OPEN Magazine 14 July 2014

congress seven shades of damnation

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14 J U LY 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD

Thom Richard is one of the few pilots in the world to possess the talent, experience and courage required to compete in the final of the famous Reno Air Races – the world’s fastest motorsport. Less than ten champions are capable of vying with each other at speeds of almost 500 mph, flying wing to wing at the risk of their lives, just a few feet off the ground. It is for these elite aviators that Breitling develops its chronographs: sturdy, functional and ultra high-performance instruments all equipped with movements chronometer-certified by the COSC – the highest official benchmark in terms of reliability and precision. Welcome to the Breitling world.

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Volume 6 Issue 27 For the week 8—14 July 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

14 july 2014

L I F E

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EL MAN ON HIS NOV ZIA HAIDER RAH

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0 14 / R S 4 7 J U LY 2 0

JIHAD 2.0

RIORS ON ISLAMIST WAR E IN IRAQ POS A RAMPAGE THREAT A NEW GLOBAL

Utkarsh Jain

KE

BY JASON BUR

I found this article, ‘Bring Back Some Imperialism Please’ (7 July 2014) fundamentally problematic for many reasons. First, the casual use of words like ‘Iraq’ as a country with no identity other than that of an unfinished war of a neo-liberal war-mongering capitalist nation like America. It seemed the general bent of the piece was towards an interventionalist stance, which, despite the glorious failure of Western intervention, portrays it as the White man’s burden to justify the forceful It’s time that infliction of ‘democracy’ intervention by the onto the ‘third world’, West, even on a moral often known by names high ground, is stopped like ‘Mesopotamia’ or and done away with even the land of ‘snake charmers’. In fact, the altogether Shia-Sunni divide, leading in its aggravated form to the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, was mostly the result of the same intervention by America, which somehow considered itself justified in invading a nation, containing its faith and people on a far-fetched theory of self defence, and completely upsetting its equilibrium. If the fall of Saddam Hussein made that war just, then at the same time, it was also made grossly unjust by the destruction of Iraq as a state along with its resulting in no real tangible benefits, except more people getting killed.

It’s time that intervention by the West, [even on] a moral high ground, is stopped and done away with altogether, leaving the ‘other’ to choose how they want to live and the kind of regime, faith and state foundation they want.  letter of the week Uncle Sam’s Undoing

what we are hearing about all the unrest in Iraq was what was feared after the US along with the UK invaded Iraq and left it in a quandary (‘Jihad 2.0’, 7 July 2014). The US took the liberty to interfere in the internal affairs of weak-butoil-rich Iraq on the false propaganda of Iraq possessing ‘weapons of mass destruction’, leaving behind deep-rooted anarchy and sectarian violence. The war left Iraq’s economy totally crippled and its infrastructure devastated,

not to speak of thousands of women fated to be widows and a similar number of children rendered orphans. The US was also responsible for the nine-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which weakened both the countries, and for the proxy war in Egypt and Syria. The crisis in Iraq is of the US’s making, and and it is incumbent upon America to find a lasting solution by bringing all countries involved—as also Shias, Sunnis and Kurds—together, rather than risking another war or through drone

7 JULY 2014

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 Directors Tarun Sehgal, Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNER Anup Banerjee assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani photo Researcher Abhinav Saha

NI’S SMRITI IRA

ISSUE 26 VOLUM E 06

Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor PR Ramesh Deputy Editors Aresh Shirali, Ullekh NP art director Madhu Bhaskar Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

DU CRISIS

attacks in which civilians will be worse affected.  MY SHARIFF

Not so Sunny After All

this refers to ‘The Inheritance of Ruins’, 30 June 2014). That the new guard is vociferous about the follies of the UPA is not unusual. By treading on the UPA’s beaten track, the NDA’s ‘achche din’ appear gloomy. The expressed generosity of Central Minister Nirmala Seetharaman that the NDA won’t be a ‘tax terrorist’ for corporates has laid bare the new Government’s move to spare the latter any bitter pill, which, on the contrary, is to be administered exclusively to millions of other clients through unjustified moves like railway fare hikes.  Chandrasekaran

Course Correction

delhi university’s four year undergraduate programme (FYUP) is good as it improves the employability of students (‘Educating Smriti Irani’, 7 July 2014). We often hear recruiters complain that most students are not job-ready. An interactive programme is better than the current one. Politics is omnipresent in this country and politicians are playing spoilsport. And the Left parties are increasingly becoming a pain in the neck for the country, with their outdated views. The poor need to acquire better skills to be at par with the middle-class and the rich; else, they will be condemned to petty jobs. Let’s open our eyes to a better future than play blind politics.  Chandra Sekhar Dulla

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

small world Didini Tochhawng

THOU SHALT NOT DRINK Father Lalzuithanga addresses a local NGO in Aizawl

A Drinking Conundrum in Mizoram reason vs faith

As the state considers abolishing prohibition, the church tries to thwart the move

The northeastern

state of Mizoram has remained a dry state for most of its history. Nine years after its formation in 1987, the state government, with the backing of the church, issued laws prohibiting the sale or consumption of liquor. However, on 8 July 2014, when Mizoram’s state Assembly convenes for the monsoon session, the government is expected to introduce a new bill that will repeal prohibition. The move is expected to increase funds for the public coffers and curb deaths caused 14 july 2014

by spurious alcohol.

Six years ago, the law was amended to allow the sale and consumption of grape and guava wine. This was done for wine processing to be facilitated in the state. In 2011, apple, ginger, passion fruit, peach and pear wine were also added to the list. The proposed bill will allow the sale and consumption of all types of liquor. It is expected to be passed easily since the current Congress government won the state election last year with a big majority.

However, the church— which wields enormous clout within the state—has publically opposed the decision.

Lalzuithanga, senior executive secretary of the Mizoram Presbyterian Church Synod, says, “Prohibition has led to less crime, fewer accidents and the state is mostly peaceful. We will fight against any amendment to this rule.” The church is going all out to halt the introduction of the bill. It has held meetings with legislators, brought up the issue in prayer services across the

state, and is currently wooing various NGOs. This has led to a deep debate among people. Says Vanlalruata, general secretary of the Young Mizo Association, “On the one hand, there is the promise of freedom. But there is also the church and its argument over how alcohol is going to corrupt Mizo society. Many are worried that the police will be ill-equipped to deal with problems that might arise from allowing the sale of alcohol.” n Lhendup G Bhutia

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contents

14

cover story

24

6

cONGRESS

Cooling breaks in the Fifa World Cup

8

locomotif

open essay

33

Will Modi play the Great Game?

Saint Antony and the oligarchy of communalism

In Memoriam

36

A party in crisis

hurried man’s guide

kerala

Orphanages as racketeers

marathaS

Do they deserve their promised quota?

End of Networking An ode to the social media platform that made being online cool rather than nerdy Lhendup G Bhutia

i

n the pantheon of Google gods that

occupy the temples of our digital lives, there are those that led short and insignificant lives, like Google Wave and Google Buzz. There are behemoths like Google Search, Gmail and YouTube that we continue to pay daily obeisance to. There has, however, never been a Google incarnation more endearing and casually intimate as Orkut, whose aim was to wrap the globe in chains of friendship. And one which went as suddenly out of fashion as it had become a rage. Come 30 September, as Google casually announced recently, Orkut will be forever put to rest. In the harsh unforgiving world of modern technology that thrives on innovations and reinventions, this Google service just couldn’t make it.

The 21st century arrived in 2000, but in India at least, it was Orkut that announced its spirit four years later. It was the father of all modern networking sites.

It might appear clumsy when one compares it to its modern incarnates, but this pastel-blue, by-invitation only website was nothing short of revolutionary. It allowed people to befriend others, to create and join online communities, and to find long-lost lovers to whom you could scrap personal messages. With smiley faces, ice cubes and hearts that served as ratings for friends, Orkut made the internet not just a nerdy or utilitarian pastime. It made the internet cool.

Born at a time when Facebook was still just a college dorm project, Orkut was the first big social networking site of its time.

4 open

It did not derive its name from the Finnish slang for ‘orgasm’, as many presumed, but from the name of its Turkish developer, a Google software engineer named Orkut Büyükkökten. Strangely, it never quite caught on in the US, its intended country, but became a phenomenon in Brazil and India. MySpace, a networking site that focuses more on music and entertainment, became the preferred medium in the US. Just four years into its launch,

Orkut had some 13 million visitors in India alone. Facebook, which had begun to take over most markets on other shores, did not have comparable numbers.

Nobody quite understood why Brazilians and Indians took to it and not Americans. Some even reasoned that this was because the website had little difficulty running in spite of slow internet connections. When the Brazilian

newspaper Folha de São Paulo asked Büyükkökten in 2005 to explain the website’s popularity, he guessed, “Maybe it is cultural. It has to do with the personality of the country, who are known as friendly people.”

But then it became creepy. The very public nature that allowed the website to catch the imagination of people became its curse. Women began receiving unsolicited and undesirable requests for friendship. All the data and pictures on the website, people began to realise, were accessible to anyone. A string of negative reports—of hate groups instigating clashes, of rave party invitations, and of kidnappers befriending a teenaged victim, Adnan Patrawala, on the website, and later murdering him—drove the proverbial nail further into the coffin.

And abruptly, the website had overstayed its welcome.

A sleeker alternative that incorporated and improved upon many of its ideas was soon around, and by 2010 Facebook became India’s preferred networking website. Orkut was soon a ghost town nobody visited. It continued to survive the years, but as we realise now, it was all on borrowed time.

Today, in the age of Facebook, as we realise the force of online social media and lament the vulnerability of our personal data, it is perhaps appropriate to lay a virtual flower to its first predecessor and remember a time when social networking did not mine users data to sell products, but carried with it the promise of a new century. n 14 july 2014

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Graduating students

A look at India’s near abroad

Brewing it at home

s books

social media

News from Babel

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f o r Threatening rivals by saying he would send his party workers to rape their women

When Mamata Banerjee led the Trinamool Congress (TMC) to a historic victory over the Left in West Bengal, backing her were numerous faces of the intellectual and artistic fraternity of Bengal, many of whom also contested elections. But that didn’t make the political discourse in the state any more civilised.

Too cool for school

Within a day of speaking against women wearing short clothes and drinking alcohol and suggesting a ban on bikinis, Goa’s PWD Minister Sudin Dhavalikar did a u-turn B A C K STRO K E

“We should not allow girls with bikinis to enter public places because it is very difficult to control people who arrive in Goa from different states. By the time a victim reaches the police it is too late”

“I withdraw the statement if it has hurt anybody. I was misunderstood. I had no intention of hurting women—I was only concerned about their safety”

—Sudin Dhavalikar to The Asian Age on 1 July

—Dhavalikar to NDTV on 2 July

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This was evident recently, in the speech of an actor-turnedTMC MP Tapas Pal, where he, while addressing his party’s supporters, threatened to send his boys to the homes of the opposition to rape its female members. In another tape, he urges his supporters to slit the throats of the opposition. Pal, a two-term MP, is a much-feted awardwinning Bengali actor known for portraying likeable characters, and the footage appears to have shocked everyone, from his party co-workers to former film colleagues. While he eventually apologised for his comments, it was only after much media scrutiny, and he initially tried to brush aside the incident with a series of excuses ranging from how he had said ‘raid’ and not ‘rape’ to how old footage was being dug up for political vendetta.

His party, meanwhile, is satisfied with the apology letter, and no further punitive action against him is being considered. n

around

RM Lodha’s criticism of the Narendra Modi Government over the rejection of the proposal to elevate Gopal Subramanium as a judge of the Supreme Court is being described as a sign of a divide between the Executive and Judiciary. The ruling side’s rivals went to the extent of terming the Government’s decision petty.

While there is a case for harmonious relations between various arms of the state, the Government cannot be faulted for his honour CJI RM Lodha in Amritsar in March 2013

14 july 2014

narinder Nanu/AFP

Much Ado About Nothing Chief Justice

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

exercising its right to have its say in matters such as selection of judges. When the Government turned down the collegium’s proposal, it was not engaging in any blasphemous act. Thanks to two apex court judgments in the 1990s, the Government can intervene in the selection of an appropriate person for the job as it is ‘one of the consultees in the appointment process’. Given this backdrop, it would be a stretch to argue that the Government’s action was a transgression of norms guaranteeing the independence of the Judiciary. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to Fifa World Cup cooling breaks During the recent Holland-Mexico match at the World Cup, which the former won, the first-ever cooling breaks in the history of the tournament were taken. Two such breaks, each lasting three minutes, were taken approximately 30 minutes into the run-of-play in both halves of the match.

This new phenomenon in football is the result of a Brazilian labour court ruling earlier this year, which ordered that players must be given breaks after about 30 minutes of play in each of the two 45-minute halves of a soccer match, whenever the ambient temperature exceeds 32° Celsius. In the Holland-Mexico game, there was a maximum temperature of up Fifa is believed to to 38° Celsius. In Brazil, have rejected the strict labour laws exist argument from the to provide strong protecBrazilian players’ tion for people working union that all 1 pm in sectors of formal games be moved to employment.

4 pm, when the The court was initially considering a 30° Celsius cut-off point but later accepted Fifa’s argument for a 32° Celsius limit. Fifa also rejected an argument from the Brazilian players’ union that all 1 pm games be moved to 4 pm, when the temperature is expected to be lower. According to the Jamie McDonald/Getty Images

temperature is usually lower

Beating the heat Players during a cooling break

new rule, the decision to take cooling breaks will be taken on a match-to-match basis. The medical officer during matches will recommend cooling breaks in each half, but the decision to apply them will rest with the referees alone.

Many, however, were critical of the manner in which the cooling breaks were utilised. Both managers, and in particular Louis van Gaal of the Netherlands, used the breaks to reformulate strategies. Van Gaal used the second cooling break to push the wing-back Dirk Kuyt to play as striker, and altered the 3-5-2 formation into a more aggressive 4-3-3. At that juncture, Mexico was leading Holland 1-0. n

All the President’s Tweets How they won’t exactly set your heart pumping M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

O

n 1 July, the Indian President decided to get onto Twitter and over the next few days didn’t exactly set the social networking world on fire. The first tweet from @RashtrapatiBhvn was that they are now tweeting, which kind of belabours the point. If it is imperative to announce it then there is always the CIA way of doing it; the US spy agency got onto Twitter early last month and tweeted, ‘We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet’.

The President’s second tweet went thus: ‘President presents National Awards, Shilp Guru Awards & Sant Kabir Awards to Artisans & Weavers for 2011.’ Nothing wrong with that but it does beg the intriguing question why awards for 2011 are being given in 2014. The third tweet—‘Indigenous handicraft & handlooms cherished aspect of Indian life; reflects nation’s diversity & infinite creativity.

President Mukherjee’—might have sent the adrenaline racing of a few joint secretaries in the Cultural Affairs Ministry, but chances are the rest of India wasn’t as startled.

And so it goes on till the person who is supposed to send out these missives on behalf of the President into the virtual world decided to lighten the mood a little. Tweet eight is therefore images of rain at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Tweet nine gets more cryptic. It shows puddles on the grounds of Rashtrapati Bhavan and these words—‘After the rains! Note the reflection of the dome, and is it a map that the rains have drawn?’ That puddle does look like a map of India. No one in high offices of the Indian Government uses a word like ‘map’ lightly. Is it then a subtle message to the External Affairs Ministry on a course correction they need to do during their border negotiations with China? Should the Research and Analysis Wing send

four astrologers to read the omens and prepare a secret report that will not be read until 2040? Alas, we will perhaps never know because it won’t get tweeted about.

Why does the Indian President have tweets laden with dispassion?

They are done by his Secretariat on his behalf. But that is also, at one level, the problem. Twitter updates get traction when there is a personal element to it.

While Presidents are bound by the code of office to be as dour and boring as possible, showing a little bit of emotion might not be such a bad Twitter thing. Take the tweets of the updates get White House. traction Before the match when there between America is a personal and Belgium at element to the Fifa World Cup, its tweet it. Showing went: ‘In a little bit of America, we don’t emotion in settle. We official tweets out-hustle the might not be competition.

That’s who we a bad thing are. Let’s do this, @USSoccer!’ And after the defeat there are pictures of US President Barack Obama on the phone with the team’s goalkeeper and forward with an accompanying line: ‘“Man, I just wanted to call and say you guys did us proud!” —President Obama to @TimHowardGK & @ Clint_Dempsey’.

Notice the difference in tone between the White House and Rashtrapati Bhavan. One tries to be as human as possible and the other tries to make it a government bulletin (except when it comes to puddles).

One engages in the casual language of its people and the other, in the timehonoured tradition of officialese, uses language to maintain distance. n 14 july 2014

business

As India’s Tiger Economy Stirs Again foto24/gallo images/getty images

BU D G E T projects could set cash rolling Did a dying-day from sector to sector, while UPA queer the fiscal pitch for power plants strapped for fuel NDA Finance Minister Arun could grunt to life on easier Jaitley? In the first two months of input supplies, financial 2014-15, the former Government incentives and even demand spent more and earned less than stirred by broad energy reforms anyone had guessed. Oil subsidy aimed at slowly aligning local payments were the chief cash prices with global realities, guzzlers, and now with snuffing out diesel gensets and hydrocarbon costs aflare again directing subsidies exclusively and monsoon clouds gone astray, to the needy. There would be big it must be a nightmare for the ifs and buts new regime to crunch this year’s fisc to 4 per cent or so of GDP. But A revival hinges along the way, a lot this is exactly what economy on how would watchers expect of India’s first Arun Jaitley depend on ever self-declared ‘small addresses the actual government’; any slip down the the Centre’s coordination spending slope would set off an fiscal deficit of policy alarm; after all, India’s ongoing action, and any revival plan of stagflation crisis can be traced to such intricacy would entail risks a cash stimulus gone awry half a that are hard to estimate. decade ago.

