OPEN Magazine 11 August 2014

SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY INDIA & WORLD WAR I

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SWAPAN DASGUPTA IMPERIAL CITIES

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INSIDE JUG SURAIYA ON THE DEATH OF ARCHIE ANDREWS

Nothing Is Private

It is so easy to bug—and to get bugged. Inside the world of everyday spying

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor PR Ramesh Deputy Editors Aresh Shirali, Ullekh NP art director Madhu Bhaskar Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai Associate Editor (Web) Vijay K Soni assistant editors

Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Aastha Atray Banan, Mihir Srivastava, Chinki Sinha, Sunaina Kumar, Rajni George Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra senior copy editor Aditya Wig copy editor Sneha Bhura Assistant Art Director Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNER Anup Banerjee assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani photo Researcher Abhinav Saha Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Rajeev Marwaha (North

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Volume 6 Issue 31 For the week 5—11 August 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

11 AUGUST 2014

Jitesh RV

Arundhati Roy has been constantly harping on the same lines—be it her stand on Maoism or Kashmir extremism—in an attempt to appease the extreme Left in India and liberals around the globe. Her stand on casteism is only as significant or as irrelevant as the others (‘Arundhati Roy’s Ahistorical Fiction’, 4 August 2014). Ambedkar’s and Gandhiji’s ideas were different, Gandhiji looked for a more inclusive society, and his debates with other social Gandhiji’s debates with reformers showed that he thought political other social reformers freedom was at the showed that he believed forefront and will solve political freedom was all other issues. That at the forefront and will doesn’t mean that he solve all other issues didn’t work for the upliftment of ‘lower’ castes. Perhaps no one else made as big an impact as Gandhiji made on the Indian conscience. We can debate indefinitely whether he did enough for ‘lower’ castes, or if he took up the cause of Black Africans. The reason is, again, Gandhiji fought against the plight of Indians in South Africa, and for that he challenged British imperialism. If this is reason enough to call him a ‘Mahatma’ is something that history alone can answer.  letter of the week Book Sena Leaders

the visuals shown on various TV channels, of a Shiv Sena leader force-feeding a Muslim staffer of the IRCTC at the New Maharashtra Sadan in New Delhi despite the individual pleading with the Sena leader that he is on fast (roza) has once again exposed the mindset of Sena leaders who feel that they can get away with any unlawful act (‘A New Low Even for the Shiv Sena’, 4 August 2014). More shocking is the laxity on the part of law-enforcing personnel to register a case against such inhuman acts, and certain leaders trying to play down the incident saying that the Sena leader was unaware of the religion of the staffer. Agreed that the quality of food served in the canteen is poor, but for Sena leaders to take out their

ire on the staff is condemnable in the strongest terms. It is time law-enforcing agencies act promptly in an unbiased manner by taking strict action against the perpetrators, because incidents of such nature are not only a blot on our democracy, but disturb the religious harmony in this diverse country.  KR Srinivasan

Hitting Around the Bush

instead of citing what Mahatma Gandhi has actually written, the author’s rejoinder is merely a repetition of what is written in school history books (‘Arundhati Roy’s Ahistorical Fiction’, 4 August 2014). The pointless rant doesn’t even attempt to show there is a difference between being ‘casteist’ and being against untouchability.

Gandhi wanted to abolish the latter, but wished that caste be kept alive. This was the regressive view Arundhati Roy pointed out. It is neither inaccurate nor particularly obscure. The entire rejoinder reeks of elitism. Just because someone doesn’t have a history degree, does it automatically disqualify him or her from reading or commenting on history? Also, a former chairman of the ICHR ought to know Arundhati Roy was offered the Sahitya Akademi award for her non-fiction book. Merely throwing around words doesn’t convince people who are actually looking for a credible answer to questions raised by this debate.  Aravind

Modi’s Ganga Challenge

this refers to ‘Fear and Foreboding in South Block’ (28 July 2014). I am tracking the Ganga clean-up project closely, although only through media coverage. This clean-up was one big promise of Narendra Modi, and now that he heads the Government, I am sure a lot of us are going to hold him accountable for keeping it.  sahil mehta

Unique Cinema Proposition don’t forget that none of the documentaries were commissioned by producers (‘Social Chic’, 4 August 2014). All of them were initiated by directors who had fire in their bellies. I salute their courage and vision. I hope we continue to make good documentary films. Looking forward to Proposition for Revolution. 

raman

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logjam Red Sander wood seized by the police in Kurnool district

How to Make the Most of Contraband woodonomics

An auction of seized Red Sander logs could help Andhra Pradesh reduce its fiscal deficit

With the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, which got Hyderabad, had a surplus budget while residual Andhra slid deep into a deficit. Desperate for money, the Andhra state government has hit upon an unusual idea: auctioning seized logs of wood that will earn it at least Rs 1,000 crore.

Red Sanders, found all over southern Andhra Pradesh, is a red-coloured sandalwood species used for medicinal purposes, apart from making musical instruments

log haul

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and furniture, with demand from China, Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia. These trees grow in Kadapa, Chittoor and Nellore districts, but the sale of their wood was restricted after it was put on the endangered list in the early 80s. For the last few years, the Centre has not cleared any sales of Red Sander, resulting in a spike in its smuggling. An estimated Rs 2,500 crore of Red Sander wood has been smuggled out of Andhra Pradesh in billets, says sources. After a shooting incident last year

in which two forest officials were killed by smugglers, the then united Andhra Pradesh government intensified anti-smuggling operations and seized 8,000 tonnes of the wood. The Chandrababu Naidu government, which assumed office in June, kept up the crackdown. And now his revenue-starved state has called for a global auction to sell the seized wood—a little over half of it.

“We asked the Centre to clear the process and received approval to sell 4,000 tonnes

of this wood. We will call for global tenders in August and expect to rake in at least Rs 1,000 crore,’’ announced the state’s Forest and Environment Minister B Gopalakrishna Reddy recently.

A tonne of this wood is estimated to command a price of Rs 25 lakh in the overseas market, and state officials believe they are sitting on a huge haul, enough to earn the cashstrapped state at least Rs 2,000 crore. n Anil Budur Lulla

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U.SUBRAMANYAM/hindu archive

small world

10

contents

cover story

Inside the world of everyday spying

26 loose cannons

6

Who the BJP can do without

8

angle

Why Salman need not be a great actor

border visit

Chronicles of scarred lives

20

locomotif

Hate wave from Gaza

couple of the week lalu yadav and NITISH KUMAR

30

saharanpur

Outbreak of violence

Partners in Adversity Faced with the prospect of political doom, Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad seek refuge in each other’s arms Madhavankutty Pillai

J

ust how impossible it is to take

caste out of the Indian political DNA has been never more apparent than in the coming together of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav. It was only till about a year ago, until he made the politically disastrous decision of separating from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that Nitish stood for everything that Lalu had not been. He looked into the future where development was the priority whereas Lalu as Chief Minister was settling past scores and reworking the social order to get OBCs a stake in power. Nitish stood for law and order, and Lalu’s 15 years of rule had turned Bihar into a state where people couldn’t step out at night. There was no taint of corruption against Nitish, while prison was a familiar place for Lalu due to his alleged involvement in the fodder scam. Nitish kept his family away from politics, while Lalu’s family and extended family members all jumped in with him in ruling and destroying the state. All of these stark disparities were why the people of Bihar kept voting Nitish back to power over the past decade. Having seen what the state had been under Lalu, they had found in him the antithesis of that was good.

And yet there was Lalu and Nitish this week, at the former’s iftaar party—skull caps adorning both their heads, arms entwined with each other’s in a half hug, pleasant grins celebrating the new grand alliance for the bypolls to counter a repeat of the BJP general

4 open

election sweep. It was as if two decades of bitter opposition had somehow been reduced to an insignificant misunderstanding.

Over two decades ago, when they had indeed been a team, there had been no doubt as to who the senior partner was.

Lalu was the man at the head of the table, the precocious politician who became an MP at the age of 29 and then, in a state where the caste matrix was almost written in stone, overturned it until OBCs gained dominance. Nitish was a leader of Kurmis, a important OBC sub-caste, but Lalu was a leader of Yadavs, the most powerful. He became Chief Minister, but after experiencing a few years of Lalu rule, Nitish had enough and broke away to prashant ravi/ap

form his own Samata Party along with other socialists like George Fernandes. For years they couldn’t upstage Lalu in Bihar even as the state continued to descend into chaos. An alliance with the BJP led Nitish into the NDA fold and gave him sanctuary in Delhi, but it was always Bihar that he coveted. And then came the moment when the people of Bihar told Lalu that they had had enough. All his social engineering meant little when there was no promise of life or security.

Nitish won power and suddenly Bihar was a place that was livable again.

It is not surprising that Nitish and Lalu should ally. There is nothing as important to a politician as power, or the loss of it.

Ideologically, the two have more affinities than differences, even though their personalities, temperament and character might be poles apart. Nitish has been uncomfortable with the BJP’s ideology but as long as it served his purpose of coming to power and retaining, it he was okay adjusting. The reason he broke the alliance was probably a false belief that the state’s citizens would appreciate what he had done for Bihar and, like Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, give him a majority on his own. And he probably deserved it. But after a decade of his chief ministership, the gratitude was spent and the Bihar’s dark days are a distant memory. Some of that remembrance is bound to come back when its voters see him holding hands with Lalu, but will they vote for him? n 11 AUGUST 2014

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36 open essay

Indian soldiers and the Great War

b books

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An erotic adventure

g books

graphic art

Tristram Hunt on ten cities of the Empire

y■ udhar SC Cho f secretary ie na ch Harya ■

f o r threatening his subordinate

IAS officer Pradeep Kasni One expects politicians to be crafty and that was just what Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda of the Congress was being when he hurriedly swore in Information and Right to Service commissioners of his choice. The Governor had changed in the state, and with the new person being a BJP

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Soft porn webcomics

nominee, Hooda was preempting any objections that the new Governer might raise over the appointments. But unlike politicians, bureaucrats are expected to go by clear rules, and that is what IAS officer Pradeep Kasni did when, as administrative reforms secretary, he refused to sign the appointment papers. He had found irregularities in the appointments and thought they were illegal. This is where the chief secretary, SC Choudhary, made a rather unsavoury spectacle of himself. As Kasni’s boss, he should have been protecting him when he was in the right. Instead, Choudhary sent him threatening SMSes and, according to Kasni, also used abusive language. Choudhary’s subsequent defence that he was joking has only made things worse for him. He has however apologised to Kasni, who has refrained from filing a complaint, but what else could he have done after the SMSes became public knowledge? n

Shahid’s ‘cerebral’ pitch

The Palestine Liberation Organisation announced that Hamas had agreed to be part of a 24-hour ceasefire with Israel, but it was soon denied by Hamas d i sc o n f i r m

“After... consultations with... Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian leadership announces... the willingness for a ceasefire for 24 hours”

“There is no credence to statements that Hamas has unilaterally approved a 24-hour humanitarian ceasefire”

—Yasser Abed Rabbo, Secretary General of the PLO, 29 July

— Sami Abu Zuhri , Hamas spokesman, 29 July

turn

on able Pers n o s a e r n U ek of the We

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

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around

Insulting Two Great Indian Sportsmen Dhyan Chand, born in 1905, was arguably the greatest hockey player of all time. Called ‘The Wizard’, he was a virtuoso who won several Olympic gold medals for India in the first part of the last century. Impressed by his performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler offered him German citizenship.

Sachin Tendulkar, 68 years younger, is considered one of the greatest batsmen.

Called the ‘God of Cricket’, he is the only player to have scored 100 international

Affront

11 AUGUST 2014

centuries, the first batsman to score a double century in ODIs and the only player to have scored more than 30,000 runs in international cricket.

It is therefore dispiriting to know that the UPA Government, at the last minute, struck off Chand’s name and replaced him with Tendulkar’s for the Bharat Ratna award. The unkind change of plan lacked in wisdom, humiliating both sportsmen. A lot more transparency in awarding the greatest civilian award is in order. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the Bangalore rape investigation botch-up The rape of a six-year-old girl in a Bangalore school shows just how shoddy police investigations can be when they are under pressure.

In early July, at the upscale Vibgyor school, the victim was locked inside a room and raped.

After she complained of pain to her parents, a medical check up discovered sexual assault.

The parents lodged a police complaint and mounted a public campaign for justice. Once the issue got traction, there were large-scale protests.

The police arrested one skating instructor from the school. The police commissioner even held a press conference and said they were convinced he was the rapist.

As evidence, however, What is not the only thing the police explained is how could cite was the existthe skating ence of child pornograinstructor could have been made an phy on a laptop which they said they found five accused without days after his arrest. anything pointing As public anger began towards him to build up, the police commissioner was replaced.

aijaz rahi/ap

This week, the new commissioner said that the skating instructor was not the accused.

What saved the instructor was the police finding that instead of 2 July, the rape actually occurred on 3 July, when he was nowhere near

Outcry An ABVP activist on protest in Bangalore

the scene of the crime. Now, two gym instructors in the school have been arrested. What is, however, not explained is how the skating instructor could have been made an accused without anything pointing towards him.

The Bangalore Police deserve some credit for admitting the botch-up. One retired IPS officer remarked on a television channel that the entire justice system gets to work at its own pace, whereas the police are expected to deliver instant results. That might be true, but it still does not justify pointing at the first person they find with a suspicious background as the criminal. n

It Pays to Know Your Limits Why superstars like Salman Khan cannot be great actors M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

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n 2009 and 2010, three back to Anand, for example, had the exact same mannerisms all through his life back Salman Khan movies— but it was only when he became a Main Aur Mrs Khanna, London Dreams and Veer— flopped and in senior citizen that people noticed the life of an actor, that is enough for how hackneyed and silly they were. people to begin writing off his career. Or, in Hollywood, take Arnold Schwarznegger who made a fantastic In fact, in most of the second half of that decade, Khan’s movies had been career without a single emotion on his face. Even great directors like hit-and-miss affairs. But just when Bollywood’s three ruling Khans were James Cameron couldn’t get that out of him, but his movies minted. And, going to be two, he went on to have the best run of his life. Barring Jai Ho, while on Schwarznegger, it is also everything he has touched has turned interesting to note that he did try to break out of the mould by playing into gold at the box office, and even roles such as a pregnant man, but no that movie would have been a hit by one wanted him in such movies. the yardstick of most actors. Kick, Similarly, Salman Khan, whenever which released last week, is becoming he has strayed from his mean, got Salman Khan’s biggest blockbuster. punished almost at But there is also once. His fans love the fact that while him only when he his movies become For Salman, getting does not experiment superhits, in critical into character for a too much. And he acclaim they usually movie is to discard gives only that much rate from ‘bad’ to some part of him, and to them. Salman Khan ‘average’. Most critics also reckon that won’t sell. His fans might make shifts in him to be a mediocre love him only when he genre, from romantic to action to comedy, actor. How is it then does not experiment but most of the movie that despite terrible too much. And he will be superficial movies and gives only that much because testing a minimum talent, creative limit is the audience seems to them always risky. One of not to tire? You can the rare movies in see the manic obsession that Aamir Khan brings to which he did such a role was Phir his movies and understand why he is Milenge, where Khan played an HIV afflicted patient. And then went on a superstar. You can see the energy to quote its failure as an example of and drive of Shah Rukh Khan and why he would never do such a understand how he became a superstar. But in Salman Khan’s case, character again.

That is probably why Khan has it is not so clear—he seems to be a been so successful. To get into superstar by virtue of being average character for a movie is to discard and not clinically ambitious. some part of him, and that won’t sell.

But this is the thing about superHis fans want him for his innate self, stars; acting ability doesn’t have too much to do with a person becoming the attitude that is so self-evident in real life. They don’t want him to step one. If it exists, then it is an add-on, into character in a movie, they want but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. Cinema history the character to become him. If he is is full of examples of superstars who to remain a superstar, then he must were average or even non-actors. Dev not be a really good actor. n 11 AUGUST 2014

business

An ultra-high net worth houselu c r e hold (ultra-HNH) or ultra-high net worth individual (ultra-HNI), as defined by Kotak Wealth and Crisil, is one with a net worth of Rs 25 crore or higher.

In 2011, the first edition of Top Of The Pyramid, a report put out by Kotak, had estimated that there were 62,000 ultraHNHs in India with an aggregate net worth of Rs 45 lakh crore. Their numbers have grown consistently, and according to the 2014 edition, brought out by the bank in alliance with rating agency Crisil, India has an estimated 117,000 such households, with Rs 104 lakh crore to their names.

Kotak Wealth projects that these numbers will grow further still, to 343,000 households with Rs 408 lakh crore by 2019.

But where are all these extra-loaded people coming from?

The report takes no names, but does make an attempt to identify the groups they belong to. It finds that three broad descriptors apply particularly well: entrepreneurs (those who wish to ‘attain a luxurious lifestyle’), inheritors (those who wish to ‘maintain’ such a lifestyle), and professionals (who want to ‘obtain’ their money’s worth, however it may be spent).

Notably, says the report, professionals are the most guarded with their expenditure. While half of the inheritors and entrepreneurs both showed an increased desire to spend in 2014, only 30 per cent of professionals said the same. They also seem to be the least interested in leisure; in 2014, just over a tenth of the professionals sampled said they would spend more on leisure. Professionals also appear to save the most—20 per cent as compared to 14 and 15 per cent for entrepreneurs and inheritors, respectively.

