indians were brought to the centres. Most 10 february 2014

of them seem to have disappeared in search of their American Dream.

Maharishi vedic pandits are recruited through the distribution of publicity literature across rural, Hindi-speaking North India to people living under the poverty line. Recruits are enrolled at Maharishi centres in the US with the promise of a high school education, after which they are to be trained as masters in the art of Hindu religious rites. After 10-15 years they have a choice to either remain

with the organisation or leave the centre and work on their own. An investigation

by Chicago-based weekly Hi India revealed that some members enrolled were as young as five years old, that recruits weren’t provided with an education past Class 5 and were made to live in makeshift trailer homes that were under surveillance 24x7. The Maharishi centres have refused to comment on the issue, but it seems to be just another case of exploitation in the name of religion. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

On the Contrary

A World without Omens What it foretells when strange things happen to the Pope and no one is unduly worried M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

I

n the opening pages of I, Claudius, supernatural is not recognised, even when plan or he has an issue with the Pope.

The third explanation is that God has a it acts on God’s representative on earth. the delightful fictional autobiograproblem with Ukrainians, because just This is just as well. Otherwise, if you phy of the Roman emperor Claudius look at this incident through the prism of before the release of the doves, the Pope written by Robert Graves in 1934, faith, it is a little problematic for the Pope. said a small prayer for Ukraine, which is there is an augury. At the age of eight, teetering with civil unrest. As one If God does not protect the doves released Claudius goes on a holiday to his aunt’s headline by a Russian media outlet from his window, then God has a deeper house near the coast of Antium. One cool cleverly put it: ‘Ill omen? Pope’s doves of evening, they are walking in a vineyard peace for Ukraine attacked by angry birds’. when suddenly there is ‘a great screeching’ The report quoted the Pope as saying, “I above. Eagles are fighting over something In an earlier age, a dove attack am close to Ukraine in prayer, in particuand as the children put their hands out to would have been read as a sign lar to those who have lost their lives in collect the feathers floating down, into from God. The Pope is fortunate recent days, and to their families.”

Claudius’ hands falls a wolf cub. A memIn an earlier age, we would have ber of the College of Augurs is with them that no one believes in omens; presumed that the answer to the prayer and his mother asks the old man what it doubly so that, despite rational was that help wouldn’t be forthcoming. means. He says that Claudius will be sense and science, the idea of the That is why the Pope is fortunate no one emperor one day, and despite the odds— Pope itself continues to survive believes in omens. And he is doubly he is lame, weak and a supposed nitwit— fortunate that despite the he survives the reigns of murdergabriel bouys/afp rational sense of humans so ous and insane family members fine-tuned by science now, the for the prediction to come true. idea of the Pope itself continues It was an age when people to survive. took omens seriously and that is As it turns out, Ukrainians are how mankind has related to not at fault. Last year, too, the nature for most of its existence— previous Pope released a dove living in connected enchantand it was attacked by a seagull. ment, where actions of beast and The reason that doves are bird and the movements of attacked, according to a National leaves and whispers of the wind Geographic article by Mel White, are messages, their air filled with is that they are white. ‘Thousands magic guiding the course of fate of pigeons (relatives of doves) live and the coming about of good in Rome… Many other species of negotiated by rites and bad birds live in Rome as well, but fended off by the warnings of none are pure white. So if you’re diviners. an aggressive, badass bird (as Contrast this with how the gulls and crows tend to be), world has reacted to the what’s going to draw your astonishing occurrence last attention? The pure-white bird.

Sunday at the very home of the What’s going to be the target of Pope in Vatican City. This is what your aggression? The pure-white happened: from a window of his bird,’ the report explained. And palace, two children who stood to make the whole episode even by the Pope released two white more this-worldly, animal rights doves, and as soon as they flew activists exhorted the Vatican to out, a crow and a seagull came stop the practice of releasing swooping in and attacked them, doves because they can’t survive leaving a scattering of white in the world outside. The feathers swirling. One dove alternative would presumably be survived; the other may not have. for them to remain caged If God wants to send a throughout their dove lives. message, this is as good as it gets, What should they pray for? God but, alas, only the very fringe believe it portends anything. The heavenly disapproval? Or does God have a problem with Ukrainians? only knows. n 6 open

10 february 2014

india

A Hurried Man’s Guide

to the French President’s break-up The French President Francois Hollande recently called up the French news agency Agence France Presse to announce that he had ended his nine-year-old relationship with Valérie Trierweiler. He said he was speaking not as the head of state, but in his personal capacity. A day after the announcement, Trierweiler, who works as a journalist for a glossy magazine and supports a charity, kept her India engagement and flew to Mumbai.

The announcement follows weeks of intrigue about the status of their relationship, after Closer magazine reported that Hollande was having an affair with an actress, Julie Gayet.

They published photographs of a man, reportedly the president, wearing a helmet and seated on the Hollande’s back of a scooter, allegedex-wife is ly being taken to meet Gayet. former French Following the revelations, presidential Trierweiler spent a week in candidate hospital for, according to her Segolene Royal office, ‘rest and some tests’.

fred dufour/afp

Before his relationship with Trierweiler, Hollande was married to Segolene Royal, a former French presidential candidate, with whom he fathered four children. The twicedivorced Trierweiler has three children of her own. While Trierweiler and Hollande never married, she has assumed the role of First Lady at

official functions since his election in 2012.

According to media reports, Hollande did not want Trierweiler to travel to India. Her trip had been planned months in advance and billed as a visit by ‘France’s First Lady’. During a press conference in Mumbai, when asked about her future, she said she had no time to reflect but that she would continue working for the charity Action Against Hunger. She also said, as reported by The Guardian, that this was her third India visit; the first time she had travelled as a journalist, the second time as the First Lady, and this time “call it what you will”. n

It Happens

Caste Yes Bar for Music Guruvayur temple stops a Dalit musician from performing on its premises S h a h i n a K K ima babu

real

protesting discrimination Kallur Babu has complained to the chairman of the Guruvayur board

K

erala seldom hits the headlines for caste discrimination, but that does not mean its social fabric has been cleansed of the evil. Recently, administrators of the state’s most popular temple, Guruvayur, proved that by not allowing a Dalit musician to perform there.

Kallur Babu, a taxi driver by profession, has been a percussion artiste for more than fifteen years.

He was part of the Panchavadyam team that had a performance slated for 5 January in the temple.

Panchavadyam is a traditional orchestra of Kerala with an ensemble of one wind and five percussion instruments.

“We had one performance during the day, and I played for about an hour and a half. We were supposed to perform again in the evening after a break. But in between, I was informed that I would not be allowed to perform inside the temple as I was from a lower caste,” says Babu, a Dalit.

Temple authorities say they are following tradition, because only members of the Marar community (relatively high up in the caste hierarchy) are permitted to perform

percussion instruments in the temple. “It is an age-old tradition. We cannot change it arbitrarily on our own,” says Vijayan Nambiar, deputy administrator of the temple. “It is the temple thanthri (priest) who is authorised to decide whether to change a custom or not.”

Babu has lodged a complaint about the matter with the chairman of the Guruvayur Devaswom Board, the trust that oversees the temple.

TV Chandramohan, the Kallur Babu Board chairman was also who is also a not invited Congress to perform leader, says that they have at Thrissur decided to hold Pooram a an inquiry by a second time retired judge.

This is not the first time that Babu is being discriminated against. A few years ago, he had performed at the famous Thrissur Pooram as part of the Panchavadyam team of another temple, Thriuvambadi Devaswom.

“They did not include me the next year. I was told that Dalits are not permitted to perform on the temple premises,” he says. n 10 february 2014

business

Watch Out for a Potential Property Bubble Speculators are good

arvind yadav/hindustan times/getty images

R E A LT Y

sniffers. Especially of money-making opportunities. They have a nose for which asset classes are likely to multiply their wealth. Lately, among the openings they seem to have spotted is real estate. Ever since the Government curbed gold imports, a measure to contain India’s current account deficit, many of them have been buying property. A report by India Ratings & Research points to a marked upward trend in prices of residential units since mid-2013, coinciding with the imposition of stiff duties on gold: ‘Demand for residential units has a substantial investor/speculator component,’ it says. The result has been higher flat prices at the cost of end-user demand, with few homes being bought by people who actually want to live in them.

“Speculator entry is negative for the real estate sector,” says Vinay Betala, author of the report, “as end-user demand, on which the sector’s sustainability depends in the longer term, is being destroyed by this short-term [speculative] love of this asset class.” However, developers seem to have developed a cosy relationship with speculators, as they seem pleased to oblige them with property rate hikes to satisfy their return-on-investment expectations.

Could this create a real estate bubble?

Perhaps. Analysts say that developers are aware of the importance of end-users; they form their primary market. “Genuine end-user buyers are offered big discounts in closed-door negotiations with develop-

scraping the sky The influx of speculative funds is among the reasons that flat prices in India keep rising

ers,” says Ashutosh Limaye, head of research at Jones Lang LaSalle India, a real estate consultancy. “So price corrections do happen,” he adds, Speculative “but behind doors and money has without distorting buoyed India’s market prices.” The real estate upshot: neither does sector, say the Indian market for realty analysts homes appear to be overpriced, nor do their stated/published prices fall.

While construction costs have risen by 30 per cent in the past four years, apart-

ment prices have gone up by an estimated 50 per cent, by and large. This partly reflects the rising cost-of-capital of builders, who often prefer to block money in unsold stock than sell cheap. This is bad news for end buyers. Late last year, the RBI changed realty-lending norms in a manner that raised capital costs for developers even further. And the RBI has just upped loan rates again. As Betala suggest, builders ought to start selling flats at lower prices instead of letting a bubble inflate. This is a market that needs to sort itself out. n SHAILENDRA TYAGI

Homes Remain Expensive Barring a few phases of decline, residential property prices in most of India’s big cities have been on a steady incline despite the slowdown NHB Residex (quarter-on-quarter change) (%) 12

Delhi

Mumbai

Chennai

Kolkata

Bangalore

Hyderabad

8 4 0

barack Obama, President of the USA,

-4 -8 Dec 12

vowing to assert his executive authority, if need be, to crank up the US economy

Mar 13

Jun 13

Sep 13 Source: National housing bank. compiled by Shailendra Tyagi

10 February 2014

“What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth and strengthen the middle-class ... Some require Congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation ... that’s what I’m going to do”

news

reel

Six Years of Apathy Roshan Jamal Khan, who was recently freed from a Spanish jail, recounts the indifference shown by Indian authorities

W

hen Mumbai resident Roshan

vijayanand gupta/hindustan times/getty images

Jamal Khan, who was convicted in Spain for six years, reached New Delhi Airport at 1.30 am on 18 January, he had been travelling for almost two days. He had been released from a jail near Leone on 16 January, had been driven for over 300 km to reach Madrid Airport, where two waiting Indian police officers flew with him on a 14 hour-long-flight. On reaching Delhi, he was taken to an empty room where the two officers grilled him for another three hours, after which he was told he was free to go.

It was 4 am by this time, Khan was tired, and he had to reach his home in Mumbai to meet his family for the first time in six years. But no further travel arrangements, from Delhi to Mumbai, had been made.

He had to borrow a cellphone to wake up one of his sons to book a ticket for him.

“But, you know what?” Khan asks, “I wasn’t surprised one bit.”

Khan was arrested from a mosque in Barcelona in 2008, just four months after he had moved to the city to explore a business of olive oil exports. An informant, named F1 in court proceedings, had claimed that the people praying at the

mosque that day were a group of terrorists planning to bomb the Barcelona Metro. In all, eleven individuals, 10 Pakistani nationals and Khan, were charged with being members of a terrorist organisation, and plotting a terror attack. Khan was handed a sentence of eight and a half years. Two years later, the sentence was commuted by the Spanish Supreme Court to six years, and the charge of conspiring to stage a terror attack was dropped. Khan claims to be innocent and says their arrests were a result of increasing Islamophobia in European countries.

“All I remember about the day of the arrest was a large noise at the door of the mosque, and a group of men with their faces covered, brandishing guns,” Khan says. They were taken to a prison and told that they had been arrested for planning terrorist attacks. Within five days, before they were taken to court for the first time, the Pakistani embassy had gotten in touch with the 10 Pakistani nationals. The Indian embassy, however, Khan claims, did not. “I waited for them. My wife [in Mumbai] phoned and wrote them letters, but no one showed up,” he says, “None of the authorities in the jail and court whom we dealt with knew how to speak Hindi or English. While the Pakistani embassy helped their nationals with an interpreter, I had none.”

His brother-in-law who lives in Spain, along with the relatives of the other ten accused, pooled in money to arrange the services of a local lawyer. “He spoke a bit of English, and he died a few months later.

His son [also a lawyer] then took up our

case,” Khan recalls. About two months after he was arrested, two individuals, a man and a woman, from the Indian embassy finally showed up. “The man said, ‘Why didn’t you inform us earlier?

We just learnt about it from your wife.’

My wife had being trying to reach them from the day of my arrest. And when they finally showed up, they began with a lie. It really put me off.” According to Khan, the woman repeatedly asked him if he had been to Pakistan. “It was almost like she thought she would be able to catch me off guard, and I would blurt out a ‘yes’.”

Over the next six years, different people from the Indian embassy visited him occasionally. “Initially, they grilled me on my past. Later, I could tell, none of them was really interested in my case. Their presence was a formality. They were not interested in helping me legally, nor were they worried about my health,” he says.

Since Khan speaks very little Spanish, his communication with the prison authorities and inmates was minimal. “To be arrested for something you are not involved in makes you really bitter. And worse, I could hardly speak with anyone. I was extremely lonely, bitter and disturbed. I would call home, but that would make me feel miserable. I would hear things like one of my sons discontinuing studies to support the family by working at a call centre. Those whom I could meet and speak to, like the embassy officials, were simply not interested,” he says.

Khan has moved the European Court of Human Rights in France, appealing against what he terms a ‘wrongful’ conviction in a Spanish court, and expects a ruling by this year. He says, “Perhaps, I will get a favourable ruling and the Spanish system will be held accountable.

But what about those who were supposed to help me? Shouldn’t they also be made answerable?” n Lhendup G Bhutia

The Ghosts of Pathribal

Several questions remain unanswered in this 14-year-old fake encounter case

A

a free man Roshan Jamal Khan addresses a press conference in Mumbai after his return

s Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah completed five years in office earlier this January, his party National Conference seemed to be headed for a split with the Congress party, its coalition partner in the state, due to sharp differences over Abdullah’s plan to 10 February 2014

create 700 administrative units.

Abdullah’s government may eventually survive the split, but the Indian Army’s clean chit to its men in an infamous fake encounter case is something that has put the Chief Minister in a tight spot.

The Army on 24 January exonerated five officers of its 7 RR unit, accused of killing five innocent civilians in a fake encounter 14 years ago in Pathribal in south Kashmir. On the eve of the then American President Bill Clinton’s visit to India, suspected terrorists of the Lashkare-Toiba gunned down 35 Sikhs in Chittisinghpura, not very far from Pathribal. Five days later, the Army held a press conference and said that it had, in a joint operation with the J&K police, eliminated five ‘foreign mercenaries’ responsible for the massacre. The villagers suspected that the Army had killed five civilians who had been picked up from nearby villages in the two days before the so-called encounter. After a major hue and cry, the bodies of those the Army had killed were exhumed. They turned out to be the badly-charred bodies of the same civilians.

In 2006, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a charge sheet against the five Army officers, accusing them of ‘cold-blooded murder’. The Army tried to shield its men by arguing that they were immune to trial under the provisions of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The case finally went to the Supreme Court in 2012, and it gave the Army a choice between trying its men on its own, or in a civilian court. The Army said it would initiate court-martial proceedings against the five officers.

On 24 January, the army gave a clean chit to its men. “The evidence recorded could not establish a prima facie case against any of the accused persons,” a defence spokesperson told the media.

The Army has not, however, specified what led the court to reach the conclusion that it did. As a result, many questions remain unanswered. For example, does the Army still believe that the five men were involved in the Chittisinghpura massacre? In July 2012, a handler of the Mumbai terror attack, Abu Jundal, extradited from Saudi Arabia, reportedly named Muzammil, a senior Lashkar operative, as the mastermind of the Chittisinghpura massacre. Also, in December 2000, Indian security agencies picked up two Pakistani nationals, Suhail Malik and Waseem Ahmed, on charges of involvement in that massacre. But even after years of trial, Indian security agencies could produce no evidence against them in the court, resulting in 10 February 2014

their acquittal in August 2011 by the Delhi High Court.

Abdullah has said he will raise the issue with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he visits Kashmir early next month.

But Manmohan Singh should not wait for Abdullah to raise this issue. He has maintained in the past that there will be ‘zero tolerance’ against human rights violations in J&K. It is time for him to show that he means what he says. n Rahul Pandita

A Comrade’s Murder

The judgment on a brutal political assassination

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n a major blow to the CPM in Kerala, an additional sessions court found 12 accused, including three CPM local leaders, guilty of the murder of TP Chandrasekharan—the leader of the Revolutionary Marxist Party. This is the most political murder in the state in recent times, and sent waves of shock across Kerala in 2012. Though the acquittal of another prominent CPM leader, P Mohanan—a member of the Kozhikode district secretariat—brought some relief to the party, the comments made by the judge referring to the ‘political animosity behind the murder’ left little doubt about the CPM’s involvement.

Among the 12 who were found guilty of the crime, eleven have been awarded life imprisonment. This includes Manojan, a former branch secretary in Kozhikode district, PK Kunjanandan, a member of Panoor area committee, and KC Ramachandran, another local committee member in Kozhikode district. The seven-member killer gang, whom the court found to have been assassins hired to annihilate a ‘political enemy’, was awarded life imprisonment, too.

TP Chandrasekharan, who walked out of the party and formed the RMP in 2009, was hacked to death on 4 May 2012. The brutality of the murder by the hired assassins sent a shiver down people’s spines, even those belonging to the CPM. The undercurrents triggered by this murder in and outside the CPM were manifold. The party lost a by-election in Neyyattinkara Assembly constituency, which was held soon after the murder, despite the existence of a strong anti-incumbency sentiment against the Congress. Many local level and area-level committees of the party

were shaken by the mass exodus in protest against the murder.

The chargesheet was submitted in three months, and the trial began in February 2013. In no other crime has the state witnessed such a noisy media trial that ran parallel to the investigation and legal proceedings all along till the judgment.

The judge also made a point about the media trial, observing that ‘the court would not be influenced by the pandemonium created by the media’. The case is also unique for the number of prosecution witnesses who later turned hostile.

Of a total of 166 prosecution witnesses, 52 turned hostile during the trial, which is likely to have resulted in weakening the prosecution’s case.

The court observed that the murder was pre-planned, ruthless, barbaric and brutal: ‘It shocks not only the judicial conscience, but the collective conscience of society’. The court further noted that annihilating political rivals will mark the death of democracy. It also stated that the members of the killer gang were mere ‘tools in the hands of the persons who entertained political enmity towards the deceased’.

The members of the killer gang, who were awarded life imprisonment, are MC Anoop, Manoj Kumar alias Kirmani Manoj, N K Sunil Kumar alias Kodi Suni, T K Rajeesh, KK Muhammad Shafi and S Sijith alias Annan Shijith. They have recently hit headlines in Kerala for active social networking in jail. They have been updating their Facebook pages regularly while in prison. The snaps of jail uploaded by them were greeted with a flood of ‘likes’ and comments. A case has been registered for this.

KK Rama, the wife of the slain TP Chandrasekharan, has demanded a CBI probe to unearth the conspiracy that led to her husband’s killing, and the alleged involvement of the CPM. She is planning a sit-in agitation before the secretariat from 1 February. The state government may concede this demand as it would politically benefit the ruling UDF, but the question of whether the CBI would take a call or not remains uncertain.

Among the 76 accused listed by the prosecution, 22 have been discharged by the trial court for want of evidence. The trial against 15 accused, including KK Ragesh, a state committee member of the CPM, has been stayed by the High Court.