In other words, the Finance Keynes is out; Hayek, in.

Minister’s safer option would be In a country of colour-of-theto plainly do what every small cat agnostics, however, there government promises to: get out may yet exist such a thing as of the way, curtail its expenses, ideological half-pregnancy. The schrodinger’s cat Yes, it’s alive, but will it roar once the Budget is out? and let private players put the Finance Minister, accordingly, country’s cash to use with may well-advisedly be tempted greater efficiency than it can. This, of to hold his fiscal fix off for a while. He the money to ripple rapidly across key course, would imply a fiscal deficit goal no could argue a coherent case for a stimulus parts of the economy. that would spur all-round investment, one Identifying such sectors doesn’t promise larger than the former Finance Minister’s, even if it’s much harder to achieve than that could plausibly be effected without to be easy, but Indian infrastructure has inflation as an instant response so long as languished long enough to offer clues for a what Arun Jaitley had bargained for.

Either way, it’s a crucial call. And it’s the effort focuses on sectors of ample spare strategy of inter-sectoral revival. Maybe unenviably his to take. n ARE SH SHIRALI capacity and adequate ‘multipliers’ —for high-speed telecom or steel-and-concrete

Keynesian Tryst Gone Wrong 2

The Centre’s loss of control over its fiscal deficit set the stage for stagflation

1 0 -1 -2 2.5

-3 -4

ARUN JAITLEY, India’s Finance Minister, making a rhetorical point that has been taken as a statement of budgetary intent

3.3 3.9

4.0

-5

4.8

-6

6.0

-7 2004-05

14 July 2014

05-06

06-07

07-08

“India needs to make a choice between mindless populism and fiscal prudence… Does India need a certain amount of fiscal discipline at this time? Do we need prudence? Or do we need mindless spending and populism?”

08-09

4.9

4.5* * advance estimate

5.7

Source:planning commission

6.5 09-10

10-11

11-12

12-13

13-14

all figures are as a precentage of gdp

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Saint Antony and the Oligarchy of Communalism

efore we talk about AK Antony, who has suddenly discovered the rot of communalism at the core of the kind of secularism practised by his party in his home state of Kerala, let us talk about a man called PK Abdu Rabb, the state’s education minister from the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). To take school education in this progressive-regressive state to international standards, the man recently came out with the revolutionary idea of introducing green boards in the place of black ones in classrooms, mainly in the Muslim-dominated Malappuram district and those in his own constituency, Tirurangadi. Mr Rabb loves green, and in the political ecosystem of Kerala, the colour is endowed with multiple symbolisms. In the leafy-serenity state you have seen in its tourism department’s ‘God’s Own Country’ advertisements, green may be the colour endangered by one of the Kerala Models of Development: the big racket of deforestation. Politically, it is the colour of power, patronage and occasional sleaze; the IUML, Congress’ biggest partner in the ruling United Democratic Front, has the Chief Minister dancing to the Mappila tunes of Malappuram, the League’s headquarters.

Our Mr Rabb even attempted to give the colour a new dash of feminist aesthetic when the education department reportedly issued a circular asking women teachers to wear green blouses at a public meeting. Mr Rabb may soon become a synonym for the fastest growing item in communal Kerala.

AK Antony is different. He had left Kerala a while ago, for the Chief Minister’s job, he came to realise, was not compatible with his political morality, his conscience, which, once upon a time—remember the famous Guwahati AICC session where the little firebrand from Kerala took on Mrs G—was pretty incendiary. Today, he is the wise old councilor in the durbar of 10 Janpath; he is the Trusted One, the Dependable One. Of late, he did not have much opportunity to play out his conscience, and that was what power did to a man who once maintained that there was more to public life than power.

Still, somehow, he retained the halo of his media-awarded sainthood, and his monosyllabic wisdom in the face of a storm was matched only by his no-syllable Prime Minister. As Defence Minister, he was worthy of Dr Manmohan Singh: both made evasion a religion, and it came to a non-believer like Antony so naturally. But Antony still had a political history, which Manmohan lacked. It was a history of youthful idealism,

of street-fighting anti-communism, of a detached conversation with power—Saint Antony was inevitable.

Has powerlessness made Antony a politician with a moral purpose again? What he said in Kerala was a banality overemphasised. That secularism has been diluted by his party’s subservience to Muslim League should not have been a shocker in a state that stands for the banality of communalism. The Kerala model of communalism is too advanced to be copied elsewhere, say in Bihar or UP, and three words capture its exceptionalism: empowerment, entrenchment and enterprise. Communal bloodshed is not very Malayalee; communal corporatisation, yes. A communal oligarchy is on the rise in Kerala, and its influence stretches from education to healthcare to the now-booming orphan trade. The ‘progressive’ state has gone past the indignities and cruelties of casteism; it has institutionalised equal distribution of the communal booty. Politics has made it easier.

And the MuslimLeague has stolen a march over others courtesy a captive constituency, electorally useful backwardness and leaders such as Mr Rabb who know the uses of colour coding.

Antony was right that Congress, under the chief ministership of his erstwhile protégé, Oommen Chandy, accepted the supremacy of Malappuram as the spiritual headquarters of Kerala politics. There was a time when even the Marxists found a second variety of opium from North Kerala very useful; but they no longer require outright communalists as CPM has already internalised the base instincts of caste—and class matters less.

The Congress Chief Minister survives on oxygen supplied by the League; and Mr Rabb’s party seems to have a monopoly over oxygen production in the coalition politics of Kerala.

Antony says this survival strategy is a deviation from the principles of secularism that his party upholds. Antony is now a Delhi leader, and his visits to Kerala are for patriarchal reasons—and for some solicited evangelism. In Kerala, he can afford to scold or advice protégés—and tell the inconvenient truth. But Antony, because of the faith that the Family reposes in this good man, is larger than Kerala. The flash of conscience he revealed in Kerala was admirable—it was the vintage rebel. For the last ten years—even longer—where was he when his party, in the name of secularism, mined minority ghettos for votes? Where was he when his government, headed by another good man like him, repudiated any semblance of morality in governance? This is the tragedy of good men who refuse to make use of their goodness at the right moment. The Saint’s conscience stirs only when he is out of the sheltering shadow of power. n

How come AK Antony’s conscience did not stir when his secular party mined minority ghettos for votes?

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open essay

By SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

Will MODI play the great game?

The last outpost of the Raj still survives in South Block

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14 july 2014

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t was joked in 1881 when Tsarist

The archaic concept of a fort’s protective glacis becomes the Near Abroad when applied to a country. The Russians, who regard 14 neighbouring states, all former Soviet republics, as essential to their security, are alarmed that Ukraine’s agreement with the European Union will bring in NATO and lead to the Russian Federation being militarily encircled. Even without that threat, Moscow fears that Ukraine’s close integration with the EU will flood Russia with cheap imports and affect oil and natural gas supplies.

Britain is fortunate in being blest with a natural glacis. The sea, its best defence down the ages, is regarded as such an exclusively British possession that one severe winter when the English Channel became a bed of ice, The Times famously proclaimed, ‘Channel frozen, Europe isolated’.

American President James Monroe’s warning to European colonial powers not to try and re-establish control over newlyindependent Latin American nations is probably the most effective articulation of the Near Abroad concept. Most Latin Americans deeply resented the policy which they thought replaced Spanish, Portuguese or French imperialism by American. India has two lessons to learn from the American experience. First, a cooperative relationship with the region’s smaller countries cannot be forced on them. It must be a willing partnership. Second, there can be no cooperation in the Near Abroad without prosperity at home. A vigorous economy is the best guarantee of innovative diplomacy abroad.

The Cuban missile crisis was probably the best known exposition of the Monroe Doctrine. Lately, the United States has extended the doctrine to warn off rival forces in Europe and Asia.

President Barack Obama’s Asian pivot makes China and North Korea part of America’s Near Abroad. The United States has a similar interest in South-east Asia. Iraq and Afghanistan are shattered because of American intervention. The Taliban owe photo imaging; photos IndiaPictures/UIG/Getty Images & Manish Swarup/AP

Russia captured the town of Merv in Turkmenistan that the governorgeneral in Calcutta became ‘mervous’.

Another little-known detail of history that should interest Mr Narendra Modi in view of the guest list at his inaugural ceremony is that the Cripps’ Mission proposed in 1945 that indepenSunanda K dent India should accept responsibility Datta-Ray for defending the ‘South-east Asia area’. is a columnist Britain’s humiliation by Japan during and author World War II was the obvious inspiration. But someone with a historical perspective in Attlee’s Cabinet may have reasoned that if Rajendra Chola could cross the Bay of Bengal in the eleventh century, destroy the Sri Vijaya empire in Sumatra and conquer Malaya, some interloper could perform the operation in reverse.

Both highlighted—like Mr Modi’s astute overtures to SAARC leaders—the importance of the Near Abroad concept. It’s a Russian term that is also translated as ‘sphere of influence’, and is best illustrated with the humdrum example of Kolkata’s Fort William. There was an older Fort William in BBD Bagh roughly where Kolkata’s General Post Office now stands. It was a congested area then, with houses extending cheek by jowl right up to the ramparts. Siraj-ud-Daulah’s soldiers merely moved from one house to another during the night of 20 June 1756 until they reached Fort William, which they captured.

So, when the British built a new fort, they gave it what is called a glacis, an open surrounding space which exposes attackers to the defenders’ missiles. It’s three kilometres from north to south, and a kilometre wide.

14 july 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 11

their existence to American funding of the Mujahideen.

India’s regional concerns are rarely spelt out. Theories are not in our culture. One of the few exceptions was Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee’s letter to President Bill Clinton after Pokhran II. But Mr Modi’s visit to Bhutan and swearing-in ceremony as Prime Minister provided more eloquent testimony than any formulation could have done. The inclusion of the prime minister of Mauritius defined his understanding of India’s regional role.

Perhaps Fiji, the Seychelles and even Madagascar could have been included.

The British Raj’s interpretation of India’s glacis included much of Central Asia, Tibet and the Himalayan states. What Kipling called the Great Game was all about India’s security.

Russia sought an opening to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea. To get to it, the Russians had to pass through Central Asia, Afghanistan and today’s Pakistan. Central Asia was already passing into Russian control with the capture of towns like Merv. The territory that now comprises Pakistan was firmly under the British. There remained only Afghanistan over which the British and Russians plotted and conspired and squabbled and fought proxy wars. Securing Afghanistan was regarded as essential for India’s security.

It’s much the same today. Remember, Mr Hamid Karzai was also at Mr Modi’s swearing-in. Afghanistan is a bone of contention because it is the Near Abroad for many countries. It’s the scene of India-Pakistan manoeuvres. It’s Russia’s glacis as it is Iran’s. The United States also regards Afghanistan as its Near Abroad because American strategic interests are not confined by geography.

Today’s oil-rich Gulf kingdoms were administered from Delhi. Iraq was a district of the Bombay Presidency. Singapore was part of Bengal. A senior officer at the Staff College at Wellington put it nicely. Nineteenth century British Indian foreign policy, he said, was based on three pivots. First, to hold India. Second, to hold the sealanes to India. Third, the conviction that God was an Englishman.

We’ll leave the British to their little fancy although we know of course that God is Indian. The imperative to hold India calls for no elucidation. It’s the sea lanes that highlight the importance the British Raj attached to India’s glacis. Memories of that grand territorial spread linger. When he wrote that the last Englishman would be an Indian, Malcolm Muggeridge, the British writer who worked on The Statesman in Calcutta in the 1930s, might have added that the last outpost of the Raj survives in South Block. That was evident at the Bandung Conference.

Jawaharlal Nehru didn’t like something in the speech that Sir John Kotelawala, the Ceylon prime minister, made. “Why didn’t you show me your speech first?” Nehru asked imperiously. “Why should I?” Kotelawala retorted. “Do you show me yours?”

Albert Rene, president of the Seychelles (1977-2004), put his finger on India’s dilemma when he called it “the awkward grandfather of the region”. In his words, “India would like to

play a big role, but it has a complex, that people will say they’re imperialistic.” Not for nothing did Sri Lankans call a former Indian high commissioner the ‘Viceroy’.

T

he Near Abroad can be defined in many ways. Geopolitical

security is the obvious basis. China speaks of ‘core interests’.

But they haven’t always asserted their Near Abroad claims only through force of arms. The Kuomintang regime of General Chiang Kai-shek—known in the West as ‘General Cash-mycheque’—encouraged Chinese soldiers to marry Vietnamese brides, expecting their bilingual children to uphold China’s position as Vietnam’s protector.

Iran sees itself as protector of adjoining Iraq’s Shia community. Syria has a similar interest in Lebanon. Today’s Russia claims a stake in lands with ethnic Russian inhabitants. Tsarist Russia’s protective role for Orthodox Christians was one of the causes of World War I. India’s actions in Mauritius (and to an extent) Sri Lanka are inspired by ethnic and religious ties.

India has several times intervened in small neighbouring countries. Some interventions like Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka have been disastrous. Some like Operation Lal Dora in Mauritius had to be aborted. But Operation Cactus in the Maldives moved Reagan to applause and prompted Margaret Thatcher’s exclamation “Thank God for India!”

Usually, India is mealy-mouthed about such actions, as Rene observed.

Admiral RH Tahiliani is one of the few unashamed exponents of an interventionist role. “We must take the responsibility that size imposes,” he said, “without having any hegemonistic aspirations. Coming to the help of a small neighbour is a responsibility, but we have no intention of spreading our sphere of influence.”

There’s a contradiction there. Intervention is itself an act of influence. It can only be performed by a superior power capable of dominating smaller nations. This is where Mr Modi’s advisors must exercise caution. The recent claim by China’s president, Xi Jinping, that “no country should seek absolute security for itself at the expense of others” may be dismissed as hyperbole. But two points must be stressed. First, security is not synonymous with acquisition. Second, while no country can afford to overlook threats in its Near Abroad, ultimate security lies at home.

The answers lie in managing smaller surrounding peoples without making them feel they are subjects, in winning hearts and minds, not controlling actions. It’s even more necessary to guarantee the basic means of livelihood to every citizen at home. The Near Abroad strategy is most effective when accompanied by dynamic economic growth. Let India never again give cause to a newspaper to write—as The Hindustan Times did on 30 August 1974, ‘Perhaps there is no need for the common man to ask for bread. He’s getting Sikkim.’ Adequate bread for all is the ultimate security. n

Intervention is itself an act of influence.

It can only be performed by a superior power capable of dominating smaller nations

12 open

14 july 2014

the backward

new

portrait of a power class

jawaharlal Nehru

Indira Gandhi

Brahmin

Brahmin

Prime Minister 1947-1964

Kayastha

Prime Minister 1964-66

M

Rajput

Jat

Prime Minister 1966-77; 1980-84

Lal Bahadur Shastri

Vishwanath Pratap singh

Charan Singh

Prime Minister 1989-90

Prime Minister 1979-80

Morarji Desai

Brahmin

Prime Minister 1977-79

Rajiv Gandhi

Brahmin

Prime Minister 1984-89

Chandra Shekhar

Rajput

Prime Minister 1990-91

ahatma Gandhi has often been blamed for laying the foundation for the Congress party’s dynasty politics. Why he chose Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru over Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to lead India still provokes passions.

Perhaps he feared incurring the wrath of Brahmins. Back then, Brahmin members in the top echelons of the party often held parallel meetings to push their agenda. Faizal Devji, an Oxford don who has written extensively on Gandhi, notes that the Father of the Nation “was a good Bania, and ended up choosing a Brahmin (Nehru) over another [relatively] ‘backward’ caste (Patel) as successor.

Is the

brahmin

on the rise by pr ramesh and Ullekh NP

HD devE gowda

Vokkaliga

Prime Minister 1996-97

PV Narasimha Rao

Brahmin

Prime Minister 1991-96

IK Gujral Khatri

Prime Minister 1997-98

Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Brahmin

Prime Minister 1996-96; 1998-2004

Manmohan Singh

Kohli

Prime Minister 2004-14

Narendra Modi

Modh Ganchi Prime Minister 2014-

From 25% MPs in 1952, Brahmins account for less than 10% of the Lok Sabha.

He played the classic Bania role of mediator and connector”. The Brahmin wrath that Gandhi perhaps feared has been tempered over the decades; from 25 per cent of MPs in 1952, Brahmins make up less than 10 per cent of Parliament now. The decline in the proportion of Brahmins in the Lok Sabha has been especially sharp since 1984, when it was 19.9 per cent; the figure fell to 12.44 per cent in 1998 and 11.3 per cent in 1999.

Now, with Narendra Modi, an OBC, as Prime Minister, ‘backward caste’ influence is expected to rise. In a striking contrast to casteist parties such as the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) and Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Modi’s social identity doesn’t translate into caste politics, but endears the BJP to Hindu OBCs who account for more than 40 per cent of India’s population. Till recently, they had disliked the domination of Brahmins, Rajputs and other ‘upper’ castes in the BJP. In the heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, OBCs, who hold the key to government formation, had been backing regional outfits since the late 1980s, an era that saw the rise of the Janata Dal and later various other non-Congress, non-BJP parties as breakaway entities.