Whatever their background, the report unambiguously declares that spending is on the rise again, with ultra-HNHs splurging 44 per cent of their income, up from 30 per cent last year. This is reflected in the fact that the luxury market grew from an estimated Rs 36,000 crore in 2012 to Rs 51,000 crore in 2013. Kotak sees this pattern continuing; by its estimates, the market will cross Rs 84,000 crore over the next three years.

The ultra wealthy of India seem to be quite family-oriented as well, with the bulk of their purchases concentrated in jewellery, apparel, holidays, electronics and décor, all of which require consultation with families. The only other significant factor determining their purchases seems to be exclusivity.

11 AUGUST 2014

ashish sharma

Life at the Top of India’s Wealth Pyramid

gilded age The sudden increase in ultra-HNIs in India has luxury brands scrambling for their attention

Whether it be Rs 48 lakh for a single day of golf, or nine cases of Rs 50,000-a-bottle whisky for an engagement, it seems that no price is too high for an ultra-HNI if the reward is early access to a snazzy new product—something of sheer snob value.

Put it this way: if 125 cars, priced at Rs 1.57 crore apiece can be sold out in just 16 days, it is no wonder that the luxury market is booming.

By 2019, India Asked what it is will have over they aspire to own, 300,000 ultra most ultra-HNIs high net worth spoke either of individuals super-luxurious armed with transport (cars, Rs 408 lakh crore yachts, personal jets), or super-luxurious property, such as a villa in Amsterdam or a private island. This trend is notable even in their travelling patterns; while ‘taking a break’ is the most commonly cited reason for travel, a high percentage of holidays taken are also trips to global shopping destinations. Also, while the average duration of a trip taken has decreased, the frequency of trips has increased; the report mentions a businessman who sent his family to Wimbledon on a few days notice, spending perhaps Rs 50 lakh to do so.

While the 2014 Top Of The Pyramid report features a special section on philanthropy, it is notable right off the bat that despite the promising numbers—65 per cent of ultra-HNIs stating that ‘giving back to

society’ is both important and necessary— only 6 per cent of their expenditure actually goes towards this purpose, just a percentage point ahead of their spending on alcohol and luxury watches. The Kotak report suggests that ‘most ultra HNIs are sceptical of [existing charities] as there is often a lack of clarity on the final utilisation of the contributions made.’ The bulk of the contributions that are made go through either trusts or NGOs (56 per cent); but on a happier note, the report notes that several ultra-HNHs are setting up their own foundations as well.

Finally, when it comes to adding to their already substantial wealth, it appears that ultra-HNIs prefer equity and real estate to other asset classes. Investment in real estate appears stable (29 per cent of an ultra-HNI portfolio on average), while investment in debt has fallen since last year to 24 per cent and equity risen to 38 per cent. Private equity has appeared as a significant new investment class too; the higher returns offered may be beginning to offset the distrust of complicated financial instruments. Of the three groups, entrepreneurs are most likely to take risky bets, while professionals are most risk-averse; but in any scenario, the report’s projections—that by 2019 there will be almost a third of a million ultra-HNHs in command of Rs 408 lakh crore—mean that there’s no escaping obscene wealth. n ADITYA WIG open www.openthemagazine.com 7

lo co m ot i f

S PRASANNARAJAN

Hate Wave from Gaza

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the new slogans of hate include ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘Child Murderers’ he news from Mumbai was not alarmand even panegyrics on the Holocaust. In the words of Natan ing. Enraged by the ‘genocidal’ fury of Sharansky, a survivor of Siberia, ‘I believe we are seeing the Israel in Gaza, where civilians are bebeginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe. What ing bombed for the ‘freedom struggle’ of makes the situation in Europe unique in history is the fact Hamas, certain shopkeepers in the city that Europe has become very intolerant of identities in a have begun to boycott American and multicultural and post-nationalist environment. This Israeli goods. According to a newspaper anti-Semitism is connected to Israel—demonisation, delegitreport, in a restaurant run by a Muslim, imisation and double standards—and is now so deep in the the justification for the boycott, and the promotion of core of European political and intellectual leaders that local products, was written on the wall: ‘We do not want to practically every Jew is being asked to choose between being strengthen the hands of the killers of humanity.’ This show to loyal to Israel and loyal to Europe.’(The Jewish Chronicle) of solidarity with the ‘martyrs’ is not alarming because we What lies beneath this imagery of the bad Jew is the twisthave been there before. Remember those days when Saddam ed narrative of good and evil—or victim and aggressor—in Hussein, smoked out of his golden palace on the Tigris, was the Middle East. The current war began with the kidnapping running from one spider hole to another, in true troglodyte and murder of three Israeli teenagers, and at this moment, style, to escape American missiles? In places as remote as Israel wants to destroy the Hamas project of building tunnels Calicut, human chains were formed to declare ‘We’re with into its territory. There are two fundamental fallacies about you Saddam’, and the Ba’athist despot got a second life in the arguments built on Israeli graffiti on the walls of Malabar. carsten koall/getty images violence and Hamas resistance.

Such moments bring the First: Some commentators are so communal constituencies that worried that the Israeli casualty identify with the global struggle is much less than the Palestinian of Islam and communists who toll of more than a thousand. live on the slogans of antiIt is as if a higher Israeli body imperialism together. India is an count will make this war a just ideal place for such confluencone. Second: If this war is an es because the so-called Third unequal war, it is because of World causes still have a marHamas, which is not a state or ket here. There was a time when a legitimate representative of the best of our valued guests Palestinians; it is a shadowy were the bloated freedom fightterrorist organization, as ers turned tyrants of Africa— opposed to Fatah, which and other worthies of the Non anti-semitism returns A Pro-Palestinian protestor in Germany controls West Bank through the Aligned Movement. Even the Palestine Authority. Hamas is homeless Yasser Arafat felt at engaged in a war with a country which it thinks has no home in New Delhi. So the Mumbai restaurateur was only right to exist. And its idea of freedom is the same medieval living up to a hoary Indian tradition. fantasy pursued by any other radical Islamist organisation.

That said, he is still a more civilised protestor than the So equating Palestinian freedom with Hamas is to reduce the one multiplying in the streets of England and Europe. AntiPalestinian issue to a variation of global jihad. In spite of its Semitism has staged a horrifying comeback in the wake of terrorist back story, Fatah is the only organisation worthy of the war between Israel and Hamas. In Britain, more than 100 being in any peace negotiation. incidents of anti-Semitic violence have been reported in the Strangely, what matters in the time of the second wave month of July. From London to Paris to Berlin, synagogues of anti-Semitism is not the Palestinian tragedy, but Israel as were stoned and kosher markets were attacked, and every the convenient bogeyman. More Muslims in the Middle East Jew, Israeli or not, was abused as being worthy of only gas were killed by rogue Muslim rulers, the latest among them chambers. As the columnist Richard Ferrer writes in The Independent of London, ‘Looking at them all marching and hys- being Bashar Assad. There were no street parodies of intifada terically slandering Israel as a ‘terrorist state,’ it’s hard to avoid though. The new wave of anti-Semitism is sustained by an ahistorical misreading of the origins of terror and the struggle the conclusion that Israel is the best and worst thing that’s happened to the Jews.’ Such sentiments are inevitable because for existence. n 8 open

11 august 2014

It is very easy to bug—and to get bugged.

NO place

Inside the world of everyday spying

to hide

By Ullekh NP

N

early 40 years before news broke out that snooping devices were allegedly found in the home of Indian Cabinet minister Nitin Gadkari, American Senator Frank Church, after investigating the capabilities of US security agencies, had made a chilling forecast: “There would be no place to hide.” Journalist Glenn Greenwald liberally borrowed the phrase for his 2013 book, No Place to Hide, on National Security Agency recruit Edward Snowden who blew the whistle on the US administration’s widespread surveillance of its citizens and others.

Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Gadkari himself have denied the report of bugging, calling it highly speculative, though BJP gadfly Subramanian Swamy has pitched in with juicy tales of the proverbial ‘American hand’ in the whole exercise.

Whatever the rumours are, it is true that not just in the US, but across the world as a whole, facts about the modern-day invasion of people’s privacy are much stranger than fiction. Snowden said so last year. Years earlier, in the Hollywood spy thriller Enemy of the State, Gene Hackman, who played the role of an ageing former NSA agent, explained to Will Smith, a lawyer on the run with a secret that could send top federal agents to jail for the murder of a Congressman, why it was nearly impossible not to leave a footprint. “In the old days, we actually had to tap a wire into your phone line. Now with calls bouncing off satellites, they snatch ‘em right out of the air,” he said, highlighting the near omniscience of Staterun surveillance operations.

It’s not just the government. Since the days of the Church and the late 1990s’ Hackman movie, snooping has gone dizzyingly hi-tech, and a digital cloud is now capable of making public the private lives of people even without human intervention; just as art often reflects life, the soonto-be-released Cameron Diaz-starrer Sex Tape portrays the plight of a young couple who discover one morning that the sex tape they made of themselves the previous night has been uploaded on iCloud, which syncs their personal iPad with all the other iPads they had gifted to friends and family for Christmas. The scenario is grim: technology is designed to snoop on you.

The Local Scenario

Interestingly, despite official denials, the swirling Gadkari controver12 open

sy has highlighted a growing menace: the easy availability in India of quick-to-use bugging tools, both cheap and expensive, that aid in listening to conversations between anyone—even those of powerful ministers. Early reports had suggested that the spying took place during UPA rule and on Gadkari’s Mumbai residence, but there were also rumours afloat that the bugs were found in the bedroom of his Teenmurti Lane residence recently. The controversy is a reminder that it is almost impossible to keep secrets, once uttered. A former Home Ministry official puts it succinctly, “A secret is something that only you and another person know, and the other person is dead.”

Indians have been slow to peep, but the demand for high-end espionage devices has been growing rapidly over the past decade, with even small business rivals smuggling in equipment with near impunity in a country where such tools are almost never tagged and monitored, though there are stringent rules in place. The most effective device on the block is a passive interceptor that would pass off as a laptop at airport security checkpoints.

Corporations and individuals are increasingly using electronic espionage to track what their rivals do and say. They have also managed to get hold of advanced technology and sophisticated know-how to bug and retrieve phone calls, text messages, Facebook chats, WhatsApp exchanges, Skype calls, BlackBerry Messenger details and almost anything one does via a computer or phone. You don’t have to stealthily sneak into a room carrying cables or risk being captured like WaterGate burglars. “The more you pay, the better and more effective bugging gets. Unlike in the US, nobody keeps tracks of spying devices you own. It is so easy,” says a Home Ministry official.

US agencies found private Facebook chats of the wives of three BJP leaders involving a rising star of the party in Haryana inappropriate.

They reported the matter to Indian authorities

Corporate Wars

When Central agencies such as India’s National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) monitor private chats between individuals, it rarely makes it to the media, claims a government official. On the other hand, when companies hire detective agencies, the latter tend to advertise what they have achieved with the hope of getting more clients. Passive GSM interceptors—laptop-like machines that can intercept and record hundreds of simultaneous calls within its operational radius of 2-5 km—are not yet being made in India, but usually make their way 11 august 2014

sajjad hussain/afp

in denial mode Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari have termed bugging at the latter’s house as speculative

into the country from Dubai, where companies based in countries such as Israel, China and Ukraine sell their wares. Thanks to a spurt in demand, the cost of this machine has fallen in the past nine years from Rs 5 crore to Rs 2 crore.

These interceptors work like this: the device makes a call to an individual’s phone, and, if received, can record any call, SMS or other communication from or to that phone by ‘reading’ the handset’s International Mobile Equipment Identity code, a 15-digit ‘IMEI’ number that is useful for blocking the phone in case of theft or loss.

While the use of such machines is highly regulated and monitored by regulatory bodies in countries such as the US and in several parts of Europe, India exercises control only on the sale and import of such products. “Customs officials can hardly make out the difference between a passive interceptor and a laptop,” says a Defence Ministry official. Suppliers of the product are thought to include the now-blacklisted Shogi Communications, which is currently said to be operating in Dubai. Agencies such as the NTRO and even police forces are allowed the use of passive interceptors, but some of these had reportedly fallen into misuse at the hands of unscrupulous officers who snoop on opposition leaders in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere to please their ruling-regime masters; various allegations had forced a probe of the matter during GK Pillai’s stint as home secretary at the Centre.

The Home Department was asked to keep a list of the devices available in the country and the police were asked to return them; Open couldn’t verify if the order was implemented or not. Pillai has stayed silent about the out11 august 2014

come. At least two officials have said that such devices were used to tap the phone records of rivals at the height of corporate rivalries some years ago.

The Art of Concealing

In Delhi’s crowded Gaffar Market, one of Asia’s largest electronics shopping centres, ‘bugs’ are available in plenty. Mostly Chinese made, they are priced from Rs 7,000 to Rs 50,000 and above. Such bugs, powered by tiny power cells, can secretly be dropped inside a room. Some of them operate by tuning into a ‘dead FM channel’ frequency, on which a spy could listen to people’s conversation within the bug’s range. Some of them on display have a life of merely three hours. “These are used by the majority. Their main customers are private detectives often hired to investigate the secret lives of close relatives,” says the Home Ministry official.

These devices sometimes make their way into ministerial offices in Delhi.

Three years ago, reports emerged that there were attempts to bug Pranab Mukherjee’s office. It emerged that Mukherjee, who was India’s Finance Minister then, had written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the previous year that an electronic sweep conducted by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) found ‘adhesives’ planted in his office, as also those of his advisor Omita Paul and his private secretary Manoj Pant; the Ministry’s two conference halls were also allegedly bugged. Though no listening devices were discovered, the recovery of a glue-like substance from ‘crucial locations in the finance ministry’ suggested an attempt to plant bugs in the office, concluded the subsequent inquiry. At the time, Mukherjee was enopen www.openthemagazine.com 13

Passive GSM interceptors are laptop-like machines that can intercept and record hundreds of simultaneous calls within its operational range

SNOOPING TOYS Most snooping devices make their way to India through Dubai where companies from countries such as Israel, China and Ukraine sell their wares. Thanks to a spurt in demand, the cost of a passive interceptor has fallen in the past nine years from Rs 5 crore to Rs 2 crore

gaged in a cold war of sorts with the then Home Minister, P Chidambaram. Notably, contrary to an IB finding that the adhesive-like substance in the rooms was only chewing gum, the agency hired by the CBDT said it could have been an attempt to spy on Mukherjee.

There have been many more such cases, including accusations against the US NSA for keeping tabs on the activities of senior BJP leaders in 2010. This appeared recently in an expose by WikiLeaks.

Similarly, two years ago, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha alleged that Chidambaram had ordered the tapping of his phone after he charged the Congress leader with involvement in the Aircel-Maxis scam. The same year, at the height of the tussle between the Defence Ministry and the Army with General VK Singh as its chief, the military intelligence wing detected a listening device in the office of the then Defence Minister, AK Antony.

Last year, a controversy broke out when the Gujarat government was accused of snooping on a young girl under the orders of current BJP President Amit Shah. The girl’s family, however, made no complaint over the matter, and instead thanked the government for offering them security.

Blackmail and Deal making

The private chats on Facebook of the wives of three BJP leaders involving a rising star of the party in Haryana recently became public, thanks to snoopers. Facebook’s own team found objectionable matter in these chats; if authentic, they had even talked about supplying girls to clinch deals. Facebook monitors accounts for attempts to solicit clients for prostitution and other nefarious activities on its network. Since American agencies that 14 open

11 august 2014

were in possession of these chats found the content ‘objectionable and subversive’, they passed the information on to Indian agencies. “They could be in for some trouble for talking about influencing a leader through clever means and for conspiring to secure money through dirty ways,” says a police official.

Interestingly, a former cricket official has made tapping phones and mapping of his rivals’ computers a means of survival. The person in question hired former Mossad operatives based in London to access various details of his detractors, including their credit card records, emails and phone conversations to “more or less” blackmail them into silence, reveals a person in the know, though Open couldn’t confirm this. He also managed to track BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) chats. “Which is how he has lassoed his opponents in cricket institutions,” says the Home Ministry official.

Last year, private detectives and policemen who worked at the behest of a BJP worker were arrested in connection with collecting call detail records (CDRs) of senior BJP leaders Arun Jaitley, Gadkari and several others.

The Delhi Police said it was Anurag Singh, a private detective who had illegally tapped the phones of Amar Singh in 2005, who had procured the CDRs of Jaitley and others.

Singh’s firm, V-Detect, was a detective agency offering intelligence, risk analysis, bank fraud investigative services, matrimonial, kidnapping, theft and burglary investi-

gations, according to its website.

The country has had no dearth of phone tapping controversies. In 2010, newspapers, TV channels and websites published transcripts of phone taps by the Income Tax Department of the chats that the now-infamous Niira Radia, who ran the PR agency Vaishnavi, had with reporters, editors, telecom minister A Raja and various others, triggering a major controversy.

On several occasions, the NTRO had come under attack for tapping the phones of politicians; the organisation has denied any wrongdoing.

Modus Operandi

Besides cell-run bugs, there are those that can be connected to a power source inside a digital phone. This is done by installing special software on this phone (via its digital switchboard) by bribing a telephone boy or an insider.

You could also turn your cellphone into a bugging device.

A so-called ‘dummy phone’ can be used to record conversations within a room even if the handset is not actively recording or attending a call. This is done by asking a person to make a call while you are in a room with another person whose conversation you want to monitor.