The ninth accused, who was the CPM area secretary of Onchiyam (the bastion of TP Chandrasekharan’s party RMP), CH Ashokan, died last year during the trial.

Two accused are still at large. n Shahina kk open www.openthemagazine.com 11

COMMENT retrogade

The New Sexual Extremism On the dangers unleashed by the Supreme Court’s determinedly archaic judgment on Section 377 minal hajratwala

astrologer is the lead petitioner in the case that has turned me, along with millions of other Indians, into a sexual criminal.

One of his bedfellows is a bushy-bearded guru in orange robes who claims he can cure my lesbianism with yoga.

(Maybe it’s an alignment problem, like scoliosis?) The others signatories to the lawsuit are right-wing religious types so radical that each one believes all the others are doomed to hell.

It is this fringe minority that the Supreme Court of India has chosen to valorise with its two recent decisions upholding the curiously archaic law known as Section 377.

On 11 December, the Court upheld the bit of the law banning ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ (translation: penetration of the wrong holes). Since then, we have seen the right-wing radical fringe gain new legitimacy. Night after night they pop up like rabbits to shout out bigotries from the many small boxes that divide our television news-and-debate shows. They stage anti-homosexuality marches, a phenomenon scarcely seen in India since the movie-theatre-smashing phase of 1998 over the film Fire. They plaster our walls—whether gay groups on Facebook or election hoardings in Madurai—with posters calling for stricter punishment.

Not even life in prison, the penalty prescribed by Section 377, will do. These extremists do not want us jailed, closeted, or even cured. They want us dead.

Death penalty for gays. Death to all sexual rebels. Death, rapes, or lashes with the whip for women who choose their own partners, for inter-caste couples, for anyone who dares transgress the ancient laws of Manu, which coincide conveniently with the archaic laws of Victoria.

But India is a free nation; the world’s largest democracy, no? Here are some of the freedoms the Court has now endorsed: At a middle-class urban dinner party, a guest now feels free to suggest electrocution for “the gays”.

A television

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legacy of Victorian England. We will not embrace the open and tolerant visions of our numerous diverse traditions, nor the inclusivity enshrined in our constitution.

We will, instead, remain loyal to our onetime masters, who were so prudish that they did not even say ‘leg’ in polite company (‘limb’ was the appropriate euphemism). Like Victorian-era constables with nightsticks and funny hats, we will persecute, legally and extra-legally, adults engaging in sex by mutual consent.

In making their decision, the judges had to read—and ignore—the manjunath kiran/afp Government of India’s 77-point argument in favour of equal human rights for all. They had to glance— dry-eyed—through the petition from parents who passionately argued for full citizenship for their queer children. They had to brush over the pleas of healthcare workers who testified that driving people into the closet makes preventive work harder and subjects street health workers to police harassment.

They chose, instead, the astrologer, the baba, the fundamentalists. They chose the aberrant, hateful sexual Section 377 originated as a extremists whose views no more liberal reform. Thank goodness represent the average live-and-let-live for the progressives of 1861, Indian than does Ru Paul.

Oddly enough, Section 377 originated otherwise who knows what as a liberal reform. Before it was instituted sort of legal bludgeon would in 1861, people convicted of unnatural have been handed down to sexual acts throughout the British empire could be subject to the death penalty. today’s anti-sexual moralists Thank goodness for those progressive parliamentarians of 150 years ago, otherwise who knows what sort of law On Sunday, 26 January, military planes we would be stuck with; what sort of legal swooped and screamed above my home bludgeon would have been handed down as part of Republic Day festivities. the generations to today’s homegrown Children paraded around my housing anti-sexual moralists. society singing an off-key, earnest The erstwhile Empress of India must be rendition of Saare Jahan Se Achcha… (India smiling in her lace-and-satin grave. Vande is better than all the world). The whole Mataram, O mother Victoria. The Queen nation waved flags to celebrate the birth is dead; long live the Queen. n of the republic 64 years ago; our independence from British overlords.

But on Tuesday, the Court decided we Minal Hajratwala is an author, will not claim our independence from the a writing coach, and editor of the anthology corseted, straightjacketed, repressed Out! Stories from the New Queer India In a medical facility, doctors and psychiatrists now feel free to pursue ‘cures’ for homosexuality, against the tide of international medical expertise (the head of the World Psychiatric Association is a gay man of Indian descent, but no matter).

In a corporate workplace, a team now feels free to harass an openly gay employee with homophobic jokes and slurs.

In the streets, the police now feel even greater freedom to harass visibly transgender people and pairs of men who look suspicious.

10 February 2014

raul irani

powers that be (from left) Raman Singh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Narendra Modi, Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh at a BJP National Council meeting in New Delhi

change

The New Saffron High Command The BJP has learnt enough from past mistakes to rid itself of its swadeshi image. This has led to heartburn among the old guard but the new leadership couldn’t be bothered PR Ramesh

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fter the morale-sapping de-

feat of the party in the 2004 General Election, the BJP attempted to figure out why the Indian electorate had stopped responding to its message.

Surely, the battering it got at the ballot box necessitated a different reflex. It began with an acknowledgement that the party cannot inspire voters if it fails to focus on the needs of a rapidly-changing India. Loud claims followed that the party will make way for its GenNext: the passing of the baton to a new leadership that would convey willingness to do business with the new India.

But things just did not change within the BJP. Five years later, when the country faced another election, the party wheeled out its once-charismatic leader 14 open

LK Advani, then 82, as the spearhead of its campaign. The party, which has over the years made counting-chickens-before-they-hatch its favourite sport, even toyed with the idea of canvassing support for Advani with ‘His best is yet to come’ as a bumper sticker message. All it did was turn the BJP’s GenNext claims into a subject of derision, and the Congress romped to victory yet again.

After 10 years and considerable prodding by a panicky party cadre, the BJP has quit dilly-dallying. What started last January in Goa, where the party—in defiance of Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Sushma Swaraj—anointed Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its chief campaigner for 2014, has only gathered momentum over the year since. And it

saw a dramatic manifestation earlier this week when the party’s new leadership contemplated a proposal for Advani and Joshi that would be the political equivalent of a voluntary retirement scheme for them. The idea was to suggest that they be kept out of the Lok Sabha race and be granted space in the Rajya Sabha instead.

Such a decision to shunt the two leaders ‘upwards’ would have formally declared the demise of the old order, but the plan was dropped at the last minute because the party’s new leaders didn’t want to be seen as being unkind to their former mentor Advani.

Interestingly, this had followed a closed-door meeting that Singh and Modi had with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat where they agreed to ‘pension off’ any 10 February 2014

At the steering Wheel Unlike before, the BJP’s core team today operates like a boardroom in action. One that holds parleys with CEOs, economists, social scientists and the public at large on its vision of a resurgent India, and is vocal about its economic perspective, social engagement and overall worldview. Desi liberalism and doles are held as

passé, to be replaced by ‘targeted subsidies’ and a push for reforms and clarity on foreign affairs, boosting a policy framework whose rudiments were first put in place by Atal Behari Vajpayee.

This core team has lieutenants in Amit Shah, Dharmendra Pradhan and JP Nadda

(Left to right, top to bottom) Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh; Nitin Gadkari, Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj; Amit Shah, Dharmendra Pradhan and JP Nadda

Regional Heavyweights These leaders have emerged as formidable faces in their respective states and are expected to run effective campaigns in

their regions of influence, where the BJP central leadership sees them as force multipliers of a nationwide Modi wave

(Left to right, top to bottom) Vasundhara Raje, Shivraj Chouhan, Raman Singh, Sushil Modi, Manohar Parrikar, Gopinath Munde and Harsh Vardhan

Consultants Inc. The old guard has been cast in the role of an advisory panel of elders. The most prominent among them is LK Advani, who offered Modi his best wishes as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate at its recent National Council meet after having opposed the Gujarat

CM’s candidacy earlier. Others in this pack include MM Joshi, Venkaiah Naidu and Thaverchand Gehlot. Their voices are still heard, even if not always heeded. For parliamentary politics, the BJP is deploying the services of Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh

(Left to right, top to bottom) LK Advani, MM Joshi, Venkaiah Naidu and Thaverchand Gehlot, Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh

Nagpur Brigade With both Modi and the RSS having realised that mutual respect is the key to forging ahead as a force in politics,

RSS representatives Ramlal, V Satish and Saudan Singh have emerged as power centres in their own right

infographic by tarun sehgal

The Who’s Who of BJP 2014

leader above the age of 75 from active politics. Later, Swaraj was asked to convey this to Advani, who had by then got wind of it. In a neat ruse, he swiftly announced he would contest from Gandhinagar, his current seat. Joshi may get to contest a Lok Sabha seat as well (in UP). But it is clear that they have been ‘elevated’ to the level of senior consultants. They are now part of the Marg Darshak Mandal, in Sangh parlance, where their views will be heard but not necessarily heeded.

J

oshi, who is achingly nostalgic for

an economic model that lost its appeal decades ago, has been egging on his soulmates in the Sangh Parivar to champion a private sector-smothering, growthstifling agenda. His senior colleague Advani, too, recently strayed into economic policy formulation by backing a proposal to do away with all taxes and imposing a 2 per cent levy on bank transactions instead. The idea was swiftly rebuffed by the new leadership for multiple reasons: it will draw the powerful voter bloc of farmers into the tax net, promote inequity as it applies equally to the rich and poor, distort the country’s federal structure, and also encumber the system in new ways. The leadership’s message was simple: such matters of policy should be left to those who would be handling the economy, and should not be outsourced to ashrams such as Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Yogpeeth.

Ramdev, in fact, was an early proponent of that taxation idea. He had tried to hardsell it to several BJP leaders before they held a meeting at Advani’s home to thrash out this ‘new economic policy’.

This gathering at the veteran’s Prithviraj Road home—built when he was Deputy PM and equipped with a massive conference hall—was attended by Swaraj, Jaitley, Yashwant Sinha, Subramanian Swamy, Nitin Gadkari and a few swadeshi economists, apart from Advani and Joshi.

While Advani, Swaraj and Gadkari backed the idea, Jaitley and Sinha argued against it saying any such switch would hurt India’s economy and prove counterproductive for the party.

Notably, the BJP has lately been toeing the line of the great free-trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who has lavished praise on Modi’s Gujarat model for focus16 open

ing on growth. Rapid economic expansion, the professor argues, will translate into higher social sector indices—so GDP growth should be given priority over direct welfare measures of the kind that Professor Amartya Sen has been keen on.

In a recent book, Bhagwati and his co-author Arvind Panagariya argued that Kerala’s high social indices are the outcome of growth initiatives rather than high social spending.

No doubt, Modi and his peers are convinced that Bhagwati is right. The professor sees pro-growth policies and marketoriented reforms as the best way to reduce poverty and ensure equitable expansion. This explains the Gujarat CM’s emphasis on unleashing entrepreneurial energy, private-sector participation and pruning the bulging subsidy bill as a way to sustain India’s growth story.

Apart from that, the new leadership has been articulating a proactive, assertive and confident line on issues ranging from borders to foreign policy. Here, the old insular non-alignment or mushy weare-one-civilisation approach has no place. The premium will be on India’s engagement with world powers on terms that benefit the country.

All this, the BJP’s new leadership believes, will help the voter differentiate the party from its rivals—especially in the light of Congress Vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s indecisive approach to both social spending and growth. “We will draw a line in the sand and articulate a model that is capable of addressing infirmities in India’s economy and foreign policy,” in the words of BJP General Secretary Dharmendra Pradhan.

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he changed command structure’s approach appears to be easing the BJP’s path to power at the Centre. Modi, who was once an infrequent visitor to the RSS headquarters, has of late been trying to keep the Sangh leadership in the loop on major decisions taken by the party.

Sangh insiders say that the relationship has matured and the RSS now looks up to Modi as the only leader in the Parivar who has the political heft to counter its opponents.

Party President Rajnath Singh, who had once removed Modi from its parliamentary board, has been moving

in lockstep with the prime ministerial candidate. “There is now greater cohesion. Leaders used to be working at cross purposes in the past. They are now complementing each other’s efforts,” says a senior BJP leader who does not wish to be named.

Alongside, the old guard is being kept out of the loop. Advani, for example, was not even invited to a dinner hosted by the Parivar on 7 January to celebrate the BJP’s recent thumping poll victories in three states. In any case, he did not have any role in those campaigns, which were all centred on Modi and regional satraps.

The Lok Sabha effort, again, is being led by a feisty team that lets no opportunity go waste. Earlier this week, minutes after the last frame of a TV interview of Rahul Gandhi went off air, the BJP’s backroom boys stormed social media with attacks on Gandhi, flaying the Congress leader for seeing social issues through a ‘faith prism’ and ‘evading issues such as corruption and troubles confronting the economy’.

In this new scheme of things, every BJP leader has a dedicated role. While Jaitley has the task of crafting strategy, Amit Shah, Pradhan and JP Nadda are the campaign’s nuts-and-bolts men. With the party having identified the Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as chief conquest regions, their plan aims to emasculate regional leaders Mulayam Singh Yadav, Nitish Kumar and Mayawati. This plan counts heavily on the ‘Modi effect’ to break into territories earlier believed to be impenetrable. “The traditional template may not have much relevance today,” says Pradhan. This may not be wishful thinking. The Delhi Assembly polls showed an upstart AAP walking away with BSP voters. The Muzzafarnagar conflagration revealed a rupture in this sugarcane belt’s JatMuslim ties—and even in SC-Muslim bonding in some parts. “A churn is on in Uttar Pradesh and established players in the state are jittery about the next round of elections,” says the general secretary.

The transformation has Nagpur’s approval. At a time when Advani is losing his voice and Joshi’s proposals are being snubbed, the RSS is aiding the BJP by playing the vanguard’s role in a political mobilisation effort that finally has another generation at its helm. n 10 February 2014

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shift

Charge of the Youth Brigade The Congress decision to send Digvijaya Singh and Kumari Selja to the Rajya Sabha is part of Rahul Gandhi’s much-touted generational change agenda raul irani

Dhirendra K Jha

the next generation Rahul Gandh at an All India Congress Committee meet in New Delhi held in January 2014

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f all the arguments spouted

by the Congress for its decision to send Digvijaya Singh to the Rajya Sabha, there is one that offers signs of a generational change taking place within the party’s leadership rather seamlessly. Singh had announced—after his 10-year-long self-imposed exile from 18 open

elections drew to an end in 2013—that he would contest the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, a move that would never have allowed Jyotiraditya Scindia, the party’s youthful face in Madhya Pradesh, to hold firm ground in the state.

Sources say that the decision to nominate the AICC general secretary and for-

mer Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister to the Rajya Sabha is aimed at diffusing that danger, thereby ensuring Scindia-centric politics in the state. “By sending him to the Rajya Sabha, the party has ensured that he will be away from active politics in Madhya Pradesh for the next six years,” says a Congress leader.

10 February 2014

Simultaneously, the move has ensured that the party benefits from the heat Singh radiates. “By freeing him from Lok Sabha polls, the party wants him to focus on his responsibility as the functionary in charge of the key states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. He may also be of great use in minority-dominated seats outside Madhya Pradesh for his anti-RSS image,” says the Congress leader.

This is, say party insiders, exactly how Rahul wants to go about a generational change in the leadership—by bringing young leaders to the fore and securing advisory positions for the old guard.

This silent shift also helps explain why Kumari Selja, a four-time MP from Ambala and a prominent Dalit face of the party in Haryana, has been sent to the Rajya Sabha. Selja is a well-known detractor of Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Her nomination to the Upper House, despite the Jat veteran’s opposition, is being read as a snub to Hooda in party circles. The latter had been pushing for his candidate, PCC chief Phool Chand Mulana, also a Dalit like Selja, for that Rajya Sabha seat from Haryana.

Sources indicate that 51-year-old Selja, a Gandhi family loyalist, is set to be made either the AICC general secretary or Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee chief before the General Election scheduled in April-May this year. “Not only has she been drafted for party work ahead of the Lok Sabha elections,” says a Congress leader, “but she will also be playing a larger role in the Assembly elections in Haryana to be held later this year.”

Taken together, the two decisions amount to a big change. This is especially so since they come in the aftermath of some significant steps by Rahul Gandhi to effect a generational change in the state-level leadership of the party.

Spurred by the party’s massive rout in the recently-held Assembly elections in the states of Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the Congress acted swiftly and changed its PCC chiefs of all four states. The changes mark generational shifts in the politics of all these states. While Union Minister Sachin Pilot was appointed Congress chief in Rajasthan, party MP Arun Yadav was made PCC president of Madhya Pradesh, Arvinder Singh Lovely was put in charge 10 February 2014

of the Delhi Congress and Bhupesh Baghel was appointed the Congress chief of Chhattisgarh. All the new appointees are young faces of the party in their respective states—52-year-old Baghel is the eldest of them—and they have clearly replaced the old guard in the party.

Sachin Pilot, 36, has replaced Dr Chandrabhan, who was defeated in the Assembly polls in Rajasthan and is in his sixties. Arun Yadav, who replaced the 60-something former tribal affairs minister Kantilal Bhuria in Madhya Pradesh, is in his late thirties. Arvinder Singh Lovely, the party’s youthful face in Delhi, replaced the septuagenarian Jai Prakash.

Baghel, who replaced Dr Charan Das Mahant, 60, in Chhattisgarh, is known as an aggressive mobiliser. All the new PCC chiefs are considered close to Rahul Gandhi. Since the appointment of these young faces as PCC chiefs is in line with Rahul’s long-term plans to rebuild the party in the four states, these leaders are expected to work in their respective states for long stints.

In fact, the debacle in the recent Assembly polls seems to have accelerated the pace of generational change in the party. Earlier, the party’s moves had been rather slow. In March last year, the party had effected a similar generational shift in its Punjab unit, when Capt Amarinder Singh, 71, was removed from the post of state PCC president and replaced by 55-year-old Gurdaspur MP Partap Singh Bajwa. In 2009, just ahead of Lok Sabha polls, Bajwa, then a sitting MLA, had been picked up to challenge sitting threetime BJP MP Vinod Khanna from Gurdaspur, and Bajwa had won the election. One month later, the Congress appointed a young Dalit leader, Ashok Choudhary, considered close to Rahul Gandhi, as its new PCC chief in Bihar. The post in the state had been lying vacant for two-and-a-half years. Choudhary, 43, belongs to the Mahadalit community, a subgroup among Dalits whom the ruling JD-U has been wooing in the state.

Between 2000 and 2005, he was a minister in the Rashtriya Janata Dal-Congress alliance government in Bihar.

Sources say the pace that this process has assumed following the party’s rout in recently held polls is unlikely to be disturbed in the days to come. In Haryana, for example, PCC chief Mulana is set to

be replaced; the front-runners for this post are Kumari Selja and 37-year-old Ashok Tanwar, another promising Dalit leader in the party. Similarly, in Gujarat, Arjun Modhwadia’s days as the state PCC chief are said to be numbered. Here, Shaktisinh Gohil, an associate of Rahul Gandhi, has already become the face of the party’s state unit. In Maharashtra, PCC chief Manikrao Thakre’s term has ended and a change of guard is likely here too. In Jharkhand, a young face of the party, Gitashri Oraon, is said to have the backing of Rahul Gandhi. At present, she is a minister in the state and an AICC secretary.

The generational shift in the party has started getting reflected in other ways as well. For example, according to party insiders, it is primarily at the behest of Rahul that the NSUI and Youth Congress now send representatives to the state-level committees that select candidates for the upcoming General Election. That this transformation has at the moment become the central theme of the party was made apparent also at the AICC session held in the third week of January.

More than half the party leaders who spoke in the AICC session that was held in Delhi this January were younger than 40.

What is even more significant is the fact that at the AICC session, Finance Minister P Chidambaram issued a call for ‘yuva Bharat, sashakta Bharat’ (young India, empowered India), urging the party to offer at least half its tickets for the 2014 General Election to those under 35 years of age. In his speech, he pointed out that 830 million people in the country are below 35, and 620 million below 25.