A senior Brahmin BJP leader from Uttar Pradesh argues that Modi’s rise doesn’t alienate ‘upper’ castes because of his “pro-market stance and merit-focused and development-oriented approach”.

“Yes, his social identity helps allay fears of OBCs, who are the largest component of Indian society and who have so far aligned with divisive parties. This is good for the BJP in consolidating all the Hindus of this country. Modi, mind you, is not biased towards OBCs, but his rise has helped get the OBCs—who were suspicious of the party thanks to propaganda—on board,” he claims.

Devji agrees with the view that Modi is not a polariser along caste lines: “I wouldn’t put the Prime Minister in that category [of OBC leaders championing the case of their castes alone] politically, as his own background seems not to have been translated into caste politics, despite the number of OBCs in his party.”

A BJP leader from Madhya Pradesh, who belongs to the OBC Yadav community, feels that the BJP leadership has over the years accommodated “more and more” OBCs “as candidates to assemblies and the Lok Sabha” to win over the largest chunk of Hindu voters who stood divided.

“Due to the clash in timing of the emergence of OBC leaders like Mulayam and Lalu and the BJP, these OBC leaders became natural allies of Muslims because their OBC politics was in direct contradiction with Hindutva politics—after all, the polarisation of OBCs along Hindu lines could have eroded their political bases,” notes this leader. He concedes that the domination of Brahmins and Rajputs in the party has been the main reason for “the limited growth of the BJP because OBCs never trusted the leadership of the BJP and felt more comfortable with regional parties emerging from the Janata Dal. This is where Modi, who never shied away from talking about his social identity, comes in and brings the whole lot of Hindus 16 open

under one umbrella.”

For his part, Modi had consistently brandished his caste credentials in the run-up to the recent Lok Sabha election, which saw caste as well as class become political weapons of choice for the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. He even alleged that rival Rahul Gandhi had shied away from being named the Congress prime ministerial candidate because the Nehru-Gandhi scion could not stand the ‘humiliation’ of losing to a person from a ‘lower strata’ of society. “The Congress feels it is not good to fight a tea vendor from a lower caste whose mother was a maidservant,” Modi had said. The BJP heavyweight had also turned Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar’s preposterous remarks against him to his advantage; Aiyar had said that Modi could never become Prime Minister, but he could sell tea at Congress meeting venues.

Ahead of the polls of 2014, the BJP, whose best Lok Sabha tally until this year in UP had been 57 seats in 1998, allotted more tickets in the state to ‘backward caste’ candidates as part of an effort to woo voters who feel they didn’t benefit much from the social engineering exercise that swept the state after the emergence of parties such as the SP and BSP. This meant that non-Yadav voters among OBCs and non-Jatavs or Mahadalits among Dalits got tickets to contest. OBC Lodh Rajputs had also thrown in their lot with the BJP, thanks to Kalyan Singh, a Lodh Rajput who had returned to the party. Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, himself an OBC, has noted that the strategy paid off in both UP, where Amit Shah was the party in-charge, and Bihar, where he had presided over the choice of candidates and alliances. The BJP and allies went on to win 73 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh and 31 of 40 seats in Bihar. The landslide for the BJP also saw the 14 July 2014

The decline of Brahmin strength has been sharp since 1984

Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Supremacy Nehru, A BRAHMIN, never hid his preferences. He anointed Brahmins as first CHIEF MINISTERS of various states, including UP, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Assam and so on

caste apart Nehru at the Constituent Assembly in 1947 (above); Narendra Modi chairing the first Cabinet meeting of his Government on 27 May 2014 (below)

PIB

In the 62 years since the first general election of 1952, Brahmin

dramatic crystallisation of a pan- Hindu vote bank under one umbrella for the first time. The various caste groupings that got splintered and became captive vote banks for purveyors of identity politics became the vanguard of Modi’s victory. The BJP encroached the social turfs of Mayawati and Mulayam and shrank the Congress to two Lok Sabha constituencies in UP. First Among Equals

Since 1952, when the first Lok Sabha polls were held, Brahmin prime ministers have ruled India for a combined span of 51 years. With the exception of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was at the helm for 10 years, no non-Brahmin Prime Minister has completed his term in office. Interestingly, Lal Bahadur Shastri (Kayasth), Charan Singh (Jat), VP Singh (Rajput), Chandra Shekhar (Rajput), Deve Gowda (Vokkaliga) and IK Gujral (Khatri) taken together were in power for only four years.

Thunders Laxmikant Bajpai, the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh state president: “In fact, Manmohan Singh, the political oddball, was a Prime Minister selected and not elected.

He was catapulted into that position by Sonia Gandhi, who was married to a Brahmin and represented everything Brahminical and autocratic about the Nehru-

Share of OBCs 10 12.5

14.5

Total 38 UTTAR PRADESH OBC Share (%)

22

Total 51 BIHAR OBC Share (%)

4.5

2.0 2.5

2.5

4.5

4.0

3.5

6.5

11 Total 40.5 RAJASTHAN OBC Share (%)

15

5 1.5

4

4

Lodhs Kurmis Kushwahas/Mauryas Yadavs Jats Baniyas/Vaishyas Other OBCs Nishads/Kewats MBCs Gujjars Malis Kumawats 18 open

Gandhi family.” He concedes that with Modi in power, ‘upper’ castes have “reconciled to the fact that it is the time of the OBCs because they are a majority and deserve to hold the reins of power”.

The ‘reconciliation’ that Bajpai talks about isn’t new to politicians of states such as UP and Bihar where ‘backwards’ have been in power since the era of Congress leader Narayan Dutt Tiwari and Jagannath Mishra ended in Lucknow and Patna, respectively. “Now this ‘social acquiescence’ is extending to the Centre as well with Modi emerging as the undoubted leader of the BJP,” says a Bhopal-based senior BJP leader from a ‘backward’ class community. Bajpai agrees with this view, but puts it differently, “The reservations that ‘backwards’ had about the BJP are dying fast and they are joining the BJP fold and voting en bloc for us,” he laughs.

Rajesh Ramachandran of Frankfurt-based Goethe University has closely studied India’s caste dynamics and its political impact. He explains the key triggers for the rapid empowerment of the OBCs in Indian politics over the past few decades: “First was the unfolding of events after the Mandal Commission report and the decision of the VP Singh government [to implement its recommendation by awarding 27 per cent reservation to OBCs in jobs]. The strong opposition to the announcement that the recommendations of the report were to be implemented resulted in creating an OBC consciousness. A group that was very heterogeneous—from powerful landed castes to poor labourers—suddenly developed salience as a category in response to the hostility shown by ‘upper’ caste members in the face of the potential extension of affirmative action to these groups.” He adds, “You could also imagine this strong bonding arising as a kind of ‘loss aversion’ effect—being promised something and then having it taken away (reservation here) results in much stronger aversion and hence coordinated action than if there had never been this possibility.”

Ramachandran believes that the endogenous evolution of the importance of identity in Indian politics is another key factor behind the rise of OBCs. “The post-Mandal scenario that created an OBC consciousness, and the significance of this phenomenon did not escape the political class. The fact that now there was a group, large in size, which could be electorally mobilised led to an increasing emphasis on the concept of identity in party platforms. The increasing use of identity by parties, along with an informationally constrained electorate using identity as a cue to voting in the absence of a better guide, and thus greater emphasis on identity by parties again, has resulted in a kind of vicious cycle where the importance of identity has grown over time,” he elaborates.

The Threshold of Change

But then, the so-called OBC consciousness didn’t result in their becoming a cohesive political force. Though it is 14 July 2014

Prime ministers have ruled India for 51 years

POWER STRUGGLE Gandhi preferred Nehru, a Brahmin, over Patel, an OBC

Nehru became the FIRST PM because he was the Congress president at the time of the interim government.

12 OF 15 state Congress panels recommended Patel for the PRESIDENT’S POST, but Gandhi persuaded Patel to withdraw from the race Devi/Fox Photos/Getty Images

true that the Mandal movement gave a political identity to OBCs who started asserting themselves in local politics from UP and Bihar to Haryana and Rajasthan, the Ram Temple movement diluted the effect of this ‘consciousness’. The result: OBCs got divided along so-called secular and communal lines.

Still, the impact was undeniable. In 1991, many Brahmin stalwarts across political parties, especially of the Congress, were rejected by the electorate. The elections of the year also saw the likes of veterans Vasant Sathe, Madhu Dandavate, VN Gadgil, Ramakrishna Hegde and others biting the dust amid a ‘backward’ class awakening. Until then, the Congress party had been on a winning streak on the back of a lethal political mix of Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims. Only these three communities had a pan-India presence, and with the overwhelming support of these communities and some support from state-level communities on local issues, the party looked invincible. Besides, since the divide until the early 1980s was mainly along ideological lines comprising four streams—modern democratic Congress values, 14 July 2014

Leftist, socialist and Hindu nationalist—caste had not begun to play the role it was destined to play soon. This meant that OBCs still did not have the political heft they would soon acquire.

“It was a time when majority communities had scarce representation in power, be it in politics or in the bureaucracy. The Mandal movement was destined to rewrite all that forever. Imagine that even a state like Bihar, which is home to nearly 50 per cent OBCs, was mostly represented by Brahmin, Rajput, Bhumihar and Kayastha leaders as chief ministers,” says a BJP leader from the state who posits that his party’s adaptability vis-a-vis caste aspirations has helped it pull in votes. “The BJP started offering OBCs what was due in terms of candidature and representation in various powerful bodies, both inside the party and in governments. It clicked,” he says.

Interestingly, until the Mandal movement, Chaudhary Charan Singh and Karpoori Thakur were two notable OBC leaders from the Hindi heartland who got national recognition, but they drew strength as leaders of farmers, not as OBCs. open www.openthemagazine.com 19

Lal Bahadur Shastri (Kayastha), Charan Singh (Jat), VP Singh (Rajput), Chandra

During INDIRA GANDHI’S TIME, the Congress rode on the strength of Dalits, Muslims and Brahmins who VOTED EN BLOC for her Gerard Gery/Paris Match/Getty Images

FIRST AMONG EQUALS Indira Gandhi, in April 1975, greets visitors at her residence

Brahmin Hegemony

When Nehru was Prime Minister, many of the chief ministers who came to power after the first state elections were mostly Brahmin or otherwise ‘upper’ caste. Nehru had sidelined Purushottam Das Tandon and favoured Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, a Brahmin, as the first Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Similarly, the Chief Minister of Gujarat was Jivraj Mehta, an ‘upper’ caste Bania.

Madhya Pradesh, which has for long seen ‘upper-caste’ dominance marked by raw deals being handed out to ‘backwards’, had Ravishankar Shukla as its first Chief Minister; Rajasthan’s first Chief Minister was HL Shastri, a Brahmin; Punjab, too, was run by a Brahmin, GC Bhargava. Assam’s first Chief Minister was GN Bordoloi, a Brahmin. A lot has changed since then.

A Politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) from West Bengal points out that the Left went 20 open

on to lose the grip it enjoyed in the initial years of Independence thanks to its lack of understanding of caste. “It rejected Ram Manohar Lohia’s suggestion that, in India, class is caste—and paid dearly for it,” he notes.

Notably, leaders of communist parties failed to adapt to new realities and lost their socialist agenda to casteist parties in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where the Left had earlier had significant presence across industrial estates and in some towns. “If you look at the leadership of communist parties in Bihar and UP, all were from ‘upper’ castes. I don’t know whether they deliberately kept ‘backwards’ away, but they didn’t grasp the importance of coopting ‘backward’ caste volunteers for their leadership.

They paid a huge price,” he says.

In Kerala, EMS Namboodiripad, a Brahmin, had constantly come under attack for promoting ‘upper-caste’ leaders over ‘backward’ ones, despite the fact that the lat14 July 2014

shekhar (Rajput), Gowda (Vokkaliga) and IK Gujral (Khatri) ruled for 4 years

ter made up a majority of the Marxists’ support base.

Interestingly, he is known to have vetoed the choice of the CPM’s legendary ‘backward’ caste leader KR Gowri Amma as the prospective Chief Minister of Kerala after the 1987 election; instead, he backed EK Nayanar, an ‘upper-caste’ leader, for the post. The CPM Politburo of 1964, the year it was formed, comprised only upper-class Hindu leaders—with Harkishan Singh Surjeet, a Sikh, the only exception.

A Congress leader from Tamil Nadu, a Brahmin by caste, says that he welcomes the new trend: that of ‘backwards’ getting what’s due to them in politics. He, however, feels that Brahmins ended up as leaders in the first place because they led most of the times’ social movements. “They had the education while others were suppressed [and kept] from expressing their political preferences back in the days of the British Raj, and also during many decades after freedom. Brahmins were change agents then. Later, they went on to bring in [their] hegemony. Now is the time of OBC consciousness and therefore hegemony,” he says. He, however, does not comment on the ‘Brahminical’ nature of power that the NehruGandhi wields over the Congress party.

Power Shift

Though Modi is the first ‘backward’ to achieve the national centrestage—let us not forget that the likes of Kamaraj

and Dalit leaders like Jagjivan Ram were zealously shoved aside by ‘upper-caste’ leaders of the time despite being national leaders—various leaders have made a mark in their respective states over the past two decades. Think of Nitish Kumar of Bihar, the late YSR Reddy in Andhra Pradesh, Bhupinder Hooda in Haryana, BS Yeddyurappa in Karnataka, VS Achuthanandan in Kerala, Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, and M Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu, among others.

A similar rise of OBCs—thanks to reservation and equality of opportunities—is obvious across other sectors such as education, technology, business and so on.

Devji says that in politics at least, OBCs have become the most powerful caste in India. “And this is because of their large numbers,” he emphasises.

“Modi being Prime Minister does not mean that he favours OBCs as cabinet colleagues. While he wants to ensure that OBCs get what they deserve, others are also accommodated well. He believes in competitive politics,” says a senior BJP leader. Among the 24 Cabinet members of the new NDA Government (Modi included), 12 are ‘upper-caste’, five are OBCs, two are Dalits and one a Tribal.

Among the 10 ministers of state with independent charge, five are ‘upper-caste’ and four OBC. There are no Dalits and there is just one Tribal. Among ministers of state without independent charge, of the 12, Tribals and OBCs have four each, while there are only three

Non Brahmin Prime Ministers such as CHANDRA SHEKHAR (left) and VP Singh, BOTH RAJPUTS, were in power only for brief periods Robert Nickelsberg//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

THE ‘SELECTED’ PM Manmohan Singh at an event to mark the 150th anniversary of the 1857 revolt

Manmohan Singh, handpicked by Sonia Gandhi for THE PM’S POST, is the first non-Brahmin to complete a FULL TERM in office Presidential Palace, HO/AP

‘upper-caste’ representatives “But the OBC writ simply runs. You could say they are the new Brahmins,” adds the BJP leader.

Oxford University’s Devji hastens to add that there is a flip side to this phenomenon: “The OBCs can also be the most ‘reactionary’ caste, especially as far as Dalits and other groups are concerned.” He also notes that the most interesting thing is what happens to the old merchant castes and Brahmins. “Have they abandoned the public sector to exercise a new kind of influence in the private sector instead? This would indicate a new division of power and influence made possible by the new economy.

In other words, the competition now is between OBCs and Dalits (and others) in the public sphere, with Brahmins and Banias operating out of the private sector,” he says.

Agrees Ramachandran: “I guess the private sector and industry, where the ‘upper caste’ still dominates, are an important source of alternative power in the face of decline in direct political influence.” Some of India’s biggest 22 open

public-sector enterprises are run by Brahmins or Banias.

Professor Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University, has dwelt at length on this ‘upper-caste’ response to assertion by ‘backwards’. She has argued that these castes continue to try gaining an edge in elite education institutions and the private sector (by often trying to denigrate the public sector). She has called these efforts a transformation of privilege into merit, or the conversion of caste capital into modern capital.

“For now, with Modi never coy about flaunting his ‘backward’ class identity and with OBCs increasingly represented in government, the trend looks irreversible and will contribute to a Hindu consolidation in favour of the BJP,” observes Bajpai. No party that fails to appeal to OBC voters can hope for an edge over others, he emphasises.

This is not the misplaced optimism of an overexcited BJP leader in the age of Narendra Modi. He echoes the political spirit of the times: the underdog has become the top dog. n 14 July 2014

ap

CO N G R E S S

Seven States of Damnation The party’s woes multiply as it has no plans of revival to face the next set of Assembly elections, writes Devendra Kumar

T

he Congress will likely face another drubbing in the

elections that are to be held in six states over the next year, and also, see itself in deep disarray across various others, including Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, thanks to political realignments that are on the cards. Trends indicate that the expected rejig within the party organisation ahead of the assembly polls is unlikely to yield results, considering the extent of trouble that the Grand Old Party faces.

In the next one year, elections will take place in Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi, Bihar, Jharkhand and Jammu & Kashmir. In four of these six states, the Congress is part of the government.

And Sonia Gandhi, Congress president, has vowed to lead the revival of her party after reviewing the resounding defeat in the Lok Sabha polls that ended more than a month ago.

But refurbishing the party in order to pull in votes—and to set the house in order—is easier said than done.

UTTAR PRADESH: In Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, Sonia’s party will have no option left other than piggybacking on the SP or BSP. Unfortunately, aligning with either party will come at a high political cost for the Congress. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress was able to secure just seven-and-a-half per cent of the votes and managed to win only two seats.