You need not take the call, yet it will record and relay the conversation for the other person’s ears. Other close-range ‘bugs’ could be in the form of a USB or pen or pair of glasses.

manish swarup/ap

PRIVACY AT A PREMIUM North Block, which houses the Finance Ministry, had a bugging scandal three years ago

express archive

Fearing that the rooms of Rashtrapati Bhavan were bugged, Zail Singh used to meet journalists and friends on the palace lawns

Granite Island Group, a Bostonbased technical surveillance agency, has classified various types of bugs and techniques. An Ultrasonic or VLF Bug converts sound into an audio signal above the range of human hearing; the ultrasonic signal is then intercepted nearby and converted back to an audible voice.

In this case, audio pressure waves are used instead of creating a radio signal.

The other, an RF (or radio frequency) bug is the most popular type of bugging device. According to Granite’s website, a radio transmitter is placed in an area or a device.

This is your classic Martini olive bug. Cheap and disposable, this one is easy to detect—an equipped specialist can spot this kind of device at a significant distance—even if tracing it back to the person who planted it is difficult. An optical bug, in contrast, is a bugging device that converts sound (or data) into an optical pulse or beam of light. A good example 16 open

of this would be an active or passive laser listening device.

The Old Days

Though not quite on the lines of the compulsive voyeur and Soviet tyrant Stalin, who would have the phones of his politburo comrades wiretapped and stay awake all night listening to their conversations, India’s rulers have also had a passion for eavesdropping.

The late President Giani Zail Singh feared that many rooms in the Rashtrapati Bhavan were bugged, presumably under the instructions of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, with whom he shared strained ties. Zail Singh, it is said, used to meet journalists and his friends on the lawns of the presidential palace so that his conversations with them could not be monitored.

For his part, the late Rajiv Gandhi had claimed in 1990 that two Haryana intelligence men arrested outside his residence were keeping watch on politicians who 11 august 2014

r.k. sharma/express archive

Maneka Gandhi had hit out at mother-in-law Indira Gandhi for putting her under 24-hour surveillance, for tapping her phone, and for censoring her mail were meeting him and listening to his conversations with them. Much earlier, in a dramatic disclosure, Maneka Gandhi, had hit out at mother-in-law Indira Gandhi for putting her under 24-hour surveillance, tapping her phone and censoring her mail.

“Meeting someone physically under the bridge or in parks, as you see in the movies, is still the best way to stay off the radar,” says a senior police officer. “But not quite,” he adds. “The sharp eye of satellites can monitor you almost anywhere in the world.”

Anti-bugging measures have it much tougher delivering results and are far more expensive than bugging. At top offices like the PMO, various security measures are already in place. In Parliament, a Tetra radio network, which doesn’t get jammed in disaster situations, was installed a few years ago. Tetra handsets allow security personnel to access security information including images of visitors and vehicles at the push of a button; they also enhance access control.

Invasions of Privacy

While human rights groups keep attacking various data-mining schemes, including those in India such as Aadhaar and Natgrid, saying that they violate the individual’s right to privacy, governments across the world have not batted an eyelid in going ahead with them.

Natgrid, for example, which is meant to route information from 21 data sources to user agencies, will have access to categories of database such as income tax, bank account 18 open

details, credit-card transactions, railway and air travel, visa, immigration records, etcetera. On the other side of the globe, the US has faced criticism over its NSA having tapped the phone conversations of some 35 world leaders for nearly five years. The NSA ended a programme that tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders after the White House discovered the operation during a review of intelligence operations in 2013.

“Looks like there is no place to stay anonymous,” says an Indian government official, referring to what Western powers are up to. “They see everything through satellites.

What they do about it is an altogether different matter,” he says, emphasising that “if the Government wants, it could tackle the Maoist menace in no time; it has the information and capabilities, and that is no exaggeration”.

Maybe he is right.

A scene from Enemy of the State in which Smith and Hackmman are fleeing from a haven offers a sense of just how omnipresent the big eye now is: Smith: What the hell is happening?

Hackman: I blew up the building.

Smith: Why? Hackman: Because you made a phone call.

A phone call may not set a house on fire, but it could blow up your reputation—or force you into a bargain you least expected. n 11 august 2014

Now just tap to OPEN

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INNOCEAN-001/12

For a Piece of Land

peace of mind Evening prayers on the eve of Eid in old Saharanpur

As Saharanpur becomes another communal flashpoint in Uttar Pradesh, Aanchal Bansal follows the fault lines in a still volatile town photographs by ashish sharma

A

s he points toward the burnt and hanging shreds of tarpaulin that were part of a rain shed above the entrance to his shop, 47-year-old automobile parts dealer Jaspal Singh suddenly goes blank. With Eid just round the corner, he had been looking forward to the festivities and bumper sales that businessmen and traders hope to see during the season. Only four days earlier, the market along Ambala Road in Saharanpur buzzed with festivity: lined with food stalls, its shops and stores overstocked with LCD TV sets, air conditioners, washing machines and mobile phones in anticipation of festival-related sales.

A few seconds later, perhaps nudged by the lingering stench of burnt chemicals and electronics hanging heavy over the market, Singh is back with us. When 22 open

we meet him, on the day of Eid, all that remains of the market is burnt shops, charred vehicles and those shreds of tarpaulin. His shop was among the 200 shops that were looted and burnt down in a clash between Sikhs and Muslims in the early hours of 26 July. The violence occurred along the highway that separates Saharanpur’s old city, dominated

by Muslims, and the new city, predominantly home to Sikhs and Hindus. The shops that fell prey to the conflict largely belonged to the town’s Sikh community, many members of which settled here after Partition and set up small businesses.

“I don’t know what made me spend Rs 5,000 on this shed just a week back. I could have saved that money,” says Singh, eyes fixed on the road while hurriedly walking away from the shop he has owned for the last 30 years. Police

jeeps and trucks, indicating the imposition of an evening curfew, begin whizzing by. Paramilitary forces begin to take charge of the road that leads up to the Idgaah, a large ground for offering Eid prayers, in the old city. The tension is palpable.

“My losses have notched up to Rs 30 lakh already. I have a son studying engineering in Chandigarh and the second one is ready to start college. I don’t know how we will manage,” says Singh.

“On Eid, every year, all you could see on this road were people in white skull caps.

I had never imagined that one would see paramilitary forces here.”

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his outbreak of violence in UP comes barely a year after Jat-Muslim riots ravaged Muzaffarnagar, not far from 11 AUGUST 2014

uneasy calm Scenes around Gurdwara Singh Sabha (left) and Qazi street in old Saharanpur on 29 July

Saharanpur in the state’s northwest.

While the earlier episode was sparked by an isolated incident, last week’s violence was touched off by a longstanding dispute between Sikhs and Muslims over a piece of land amounting to nearly 3,400 sq ft, next to a gurdwara by the railway station. While the matter was being heard by a tribunal of the local Wakf Board (a body governing properties dedicated to religious, pious or charitable purposes as recognised by Muslim Law), Sikhs allegedly kept their construction work going on the piece of land; where, according to residents, a mosque once stood.

On 26 July, tension mounted and clashes began in the hours of sehri (a pre-dawn meal had by Muslims before a day of fasting) when a few faceless youths identified by their get-up as Muslims are said to 11 AUGUST 2014

Last week’s violence was touched off by a longstanding dispute between Sikhs and Muslims over a piece of land amounting to nearly 3,400 sq ft, next to a gurdwara by the Saharanpur railway station have pelted bricks—presumably in protest of the construction—at an old Sikh woman who was visiting the gurdwara for the early morning path (reading or recitation). According to Balbir Singh Dheer, pradhan of the gurdwara and Sri Guru Singh Sabha of Saharanpur, the security guard reported that incident at around 4.30 am. “We rushed to the gurdwara in our nightsuits only to find huge

chunks of bricks lying outside on the road,” he says. “While we informed the police and district administration about the incident, we noticed a Muslim crowd gathering at the chowk in front of Qutub Sher station, barely 50 metres away from the gurdwara on Ambala road.”

According to Virender Pal Kohli, a member of the Sri Guru Singh Sabha, the crowd continued to swell under the leadopen www.openthemagazine.com 23

ership of former councillor and local goon Moharram Ali Pappu, who was the main claimant of the piece of land on behalf of Muslims as a community. “He is a land mafia dealer who was blackmailing us and wanted to extort money from us to quash the case,” Kohli alleges. The police has booked Pappu, who has been absconding since the incident, for rioting and arsonry. They say that there were negotiations underway between Pappu and Sikh leaders; but these talks had failed. “It is not a communal clash but a clash between two communities over a piece of land,” says Rajesh Pandey, Senior Superintendent of Police, Saharanpur.

By about 9 am, claims Kohli, a huge crowd of Muslim men was seen heading toward the gurdwara, past the police station. “They had tamanchas (countrymade guns) and bricks in their hands and started firing at us,” says Kohli, “We too picked up chunks of bricks to save our-

selves but ran in the opposite direction.”

The police opened fire at the mob, and the crowd reportedly got out of hand when a constable was killed in the crossfire. As Sikhs ran for cover, he says, the charging crowd began looting their stores and setting them ablaze.

“It was all pre-planned,” believes Sikh shopkeeper Jaswinder Singh, claiming that the Muslim shops in the area were spared. While the fire station was attacked first, its vehicles and water supply destroyed, a strange incendiary chemical was used by the assailants, he alleges.

“My shop still erupts in flames even after two days,” claims Singh, who had an electronic goods store.

With news of subsequent attacks in different parts of the city spreading, the police imposed a curfew by evening.

Only three days later, on Eid, were the hours of curfew relaxed; the old city was opened up for the morning namaaz, re-

The violence has erupted at a politically sensitive time; by-elections for Assembly seats in Saharanpur and Moradabad are scheduled next month, and political parties are blaming each other for the outbreak

24 open

stricting numbers to about 3,000 at the Idgaah. In the evening, curfew hours were relaxed, alternately, in the new city.

The situation continued to simmer, however, evident in the panic that took hold when a young Muslim couple lingered in front of the gurdwara as they were walking from the railway station toward the old city during curfew hours.

Paramilitary forces whisked them away, escorting them to the old city.

T

he piece of land that led to this row had passed hands from a Muslim nawab to a Hindu Baniya family, before ending up with the gurdwara.

Community leader Qazi Nadim Akhtar says the property had belonged to a man called Hassan Askari, and that it was famously known as ‘peeli kothi’. Within the plot lay a mosque Askari had built for private use. After Partition, he sold off this land to two Hindu sisters, Mansa and Lajwanti Devi, but clearly excluded about 3,400 sq ft of land that housed the mosque in the sale deed signed in 1949, says Akhtar: “The property is mentioned as a masjid with No 1102 in the records of the Waqf Board.”

In 2001, the gurdwara committee bought the land from the family. “The entire 3,500 square yard plot of land belongs to them, excluding the part over which the mosque is built. If the sale deed clearly mentions that, it is up to the Waqf Board to decide, [the gurdwara committee] cannot do anything about it,” Akhtar adds. While the Waqf tribunal is still hearing the matter, the district magistrate did pass an order in December 2013 on the basis of an application filed

by Muslims, declaring that any construction on the land would be termed illegal.

“The gurdwara, however, continued with the construction at night and the matter got out of hand. Unfortunately, we live in a country governed by emotions, if only the crowd had waited for the city administration to take action,” says Akhtar.

The violence has erupted at a politically sensitive time; by-elections for Assembly seats in Saharanpur and Moradabad are scheduled next month, and political parties are indulging in a slugfest of sorts, blaming each other for the outbreak. While BJP MP Raghav 11 AUGUST 2014

aftermath (Facing page) Members of the gurdwara prabandhak committee take stock of the situation; gutted shops on Ambala Road, Saharanpur

Lakhan Pal pinned the blame on the state’s Akhilesh Yadav government and its political plans, Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan, speaking on the occasion of Eid, blamed the Centre and Congress for the violence.

Both Sikh and Muslim community leaders, however, blame the city administration. “They knew about the case since the beginning, but still couldn’t prevent the illegal construction,” says Akhtar. “They wanted to ensure peace during Eid and could not prevent a crowd from assembling in front of the police station; even the fire station was rendered useless by the rioters, all under the nose of the administration,” says Dheer.

While the police are still trying to nab Pappu—who had about 15 cases of extortion and blackmailing levelled against him prior to the incidents—and claim to have arrested 43 people on 11 AUGUST 2014

the basis of 22 FIRs filed in the matter, they also say they will investigate allegations of the riots being part of a plan.

As an eerie silence settles on Eid, a few hours before the evening curfew comes into effect, 68-year-old Jamal Shah winces in pain, lying in the district hospital.

His head is heavy, covered with heavy bruises, and he cannot move his right leg even now.

“I still don’t know what happened,” says Shah, who works as a daily wage labourer in sugarcane fields. The last thing he remembers, minutes after walking out of the railway station toward the old city, is a flurry of stones flying in his direction. “I was returning from Firozabad as I had gone to collect funds for a mosque to be built in our village in Kunda. I had Rs 30,000 and was on my way to fetch my daughter who was living with a relative,” he recounts. He was hit with a blunt and heavy object on his head and leg, and was

found unconscious near the gurdwara on the day of the violence. The mob had robbed him, of course. “I don’t know whether they were Sikhs or Muslims; they were thieves,” he says.

At the same hospital, Mohammad Talib, still unable to walk, realised what had happened only after he woke up to find his head shaven and wrapped in bandages. “I was unconscious for about a day,” says the kirana shop owner, who was in the area to buy goods for his shop.

He was in a light carrier vehicle popularly known as a chhota haathi in the area.

“The mob came and pulled me out of my vehicle. Since I have polio, I couldn’t run. They robbed me and hit me with iron rods,” he says. Like Shah, Talib says he has no clue who his attackers were.

“They ruined Eid for my family and robbed us of our money,” he says, “I don’t know whether they were Sikh or Muslim; violence has no face.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 25

POLITICS

DISGRUNTLED AND DANGEROUS

They were once the flag bearers of saffron power.

Denied rewards in the form of positions in the Government or special notes of appreciation from the Prime Minister, these worthies today spell more trouble than comfort for the NDA regime Lhendup G Bhutia illustrations by anirban ghosh

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E

very star has its own galaxy.

Every power source has elements that derive energy from it. Thus, when a new political dispensation assumes office, so does a coterie of hangers-on. There are many such individuals in the Narendra Modi establishment, who are seen to be close to the BJP and who were perhaps useful to the party once, but are now increasingly a headache. They shoot their mouths off with nothing to gain, push their own personal agendas, and when their bidding is not done, turn to bite their master’s hand.

Here is a sample.

11 AUGUST 2014

The Political Postures of Baba Ramdev

When Babul Supriyo, the Hindi and Bengali playback singer who won the Asansol seat in the recent parliamentary elections, revealed how spiritual leader Baba Ramdev had helped him get a BJP ticket in a Bengali newspaper recently, it exposed what had long been suspected— the manner in which the wily yoga guru had extracted his pound of flesh. In his article in Anandabazar Patrika, Supriyo wrote about how, overhearing the guru discussing ticket distribution on a flight, he had joked with Ramdev that if he was not given a ticket, he would tell the media about the guru giving away BJP tickets.

Within a few days, the singer was nominated by the BJP for the Asansol seat.

And it was not just Supriyo. For whatever Ramdev was worth—his large following, for instance, in large pockets of India, and his focused attacks on the UPA—the BJP humoured him. But it soon became apparent that the guru wanted more: his own men in the Government. It is said that Ramdev began making demands of the party, asking for dozens of seats, ultimately managing to get four.

Apart from Supriyo, these include two gurus—Baba Chand Nath from Alwar and Swami Sumedhanand from Sikar, both in Rajasthan—and Kanwar Singh Tanwar, from Amroha in Uttar Pradesh. The local BJP units weren’t particularly thrilled by these choices. Chand Nath, who has a murder charge along with allegations of distributing cash to local journalists against him, was caught on tape during the campaign complaining to Ramdev about how difficult it was to bring cash into the constituency (the two later de11 AUGUST 2014

nied it). Tanwar, a political opportunist who had represented two political parties in the last five years—the BSP and Congress—wasn’t supposed to have gotten the Amroha seat. It had been intended for the former Indian cricketer, Chetan Chauhan.

Ramdev has various court cases against him related to allegations of tax fraud and land grabs. After the BJP victory in May, the senior leadership apparently tried to convey its misapprehensions to him; this was seen during an event at Talkatora Stadium in Delhi, where top BJP leaders, while thanking him for his contribution, hinted that he should not expect any favours. But, according to some reports, Ramdev has now begun to push for Supriyo to get a Cabinet berth during the next reshuffle.

The man claims he can, with mastery over his breath, teach people how to ‘cure’ themselves of homosexuality and regenerate livers, and suggests that by ridding the country of all Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, black money can be reduced. One can never quite be sure what to make of his proclamations. According to Supriyo’s article, when the singer told the guru he wouldn’t be able to spend a large amount of money on his campaign, the guru laughed and told him, “The BJP will take care of that. But promise me that you will learn pavan mukta asana (wind relieving posture).”

The Anarchic Militancy of Subramanian Swamy

Every political party, irrespective of ideology or inclination, needs a bouncer.

Someone who, with little care for civility, can heckle and bludgeon opponents.

Swamy, the great conspiracy theorist, has been performing this role for the BJP. He has, in fact, taken heckling to the level of performance art.