By all means, these changes—as well as the fact that the old guard in the party is allowing this change to unfold smoothly—constitute the foundations of a more youthful leadership structure. But can all its problems be solved by a generational change in the party’s leadership? No one at its 24 Akbar Road office wants to argue against the consequences this change may have on the electoral prospects of the party, come April-May. There are still many ifs and buts, and Rahul would have to negotiate these if he wants the grand old party to work some miracle among India’s younger voters. A mere change of guard is unlikely to be enough. n open www.openthemagazine.com 19

g r ac e

Dominic Rouse/art graft/getty images

Life Gets a Long Rope

What the Supreme Court’s commutation of 15 death sentences at one go augurs Anoo Bhuyan

T

wenty-one years ago, a bus rolling through the

Satyamangalam forest in Karnataka carrying police and forest officials went over a landmine and blew up. As many as 22 people were killed, and since most of them were policemen, the State’s retaliation was swift. It arrested a large number of men, several of them linked to the sandalwood smuggler Veerappan. It would take a decade for a court in Mysore to acquit 109 of them.

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The judgment came in 2001. Of the 14 convicted, seven were sentenced to life. These included Bilavendran, Simon, Gnanprakasam and Madiah, who appealed to the Supreme Court and found themselves sentenced to death instead. The ‘Veerappan gang’ of four are now, respectively, 55, 50, 60 and 64 years old.

Their mercy petitions were sent to the President, but nine years later, they still had no answer. Three times did 10 February 2014

the Union Home Minister advise the President to turn down the mercy pleas. The petitions passed from one incumbent of the Rashtrapati Bhavan to the next, until finally in February last year, President Pranab Mukherjee rejected all four. Some time before that, he had rejected the pleas of terrorists Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru and they had swiftly been executed in secrecy. More hangings, many sensed, would come soon. On 17 February 2013, a group of anti-capital punishment activists learnt that the Veerappan four were going to be executed the next day.

They contacted Yug Mohit Chaudhry, a Mumbai-based lawyer who is one of India’s foremost experts on postmercy pleas. “I immediately prepared a petition and sent it to a lawyer based in New Delhi,” he says, “He then moved the Chief Justice at his house late that night.” The next morning, the executions were stayed.

Last week, the Supreme Court took up a set of 15 petitions, all of which had been rejected in the past year after hanging fire for years on end before Mukherjee took over as President in July 2012, and, in a burst of executive efficiency, began disposing of one case after the other in rapid succession. Execution dates had been fixed for all 15 petitioners, who had lawyers such as Yug Mohit Chaudhry, Anand Grover, Colin Gonsalves and Ram Jethamalani arguing in their defence.

On 21 January, The Supreme Court ruled that there was no doubt about the guilt of any of the convicts, but commuted all 15 death sentences to life terms. The main reason the court cited was the delay in rejection of their mercy petitions. Ranging from a wait of 11 years, as in the case of Suresh and Ramji, to two in the case of Magan Lal Barela, the Government could not offer any explanation for its tardiness. In the case of the Veerappan gang, it was worse. An RTI application showed that their mercy petitions were kept pending while those submitted after them were accorded priority. Another reason for the commutation was that a few of these convicts were found mentally ill, and to hang them would go against globally accepted norms of human rights.

All the cases are of gruesome murders. The convicts include men who murdered members of their own family.

One case was of a rape and murder, another of a gambling debt, while two were related to crimes of passion, and one was an act of terror. The commutation does not mean they stand absolved of guilt, just that they will serve a less severe punishment.

Some might call the 21 January verdict nothing short of a miracle. Others may say that justice is losing its potency. Either way, 15 human beings have unexpectedly been brought back from the dead. It is a rare moment in Indian judicial history.

Y

ug Mohit Chaudhry may as well be a doctor. He saves

lives. “He is like an angel,” says Kumar, brother of Sanjeev, one of the 15 convicts. The bidi-smoking lawyer

10 February 2014

has a PhD in English Literature from Oxford. He followed this up with a degree in law at Cambridge. He is a death penalty abolitionist who specialises in ‘post-mercy’ cases—those that have been through three rounds of court hearings and have had their mercy pleas rejected even by the President. There exists only one legal last resort after such a rejection—a final appeal to the Supreme Court.

Working with a group of eminent lawyers from Delhi and some juniors, Chaudhry represented all 15 petitioners whose death sentences have been revoked for a lighter punishment. This victory takes his tally of those saved from the gallows to 20 individuals (a few thanks to a mercy plea acceptance by the President).

“Will you come and celebrate with me tonight?”

Chaudhry asks a friend on the phone, at a guest house in New Delhi where he is staying. “Run off if you have to, but you have to meet me, even if it’s for half an hour.” The lawyer’s phone rings incessantly, but when he is in Mumbai, you can only reach him in office on a landline. He carries a mobile phone only while travelling. This is unusual for a lawyer who focuses on capital punishment, considering the alacrity with which India has been trying to execute death row convicts. Chaudhry was also the one who coordinated the last-minute reprieve of the executions of Magan Lal Barela and the Veerappan four. In both these cases, lawyers approached the Chief Justice of India at the judge’s residence on the night before the execution and got a stay order.

‘And what if excess of love bewildered them till they died?’ asks Chaudhry in an article he wrote for a newspaper. The line is from WB Yeats’ 1916 poem titled Easter.

The underlying philosophy seems to be an inspiration to him. After his PhD, he had published a book on Yeats.

What made him rethink the purpose of his life, however, was a specific instance of police torture: the cops had brutalised some employees working on his sister’s farm.

“What is the use of teaching English in India if I am unable to protect people who work for me? It seemed like self-indulgence with no utility,” he says, “I concluded that law is the more effective way to bring about change.”

As a lawyer, he is relatively young, having started his practice only in 2000. His first post-mercy case was in 2010. “I was definitely a better person when I was not practising law,” he laughs. Now, he is on a mission. “A man’s life is going to be taken and it is going to be taken in our name,” he says in general horror of capital punishment, “It behoves us to do something about it.”

Yet, law demands utmost professionalism and Chaudhry refuses to get emotionally entangled in the cases he handles. “I didn’t tell my clients the date of their judgment. I didn’t want them to suffer the anxiety,” he says. “Of course, I always want all my clients to win, but I wouldn’t dare hope. The fall [of disappointment] is too great. But this is a terrible position to be in. Because sometimes you ask yourself, ‘Who might lose?’ and realise you’re playing the role of the executioner.” open www.openthemagazine.com 21

See Li/Demotix/Corbis

noose morality (Clockwise from left) A protest against the death sentence awarded to Davinderpal Singh Bhullar; a celebration of the hanging of Ajmal Kasab; an effigy of Afzal Guru; and banners calling for the execution of the six men accused (and subsequently convicted) of the 16 December 2012 gangrape in Delhi AP

Saarthak Aurora/ Hindustan Times via Getty Images

T

he death penalty has a twisted history in India. It was in 1980 that the Supreme Court gave its seminal Bachan Singh judgment, instituting the doctrine of its being applied only in the ‘rarest of rare’ cases. It also laid down mitigating factors like age, poverty and scope for reform. India currently has 414 prisoners on death row, according to statistics for 2012 of the National Crime Records Bureau, and the past few years has seen the air getting increasingly charged in favour of capital punishment.

In 2012 and 2013, following the Delhi gangrape, there were people on the streets screaming for the rapists to be hanged, without any mercy shown to even the convicted juvenile. A group of agitators demanding their execution may still be spotted at Jantar Mantar, a popular protest site in the national capital. In 2012, the State’s 22 open

Amit Dave/reuters

execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, met with what can only be described as popular applause. Before Kasab’s hanging, the last execution had been back in 2004. But Kasab’s was followed in 2013 by Afzal Guru’s as punishment for his 10 February 2014

role in the December 2001 attack on Indian Parliament.

Given the din of demand for executions, Chaudhry calls the present judgment humane and brave. “It takes a great deal of courage for a court to commute such a large number of death sentences at one go,” he says, “Usually there will be considerations in a judge’s mind that such a move will be criticised. This has not happened. The judgment also covers a large number of issues besides the matter of delay or mental illness. It is concerned not just with imposition of the death penalty, but what we do with people before we execute them—the conditions under which a prisoner is kept, the lingering death of living under threat of the noose, and even post the execution of the convict. They have tried to humanise as far as possible the manner in which a death sentence is executed.”

The humane aspects of this verdict are evident in the tonal difference with the earlier Bhullar judgment, for example, which scoffed at the idea of grace. ‘It is paradoxical that people who do not show any mercy or compassion for others plead for mercy,’ wrote Justice GS Singhvi in his verdict then. The judge differentiated between the value of a terrorist’s life and that of a non-terrorist’s.

Contrast this with the view of this bench headed by Chief Justice of India P Sathasivam, which speaks of how an unreasonable delay in executing a prisoner amounts to his or her torture, an agony that in itself violates a citizen’s right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. He coupled this with Article 14, which guarantees equality, and clarified that a terrorist can thus not be discriminated against.

undar Singh, one of the 15 convicts whose sentence has been commuted, has been certified a ‘schizophrenic’ by the State Mental Health Institute in Dehradun. Singh, according to a researcher who met him, believes the people he killed are still alive. “He thinks he is in jail only because his house collapsed and the police brought him there to protect him,” says the researcher, who is studying the socio-economic backgrounds of death row convicts and does not want to be named.

On its part, the court judgment notes that Singh is ‘unkempt and untidy, cooperative but not very much communicative’ and ‘at times is inappropriate and illogical’.

Jail staff and fellow prisoners found that he likes to stay alone, does not interact with others and is unconcerned about his hygiene. “He is not mentally fit to be awarded [the] death penalty,” doctors are quoted as saying in the judgment document, recommending that he be placed under long-term supervision. Despite this, his mercy plea had been rejected.

Davinderpal Singh Bhullar, though not a petitioner, has also been undergoing psychiatric treatment. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the presidential rejection of his mercy plea. “I was surprised and bitterly dis-

S

10 February 2014

appointed at the wrong judgment in the case of Bhullar,” says Chaudhry, “But I’m delighted that this judgment has corrected that mistake.” Among the many things that the judgment seeks to correct is the judicial system’s insensitivity towards mental illness. It has overruled the Bhullar verdict, and his family is now in the process of applying for his sentence to be commuted to life.

The judgment could also impact the Rajiv Gandhi case.

Here too, there has been a long delay, with three convicts having waited 11 years already to know their fate. “The President and the Government have not applied their mind to the facts of the case. Last week’s verdict completely covers this case,” says Chaudhry, who will represent the petitioners in this case as well.

This judgment does not mention Afzal Guru but it seems to have tried making amends for the shameful manner in which his execution was conducted. Guru was not even allowed to meet his family before being put to death. “Even Pakistan treated the case of Sarabjit Singh better than we were treated. His family was allowed to meet with him, and his body came back to Punjab,” says Tabassum, Guru’s wife, speaking over the phone from Sopore. His cousin Yaseen recounts, “The letter informing us that his mercy petition had been rejected and an execution was fixed reached us two days after he was hanged. And it said, ‘This is for information and necessary action.’ What necessary action could we have taken then?” “Had the Supreme Court’s present judgment come a year earlier, Afzal might have been alive,” sighs Tabassum. This February marks a year since the execution of the former fruitseller turned terrorist.

Not all prison manuals in the country have the same procedure for executions. “In some cases, convicts are only told verbally by jail authorities. In states like Uttar Pradesh, there need be only one day between the rejection of your mercy petition and execution. This makes it difficult for us to even attempt to have the execution stayed,” says Chaudhry. Last week’s ruling makes it essential that the family and convict receive this notice in writing. Also, the execution can take place only 14 days after the convict is informed that his mercy petition has been rejected.

The new norms might prevent a situation like what happened with Magan Lal Barela last year: word unexpectedly reached his lawyers through a news website one evening that he was to be executed the next morning.

They had to go to the Chief Justice’s residence late that night, and he stayed the execution around midnight.

Barela was saved in the nick of time. And now his sentence is among the 15 just commuted.

I

n many ways, the 154-page judgment exceeds its brief

by setting up an entire framework for capital punishment. It has formulated 12 guidelines, prescribing legal aid, regular physical and mental health reports, the open www.openthemagazine.com 23

making of all necessary documents available to the convict, and a post-mortem report. The court has categorically held solitary confinement as unlawful and called it a form of torture.

There is no definition, though, of what constitutes ‘delay’. It speaks many times of how it is not possible to declare a time limit for dealing with a mercy petition.

Chaudhry does not see this vagueness as a problem for future cases in which he intends to use this one as a precedent. He will have to work to show the court that the State delayed the execution without reason, while the Government will have to show otherwise.

Mercy petitions do take time. One files it with the state’s Governor and country’s President. The Union Home Ministry is expected to make a recommendation on it for the President to consider. The President can ask for such a recommendation to be reconsidered, but only once. After that, he must take a decision. To do this, he examines comments made by the Home Ministry and even previous Home Ministers and Presidents. Chaudhry feels this process cannot be fast tracked or bounded in. “Things sometimes have to be left undefined in order to accommodate the differences inherent in each case,” he says.

There is a macabre irony to the case of the 15 who have just escaped the gallows: if their petitions had been dealt with diligently, they might already have been hanged. It is the inefficiency of the process, then, that has saved them.

Death row convicts will now be faced with an existential crisis: whether to hope for delays or promptness in the sealing of their fate. Human rights activists too are faced with a bizarre choice: whether to address the problem of dithering or worry about decisiveness. This riddle is not solvable. The ultimate goal of human rights lawyers is the abolition of capital punishment, but until then, in the words of lawyer Anand Grover, who presented the case on why mental illness is reasonable grounds for commutation, “you cut at the edges first in the hope that the core may fall… It is difficult to directly challenge the death penalty.” Grover has also been instrumental in the reading down of drug trafficking laws that prescribe death.

The way forward could be court judgments that step over each other as we plod along towards a social consensus on capital punishment. Or activists could push for legislative abolishment of the practice. This could be done even at the state level. The state governments of Punjab and Tamil Nadu have been agitating against the hanging of Bhullar and of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins, respectively, but have made no Assembly move to pass a law to abolish the penalty. “All they need do is pass a law and send it to the President for his signature. If he signs it, there will be no hangings in Punjab or Tamil Nadu.

Politicians are misleading the people,” says Rajinder Sachar, retired Justice of the Delhi High Court.

The Central Government could also enact a law that 24 open

There is a macabre irony to the case of the 15 who have just escaped the gallows: had their petitions been dealt with diligently, they might already have been hanged.

It is the inefficiency of the process that has saved them

ends this form of punishment. Chaudhry, Grover and Sachar all concur that this is an ideal way out. “Pressure on Parliament is what will work. Activists need to ensure that they don’t let this issue go,” says Sachar. “Just as we got rid of slavery, or accepted women’s equality, so will this important principle gradually develop.”

Indeed, some things have changed in India, and dramatically so. Section 303 of the Indian Penal Code used to confer mandatory death on life convicts who commit murder. This was struck down. The Narcotics Act made death mandatory for traffickers, but in 2010, the Bombay High Court read it down, making it discretionary (a petition on this is pending in the Supreme Court).

There will, of course, be arguments on both sides of the death penalty divide. Some may look at the crimes of the 15 who have been saved and argue that they have no right to live. Sonia and Sanjeev wouldn’t agree. When they were incarcerated in 2001 for killing eight family members, their child was a year old. “Sonia and Sanjeev want to see their child grow. For this sake, they want to live,” says Sanjeev’s brother Kumar. Others like Jafar Ali want to devote the rest of their lives to the pursuit of knowledge. “If my execution has to take place, I would rather read more before my death,” Ali confided to a researcher, “Like Bhagat Singh, I too want to spend my remaining time reading and knowing more about the world.”

The cause is gaining ground. Chaudhry is clear about its aim. “As long as the death penalty exists, we will make it as difficult as possible for the Government to execute anybody,” he says. “My goal is to make the death penalty inoperable.” n 10 February 2014

open house

All Are Invited Indian democracy has a surfeit of parties with peculiar agendas. A look at some parties that have emerged before this year’s general election Omkar Khandekar

I

t was sometime in September 2011 that Yogendra Yadav received a phone call that would turn him into a corruption fighter. The caller rang up one afternoon while Yadav was taking a stroll in the lush banana plantations that surrounded his ancestral home in the town of Bakhtiyarpur, about 50 km from Patna, a place he and his wife would retreat to when they weren’t at their son’s place in Ghaziabad, near Delhi.

It has been over two years since that call, and Yadav still has no answers to some questions. “I don’t know how he got to know about me,” he says. Or why he was picked for the role. What he did know after the telecon was that he needed to go to Delhi. A certain Jasvir Singh, an NRI working at a management firm and the caller in question, wanted to meet him. Back then, the two were strangers to each other, Yadav confesses, so it was natural to be suspicious. All they had in common was a desire to rid their motherland of the stain of corruption.

In any case, Yadav told himself as he packed his bags two months later, a trip to the capital was long overdue (to collect his pension). When he reached the meeting venue, the canteen of a community centre, he did not expect himself to be but a blip among some 400 people gathered there—all at Singh’s behest. After a discussion that lasted 8-10 hours, the gathering decided that platitudes about getting one’s hands dirty to clean the system held true, and that it’s imperative to involve the youth as change agents. And thus emerged the Bharatiya Rajnitik Vikalp Party (BRVP), an outfit of youngsters who unanimously decided to appoint 75-year-old Yogendra Yadav—not 26 open

to be confused with his Aam Aadmi namesake—as the party’s face.

I

n October and November 2013, the

Election Commission of India released two successive lists of newly formed political parties. The world’s largest democracy, the lists indicated, had got a shot in the arm with the number of registered political parties rising to 1,534, up by 142 since January that year. A cursory glance reveals the politically charged landscape of the north emerging the most active on that front. Uttar Pradesh leads the band-

The Bharatiya Rajnitik Vikalp Party wants to start by redefining the word ‘youth’... to include everyone from 18 to 60 years of age wagon with 28 new parties, with New Delhi hot on its heels with 25.

Poll pundits look at this trend without enthusiasm because it happens before every general election. Most such outfits are merely letterhead parties. In the runup to the previous Lok Sabha polls of 2009, India’s count of registered parties stood exactly at 1,000. By the time the battle reached the polling booths, only 364 of them surfaced on the ballot.

Nevertheless, every party wants a revolution, some through means more colourful than others. The BRVP, for one, wants to start by redefining the word

‘youth’, whose classification will be enhanced to include everyone from 18 to 50 years of age. “No,” Yadav interrupts as I quote the aforementioned part of his party’s constitution. “We changed it to members between 15 and 60 years. People suggested, ‘Sixty tak log tight rehtein hain, aap unko yuva consider kar sakte hain.’ (People are fit till the age of 60, so you can still consider them young).” Although Yadav doesn’t quite fit into that generously defined bracket, he claims to act as an inhouse adviser since “nobody takes these youngsters seriously”.

The USP of the party, however, lies in its proposal of a complete overhaul of the existing Parliamentary form of democracy to replace it with a Presidential system, a lá the United States of America.

Several years ago, Yadav had a chance to witness a US Presidential election from up close, and he returned overawed with how it works. But it was only years later, after he started getting emails from Singh, that he thought of adopting that form of governance. That, and, as he puts it, “Kuchh timepass chahiye, na.” (One needs a pastime).

Except he himself, all members of his party are young—of average age 30— mostly unlettered and, to his mind, ‘incorruptible’. Yadav says that he avoided getting members with experience, since those who know the mechanics of corruption also know how to practice it. Not that the party has been insulated from vested interests. The NRI founder, it turned out, allegedly wanted to control the party from Belgium. Party members, however, did not accept this, so, in May 2012, Jasvir Singh disassociated himself from its active functioning.