24 open

JHARKHAND: The odds are stacked against the Congress in neighbouring Jharkhand as well. The last time Congress won more than 20 per cent of the votes polled in the state was in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. It won as few as 16.2 per cent, 15 per cent, 12 per cent and 13.3 per cent of the votes respectively in the 2005 Assembly, 2009 Lok Sabha, 2009 Assembly and the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Though the Congress is part of the ruling alliance in the state, all three partners of this alliance have, even when taken together, failed to get even 25 per cent of the votes polled. With the BJP emerging as a very strong force by clocking 40 per cent of the votes, the Congress is staring at a very bleak future in the state, and will depend heavily on regional players like the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (JVM) and All Jharkhand Student’s Union (AJSU), even to merely remain in the opposition.

MAHARASHTRA: The Congress could be in for a major crisis in Maharashtra where it may lose its key ally, the NCP, led by former party veteran Sharad Pawar, who is increasingly veering towards the BJP. Pawar, whose exit from the party marked the decline of the GOP in the state, is fidgety about continuing to be in an alliance with the Congress following the recent poll setback.

The BJP-led NDA secured 50 per cent of the votes in the state, winning 42 seats and reducing the UPA’s tally to 34 per cent of 14 July 2014

the votes and six seats. If we compare the relative performance of the UPA with its partner, the NCP did better because it won four of the 20 seats it contested, while the Congress could win only two despite contesting 27 seats. It is definitely a cause of major worry for the Congress that some NCP leaders have been making overtures to the BJP and unleashing tirades against state Chief Minister and Congress leader Pritviraj Chavan. Worst-case scenario: the Congress may be left without an ally in Maharashtra in the forthcoming Assembly polls.

News from other states such as Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Assam offer no scope for cheer for the Congress leadership either.

VOTE SHARE OF CONGRESS AND BJP IN LOK SABHA ELECTIONS SINCE THE FORMATION OF BJP IN 1980 50

49.1 BJP

40

36.3 28.8

30

20.1

10

HARYANA: In Haryana too, the Congress was pushed to third place in this election, winning just a single seat. Despite increasing depletion of the strength of the powerful Chautala family of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), the Congress failed to manage even the second slot, securing merely 22 per cent of the votes polled. If the BJP takes over the reins of this state after the Assembly election scheduled later this year, several corruption cases against the ruling establishment are expected to surface—and some of them may target a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family. If this happens, the Chautala-led INLD will end up emerging as the main challenger to the BJP while the Congress’ fortunes slide further. The Congress, observers say, would then get into an alliance with the INLD. PUNJAB: The Congress had hoped to repeat its 2009 performance of winning eight Lok Sabha seats in Punjab thanks to a perceived anti-incumbency wave against the ruling NDA. However, the AAP spoiled its chances with a strong debut, clocking 24.4 per cent of the votes and winning four seats. Which means that going ahead, the Congress is in danger of getting pushed to the third place because the NDA, led by the Shiromani Akali Dal, can’t possibly slide any further—it still enjoys a strong backing of the Sikh community.

14 July 2014

0

25.8 25.6

20

20.3

28.3

26.5

23.8

22.2

11.4

7.7

DELHI: In Delhi, where the Congress was pushed to third place in the 2013 Assembly election, the party was further marginalised in this year’s General Election. The party that ruled the state for the last 15 years could win just 15 per cent of the votes this time.

Dalits and Muslims, who have historically been the backbone of its support, shifted their loyalties to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaving the Congress without a strong base. Assembly-level patterns of the Lok Sabha election indicate that the Congress failed to lead in any single segment, not even in its traditional strongholds which are heavily populated by Muslims.

The chances of the party being a meaningful opposition in Delhi look bleak.

INC

39.5

1984

1989

31

28.6

19.3

18.8

ALL FIGURES ARE IN PER CENT 1991

COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE BETWEEN 2009 AND 2014 IN STATES WHERE BJP AND CONGRESS ARE IN A DIRECT FIGHT Andaman Total seats

1996

1998

1999

2004

2009

2014

Daman & Diu 1 1 1 0 0

Goa 2

1

2

1 0

1

No of Seats won by BJP 2009 1 2014 1 No of Seats won by INC 2009 0 2014 0

Arunachal Pradesh

Gujarat

1

0

Himachal Pradesh 4 3

4

1 0

2

Chandigarh

Madhya Pradesh 29

1 0 1 1 0

16

Rajasthan

11 10 10 1 1

Dadra & Nagar

27

12

2

Chhattisgarh

1 1 1 0 0

26

11

2 0 1

26 15

25

4

25 20

0

Uttarakhand 5

0 0

5 5

open www.openthemagazine.com 25

COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE BETWEEN 2009 AND 2014 IN STATES WHERE BJP AND CONGRESS ARE NOT IN A DIRECT FIGHT Vote Share 2009

Vote Share 2014

Gain

Loss

Seats 2009

J&K

Seats 2014

ANDHRA PRADESH ALL VOTE SHARES IN % 2009 2014 Gain/ Loss

39

-27.5

11.5

BJP

3.8

8.5

4.7

TDP

24.9

29.1

4.2

NA

28.9

YSR TRS

6.1

13.9

2 0

INC

24.7

22.9

BJP

18.6

32.4

JKNC

19.1

11.1

PDP

20.1

20.5

7.8

2

Gain/ Loss

Seats 2009

Seats 2014

-1.8

2

0

13.8

0

3

-8

3

0

0.4

0

3

SEATS

40.1

INC

0 BJP

27.5 6

NA

Vote Share 2014

JHARKHAND

3

NA

ASSAM

33

Vote Share 2009

16

15.0 13.3

11.7

12.1

9.3

9

2.3 11

-1.7

12.6

-2.4

9.8

INC

BJP

JMM

JVM

INC

36.5

4

AIUDF 1

16.2

7

3

BJP

29.6

7

INC

37.7

40.8

3.1

BJP

41.6

43

1.4

JDS

13.6

3

16.1

-5.3

20.3

-1.3

INC

BJP

AIUDF

19

17

9 6 32

-2.6

11

INC BJP JDS

KERALA

SEATS

BIHAR

13

Party

Vote Share 2009

Vote Share 2014

Gain/ Loss

Seats 2009

-9

31.1

INC BJP

6.3

10.3

CPM

30.5

21.6

INC

10.3

8.4

-1.9

2

2

13.9

29.4

15.5

12

22

RJD

19.3

20.1

0.8

4

4

JDU

24.0

15.8

-8.2

20

2

8 4

4

-8.9 INC

5

00 BJP CPM

MAHARASHTRA

HARYANA 22.9

40.1

Seats 2014

BJP

SEATS

-18.9

BJP

12.1

34.7

22.6

INLD

15.8

24.4

8.6

26 open

12

KARNATAKA

14.8

41.8

8

SEATS

34.9

INC

2

JMM 2 2 JVM 1 0

SEATS

INC

SEATS

Party

INC

9

1 BJP 0 INLD 0

7 2

Party

Vote Share 2009

Vote Share 2014

Gain/ Loss

Seats 2009

Seats 2014

INC

19.6

18.1

-1.5

17

2

BJP

18.2

27.3

9.1

9

23

17

20.6

3.6

11

18

19.3

16

-3.3

8

4

Shiv Sena

NCP

14 July 2014

DELHI

SEATS

57.1

INC

46.4 35.2

32.9

-42 15.1

ASSAM: In Assam, the Congress’ winning streak from the 1996 Assembly election continued till the 2011 Assembly polls when it secured 40 per cent of the votes, decimating the BJP and other regional players. Riding on its campaign against illegal Bangladeshi migrants and soft communal polarisation, the BJP reversed its fortunes this year by securing 36.7 per cent of the votes and winning seven Lok Sabha seats in the state. On the other hand, the Congress won only 22 per cent of the votes and three seats. If the BJP continues its special focus on Northeastern states along with the much-announced “appropriate” policies to deal with illegal migrants, the Congress may find it difficult to make a comeback in the next Assembly election scheduled for 2016. Internal dissidence led by Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was once a confidant of Congress leader Tarun Gogoi, is an indication of things to come for the party.

The Congress could look to align with the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) to consolidate the minority vote.

A local political entity, the AIUDF is fast emerging as the party of choice for Assam’s Muslims.

7

AAP NA 0

NA

BJP

INC

BJP 0

NA 11.2

7

0

AAP

ODISHA Party

Vote Share 2009

Vote Share 2014

Gain/ Loss

Seats 2009

Seats 2014

INC

32.8

26

-6.8

6

0

BJP

16.9

21.5

4.6

0

1

BJD

37.2

44.1

6.9

14

21

PUNJAB

SEATS

INC -12.1 BJP

33.1

-1.4

NA

8

10.1 8.7

SAD -10.3 AAP

45.2

23.6 NA

4 4

4

SAD

NA AAP

3

33.9

2 1

24.4 INC

BJP

TAMIL NADU Vote Share 2009

Vote Share 2014

Gain/ Loss

INC

15

4.3

BJP

2.3

5.5

DMK

25.1

AIADMK

22.9

Party

Seats 2009

Seats 2014

-10.7

8

0

3.2

0

1

23.6

-1.5

18

0

44.3

21.4

9

37

UTTAR PRADESH Party

Vote Share 2009

Vote Share 2014

Gain/ Loss

Seats 2009

Seats 2014

INC

18.3

7.5

-10.8

21

2

BJP

17.5

42.3

24.8

10

71

SP

23.3

22.2

-1.1

23

5

BSP

27.4

19.6

-7.8

20

0

WEST BENGAL Party

Vote Share 2009

Vote Share 2014

Gain/ Loss

Seats 2009

Seats 2014

INC

13.5

9.6

-3.9

6

4

BJP

6.1

16.8

10.7

2

2

AITC

31.2

39.3

8.1

19

34

CPM

33.1

22.7

-10.4

9

2

14 July 2014

R

eports from Odisha aren’t encouraging for the Congress

either. Though the BJP won only three seats in this state, it secured 21.5 per cent of the votes compared with the Congress’ 26 per cent. The BJP certainly has the potential to replace the Congress as the main opposition to Odisha’s ruling Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal (BJD). The BJP is committed to expanding its base in Odisha; it offered two important ministerial berths in the Narendra Modi Government to Odisha leaders Dharmendra Pradhan and Jual Oram.

There is disquiet even on the southern front, where the results of even 1977—when the Congress was dethroned at the Centre for the first time—favoured the party. Then, the Congress did very well in four southern states by winning 92 of the total 129 seats; 92 Congress MPs from the South constituted 60 per cent of its total strength of 154 MPs. The scale of disaster for the Congress in 2014 is greater than what it was in 1977; but again, Kerala and Karnataka helped the Congress emerge as the second largest block of MPs by electing eight and nine MPs, respectively. But winds of change are likely to buffet these states as well.

The creation of the new state of Telangana didn’t help the Congress in the state, while the YSR Congress and internal dissidence led the rout in Seemandhra. In Tamil Nadu, the Congress was left to fend for itself after the DMK parted ways with it over the ‘2G’ scam. However, regardless of its alliances, the Congress-led UPA would not have survived the Amma wave. In Karnataka, the BJP came back strongly to secure 43 per cent of the votes, which is a two per cent increase over its 2009 vote share. Even in Kerala, the Congress’ vote share was reduced from 40 per cent in 2009 to 31 per cent in 2014.

Clearly, things look bleak for Congress President Sonia Gandhi who is looking at passing the baton to her son Rahul, a reluctant leader who has consistently failed to breathe new life into the party. n Devendra Kumar is a Delhi-based political analyst and number cruncher open www.openthemagazine.com 27

a r m e d fo r c e s cyril davesne/marine nationale/ap

Call to Arms

PURCHASING POWER A Rafale Jet fighter takes off from an aircraft carrier

The defence sector needs the attention of Modi the moderniser, now By Harsh V Pant

O

nce again, the Indian defence

sector is raising global expectations. Once again, India is beginning to be courted as a lucrative market for defence supplies. Once again, global vendors and foreign leaders are vying with each other to get the first mover advantage. But there have been so many false starts in the past that it would need some serious effort by the Narendra Modi Government to convince its external interlocutors that this time, unlike the past, the deals won’t be a damp squib.

Prime Minister Modi and his Defence Minister Arun Jaitley have underlined the urgent need to reform India’s defence procurement policy. Jaitley has been given charge of two important portfolios—Finance and Defence—underscoring a recognition in the highest echelons of the Modi Government that, unlike the previous two decades, in the coming years India will have limited resources to spend on defence. At the same time, Indian armed forces are facing critical shortages.

The Indian Army urgently needs new field artillery, with some reports even suggesting that it may not even have sufficient reserves to sustain a full-fledged war for 20 days. The Indian Air Force has repeatedly expressed concern about the obsolescence of its ground-based air defence systems. The Indian Navy’s depleting submarine fleet poses its own set of challenges with just 13 conventional diesel-electric submarines, 11 of which are 20-27 years old. Army chief General Bikram Singh is reported to have told Prime Minister Modi about the “critical hollowness” afflicting the Army after a decade of missed deadlines for procurement of the wherewithal to 30 open

face war. It will be a delicate task to manage an Indian defence modernisation programme, a priority of the Modi Government, during a time of slow economic growth.

Modi has emphasised the importance of upgrading Indian weaponry repeatedly, with an aspiration to turn India into a defence manufacturing hub, rather than being the world’s largest arms importer.

Jaitley has acknowledged that defence modernisation had ‘slowed down’ in the last few years, and said that providing the required equipment to the armed forces in a speedy manner would be the top priority of the Modi Government. The BJP manifesto had talked of ‘FDI in selected defence industries’ with a focus on jobs and asset creation, besides increasing private sector participation in the defence sector. In line with this overall sentiment, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), has circulated a note to the Cabinet to raise the FDI cap in defence to 49 per cent without technology transfer and beyond that with technology transfer. It calls for a 74-per cent cap in cases where the investor is willing to share technology and for allowing 100 per cent FDI in manufacturing of state-of-theart equipment. Foreign investment in the Indian defence sector is necessary to improve India’s defence preparedness as well as to reduce the dependence on imports.

With the world’s fourth largest military and one of the biggest defence budgets, India has been in the midst of an ambitious plan to modernise its largely Soviet-era arms since the late 1990s—one that has seen billions of dollars spent on the latest high-tech military technology—as it started asserting its political and military profile in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. In line with India’s broadening strategic horizons, its military acquisitions have also seen a marked shift from 14 July 2014

conventional land-based systems to a means of power projection, such as airborne refuelling systems and long-range missiles. India has been busy setting up military facilities abroad, patrolling the Indian Ocean to counter piracy and protect crucial sea-lanes of communication, and also demonstrating a military assertiveness hitherto not associated with it.

Yet, most of this has happened in a context where India’s dependence on external actors in the defence sector is at an all-time high. Drastic steps are needed as the bill for Indian defence imports is estimated to reach $130 billion over the next seven years even as homeland security purchases are likely to cross $110 billion. Though in the mid-1990s India was convinced that the indigenous content of weaponry would increase from 30 to 70 per cent by 2005, the nation still continues to import more than 70 per cent of its defence requirements from abroad. Today, India buys $8 billion worth of defence equipment from foreign manufacturers every year, even as the story of the domestic state-run defence industry has been largely one of gross inefficiency, incompetence and failure. The performance of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has been abysmal because of lack of any accountability, and the Indian armed forces have not had a reliable experience of working with DRDO-made armaments. Given its significant budgetary resources—in the context of a developing nation—it seems to have failed in delivering quality output.

Most of its key projects have either not been completed on time or have resulted in huge cost overruns.

India has not been successful in attracting FDI either, with a measly $4.9 million coming into India since FDI was first allowed into the defence sector back in 2001—the lowest in any open sector.

When the UPA Government tried to increase the FDI limit from 26 per cent to 49 per cent, the then Defence Minister, AK Antony, was steadfast in his opposition, arguing that this would make India dependent on foreign companies and vulnerable to the policies of their countries of origin on a long-term basis.

This is a strange argument to make in a country that is already importing most of its critical weapon systems from abroad. The real reason, perhaps, was Antony’s desire to not rock the boat, which has been the hallmark of his time in the government, making him one of the worst defence ministers India has ever had. He neither managed to bring transparency to the moribund procurement system, nor provide a strategic direction to the country’s defence planning.

The Indian corporate sector has been a house divided on the issue of FDI in the defence sector. Initially supportive of FDI— including no caps on investment—the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) has been changing its tune, suggesting that it is unlikely that technology transfers will be guaranteed by this move. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), meanwhile, has argued that FDI over 49 per cent should only be allowed on a case-to-case basis and, that too, only with technology transfers. Despite the fact that it doesn’t have the capability, the Indian private sector is apparently raising the bogey of ‘a lev-

el playing field for the domestic industry’ in order to scuttle the move to bring foreign companies in.

T

here is an urgent need to strengthen India’s weak military

manufacturing base by expanding private sector participation. This can be done by raising the FDI cap in the defence sector and by encouraging joint ventures between domestic and foreign defence firms. India’s modernisation programme and the desire of external actors to tap into the new market should be an impetus for reforms. Notoriously slow bureaucratic processes will need to change if India wants to reach Western markets. Changes have been slow in implementation because some institutional interests are so entrenched in government policy that it is nearly impossible to break the inertia.