He will call Priyanka Gandhi an alcoholic, speak of Sonia Gandhi and her rumoured ill health, and call Rahul Gandhi

a drug addict who has faked a Harvard degree, all in one breath. He will tirelessly file cases in court, rake up issues of corruption and keep opponents on their toes, like he did with the National Herald case, accusing Sonia and Rahul Gandhi of fraud and a land-grab. It is very well to have such a Jack up your sleeves when the party is warming the opposition benches. But the former Janata Party head is quite the gadfly, in constant search for public attention.

He is known to have been out of favour with the last BJP Prime Minister, AB Vajpayee, whom he called a drunk in his memoirs. It is said that Vajpayee ensured that Swamy had very little say in any matter of importance. He rejected the idea of

Swamy as Finance Minister back in 1977, when the Janata Party came to power; three years later, when the BJP was formed, Vajpayee kept Swamy out. And then, in 1999, when the Finance Ministry eluded Swamy yet again—after he helped the BJP gain power by brokering AIADMK support—he engineered the NDA Government’s collapse by getting that party to switch allegiance to the Congress.

He is now a member of the BJP, a prominent face at that. But how long will it be before he stokes another needless controversy? Recall his silly and prejudiced article on how to wipe out Islamist terror after 26/11. More recently, after media reports emerged alleging that Nitin Gadkari’s bungalow in Delhi had been bugged, almost all BJP leaders, including Gadkari denied this. But not Swamy. He didn’t just ignore the party line; the conspiracy theorist that he is, he pinned the blame on America’s Central Intelligence Agency. As he told NDTV, “My view is that the senior leadership of the BJP was definitely targeted by the NSA (National Security Agency, a top US spy agency), and NSA can also include, temporarily, people from the CIA, and therefore we need to know the truth.” The NDA Government, like its predecessor, does not have an antiUS policy. Such statements, even if sum28 open

marily dismissed by the BJP leadership, as and that large parts of south and central has happened in this case, can only hurt Asia—including Pakistan, Afghanistan, the regime’s relationship with the US. Bangladesh, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar—are part of a greatThe History Revisions of er territorial ‘Akhand Bharat’. As one Dinanath Batra would expect, leading scholars and comOver the years, the retired schoolteacher mentators have dissed his efforts. Romila Dinanath Batra has taken upon himself, Thapar has said that his books are “not histhrough his organisation Shiksha Bachao tory, but fantasy”; “This is absurd. If educaAndolan Samiti, the task of correcting his- tion is about training children how to tory. He has famously taken on the think, this approach will not work,” she National Council of Educational Research said, speaking to The Hindustan Times. and Training (NCERT) to remove ‘objecBatra’s efforts may garner him headlines tionable passages’ from its textbooks for and get his opinions into the public saying, among other things, that Aryans sphere, but they also feed a paranoia that in ancient times consumed beef. He had exists about right-wing parties. The BJP is filed a case against renowned artist MF unlikely to use its parliamentary clout to Husain to protest what he saw as blasphe- have history books rewritten, the party’s mous depictions of Hindu gods, got sex supporters surmise. In fact, such efforts education taken off the curriculum of would hurt its image. But Batra remains Madhya Pradesh schools, sought to re- unshaken. He’s been at it for far too long. move AK Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana from Delhi University’s histo- The Strange Turnaround of ry course and even sent The Hindu Group Madhu Kishwar a legal notice for a Frontline cover story sev- Even in the career graph of the most seaeral years ago on Hindu terrorism, object- soned politician, a volte-face, when it ocing to its use of the word ‘terrorism’ together with Hinduism. In 2001, when he was on a similar warpath against NCERT textbooks, he defended his actions by tellhRD ing Outlook, “Jesus Christ was a najayaz (illegitimate) child of Mary, but in Europe they don’t teach that. Instead, they call her Mother Mary and say she is a virgin.”

The BJP-led Government has said nothing in support of Batra’s plans, but the former schoolteacher has kept up his dharmayudh. Earlier this year, he got Penguin Books India to pulp American scholar Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History. In various interviews, Batra has claimed that Doniger is driven by a “Christian missionary zeal” to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light. He didn’t stop at that. His actions led to the withdrawal of another book by Doniger, On Hinduism—although the publisher, Aleph Book Company, has now decided to reprint the title. Significantly, according to the latest, much tweeted news, six of Batra’s books have been made mandatory reading in Gujarat’s 42,000 primary and secondary schools. The books, among other things, apparently say that people should refrain from blowing out candles for birthdays as this is a ‘Western custom’; that they should wear swadeshi clothes and recite mantras and feed cows;

curs, is embarrassing. And if you are an academic who has built a career critiquing politicians and social injustices, it is nothing short of cringe-inducing.

Madhu Purnima Kishwar, the academicjournalist who was once considered a leading feminist voice, has made a big switch-over once, and by all available evidence, she is making another one now.

Kishwar was once a leading critic of the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat.

She claimed, among other things, that the state government was responsible for the 2002 riots in the Gujarat. She wrote articles and editorials denouncing the government and its then Chief Minister— but by the time it had become clear that Modi was going to bid for the Prime Minister’s post, she had undergone a remarkable transformation. She met him for interviews, wrote a book on him, attacked news organisations that weren’t rallying to his side, and generally defended him with the embarrassing zeal of a devotee. It wasn’t just that she built a temple around Modi. She had also appointed herself its high priestess.

A day after Modi’s swearing-in ceremony, Kishwar underwent yet another transformation. She attacked the very government she had so long appeared to want in power, providing a battered Congress ammunition to mount its first attack on the BJP. The issue: Smriti Irani’s appointment as Union Minister of Human Resource Development. Her grouse: that an education culminating in class 12 and the career of a model and television actress left Irani unfit to handle the education port11 AUGUST 2014

folio. Kishwar declared that she had nothing personal against her, and that concern for education was her only cause.

Two months on, she continues to badmouth Irani, recently calling her an agent of the Left, and sharing pictures of the HRD Minister apparently dozing off in Parliament. Her reservations have also extended to the rest of the Government.

Every few days, she gets on Twitter, objecting, among other things, to individuals like Aamir Khan meeting Modi; the PM’s decision to travel to the US; and the BJP’s alleged ham-handed manner in dealing with the Intelligence Bureau leak of a report on foreign-funded NGOs. Consider the tweet she sent out on 20 June, less than a month after Modi took office: ‘Too many actions of Modi govt totally out of sync with @narendramodi who was Gujarat CM. Can’t make sense. Has Modi changed so drastically?’ It is unlikely Modi changed in a month. If anything, her expectations have.

The Sudden Rebellion of Arvind Panagariya

All through the run-up to the General Election, we heard the economist Arvind Panagariya discuss Modi as the answer India’s economy has long been looking for: someone who would take the toughest possible action, if the need arose, to fix things, reform policies and bring about development. He began doling out economic advice to kickstart the economy long before the votes were counted. Along with Jagdish Bhagwati, he co-authored a book called India’s Tryst with Destiny that

made glowing claims about Gujarat’s economic model; he even wrote a letter to The Economist with his co-author, objecting to the magazine’s coverage of Modi. One can safely assume that a glistening resume was kept ready, as Panagariya’s stance led many to believe that a plum position awaited him, perhaps as chief of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. He had unequivocally put his weight behind the Modi campaign. But the job call, it seems, never came.

Now consider his recent review of the Union Budget that Arun Jaitley presented on 10 July. In The Times of India, he writes, ‘Many had eagerly awaited the budget speech for a policy vision of the new government. Unfortunately, it too left observers guessing on whether the government would tackle tough reforms or rely principally on better implementation.’ He makes a few concessions on the good points of the Budget, about the promise of an entrepreneur-friendly legal framework and the credibility of proposals to accelerate the building of infrastructure. But these are quickly done away with in a few paragraphs, as he launches into how the only explanation for this budgetary disappointment is that continuity-minded bureaucrats had effectively hijacked it. ‘Contrary to claims by many, this is not the best budget possible in 45 days...,’ he writes, ‘Even the cleverest rewriting would not substitute for the missing policy vision.’

How does the BJP reconcile itself to the words of a man who was once so effusive about Modi’s vision? n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

border

in the OF FIRE Mihir Srivastava travels through villages along the LoC in Jammu & Kashmir to chronicle lives scarred by the never ending hostilities between India and Pakistan photographs by ashish sharma

t

C O L L AT E R A L lo s s Sharifa Begum from the village of Mohrakampala, who lost her leg to a landmine explosion in 1994. Three years before that, she lost her brother to a similar accident. They were both out herding cattle at the time 30 open

W

hen India’s newly elected Prime

Minister Narendra Modi met his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif on the very day he asDardpura sumed office, it filled people living along the Line of Control (LoC) with hope. Peace between J&K the two countries on either side of this divide— Mohrakampala this 740-km long line in Jammu & Kashmir is not recognised as an international border but Suchetgarh serves as one for all practical purposes—could mean the silencing of guns, an easing of tension and a revival of civilian ties that Partition took apart, with all its dividends. “Indo-Pak leaders should make a thorough review of cross-LoC trade and initiate steps for its promotion,” enthused YV Sharma, president of Jammu and Kashmir Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Right now, trans-LoC trade, which began in 2008, is restricted to the barter fairs that take place four times a week at the crosspoints of Salamabad, Uri and Chakan-Da-Bagh, Poonch.

Yet, barely a month-and-a-half-later, when Modi travelled to the Valley, the mood had darkened. On 3 July, three intruders tried to sneak across the LoC in Poonch district; they were shot by the Indian Army. On 13 July, separatists called for a shutdown in protest against ‘separate enclaves’ for Kashmiri Pandits, the prospect of whose return from exile has caused much unease. Pakistan, too, was back to its old rhetoric, with its foreign office spokesperson, Tasnim Aslam, calling J&K “a disputed territory”.

The Indian Army maintains a heavy presence along the LoC, with soldiers Tithwal

11 AUGUST 2014

often offering the odd visitor a cup of tea.

‘Atithi devo bhava’ is the spirit; ‘guests are like gods’. Intruders, however, are not guests, they clarify. “They will only get bullets,” quips one, “not tea.” Such humour masks the grim reality of the risks they face. On 22 July, an Indian soldier was killed in the Akhnoor sector when Pakistani troops fired at Indian positions.

“The firing was intended to facilitate the infiltration of militants across the LoC,” says Colonel Manish Mehta, local spokesperson for the Army.

However, few people pray for peace as fervently as the civilians who live in remote villages along the LoC. Lives here are dangerously led, with bullet injuries, amputated limbs, state harassment and tales of terror common to most residents, Hindu or Muslim. Here follow reports from four such settlements scarred by decades of violence:

Suchetgarh

A Hindu Village of Muslim Traditions

A dusty road leads us to Suchetgarh, 23 km west of Jammu city in the RS Pura sector.

Fewer and fewer people are to be spotted as we approach, which is a sign of nearing a border area. We reach a Border Security Force checkpost, take a sharp turn right, and a kilometre long stretch along the fenced LoC gets us to our destination. It’s a village of about 1,200 families, all Hindu.

They speak Dogri, but are not unfamiliar with the Urdu-laced Punjabi spoken within earshot just a few hundred yards on the other side of the fence.

Locals often complain of government neglect. “We are ignored because we are Hindus and there’s a government bias against the aman pasand (peace inclined),” alleges Saran Lal Bhagat, 50, who has been the village sarpanch for three years.

“This is in contrast with those who take to violence,” he adds, “We are ignored because we aren’t a threat.” Suchetgarh gets no water supply, its sole school operates poorly, and its healthcare facilities are so inadequate that they cannot even save snakebite victims. “My problems are not with Pakistan,” says Bhagat, “but with our own government.” An exception to VIP apathy was last year’s visit by the then Home Minister Sushilkumar i n cl u s i v e C U LT U R E A mazaar in Suchetgarh, a Hindu village near the LoC 32 open

her thigh. She bled profusely. It took three days to extract the bullet.

It was a curse, Sansaro Devi felt. Her husband, Tharu Ram, a farmer, wasn’t doing well either. His farm output was down and cattle were sick and dying.

That’s when Baba Kaliveer, a Muslim sage, appeared in her dream, telling her that her house was his resting place, she says. So they built a mazaar in his honour in their frontyard and painted it green.

Next to it is a small temple, painted saffron. Every Thursday, they offer prayers at the shrine, a Sufi Muslim tradition upheld in a typical Hindu fashion.

There are 15 such burial shrines in the village, all well taken care of by Hindu families. The biggest is at the centre of the village on top of a mound, inside a BSF zone. It’s the mazaar of Pir Baba, a Muslim sage popularly believed to be the protector of Suchetgarh. Not only locals, but even BSF personnel stationed here make a beeline every morning to offer it floral tributes. And despite all the shots fired, say locals, there has been no serious casualty in the village for years.

Mohrakampala

Village of the Disabled R E T U R N T O INN O C E N C E Noor Hasan Khatana, a former militant from the village of Dardpura (above). For six years under training as a jihadi in PoK’s biggest town, Muzaffarabad, he was paid Rs 900 a month as a stipend by the administration there

Shinde, who held closed-door meetings with BSF officials. He made tall claims and big promises, says Bhagat, but nothing came of it.

Meanwhile, locals live in fear of latenight firing and mortar shelling; they say that a BSF jawan was killed and three others injured last week when Pakistani troops opened fire on Indian posts.

Sansaro Devi, a 50-year-old woman who lives on the western edge of the village, just 100 metres from a Pakistani post, was hit by a bullet five years ago. She was in her kitchen, cooking with the door slightly ajar, when a bullet from across the LoC ricocheted off the wall and buried itself in 11 AUGUST 2014

For a drive to desolation, the journey is breathtaking. The sky is a cloudless blue and the road meanders through lush forests of tall Deodars trying to outgrow one another. Mohrakampala is an hour’s journey from Nowshera, the nearest town near Rajauri in Jammu. The huts are scattered far and wide, hidden from each other by trees and hills, and there are terrace farms full of paddy water.

In a mud hut on a bare patch of one such hill lives Alauddin, a 60-year-old farmer with a sharply trimmed beard and a crewcut—perhaps inspired by the soldiers deployed in large numbers here. It’s late afternoon, and he has just returned from the bazaar with half a dozen bananas for his grandchildren. His daughter Sharifa Begum lost a leg in a landmine blast back in 1994, three years after he lost his six-year-old son in a similar blast. They were both out herding cattle at the time.

Their house overlooks the LoC fence. It was put up 20 years ago, but before that, laying landmines along the Line was the Army’s preferred way to thwart infiltrators. There is no official record of the peo-

ple injured by landmine blasts in the area, but in this village, every third home has someone with a severed limb.

“I could run faster than all my peers,” says Sharifa, “I still want to run.” She is married now; her husband ploughs a field owned by Alauddin, and she stitches clothes for a living. “The government has done nothing for us,” she says.

Alauddin is also bitter about the cancellation of his Below Poverty Line card, for which he blames the local patwari.

Landmine removal is a tough job, and the Army has not even tried yet. “When they move in these areas, they carry equipment and sniffer dogs,” says Kuldeep Singh of Hathinala village, who lost his legs 20 years ago to a blast.

The Army, though, has been helpful in other ways. Its Sadbhavana scheme has provided dozens of villagers with artificial limbs, and three blast victims have been granted support packages of Rs 1.5 lakh each. “The Army is the only government arm that works seriously for the poor,” says 28-year-old Mushtaque Ahmad, who has had his right hand, lost in 2006, replaced by a mechanical one that lets him clasp objects. “Its clings to me like dead tissue,” he says.

Mohammad Shakoor, a lean man of 18, lost his right leg when he was 11 years old. His artificial leg is as thin as his real one, hardly distinguishable. It sometimes slips off in humid weather and he often falls. “But something is better than nothing,” he insists.

The village’s most recent victim was 45-year-old Mohmad Rashid, who lost a leg three years ago, and with it, a job in the city. He has hardly any land to cultivate, and ambles his way home with tomato, brinjal and 2 kg of barley flour that he has borrowed from a neighbour. It is all he could put together to break his daily fast at Iftaar during Ramzan.

Tithwal

A Hamlet No One Hears About

Located in the Kupwara sector, the village of Tithwal is a bare 10 metres away from Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (POK), separated by a rivulet that foams as it curves and gushes down its path. Indians call it the Kishanganga while Pakistanis have named it the Neelamnadi—and it acts as the LoC in this region.

Shahid Basheer, 20, studies at a local colopen www.openthemagazine.com 33

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lege about 30 km away. His bearded friend Mansoor Din, just a few years older than him, could easily pass for his father.

Both of them are contract labourers, and the latter proudly discloses that he has been as far as Punjab and Delhi for work. They have just crossed the last of the five Army posts erected along an hourlong route along the Kishanganga, trudging up a hill and then down to reach Tithwal.

Everyone must submit to thorough checks and rechecks by security forces on entering or leaving the village. Even on a Ramzan evening, tension in the air is palpable as locals quietly go about preparing for Iftari. “The [Indian] army is responsible for the mess here, and not Pakistan,” says Mansoor Din, “We are treated like outlaws in our land.”

The silence is frequently broken by white Tata Sumos with yellow number plates that crisscross the hills, leaving dust trails in their wake. The village looks like small town, somewhat pros-

perous compared to others in the region.

It has large dwellings lining the rivulet, some of which resemble English cottages in Shimla. There is a sports field with carpet-like grass, and a school.