10 February 2014

ruhani kaur

election season demonstration Members of the Aarakshan Virodhi Party protest India’s affirmative action policy outside the district collector’s office in Faridabad

Yadav is realistic of his party’s chances in the upcoming election. Though the BRVP aims to contest the polls from 14 constituencies, he says it might win only one or two seats in the Lok Sabha.

However, for now, its members have a bigger cause: that of educating people on a Presidential form of democracy. This, he admits, will be a long haul—convincing people that the post of Prime Minister needs to be abolished and autonomous states favoured. It could take three or four decades, and the party might still not manage to reach all voters. What then? “[In that case,] just like the Parliamentary system governs us all without people knowing what it is about, a presidential form of government will take over.”

T

he two main governmental agen-

cies that must deal with this upsurge in new party formation are the Election Commission and Income Tax

10 February 2014

Department. By design, donations to political parties are exempt from income tax. The only catch is that details of donations above Rs 20,000 must be submitted to the taxation authorities.

Time and again, the EC has tried to draw attention to the grey activities conducted under the guise of political outfits. In 2006, the then Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami had expressed concerns over money collected by political parties. In a communication dated 31 July 2006, as reported by The Times of India, he wrote about instances of the EC having encountered cases of little-known parties getting donations from individuals and companies that ran into lakhs of rupees. Often, the payments were made in cash. In 2011, the EC took a close look at all registered parties and studied their operations. It found that only 16 per cent of the 1,200 parties at the time were actually engaged in ‘political activities’. Most had been floated to park

money illegally as donations to exploit tax exemptions.

Some ‘politicians’, like property dealer Mahesh Tyagi who formed the Bahujan Samajwadi Party (Baba Saheb) last year, are upfront about the purpose of such a party. Asked about the reason for setting such an entity up, Tyagi reportedly told a journalist, “Politics helps business. You know it better than I do.”

It makes the EC cringe. Its ability to derecognise one is severely restricted.

Setting up a party is easy. All it takes is 100 members swearing allegiance to such a formation on an affidavit and a demand draft payment of Rs 10,000 in the EC’s favour as registration fee.

Registration may take anywhere between six months and one-and-a-half years, and even if the party does not participate in elections, it continues to exist.

One can sense frustration in Gopalaswami’s voice when he talks about how a dormant party cannot be open www.openthemagazine.com 27

ashish sharma

time for party caps Yogendra Yadav (centre) presides over a meeting of the Bharatiya Rajnitik Vikalp Party, which was formed to fight corruption, held in Ghaziabad

knocked off the register: “Not as long as you have the [present] constitution. The interpretation can be so wide, that tomorrow someone might go to the SC and say that ‘Forming a political party is my birthright’.”

The former CEC lists a number of reasons for the formation of a dummy party, ranging from money laundering and simple egoism to squatting on a party name/symbol and dividing votes to meet another party’s strategic aims. “There could be a minuscule minority who genuinely want to do something different,” he says, “Most of it is bullshit.”

F

or a man in the business of soliciting votes, 55-year-old Dilip Thakore comes off as surprisingly—if not refreshingly—reluctant to approach voters. Although the Lok Sabha polls are less than four months away, Thakore is averse to organising rallies and giving speeches, unless invited. “I don’t want to pander to the people; run after them and 28 open

tell them how great they are,” he says. “I am going to tell them [that] I have solutions. If you want solutions, you have to come to me... It’s irrelevant whether they vote for me. Either way, I gain as long you begin to understand things.”

A resident of Bangalore, Thakore is publisher-editor of Education World, a human development magazine, and also the founder of Children First Party of India. On the face of it, the CFPI might sound like a party that wears a singlepoint agenda on its sleeve. Thakore thinks otherwise: “Nobody has a better manifesto than us.”

The party’s manifesto focuses on making an attempt to assess each aspect of national spending, snipping it appropriately and releasing funds for the empowerment of the ‘next generation’.

In addition, the party promises to reduce crimes against women by 75 per cent in one year.

A barrister trained in London, Thakore has been rubbing shoulders with politicians long before he decided to field a po-

litical party. He practised law at the Bombay High Court for five years before getting disillusioned with the legal system and joining the manufacturing sector. During this period, he went from being a Congress sympathiser to a Janata Party supporter, helping raise campaign funds and lobby power groups. Now that he has entered the arena himself, Thakore complains of being unacknowledged for the same reason he attributes to all the other problems plaguing the country: civic apathy. His party has a website; Thakore has a Twitter account, an editorial page in his magazine, and “a million readers”, as he puts it. “They know about us and yet they are overlooking it,” he says. “It’s possible that the people of India don’t want to be saved. You can take a horse to the water but you can’t force it to drink, right?”

At its onset, the 400-member strong CFPI had a novel approach towards recruiting party workers, a concept typical of pyramid marketing. Membership is conditional and granted once an appli10 February 2014

cant ropes in two other members, who, in turn, are supposed to enrol two each.

‘Through this multi-level marketing strategy,’ the website reads, ‘CFPI intends to build a membership base of 100 million within 12 months.’

“It has been over ten months since you launched the party. How is it working out?” I ask.

Thakore laughs. “I think the 12 months is a bit too optimistic,” he says, “Put a full stop after 100 million.”

“Over what time span then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t predict.”

“But when you wrote that...”

“Well, it’s okay,” says the aspiring politican. “It’s not written in stone.”

D

eepak Gaur’s party has been on a networking blitzkrieg of sorts: appointing conveners, organising rallies, gathering signature campaign support and doling out promises. He claims his party has inducted about 12,000 volunteers from various parts of North India.

In a few months, the party will be ready to fight nearly 40 Lok Sabha seats.

“I am not a politician,” he says. “I am a kalamkaar (writer).”

So why enter politics? “When writing about it doesn’t work, one has to flex some political muscle, no?” he chuckles.

Seated in his office at Faridabad that serves as a workshop as much as a garage, he rewinds the clock to the time he met Sushma Swaraj of the BJP. It was December 2012, and yet another wave of anti-reservation protests had swept the grounds of Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.

There were black bands, coordinated protests and effigies set afire. Of the nearly 8,000 protestors gathered there, Gaur and a few leaders of some NGOs made their way to the residence of the opposition leader, demanding that she meet them.

When she finally did, the leaders crowded around her and insisted that she take up their cause. They cited numerous letters they had written to her registering their protests, pleas which had gone unanswered. According to Gaur, Swaraj expressed helplessness, justifying India’s affirmative action policies as a corrective measure for all the crimes committed against India’s ‘lower castes’ by those from the upper echelons.

A Brahmin himself, Gaur says he strug-

10 February 2014

gled to grapple with Swaraj’s sweeping generalisation. “I told her my father was a farm labourer. All he did was toil throughout his life to purchase a few bighas of land. ‘What did he do? If your people committed these crimes, give them your share of reservations’,” recalls Gaur, adding that Swaraj dismissed their case by saying that the issue doesn’t figure on the BJP’s agenda.

“That pinched us,” he says. Four months later, Gaur got together with other NGO members and launched the All India Anti-Reservation Front. He admits that the party has not done any welfare work yet, but adds that it will deliver the goods the day it achieves power.

Although the party claims the support of all citizens, including that of ‘lower castes’, all its state and national working committee members (barring its convener in Rajasthan) are upper caste. Gaur smiles when I ask him about this. “We

The Vishwa Shakti Party seeks to abolish income tax, make provisions for a ‘housewife allowance’ and outlaw Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations had appointed our conveners through the internet,” he says, “It is possible that lower castes didn’t notice our presence.

Those who did must be availing the benefits [of affirmative action] themselves.”

I ask Gaur about his party’s take on India’s defence policy. “Defence [forces] don’t have reservations,” he replies.

What about foreign policy? “When we come to power, then we will think about this,” he says. Issues such as Kashmir can wait, too. For now, the party is gearing up for effigies to be burnt.

N

ew parties mushroom before every General Election, but this time round, the astounding success of the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi has spelt hope for many more wannabes than usual. Naturally, their role model of choice right now is Arvind Kejriwal.

However, Prasoon Kumar Mishra, a

Supreme Court lawyer who has started the Vishwa Shakti Party, has a different story to tell. In April 2011, social activist Anna Hazare and several of his supporters, including his protégé Kejriwal, were at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on a hunger strike. Two months later, yoga guru Ramdev Baba led another chapter of protests against black money at Ramlila Maidan. Supporting both the movements was Mishra, who claims to have shared the dais with Hazare several times.

“In those days,” says Mishra, “people used to ask Anna why he does not form a political party to fight [for the cause]. He used to say, ‘You can’t expect us to do everything. The leader will come from the masses.’ That’s what inspired us.” About a year later, Mishra and several others of Hazare’s India Against Corruption movement got together to form their own political outfit. The idea was to realise the dreams of their mentors, Hazare and Ramdev.

“Our party was getting increasingly popular,” claims Mishra, “Kejriwal thought, ‘I was at the agitations for all these days but malai toh koi aur khaa gaya (someone else is making off with the cream). When I got wind of this, I told him, ‘You don’t need to set up another party. I have already made one. Why don’t you run it?’ He refused and went ahead to form his own party.”

Mishra is unfazed by the fact that Hazare and Ramdev have little to say about the political outfit that aims to serve the cause they espoused. His party’s agenda, nonetheless, is to bring back the original Jan Lokpal bill and act on Ramdev’s advice against black money.

Apart from declaring black money ‘national property’, the VSP also seeks to abolish income tax, make provisions for a ‘housewife allowance’ and outlaw currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations to keep wealth from being hidden away. Although Mishra’s party hasn’t started campaigning yet, he is confident of its chances. The VSP intends to field Lok Sabha candidates in six states, he claims.

With goals as clear as his, Mishra is sure that running a country is not a daunting prospect. “Jaise ghar chalta hai, waise desh chalane ki koshish karenge (We will run the country the same way we run our house),” he says. n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

HUBERT LIBISZEWSKI

protesting appeasement A demonstration in front of the Universities UK office in London

co n s e rvat i s m

Separate Is Never Equal

Gender segregation on British campuses highlights how efforts to placate vocal minority groups put individual freedoms at threat Sophie Morris

W

hen the Atheist, Secularist &

Humanist Society at Reading University in England labelled a pineapple ‘Mohammed’ in its stall at the university’s freshers’ fair back in 2012, its representatives were ejected from the event for ‘causing upset and distress’ to some students, as the college Students’ Union put it. The group of atheists reacted by saying the offensive pineapple was a means for them to assert they lived in a country where free speech was protected and where a fruit may be named whatever they so choose.

Later that year at Bristol University, the Christian Union decided that women would only be permitted to speak and teach at events and meetings if they were accompanied by their husbands (amazingly, women were not allowed either at all until then). After coming under intense attack, the Union decided to revoke this on 4 December 2012, as reported by The Guardian.

On another occasion at University College London (UCL), at a talk titled ‘Islam or atheism: which makes more sense?’, atheist speaker Professor Lawrence Krauss noticed that people were being moved from their seats so men and women could sit separately.

Appalled, the professor protested.

‘Almost walked out of debate as it ended up segregated,’ he tweeted, ‘saw 3 kids being ejected for sitting in wrong place. I packed up and they caved in’. To its credit, UCL took swift action against the Islamic Education and Research Academy (IERA), which had organised the event, and banned it from campus; IERA did not respond to a request for an interview for this article, but at the time disputed Krauss’ version of events, saying there was an option of a mixed seating zone, with the other two sections only for men and women who opted to sit apart.

As such ‘voluntary segregation’ becomes common in British colleges, it has inflamed a debate on campus concessions made to religious groups.

According to Student Rights, an organisa-

10 February 2014

tion that tracks extremism at universities, radical preachers of assorted faiths spoke at 180 events during a one-year period ending March 2013, with 40 of these organised by Islamic societies that allowed gender segregation. Further, an investigation by an education supplement of The Times found that of 46 respondents, 29 universities allowed this practice.

British students say they feel suffocated by all this deference to religious practices in other ways as well. “We’ve seen a stream of events which have in common the censorship of the publications of non-believers such as satires and comics,” says Chris Moos, a PhD student at London School of Economics (LSE) who was ejected from his own freshers’ fair in October 2013.

While campus segregation was still fizzing, news broke that a Muslim staffer of Marks & Spencer had refused to serve a shopper buying alcohol What stands out is the fervour with which Moos and his colleague, Abhishek Phadnis of LSE’s Atheist, Secularist & Humanist Society, were asked to desist from wearing certain ‘Jesus and Mo’ T-shirts that had satirical depictions of two religious personalities. Moos and Phadnis were shocked. They contend that this amounts to harrassment and believe there was no evidence that any student had complained. The Student Union representatives, they say, took it upon themselves to banish the T-shirts to avoid causing anyone who may see them any hypothetical offence.

This was all the more surprising, given the point made by the Student Union’s General Secretary Jay Stoll only a month earlier: ‘The rights of each person to dress... as they choose has been at the core

of the cohesion of our multicultural society.’ Stoll, who declined comment for this story, considers this matter closed.

Moos, however, is alarmed that it is student unions rather than university authorities that have begun to encourage such censorship. “This is quite a shocking development,” says Moos.

B

ritish universities are public-

ly funded, and Britain prides itself in upholding the liberal values of democracy and equality, including gender equality. It is a country where debate is encouraged and freedom of expression shielded. Its universities, in turn, have a hallowed position in defending and inculcating the same in its students so they can be the country’s next doers, thinkers and leaders.

Yet, says Moos, “Many student unions have the misguided idea that since there is a lot of prejudice against minorities, they have to support the most reactionary factions within those minorities, which is ironic, because many of these people support misogyny, anti-democratic values and homophobia.” While dissent is as much a feature of student unions and universities as of society itself, Moos is unsettled by where such support may lead. “This is the society we’ll be looking at in 20 or 30 years,” warns Moos. “It’s a matter of who cries loudest. These people will be in leading positions. When we allow this, we’re sending a clear signal to society that this is permissible; it is a sign that these are the values we want to uphold.”

Confrontations between the rights of the religious and those of non-believers have always been awkward, but now many students fear that universities and student unions are acting in favour of the radically religious. It has been suggested that money is at the heart of the issue; that foreign students and their tuition fees are too valuable to lose.

Like businesses dependent on foreign revenues, universities must also cater to open www.openthemagazine.com 31

overseas students—who happen to pay much higher tuition fees.

One lot of campaigners, including a British Indian undergraduate studying History at Cambridge, Radha Bhatt, has written to the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva asking for its intervention in what they call the ‘persistent issue of discrimination through gender segregation at public universities in the UK’. Among those who have sought its help are London School of Economics’ Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, Southall Black Sisters and the FitnahMovement for Women’s Liberation.

The issue has gone far beyond student life in the UK. While campus segregation was still fizzing just before Christmas, a news story broke that a Muslim employee of Marks & Spencer, a British chain of stores, had refused to serve a customer buying alcohol. The firm apologised, calling itself a ‘secular business... that welcomes all religious beliefs’, and admitted that it should have placed the employee in question in a more suitable role. But the incident brought into focus a similar dilemma faced by businesses: to uphold secular British values or privilege minority sensitivities.

Bhatt, who has been watching trends, made the move from disgruntled bystander to active campaigner when an extraordinary event hit the headlines in November 2013, bringing several separate instances of discrimination on university campuses together. An organisation called Universities UK (UUK), a representative body for British institutions of higher education, released a guidance document on hosting external speakers at university events.

Its most controversial bit related to a hypothetical case study, where, say, a radical preacher might visit a university and request that men and women be seated apart: ‘Assuming the side-by-side segregated seating arrangement is adopted,’ the document said, ‘there does not appear to be any discrimination on gender grounds merely by imposing segregated seating.’

Outraged, Bhatt instructed lawyers to press for a judicial review on grounds of discrimination; UUK withdrew the hypothetical situation from its guidelines temporarily to seek further advice.

Contacted for this story, UUK says it is 32 open

unable to comment on the matter while seeking legal advice. Bhatt says she is pursuing the issue to make sure that this doesn’t happen again—that the so-called hypothetical case study is withdrawn permanently. She does not see this as a Muslim issue: “It involves all religions and affects all women. Religious freedom is very important, but not as important as gender equality or human rights,” she says. “Segregated seating is symptomatic of the real rise of religious fundamentalism in the UK, and bodies such as UUK, which should be defending minorities, are instead supporting them.”

Many apologists have compared such segregation with the creation of spaces like women-only and faith-based schools and colleges in the UK. But this is a lazy argument—the latter were intended as spaces for women in fields of activity and education that had historically kept them out. “These guidelines will also have a disproportionate impact on minorities where women already struggle to assert their right to equality,” says Bhatt.

O

ff campus, the issue of veiled Muslim women has seen heated exchanges. In 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreign and home secretary Jack Straw spoke out against the full veil—from head to toe—saying it was bound to make relations between Muslim and non-Muslim communities more difficult. This was a bold statement for a member of a Labour government that had made multiculturalism the lynchpin of its vision of a cohesive, empathetic Britain, lived in by people with different faiths but shared values.

He had not, as was wrongly reported, asked for a ban on the veil. Faced with flak, Straw later apologised for what he said, but, in his memoirs published in 2012, said he was glad he had been brave enough to raise the issue.

Many Britons agree that this is not just about women’s rights, but about securing Britain from the threat of religious fundamentalism. Appeasement, they say, has proven itself ineffective as a policy in the face of rigid belief systems.

Britain’s current Prime Minister David Cameron of the Conservative Party has recently said he was ‘absolutely clear’

that universities should not permit gender segregation. This sounds heartening, yet his government is the most religious in many years. He has appointed a minister of state for Faith, Baroness Warsi, who recently boasted that Britain has one of the ‘most pro-faith governments in the West’. The eagerness with which it is opening new faith schools—at least 25 this year—compounds this. Cameron might have condemned gender apartheid, but he has not addressed the factors that allow these grotesque inversions of the country’s ideals.

Maryam Namazie, a spokesperson for the Fitnah-Movement for Women’s Liberation, a signatory to the letter to the EHRC, however, is certain that gender equality is not in conflict with religious freedom. ‘If anything can be learnt from the recent fight (and small victory) against the endorsement of sex segregation at UK universities, it is that gender segregation has nothing to do with the right to religion; after all, ordinary Muslims (not a homogenous group by any means) manage to go about their lives while freely mixing with the opposite sex all the time,’ she writes in email response to my questions, ‘Of course, it is not just Universities UK. Whilst many got it right this time around and opposed the UUK’s position that sex segregation is a deeply-held religious belief, many— including the British government— have got it wrong countless times before.

Which is why the UUK thought it could get away with endorsing gender apartheid, and why Islamists can dare to speak of ‘women’s comfort’ (as they sit far enough away from men), while waging an all-out war on women.’

At the intersection between religious freedoms and gender equality, the body entrusted to support the British university system appears to have bowed to a few extremist, outmoded and unashamedly discriminatory whims. ‘Freedom’ here in the UK, as in every nation state, is defined by an evolving array of explications and limitations. In this instance, the UUK was quite clearly privileging freedom of religious expression, which is enshrined in Britain’s laws and throughout the systems that govern it, over the rights of women. The latter are similarly protected by law, if not always by reality. n 10 February 2014

i m ag e ry

Women in Our Ads It’s not just that Tanishq ad, a swarm of new promotional campaigns project women as strong, independent and in control of their worlds Aanchal Bansal

I

n october last year, ahead of Diwali

and the impending wedding season, retail jewellery brand Tanishq came up with a commercial that created quite a stir. The advertisement, directed by Gauri Shinde of English Vinglish fame, is a simple video for the brand’s new collection, and has been commended for breaking away from the stereotype of fair-skinned virginal brides and intro-

counter punch A still from the new Bournvita TV spot featuring a mother encouraging her daughter as she trains as a boxer

ducing the concept of remarriage—perhaps a first in Indian advertising.