An external force might just be the impetus India needs.

These external forces might come in the form of a backlash from Western industries over the slow, tedious contract process. The US and Europe have made it clear they want to sell to India, but the current structure of the procurement process will only be tolerated so far. Eventually, someone might walk away.

India can certainly emerge as an attractive destination for foreign firms to set up manufacturing facilities for global defence markets. This will in turn lead to high-technology coming into India with cascading effects across multiple sectors. But even an increase to 49 per cent FDI may not be lucrative enough for global investors. As a result, the Modi Government will have to go for a gamechanging formula, one that not only enhances India’s credibility in the eyes of global vendors but also encourages the Indian private sector to participate more fully in a wide range of defence industries.

For this, domestic political leadership is needed. The Indian Government has, over the years, failed to demonstrate the political will to tackle the policy paralysis in defence that seems to be rendering all claims of India’s rise as a military power increasingly hollow. There has been no long-term strategic review of India’s security environment, and no overall defence strategy has been articulated. The challenge for the Indian Government is to delineate clearly what products they need, and how to build up our own industry in the process by significantly reforming the domestic defence manufacturing sector. In the absence of a comprehensive, long-term appraisal of the country’s defence requirements, there will be little clarity on India’s real acquisition needs. And India’s rise as a major global player will remain merely a matter of potential.

Indian defence policy remains dysfunctional in large part because of mismanagement by the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Defence. It is now up to the Modi Government, with its huge mandate, to provide some strategic direction to Indian defence policy. n

India imports more than 70 per cent of its defence requirements from abroad, buying $8 billion worth of equipment annually

14 July 2014

Harsh V Pant is a professor of International Relations at King’s College, London open www.openthemagazine.com 31

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Kalpak Pathak/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

vote baiter Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan at his desk

r e s e rvat i o n

Grant Maratha Does Maharashtra’s dominant social group deserve the quota promised by the state government?

Haima Deshpande

O

n 25 June, a beaming Maharashtra

Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan announced that his government would reserve 16 per cent of state jobs and educational seats for Marathas. The CM and his deputy Ajit Pawar—both of whom are Marathas themselves— looked pleased with themselves. With Assembly polls slated for October this year, perhaps they believed they had scored over their BJP and Shiv Sena rivals, most of whom are also Marathas.

14 July 2014

As Chavan and Pawar seem to see it, the move is a lifeline for the state’s Democratic Front government, a coalition of the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which has seen its re-election chances drop drastically over the past two years or so. Together, the two ruling parties won only six of the state’s 48 Lok Sabha seats this summer.

Marathas, who are estimated to constitute 30 per cent of Maharashtra’s population and hold sway in at least 200 of its

288 Assembly segments, are being looked upon to revive the coalition’s prospects. What strikes observers hard, however, is the utter cynicism of the announcement. The government has sought to dovetail the Maratha quota with a 5-per cent reservation for Muslims, suggesting that both groups need help to overcome deprivation.

Applied to Marathas, that suggestion has stunned those who are familiar with the state’s social power structure. Not open www.openthemagazine.com 33

maratha mastermind The NCP’s Sharad Pawar is thought to be the man behind the state government’s brazen attempt to lure voters of his community

only are they politically, culturally and socially dominant as a group, many of them are financially well placed.

Consider the numbers.

An estimated 3,000 Maratha families control 72 per cent of the state’s landed property. Some 171 Maratha families may be said to be politically dominant.

By one count, there are 22 prominent Maratha ‘dynasties’ in the state.

A database on elected representatives from 1960 to 2004 shows that of the 2,430 MLAs the state has had in that period, as many as 1,336 have been Marathas. Of the 17 CMs the state has had, 10 have been of this community, Chavan included. Nearly half the current Assembly’s seats—135 of 288—are held by Marathas.

The group also plays a significant role in the state’s economy, with Marathaowned businesses accounting for a major chunk of it. So how do they qualify for affirmative action?

T

he government has gone out of its way to classify Marathas as a new ‘Educationally and Socially Backward Class’ to justify its move. However, they have never been a marginalised group or faced any social stigma. Also, as many say, they have always considered themselves to be ‘forward’, akin to Kshatriyas, and they find being placed on a bench with ‘Backwards’ hard to digest.

“We have always prided ourselves as being a ‘forward caste’. We do not want the ‘Backward Class’ tag. In India, it’s taboo,” says Sridhar Salunke, 35, a medical representative. “I am not happy to be clubbed with Backward Classes. Shivaji Maharaj was an ancestor of Marathas.

Was he of a Backward Class? Then why should we be?” asks an angry Salunke, who has promised himself never to avail of a quota. “Give the poor these benefits, but don’t put us all in the Backward Class basket,” says Pradnya Shelar, a student, “One day, I am from a ‘forward’ class, and the next day I become a Backward Class person. How is it going to help me?”

Historically, some say, the Maratha community was formed by the amalga-

34 open

“We are not a party of sadhus and sants,” Pawar has said, “It is a long pending demand that we have fulfilled” mation of several royal clans that settled in the region from different parts of India. Today, many Marathas trace their lineage to warriors of the clan of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the king of Maharashtra who freed the state of Mughal rule in the 17th century. They identify strongly with him even now, and count such leaders as former President Pratibha Patil, NCP chief Sharad Pawar

and former CMs Shankarrao Chavan, Vasantdada Patil and Vilasrao Deshmukh as their own. Other famous Marathas include the 13th direct descendant of Shivaji, Chhatrapati Udayanraje Maharaj, spiritual godman Bhayyu Maharaj, public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam, education barons DY Patil, Patangrao Kadam, Datta Meghe and Balasaheb Vikhe Patil, and pop culture celebrities Ritiesh Deshmukh, Madhu Sapre and Vijayendra Ghatge.

Maratha education barons control at least half of the state’s educational institutions. Dr DY Patil, the current Governor of Tripura, for example, runs numerous institutions under his name, while Dr Patangrao Kadam is vice-chancellor of Bharatiya Vidyapeeth. Dr Balasaheb Vikhe Patil owns the Pravaranagar group of institutes. While most of these are built on land allotted by various state governments at nominal rates to offer affordable education to the masses, their fees have risen beyond the reach of most students.

14 July 2014

A defiant Chavan, though, is determined to have his way. Sharad Pawar, meanwhile, has made the NCP’s stance on the issue clear. “We are not a party of sadhus and sants,” he said, “It is a long pending demand that we have fulfilled.

We did not consider whether we will benefit from this. But if we do, so be it.”

The buzz in political circles is that Pawar was the move’s mastermind.

While he himself has not spoken in favour of a quota for his ‘own people’, it is well known that community leaders such as Maratha Mahasangh President Vinayak Mete have been making this demand with his blessings. Another Pawar supporter, Chhatrapati Sambhajiraje, a descendant of Shivaji who heads the Maratha Arakshan Mahamorcha, had issued an ultimatum to the state government to expedite a quota for Marathas.

He had warned that the Mahamorcha would oppose the government in the next polls if it failed to do so. “The government’s ready acceptance hints at its being a Pawar move,” says a source.

Mohd Zakir/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

Scoffing at the quota, says Prakash Ambedkar, great grandson of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: “It is solely a political move for benefits in the Assembly elections… Of the 200 sugar factories [in the state], 168 are controlled by Marathas.

An estimated 70 per cent of the district co-operative banks are controlled by them. Do they need reservation?”

Union Minister for Minority Affairs Dr Najma Heptullah has also called it ‘vote bank’ politics. “Constitutionally, it is not allowed,” she told the media, “It will be stopped by the courts.”

Ketan Tirodkar, a former journalist and activist, has filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court arguing that Marathas are not a caste but a linguistic group. It is expected to come up for hearing shortly.

The quota may also violate a Supreme Court order that placed a 50-per cent cap on all reservations. Legal experts believe that the Maratha quota will not hold up to legal scrutiny, as it would take the overall percentage of reserved posts and seats above the halfway mark.

14 July 2014

R

ajeshwari Deshpande, professor

of Politics and Public Administration at University of Pune, has done research on caste-based reservation and its impact. According to a paper presented by her: ‘Along with the numerical preponderance, the Maratha dominance was a result of land ownership in Maharashtra and a historically nurtured sense of identity.’ She says the Congress party appropriated this sense of identity under its Bahujan Samaj ideology, by which the caste and cultural conflict in Maharashtra was essentially seen as a conflict between Brahmins and the rest—with Marathas seen as leaders of the latter. ‘The construction of the Bahujan ideology provided a much needed cultural tool to the Congress and Maratha dominance became synonymous with the politics of Maharashtra,’ writes Professor Deshpande.

It was Mandal politics that upset that paradigm. In 1980, the Mandal Commission had classified Marathas as a ‘forward class’. In the 1990s, with the BJP and Shiv Sena upholding Hindutva to rally broad support, the Maratha solidarity in favour of the Congress began to weaken. Ever since, the Congress and its

breakaway NCP have feared that Marathas have drifted away from them.

Matters reached a breaking point in 1994, when Sharad Pawar as Chief Minister renamed Marathwada University after Dr BR Ambedkar. This angered Marathas, who vowed to defeat the Pawar government. In the 1995 Assembly polls, Pawar lost power and the Shiv Sena-BJP won. Over the past decade, the poor among Maratha farmers have been leaning towards the Sena.

In 2009, the Congress-NCP mooted the idea of granting Marathas OBC status. It did not happen; the state’s Backward Commission argued that they faced no oppression. In 2003-04, the National Commission for Backward Classes did not approve of OBC status for them either. As of now, OBCs have a 27-per cent quota, and a subgroup of Marathas who are mostly farmers, known as Kunbis, are classified as such and can avail of it.

Deshmukhs, Kadus and other Marathas cannot. Many suspect that reserving posts for all Marathas is a device to block the political aspirations of OBCs. Senior journalist Abhay Deshpande feels that the state needs to relook at its reservation policy. “Maharashtra’s agriculture is rain-fed,” he says, “There is only 18 per cent irrigation in the state—much below the national average. Therefore, the farming community, which is predominantly Maratha, is overdependent on the monsoon. With several districts of Maharashtra facing severe drought in the last decade, farm production has fallen. This has impacted their income and status. However, this cannot be grounds for reservation. Marathas have never been a marginalised class.”

The state BJP, meanwhile, is divided on the issue. According to the state unit president Devendra Phadanvis, a Brahmin, the government is clearly eyeing votes.

“After fooling the people for 15 years, they have now brought in reservation,” he says, “It is a hasty decision. The government has not checked if it can withstand the legal and constitutional test.”

In contrast, the BJP Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council, Vinod Tawade, a Maratha, favours the plan. “The reservation [level] should be higher. However, if this quota is challenged in court, we will support the state government,” says Tawade. n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

r ac k e t

Auctioned Elsewhere... Or Political patronage comes in handy for Muslim orphanages in the state that ferry children from poor states such as Bihar and Jharkhand.

Will they continue to beat the rap? MG Radhakrishnan

T

As many as 1,502 organisations received a total

Rs 850 cr

in 2012-13.

Except the Mata Amritanandamayi Mutt, all the top recipients were Christian and Muslim organisations

he Kerala conundrum has become a cliché by now. Yet, it refuses to die, with newer contradictions continuing to pop up every now and then to remind us just how well and how badlyKerala is doing. The latest scandal is the ‘orphan trade’ that has recently surfaced to rock the state.

Kerala has a peculiar labour scenario.

Thanks to petro-prosperity and the peculiar status-consciousness created by huge financial remittances—estimated at Rs 60,000 crore last year—sent by its 2.5 million-strong community of Malayalees employed in the Gulf, there are almost no takers in the state for blue-collar jobs.

This is in spite of the state’s high rate of unemployment. Unsurprisingly, the state’s high minimum wages have lured unskilled migrant labour by the drove even from distant states such as Assam.

The state that thrives on Gulf money has, in effect, turned into a Gulf of sorts for migrants from other Indian states, with their count touching 2.5 million now— the same number of people from Kerala who are in the Gulf.

So while the state has the rare distinction of being the highest exporter as well as importer of labour, an even more interesting demographic phenomenon is that its number of immigrants more or less equals its emigrants. In sectors that range

from construction to domestic help, Kerala depends on labour from other states for most of its low-paid jobs.

Until recently, however, few knew that Kerala has even been sourcing orphans from other states!

The state, it seems, does not have enough orphans for its 2,000 odd private orphanages to admit. Hence, these orphanages, most of them run by Muslim and Christian religious groups, have been getting hundreds of poor Muslim children from states such as Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal with the help of a network of agents.

It is no secret that more than any humanitarian concern, what drives orphanages to desperately seek inmates are the liberal government grants and huge donations from abroad. According to statistics available with the Union Home Ministry, 1,500-odd organisations based in Kerala—most of them religious entities or NGOs—received more than Rs 10,000 crore over the past decade as donations, of which 60 per cent went to those running orphanages and destitute homes. In 2012-13 alone, 1,502 organisations received a total Rs 850 crore. Except the Mata Amritanandamayi Mutt, all the top recipients were Christian and Muslim organisations, with the Believers Church leading the pack with Rs 417 14 July 2014

phaned in Kerala

WITH NO PLACE TO GO Children from Bihar and Jharkhand detained by the Railway Police on 24 May at Kerala’s Palakkad Station

The children had reportedly been “purchased” from their families for

Rs 1,000

each by agents to be sold at double the price to orphanages in need of inmates

‘‘

Why do these orphanages import children from other states instead of setting up centres there if they’re so concerned about these children?

‘‘

Ramesh Chennithala, Home Minister and former KPCC President

38 open

crore collected in the past three years.

The scandal of Kerala’s orphan trade surfaced dramatically on 24 May when the Railway Protection Force at Palakkad Railway station intercepted two long-distance trains coming from Assam and Bihar. Out came from two coaches of either train about 600 Muslim boys and girls aged between five and 13 years, all of them originally from Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand. These children, packed like sardines in the compartments, were utterly exhausted from their long journey, and more than 150 of them had neither tickets nor any documents. Under interrogation, the eight adults who had travelled with them disclosed that the children were being brought to be admitted to two orphanages in Kozhikode and Malappuram districts run by Sunni clerical organisations closely associated with the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a party that happens to be the second largest constituent of Kerala’s ruling United Democratic Front. One of the two orphanages under the scanner is headed by Syed Hyderali Shihab Thangal, the League’s state president.

On their arrival at Palakkad, the orphanage authorities paid the fines levied by the Railways on those who had travelled without tickets, admitted that the children were being taken to their institutions, and proclaimed themselves to be do-gooders, wondering aloud what was wrong with their “humanitarian” mission of helping orphans from other states, as they had been doing for decades.

However, the District Child Welfare Committee under the state Social Welfare department, led ironically by a Muslim League minister, took custody of the kids and recommended action against the orphanages and their agents under the Juvenile Justice Act. On their part, the state police registered cases of child trafficking.

Asked Ramesh Chennithala, Kerala’s home minister and former KPCC President, “Why [do] these orphanages import children from other states instead of setting up centres there if they’re [so] concerned about these children?”

Even the IUML’s MK Muneer, the state’s social welfare minister, demanded action against the alleged child traffickers.

The children, it was confirmed, had been brought in violation of laws on or-

phan admission. This kicked up a storm.

Under the Juvenile Justice Act of 2006, sanction letters from the concerned state governments, local self-governments and families are mandatory, as also birth certificates (among other things), for the admission of children from other states to orphanages. Most children did not have these documents. Some had fakes.

The state government appeared to initiate strict action against the offenders.

But soon, League leaders and scores of Muslim outfits jumped in to defend the orphanages. They attacked police officers for registering cases and chastised Chennithala for portraying the soclaimed ‘minor procedural lapse’ on the orphanages’ part as a case of child trafficking. They also hit out at him for ‘communalising’ the issue, as they put it.

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy parroted the League line and Chennithala fell silent. Kerala’s Minorities Commission, led by a Congress leader, defended the orphanages as well. Muneer, too, changed tack and swallowed his words, saying there was no case of child trafficking but only a minor procedural lapse.

The state BJP, in the meantime, took the case to the Centre. Union Minister Maneka Gandhi described it as one of child trafficking. Malayalam TV channels sent reporters to the children’s villages in Bihar and Jharkhand, and reported that they had been “purchased” from their families by agents for Rs 1,000 each to be sold at double the price to orphanages. Officials of the Jharkhand government arrived in Thiruvananthapuram and confirmed that it was a case of child trafficking and asked for the children’s immediate return. The state Human Rights Commission came down heavily on the orphanages and instituted an investigation. With the Kerala High Court too reprimanding the state government for its casual attitude towards the incident, League and Congress leaders have now chosen silence. Chandy has offered to bear all expenses for the children’s return journey. But as the dust over the scandal settles, the case of child trafficking looks like being given a silent burial and the orphanages getting back to business as usual. n MG Radhakrishnan is a senior journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram 14 July 2014

enterprise

HOME IS WHERE THE BREW IS Tired of lager? Perhaps you could make your own beer at home, like this small community of Indians Lhendup G Bhutia ‘Ever since man became sapient he has devised means of intoxicating himself’ —A History of Beer and Brewing by Ian Spencer Hornsey

A

s the story goes, during the time

of the British Empire, their soldiers and merchants in India faced a peculiar problem. All the beer shipped from Britain arrived flat, musty and sour, since the long, hot ocean journey to India—lasting several months—ensured that the beer did not stay too well.