Everyone here has a relative or two across the river in PoK. “They are so near, yet so far,” says Shashirahman, who claims to be 43 years old but looks to be in his late sixties. He owns a grocery shop.

Last year, his ailing mother’s brother came visiting from across the LoC to see how she was. “My uncle lives not even a kilometre away from my shop,” he says, pointing across the river to a hill.

Shahid and Mansoor Din interact with their relatives across the LoC every Thursday, which is when visa-holders on either side are allowed to cross over. It’s a good scheme, says Mansoor, even though getting a visa could take anything from one to six years. Most of these meetings are not elaborate. They exchange smiles and ask “Khairiyat hai (all well)?” Some people exchange more

than that, reveals a villager anonymously; they pass letters and parcels, some of which contain brown sugar. Also, once darkness descends and the Army lowers its flag at 7 pm, splashes are sometimes heard of people swimming across the Kishanganga.

Dardpura

The Village of Widows and Spinsters

It is an arduous walk, with steep climbs and slushy passages to negotiate, but the very first sight of Dardpura is a reward in itself. The houses, mostly log cabins with slanted tin-sheet roofs, have a fairytale charm about them. Children play on the t T H E C O S T O F WA R Sahiba Jan, a widow living in Dardpura village (below).

Denied the closure of seeing her husband’s body, Sahiba keeps saying over and over that he is dead, killed by Indian Army bullets

S O C L O S E Y E T S O FA R A Pakistani village across the LoC from Tithwal (left); and an ‘enemy’ watchtower visible from Suchetgarh

streets, their chubby cheeks glowing in the sun and pale brown eyes inquisitively looking this way and that.

However, nothing in the beauty of Dardpura betrays the grim past till one sees the sullen faces of its elders.

Sahiba Jan is 50 but looks 70. One evening—she doesn’t remember the year, but perhaps it was 1990—her husband had left home without saying a word. Their five-year-old daughter was attending to her newborn sister at the time. Now a quarter of a century later, they are grown up, work in the fields, and despite their robust good looks and charm, do not entertain much hope of marriage or any other passport to a better life. Is there hope that Sahiba Jan’s husband might be alive? “No. He is dead.

They killed him when he tried to cross the border. Some saw his body roll down the hill. He is dead, he is dead,” Sahiba Jan repeats, as if still struggling with denial, “I know he is dead, and the dead don’t come back.”

She has survived many a severe winter with an empty stomach and two daughters. “The villagers helped me get by,” she says. And she is not alone. There are 370 widows like her in Dardpura, and most have not had the closure of seeing their 11 AUGUST 2014

husbands’ bodies. But they believe the missing men to be dead and gone. This belief has helped them to move on. Grief is a luxury they cannot afford. One of the widows has six unmarried daughters, Sahiba Jan says, as if having only two is a blessing. “Dardpura will soon be known as the village of young spinsters, not widows,” she says with a wry smile.

It was in 1990-91 that the exodus took place. Some 400 of Dardpura’s men deserted their families and homes to become jihadis. They crossed the border into PoK, got indoctrinated, and vowed to free Kashmir of kafir—read Hindu—rule.

Noor Hasan Khatana, 50, is one of them. He lived in PoK’s biggest town, Muzaffarabad, for six years. The administration there took care of them. They were treated as privileged refugees and paid Rs 900 a month, which was more than twice what some widows get from the J&K government, he adds. Some LoC-crossers even got married and had children. Each family member would get Rs 900, says Khatana, irrespective of gender and age.

Why did he come back, then? In a few years, he realised he was being reduced to a mercenary in the name of Allah. He was being trained to kill his

own people. Like him, many others decided to return home, but most of them were killed either by the vagaries of nature or Indian Army bullets on their return journey. Only 150, he says, survived the journey home.

Khatana feels cheated, however. He was detained for four months after his return in 1996. “This is my country and I came back. I was wrong,” he says, “I was promised Rs 4 lakh to start my life afresh.” He never got it. Somehow, he has managed to put his life together. He has a house and a son, Altaf Ahmad Khatana, who is now studying engineering in Jammu on a government scholarship.

But others, he says, are not as lucky. They get few hundred rupees as pension— “which is not support but a joke”.

Dardpura’s sarpanch, Nazar Ahmad Bhat, says that the real issue is not militancy but lack of development. “We have no problems with Pakistan,” he says, “We suffer because of the J&K government’s apathy: there is no water, roads, nothing.” It is all local effort that gets anything built, he says. He has had a road laid. A panchayat office is being built; and there is a mosque at the far end of the road. Instead of a dome, it has a pagoda-like top. n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

open essay

By SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

Where the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row When Indian soldiers defended what God abandoned and risked their life in the faraway fields of the First World War a century ago

Pictures courtesy: Roli Books, from its forthcoming book, Their Name Liveth Forevermore: India and the First World War By Vedica Kant

36 open

11 AUGUST 2014

T

he windswept loneliness of the small white cupola at the top of a wide flight of granite steps above the Sussex Downs reminded me of Singapore’s sparkling Outram Park metro station. The link was Lalu (Lal Singh), an innocent Punjabi peasant who fights for the English in Mulk Raj Anand’s First World War novel, Across Sunanda K the Black Waters. Both the Chhatri (as Datta-Ray the Downs memorial is called) and is a columnist Outram Park recall that war-to-end-alland author wars in which India’s leaders sacrificed more than 74,000 young Lalus on the altar of their political ambition. Their death was the price our nationalist elite eagerly paid for the promise of swaraj after the war.

There was quite a flutter on the country bus from Brighton (where I was staying with my son), when I asked for Patcham, the village at the foot of the hill on which the Chhatri stands.

Several passengers knew it. “‘Chhatri’ means umbrella, doesn’t it?” one asked. An old man said he had got lost once trying to go up. Another recalled playing by it as a child. “Say a prayer for me when you are up there,” someone said as I disembarked to trudge up the empty hill where 53 soldiers—who fought in France like Lalu but died in Brighton—were cremated, their ashes scattered over the English Channel. Only some Friesian cows witnessed my panting ascent.

In contrast, Outram Park throbs with activity. But even among the Indian Singaporean commuters, many are ignorant of, or indifferent to the grim memory it enshrines. I chanced upon the commemorative plaque after visiting the nearby Singapore General Hospital, and SR Nathan, the then president of Singapore, filled in the details. Outram Park’s Hokkien name of si pai poh means ‘Sepoy plain’, named after the nearby Sepoy Lines and parade ground. Being an all-Muslim (Ranghar Rajput and Pathan) regiment, the 5th Light Infantry, which mutinied on 15 February 1915, was especially sensitive to national and religious propaganda. Ghaddar Party incitement was one provocation, while the Turkish Sultan Mehmed V’s fatwa urging Muslims to oppose the Allies was another. A third was the rumour the regiment would go to Europe to fight the Caliphate; and an unpopular and unsympathetic British commander was the clinching factor.

Nathan told me that the mutineers expected Singapore’s German prisoners of war to join them.

Disappointed, they attacked and killed 47 British soldiers and civilians in the seven days before British troops helped by French, Russian and Japanese naval detachments captured them. More

than 200 sepoys were tried for treason. Seventy-three were jailed for up to 20 years, and 64 transported for life. The Straits Times reported that more than 15,000 people packed the slopes of Sepoy Lines to watch a firing squad gunning down 47 others.

The massacre is forgotten. Yet, it exposed the tortured relationship between Britons and Indians more sharply than stirring legends of India’s military contribution could hide.

A great-uncle’s racy chronicle of fighting in Egypt, the Dardanelles, the Balkans, Mesopotamia and Iraq, Through war, rebellion and riot, 1914-1921, introduced me to the war. Kunal Chandra Sen—Acharya Keshub Chandra Sen’s grandson—was credited with organising the field post office for Indian servicemen abroad. I also heard a great deal about the heroic Laddie (Indra Lal Roy), an ace pilot with the Royal Air Force who achieved 10 “kills” before the Germans shot him down over France on 22 July 1918. Nineteen-year-old Laddie, great-uncle of NDTV’s Prannoy Roy, was the first (and probably only) Indian to receive a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross.

The stories of Laddie and Kunal Sen can’t have had much resonance beyond their own Westernised upper middle-class Bengali milieu; and that also applies to the first Lord Sinha, the only non-White member of the War Conference in London and India’s representative at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference.

Even the London Times marvelled disingenuously that Indians without blood ties with Britain should rally in such numbers to its flag

11 AUGUST 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 37

1 3

1 A contingent of Indian soldiers in the British army; 2 A wartime cartoon celebrates the Indian soldiers fighting against the Kaiser; 3 A photograph of Indian soldiers relaxing between battles; 4 Indian cavalrymen at the front lines; 5 A cartoon that calls Sikhs serving the British army ‘heartbreakers’

2 4

5

Another ace pilot, HS Malik, who survived the war to serve independent India as a distinguished diplomat, was also exceptional. The war’s truly unique phenomenon was the Nizam of Hyderabad who bought the titles of ‘His Exalted Highness’ (he wanted ‘His Majesty’) and ‘Faithful Ally of the British’ by contributing Rs 60 lakh and two regiments to Britain’s defence.

They were as distant from mass reality as the passionate loyalty (“The English Empire is as one great family under one beneficent Crown”) that Sir Gangadhar Chitanvis and the Raja of Mahmudabad professed in the Legislative Council on 8 September 1914. Edwin Montagu’s declaration of 20 August 1917 that indicated some kind of self-government within the empire impressed politicians, but was unlikely to have influenced village calculations in Punjab and UP. All that the lusty rustic lads understood of the Biblical riddle of Mahatma Gandhi’s “Seek ye first the Recruiting Office, and everything will be added unto you” were the words “Recruiting Office”.

Even the elaboration of Gandhi’s message in Surendranath Banerjea’s Bengalee newspaper would have baffled them. They didn’t need the face-saving hyperbole of the Bengalee editorial, ‘Behind the serried ranks of one of the finest armies in the world, there stand the multitudinous people of India ready to cooperate with the Government in the defence of the Empire, which for them means, in its ultimate evolution, the complete recognition of their rights as citizens of the freest state in the world.’ They needed jobs. Anand’s Lalu and his comrades waited ‘uncomprehending and still, ignorant of what awaited them in the murderous devices of the devil who controlled their destinies’. They were the cannon fodder Indian politicians offered Britain in return for self-rule. A London music-hall parody ran:

try and a cause that meant nothing to them. The Western Front alone had two Indian infantry divisions, two cavalry divisions and four field artillery brigades—138,608 soldiers in all. Anand calls them ‘conscripts, brutalized and willing to fight like trained bulls, but without a will of their own, soulless automatons in the execution of the army code, though in the strange dark deeps of their natures, unschooled by the Sarkar, there lay the sensitiveness of their own humanity, their hopes, their fears and their doubts.’

Recruitment ‘greatly surpassed all expectations’, wrote the historian LF Rushbrook Williams. Even the London Times marvelled disingenuously that Indians without blood ties with Britain should rally in such numbers to its flag.

The brutal answer severely indicted the bleak Indian conditions Lalu and his peers hoped to escape. It didn’t matter to them that they were being traded—flesh and blood, bone and muscle—for political power. Their own compulsions were more fundamental. Peasant families were even larger in those days, and landholdings already becoming smaller. Third and fourth sons had nothing to live on; and perhaps the martial tradition of some communities was an added inducement. The Duke of Connaught noted that Lalu’s Punjab had become a “household word” because of “the splendid fighting qualities displayed” by Punjabis. They accounted for more than half the manpower India mustered. The Doaba region led in providing recruits, just as it led the emigration drive 50 years later. Necessity forced Britain to abandon the Whites-only Crimean and Boer war recruitment policies and allow India’s Lalus to shed blood, lay down their lives and even be paid for it.

Nor was Britain ungrateful. King George V had Brighton’s Royal Pavilion converted into a military hospital for Indian soldiers, believing that the ornate onion domes, minarets and pillars of Indo-Saracenic fantasy would make them feel at home. He and other royals visited them there. Nine kitchens and other areas that were cordoned off for worship catered to Hindu, Sikh and Muslim dietary and religious needs.

Organised tours took recuperating soldiers to see the sights of London.

Indians acquitted themselves with conspicuous bravery in East Africa, Japan, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, Mesopotamia, France and Belgium. Europeans were impressed from the moment these men landed at Marseilles. Khudadad Khan won a Victoria Cross, the first of 12 awarded to Indians during the First World War (six on the Western Front), at the Battle of Ypres. This

Europeans were impressed from the moment these men landed at Marseilles.

Khudadad Khan won a Victoria Cross, the first of 12 awarded to Indians during the First World War at the Battle of Ypres

We don’t want to fight; But by Jingo, if we do, We won’t go to the front, We’ll send the mild Hindoo.

Lalu knew nothing of Gavrilo Princip, the man who shot dead an Austrian prince and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, sparking off World War I. Nor did he know much about the Austro-Hungarian, German, Tsarist and Ottoman empires he was fighting. More than a million young recruits like him, as well as soldiers from 29 princely states, not to mention sailors and non-combatant labourers, risked their lives for a coun11 AUGUST 2014

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battle is notorious for the first use (by Germans) of poison gas.

The casualties were heavy: 840 missing or captured, 16,400 wounded and 7,700 killed. Some of the dead lie in the desolation of Flanders fields where ‘the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row’ in John McRae’s moving poem.

Sir Herbert Baker, who designed North and South Block in Delhi, also designed the main memorial to the Indian Army on the Western Front at Neuve Chapelle in northern France, which was the scene of the British army’s first major attack after the miserable winter operations of 1914-15. Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala had already unveiled another memorial, Brighton’s Pavilion Gateway, in 1921, while it was the Prince of Wales (Duke of Windsor) who unveiled the Chhatri. Standing there, I telephoned an old colleague, Philip Crosland. He had suffered greatly as a Japanese prisoner in the Second World War, but had struck a blow for racial fair play by refusing the special golden jubilee compensation until assured that Indian soldiers who suffered similar privations would also be rewarded.

The Chhatri’s stark simplicity is a poignant reminder of the motivation that unites Silicon Valley billionaires, Oxbridge dons and daily labourers in Malaysia with these soldiers of fortune. The trend continues to this day with India jostling Bangladesh to provide the most troops for UN peacekeeping missions. Lalu felt special among other economic refugees for ‘he was going to Vilayat after all, England, the glamorous land of his dreams, where the sahibs come from, where people wore coats and pantaloons and led active, fashionable lives—even, so it was said, the peasants and the poor sahibs.’ He escaped the 40 open

6 Indian soldiers wielding a Hotchkiss gun at a sandbagged position; 7 A painting depicting the divisions Indian soldiers served in: 6th Gurkha Rifles, 3rd Sappers and Miners and 26th King George’s Own Light Cavalry; 8 Recuperating soldiers play cards outside their hospital in Brighton

death that the Chhatri honours, but returned from war to find his family destroyed, his parents dead and the land for which he sold himself gone forever.

The bigger picture changed as well. The First World War prompted the Industrial Commission of 1916; and Lord Sinha, as Under-Secretary of State for India, piloted the Government of India Act of 1919 through the British parliament. Indians became eligible to become the King’s commissioned officers; one of the first was Rana Jodha Jung Bahadur, who commanded the Tehri-Garhwal Sappers and Miners from 1915 to 1919. The War also gave a fillip to the Ghaddar and Jugantar revolutionary movements, and produced men like Rash Behari Bose and Jatin Mukherjee (‘Bagha Jatin’), in whom Lord Hardinge claimed in his memoirs, My Indian Years, to have ‘discovered a real leader of men’. As for Lalu and his kind, Alfred Edward Housman said it all in his Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries: These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

Whatever their motive, Britain has good reason to be grateful to them. n 11 AUGUST 2014

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jug suraiya

Requiem for Riverdale

What the death of Archibald Andrews says about the imperative of tolerance

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f my sister Hemu had been around today, she might well have been at the front of a cortège mourning the untimely demise of Archibald Andrews, longtime resident and foremost citizen of the idyllic small town of Riverdale, USA, who was shot dead by a homophobe while trying to protect his gay friend, Kevin Keller. For Hemu, older than me by ten years, was one of the myriad Indians of the 1950s who was an ardent fan of Archie, the redheaded, freckle-faced, all-American teenager hero of the eponymous comic book series that made its debut in the early 1940s.

So taken up was my sister by Archie and his group of high school buddies—the glamorous and super-rich Veronica Lodge, the blonde girl next-door, Betty Cooper, the slick-haired and scheming Reggie Mantle—that she shortened my given name—Jagdish—to Jug, itself short for Jughead Jones, Archie’s sleepy-eyed, needle-nosed best friend whose skinny frame belied his insatiable appetite for hamburgers. Thanks to Riverdale, I became Jug, and have remained so ever since.

The series was created by publisher/editor John Goldwater, written by Vic Bloom and drawn by Bob Montana.

While some of the characters were said to be based on real life people Goldwater had met during his travels in the midwest looking for jobs, Archie himself was reportedly inspired by the popular Andy Hardy Hollywood movies starring the young Mickey Rooney. The comic series was to become an enduring success in a post-World War II America, which would soon start living its own dream, yet to be scarred by the trauma of Vietnam.

By the 1950s, America was the envy of the world, its growing influence as a cultural ‘soft power’ helping to sanitise its brute military strength as exemplified by the twin mushroom clouds that had bloomed with terrifying toxicity over Hiroshima and Nagasaki scant years previously.