The ad features a dusky Indian woman—played by theatre actor Priyanka Bose—looking at herself in the mirror while getting ready. A little girl walks up to her, and after a brief conversation, the two of them walk towards the mandap (altar). The little girl settles down with her grandparents, but soon wishes to be a part of the pheras. While she is shushed by her grandparents and the bride, the groom calls out to her and asks her to join them while the ceremony is carried out.

The ad ends with the girl asking the groom if she can call him ‘daddy’.

Within days of going online, the ad went viral, with the online community lauding it as ‘taboo-breaking’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘progressive’. The ad recently made it to the list of ‘7 most inspiring campaigns for women in 2013’ compiled by US-based trade magazine Adweek, which described it as ‘not only revolutionary [but] crazy bold’. The ad was ranked fourth, beaten by an ad for a school in Kentucky, a Pantene shampoo spot that plays on tropes of gender politics at the workplace, and a Dove commercial.

While the Tanishq ad tinkers with traditional notions of marriage and complexion, Indian advertising has more often than not piggy-backed on these concepts to promote fairness creams, soaps, shampoos and possibly every other consumer product under the sun. The ad also comes at a time when Indian advertising is grappling with a new women’s discourse on rights, stereo-

More often than not, Indian ads have piggy-backed on traditional notions of marriage and complexion to promote shampoos, soaps, fairness creams, et al types and representation that is gathering momentum.

The furore over a series of Ford Figo print ads by JWT India last year—ads showing women gagged and thrown into the back of a Figo to highlight the car’s ample boot space—led to the stepping

down of senior staff. Released around early March 2013, the ads did not go down well with a country still fuming over the gangrape in Delhi on 16 December 2012.

The campaign, which was created for submission to ad awards and eventually retracted, raised hackles for its ‘offensive’ and ‘sexist’ use of exaggeration.

W

hile the ad fraternity pledged to be more responsible in the future, the Indian Chapter of the International Advertising Association has since kickstarted a campaign on gender sensitisation called Violence on Women (VoW).

Issues like over-sexualisation of deodorant ads and stereotypical roles represented in cooking oil ads were taken up by this campaign. What trickled in over the months that followed were ads like Gillette’s soldier ad that called for protection of women and Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Jaago Re’ ad in which he pledged that he would make way for the heroine’s name to be listed first in the casting credits of his films.

The Gillette soldier ad was critiqued for being ‘superficial’; its creators at

a new ideal Stills from an advertisement for Tanishq wedding jewellery featuring a single mother rather than the typical virginal bride

BBDO India were seen as calling out to men to embrace soldierly values by protecting women. The clear implication is that women are vulnerable, and need men to defend them. SRK, too, has only pledged to ‘make way’ for his leading ladies to be listed first.

Advertising agency Taproot, which released a series of press ads on social media networking sites to combat domestic violence, resorted to portraying women as goddesses who shouldn’t be assaulted or violated. Its images of battered and bruised goddesses were meant to appeal to cultural sensibilities against violence being inflicted on women, but again, the subtext suggested that women seen as goddesses should be respected, that there is no place for the ordinary.

It is in the context of these rather lukewarm responses to the gender discourse triggered by the gangrape and the reaction to them within the public realm that the Tanishq ad seems to shine through, though it may be accused of echoing a Femina campaign some years ago.

Indeed, the ad has its share of detractors.

According to veteran advertising professional Alyque Padamsee, who in the 70s and 80s created iconic female characters like Lalitaji for Surf, marketed by Hindustan Lever, and the Liril girl, the Tanishq ad is “refreshing” but it fails in one crucial aspect. “While the ad focuses on the woman, she has no voice,” he says.

The jewellery ad, according to Padamsee, still reflects on the man. “It still takes a man to make a statement and marry a woman who already has a child. Where is the woman here?” he asks.

“Lalitaji was a woman who had a voice; she had a no-nonsense demeanour, couldn’t be taken for a ride and could make an informed choice by buying the product without a man telling her to do so,” he explains. Speaking of the bikiniclad Liril girl dancing under a waterfall, Padamsee says that the character represented the fantasy of a typical housewife who could manage to steal some time for herself only while taking a shower.

But Tanishq is not alone. Several ads in recent months seem to have taken a more definitive stance as far as the representation of women is concerned. The recently-released ‘Jeet ki Taiyyari’ campaign by Cadbury Bournvita is an example.

Highlighting the role of the mother in 10 February 2014

‘progressive parenting’, one of the spots in the series shows a mother, perhaps single, juggling time between working shifts at a takeaway outlet and taking her child for boxing training. Through a grim and sombre tint, the mother and child are seen diligently training together and negotiating a rather hard life of limited resources and opportunities.

This is quite different from the standard banter that a mother and son share in ads for similar products. Incidentally, or perhaps by design, the child in this particular ad is a girl. The mother is the one in command here. Compare this to the commonly-seen doting mum running after her child with a glass of milk, often outwitted by his antics and tantrums.

While the brand places itself in a situation where parents are no longer bystanders and actively participate in the competitive lives of their children, it also sees itself as a gender-fair brand.

Several ads in recent months, such as TV spots for Tanishq and Bournvita, seem to have taken a more definitive stance on the representation of women However, the brand is quick to point out that the ad was not meant to make a statement on ‘women empowerment’—that its casting of a strong mother and a girl in practice for boxing is just reflective of changing times.

“We see women as progressive parents in their own right... the philosophy of the brand is absolutely gender fair. There is a representation of both a boy and girl in our series of ads,” says Manjari Upadhye, Vice-president, marketing, cocoa beverages, Cadbury India.

As ads like Tanishq and Bournvita dabble in bending gender stereotypes, Bindu Sethi, chief strategy officer at JWT India, explains that advertising works by dipping a toe in the pool. “Advertising is not like cinema. Films respond first to ideas and change in society—they make a statement and people respond to it and talk about it, but the movie is over in three hours. But advertising takes time to

respond because, at the end of the day, it is about building a brand, a concept, and pursuing people to buy the product [regularly].” Taking the example of the ‘Daag Achhe Hain’ campaign started by Ariel, Sethi explains that this was the brand’s way of suggesting that one need not worry about dirty clothes—let children play; the detergent can take care of the rest.

Similarly Nirma, a detergent patronised by middle-class and lower-middle class households, toys with idea of women having more agency than just being home-makers by showing four women literally getting their hands dirty and pulling out an ambulance stuck in muddy slush. “The brand is taking ‘permission’ here. After several years of sticking to advertising about homemakers taking pride in [their clothes’] colours remaining intact and clean after using the product, the brand gently suggests an alternative role for women—don’t hold yourself back from stepping into whatever you want to; there is Nirma.”

And before eyes begin to roll at the importance given to washing clothes and detergents in a woman’s life in advertising, Sethi is quick to point out that statistically, only 18 per cent of households in India have domestic help. “It is a myth that we have ample domestic help in our country. Most women still have to worry about laundry,” she says.

There are other campaigns too; a Tata Docomo ad called ‘Open up with Honesty’, in which a bride musters the courage to speak with her in-laws and tell them she hates tinda and lauki; and that Asian Paints ad where a young army man makes the effort of doing up a room for his new bride to make her comfortable.

As advertising continues to dabble with portraying women differently and realistically, beyond fair-skinned cutouts, the representation of women in advertising is being re-thought, it would seem.

“Times are changing and we have to keep up,” says SK Swamy, who heads the Indian chapter of the International Advertising Association. He also offers a word of caution: “I recently watched an ad for Titan Fastrack in which a woman was battering a man, and is seen as championing today’s woman’s cause. We should watch out for swinging to the other extreme. Violence should be condemned equally for both the sexes,” he says. n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

pa s s i n g t h r o u g h

ritesh uttamchanadani

The Thorn in Schumi’s Flesh

the fast and the philosophical Damon Hill, 1996 F1 champion, thinks destiny has a role to play in victories and losses

Damon Hill, 1996 F1 World champion, on the delusions of daredevils and his battle with Michael Schumacher Akshay Sawai

T

he vast lobby of the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, with its white Thassos marble floor and musical notes floating out of a bright red piano custom built in Germany, is a setting of luxurious tranquility. But Damon Hill, the British Formula 1 World champion of 1996 who sits by a large window facing the Arabian Sea, knows the fragility of this sense of well-being. He doesn’t say it but his wise eyes under thick dark eyebrows do. It is not known whether Hill, the rare driver to have defeated Michael Schumacher at his peak, is aware that in this very lobby five years ago there was terrorism and carnage. But Hill has seen enough tragedy in his own life.

Damon Hill was born into privilege.

He was the son of 1962 and 1968 Formula 1 World champion Graham Hill. Graham and Damon Hill are the only father and son to conquer the top prize in F1. At the height of Graham Hill’s fame and fortune, he, his wife and their three children lived in a 25-room mansion in Hertfordshire. But in 1975, when Damon was 15, Graham Hill (senior) died when the twin-engine plane he was flying crashed on a foggy night. The Hills no longer had the same means. As a young man, Hill had to work as a construction labourer and motorcycle courier to earn a livelihood.

“It was hugely traumatic,” Hill says of his father’s death. “It just makes you a bit more philosophical, reflective about what life is all about. You have to change your expectations and adapt to the way life is rather than what you want it to be.

They say it’s character building. I don’t like that expression—it sounds like corporal punishment.”

He laughs when he says the last bit. He has a serious face but also a sudden hearty laugh that reaches his eyes. He turns serious again and says, “It instills a… once you know what you are dealing with, it makes you determined and tolerant of disappointment.”

10 February 2014

Of the family’s adjustment to the new economic realities of their life, Hill says, “When you are young, it is not a problem.

I did not cry over it. In a way, it was a good lesson for a young person, not being dependent, not expecting advantages. I was just following the model my parents followed. They lived through World War II, everyone just picked up the pieces and got on with life. But [my father’s death] was much, much harder for my mum.

My mum lost everything, a husband, financial security, social status, and she had to worry about the kids.”

H

ill, 53, and a father of four him-

self, had jet black hair in his racing days. He is almost completely grey now.

Pronounced nasolabial lines and a goatee are the other defining features of his face.

He is in Mumbai to promote the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon. He sits in a chair with a slate grey cushion and once or twice adjusts the square red pillow behind his back. While answering questions, he often gazes out of the floor to ceiling glass panels to his left. Right outside is a lawn. Small garden plants dance in the 4 o’ clock breeze. Beyond the lawn and the road is the sea and tip of Malabar Hill with Raj Bhuvan, the official residence of Maharashtra’s governor.

A love for speed and racing was hardwired in Hill. After working small jobs, taking loans and paying his dues in motorcycle racing, Hill finally got his F1 break in 1992, at age 31. There were obstacles ahead. Due to his late entry in the sport, he only had a few years to prove himself. Two, being Graham Hill’s son he bore that weight of expectations. Three, he was racing in arguably F1’s toughest years. Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, the icons of the sport, were still roaring on the track. Then there were hungry young drivers like Schumacher, Mika Hakkinen and Rubens Barrichello. But Hill had ability, and soon a good car too

(Williams). In 1993, just his second season, he finished a creditable third behind Prost and Senna.

Then came the two days in April and May 1994 that changed F1 and Hill’s career.

On 30 April, during the second qualifying of the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy, Roland Ratzenberger, a rookie Austrian driver, failed to make a right turn and slammed into a wall at almost 315 kmph.

The car, one side blown to bits, spun off the walls and came to a halt. As rescuers ran towards the car, Ratzenberger’s head, a red and white helmet still on, dropped to its side. He was dead. In the Williams paddock, Senna, the sport’s cult figure, a daredevil with the face of an enigmatic poet, tried to comprehend the accident, briefly discussing it with a technician, thrusting his left palm forward to indicate the path of the car, and walked back out of sight of the cameras. A day later, another car rammed into a wall. Another slumped helmet. This time, yellow with a green band. Senna’s.

Hill saw all that. He and Senna were both driving for Williams. This was not the first time he had lost a teammate. In 1986, coming up the ranks, he had witnessed the death of a driver named Bertrand Fabi, a would-be teammate. But on both occasions Hill went on record to indicate that he would continue to race and nurse his passion for speed.

I

n the Oberoi lobby, with the piano in the background and having just consumed a cup of aromatic coffee, and, from the evidence of the buttery crumbs on a plate in front of him, a small cookie or two as well, Hill considers a question about what place fear has in the construct of men with hazardous passions.

“Maybe we are all slightly deluded,” he says. “Damien Hirst’s piece of art, the shark in a tank, is [about] the impossibility of death in the mind of someone open www.openthemagazine.com 39

living.” The work, a real dead shark in a tank filled with formaldehyde, is really called that: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. (The tabloid The Sun had another name for the expensive exhibit—‘£50,000 for Fish Without Chips’). Hill adds, “It is impossible for us to not think of being, so we kind of put it out of our mind.”

So he doesn’t feel fear, then.

“You feel fear,” he says. “Ayrton [Senna] said fear comes around you when you get into the car. You have to be aware of the risk. You’d be a liability if you weren’t.

The challenge is to do it right. Spectators like to see accidents, I know, but for a driver [an accident] is a failure because he’s made a mistake and is not going to get a result [from the race]. Attention has as much to do with winning as not making a mistake. It’s about that and not about worrying whether you are going to get hurt.”

Senna’s death pitchforked Hill into the position of Williams’ team leader. He was adequate to the challenge, and helped in part by a disqualification of Schumacher in the British Grand Prix and his being barred from the subsequent two races.

Hill was close to the title, but a crash with Schumacher in the season’s final decisive race in Adelaide denied him the Championship by one point. Some followers of the sport still believe the crash was deliberate on Schumacher’s part.

Asked if there was animosity between him and the German, Hill says, “Animosity is a negative emotion.

Frustration, yes. Michael was tough to beat. But ultimately, I realised I just had to get on and focus on my job.”

Hill does agree when asked if some of Schumacher’s tactics pushed the boundaries of fair play. “Yes, it was no secret that his approach was pretty uncompromising to winning and sports. He stepped over the line a few times of what most people would like to see in sports. He was certainly a controversial competitor, but there’s no denying his ability, competitive urge, determination to win time after time.” Hill is saddened that this winning machine who infuriated him at times but who also brought out the best in him and with whom he had champagne baths on the podium several times, this very picture of health and vigour, now lies in coma in a hospital in 40 open

France. “Everyone’s still in shock. It was a horrible thing to happen and has affected everyone in the sport.”

In 1996, Hill finally won the title.

Though he had the advantage of an efficient car, it was a remarkable achievement because he clinched it only in the last race of the season, in Suzuka, Japan.

Two, he did it despite having been dumped by his team for the next season.

“It’s a relief because you know [that morning] that you are going to find out [the result] that afternoon. You don’t have to wait six months,” he says of the most important day of his career in Suzuka.

“You get to a point where you just have to have faith in fate. It could go either way.

Villeneuve’s wheel came off (Jacques Villeneuve, his closest rival that season, finished second). It could have happened to my car. So how much of it is a roll of the dice, I don’t know.”

After the win, there was elation and

“Yes, it was no secret that [Schumacher’s] approach was pretty uncompromising to winning...but there’s no denying his ability, competitive urge, determination to win...” d a m o n h i l l , former FI champion

more relief. “Slowly, it becames a reality.

At first, it’s not a reality,” Hill says. He was, like his father, a Formula 1 champion. He’d never have to do odd jobs again, for one. Not that they weren’t fun. Hill narrates a story from his courier days.

“I was working as a motorcycle despatch during the week, racing motorbikes on Saturdays and cars on Sundays.

I don’t know what my insurance profile was then. Riding my motorbike through the streets of London and being paid for it… I couldn’t think of a better job. This [story] goes back to the pre-internet days.

Ad agencies would [physically] deliver artwork, and sometimes it was too big for the bike. One time I remember there was this artwork that was three square foot. I lost it in a tunnel in Knightsbridge. I came out of the tunnel, realised it had gone…” Again, the full laugh. “Had to go

back all the way around Piccadilly and back into the tunnel. The artwork was still there. I thought ‘Oh great.’ Then a taxi went right over it.”

Consequences?

“Embarrassment.”

Another time, he lost his consignment twice. “It had to get from Chelsea to Fleet Street in ten minutes. When I got there, I realised I had lost the artwork. Luckily, there was a copy. I picked it up but lost that too. This time, I did not want to go back.”

Hill is asked about contemporary Formula 1, especially its seemingly unfair financial structure where a new driver has to bring in hefty sponsorship, $10 million and upwards, for just a chance to race. For Indians in particular, participation in the sport is beyond reach. Even the lower leagues of the sport do not come cheap. In an interview to a youth portal, Karun Chandhok, one of only two Indians to race in Formula 1 (Narain Karthikeyan being the other), said, “To do Formula 3, you are looking at [a sum of] Rs 3-3.5 crore, to do GP-2 you are looking at £1.7 million, which is about Rs 10 crore.” Couldn’t Formula 1 sponsor talented drivers?

“I won’t disagree,” Hill says. “That really was the responsibility of the FIA (Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, governing body of world motorsport). They have somehow failed in their duty to police that side of things, in making sure some of their profits are put back in the sport to help build the pyramid. Their duty is to be guardians of the entire project, not just one group. It’s gone out of their hands.”

The conversation cannot end without a mention of Hill’s brush with music. As a teenager, he was a member of a band with a rather understated name—Sex, Hitler and the Hormones.

“It was a stupid schoolboy name for our punk band,” Hill says. “Everyone was trying to outrage everyone. When you are 16, you see the Sex Pistols and punk rock comes up, you get very excited. It was a joke name. But it was a very bad joke. Bad taste was the fashion those days. We did a couple of shows. It didn’t last. Which is not surprising.”

A little short of musical Hall of Fame, was it?

“Consigned to the dustbin of pop.” n 10 February 2014

organic

Weekend Harvest Bangalore’s growing community of urban farmers ANURADHA NAGARAJ

O

n a warm Saturday morning on the outskirts of Bangalore, on a 400 sq ft plot, Sajith U is busy digging. Next to him, his wife Deepthi harvests carrots. Four-year-old Amanyu watches his parents toil on their little patch of land as he eats his snack. It is a family thing. After five days of being busy infotech professionals, every Saturday the couple drives nearly 20 km from their Bangalore flat to their plot.

They till the soil, sow seeds, put in manure brought from their ‘smart compost pot’ at home, and harvest their crop. By

noon, they have a bagful of organically grown vegetables and the promise of more when they return to their ‘farm’ the next Saturday.

“We eat what we grow. What could be better,” says Deepthi, a software engineer with Intel by day and a farmer on weekends. “It started with gardening and then growing vegetables in little pots at home.

But when we got a taste of what we grew, we wanted more.”

And so the family made the transition from their balcony garden to a plot of land at Green Thumb Mini Farms at Kodati photos vivek muthuramalingam

sabziwala Anand Maddur harvesting bananas with his father at Green Thumb Mini Farms near Bangalore

village on the fringes of the city, not very far from the infotech hub on Sarjapur road. On plots leased out for Rs 2,000 per quarter, all the seeds Amanyu saved for ‘amma’s garden’ and the waste for ‘amma’s compost’ was put into the soil, and what grew amazed and delighted them.

“In the last three months alone, we have harvested cabbage, cauliflower, tomato, carrot and all varieties of greens. And we share our produce with others here.”

Deepthi, like many others, is now a ‘seed hunter’. “Everywhere we go, even on holidays, we look for seeds and carry them back with us to the little plot that promises so much,” she says. “We grow three varieties of ladyfingers, including a red one. I don’t like to eat it, but love growing it. And the beautiful cabbages and cauliflowers we harvested tasted unlike anything we have tasted before.”

One of the other successful ‘weekend farmers’ with an envious array of veggies growing on her plot is Sumathy Sreekumar, who grew up listening to songs while she took care of a vegetable garden back home in Kerala. The software professional carried her love for plants to the city and began by growing flowers in her balcony.