Since beer could not be produced in India’s hot climate, English brewers attempted various solutions. One of these even involved making freshly-made beer go flat by uncorking the bottles, re-corking them later when they were loaded on board India-bound ships. The belief was that the ship’s rocking motion would enable the beer to achieve a second carbon40 open

ation—and with that, retain its taste.

This was not successful.

This issue continued to vex the British until a brewery in East London, Bow Brewery, came up with a new beer. It took the recipe of the pale ale—a light-coloured drink compared to the darker ales of that period—and added to it large amounts of hop (which gives beer its bitter quality), and extra grain and sugar as well. The brewery found that the high alcohol content and large quantities of hops protected the beer from souring. The result was an incredibly strong, bitter, alcoholic pale ale that could withstand the rigours of the journey to India; and also, one that tasted like no other. The Indian Pale Ale (IPA), as it came to be called, turned out to be a rage not just in India but in Europe as well, becoming, as some historians claim, the first global beer.

All these years later, despite this country’s role in the development of one of the

most celebrated types of beer, and even with advancements in refrigeration and brewing, almost every beer produced in India is a uniform-tasting bland lager.

Even as wine becomes more popular in India, with people consuming both international and domestic vintages, most beer in the country is either Kingfisher, Haywards, Budweiser or Cobra. Nothing but a bland beer, always out of a bottle, rarely from a tap, treated with glycerine to preserve it, and with little to distinguish the taste of one from another.

But, if you turn up at Navin Mittal’s home in Mumbai, he can fix you something entirely different. He can offer you a mean IP as strong as the one prepared back in the nineteenth century. Or he can even fix you something more experimental, say, a paan or cardamom beer. Mittal, who describes himself as a beer geek, is the sort of person you would expect drinking good craft beer, imported from 14 July 2014

BREWMASTERS Navin Mittal, Rahul Mehra, Umang Nair and Krishna Naik (left to right)

halfway around the globe. But what this former head of Shaadi.com’s networking site, Fropper, is doing, is brewing the beer himself. He is part of a growing group of home-brewers in the country that is too small to be termed a subculture but too passionate to be dismissed as faddists.

Every few weeks, either with friends or alone, he will brew anywhere between five and 10 litres of various types of beer in his kitchen, which will last him for a week or so. “Brewing is cooking,” Mittal says, “but with different utensils. The end product is like food, but it will leave you a little high.”

The home-brewing community in India owes its origin to the internet.

While micro-brewing and home-brewing is quite popular in Europe and the US, with easily available DIY kits, ingredients and equipment, in India most homebrewers have learned their craft online.

Mittal, perhaps one of the earliest to be14 July 2014

gin in India, has been brewing beer since 2006. He sourced various ingredients and equipment online, purchased a new refrigerator and had it tweaked so that he could control its temperature, and every weekend when his kitchen was not being used (or his family was away), he would learn and try to perfect his craft.

“The blasted thing was, I couldn’t share it with anyone,” he says. “There was no one to tell me if the beers tasted alright.

Nobody among my friends or family was enthused. But I enjoyed the process. I liked the taste of my beers and they were far cheaper than the ones available. So I carried on.” Three years ago, he even travelled to the UK to enhance his skills by attending a three-week long course at Brewlab, which runs programmes on this craft.

Mittal then began blogging about his experiments with home-brewing, as Indian Beer Geek, which brought togeth-

er people from Mumbai—as well as other cities like Delhi, Bangalore and Pune— who were also trying out or wanted to learn home-brewing. “We started meeting up, sharing notes as we made our beers, and soon enough we realised we had come [up] with an enthusiastic group of home-brewers.”

Unlike the West, where you can easily dispense with various tricky steps—for instance, by using readymade ‘wort’ (available commercially), which is dissolved in boiling water, mixed with yeast, and allowed to ferment—homebrewers here start from scratch. Mittal and his group source barley malt from a factory in Gurgaon, which distributes most of its grain to alcohol manufacturers and health-drink creators. For hops and yeast, they either place an order or ask friends and relatives travelling to the West to purchase it for them. The brewers then grind and boil the barley malts open www.openthemagazine.com 41

to create a liquid called ‘mash’. When the malt is being boiled, hops are added to make the liquid bitter. To this liquid— called ‘wort’ after straining—yeast is added, and the liquid is set aside for at least 10 days in air-tight utensils to ferment.

Lenin D’Costa, a software engineer in Mumbai who has been brewing for over two years, says, “Initially when I began, I didn’t know how to source the ingredients. I used to grind and boil Horlicks, thinking that since it was made from barley malt it could be used as a supplement.

I followed all the steps, but within a week of fermentation, it started to stink.” As he

fact that millions of dollars have been pumped into showing how ‘cool’ and ‘great’ lager is. When I meet Mittal, dressed in a white formal shirt and cream pants, in his first floor office in South Mumbai’s Chira Bazaar, he asks me, “Do you know why you drink any of those mass-produced lagers chilled?” His answer comes accompanied with the corners of his mouth forming a beatific smile. “Because the cold numbs your taste buds and you don’t realise the depressing truth—that you are drinking shit,” he says. “But real ale is different. Every sip provides an explosion of tastes.”

“You can brew any kind of beer imaginable,” says Rahul Mehra, “An IPA? No sweat. A paan beer? Sure. Something stronger? Of course” began to meet other home brewers, he started improving his beers. He now brews late on Saturday nights or early on Sundays when the kitchen is not being used. He says, “When a batch is good, I store it. When it is poor, I throw a party.”

The debate about whether homebrewed beer in India is superior to that available commercially is also largely a debate over ales and lagers. Lagers are lighter beers, fermented over longer periods and in colder climates than compared to ales. Most of India’s home-brewers are real ale fundamentalists who decry the 42 open

However, home brewing isn’t an easy task. Apart from half a day of boiling and stirring large vats of strange mixtures, using equipment like refractometers to measure the sugar content—as you consider the future of what will perhaps turn to beer—a large part of brewing is also spending several thankless hours doing mundane chores like boiling water and using it along with chlorine-based bleaches to clean utensils. A little mistake, a few invisible bacteria not cleaned away thoroughly enough, and an entire batch can get ruined. “Just imagine,” says

Pankil Shah, co-founder of Neighbourhood Hospitality, a company that runs a number of restaurants, “all that work, 10 days or more of waiting and you end up with something non-drinkable.” Shah brews his beer with some of his friends over weekends. “My first few beers, like, I guess, all first home-brewed beers, were smelly and awful. But then, if you are patient, you improve quickly. I think there’s a lot of mystery to brewing.

But if you stick with it, you can easily learn,” he says.

Pateeksh Mehra, a 30-year-old photographer living in a bungalow on Mira Road, a distant Mumbai suburb, converted the 700 sq ft basement of his bungalow into a small brewery. Over the last few months, he has begun to make cheese, and part of this space is now used for that.

He says, “Beers should be, at least, fermented for 10 days. In India, most of the beers are hardly kept for five days.

My beer is smoother, tastier and probably also has health benefits,” he says. His says that his favourite beer is his paan beer, made by adding betel leaves (that he grows outside his bungalow) to the fermenting liquid. “The possibilities are endless,” he says. “With just a few weeks and a little effort, you can brew any kind of beer imaginable. An IPA? No sweat. A paan beer? Sure. Something stronger? Of course.”

A year ago, Mittal and two other homebrewers, Rahul Mehra and Krishna Naik, took their passion a step further. They started a microbrewery, Gateway Brewing Company, and started supplying their ales to select pubs and restaurants in Mumbai. Mehra says, “Everyone [among our friends] loved what we made.

So, we thought, ‘Why not take it to the next level?’”

The task of setting up a microbrewery, coupled with the fact that his house is undergoing a renovation, has ensured that Mittal hasn’t brewed in over two months. He says, however, that he is itching to get back to it. “When we brew, the kitchen is a huge mess. Water and smells all over. Equipment lying everywhere. To many, it would perhaps seem like a waste of time. But I think what keeps us home brewers going is that there’s a certain mystery to making your own beer. And all of us in a way are trying to solve that mystery.” n 14 July 2014

BOOKS

mindspace

FROM GROUND ZERO Three writers from the Subcontinent make sense of one of the most dangerous places on earth 52 The Word on the Street

63

o p e n s pa c e

Bipasha Basu Harman Baweja Alia Bhatt

62

n p lu

Ek Villain Transformers: The Age of Extinction

61 cinema reviews

LG 84UB980T Aquaracer Lady Oppo Find 7

60

tech & style

The Neanderthal diet Mastering myopia Sozzled to death

59

science

In defence of seriously bad cinema

58

roug h cu t

Adarsh Balak: a good student gone bad

57

so c i a l m e d i a

Weapons against the ravages of stress

w e l l n e ss

News from Babel The Warrior State by TV Paul This Divided Island by Samanth Subramanian The Pashtuns by Abubakar Siddique

48 64

Books News from Babel The art of translation and the tragedy of Indian literature Madhavankutty Pillai

Glen Lear/Illustration Works/Corbis

A

48 open

runava Sinha is probably one of the most prolific translators of literary works from Indian languages to English. He has completed 27 Bengali translations in the last seven years and works on at least four projects at any given point—one first draft, one second draft, one piece edited by a publisher and sent back to him with changes and one work that has to be proofread. His first translation was of 1962 hit Chowringhee, the bestselling Bengali novel by Sankar. It was published in 2007 and continues to be one of Penguin Book India’s most successful crossover hits, selling around 50,000 copies; a great number even for an original English literary novel.

In the late 1980s, Sinha was part of the editorial team of a city magazine in Kolkata, Calcutta Skyline, which used to publish one short story in translation every issue. It was around this time that Sankar got in touch with him and asked if he would do a translation of Chowringhee—only, not as an actual manuscript. “It was at that point meant to be a translation for some European publishers who were interested in publishing in their languages.

But they needed an English version. It was meant for these publishers to pass around and make up their mind over. I did the translation as a commissioned piece of work,” says Sinha. He had a day job at The Economic Times then, and he worked nights on the translation, finished it off in three months and gave it to Sankar. Soon after, he left Kolkata.

In 2006, 14 years later, an editor at Penguin who was also his friend called and said she had something interesting to tell him. They wanted to publish Chowringhee in English and had got in touch with Sankar, who said there was already a readymade translation; which led to Sinha. After the book was published, the editor came back to Sinha and asked whether he was in14 july 2014

terested in translating another one of Sankar’s books. By 2009, with two more books out besides Chowringhee, Sinha realised this would be a good project to continue. “I thought, ‘Publishers are interested, I am enjoying it, why not do more?’”

And yet, despite his evident success and productivity, Sinha is a part-timer. He has a steady job heading web portals for a media company and does the translations at night and on weekends. For, being a full time translator in India is just not an option for a creative professional. “There are a very small number of translators in India.

You can’t make a profession out of it yet. It doesn’t pay enough. Most writers can’t make a living out of writing, translators come even lower down the pecking order,” he says. And while Chowringhee’s translations might have sold really well, it is an exception. A translated literary work would be considered successful even if it only sold a few thousand copies.

One of the first works of contemporary fiction that R Sivapriya— Penguin’s managing editor and head of its translations list—commissioned for the publishing house was Goat Days, a translation of the Malayalam bestseller Aadujeevitham, by Benyamin. “Goat Days really worked. We’ve sold over 6,000 copies, which is a pretty good number for literary fiction. It is nothing compared to the number sold in Malayalam, which, a couple of years ago, must have been over 50,000,” she says. While Penguin is actively focusing on literary translations like many mainstream publishers, Sivapriya, who has over a decade of publishing experience, says she cannot remark on any radical change in readership numbers of late. “We are getting just a little more reviewed these days, and that is also probably because we market and publicise the books better.”

Mini Krishnan, translations editor at Oxford University Press (OUP), has so far managed 84 full-length works—a mix of short stories, novels, autobiographies, anthologies, biographies and plays—over three decades.

Some of the works she has commissioned include UR Ananthamurthy’s 14 july 2014

Bharathipura, translated from Kannada

by P Sreenivasa Rao; Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan, translated from Tamil by Karthik Narayanan, Uddhav Shelke’s Embers, translated from Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, and Mridula Garg’s Anitya: Halfway to Nowhere, translated

by Seema Segal. When 11 more scripts appear between October and February, that number will rise to 95 volumes.

One writer calls her ‘a one-woman army in promoting literary translations’.

When Krishnan was a student in the late 1960s, very little was being published in the way of literary translations. “Occasionally I would come across a Jaico book, and the joy of reading about Indian situations in English gave me a thrill that no amount of English literature could. My mother read Tagore in Malayalam, so a dim sense of it being possible to look over the wall began to grow,” she says. When she was completing her MA at Delhi University, she remem-

lation: five modern novels from eleven Indian languages. The management was “horrified”, she says. “The MD said flatly, ‘You can do the project if you find the funding outside, but not with my money and you cannot slow down on your textbook programme’.”

T

hen, translations were not considered worthy of even an hour during annual sales conferences.

“Mainstream publishing was not in the least committed to a nationalistic philosophy or mission of recovery of our own past. No one seemed to realise the emotional importance of translation to a polyphonous country like India.

At literary seminars, when the presenter of a paper on translations stood up, the room would empty. We didn’t seem to mind insulting ourselves,” says Krishnan.

For the Macmillan list, she had to source texts, writers, translators and

“The MD said flatly, ‘You can do the project if you find the funding outside, but not with my money and you cannot slow down on your textbook programme’” bers a professor begging students to join the Indian Literature in English course because he couldn’t otherwise keep it open. “The idea that an Indian language had something of equal worth was so remote that no one even thought it worth mentioning,” she says.

She joined Macmillan India in 1980, and on the first day received a 4,000 page script. It was Comparative Indian Literature, a two volume survey of Indian literatures covering the history of every genre in 17 languages, edited

by KM George. “As I read and edited the 200 contributors and supported George in his involved discussions with the 17 chief editors, I knew this was a world hopelessly closed to me because descriptions of all the famous works were being made available but not the works themselves,” she says. Krishnan therefore designed a programme of trans-

funds all by herself. “I was the first to insist on equal returns for the translator and author, and to print the translator’s name on the cover with a note on the translator alongside that of the author. In those days translators were paid as little as two or three per cent, and sometimes settled [on] one-time fees,” she says.

MT Vasudevan Nair is the greatest novelist Malayalam literature has produced. Anyone who reads books in Kerala knows his work. But in the rest of India, he is practically unknown and the few who are familiar with his writing know it mainly through the translations of Gita Krishnankutty. Among MT’s novels, Naalukettu (1958) is one of the most iconic in Kerala. When Krishnankutty first completed a translation of Naalukettu in the 80s, her experience while getting it out illustrates how translations were perceived. “I open www.openthemagazine.com 49

sent the manuscript to a publisher who accepted it for publication, kept it for about four years and then sent it back saying they had changed their mind because it was too long. Another wellknown publisher took it from me at this point, kept it for three years and finally said they could not publish it either. I then put it away and tried to forget about it. Two years later, to my surprise, Orient Longman asked me for the novel and published the first edition immediately. A second edition came out three years ago,” she says.

The respectability of translations was established only in the 1990s, and according to Krishnan, a number of elements contributed. “The women’s movement, the rise of Dalit consciousness following the Ambedkar centenary celebrations, the availability of translations of Latin American literature, the deep consciousness of ourselves as a post-colonial civilisation wrestling with a multitude of forces amidst us where millions were not really affected by the presence of English in our midst for nearly 200 years. The realisation that we have a medieval mindset about most traditions but are applying Western norms to them! The sense of identity that we seemed to be searching for suddenly seemed possible through reclamation and reinterpretation of our own past photos ashish sharma

AN AUTHOR AND A TRANSLATOR Aruni Kashyap 50 open

and our own stories,” she says.

Sinha has an interesting explanation. He says the acceptance of translations has to do with the quality of Indian writing in English, and how it has been compromised. “In the 90s, the [Indian English] books written and published were genuinely good books that broke new ground in so many different ways. But then, when thousands of people started writing in English, obviously the quality went down. Publishers realised [that] on the one hand there was this great publishing explosion, [but] on the other hand they didn’t have enough good material. It was natural to turn to books that you already knew had been successful in their languages. There was already a canon around these Indian language writers. There was an established track record, they had a pedigree.

It’s almost obvious that as a publisher you would want to tap this.”

I

n the absence of any organised cul-

ture of translations, those who venture into it are led by love of literature or a creative necessity. The case of Professor AJ Thomas, former editor of the Sahitya Akademi journal Indian Literature, illustrates this. In 1977, he was working at the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation’s Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary in Thekkady when an Australian woman asked him for some samples of literary works in Indian languages. Thomas had been writing poetry for about five years then. “That was the time when Kamala Das was Poetry Editor at The Illustrated Weekly of India. She used to publish translations of poetry from various Indian languages. So, I could get hold of some ready samples to show the lady. But there was none available in Malayalam. In my eagerness to show her some specimens from Malayalam, I set to work and translated a few poems of Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri and some others. That was my first attempt at literary translation,” he says. After this, he continued translating poems and then short stories, novels and plays. “Through translation, I became more acquainted with the form and structure of poetic com-

position. It helped my own poetry.

Translating fiction gave me new insights into the creation of stories, which helped me in writing my own stories,” he says.

For Aruni Kashyap, whose first novel, The House with a Thousand Stories, was published last year, his own writing and translation have worked together since his student days. Kashyap is from Assam, and moved to Delhi in 2004 to study Literature. He noticed that in a course called ‘Twentieth Century Indian Literature’, there were writers from Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Hindi traditions, but not a single one from the Northeast.