For middle-class, urban Indians of the time, America seemed more distant and, for that reason perhaps, more fascinating than the surface of Mars. America was the land of super-abundance, a cornucopia of tail-finned Cadillacs and kitchen cookie jars that miraculously refilled themselves the more they were raided by mischievous young hands; socialist India was the land of seemingly endless shortages, of droughts and famines, and the conspicuous austerity that it wore on the sleeve of its Nehru jacket.

The real America—if there were such a thing, apart from the image it had created for itself—was unreachable. For one 42 open

thing, passports which you needed to travel abroad were almost impossible to get, as was foreign exchange, unless you could provide a very good reason, such as business or study, for wanting to go overseas. When my uncle, Madhubhai, became the first person in the family to get a passport, a special dinner was thrown in his honour and the prized document was passed reverentially from person to person and subjected to awed scrutiny.

We couldn’t go to America, but America could come to us. A hand-me-down America was available on the dusty pavements of Calcutta’s Park Street, where roadside vendors sold threemonth old copies of Screen Stories and Photoplay, with all the Hollywood gossip, which was only slightly stale. My sister would take me to buy these glossies, along with Archie comics.

The comics were a magical gateway not only to a mythical America but also to a thrilling new terra incognita called adolescence, with its acned angst and its exuberant ecstasy.

There were no Indian teenagers then; there were children who overnight became young adults, with no intervening rites of passage.

There was no TV, no Facebook, no Twitter. There was little or no locally produced fiction, of any form, for young people. No dreamscape for the young mind to occupy. From pre-pubescent Enid Blyton, you progressed to tumescent Harold Robbins, with no transit stop.

Riverdale, as portrayed in Archie comics, provided the transit stop, with its icecream sodas, and its prom dances, and its rituals of going on dates, and holding hands beneath a butterscotch moon, and occasionally exchanging kisses, but no more than that.

Riverdale was romance not at the time of AIDs. It had to change of course, and it did; innocence is the ultimate self-destructing device. Along with the rest of the world, Archie grew older, and, if not wiser, at least more aware of the ways of evil. Yet his self-sacrificing death at the hands of a sexual bigot could be seen as a new beginning, a regeneration not of lost innocence but of the imperative of tolerance in all its forms—social, political and sexual—in an increasingly embattled and strife-torn world.

Archie dies so that tolerance might live. Will it? If Hemu were here today, while shedding a tear for Archie, she’d be the first to hope so. n Jug Suraiya is a columnist with The Times of India 11 AUGUST 2014

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mindspace How life is art

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o p en s pa c e

Deepika Padukone Hrithik Roshan Shahid Kapoor

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Kick The Grand Budapest Hotel

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Rega RP10 Longines Avigation Samsung Galaxy tab s 8.4

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Evolutionary purpose of jealousy Another mass extinction?

Female triathletes at risk

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The uncanny appeal of Salman Khan

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Online soft porn comics

g r a p h i c a rt

Ten cities that made an empire

by Tristram Hunt Chanakya returns

by Timeri N Murari Play with me by Ananth

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sspl/getty images

imperial mission Swapan Dasgupta reviews Tristram Hunt’s riveting portraits of cities that made the Empire 48

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Stones of Empire Tristram Hunt may not pass the draconian Romila Thapar test but the lucid British politician-historian’s portraits of cities such as Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay bring to life the imperial mission SWAPAN DASGUPTA

Ten Cities that Made an Empire

Tristram Hunt allen lane | 544 pages | Rs 1,105

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 48 open

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n 1911, speaking in the House of Lords after the King-

Emperor had announced the transfer of the Capital from Calcutta to Delhi, Lord Curzon—India’s most celebrated and most vilified Viceroy—admitted to having “a very warm feeling for Calcutta myself. It has always seemed to me to be a worthy capital and expression of British rule in India. It is English built, English commerce has made it the second city in the Empire…” To Curzon, a Viceroy with an acute sense of imperial destiny, Delhi with its “mass of deserted ruins and graves” was a testimony to “the mutability of human greatness”. Curzon was right. The British Raj never got to enjoy New Delhi. Lutyens’ majestic creation became the happy hunting ground of a successor regime. As a city, Delhi grew 11 AUGUST 2014

The great virtue of Hunt’s latest work is that the British Empire is presented as an aggregation of riveting national histories, minus the theoretical mumbo-jumbo

COLONIAL TIMES Calcutta as seen in 1895 from Esplanade print collector/getty images

and prospered. The same could hardly be said of the city the East India Company bequeathed to India.

In early-1985, India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, fresh from a spectacular election victory, visited Calcutta.

Exasperated by unending accusations of wilful neglect, the young and somewhat impetuous inheritor snapped back that Calcutta was a “dying city”. Predictably, all hell broke loose, and for much of his remaining tenure Gandhi had to endure the angry taunts of emotional Bengalis for whom urban decay was the fountainhead of poetry and romance.

Lacking a sense of history, Gandhi’s choice of words seemed heartless and politically clumsy. In essence, he was pointing to an undeniable reality that was soon to become conventional wisdom after the great economic opening-up of India in 1991: that Calcutta had failed to manage the transition from the colonial to the modern economy.

Four years before Gandhi discovered decline on the mudflats of the River Hoogly, Michael Heseltine, a colourful British Conservative politician, spoke lyrically about Liverpool, another port city that had witnessed social unrest as a consequence of urban degeneration and decline. “The Mersey, its lifeblood, flowed as majestically as ever down from the hills. Its monumental Georgian and Victorian buildings, created with such pride and at such cost by the 11 AUGUST 2014

city’s fathers of a century and earlier, still dominated the skyline. The Liver Building, the epicentre of a trading system that had reached out to the four corners of the earth, stood defiant and from my perspective very alone. The port had serviced an empire and sourced a world trade.” Since then, he rued, “everything had gone wrong.”

Or had it?

In a book that should be read as much for its stylish narrative as for its majestic sweep across continents and centuries, Tristram Hunt—a man who has made a worthwhile switch from professional history-writing to professional politics— uses the tale of 10 cities to weave the story of an Empire that was forged as much by circumstances, even absent-mindedness, as by design.

The story of each of the 10 cities—most of which grew as a consequence of Empire—can of course be told in isolation.

Indeed, their present-day residents are unlikely to be terribly enamoured by the awareness that their present hasn’t been shaped merely by their national past but through the crisscrossing linkages that made the British Empire more than an aggregate of overseas possessions. Indian historians—or at least the Indian history that is taught in India—often make a virtue of viewing the colonial past as being connected to an abstraction that goes by the name of ‘imperialism’. The great virtue of Hunt’s latest work and indeed many of the popular but no less scholarly histories that have hit the stands in the past decade (often as spin-offs of very watchable TV programmes) is that the British Empire is presented as an aggregation of riveting national histories—minus the theoretical mumbo-jumbo.

To qualify as proper history, it has been suggested by the more politically involved of India’s historians, a work must gain the acceptance of the scholarly community. By that logic, this book would probably fail the draconian Romila Thapar test, as would Niall Ferguson’s Empire.

For a start, its tone is not hectoring. Hunt doesn’t think that the main thrust of his study is to debunk the British Empire in its entirety and demand that the Queen and the British Prime Minister issue grovelling apologies for past misdemeanours and, where necessary, pay reparations.

Hunt is not an apologist of Empire and doesn’t overlook the mismatch between Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ and the sordid realities of the slave trade, opium trade and man-made famines. He allows contemporary accounts to tell a story and replenishes those with relevant economic data.

Secondly, Hunt blends the rigours of historical research with the craft of good journalism to make history alive to the non-specialist reader. I have often been asked why histories by British writers (including on subjects Indian) make it to the Sunday Times bestseller lists while scholarly studies

by Indian authors are to be found only in specialist libraries. open www.openthemagazine.com 49

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preponderance of smugglers proved extremely lethal for imperial interests. Mercifully for London, this wasn’t the case with the rest of the colonial possessions.

Likewise, there were differences over how the British viewed different parts of the Empire. The Union drastically diminished the commercial and political importance of Dublin.

But Empire provided the Irish and, for that matter, the Scots additional opportunities as soldiers, administrators and merchants. The Scots (and Marwaris) dominated the commercial life of Calcutta and a significant chunk of the Indian Civil Service was made up of Irishmen. Indeed, I believe that Hunt should have added Edinburgh to the list of cities that made the British Empire. Apart from Calcutta, the Scots seem to be among the great casualties of de-colonisation.

For the British, as Hunt has vividly demonstrated, the Empire wasn’t always a win-win project. In political terms Britain became a power, but the terms of trade weren’t always weighed in favour of the manufacturing industries at home. Nor did Empire help in improving the quality of life.

Hunt is not an apologist of Empire and doesn’t overlook the mismatch between Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ and the realities of the slave trade and man-made famines EMPIRE STATE OF MIND Author Tristram Hunt

The answer lies in accessible writing. Hunt, like many others, has repeatedly demonstrated that lucidity does not compromise scholarship. To believe, as some historians— particularly those infected by the post-modernist virus— do, that convoluted prose equals profundity is patently ridiculous. On the contrary, it is the story-telling ability of a historian that should be at a premium, ideological preferences notwithstanding.

In this book, using a wealth of contemporary accounts, Hunt has demonstrated that the far-flung parts of the globe that made up the parts of the world map coloured red have both inter-locking and separate histories. Bridgetown in the West Indies, for example, grew in prominence as the centre of trade in slaves from West Africa and as a producer of sugar.

The sugar economy in turn linked Bridgetown to India and China, the principal producers of tea. And both these centres were connected to Liverpool, one of the principal ports catering to the sweetened-by-sugar tea economy.

Yet, while trade bound various parts of the Empire into a common ecosystem, their politics differed substantially.

Boston, a city founded by non-conformist Anglican dissidents fleeing Stuart persecution, equated the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ with no-taxationwherever-possible. This differed substantially from the loyalism of both Bridgetown and, at the other end of the earth, Melbourne, which developed a reputation for being the most imperial-minded city of the Empire. Boston was a city where a mix of rugged Puritan individualism plus the 50 open

By the late-19th century, in fact, there were a large number of public-minded Englishmen who felt that the racial stock would be considerably enhanced by the injection of clean air and sunshine, such as that which existed in Australia.

In terms of the great ‘civilising’ mission, Hunt documents the double standards that prevailed in imperial attitudes towards the ‘white’ town and ‘black’ town. The move towards enlightened town planning was inspired by Dublin and also got a fillip during the sewage constructions in Bombay. However, in places such as Calcutta, the indigenous elite opted out of civic life and lolled about in their great country estates—an unintended consequence of the Permanent Settlement.

Finally, Hunt’s study provides revealing insights into modern-day attitudes to the proverbial ‘stones’ of Empire.

The Irish (until recently) have been dismissive of Dublin’s Georgian architectural heritage; in Bombay, the site of the original Kala Ghoda is a car park; and crude mod-con embellishments have taken away some of the charms of many Lutyens-inspired bungalows. Ironically, it is Calcutta that has suddenly woken up to the delights of Empire.

Mamata Banerjee now seeks to transform the city of the Black Hole into a second London!

Who says history only follows an economic trajectory?

There are just too many unintended consequences. n Swapan Dasgupta is a conservative thinker and political commentator based in Delhi 11 AUGUST 2014

books Return of the Sage This stark telling of the swift ascent of a political demagogue is a compelling commentary on modern India, despite a simplistic take on the ancient master of statecraft aditya wig chanakya returns

Timeri N Murari ALEPH BOOK COMPANY | 255 pages | Rs 495

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as well; there are suggestions of a less than platonic relationship between Avanti and her father.

Politically, the dynamics of this tale is fascinating. Murari presents Chanakya as a man who renounces all idealism in favour of naked ambition. As his protégé, Avanti swiftly follows suit, rising through the party ranks as she sheds her scruples one by one.

On the eve of Avanti’s first election campaign, for instance, there is not even a suggestion in their council of war that the election be fought on real issues, or with the aim of actually bettering the lot of ‘the people’. Instead, Chanakya blandly states, ‘We make a list of promises for the poor, trailing them as a fisherman the hook in the flowing waters’. This may be a true reflection of today’s politics, but it is rather odd to hear Chanakya—a historical contemporary of the Buddha, born in a time of deep philosophy and sound morality— speak as though his understanding of dharma and karma were at the same level as those of today’s leaders. The character speaks as one schooled in the Arthashastra, rather than as the one who wrote it; and while his infatuation with actress ‘Siggy Chopra’ may have been intended to humanise, it trivialises instead.

The novel’s strength lies in its caricature of reality: Avanti’s best friend Monika, the daughter of the wealthiest man in the state, ‘lives in a thirty-floor building… [that] towers over the city and peers down at the slums at its feet’; while the mercenary habits of today’s godmen mean that— ‘Even on the pathway to heaven you have to pay the toll before you start the journey’. sahu john In terms of style, the book is both brisk and eventful. However, in a curious choice of grammatical flourish, the text does away with quotation marks entirely; forcing the reader to either slow down and pick apart sentences individually, or speed up and sacrifice complete understanding in the pursuit of narrative flavour.

Chanakya Returns is worth the jacket price, but if it has a weakness, it is this: were it not for the fact that the narrator grandly declares himself to be the Chanakya, one could quite plausibly have imagined him as Lalu instead. n

ny tale narrated by Chanakya—the teacher and philosopher widely identified as ‘Kautilya’ or ‘Vishnugupta’ who authored the Arthashastra— would be intriguing. More so when the narrator is a spirit that is reborn to this world after thousands of years in the void. Rebirth is the reason for Chanakya’s presence in Murari’s world, but as for the how of such a thing, Chanakya replies, ‘I cannot answer… despite my years of non-existence, as I did not find [God]… I am embarrassed by this to a certain degree. Especially as I was a Brahman once, a believer in Mahavir and am now an unbeliever’. There is a beauty to simplicity, but it is entirely possible to wield Occam’s razor too bluntly.

Timeri N Murari is known for his bestsellers The Taliban Cricket Club (2012) and The Taj (2007). In his latest novel, he is no less engaging, speaking to jaded modern India with acerbic wit. His Chanakya—once Mohanlal, the son of a modern day farmer who finds himself possessed by the spirit of the ancient strategist—is a dry, humourless man who believes in neither God nor love, driven only by desires honed by ‘sucking on star dust for more than two thousand years’. Burned at a young age in an accident, Mohanlal finds that ‘something mysterious was growing in my mind...

Mohanlal was receding; Chanakya was growing more powerful, claiming my thoughts and my heart’. The grown up Mohanlal, now calling himself Chanakya, is a somewhat unsummoned guide who inexplicably is given charge of Avanti, the daughter of the President of a nameless state in India.

Avanti is conflicted between her love for her father, her ambition and the passion she feels for a filmmaker she wants to marry. The novel begins with the latter conflict: in Chanakya’s own words, ‘His name is Aditya, a nobody, and love will only lead her to the role of a housewife, serving one man and not a nation’. past master Timeri Murari But Murari explores a more risqué angle

11 AUGUST 2014

Aditya Wig is the author of the forthcoming fantasy novel King’s Fall, an alternative history of Chandragupta Maurya open www.openthemagazine.com 51

books Between the Sheets An enjoyable erotic adventure, cooked up right at the publisher’s office, takes us directly to the young loins of politically correct urban India RAJNI GEorge play with me

Ananth Penguin Books India | 252 pages | Rs 250

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rotica is not an Indian forté, post The Kamasutra.

We tend to laugh at ourselves in bedroom scenes, or romanticise the naughty bits. It’s never easy. Notably, we’ve had Electric Feather, an anthology of erotica from around the Subcontinent with some valiant attempts in this difficult genre (disclaimer: I was one of its original editors at Random House India, though we didn’t end up publishing the volume), in 2009; last year, Aranyani’s A Pleasant Kind of Heavy, with some heavyhanded stories from a woman in Tamil Nadu using a nom de plume; Khushwant Singh’s naughty stories. Like many, Chiki Sarkar, publisher of Penguin Random House India, looked far and wide before she found

sex appeal Ananth

someone to write unabashed erotica—and there he was, working right by her, orchestrating the sales of her books.

“One day, when we were discussing EL James [author of the notorious S&M fantasy novel Fifty Shades of Grey] and commissioning erotic fiction, Chiki said, ‘A, you have to write this’; R Sivapriya [Penguin’s managing editor] had seen my work and told her about it. I said I’d give it a shot. On my commute from Gurgaon to Delhi every day, I would think about what I would do,” says the publisher’s unlikely erotica debut, Ananth, senior vice-president of sales. “It’s very difficult to get it right.” He couldn’t have picked a better or more difficult place to try his hand at writing about pleasure; your average head of sales is both perfectly placed to understand his market and new to playing the role of author.

Always an avid reader, Ananth took a summer job at Landmark, Chennai’s favourite bookstore, after finishing school, and was offered a job in sales by then Penguin publisher David Davidar in 1997, which led to a longterm career in the industry. The writing began with a delayed meeting.

“About two years ago, on my way to a meeting, in Delhi, I had to pull over and wait in Saravana Bhavan because the meeting got pushed by an hour; I sat there and wrote my first erotic story in an hour. It’s about a guy who goes to New York on work and goes to a strip club called Pink Panther. He sees this girl there and thinks he’s seen her somewhere; he last saw her when she was 10 years old,” says the writer.

Were his professional instincts far off?