Freelance writer Aparna George exper-

kitchen properties The small plots Maddur leases city-dwellers who want to grow their own greens

imented with a few pots and now has a terrace garden full of fruits and vegetables, including mandarin oranges and lime. Her plot at the Green Thumb Mini Farms is next to Sreekumar’s.

All of them are part of a growing community of Bangaloreans who spend their weekends farming, courier seeds to each other, barter saplings, excitedly share pictures of the quantity and size of their produce, celebrate Kitchen Garden Day every 28 August and constantly look for ways to spread the message of “oota from your totha” (food from your garden).

The journey, which began nearly 10 years ago with simple workshops on organic terrace gardening in the city, has now transformed into a movement.

A

mong those giving Bangaloreans the space to cultivate their own food is Anand Maddur. After working for 12 years in the United States, the engineer with an IIM degree came to Bangalore and decided that he wanted his own kitchen garden. “My search for agricultural land brought me here,” he says, standing near his banana plantation and the smaller plots he leases out to enthusiasts like Sujith and Deepthi. After

weeks of talking to local farmers and jotting down farming tips, Maddur found exactly what he was looking for—land that he transformed into his Green Thumb Mini Farms. His initial investment was Rs 2 lakh.

In April 2012, Maddur got his first customer, and before he knew it, all his 30 plots on three acres of leased land were taken. “Almost everyone was an IT person and it didn’t surprise me,” Maddur says, standing under a chikoo tree. “You know, these guys are stuck in a room and sit in front of their computers for eight to ten hours. They want some time in the sun and this is far better than a weekend family outing at a mall.”

Access to the mini farms is restricted only to those committed to the idea. “Most have tried it out in their balconies and terraces,” says Maddur. “But a couple of newcomers have approached us. They want to cultivate organic cherry tomatoes and then sell [them]. Leasing out land to them will be a first in terms of allowing inexperienced people in. But they seem driven.”

During the week, Maddur has hired help to water all the plots and ensure general upkeep. For an additional charge (Rs 25 for de-weeding and Rs 45 for mowing), he ensures that those who can’t make it

to the farm don’t lose out on their crop.

No pesticides are allowed on the farm and handy hints to tackle pests with neem sprays and herbal concoctions are liberally shared. “I go through the same process that all the others here do, so we kind of anticipate each other’s problems,” says Maddur. “I’ve grown corn here and now have this banana plantation. The only problem we face is water, and if that is sorted I will be more than happy to create more plots for other enthusiasts.”

In another part of the city, mechanical engineer Laxminarayan Srinivasaiah is leasing out 1,000-sq ft plots for Rs 4,000 per quarter and Rs 12,000 annually. “It started during the 2008 financial meltdown,” says the 38-year-old employee of SAP labs. “We were sitting on the bench a lot and ended up visiting relatives back home and saw them grow things. I had the time, so I came back and started replicating it on my terrace. The common complaint was that there was seepage.”

Srinivasaiah put his mechanical engineering skills to work and created containers that were on stands a couple of inches above the ground. The results were “phenomenal”.

“Community farms are the only way out for a lot of us,” Srinivasaiah says.

“There are multiple reasons so many people want to do this, the most important being safe food for our children. Terrace growers eventually want more space and there is a lot of empty barren land around the city that can be used. Water is the only issue. But with drip irrigation techniques, it is possible to overcome [it].”

M

ost Bangaloreans began their search for “safe, pesticide-free food” around the same time, and they all drew their inspiration from a basic workshop on organic terrace gardening started in 1995 by Dr BN Vishwanath, who says it all began with a “silly idea”. An entomologist by profession, Vishwanath spent years teaching at an agriculture university in the city, besides making films on agriculture and then finally working with bio-fertilisers.

“I had always told people how to kill the insects that invaded their plants using pesticides,” says the 70-year-old man, synonymous with organic terraces in Bangalore. “In the early 90s, everyone in

10 February 2014

Bangalore was talking about rising temperatures in the city and the increasing pollution. Somewhere, it was linked to [shrinking] green spaces. In 1992, I turned organic and it would have stopped there if not for a plane journey from Delhi to Bangalore.”

Looking down at the garden city from his plane window, Vishwanath says he was struck by the number of “reflecting terraces” he saw. “They gave the impression of heating up the environment around them even more, and I thought, ‘Why not grow plants on these terraces to cool things down a bit?’ A friend said, ‘Why not vegetables instead?’”

So in 1995, he organised his first workshop on organic terrace gardening; 100 people attended, 75 of them women. For 10 years, Vishwanath held classes packed with enthusiastic people who wanted to know how to use their terraces and balconies. He grew his own terrace garden so he could actually show people what it

A growing number of Bangaloreans spend their weekends farming, courier seeds to each other, barter saplings and share pictures of their produce meant and how it was done.

“The classes were full but they were not getting converted into gardens,” he recalls. “Between 1995 and 2005, there were hardly 15 terrace gardens that came up in the city. In fact, for the first five years, I don’t remember getting any calls post the workshops either. It was disappointing and I considered stopping the workshops in 2005.”

But that year, everything changed.

Describing it as a “tremendous year”, Vishwanath says that the movement was taken over by young professionals, architects and builders. Suddenly, his phone rang incessantly and callers wanted to know how to deal with a pest or seepage.

“The calls confirmed that the movement had gained momentum.”

Around the same time, Aparna George joined Vishwanath’s Garden City Farmers, a non-governmental organisation that focuses on ‘educating citizens

on the benefits of organically grown food, the need for urban farming, fostering the set up of urban farms/kitchen gardens and reducing food miles, leading to a healthy ecosystem.’

Out of it grew the Organic Terrace Gardening group, which boasts 15,157 members on Facebook and is now a closed group. Both George and Srinivasaiah contribute as admins.

“The thing is, in Bangalore the weather is such that you throw any seed and it will grow. That gets you hooked,” says Srinivasaiah, trying to explain why every other terrace in the city is aspiring to be a garden better than the next. “And of course, the city has traditionally had a lot of gardeners. It’s in the city’s genes, I guess, and that’s why the ‘grow your own food’ idea has caught on so much here, more than anywhere else.”

The trend was identified way back in 2008, when the Resource Centres in Urban Agriculture and Food Security Foundation identified Bangalore as one of India’s cities for a pilot project on periurban agriculture.

Their final report, published in 2009, stated: ‘In Bangalore city, the resident associations are focusing on identifying… citizens [interested in] getting trained on home gardens—in their terraces, backyards and front yards. The focus is on helping… citizens… grow pesticide free vegetables in the limited spaces they have. Also, citizens are being helped in recycling kitchen waste as manure for their gardens… However limited in scale these efforts may be, we hope Bangalore city will [set] new benchmarks in growing and consuming healthy foods [and] keeping [the] environment clean, indirectly contributing [to] reducing ‘food miles’ and thereby [the] negative impact on [the] environment too.’

To that end, 11 professionals have come together and invested in 17 acres of land outside Bangalore in a community farming experiment. For this set of weekend farmers—again, all infotech professionals—the success of their investment lies in the fact that they have just harvested their first crop of toor daal and ragi, all organically grown.

“Community farming is here to stay,” says Vishwanath emphatically, even as he gets ready for another workshop in the garden city. n open www.openthemagazine.com 43

between the sheets

Learning Not to Settle

Sometimes, to kick someone out of your life, it takes an unforgiveable transgression sonali khan

L

ast week, I met a friend who’s dating a jerk. She’s a

doctor; well-spoken, well-educated and with a handwriting that’s actually readable—you don’t have to pray that the chemist doesn’t mistake a crucial ‘u’ for an ‘n’ and plies you with a month’s supply of Viagra pills instead of oral contraceptives. He? He’s the sperm that swam the fastest. When they started dating, we (her close friends) smiled bored dismissive smiles and wagered money on how soon she’d lose him. Since this was right after things had ended with the man I will forever think of as the biggest mistake of my life, I had been anointed the group’s in-house expert on dating degenerate losers. And my expert opinion was that Fastest Sperm would last two months.

This was just a little under a year ago. Over the past one year, each time I’ve met my friend she’s gone away thinking she’s ‘definitely breaking up with him tonight’. I’d wait for her to call and tell me that the deed was finally done, but the call would never come. Somehow, inexplicably, he’d find a way to convince her to give it just one last shot.

How does a really smart, sexy, witty girl fall into a relationship black hole?

It’s actually very easy.

When I was studying economics in college, we were taught a very interesting concept: value addition. It references ‘the amount by which the value of an article is increased at each stage of its production, exclusive of initial costs.’ The idea is to create a perceived added value in the minds of your consumers, just enough to keep them from taking their business elsewhere, fleeing shoddy customer service. Some relationships function exactly that way. And some partners wouldn’t have to work a day for the rest of their lives if they were to charge VAT. This is precisely the kind of relationship that my friend is—and I was—in.

At each step along the assembly line of our relationships, they’d add just enough to keep us there. “I can’t do this anymore,” I remember saying to him after coming back from a vacation to think things through. “Sorry. But I think I want something else.” Over time, he’d gotten really good at sensing when these talks were coming. And there was always a ready plan to sweep me off my feet again and confuse me. Thoughtfully planned dates, flawlessly executed. When even that wouldn’t make me break a smile, the words would follow. “I’m going to fight for

you and for us. I love you.” I remember reading such messages multiple times a day, and feeling like shit for wanting out. At night, he’d pull me into him and make me believe. And I’d second guess myself. The red flags were still there, but like a fool, I was waving my hand at them.

‘Maybe he really is crazy about me,’ I’d think. ‘In his way, not mine.’ Or maybe I really did want to believe that the red flags were really just white flags that had gotten mixed up while doing the laundry.

In retrospect, while there was burning humiliation and hurt that spread like acid when I finally found out that our whole relationship had been a big fat lie, there was also relief. Finally he had done something unforgivable. When someone is wilfully hurtful, you know exactly how to feel. But when the problem is that you need more but the person seems incapable of giving it to you, you start wondering whether there’s a way to be happy with what you already have instead of holding out for what you think you deserve. We often accuse married couples, particularly those who go the arranged marriage way, of making do, compromising and settling for the known devil. But almost everyone I know has made the exact same mistake at some point. It takes having your spirit crushed in the emotional equivalent of a sugarcane grinder—and surviving it—to find the courage to go after what you truly want, whether it’s a person, marriage, a roaring career, a dream car or a lifetime of never having to answer to anyone.

Last week, when I met my friend, she asked me the question I had asked myself so many times in the months leading up to my big relationship explosion. “Am I asking too much?” I wish I could give her an answer, because I know what she’s really asking of me is to decide for her. But I also know that no matter what I say, she’s going to ignore the advice she doesn’t want to hear anyway. The answer has to be hers: “No. I can’t be happy this way. Maybe I would’ve been okay with it two years ago, but not now.”

Or maybe she’ll get lucky like me and Mr Fastest Sperm will do something to make her kick him out of her life. n

How does a smart, sexy, witty girl fall into a relationship black hole? It’s actually very easy

44 open

Sonali Khan was holding on to her virtue, and then she fell in love...with several men.

She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan 10 february 2014

life and letters

mindspace A Gandhian Force

63

O p e n s pa c e

Kareena Kapoor Hrithik Roshan Anurag Kashyap

62

n p lu

Jai Ho Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

61 Cinema reviews

Seamaster Planet Ocean Orange Ceramic BenQ MS504 Creative T30 Wireless Speakers

60

Tech & style

Can Cancer be Contagious?

Infant Memories Fade at Seven Scent of Cancer

58

Science

The Cult of Zara

54

fa s h i o n

Jimmy Shergill: The Underdog

48

cinema

How I Write: George Saunders Michael Sandel on the Moral Limits of Markets

books

Drink in Peace

46 64

David Ramos/Bloomberg

fashion How a Spanish high-street brand has transformed the way affluent urban Indians shop and dress 58

life & letters

Drink in Peace On the dive bar as a haven for the trend-bucking citydweller Michael Edison Hayden garden of an obscure mid-budget hotel off Colaba Causeway in Mumbai, Cloud 9 Café isn’t the casual tourist’s destination of choice. It’s not even the local’s destination of choice, really. They don’t play Miley, Justin or Bollywood, there’s no dance-floor, and, hell, I don’t think the place owns a radio. There are no upwardly mobile businessmen buying out the bar to impress young girls, and there’s no champagne to do that with anyway.

You get only two guarantees here: salted peanuts with your Blender’s Pride, and no conversations about fancy brunch or designer clothes. In short, Cloud 9 is a refuge up above one of the loudest, most obnoxious cities in

rooftop dive Cloud 9 is a refuge from Mumbai’s maddening crowds

the world. It’s my local dive bar, and I wouldn’t trade it for the Taj Mahal.

Definitions of what constitute a dive bar might vary, but I assure you that Cloud 9 fits the bill. Maybe it’s better to start by listing the qualities that dive bars don’t have: they lack what the media world regularly refers to as ‘buzz’. They lack catchy drink names and clean menus. They’re missing certain top shelf liquors. Dive bars ararely entice a society’s elites. We’re talking about the alcoholic version of a roadside dhaba here, or a car chase movie starring Jason Statham. Dive bars have no capacity for glamour.

Still, the right type of dive should have its own self-contained glamour. A bar I used to frequent in Manhattan, a

legendary but now defunct hole called The Holiday Cocktail Lounge, had a brass Lowenbrau sign from the 1970s that looked like the Cullinan diamond when placed in the context of a basement with electric tape patching together the seats.

A definition pulled from a 1961 edition of Webster’s calls the dive a ‘disreputable resort for drinking and entertainment’. Three problems here: a) a good dive is ‘disreputable’ to only the exact type of pretentious clowns you’re going to dive bars to weed out, b) ‘resort’ implies an activity like swimming or skiing, but honestly speaking, we’re only getting drunk here, and c) the only ‘entertainment’ comes from you and the friends who help to lift your corpse martin prihoda

P

arked on the ninth floor roof

into the back of a cab at the end of the night. Dives don’t hire comics. You don’t go there for a lap dance.

I’d like to think it’s about something tenderer.

To me, a great dive is constructed of four basic elements: 1) conversation, or the ability to conduct one steadily at said location, 2) alcohol, served in as unfettered a manner as possible, 3) a marked unpretentiousness, particularly in the context of social standing, and finally, 4) eccentricity. It’s eccentricity that separates a great dive bar from just any dingy urinal with beer floating in it. And that’s what Cloud 9 has in spades.

Let’s start with The Godwin, the hotel that hosts the place. It’s difficult to discern the Godwin from other hotels on the strip. They all look the same.

Same old dude, half asleep, working the night desk. Same heavily perfumed Saudi Arabian sisters wearing niqabs, reading Femina on an ugly vinyl couch.

Same calendar highlighting Hindu holidays that passed three months ago.

Same elevator too—it’s about the size of a closet where you’d expect to be thrown by a serial killer right before he does his business, and it smells about as good as the last person or primate who took a ride in it.

The bar itself is just an open terrace. It has the appearance of a place whose management did everything they could to make it slick and sexy back in 1999 when it opened and then abruptly gave up out of indifference.

Today, the atmosphere feels as unplanned as the ridges of the Grand Canyon. The floor tiles are an earthyreddish brown and the white metal furniture looks like it was swiped from a 76-year-old Englishwoman’s garden.

White Christmas lights wrap around the edge of the terrace, snaking in and out of inexplicably placed white Greek pillars. In daylight, it looks like Zeus tore the roof off of a Greek restaurant and tossed what was left on top of a Mumbai hotel. But at night, the atmosphere takes on a more mysterious vibe, like an ancient opium den that serves grilled cheese sandwiches.

Maybe the best attraction of any dive 10 february 2014

is its staff, and Lobo, who only goes by one name, is the Mozart of bartenders.

He’s a tall, skinny chap with an upper echelon Bombay moustache and a uniform that looks like something you’d have seen on a bellhop back in the early 1930s. He memorises the drink and food orders of his regulars and never forgets a face. If you’re the only people in the bar, he’ll keep it open for you beyond closing. He knows this is a hot weather city, and freezes the beer to keep it extra cold. He’ll give you a slice of cucumber with your gin and ton-

DIVE BARS LACK ‘BUZZ’.

They lack catchy drink names and clean menus. They’re missing certain top shelf liquors. They rarely entice society’s elites. They have

NO CAPACITY FOR GLAMOUR They don’t hire comics and you don’t go there for a lap dance.

IT’S ABOUT SOMETHING TENDERER. ic and refill your peanut bowl before you even know they’re gone. It’s as if he were blessed with some kind of sixth sense that only applies to drunks.

Friends who have left Mumbai to work elsewhere always ask me about Lobo. They miss him like he’s family. His polite efficiency inspires confidence in his clientele, and, coupled with the gentle inscrutability of his face, lends him an ethereal, almost spirit-like quality, as if he only appears when you appear, or sleeps under the floorboards of the bar waiting for you

to arrive. A friend of mine who once visited me in Mumbai told me that Lobo appeared to him in a dream, offering him a drink in the confessional booth of a Catholic church. Another friend, who recently moved to Delhi, wants to fly him out to serve drinks on the rooftop of his new apartment building.

I asked Lobo what it was like to work in a bar, and he smiled and said it was “okay”, which was like saying life in general was just okay because he’s worked in one his entire adult life. He was 20 when The Godwin hired him in 1992. He had been ringing doorbells looking for work when the owner tossed him that chequered uniform.

He had never tended bar or even drunk alcohol before, but he learnt the trade by customer demand, working a makeshift table down in the lobby. In 1999, The Godwin gave the new terrace bar a grand opening, called it Cloud 9, and moved Lobo upstairs to work the crowd.

At first, he says, people showed up in decent numbers. But in a trendy, disposable city like Mumbai, people eventually moved on to discotheques, lounges and other places I wouldn’t dare enter at age 34. Today, the bar sustains itself off of its die-hards—myself included—and the weird hotel guests that wander in. You might see a mix of a few writers on one table, and some overweight Frenchmen with sunburns at another, talking it up with some stoned old man in Vietnamese pajamas and Blind Willie sunglasses.

But maybe the most important feature of a great dive is a more intangible quality: stubbornness. Because for people who revere dives, it’s the stubbornness, the resolute unwillingness to change, that brings them back time and time again. Cloud 9 hasn’t made any upgrades in 15 years. It’s almost as if they don’t care. Once, during the 2011 World Cup, the owners begrudgingly added a TV so that people could watch cricket while they got wasted.

The TV is still there, but matches play in silence. In a city where everything is about newness and ‘the now’, it is refreshing to know that at least one place will always be the same. n open www.openthemagazine.com 47

Books How I Write

The Accidental Genius George Saunders, who suspects he won the MacArthur genius grant through an error, on his ability to write anywhere and the importance of doing the dishes AKSHAYA PILLAI

G

eorge Saunders was a guitar-

ist before he took up geophysical engineering, and a student at Syracuse University before he began teaching there. Now considered among the sharpest, funniest writers of short fiction, his recent collection of stories, Tenth of December, made it to almost all of last year’s ‘top ten’ lists.

Hailed in The New York Times as ‘the best book you’ll read this year’, this collection, written over a span of seven years, is surrealist and satirical.

But it can also be affecting. In Semplica Girl Diaries, a daughter has committed a grave crime and her father is afraid that the detective lurking in their lawn late at night, humming, will wake up his children. He walks into their room worried and, watching his daughter sleep, observes: ‘Eva, source of all mayhem, sleeping like baby.’ This is a slice of what a Saunders story can do. With his ability to get inside a character’s head, he can experience and explain his protagonists’ dilemmas and anxieties until you, too, are weighed down by their aches.

Tenth of December is more emotionally accessible than your earlier works. You have mentioned elsewhere that it was an attempt at being more expansive, attracting more readers. Did you take any conscious steps to extend its reach?

I really didn’t take any conscious steps—the book was written over about a seven-year period, so [it] was rather like a slow-moving and very big ocean liner. It moved of its own accord.