This was how he started translating Assamese works he liked, especially those of Indira Goswami. His translation of Goswami’s The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar, originally published in Assamese in 2009, was also released last year.

Predictably, the translation got about four reviews in English national newspapers, while his own novel, written in English, was reviewed by almost every publication. However, he still sees more visibility for translations today.

“If a book does not sell one million copies, I am not disheartened because it started a conversation in some quarters—and it would if it is a good translation and gets visibility. People translate because of the love of it, people write literary fiction for the love of it.

But the time of living off translation[s] has not arrived in India yet,” he says.

“The best publisher will split the royalty (often 10 per cent) on a 50-50 basis between the original author and the translator. But many publishers give the translator a lump sum, which would really be unmentionably slight,” says Thomas.

The difficulties for the Indian translator are not only focused on getting published and marketed; there is also the creative challenge. Thomas did his PhD in Translation Studies—his paper was titled ‘Modern Malayalam Fiction and English: An Inquiry into the Linguistic and Cultural Problems of Translation’. He says, “The translator has to negotiate a number of hurdles in creating ‘equivalences’ in the target 14 july 2014

language text, making aesthetic sense for the reader of that text, presenting as faithfully as possible the essential meaning and intent of the original text.”

The problem of equivalences keeps coming up in conversations with translators. Kashyap says Goswami employs dialect in her writing, and asks how one can get that across when writing in English. Likewise for Krishnankutty.

“English does not offer equivalents for the varied registers of spoken Malayalam. I generally prefer to aim at maintaining a comprehensible idiom, which of course means that I fail to convey the subtle linguistic nuances in the text. I am not sure there is a way to overcome this problem. Words that are specifically cultural are equally hard to translate, particularly those that are associated with rituals. As far as possible, I try to explain them in the text and this sometimes makes a sentence much weightier than it is in the original.”

Sinha says the problem is that English is a product of a different culture. He takes the example of the complexity of relationships within an Indian family. “There are no equivalents for them in the English language. In an Indian language, your father’s brother is addressed differently from your mother’s brother. But not in English; they are all uncles,” he says.

Something is lost in the process but you can work around it—explain, retain certain words and avoid papering over the differences.

Likewise, the problem of dialogue.

Sinha gives the example of a conversation between a man and his driver in India. “Let’s say they are talking in Hindi or Bengali; they will employ a very different vocabulary, although they understand each other perfectly. How do you reproduce that difference? So there are challenges, but that is where the creativity comes in.”

Any debate over whether writing in Indian languages or English is superior is a fallacious one, because they are separate worlds. It can only be bridged to some extent by translations. Only then is it possible for the English speaking world to understand the ambition and genius on the other side.

14 july 2014

fresh cluster of novellas, one of which is the famous Kusumabale (Kannada) by Devanura Mahadeva. There is the first Kannada novel, Indira Bai, waiting to be edited. Each of these books opens up an unknown world. It lets you into its secrets, which in turn become your secrets,” she says.

One of the reasons why India has never seen an Orhan Pamuk, who writes in Turkish but has global appeal, is that Indian language literature in translation just doesn’t get access to the world. Kashyap calls it a problem with gatekeepers, the literary agents who are not willing to accept Indian literature in translation. “How many international literary agents represent Indian writers who don’t work in the English language? The Western publishing market only wants to see a certain kind of India. They can’t handle a multilayered, complex India. They want names they can pronounce. They want stories they can handle.”

Earlier, you could have put this gap down to a paucity of great translations, but AJ Thomas says this is not true anymore. “Of late, great translations do appear, as we can see from the works that emerge from publishers here. In the case of Pamuk, a dedicated publishing giant like Faber & Faber sends out his books as international editions.”

Besides Chowringhee, only one other translation by Sinha, Buddhadev Bose’s My Kind of Girl in 2009, (originally Monor Moto Meye, in 1951) was published internationally, in multiple languages and written about in the foreign press. Sinha says the two books are exceptions. He thinks the way to get a global audience lies in the concerted marketing of translated works.

“You have to present it as a canon. If you bring all the works of writers— the greats—together and go out to the world and do a roadshow for the major publishers and say, ‘Here are our 100 best works from Indian literature in the last 100 years,’ I am sure they will find a global audience.”n

“In an Indian language, your father’s brother is addressed differently from your mother’s brother. But not in English; they are all uncles” Arunava Sinha Translator of Bengali literature

T

his month, Penguin will publish KR Meera’s Hangwoman, which was first released as a serialised novel in a Malayalam weekly, Madhyamam, and then as Aarachaar (2012), in Kerala.

Sivapriya read excerpts in a special fiction issue of Tehelka and immediately asked Meera if she would give the book to them. She then recruited a translator, J Devika, who had worked with Meera before. What got Sivapriya interested was the ambition of the writer.

“Meera’s a Malayalee sitting in Kerala and she writes this novel that is set completely in Kolkata and is about a Bengali family. It has no Malayalee connection at all. I think she did two recce trips, that was about it. And a lot of reading. It is really quite extraordinary,” she says.

Krishnan lists the books she is involved with presently, a veritable tapestry of India. “There is a tribal work called Mandol from the Bhili language, the first Oriya Dalit autobiography, Bheda (Target). Then, I’m just finishing up work on the Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing and a

open www.openthemagazine.com 51

Books South Asia Special From the tribal remoteness of North Waziristan to the village of Kandenuwara

The Wretched Land A study of Pakistan’s pervasive military influence masters the broad strokes of its history but lacks the insight of intimacy JASON BURKE The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World

TV Paul Random House India | pp 272 | Rs 499

I

n the bunkers behind the Pakistani positions overlook-

ing the Srinagar-Leh road during the fighting of 1999, young officers read biographies of cricketers in downtime, between firing their massive, five-and-a-half inch guns into India. A decade later, similar officers, engaged on the country’s western frontier against Islamic militants who had established enclaves, ordered tea and biscuits after clearing a town of their enemy. They sipped their scalding masala chai from china cups amidst the smoking ruins as mortar shells landed a few hundred metres away. Now, of course, the Pakistani army is undertaking operations in the critical North Waziristan tribal agencies, against a different band of militants who they and their civilian compatriots appear convinced are backed by Delhi.

This complex mix of shared heritage from shared colonial overlords—cricket, tea and mutual hostility, also arguably another of the many negative effects of British rule— is at the heart of TV Paul’s earnest but uneven The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World. Paul, the author of 15 books on international security and an academic at Montreal University, Canada, is a very long way from Waziristan, Rawalpindi, Karachi, the Punjab or any of the other key locations whose details are so necessary to understand a large, varied country of just under 200 million inhabitants.

Paul’s thesis, repeated variously in The Warrior State, is as follows: ‘Since the very inception of the state in 1947, the Pakistani elite has held on to an ideologically oriented hyper-realpolitik worldview, as though chronically under siege… The policies of neighbouring states, especially India, have contributed to this process, but the particular policy choice to respond militarily was largely Pakistan’s own… The search for power symmetry with India has been facilitated by the geo-strategic location of the country [which] has laid a ‘geostrategic curse’ on Pakistan.’

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This curse, Paul defines as similar to the ‘resource curse’ suffered by, for example, oil producing states where regimes do not actually have to implement any reforms or invest in their population to earn legitimacy and remain in power; they can simply distribute the receipts of sales of a muchneeded global commodity. Similarly, states like Pakistan can trade on their strategic position to win resources from great powers, which likewise obviates the need for steps that would lead to economic development, social transformation and, sometimes, democracy. The result, Paul suggests, is the crippled, weak, ‘failing’ but nonetheless belligerent Pakistan which we know today, incapable of changing itself, condemned to sow insecurity in the region.

None of this is very controversial, or very new. Where Paul is very good is on the mechanics of the search for symmetry with India. He explains how a range of topographical, geographical, geopolitical and technical factors come together to give the poorer, less numerous Pakistanis a limited tactical advantage in certain locations such as Kashmir; around ten days on its neighbour. India has half its military strength deployed to counter a possible Chinese threat, for example, and takes much longer to mobilise its dispersed forces through a cumbersome command system. Pakistan’s use of unconventional weapons—whether proxy insurgents with AK47s or nuclear arms mounted on F16s—is another leveller. And finally, Paul rightly points out, Pakistan has done a much better job than India at leveraging assistance from great powers that have a short-term—and often poorly-informed—view of their own interests in the region, or in Asia. This success may be, as in recent times, a reward for Pakistan’s skills at negotiating by pointing a gun to its own head, but it is evident nonetheless.

There are other useful observations. Paul suggests the Pakistani army’s sense of rightful leadership of the nation— including restrictions on freedom of expression and association—derives in part from British colonial-era ideas of governance. He also borrows from leading journalist MJ Akbar and Pakistan specialist Farzana Shaikh to construct a fascinating discussion of the cultural roots of this sense of entitlement to power. It is, he says, in part because the ‘Pakistani elite’ have inherited a sense that ‘power was a divinely ordained Muslim prerogative [that] came directly from the Muslim rule in India and got projected firmly in the collective 14 july 2014

in Sri Lanka, our reviewers look at India’s near abroad—in war, in peace memory of the Muslim community.’ Paul suggests one reason Indeed, The Warrior State is very much about Pakistan as a Muhammad Ali Jinnah became latterly so committed to the dry concept in international relations, and not Pakistanis. It idea of an independent state was his belief in ‘the glorious his- is unclear from the book if Paul has actually visited the countory of Muslim rule and cultural achievement in south Asia’. try, but what is evident is that any sense of the living, breathThis does not explain Jinnah’s earlier opposition to the idea of ing, animated, vibrant society that is India’s ‘hostile neighPartition, but is an interesting possibility nonetheless. bour’, as we Delhi-based foreign correspondents like to call The Warrior State has many problems too, however. Paul it, is absent. Paul barely engages with the idea that Pakistanis, makes little effort to differentiate between different elements like most people around the world, can simultaneously mainof the ‘Pakistani elite’, which he describes as effectively havtain religious as well as nationalist identities, and that these ing captured the country. Any elite cannot be usefully redo not in reality conflict but in fact reinforce one another. If duced to a single entity, as Paul repeatedly does. In Pakistan, there is any obvious major trend in Pakistani culture and sothere are various contesting elements, all of which constitute ciety in recent decades, it is this fusion. The resultant ‘Islamoparts of the elite. These have also evolved over time, allying at nationalism’ is a powerful unifying factor, as is the genertimes, confronting at others. There is the military of course, al shift towards a more conservative vision of Islam, a trend but also the senior ranks of the bureaucracy, the commercial which is linked in part to urbanisation and economic deelite (of which Prime Minister Nawaz Adrees Latif/Reuters Sharif is a part), the civilian feudal elite (including much of the upper ranks of the Pakistan People’s Party), the judicial elite and indeed, increasingly, a religious elite too. The army may be the biggest actor, but it is far from the only actor, and Paul’s vision of total domination by the military and of the apparently closed nature of an extractive, repressive ‘elite’ or ‘state elite’ which sits on top of ‘ society’ needs to be nuanced.

The army itself is a much more complex institution than Paul seems to allow. Reading his book, one has the impression that the Pakistani military is an occupying alien force—like the Ottomans in Mesopotamia, or indeed the British in India. But the army recruits from society, and particuTHE LONG FIGHT A Pakistani soldier holds a rocket launcher in Khar, along the country’s Afghan border lar parts of society too. It is thus a representative institution, often reflecting as much as forming the views of society. Over time it has velopment as well as the spread of Gulf-based unitarian or evolved too, reflected in the rise and fall of various elements.

Wahhabi ideologies. It has always struck me how, when talkEarlier on, its senior officers were often landholding aristoing to Pakistanis pretty much anywhere in the country, you crats, and its culture was very anglicised. In the 1970s, as men will get the same responses to around a dozen fundamental like Zia-ul-Haq, the son of a minor bureaucrat, ascended the questions about the nature of their state, the role of religion in ranks, it became much more conservative, religious, inwardit, its place in the world and relations with India. The army is looking, and less influenced by a colonial cultural legacy. part of this process, both proactively and reactively.

The rank and file remain recruited by and large from villagPaul is very good on the mechanics of confrontation in es in the Punjab and northern Pakistan, with long traditions South Asia—the hardware, if you like—but much weaker on of sending men to fight. These are the men I spent time with the social and the cultural; the software. Sadly, without one in 1999, during Kargil, and in 2008–2010 when the Pakistani you cannot explain the other, nor Pakistan as a whole, army was fighting in the tribal agencies north of Peshawar. whether it is a ‘warrior state’ or not. n Why had they been told by their senior officers that the men Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent of The Guardian they were battling were funded by India? Because otherwise, and the author of On the Road to Kandahar they would not have fought, as conversations made clear.

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open www.openthemagazine.com 53

Books The Island of the Day Before An empathetic portrait of the Sri Lankan Civil War gives powerful voice to the living and the dead Gordon Weiss

This Divided Island: Stories from the sri lankan war

Samanth Subramanian Hamish Hamilton | 336 pages | Rs 499

I

n early 2007, I flew to Jaffna on

Sri Lanka’s northern peninsula to see for myself the once beautiful Tamil town ruined by war. At the time, I was the spokesperson for the United Nations in Sri Lanka and we swooped in by light plane because the town was a fortress, separated from the rest of the country by Tamil Tiger forces and the stolid opposing lines of massing Sinhalese troops which were preparing to trounce the guerrilas once and for all.

Indian troops had of course played their own special role in wrecking Jaffna during a clumsy foreign expedition as peacekeepers in Sri Lanka, 20 years earlier. Locked into the spiralling embrace that war cements, Indian, Tamil Tiger and Sinhalese forces had since rolled through the town for years like a gigantic wrestling tag team, crushing temples and pink colonial-era houses with the monstrous boots of heavy weapons and ambush. Within hours of landing, I was attending the wakes of civilians who had died by bomb and gun. Fishermen casually sniped as they fished offshore; a woman shot dead by troops who had survived the dizzying blast of a Tiger street bomb, in a frenzy of retaliatory street fire. These were the quotidian early victims of the renewed low-level counter-insurgency of the final phase of the civil war. President Mahinda Rajapaksa had pressed the green light, and his brother Gotabaya would bring the game to a close two

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years hence, with a cataclysmic toll on Tamil civilians.

When I left Sri Lanka after the war, I analysed the history of Sri Lanka and the military campaign that killed so many in my own book, written in under ten months. Independent journalists had been excluded entirely from the battle zone; nobody knew for sure what had happened. It was vital to unpick the military campaign and the social and historical currents that underlay the slaughter, for a largely ignorant world.

It had been too easy for the Rajapaksa government to dress up their victory as an extension of the global war on terror, and to dismiss the terrible toll their forces had exacted as Tamil propaganda.

Yet, as we are witnessing once more in Ukraine and Syria, although wars are the stuff of analysis and the wash of history, comprised of the acts and omissions of giants and on-the-make gargantuans, war is nothing if not an accumulation of millions of individual decisions emanating from the anonymous masses. It is here that Subramanian’s This Divided Island is a welcome read, very different from any other book written on this terrible chapter of human struggle. Slowcooked over a number of years, meticu-

What did it take to turn peaceable Tamils violent?

How did they almost achieve an independent Tamil state?

lously constructed and with a passion and sympathy for Sri Lanka and her people, this Tamil Indian writer illuminates the central dilemma established midway through the book, and around which all hinges: What did it take for an ordinary, peaceable Tamil to commit to violence? And how did the decisions of individuals accumulate into a movement that came arguably close to achieving the central war aim of the Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, an independent Sri Lankan Tamil state?

Here he describes a typical Jaffna street in the old town, the very same sight I witnessed during the war: ‘Their roofs had surrendered and caved in, and their walls were being patiently split asunder by the roots and trunks of trees. Out of the windows of some houses, plants and creepers burst dramatically and unexpectedly, like torrents of vegetal vomit. The oldest houses were skeletal, some of their ribs pitted with bullet holes or craters from nearby explosions, and their front yards reclaimed by Jaffna’s native shrubbery.’

Subramanian moved to Sri Lanka in order to write this post-war testament, and he captures the languid charm of Sri Lanka and the essential exuberance of her people that always seemed to me its most natural mood, largely lost amidst the racket and smoke of war. I could have extended his description of Sanjaya, a Sinhalese friend in Colombo, to a number of my own: ‘When he laughed, his eyes narrowed into letterbox slits, he quivered noiselessly, and his shoulders heaved. His mirth was tectonic.’

Although there is little that is new in the way of facts within these pages, there is loads of unforgettable nuance and fine portraiture like this. Reading 14 july 2014

Roger Hutchings/Alamy/india pictures

REMAINS OF THE DAY Survivors continued to live amid the ruins of the old way of life during the conflict, which ran for 26 years, ending in 2009

this passage, I envied his ready access to the people with whom he spoke, and his attuned attention to the language and cultural peculiarities of his subjects.

His sympathy for the variegated moods of his interviewees over the weeks and months he spent with them is touching, his language deft as he brings their individuality to life and gives force to the truth—and often lasting conviction— of the paths they chose. Indeed, the author’s revelations of ordinary human motive apply equally well to other simmering conflicts and boiling wars.