“The only time I used my sales head was to pick up this Excel sheet, write what I wanted to happen to these people, then every time I was done with a chapter, turn the red color to green,” says Ananth.

“I sat down as if I was presenting the story to someone; what would I tell them?

It helped. When I was rewriting the eighth chapter I could go back and see if the connection worked; I wrote the last chapter long before many others.”

Play With Me is a bold contemporary story of love, sex and some dhokha, told through the character of Sid, a young man with his own advertising agency, where he is surrounded by lovely womashish sharma

11 AUGUST 2014

en, several of them in love with him. It all begins when Cara, the book’s glorious central figure, walks into Sid’s life as an intern who signed up asking to work only with him, sparking a torrent of fantasy in her boss—only she makes all the first moves. For, it’s all fifty shades of political correctness; Sid thinks about how he might be objectifying her, for example, reflecting how modern an Indian man he is (in fact, everyone has an Indian name that is turned Western, or is Western in concept; the book might be set anywhere though this is definitely modern India, we are reminded).

Luckily, the natural impulses of sexual play are never forgotten in a book that is written purely for pleasure (the epigraph duly notes: ‘for the pursuit of pleasure and the pleasure of pursuit’). Even as the plot twists —Sid starts to recognise feelings he has for his pretty friend Nat (though she is married) on a trip to New York, and even to act on them—it’s always the sensory experience that has us.

And what is wonderful is that Ananth’s women enjoy their bodies fully and take ownership of what they unleash. “She’s like a juggernaut. There’s this joke: typhoons are like beautiful women, they come in wet and wild and they leave you without a home,” he says of Cara, who is indisputably the book’s draw. Wild, fiery and irrepressibly naughty, she wears killer outfits (a little too much party wear maybe for an office? Who cares, in the name of fun) and writes the best ad campaigns. In a way, she’s more quintessential man than sensitive Sid, great at banter—‘Cara was blessed with the ability to convert any casual conversation to sexting and use it as foreplay’—yet aloof.

“She’s not guilty, not jealous, and has never withheld what she wants,” says Ananth. “But one thing you never find out—I couldn’t get her to say whether she loves him or not.

Getting Cara right was important. It was difficult because it was through Sid’s voice that I had to paint Cara and Nat. I didn’t want to cloak anything either. And he was almost looking for a relationship, more than her.”

The very embodiment of the equivocal married woman unable to sate her lusts, Nat is behenji meets vixen—her Mommy-like worrying over Sid is perhaps where the Indian background shows itself more tangibly. A repressed tease, she seems almost evil in her ability to lead poor Sid on; though he’s having too much fun for us to feel too bad for him, by that point. It’s threesomes in Goa with Cara and an equally hot friend Rhea one weekend, adulterous sex as soon as he gets back with Nat, the following week.

“It’s the classic ‘bad girl who is actually good girl’ thing,” says Ananth. “He loves both of them. I think people are capable of loving more than one person, for various reasons. You choose to be with one person or not, even if you’re single.

Loving two people is not in relation to whether one person is committed or not.” He adds: “The contrast between Cara and Nat became more apparent as the guy’s confusions became apparent. He’s not sure. Unless you’re sure in a relationship, you go through self doubt.” Sex and romance are clearly not mutually exclusive, even in erotica.

Ananth, who reads The Fountainhead once a year, is a phographer too. “Photography helped me immensely. It’s almost 11 AUGUST 2014

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his is now officially my favourite place on earth,’ Cara said and, walking straight into the rain, she spread both her arms and began to dance.

I stood there transfixed. Twirling amid the twinkling terrace lights, her bare, wet legs gleaming, Cara looked like an ice cube inside your drink. Something you desperately wanted inside your mouth, to roll your tongue around. I couldn’t take my eyes off her even when she saw me gawking, and when she smiled, a slow, dull ache began to gnaw at me.

She continued dancing in the rain, moving like the tongue of a black fire. Her wet dress clung to her like a second skin, accentuating every curve of her gorgeous body, begging to be peeled off. She was bathed in sparkling light. The dress, now wet, was almost transparent. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a brasserie. I had read somewhere that breasts were the perfect size if they fit within the rim of a champagne flute and that made me smile—her breasts were beautiful and delectably larger and wouldn’t fit in any champagne glass.

She motioned to me, asking me to join her.

‘Maybe I should get out of this, I am completely wet.’ She looked me in the eye and pulled off her dress and stood there in the rain, just in her red panties.

I couldn’t feign indifference anymore, so I walked up close to her and said, ‘Cara.’

She leaned towards me and I pulled her into my arms.

I could taste the rain on her luscious lips and when I slid my hands down her back and squeezed her ass, she moaned.

Kissing my way down her body to her navel I went down on my knees and licked her along the edge of her panties. I felt her shiver for a delicious moment and then she yanked my head back up to her breasts, which I gladly took in my mouth, one by one. I rolled my tongue around her nipples, sucking and biting them lightly. She arched her body towards me and groaned.

second nature. It’s what [Sid] sees. He zooms in, zooms out.

It’s the light in the house, the light in Central Park, in the late evening at the Brooklyn Bridge. You’re listening to stuff, as the photographer would say it. There is a certain photographer’s patience.”

Is his hero flawed? “I thought, there must be a reason this guy’s single. He has this great girlfriend, the sex is great, and there is no reason to be confused with Nat. He seems to have a past that is not letting him do any of these things completely. He is not obsessive about Nat either, and is not trying to make her feel guilty. He doesn’t want to hurt himself further; their relationship is as close as can be, yet as far. There’s no compulsion but there’s possessiveness.” Sid was hurt by someone on a romantic level and he also lost a romantic relationship over a period of time, Ananth explains, bringing up the character’s first love, touched on but not quite dealt with.

“Nobody likes the first girlfriend, Kay, but the idea is I’ll probably be writing a second book, called Think of Me. Their relationship is unresolved. Kay might come back.” Readers may be watching a trailer very soon. n open www.openthemagazine.com 53

G R A P H I C ar t

STRIP TEASE Is sex in cartoon strips more appealing than hardcore pornography?

The enduring temptation of Savita Bhabhi and her South Indian avatars LHENDUP G BHUTIA

S

ometime in 2008, as a young journalist learning the ropes of the profession at a newspaper, I, along with a number of new recruits, was assigned the tedious task of going through the previous day’s edition to spot errors. I suppose it was to improve our proof-reading skills, but back then it felt like nothing short of drudgery. Every day, all of us sat in a row, our heads buried inside a day-old newspaper, red pens in hand, each one of us contemplating the fall of our journalistic ambitions. To ease the boredom, some of us stopped watching TV news or having the newspaper delivered every morning, thereby reading every stale copy of it afresh.

One day, as we were going about proof-reading an old newspaper, a senior of ours appeared above the short wall that divided us.

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“Hey you guys,” he said, talking to a few of us, “Have you seen the latest issue?” We replied in the negative. “Then you must,” he said, and dragged us outside the office, up a flight of stairs, to the abandoned terrace of the newspaper building. “We are sorry,” I told him.

“But we can explain…”

Before I could complete the apology, a laptop was powered on. And on the roof under a hot afternoon sun, we were introduced for the first time to Savita Bhabhi. The senior had recently discovered the porn comic strip and wanted to share it. As the days went by, the comic strip became something of a phenomenon among many of my friends. It had less to do with titillation and was more a touchpoint for ribaldry and fun inspired by its dialogues and storyline. But, as we came to realise, it wasn’t just us. A num-

ber of individuals, both within and outside the office, were being seduced by Savita Bhabhi and her exploits with bra salesmen, courier deliverers, her husband’s office friends and young neighbourhood boys who accidentally crashed their cricket balls into her bedroom window.

The plotline was often corny and the drawings were amateurish, but Savita Bhabhi became India’s very own BILF (‘Bhabhi I’d Like to Fuck’). When it was taken down about a year later on charges of indecency and immorality, the internet comic strip only got a popularity boost, as old copies started surfacing on other web portals.

When I asked the author Amit Varma, who would often blog about the character on India Uncut, to explain her popularity, he said, “It was a novelty, and attracted a lot of attention for that 11 AUGUST 2014

online rage Raunchy comic strips like Miss Rita, Agent Maya, and Savita Bhabhi (left to right) have legions of internet fans

reason. Also, it had the virtue of simplicity: it took on popular porn tropes and gave them a straightforward treatment, keeping it simple. It was effective storytelling in a new format.”

A

ll these years after the ban, the comic strip has not disappeared; Savita Bhabhi is still around. The drawings have improved, the sex is more explicit, and the plotline is as corny as ever. Savita Bhabhi, now behind a paywall, has also lost the tubbiness of her previous incarnation. Her face is more angular and her body proportions larger. And her popularity has led to the rise of several knock-off characters: Velamma, or Mrs Velamma Lakshmi, a buxom South Indian ‘aunty’ who is often referred to as ‘the Savita Bhabhi of the south’; Veena, her college-going 11 AUGUST 2014

‘Fans of Savita Bhabhi needed her to continue... she had become a voice for the freedom of the internet’, says Puneet Agarwal, the strip’s creator daughter; and Miss Rita, a college teacher who is pursued by her colleagues as well as students. There are other such series too: of Savita Bhabhi when she was 18, of a secret agent named Maya whose job is to seduce suspects, and of a housing society called

XXX Apartments, a ‘married aunty sex heaven’ as the comic strip’s protagonist calls it.

Puneet Agarwal, the creator of Savita Bhabhi, who earlier called himself Deshmukh but revealed his identity as a 38-year-old entrepreneur of Indian origin living in a European country in 2009 to protest the ban on Savita Bhabhi, has been tracking trends. The new online characters, he says, have become very popular indeed. Velamma and Veena, who have a website of their own (Velamma.com), get daily traffic of about 50,000 visitors, by Agarwal’s estimate. Savita Bhabhi and the other characters, found on Kirtu.com, get around 100,000 visitors daily—of open www.openthemagazine.com 55

which over 1,000 are people who subscribe to the comic strip. ‘Just before it was banned, Savita Bhabhi had more than fifteen million monthly visitors,’ says Agarwal over email, ‘These fans of Savita Bhabhi needed her to continue, not only for the entertainment value but also because she had become a voice for the freedom of the internet [against] government censorship.

The decision to continue Savita Bhabhi was based on that.’ But he had expansion plans as well. ‘When we converted it to a membership-based model, we realised that to give our supporters value-for-money, we needed some more characters...’

Agarwal is still secretive about his identity. He does not grant interviews over the phone or Skype, only through email. He claims to work with a team of more than 10 artists, writers and web administrators in Europe, and that his server is located in the US. ‘In both [the US and Europe], Savita Bhabhi is completely legal,’ he says. ‘However there are still a lot of hotheads who are living in the Victorian age of false morality. We want to concentrate on our goal of making Savita Bhabhi popular… rather than waste our time dealing with the few people who still believe sex is something dirty. That’s the main reason for our discretion.’

A

nimation or cartoon pornography still confounds many observers as a phenomenon. Why would anyone go for cartoon smut when such a large range of real-action pornography is easily available on the web? Can such comics, hardwired into our brains since childhood as cutesy stuff meant for laughs, also tickle another bone? Can drawings ever be turn-ons?

There is a wide array of erotic cartoons online. There are artfully-rendered erotic comic books of characters like Red Riding Hood, for example, with the wolf re-imagined as a handsome man of the forest. There are also re-sketches of The Simpsons, whose possession led to the arrest of an Australian in 2008 on accusations of ‘child pornography’ (thanks to the way its underage characters are depicted).

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Then there is, of course, the famous example of Japan, the world’s largest producer of anime pornography, often called hentai, which often features underage characters rendered in manga form being sexually assaulted by aliens with slimy tentacles.

In India, however, these characters are usually far more lifelike. Their pop-

equal opportunity sex Velamma, or Mrs Velamma Lakshmi, a buxom South Indian lady, is often referred to as ‘the Savita Bhabhi of the south’

Online graphic porn is unique in its appeal, believes Agarwal: ‘A comic allows us to explore the fantasy in a much more vivid way than any other medium’ ularity cannot be explained with cartoon pornography’s assumed association with paedophilia. Here, it is more about desi fantasies—of the hot bhabhi, the large, the dark-skinned South Indian aunty, the class teacher, or the sexually-promiscuous college-goer. In the Velamma series, Velamma always unwittingly gives in to the persuasions of other men, often young friends of her son, her sister’s husband or other acquaintances. Her South Indian identity is sought to be highlighted by her complexion and large gold ornaments, besides the fact that her husband reads The Hindu. Her daughter, Veena, is even more sexually eager.

She shows few qualms as she seduces her professor, and later, after her graduation, her landlord and then her boss at office. Miss Rita, in comparison, is gullible; she falls for the principal of the college she teaches at (and some students too). ‘All our characters are based on popular fantasies which abound in the Indian psyche,’ Agarwal says, explaining how his team has perfected the Indian fantasy formu-

la. ‘Every hot-blooded Indian male has fantasised about a Velamma and a Miss Rita sometime in his life. The characters are just realisations of that fantasy.’

Each Savita Bhabhi, Velamma, Veena and Miss Rita episode is a return to an older form of pornography that had characterisation and storylines, however ludicrous they seemed. Most porn available today, as assessed by an online sample, is hardcore sexual action without much of a plot or storyline; much of it is violent, too. In Savita Bhabhi or Velamma, or any of the other new series, the characters do not just have sex, they tell you why they have sex. Carnal encounters in these comic books have lead-ins, some of them set up in hilarious ways but always part of a narrative. When Veena and her accounts tutor, Ramalinga Sir, first get it on, he tells her, “I think we’ve had enough accountancy for today. It’s time I taught you something else.” Once Veena’s grades improve, she explains it to her father thus: “The professor is a very 11 AUGUST 2014

hands-on teacher.” The sex in itself is quite explicit, with a wide range of encounters and arrangements explored— from romps in public to threesomes.

A

ccording to Dr Mahindra Watsa,

a well-known sexologist and columnist in Mumbai, these characters are popular not just because they pander to popular sexual fantasies, but also because some net surfers prefer adult cartoons to hardcore pornography. “I knew a patient once who admitted to me that he preferred such adult animation to pornography,” he says. “When I asked him why, he explained that he found the sex in cartoon strips more compelling and less grotesque than that in regular pornography.” According to the sexologist, animation porn could also be more appealing to a young teen who has just moved on from his childhood experience of watching TV cartoons.

The subject, however, has received very little attention. According to some psychologists, there are people who are attracted to cartoon characters, and 11 AUGUST 2014

that this type of fetish is called ‘schediaphilia’ (also referred to as ‘toonophilia’). Dr Ogi Ogas, a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University who argues that fetishes and paraphilias are natural in his book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, dwells on the human attraction to cartoons. In order to measure how clinically defined paraphilias stack up against online behavioural data, Dr Ogas went through online data of web searches, individual search histories and popular adult websites, apart from the private records of such adult websites as PornHub.com and several other cross-cultural online data sets. In an article in Psychology Today, he writes, ‘The evidence strongly suggests that the male sexual brain is designed to imprint upon individual sexual cues. Most of the time, men end up imprinting upon female body parts (namely, breasts, butts, and feet), female body types (young or MILF, skinny or BBW), or reproduction-oriented sexual situations. These all direct men towards intercourse and are a sign of the healthy, natural functioning of the

male brain. We also find ‘paraphilias’ as a natural, healthy component of sexual behaviour in many birds and mammals, such as male baboons fetishising female buttocks, male roosters fetishising red female combs, and female zebrabirds fetishising colourful male feathers. Our complex, technological society now exposes us to a greater diversity of stimuli than ever before, so it’s now much more likely that a man will imprint upon stimuli that are similar to those cues men are biologically predisposed to imprint upon, such as women’s shoes (instead of feet), hypnotized women (a variant of submissive women), Japanese anime characters (instead of young, curvy women).’

Agarwal believes that the lure of the comic character as porn star is the uniqueness of the medium. ‘We’ve had MMSs, videos, stories, etcetera [in Indian porn], but no porn comic,’ he says. ‘A comic allows us to explore the fantasy in a much more vivid way than any other medium… we can really allow our creativity to go unbridled.’ n open www.openthemagazine.com 57

rough cut

Anatomy of a Salman Film What is it about his appeal that we have all missed?

Mayank Shekhar

I

take my life’s lessons from Salman Khan’s films.

ible contribution to popular culture is the creation of a male Okay, I don’t, but surely many young boys must have fan-base that aspires to hit the gym and build a body like his, when they whistled aloud as love-guru Salman Bhai ofslipping into T-shirts that fit like bras around the chest. I supfered them gyan on wooing women in Wanted (2009): “Ladki pose this is admirable for a nation of paunchy men. These fans ke peechhe bhagega, ladki paise lekar bhagegi. Paise ke peechare often called ‘Bhai-sexuals’. Observing the strangely homohe bhagega, ladki tere peechhe bhagegi (Run after a girl, she’ll erotic hysteria generated in the theatre when Salman takes run away with your money. Run after money, she’ll run after his shirt off in Ready (2011) and Bodyguard (2011) was by itself you).” Applause! worth a movie ticket for me. Those films defied description.