Or, I should say, as I gradually changed as a person—our kids grew older and went to college and so on—the stories started to subtly reflect a new perspective: a little more patient, a little more Marion Ettlinger/outline/Corbis

48 open

inclined to ask, ‘How is it that things sometimes go right in this crazy world full of suffering?’ It’s still, I think, a pretty dark book—but maybe with little cracks in it, through which some light is shining. I hope so anyway.

I think the main thing that helps with writing is just getting in there and trying it. I really love writing so I don’t find it hard—I mean, I find it hard to do well, but I am always pretty eager to go in and get started in the morning.

You seem to have a fascination for death.

Do you often attend funerals or visit cemeteries?

Where do you write? What does your writing space look like?

No, not at all. If I had my way, I would never attend another funeral in my life, because no one would die. I’m interested in death in the sense that, since it’s going to happen to me, I would like to be as ready as I can to meet it in a good way. As Woody Allen once said, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

The Semplica Girl Diaries originated in a dream you had in which you saw women from the ‘third world’ hanging in your lawn, strung together with a piece of thread that passed through their heads. Do you often have wild dreams that you turn into stories?

Is that why your stories are so surreal?

I often have wild-ish dreams but usually, when I wake up, they are just seen to be nonsense. Every so often—maybe three times in my writing life—I’ve had dreams that seemed a little more deeply wired. I love it when that happens, and wish it happened more often.

In 2006, you were honoured with a ‘genius grant’ by the MacArthur Foundation. What sort of research goes into your writing?

I don’t know how I got that—I suspect a clerical error. And no, I almost never do research. I have a new project I’m working on that has taken a little bit of historical reading to get started—but generally, no.

Do you carry a journal when you are out?

No. My approach is to just live with my eyes open, and assume that when I need a certain something in a story— an image or anecdote or visual detail— it will come down naturally from my mind, and will, in this way, be more organically appropriate for that exact moment in the story.

You recently adopted Nyingma Buddhism.

Does this belief help you write?

10 february 2014

I have a little writing shed near our house—with no internet. But I can write pretty much anywhere. I trained myself in this by writing my first book while at my engineering job.

Do you write with pen and paper? Or do you use a laptop? How many drafts do you do for a story?

I write on the computer and then, to edit, I print [it] out on paper and use a red pen.

“I’ve never written a novel.

I think a writer has to do whatever he can do well. I don’t seem to have much of a gift for prolonging or explaining or complicating. My main impulse is to condense ” After long hours of typing at a stretch, what is your idea of an ideal break?

I’ll just go in and play the guitar for a while. I’ve been doing that since I was a kid and really love it. I think it works a different part of the brain. Also, doing the dishes is good.

Do you write songs as well?

I just started writing songs again after about a 15-year break. The strange thing is, I have no trouble writing the music, but the lyrics are hard for me.

But it is, as best, a much-beloved hobby.

Do you prefer short stories over novels? As a writer, which is more satisfying?

I’ve never written a novel. I think a writer has to do whatever he can do well. I don’t seem to have much of a gift for prolonging or explaining or complicating. My main impulse is to

condense. So I think we seek out the artistic form that suits us, and that we can somehow inject with sufficient energy to make it interesting to our audience. That said, I would like to write a novel—but only if I could write one that was somewhat original and not boring. I would not like to write one just for the sake of writing one, in other words.

You have been hailed by The New York Times in its elegy to Tenth of December as a ‘writers’ writer’. Who are the writers you admire?

I think my favourites are [Nikolai] Gogol, [Isaac] Babel, [Leo] Tolstoy, [Anton] Chekhov (I love the Russians), as well as [Earnest] Hemingway, [Charles] Dickens, Henry Green, Alice Munro, and Tobias Wolff.

Shakespeare’s pretty good too.

You attended and now teach at the same university where Raymond Carver once taught. Did he influence your writing?

Very much so. When I was young and first starting to write, he was the writer of the moment. I loved his understated prose, and especially the fact that he was writing about working-class people. I felt the influence of Hemingway on him, and was very drawn to that too. When I came to Syracuse as a student, he had just stopped teaching— but I did see him a party once: a tall and quiet man of great dignity.

You have been teaching creative writing at Syracuse for almost two decades. Do you believe that writing can be taught?

This year, we got 600 applications for six places in our programme. So the people who get in are already wonderful writers—we don’t need to teach them to write. What we try to do, though, is get them to start writing in a way that only they can write—that is, to occupy what we might call their ‘iconic space’. That is deep work; that is done with close-reading and editing of their (already excellent) stories.

What is the one piece of advice you repeatedly give your students?

Learn to revise. The first draft is only the beginning. n open www.openthemagazine.com 49

ritesh uttamchandani

Books

Don’t Step Over This Moral Line Using intriguing illustrations, Michael Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, shows how markets are creeping into places they have no business being Madhavankutty Pillai

I

n Michael Sandel’s book What

Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, one of the most fascinating illustrations has to do with day-care centres in Israel. When parents started showing up late to pick up their children, the centres decided to fine them.

What happened was the opposite of the result they sought—the number of late pickups went up. Paying money had made parents feel less guilty about their behaviour. In their minds, they had converted the fine into a fee and begun to look at it as a service being provided by the school.

The first chapter of What Money Can’t Buy is titled ‘Jumping the Queue’.

In it, Sandel, who teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, speaks about markets corrupting the simple ethic of waiting your turn. For example, in Beijing, patients at public hospitals stand in long queues to get appointment tickets. This has led to a trade in these tickets, with scalpers collecting them beforehand and then selling them to patients. In Washington DC, for hearings of Congressional committees where anyone can enter on a first-come-first-serve basis, there are now ‘line standing companies’ providing services to lobbyists.

Someone else will stand in line and the lobbyist will arrive only when the hearing begins to take his place. In US and UK airports, Economy Class passengers can pay a small fee and move to the head of the queue for check-in and boarding.

Reading it, I was struck by Indian parallels. For example, at Mumbai’s sub-

moralist Michael Sandel is a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University 10 FEBRUARY 2014

urban railway stations, there are two lines for the same ticket counter; one for first class, where there is usually no queue, and another serpentine one for the general class. There is an even more interesting Indian parallel that shows how queues can lead to markets. Till about a few years ago, to get a passport we either had to suffer large queues and red tape or pay an agent.

The Government then made agents illegal and everyone is now forced to go to a passport office to submit an application. The process was streamlined

In his book, Michael Sandel discusses queue jumping, explaining how ‘the ethic of the queue—“first come, first served”—is being displaced by the ethics of the market— “you get what you pay for”’ by making it compulsory for applicants to take prior appointments online, but given that a passport office can only cater to a limited number of applicants per day, as soon as the window for taking appointments opens, all the slots get filled. Those who don’t have a broadband connection can forget about ever getting an appointment. This has led to an entirely new subset of agents: those who make online applications for people. They even advertise themselves online.

I point this out to Sandel and it immediately piques his interest. We are in a hotel lobby in South Mumbai. He is in the city to give a series of talks on

the theme of his book. “An appointment industry, I love it,” he says, asking for my pen and noting it down.

Sandel’s use of everyday examples like these, which are there all around us but go unnoticed, and sifting out the moral questions they raise are what make his lectures so incredibly popular at Harvard where thousands of students attend them in large halls.

When markets influence queue jumping, he writes in his book, ‘the ethic of the queue—“first come, firstserved”—is being displaced by the ethics of the market—“you get what you pay for.” And this shift reflects something bigger—the growing reach of money and markets into spheres of life once governed by nonmarket norms.’

O

ne example of this is in the use of monetary incentives to guide human actions. The book cites the example of Barbara Harris, a social worker from North Carolina, USA, who offered $300 to women drug addicts if they would consider long-term birth control.

This was to prevent babies being born addicted and brought up neglected.

Such a deal might seem alright because it is consensual and everyone wins. But Sandel says there are two arguments against it. One is that it is a form of coercion. The drug addict may not be “acting freely… given her addiction and, in most cases, her poverty.” But there is also one more argument: that it corrupts the norms that govern parenthood and the human body’s reproductive capacity, turning it into a commodity.

He writes, ‘Harris treats drug-addicted and HIV-positive women as damaged baby-making machines that can open www.openthemagazine.com 51

be switched off for a fee. Those who accept her offer acquiesce in this degrading view of themselves… They treat their reproductive capacity as a tool for monetary gain rather than a gift or trust to be exercised according to norms of responsibilities and care.’

Another example in his book is of some schools in the US giving children money as an incentive for getting good grades. This corrupts the norms that govern education.

When markets encroach upon such traditionally non-market areas, the moral objections essentially boil down to two: the fairness one (it is unfair to those who can’t pay to get to the front of the queue) or the corruption one (it corrodes the norms that govern a nonmarket activity like parenthood). I ask Sandel which of the two he thinks is more problematic. He says, “The fairness argument is much more familiar in general public discourse. Many people oppose free markets in the buying and selling of organs or reproductive capacity [say, surrogacy], on the grounds that inevitably it will be desperately poor people who make that choice. It won’t be a truly free choice because it will be under the pressure of necessity. But I emphasise the second, the corruption argument. It points to the erosion of the moral and civic fabric that can occur when we put a price on every aspect of the good life. We pay less attention to it, yet it is pervasive as market thinking and market values reach more and more aspects of life.”

Another riveting instance his book provides of the overreach of markets is in death. For example, multinationals in the US have started to take large life insurance policies on employees in which the company itself is the beneficiary—they would profit if a worker died. Or, consider the life settlement market, in which investors buy life insurance policies from elderly people by paying them a lump sum and get the money when the insured person dies. Wall Street went one step further: it bundled these policies and created death bonds out of them, just as they did with mortgages which led to the 2008 recession. The problem with markets that depend on people dying 52 open

to make money is that they make an investor hope for the death of someone so he can profit from it.

S

andel says the germ of the book’s idea goes back to his days as a graduate student when he grew interested in economics because of its clarity and rigour in addressing social life and politics. “I wondered back then whether these rigorous methods could include ethical considerations such as concern for equality, for justice, or whether those ethical concerns had to be worked independently,” he says. In the book, he argues that economics needs to reconnect with moral and political philosophy because this was how the subject began. “If you go back to the classical economists like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, despite

Economics is so seductive because it has one answer for everything. “Markets,” Sandel says, “have a single transactional principle which says consenting adults should be free to place whatever value they want on the goods exchanged” their different ideological orientations, they all shared the assumption that economics was not an independent science. It was really a sub field of moral and political philosophy and I think we need to get back to that understanding,” he says.

The absence of this understanding lets the market run riot in places it has no business being in. But how do you know whether a norm is being corrupted when a market suddenly comes up?

There is no one universal principle.

“We have to look case by case. It is hard to identify a single rule or principle that can tell us whether a norm worth caring about has been corrupted,” he says. To show why this is the case, he offers two examples—prostitution and

voting. For the first, one can ask, ‘Does it violate human dignity to buy and sell sex?’, and for the second, whether there should be a free market in votes during elections. To think about the first requires thinking about the meaning of sexual intimacy, the relation of one’s body to one’s person. In the second example, the relevant virtue is the civic virtue of deliberating on the common good and exercising a voice in how we are governed—does the buying and selling of votes corrupt that? “The answer will be different, and the moral deliberations will be different if we are talking about a free market in sex and a free market in votes,” he says.

That is also why economics is so seductive—it has one answer for everything. “Markets have a single principle—a transactional principle which says consenting adults should be free to place whatever value they want on the goods exchanged,” he says.

Sandel says we are becoming market societies without realising it, and that moral philosophy is a way to draw lines to keep that at bay. “The first thing is to recognise how far we have travelled as a market society. The second step is to engage in a public debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong. The third step, having had that debate, is to try to have policies to enjoy the benefits that markets can provide and keeping markets in their proper place, preventing them from invading the whole of life,” he says.

The ultimate objective of such measures is for human beings to lead what he calls the good life. To lead such a life we must first come to an understanding of what it is; what is just and unjust.

He says, “One element of the good life is to develop these capacities for judgment, for deliberation in the company of others, and that requires that we share a common life, a sense of community. Which is why living in a good society and having a voice in its government is an essential aspect of the good life. One of the most corrosive effects of markets in recent decades has been to erode the moral and civic fabric, to lead us to see ourselves as consumers rather than as citizens.” n 10 FEBRUARY 2014

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CINEMA The Underdog Jimmy Shergill has not given up just yet. His acclaimed performances in Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster I and II and Bullett Raja may revive his Hindi cinema career—or so he hopes SHAIKH AYAZ

ritesh uttamchandani

S

omebody recently asked Jimmy

Shergill why he wears sunglasses at night and went on to suggest that he should do away with them entirely. “Aap ki aankhein toh main

hain (your eyes are the main thing),” the man argued. Before Jimmy could mumble his defence—“Kya hai na sir, woh poora din kaam karke aankhen thaki hui lagti hain, laal ho jaati hain (the thing is, sir, after a day’s work my eyes look tired and red)”—the man floored him with a compliment: “Aap ki aankhon se lagta hai ke aapne duniya dekhi hai (it seems from your eyes that you’ve seen the world).”

And yet director Tigmanshu Dhulia had to make a herculean effort to haul him on board his 2011 film Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster in the title role of the devious, sharp-tongued overlord of a princely state—not everyone, it seems, was in favour of Jimmy as Saheb. Amid hushed protests, the question was: can the boyish-looking Jimmy—with a boyish-sounding name to boot—pull off the mature

“Somewhere after Mohabbatein, Dil Vil Pyar Vyar and Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai, I think people started thinking of me as a chocolate boy,” says Jimmy. “A bell rang in my head that, ‘Boss, I must not allow this image to get stuck’” and authoritative Saheb? “Probably,” the actor speculates, with less bitterness than vindication, “they were wondering, ‘Jimmy toh baccha lagega (Jimmy will look like a kid).’ But Tishu [Dhulia] had faith in me. Those same people, when the film got completed, they came and said, ‘Sorry, we were wrong’.”

One thing has to be said about Jimmy—he still looks about the same age as he did back in 1996, the year he debuted in Gulzar’s Maachis. But it was Aditya Chopra’s Mohabbatein four years later that branded—and, in a

steady climb Jimmy Shergill regards his past year in films as a maturing stage in a career that has been long but not extraordinary

way, unbranded—him. He assures you that Gulzar and Aditya Chopra are his mentors forever, but blithely confides, “Somewhere after Mohabbatein, Dil Vil Pyar Vyar and Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai, I think people started thinking of me as a chocolate boy. A bell rang in my head that, ‘Boss, I must not allow this image to get stuck.’”

That explains why he turned to more realistic films like Haasil and ...Yahaan, both vastly under-appreciated efforts by debutant directors.

Of late, there’s been a similar epiphany: “At one point, I was wondering, why do solo leads [when] after two days people are going to forget the film anyway? Might as well do a film where I am playing a supporting role but at least it’s a powerful role in a film that’s going to be remembered.”

In the recent Bullett Raja, Saif Ali Khan’s character fondly calls him “mere Shashi Kapoor”. That’s dreadfully symbolic of Jimmy’s own position in the movies—a talented sidekick who’s too old to be The Matinee Idol (think Ranbir Kapoor) and too young or perhaps not accomplished enough to be The Actor (think Irrfan Khan).

Luckily, films like Tanu Weds Manu, Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster I and II, Special 26 and Bullett Raja where he played a badass with delicious meanness, have kept him in the game.

He has certainly evolved as an actor. With genuine gratitude, he credits his directors and sharp writing for that, and regards last year’s Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns and Bullett Raja as a maturing stage in a career that has been long but not extraordinary.

T

here’s no doubting Jimmy’s ability as a tough opponent for any costar, but he himself doesn’t see the point in jousting over screen space with co-stars. “Irrfan Khan is my favourite actor, but when we’re working together, we’re not in a race,” he says.

Irrfan is seen as a method actor; Jimmy is the very opposite. He’s wary, if not entirely dismissive, of the grand words associated with acting these days—internalising, incubating, immersing, improvising, etcetera. He’s open www.openthemagazine.com 55

the sort who goes with the flow, for whom the director’s word is gospel.

“My idea of a workshop is sitting with the director and getting a sense of what the character is going to be like.

For Saheb’s role, Tishu said, ‘Saheb is the kind of guy who when somebody calls out to him doesn’t turn his head instantly. He turns like this, slowly, very slowly.’ The moment Tishu said that, I nailed it.”

If the director insists on a physical transformation, Jimmy is always game. Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster and its sequel called for a Thakur-style moustache. So he grew one. “Tishu said, ‘Yaar, woh mooch rakhte hain UP ke Thakuron wali. Chipkayenge nahin yaar, ghumayenge’ (Let’s have a moustache like the Thakurs of UP. We won’t stick it on; we’ll twirl it),” says the otherwise clean-shaven actor, twirling an imaginary moustache.

Jimmy and Tigmanshu are both from Uttar Pradesh and have been close friends and a winning team since the latter’s first film, Haasil, in 2003.

Jimmy was raised partially in Punjab, and retains a native’s command over Hindi and Punjabi. “The director tells you ki ‘bhai woh typical Lucknow wali chhodo yahan par, samjhe? Yeh uss zone ka hai: ‘Abe hato yaar’.’ Itna kahoge toh ek UP wala aadmi kyun nahin samjhega? (The director tells you, ‘do a typical Lucknow dialect here, okay? The character is from that zone.’ If you say it like that, a person from UP will get it).”

Jimmy recalls his childhood as one of bucolic pleasures and the freedom of having “the entire house to yourself”. “I was born in Gorakhpur. We had a big farm... at the centre of which was a big house. Poora khula maidan (wide open grounds). Most of my memories are of meadows, haystacks and rural festivals. I learnt to ride bicycle there and later, truck and tractor. I was maybe six or seven when I started ploughing fields on my tractor. My parents used to be between Gorakhpur and Patiala. There were times I had the entire house [to] myself.”

That is not to say that he kept himself away from the charms of city life.

As a teenager, he recounts driving from Gorakhpur to Delhi overnight 56 open

and calling his shocked parents to say he wouldn’t come home that day because he was in Delhi. “Humnein sheher bhi dekhe hain aur parents Shimla wagerah le jaate the toh hill stations bhi dekha hai, aur, of course, Dilli bhi gaye hain (We’ve seen the city and, when parents took us to Shimla, the hill stations, and, of course, we’ve been to Delhi). When we came to college, wahan badmashi bhi dekhi hai, logon ko peeta bhi hai, college aur university ke baapgundon se bhi paala pada hai (we’ve made mischief, beaten people up, and got embroiled with the bullies of college and university too).”

The relish and accent with which he speaks reminds you of Tanu Weds Manu’s Bholenath-swearing brute Raja. He has channelled his experienc-

“My idea of a workshop is sitting with the director to get a sense of the character.

Tishu said, ‘Saheb is a guy who when somebody calls out to him doesn’t turn his head instantly. He turns like this, very slowly.’ The moment he said that, I nailed it”

es—or ‘zone’, as he describes it—into his characters.

Here is his one-line assessment of acting: “You can play any character well if you know that character well.”

By that he means, “Suddenly, if somebody tells me to play some atrangi type, someone who has grown up abroad, I’ll have to get into that zone before I can play him.”

J

immy was discovered by Gulzar— or rather, Jimmy sought the great man out. After a crash course in acting in the mid-90s, Jimmy was frantically looking for work. He knew of friends who were going through their own struggles and weren’t getting anywhere near a film set. “I didn’t want to wait outside the producer’s

office. Neither did I want to go into depression just because of a bloody film,” he says.

One day, he found out from a relative that “Gulzar uncle” is making a film with newcomers. Why not give it a go? That film was Maachis.

The meeting with Gulzar went beyond his expectations, in that the poetfilmmaker stumped him with his legendary politesse: “Inmein se kaunsa role aapko pasand hai (Which of these roles would you prefer)?” A puzzled Jimmy was reminded of the phrase ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ Simultaneously overjoyed and nervous, he nodded his head, indicating his desire to play the baby-faced rebel named Jimmy.