Wanted, a remake of the Southern hit Pokiri, was a turnSalman’s newest offering, Kick, defies a review, which would ing point both in Salman’s career and for Bollywood in the be true of all his movies of late, barring Dabanng (2010) and Ek short-run. At a time when cinema audiences were split beTha Tiger (2012). tween multiplexes with super expensive tickets and semiSalman, by self-admission, is not much of an actor. His urban ‘single screen’ theatres, the commercial success of body movements and expressions are rather stiff. But that’s Wanted through single screens alone surprised most pronot even the point. Most Salman or Rajinikant fans are as ducers over how much they could still rake in by merely much proper film-buffs, in a purist sense, as most Sachin eyeing the cheaper seats. Big budget productions thereafter bhakts in India are genuine connoisseurs of cricket. Mass with loud dialoguebaazi, athletic dance numbers, along with entertainment works a lot like organised religion that way. songs of brooding romance with a redundant heroine and It’s led by collective feelings and personal faith. a ready-made script aesthetically inspired On screen, Bhai projects himself as a well by the South gave many middle-aged hemeaning but wronged and misunderstood roes and even younger ones a chance to reshero who has anger management issues In a nation of urrect their careers: Akshay Kumar (Rowdy and is prone to breaking into violent sompaunchy men, Rathore), Ajay Devgan (Singham), Shahid ersaults and punches. But he’s a nice man. I Salman Bhai’s big Kapoor (R…Rajkumar), Shah Rukh Khan can see this being particularly alluring to a contribution to (Chennai Express)… Such films work on us hot-headed young man with self-image ispopular culture is like comfort food. Audiences enjoyed these sues. Off screen, he appears as an unpredicta male fan-base ‘formula films’, with or without Salman. able sort of public figure—full of swagger, Although, given the genre, nothing succeeds often erratic, even funny in his responses, that aspires to hit like Salman. totally unmindful of the attention on him. the gym and build a The urban middle-class would have igThis is instantly appealing to a middle-class body like his nored these movies altogether. But they ran that is tired of public figures who seem eithe risk of being branded snobs. By the late ther politically correct or publicity hungry.

2000s, they were getting used to watching mainstream movHe’s cool because apparently he doesn’t care. No doubt, he ies in plush multiplexes with realistic, vulnerable charachas a strong female following. All good-looking male stars do. ters delivering dialogues that were more conversational than But I’m sure he derives his greatest respect from his male bombastic. Credit for this change is often attributed to Dil fans for being the enviable, eternal bachelor boy at 50, Chahta Hai (2001), which was Farhan Akhtar’s first film as having dated some of India’s most beautiful women and writer-director. Farhan is also an actor now. Salman’s first storomancing women half his age on screen. This is the ultiry idea as a writer was Baaghi: A Rebel for Love (1990). His last mate male aspiration in a country that weds in its twenties. script was Veer (2010). As an actor, Farhan can’t look He gives them precious advice on love. Dumping his girlbeyond Robert De Niro. In an interview, Salman came across friend (Jacqueline Fernandes) in Kick, because she wants him as a Sylvester Stallone fan. He’d just watched and been to “settle down” and lead a boring life, he tells her, “Main tumfloored by The Expendables. hare saath boodha hona chahta hoon. Tumhari vajah se nahin. (I Bollywood’s bodybuilding revolution in some ways want to grow old with you, not because of you!)” Priceless! n is a throwback to 80s Hollywood when Stallone and Mayank Shekhar runs the pop culture website TheW14.com Schwarzenegger ruled the scene. Salman Bhai’s most discern-

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11 AUGUST 2014

science

losing out The human population has doubled in the past 35 years; in the same period, the number of invertebrates—such as beetles, butterflies, spiders and worms—has decreased by 45 per cent

Jealousy and Evolution Dogs can feel jealousy, and like anger and fear, it might even serve an evolutionary purpose

Another Mass Extinction?

W

hat causes jealousy? Is it simply a human social construct, not necessarily seen among all human races and cultures, and mostly tied to sexual or romantic relationships? Or could it be a more primordial emotion, like anger and fear that serve an evolutionary purpose? Over the years, researchers have been divided on this issue, with many believing that jealousy is not hardwired into human beings the way anger and fear is. However, a new research study, on dogs, claims to prove that jealousy evolved over time to protect social bonds.

This study, conducted by US researchers from UC San Diego, was published in PLOS ONE. For this study, the researchers had the owners of 36 dogs ignore them in favour of items like a stuffed dog, a jack-olantern pail or a book. The researchers found the canines pushing their owners and rivals, indicative of jealous behaviour, when they were ignored. This was most pronounced when the object was a stuffed dog, with as many as 78 per cent of all dogs behaving in this manner. It remained quite prominent even when

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the owner showed a preference for a pail, as much as 42 per cent. It was least, 22 per cent, when the rival object was a book. About 30 per cent of the dogs also tried to get between their owner and the stuffed animal, with 25 per cent snapping their jaws at the stuffed dog. Only one dog tried to snap its jaws around the book and the pail, each.

The researchers write in the journal, ‘It is commonly assumed that jealousy is unique to humans, partially because of the complex cognitions often involved in this emotion.

However, from a functional perspective, one might expect that an emotion that evolved to protect social bonds from interlopers might exist in other social species… We found that dogs exhibited significantly more jealous behaviors… when their owners displayed affectionate behaviors towards what appeared to be another dog as compared to nonsocial objects. These results lend support to the hypothesis that jealousy has some “primordial” form that exists in human infants and in at least one other social species besides humans.’ n

According to a new study published in Science, the loss and decline of animals is contributing to what appears to be early days of the planet’s sixth mass biological extinction event. The planet’s current biodiversity, the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution, is the highest in the history of life, but it may be reaching a tipping point. Since 1500, over 320 terrestrial vertebrates have become extinct. Populations of the remaining species show a 25 per cent average decline. The situation is as bad for invertebrates. While previous extinctions have been driven by natural planetary transformations or asteroid strikes, the current die-off can be linked to human activity. n

Female Triathletes at Risk

Female triathletes are at risk of pelvic floor disorders, decreased energy, menstrual irregularities and abnormal bone density, according to researchers at Loyola University Health System (LUHS).

The study found that one in three female triathletes suffers from a pelvic floor disorder such as urinary or bowel incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse. One in four had one component of the ‘female athlete triad’, a condition characterised by decreased energy, menstrual irregularities and abnormal bone density from excessive exercise and inadequate nutrition. Researchers surveyed 311 women at triathletic risk. Every week, on average, they ran 3.7 days, biked 2.9 days and swam 2.4 days. n 11 AUGUST 2014

tech&style

Rega RP10 A classy turntable designed to extract clearer music from a vinyl record than ever before gagandeep Singh Sapra $6,495

I

f you understand vinyl records,

you also understand the precision engineering that goes into building a turntable, and this is where the RP10 comes shining through. Rega calls it the ‘biggest step forward’ in the evolution of Roy Gandy’s (its founder) turntable design philosophy, and one has to agree.

A brand new RB2000 tonearm, a new power supply and a ceramic flywheel platter ensure that there is complete control over both motor vibration and speed, guaranteeing you a high level of performance.

Rega understands that even a bit of ambient noise can be too much of a disturbance while you listen to your music, which is why it has worked on every little detail. The turntable uses a low-noise 24-volt motor, apart from a digital signal processor for its power supply and a high-stability crystal to generate square waves, which are converted into sinusoidal waves that allow efficient control of the motor, which then turns the platter at the selected speed without any vibration.

Another innovation of the RP10 is its new RB2000 tonearm, which is su11 AUGUST 2014

perlative in both design and detail.

Meticulously handcrafted by skilled technicians, the tonearm works in perfect harmony with the cartridge.

To ensure there is no random glitz, the machine features minimal mechanical joints and uses the stiffest materials in parts that matter; also, it avoids the use of adhesives in its manufacture as an additional quality measure. The ceramic flywheel effect of the platter is produced with ceramic oxide powder, compressed, fired and then diamond cut to ensure accuracy and flatness across the surface; this, in turn, is supported

by Rega’s light and stiff plinth.

A stressed skin structure for the plinth avoids picking up of any airborne vibration from the music.

All in all, what it delivers is superb sound, with all unwanted noise reduced to undetectable levels.

The RP10 comes with a de-coupled outer frame and polystyrene dust cover. And in case you like edgy design, the device can also be used without its outer frame. All said, there’s no excuse left not to haul out that old vinyl collection of classics. n

groovy again According to the latest numbers of Nielsen Soundscan’s mid-year report, vinyl record sales in the US were up more than 40 per cent in the first six months of 2014, with 4 million units sold. In 2013, vinyl sales hit their highest level since at least 1991—with 6 million units sold

Longines Avigation w

Price on request

With the Longines Avigation, a model dating from 1949 and produced for the British army has been brought right up to date. The circular steel case of this new model has the same diameter as the original one: 44 mm. It houses an L704 self-winding, mechanical calibre, which shows the hours, minutes, seconds and date, as well as a second time-scale. As in the 1949 model, the movement is encased in a soft iron plate and dome that protect it from the effects of magnetic fields. The Avigation comes with a black alligator strap and a buckle. It is water resistant up to 30 metres. n

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4

Rs 37,800

The first thing you notice about the Galaxy Tab S is how Samsung has come a long distance from its first tablet: it is finished well, is thin at just 6.6 mm, weighs only 298 gm and feels good in one’s hand.

The other thing you notice is its beautiful AMOLED 2,560x1,600-pixel display, which Samsung claims delivers more than 90 per cent of the Adobe RGB colour coverage, and has a remarkable 100,000:1 contrast ratio. The Tab S features an eight-core Exynos processor, 3 Gigabytes of RAM and 16 GB of storage that you can expand with an additional 128 GB microSD card.

It also features an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 2.1 megapixel front camera. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

in loving memory Sajid Nadiadwala, director of Kick, was secretly married to yesteryear actress Divya Bharti who fell to her death in 1993 from a five-story building at the age of 19. Nadiadwala has Salman dancing to her hit song Saat Samundar Paar Mein Tere in Kick

Kick With some mildly thrilling sequences and Salman Khan as superhero, this film will find its takers ajit duara

o n scr een

current

The Grand Budapest Hotel Director Wes Anderson cast Ralph Fiennes, F Murray

Abraham, Mathieu Amalric Score ★★★★★

an, randeep Cast salman kh ne fernandez eli qu jac , oda ho iadwala Nad jid Sa Director

Y

ou may well get a bit of a kick out

of watching Kick. The second half of the film is a delightful parody of the unwieldy Aamir Khan vehicle, Dhoom 3. Just as that ‘thriller’ was about a police officer (Abhishek Bachchan) desperately trying to nail a mysterious cat burglar (Aamir) who robs banks, Kick is about a very similar masked robber called Devil (Salman) who steals from the rich and corrupt, and who also challenges a police officer (Randeep Hooda) to catch him. The design of the film and its message is clear: what one superhero can do, the other can do better.

Certainly, the supporting cast of Kick is much better. Randeep Hooda, over the years, has turned into a fine actor with a natural style of conversation.

In a charming drinking session with Devi Lal Singh (Devil) on the ledge of a tall building, he keeps insisting that he never gets drunk on duty, while swaying precariously near the edge. It is a funny scene which works well to break

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the non-stop action sequences.

The other supporting actor is, of course, the gifted Nawazuddin Siddiqui. He plays the ‘Joker’ to Salman’s ‘Batman’. Eccentric, somewhat abstract in his evil thinking, he makes a popping sound after delivering every clever bit of dialogue, and then exhales in pleasure. When Salman finally has this villain barbecued, he imitates the same mnemonic: pop, exhale!

Unfortunately, the first half of the film is a bit of a bore. Credibility is stretched when we are expected to believe that a psychiatrist in Poland (Jacqueline Fernandez) gets a kick out of dating the unemployable Devi Lal Singh. Jacqueline’s acting skills may be somewhat imperfect, but the dance sequences demonstrate her perfect 10.

She reveals legs that go on for so long, you have to adjust your bifocals to get them in frame.

This is not that good a film, but is watchable nevertheless. n

Director Wes Anderson says that his film is inspired by the life and work of the Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig, who fled his native country in the 1930s, fearing the rise of fascism. He was Jewish and died in exile, depressed about the loss of an era of tolerance in Europe.

This film is set, largely, in those uncertain times and is about Monsieur Gustav H (Ralph Fiennes), the concierge of that hotel. He is an old world character, whose view of the universe is constantly challenged by anti-intellectual characters who hound him and his protégé, a lobby boy at the hotel. Whenever he travels by train, fascist officers turn up to check his papers. When he goes to the funeral of a dear friend, he is framed for her murder by a paranoid regime. Betrayed and jailed for simply being who he is, it mimics the collapse of Europe—‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’ The film is, however, presented as a comedy of capers narrated by the lobby boy, now an elderly man (F Murray Abraham). It is an art-directed film, designed like animation—funny, but with obvious cultural and political references.

Though a thoughtful and entertaining film, it is not as impactful as Anderson’s previous film, Moonrise Kingdom.n AD

11 AUGUST 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

All for Love’s Sake

If Deepika Padukone showed up in Barcelona to hang out with her ‘good friend’ Ranveer Singh while he was filming Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do with ex Anushka Sharma and others, then Ranveer returned the gesture by landing up in the Mediterranean island of Corsica recently where Deepika is shooting Imtiaz Ali’s Tamaasha with her ex, Ranbir Kapoor.

DP and Ranveer were spotted and even photographed by tourists taking in the sights and sounds of the beautiful island on her day off the sets, but the couple still won’t come out and say they’re a couple.

Meanwhile, Katrina Kaif who’s currently shooting not too far, in London, for Kabir Khan’s Phantom with Saif Ali Khan, is expected to spend her own weekends away from set visiting Ranbir in France. It’s also now no secret that Anushka visited her ‘good friend’ Virat Kohli in England while she had a few days off from Akhtar’s set. The pair was photographed at a local Boots outlet in Nottingham, and didn’t seem to care that virtually the entire Indian population in the area had come out to catch a glimpse of them together.

Brain Versus Brawn

Shahid Kapoor and the makers of his latest film Haider are gambling on the confidence that enough audiences will choose their film over Hrithik Roshan’s action extravaganza Bang Bang! when both films open the same holiday weekend on 2 October. It’s a big bold move, industry insiders are saying, given that Fox Star India, the studio behind the Hrithik-Katrina starrer, has invested roughly Rs 150 crore in that film and will likely pull out all stops to make sure it’s the Number One choice on opening weekend.

But UTV, the producer of Haider, reportedly intends to position its film as the ‘more cerebral choice’ against the masses-targeted behemoth that Bang Bang! is. While there is no questioning the pedigree of Haider—Vishal Bhardwaj is the film’s director, and it’s an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—it’s also no secret that Shahid Kapoor just doesn’t have the box-office clout of Hrithik.

What’s particularly ironic in this case is that Shahid himself was the origi11 AUGUST 2014

nal choice for Bang Bang!, but the Anjaana Anjaani director Siddharth Anand quickly approached the Krrish star after discussions with Shahid went sour when he allegedly demanded script changes and wanted a say in casting decisions.

The Spendthrift Director

A respected filmmaker, currently in pre-production on his next film, has reportedly rubbed multiple studio heads the wrong way with his “arrogant, stubborn attitude”. The producer-director recently took meetings with several honchos about bankrolling his latest project, but came off difficult and inflexible on his demands.

The filmmaker allegedly quoted a budget of Rs 60 crore for the film, and flatly refused to negotiate the number. To be fair, that’s not an astronomical budget these days, but the reason studio bigwigs balked at the price-tag is that the film doesn’t have any bankable star to justify the cost. This is the first time the filmmaker will work with newcomers. And any studio, if it were to get involved, would naturally be required to spend at least another Rs 10 crore on marketing the film, an especially difficult and crucial responsibility when it comes to non-marquee stars. Typical meetings with studio representatives start with the filmmaker stating that he requires Rs 60 crore for the film, and adding that while he’s willing to consider their opinion on everything from locations and music to the supporting cast, the budget is strictly non-negotiable. No wonder he’s been unable to land a deal at any of the major studios and has signed up with a new production outfit floated by a leading industrialist.

The studios were apparently wary of doing business with the filmmaker despite his last film being a bumper hit because they’re aware, of course, that in spite of crossing Rs 100 crore in net collections, the only person who made money on that film was him. It is no secret that the studio that bankrolled the picture made virtually no profit on the project because it was left to pick up the tab after the film went way over-budget, with the producerdirector refusing to keep down expenses. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

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How Life Is Art in India

by A M A N NAT H

Wear your ‘art’ eyes and the whole of India becomes an open air gallery, forever presenting you cinema and installations. The road from Coorg to Mysore can’t be any different. Krishen Khanna spent years immortalising the labour that squats like the ‘I won’t see, won’t talk and won’t hear’ trio of Gandhi. I had sent the artist pictures from my road wanderings so that he would turn them into canvases for posterity – and he did. Fellini wouldn’t have had to labour with any elaborate sets in India, for all incongruencies falls into place eventually. It is not just the naked 19th century faqir for the Orientalists’ camera, or the ruins for the Daniells’ art, which fall effortlessly into the frame today, but how the medieval and modern keep remarrying daily on the streets . This hybrid mating produces an ever-evolving progeny of uncertain DNA. In this photograph, the porters of synthetic white bags stuffed with coconuts, huddle under an electric blue rain cover as the intermittent monsoon remains full of surprises. The truck is flanked by commercial hoardings and it isn’t easy to tell if India is a left-lane country or a rightist one. The centre may seem safe in politics, but remains precarious on the highway. Remember, sitting on the fence always pokes

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11 AUGUST 2014