That was already his nickname and he thought of his role as nothing more than a happy coincidence. “Toh phir jao. Daadhi badhao (Go on then. Grow out your beard),” Gulzar ordered from behind his writing desk. And Jimmy’s career got off the ground.

Currently, in Punjab, that very nickname is a major draw, with its 43-year-old bearer being hailed as the new Dharmendra of Punjabi movies. Jimmy did his first Punjabi film in 2005 and has since appeared in half a dozen more.

“Mujhe maza aa raha hai (I’m having fun),” he says, referring to the excitement and fun to be had in rural Punjab. “Shooting pe purane dost aa jaate hain kabhi. Mausam bahut achcha hota hai aur khana bhi bahut achcha hota hai (Sometimes old friends show up to shoots. The weather is great and the food is also great),” he says, making it sound like a picnic. Maybe it is.

His growing interest in Punjabi films has given rise to a misconception in Bollywood that Jimmy has moved to Chandigarh, which he is keen to dispel. “Here I was ill and bedridden for close to a year and people were speculating that I had moved to Punjab,” he says.

He assures us that a lot of work is to be done, and that he has a string of ‘badhiya’ Hindi films lined up.

“Abhi toh maamla baaki hai, bhai (it’s not over yet, my friend),” he signs off, voicing both confidence and vulnerability. n 10 february 2014

fashion

The Cult of Zara How a Spanish highstreet brand changed the way affluent Indians shop—and dress Aastha Atray Banan

photos ashish sharma

W

hen Mango opened its first

big store in South Extension, New Delhi, in 2001, collegegoing me went crazy. Gone were the days of wearing sporty luxe wear from Benetton and the likes of Lacoste, Levi’s and Lee, which made me feel like I was still in school. Mango was a different world. There were basic vests with plunging necks that looked great with denims, dresses that were sexy not cute, and trousers that highlighted your butt instead of making you look like you were ready to play golf.

I also ditched the Fabindia uniform of Delhi University as I left college for a more chic me, ready to go out and work in a professional environment. Mango changed my style, and so changed me.

I have not gone to Mango since 2010.

That’s the year Spanish high-street

58 open

brand Zara opened its first stores in India, in a tie-up with Tata’s Trent initiative. If news reports were to be believed, almost 500 women visited the first store in Delhi’s Select Citywalk mall in the first few hours, and the store clocked Rs 1.25 crore on the opening weekend.

Sonali Nangiya, president of retail consultancy firm Technopak, says that the high-street brand has done really well in India thanks to its understanding of what the Indian buyer wants.

“They made almost Rs 400 crore last year. It’s been an early win for them as they know what the aspirational Indian wants. They have more casual wear in India and they retain their expensive line in their limited editions.

Their pricing is great as well.”

Having been branded a ‘Zara whore’ by those who feel the high-street giant

is a mass-producing demon that diminishes individual style, I still think the retail chain has changed the way some of us shop. On an average day, you may find me dressed head to toe in Zara— top, denims, bag, shoes, dress, all—and I am unabashedly okay with that.

With its unusual ability to cut across ages—I have seen a 16-year-old and a 45year-old try on the same jumpsuit—and its strong hold on international trends, Zara has fast become a go-to for affluent Indian women. When you wear Zara, you’re right on track with what’s on international runways—though this has exposed Zara to the wrath of many. It was recently noticed by fashion bloggers worldwide that Zara had been ‘inspired’ by designer brand Celine’s 2013 pre-fall collection to create a polyester accordion skirt and silk blouse exact10 february 2014

brand ambassadors Raj (left) says Zara makes him feel confident and trendy, while Priya (right) says it helps her experiment with her look

ly like the brand’s. Zara’s, of course, was priced much lower than the original.

But Zara has come a long way from the time it was almost named Zorba by its Galician founder Amancio Ortega, who was the world’s third richest man in 2012 and replaced Warren Buffett on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

Ortega owns Inditex, known by its most popular brand Zara, among other brands such as Bershka and Massimo Dutti. As a 2012 New York Times piece on Zara put it, ‘Inditex is a pioneer among “fast fashion” companies, which essentially imitate the latest fashions and speed their cheaper versions into stores. They all follow the Zara template: trendy and decently made but inexpensive products sold in beautiful, high-end-looking stores.’

But that’s exactly why Zara works— it’s fast, chic, on-trend fashion at prices we can actually afford. Raj Kundal, a Delhi boy from Janak Puri who owns a call centre but can’t converse too well in English, is a die-hard Zara lover. “I don’t go to a gym and all, but I am already slim and sleek and that’s why Zara suits my body well.” Before Zara, he used to shop at Levi’s and Louis Philippe, but he hasn’t gone to those stores for a while now. “It’s obviously about their quality and all, but it’s also about a state of mind. It makes me feel confident, and I know I am looking super trendy when I wear Zara. That’s important for me.”

Priya Sharma, 24, feels Zara has forced her to experiment with her look— ironic, because many fashionistas are of the opinion that Zara forces you to conform. Once at a fashion week some well-meaning person told me snidely, “But it must be easy for you, right, to dress up for fashion week. You just go to Zara and buy things that match.” Priya laughs, “I don’t let the brand dress me.

I dress the brand. Yes, I may wear Zara as formal wear, casual and even nightwear, but I add my own edge to it, be it with a piece of jewellery or shoes. Zara has changed the way I dress for sure.

It’s a brand with bold cuts and bold prints—stuff I haven’t seen anywhere 10 february 2014

else. That has made sure I look edgier and smarter. It’s also so affordable.”

For news anchor Janvi Morzaria, it’s as simple as the fact that she finds trousers at Zara that make her Indian body look slimmer and slender. “That’s an awesome thing. They fit me so well.”

A 2003 Harvard case study on Zara says: ‘Instead of predicting months before a season starts what women will want to wear, Zara observes what’s sell-

Zara sees different shapes: if it has a crop top for the skinny teen, it has a lace dress for 31-year-old me who wants to show a bit of skin while keeping it classy ing and what’s not and continuously adjusts what it produces and merchandises on that basis.’ And it’s selling to the rich and famous too. The Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton has been spotted wearing Zara (her blue dress caused quite a flurry), Selena Gomez is a fan and even the British First Lady Samantha Cameron can’t get enough.

At home, Deepika Padukone, Parineeti Chopra and Sonakshi Sinha have all

been seen sporting Zara. An Atlantic piece on Zara’s popularity quoted Masoud Golsorkhi, editor of Tank, a London magazine about culture and fashion, as saying, “Prada wants to be next to Gucci, Gucci wants to be next to Prada. The retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the likes of Zara. Zara’s strategy is to get as close to them as possible.”

Blogger and designer Akanksha Redhu says that Zara’s biggest strength could be the fact that it has made Indians aware of trends. “We now don’t shop because you need clothes. Instead it’s like, ‘Oh, ripped denims are in fashion, so let’s go to Zara and buy them. Oh, cropped tops are the new ‘it’ thing; Zara will have them.’ That is its impact.”

Why I love Zara could just be because it seems to realise that all women are differently shaped—in their bodies and in their minds. If it has a crop top for the skinny teen girl, it also has a lace dress for 31-year-old me who wants to show a bit of skin while keeping it all classy. Maybe why Zara works is best explained in a few lines that its communications director, Jesus Echevarría, said to NYT, “We must have [a] dialogue with the customers and learn from them. It’s not us saying you must have this. It’s you saying it.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

memory Young children forget events faster than adults do as they lack the strong neural processes required to piece together all the information that goes into a complex autobiographical memory

Can Cancer be Contagious? Researchers have discovered an 11,000-year-old transmissible cancer strain in dogs

Infant Memories Fade at Seven

S

everal years ago , it was discovered that many Tasmanian devils, a type of carnivorous marsupial found in Australia, were suffering from a unique type of cancer. It was a facial cancer that was contagious in nature. Transmitted through bites, the cancer has taken the animal close to extinction.

The other known contagious cancer is a sexually transmitted cancer that occurs in dogs. Known as canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT), this cancer has outlived the dog in which it first emerged by spreading its abnormal cells on to other dogs through mating.

Researchers have now discovered that this cancer, which results in genital tumours, first arose in a single dog that lived about 11,000 years ago, making it the oldest known line of cancer cells.

The researchers, from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK, came to this conclusion after they were able to decode the DNA of the cancer. They do not know how the cancer first emerged, but they have been able to learn that the animal in which it first appeared was an ancient husky-like dog of medium size 60 open

with a short, straight coat that was grey-brown or black in colour.

According to findings of the research, published in Science, the cancer has been able to survive despite undergoing millions of genetic changes. In all, there have been about two million mutations. Human cancers in comparison usually have between 1,000 and 5,000 mutations. For a long period, the cancer existed in an isolated population of dogs. It then rapidly spread in the last 500 years, which according to the researchers was perhaps caused by dogs accompanying explorers on sea voyages.

The research shows how, given the right conditions, cancers can spread and continue to survive for many years. According to the researchers, this work will help them understand how cancers turn transmissible. One of the authors of the study, Professor Sir Mike Stratton, said in a press release: ‘Although transmissible cancers are very rare, we should be prepared in case such a disease emerged in humans or other animals. Furthermore, studying the evolution of this ancient cancer can help us to understand factors driving cancer evolution more generally.’ n

Psychologists at Emory University have found that age seven is when infant memories tend to fade into oblivion, a phenomenon known as ‘childhood amnesia’. The research involved interviewing children about past events in their lives, starting at age three. Different subsets of this group of children were then tested for recall of these events at ages five, six, seven, eight and nine. While the children between five and seven could recall 63 to 72 per cent of the events, the children who were eight and nine years old remembered only about 35 per cent. Researchers now hope to confirm the age when people acquire an adult memory system, which is believed to be between nine and one’s college years. n

Scent of Cancer

According to a study published in Scientific Report, fruit flies are able to distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells via their olfactory sense. Researchers from Konstanz and Rome used the fact that single odorant molecules dock with receptor neurons of the flies’ antennae and thus activate these neurons. In an imaging technique developed by the researchers, different odorant molecules of the respective scent samples are seen to create different patterns of activated neurons that fluoresce under the microscope, thanks to a genetic modification. In the experiment, five types of breast cancer cell lines were analysed, compared to healthy cells, and clearly divergent patterns were generated that were distinct from one another. n 10 february 2014

lumen A unit of measurement of the amount of brightness that comes from a light source. Lumens define ‘luminous flux’, which is energy within the range of frequencies we perceive as light. For example, a wax candle generates 13 lumens; in contrast, a 100 watt bulb generates 1,200 lumens

tech&style

Seamaster Planet Ocean Orange Ceramic This Omega wristwatch boasts of superlative craftsmanship

BenQ MS504 w

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Price on request

A budget projector from BenQ that is good enough for enjoying a movie at home. The 504 is designed for small to midsized spaces and has a high brightness of 3,000 ansi lumens that works well even in a lit room. The projector also uses Colorifc’s image quality engine to ensure accurate colour and crisp contrast. Its lamp has a long life of nearly 10,000 hours.

The projector’s SmartEco technology assures nearly 80 per cent savings on power consumption. n

Creative T30 WirelessSpeakers

T

he Seamaster Planet Ocean

Orange Ceramic has a brushed and polished 43.50 mm case crafted from 950-grade platinum with a bi-directional 24-hour GMT rotating bezel whose polished ring is made of orange ceramic, a world premiere.

This wristwatch has been produced in an edition limited to only eight pieces. Confirming its unique status are the words, ‘World Premiere’, engraved on the caseback, along with the limited edition serial number.

The sapphire crystal on the caseback allows an unobstructed view of the Omega co-axial calibre 8615 at the heart of this timepiece. This exclusive co-axial mechanical movement is fitted with a Si14 silicon balance spring.

Adding to the watch’s appearance are the 850-grade platinum Liquidmetal numerals, division lines, inner ring and triangle on the bezel.

Beneath the domed scratch-resistant

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sapphire crystal, its sand-blasted 950-grade platinum dial complements an orange ceramic bezel ring and dazzling platinum case.

Along with facetted 18K white gold indexes and central hour- minuteseconds hands, there are its ‘6’, ‘9’ and ‘12’ numerals, GMT applique and a central GMT hand that rotates once every 24 hours in orange aluminium.

This complication can be used with the rotating bezel to help you keep track of time in a second and third time zone.

The watch features an integrated orange leather strap with platinum stitching and a 950-grade platinum foldover clasp. An orange rubber strap is also included with a special tool to change it. This impressive timepiece comes in a special wooden box with a four-year warranty.

The Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Orange Ceramic wristwatch is water resistant to 600 metres. n

Rs 13,999

At first glance, these T30 speakers remind you of PC speakers of yesteryears, but these are wireless.

The T30 can connect to your smartphone using NFC or Bluetooth, and pair with a PC via Bluetooth.The T30 speakers come with custom-made silk dome tweeters that deliver smooth highs; also woven glass fine cones for full-bodied mid-range audio; and large port tubes to deliver high-impact bass. The T30 also features its power, volume, bass, and treble controls on the front panel. The speakers use aptX high definition codecs to ensure sound quality. T30 even has an auxiliary port for a wired connection to your MP3 player, in case the player does not have Bluetooth. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

one of these things is not like the other Despite their vastly different perceived personas, one masala entertainer and the other an indie professional, Salman Khan and Tabu have often appeared in the same films. Jai Ho is the fourth time they will be seen together after Jeet (1996), Biwi No 1 (1999) and Hum Saath Saath Hain (1999)

Jai Ho Proof that the Salman Khan persona and moral philosophy do not go together ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Directors justin chadwick cast idris elba, Naomie Harris Score ★★★★★

an, tabu, daisy Cast salman kh ongpa shah, danny denz an kh il ha Director so

J

ai Ho is a morality tale told by

characters whose own moral positions seem murky. Coming down to us third hand, from Hollywood’s Pay it Forward (2000) and Telugu cinema’s Stalin (2006), the movie proposes that the world would be a better place if we repaid every favour done to us with three favours done to others. If that equation continues across the population in geometric progression, the film says, many social and economic problems of this country would be solved.

But to connect the philosophy of altruism with the image of Salman Khan is going to be one great leap of faith. Jai Agnihotri (Khan) beats up anyone who comes in his way, so it seems much more likely that the victim of his pummelling will do the same favour to three others.

At any rate, the two narratives, one of good deeds and the other of violent ones, continue in parallel. Jai was a hero in the Indian Army and is now leading the life of a private citizen and

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‘do-gooder’. One of the things he does is help a physically challenged girl write her exam papers. One day things go horribly wrong and a chain of events leads to her death. Enraged, Jai uses his fists to exact revenge, violence begets violence, and he is brought into direct confrontation with the villainous Home Minister (Danny Denzongpa).

Meanwhile, the good deed stories continue unabated. The most amusing one is about a rickshaw driver (Mahesh Manjrekar) who takes a drunk safely home every night from a bar. One night, when the rickshaw wala confesses that this is going to be his last ride because he is going to sell his rickshaw to send his daughter to college, the drunk pulls out a stash of money and pays for the girl’s education so that his rides to the bar continue.

Even Ayn Rand had fewer flaws in her moral philosophy. The bitter truth is that morality and the Salman Khan character just don’t go together. n

Historical perspective is impossible in a movie that comes out the same dramatic year Mandela passes on. The film tells you absolutely nothing that you don’t know, and a bit too much about what you do know.

Mandela was a giant of a leader, but the African National Congress was a huge political organisation with a long history of fighting apartheid. Some of the leaders in prison with Mandela are touched upon, but Oliver Tambo and Archbishop Desmund Tutu are scarcely mentioned.

Instead, what we have is a family drama on Nelson (Idris Elba) and Winnie (Naomie Harris); their personalities, how they drifted apart during his 27-year incarceration, how they set off on two different political and personal trajectories.

This is well done, with both actors doing a fine job, but in truth the exercise ends up more as soap opera.

Again, post the 1994 election, the film tells us nothing about the controversial ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ and the struggle to heal decades of bitterness between Blacks and Whites. The focus is all on Nelson’s ability to forgive and Winnie’s intransigence.

The movie’s longevity as a film on the achievements of Mandela is doubtful. It chooses drama over history. n AD

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Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Running out of Patience

No one was more excited than Kareena Kapoor at the prospect of reuniting with her Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham co-star Hrithik Roshan for Agneepath director Karan Malhotra’s Shuddhi, but it appears that this casting coup may be jinxed after all. According to sources close to the actress, Kareena has spoken to the film’s producer and her good friend Karan Johar to explain that she’s a little tired of waiting around for Hrithik to allocate dates to the project.

Originally scheduled to begin filming in December 2013 after the release of Krrish 3, Shuddhi’s start date was moved when Hrithik was reportedly coerced by his Bang Bang! producers to wrap their film before moving on to any new projects. Fair enough too, considering the production schedule of the Knight & Day remake has been in a tizzy since Hrithik first went in for brain surgery in July last year, and then put all other work on hold to focus on the release of Krrish 3.

With no concrete start date for Shuddhi in sight, Kareena has apparently told Johar that she can’t possibly sit around idly until Hrithik decides to commit dates to the film. She’s already signed Dev Benegal’s film opposite Farhan Akhtar, and Rohit Shetty’s Singham 2 opposite Ajay Devgn, and doesn’t know how she can participate in a 160-day schedule of Shuddhi while those films are underway.

So although she hasn’t bowed out of the film, she’s indicated to everyone concerned that there’s a good chance she may not be able to work on Shuddhi after all—if those dates overlap with the ones she’s committed to her two other films. Nobody could be more disappointed than she herself about the possibility that she’ll have to wait still longer to make another movie with Hrithik.

Save the Date

Anurag Kashyap is reportedly hopping mad at Aamir Khan and the makers of P.K. for blindsiding him by shifting their release from June 2014 to Christmas 2014 without so much as keeping him in the loop.

Kashyap had already blocked 10 february 2014

25 December as the release date of his ambitious Ranbir Kapoor starrer Bombay Velvet.

Turns out Kashyap had already been toying with the idea of moving from his December release date when he learnt that Aamir was eyeing a Christmas release for his latest. He is believed to have got in touch with P.K. director Rajkumar Hirani only days before they made the announcement to check if they were indeed moving their release. Kashyap apparently requested Hirani to allow him to announce Bombay Velvet’s changed release date before Hirani and Aamir announced P.K.’s shift to Christmas, so that it wouldn’t come across as if Kashyap was shifting his release in fear of being crushed by the Aamir Khan behemoth.

An Odd Couple Done Apart

Another romance appears to have bitten the dust. It seems like only yesterday that this young film director and this celebrated author began seeing each other.

They first caught the media’s attention when they showed up together for the wedding celebrations of a casting director in Delhi last November, where they did little to hide their mutual affection. Around the same time, they attended a literary fest in Mumbai, again looking very much in love.

Despite the fact that the author lived in Delhi and the filmmaker in Mumbai, and the significant age difference between the two, friends say they were perfectly compatible and made the most of their time together. The author, who is currently hosting a show on television, made regular trips to Mumbai, and the filmmaker began traveling frequently to Delhi too.

But now insiders are saying the couple has split. And that the long-distance nature of their relationship may be the cause of their break-up. Others insist it is the fact that they come from such different worlds. The filmmaker, who delivered a big box-office blockbuster last year, is close friends with his superstar leading man, and counts big names in Bollywood as his inside circle. The author, meanwhile, moves in erudite Delhi circles, and couldn’t be more out of place at a filmi party. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

A Gandhian Force

by as h i s h s h a r m a

The Delhi Police Headquarters has just got itself a chic patriotic paint job—the side of the building now displays the Father of the Nation’s head and shoulders, watching benevolently over Delhi’s citizens. Completed on 28 January 2014, the large-scale Gandhi portrait was created in five days by artists Anpu Varkay, 33, from Delhi, and Hendrik Beikirch, 39, from Germany, who has created many such artworks for public spaces in various countries. Perhaps this is the Delhi Police way of announcing a new alignment with Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa.

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10 february 2014