And so, the words of Tamils caught up peripherally or at the very heart of war provide an unimpeachable collective testimony of the facts we all know. After independence from Britain, Sri Lanka failed her Tamil citizens through State-sponsored discrimination and brutality. Eventually, 14 july 2014

political negotiation proved fruitless, and armed resistance seemed all that was left. Prabhakaran promised resistance, and offered the possibility of freedom.

Unfortunately, and as some of his former associates testify in these pages, Prabhakaran was quite possibly a psychopath, and was certainly a multiple murderer and messianic who saw the lives of his own people as calculable sacrifices in a life-and-death struggle for a political ideal. After Prabhakaran had committed one nasty double homicide (of two comrades), one associate testifies: “Prabhakaran told Raghavan about what he had done. ‘My impression was that he felt bad about it, but he said he had no choice. Several of us found it difficult to stomach this. If you’ve been living together as comrades, this makes you

very uneasy.’ Prabhakaran, he said, had developed the rudiments of a messiah complex. ‘He never apologised for anything he did, never critically analysed his own actions. Never.’ ” The publication of This Divided Island coincides with the announcement this month of the precise format of a UN Commission of Inquiry that will closely examine allegations of mass atrocities committed by both sides during the final chapter of Sri Lanka’s war. The investigators and advisors to the new Commission would do well to read Subramanian’s work, knowing that it will give life to the tens of thousands who died, and who are now the subject of their investigation. n Gordon Weiss is the author of The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers open www.openthemagazine.com 55

books Graveyard of Ignorance A first-hand study of Pashtuns offers a native’s perspective often lost on world capitals Neil Padukone

The Pashtuns: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan

Abubakar Siddique Random House India | pp 316 | Rs 499

“I

like Americans!” an Afghan once declared to me.

“To Americans it does not matter whether I am an ethnic Hazara, Pashtun, Tajik or Uzbek.” There’s an old joke that the only way Americans learn about a country is by invading it. But 13 years after the war in Afghanistan began and just months before the purported drawdown of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), has the world moved beyond its sense of Afghanistan as a graveyard of empires? Journalist Abubakar Siddique’s The Pashtuns says it hasn’t, despite decades of intermittent involvement in the region. Few truly understand Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, he insists; a plurality—40 per cent—of that country and more than 15 per cent of Pakistan. Attempting to dispel myths that the area’s instability is caused by an inherently ‘martial’ people governed by a fundamentalist code, Siddique, a Pashtun himself, mines modern Pashtun history.

Through Pashto treatises of Sufi philosophers and debates between the ideas of Pashtun nationalists like the prodemocracy Afrasiab Khattak, leftist activists such as Faiz Mohammad and Islamist thinkers like the late Mawlawi Younas Khalis, we learn Pashtun identity has been forged by integrating the religious with the cultural, political imperatives with geographic ones. Siddique offers an encyclopaedic yet accessible description of Pashtun majority districts.

While their lands are the crossroads of the Silk Road, the last half century of globalisation, state building and external influence has brought Pashtuns to their current chaotic state, he explains. For, Afghans have been casualties of American and Soviet manoeuvres in the 1980s, of Saudi Arabia and Iran in their quest for hegemony over the Islamic world, and most profoundly, of Indian and Pakistani jockeying.

Pakistan has repeatedly used Pashtuns for its own purposes, Siddique says, to gain strategic depth in Afghan land; clamp down on ethnic nationalism within its borders, enforced by draconian, imperialera legal systems like the Frontier Crimes

Regulations of north-western Pakistan; and create a hardline Islamic identity to strengthen Pakistani cohesion and distinguish Pakistanis from Indians. For this last goal, Saudi money and religious doctrine as well as American weaponry, have become game-changers, he asserts. Thus, Pashtuns have become synonymous with the Taliban, and because of the region’s complicated dynamics, Washington and Islamabad have gone back and forth between supporting and attacking bands of militants and the civilians amongst whom they reside. ‘Washington’s failure to persuade Pakistan’s security establishment to dismantle extremist networks threatened progress in Afghanistan’, says Siddique.

The autonomy of Pashtuns in these struggles has been compromised by the fact that they straddle the Durand Line, the 2,460 km-long Afghanistan-Pakistan border deemed illegitimate by countless Afghan governments; practically ignored by the Pashtun tribes. A Pashtun proverb says, ‘You cannot separate water with a stick.’ The Durand Line attempts just this, and Siddique advises Kabul and Islamabad to open the border permanently as a solution. At the outset, Siddique tells us the world will fall short in Pashtunistan ‘so long as [the] focus remains on short-term security goals and not… development and cooperation’. A step in this direction, we are reminded, is the presence of millions of Afghans in Pakistan with strong links across South Asia—including Karachi, with the world’s highest concentration of Pashtuns.

Yet, the book only casually mentions the Chabahar road in eastern Iran. This new India-constructed road passes from the Arabian Sea to Afghanistan’s western Herat, and is shorter and more stable than the two other land routes connecting Afghanistan to the sea through Pakistan—ending Pakistan’s monopoly on Afghanistan’s maritime trade, which had enabled Islamabad’s pernicious influence in Kabul. Moreover, pivotal strategic changes, including shared energy infrastructure in north-west India and eastern Pakistan and transit trade between Kabul, Lahore and Amritsar, could be explored more fully.

At once history, analysis and policy prescription, The Pashtuns reminds us of its subjects’ often forgotten humanity. As Operation Enduring Freedom ends, NATO looks for a graceful exit. Hopefully this time they will care to find out more. n

Washington and Islamabad have gone back and forth on Afghan militants and how to tackle extremism

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Neil Padukone is the author of Beyond South Asia: India’s Strategic Evolution and the Reintegration of the Subcontinent 14 july 2014

wellness

Lighten up, Live Longer Some measures to beat stress Dr Issac Mathai

S

tress affects people of all ages and both sexes. As

lustre), the thinning and greying of hair, an altered body a result of busy modern-day lifestyles, it has begun shape due to fat accumulation, etcetera. afflicting younger people than it used to. By definiThis is the time that one needs to focus on one’s body and tion, ‘stress’ is a non-specific response of the body to a dework to retard the combined effects of ageing and stress. mand—which could be physical or psychological, real or Ignored, it could wreak havoc on one’s health. perceived—that entails the release of certain chemicals like To effectively contain stress, there is no alternative to a cortisol and catecholamines into the blood stream. When healthful lifestyle. Here follow some simple measures one we confront a stressful situation, messages are sent to the should take: » Eating wholesome, nutritious food at regular intervals. brain, causing the release of these chemicals. » Regular exercise including walking, yoga and meditation.

This brings about changes in various mechanisms of the » Taking at least a day off from work and doing things that body. It can also influence the autonomous functions of the relax the mind. body, altering one’s blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, » Going on a vacation for a few days once a year. glandular secretions, temperature, and so on. Over time, » Taking up hobbies of one’s choice. this could lead to the setting in of pathological changes, re» Attending stress reduction workshops. sulting in hypertension, arthritis, diabetes mellitus, peptic ulcers, bronchial asthma, infertility and impotence, skin Also advisable are breathing exercises: ailments and miscarriages, among other health problems. » Sit with the spine straight and take deep breaths. Try to A person under stress may display symptoms such as maintain the ratio of inhalations to exhalations at 1:2. If excessive sweating of his or her palms and feet, dryness of you inhale for three counts, exhale for six. the mouth, loss of appetite, tremors, irritability, depression, » Notice the movements of the abdomen, thorax and shouladdictions, lack of concentration, memory gaps and shortders with every inhalation and exhalation. Notice the abness of breath. domen and thorax expanding and shoulders rising with The pathological changes due to stress do not set in all of every inhalation; abdomen and thorax contracting and a sudden. It is a gradual process; from a state of balance, one shoulders lowering with every exhalation. reaches a state of imbalance, which, if unattended, leads to ill health and ultimately to disease.

Apart from the above, traditional systems of medicine Our cells constantly undergo regeneration, especially also offer treatment regimes that not only reverse the damwhen one is young. This cell regeneration keeps one’s skin, age caused by stress, but also help prevent such damage. hair, bones, muscles and all internal organs healthy. After a These ayurvedic, naturopathic and yogic certain age—pegged at 35 years these days— Tomacco/getty images treatments should only be taken under exthis process of regeneration slows down. pert guidance, though, to avoid side effects.

How much it slows depends on the lifestyle Ayurvedic anti-stress remedies include abone leads, but its effect starts becoming evhyanga, shirodhara and panchakarma lines of ident around the age of 40. Though it is not treatment, while there are also naturopathfully pronounced at this stage, the changes ic packs and hydro baths that help soothe one would notice are a loss of energy, generone’s nerves, improve circulation, relax the al lethargy, gain in weight (as a result of an muscles and joints, and rejuvenate the indiimpaired metabolism), digestive disturbancvidual. Taken under the advice of authentic es and stiffness of the muscles and joints, practitioners, they serve to not only shield while a closer look would reveal fluctuating one’s body and mind from the harmful blood pressure, rise in blood sugar (indicateffects of stress and anxiety, but also help ing a pre-diabetic state) and cholesterol regain one’s balance and health. n levels, disturbed sleep, reduced concentration and a weakened memory. One also Dr Issac Mathai is the founder of the would notice visible changes in appearance: well-known holistic health centre Soukya wrinkles in one’s skin (and the loss of its

14 july 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 57

social media Too Cool for School What happens when the ideal student goes bad? You get Adarsh Balak as an internet sensation GUNJEET SRA

A

lmost a year ago, a poster featur-

ing a young boy in a plain shirt, shorts and socks—his hair neatly combed back and rolling a joint—with a banner ‘T for Toke’ in Devanagari, went viral online. It was an obvious reference to the Barakhadi charts of the 80s and 90s that used to be hung across schools in the country, depicting a young boy—usually captioned ‘The Ideal Boy’ or ‘Adarsh Balak’—who did things that were supposed to be ‘good’.

To have this icon of moral righteousness make a break for badhood is both devious and clever. The young artist behind the work, 23-year-old Mumbaibased Priyesh Trivedi, turned the poster into a painted comic series Adarsh Balak, which has become an internet sensation in the two months since it started.

“I always found the visual styling of the educational charts from the 80s and early 90s very amusing. The love for nostalgia and the archaic which most of us have is partly responsible for its popularity,” says Trivedi, who has given up a career in animation and is now devoted full-time to his comic strips.

In this subverted world with textbookstyle graphics, Adarsh Balak is shown vandalising walls with graffitti, offering a joint to his tired father, making LSD in a chemistry lab and sporting a Devanagari YOLO necklace. All the strips revolve around contemporary themes of social deviance.

The satire on classroom education has found resonance with a young audience, as most have been force-fed traditional values. Yet, as Trivedi points out, we have developed our own set of beliefs that stand in stark contrast with what society expects of us. “When I saw it for the first time, I laughed and instantly wanted to share it with my friends,” says 22-year-old Sahil Nagpal, an avid fan of the series.

The Facebook page for Adarsh Balak has generated over 37,000 ‘likes’.

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Trivedi has also started selling posters of the comic hero. Organisers of a recent concert in Mumbai got in touch with him asking if he would like to sell prints of Adarsh Balak art. At the concert, postcards were laid out on a table alongside a fishbowl for people to put in money. “I was there, but I didn’t make it obvious that I was the artist. I just wanted to see how people reacted to my art,” he says. He ended up selling all his postcards; and demand for his work is still rising. The artist has adopted a traditional approach: he does all

control. Sometimes it’s an individual revolution, sometimes it’s collective.”

His work is inspired partially by the Spanish cartoonist and illustrator Joan Cornellà, famous for his surreal and unsettling comic strips.

Trivedi says he did not anticipate the kind of response that Adarsh Balak has generated. The series has become so popular that people are using his work on social media without attribution.

Twenty-three-year-old Sharmistha Rao, for instance, has a T-shirt of the Toke poster along with a framed print

the new role model Thumbnails of some popular strips from Priyesh Trivedi’s Adarsh Balak comic series

his paintings on paper and then scans them, thereby retaining their authenticity. His illustrations, he says, are mostly intuitive and arise from what he thinks might be cool. “It doesn’t necessarily need to have a deeper meaning. Some of them might, like the anarchy painting [which shows Adarsh Balak vandalising a wall while there is fire and destruction all around him]. I feel at some point everyone turns into an anarchist when situations get out of

for her room. Asked who the artist is, like many others, she does not seem to know. But Trivedi remains unperturbed . He has noticed an interesting trend. Now when someone posts his images on external sites, there are enough people who add a link to his Facebook page comments. He even has a few famous plagiarisers—Diplo, the American DJ and rapper, among them.

Trivedi, however, accepts it all as part of his new celebrity status. n 14 july 2014

rough cut

In Defence of Seriously Bad Cinema Mayank Shekhar

Is there such a thing as a universally panned flick?

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he ‘first day first show’ (FDFS) of a film, usually have to struggle with scripts. Music companies that probetween 9.30 and 11 am on a Friday at a theatre near duce films know this. Who cares what T-Series’ Yaarian was you, is a lonely hearts’ club. I’ve been its honorary all about? It was apparently a hit because of Yo Yo Honey member for over a decade, mainly because of work. As the Singh’s ‘ear-worm’ (Paani Paani Paani). Sex is another deterlights come on in the interval, each week I notice a near minant of course. In the pre-internet days, I could guess the vacant hall with its seating plan dotted by self-contained, sexual content of art-house films from the number of uncles solitary middle-aged men, waiting for the film to start again. lined up outside embassy retrospective screenings in New The backrows and corner seats are reserved for canoodling Delhi. It was impossible to get into The Last Tango in Paris couples—some of them lost in teenage love, many others at the gigantic Siri Fort auditorium. Certainly that crowd old and seemingly too happy to be married (to each other). hadn’t landed up for Bernardo Betrolucci. Even body-douIn crowded cities, the cinema doubles up as that rare, vast bles of Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider would do. empty space where you can be in public and still feel like Many others use the big screen and dark halls to travyou’re completely by yourself. The killer air-conditioner el to exotic desitinations. My mom always wants to know and cushy seats provide comfort. Dark halls encourage priwhere a film is shot: “Kahan ka dikhaya hai?” There is the acvacy. You could cry or laugh yourself silly in such public cess to culture that some crave. Yash Chopra realised this places and nobody will know, especially at the FDFS, where when his ‘NRI’ movie Lamhein bombed domestically but everybody is seated so far apart. cracked it abroad. He spawned a new genre Every few months, a major blockbuster called the ‘overseas territory’. Germans If music weren’t the hits the theatre, disturbing the peace of this fell in love with these romantic melodraotherwise calm Friday club. The pandemomas. Even Shah Rukh Khan’s Swades was mainstay of Indian nium is at its peak during Diwali, Dussehra, movies, mainstream freshly cut for German TV. The Best movChristmas or Eid—giving the term ‘festival ie of 2009, according to readers of a German filmmakers would films’ an altogether other meaning in India.

Bollywood magazine Ishq, was Yash Raj’s have to struggle These big pictures, on the back of a massive Dil Bole Hadippa. This fixation with genre with scripts. Music marketing push, compel millions to check spreads to the boondocks of Bihar, where companies that what the fuss is all about. Curiosity is concathartic, violent films have traditionally tagious. Huge budgets help filmmakers set ruled. Akshay Kumar’s Jaanwar (1999) reproduce films know aside money for special effects, stunt semains the greatest hit ever. I once noticed this all too well quences or ‘magic of the big screen’—one of a poster of the comedy All The Best there the main reasons people watch movies anywith heroes holding a gun! A theatre ownway. You expect a long line for an early morning darshan of a er in Patna told me that as the law and order in the state impopular star headlining such a film. proved, people started to prefer comedies (3 Idiots had done Then there is that odd weekend when you enter the theexceedingly well in 2009). This must also be the case with atre shocked, like some other members of the Friday club, to fairly educated, reasonably affluent audiences—with cerefind the auditorium mysteriously packed. Few will recall a bral day-jobs—who just love grotesquery and negative IQ flick called Janasheen (2003). I had to score that ticket from a comedies because it just helps them not to think. shadey scalper or ‘blackiya’ (wherever have they disappeared Bearing these permutations and combinations in mind, now?). You could barely decipher the gibberish from the filmmakers roll the dice every Friday. Each member of the screen as the grand old Feroz Khan launched into ‘abracaaudience, like a trained dog, sniffs out the content from the dabra’ in Pashtun or Arabic, leaving his core audience promo and heads for the theatre regardless. Everybody with a delirious with joy. film ticket and a Twitter/Facebook account blasts the hell out The delight in catching a popular song’s picturisation on of Sajid Khan’s Humshakals. It collects Rs 40 crore on its first 70 mm, I suspect, drives a lot of people to the cinemas. Even weekend. Am I surprised? No. Do you look for memorable Jackky Bhagnani has delivered a hit (called Faltu) on that characters and stories in your movies? Ha ha, good for you. n account (a track called Char Baj Gaye). If music weren’t the Mayank Shekhar runs the pop-culture website TheW14.com mainstay of Indian movies, mainstream filmmakers would

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insight Developed Asian countries report increasing myopia rates of up to 80 per cent, the rapid rise of which suggests that environmental factors play a significant role

The Neanderthal Diet Ancient poop reveals that the food of our primitive cousins was not very different from ours

Mastering Myopia

GraphicaArtis/Corbis

science

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s the popular conception of Neanderthals goes, both among scientists and lay folk, our primitive cousins were carnivores. They went out on hunts, and much if not all of their diet consisted of meat. However, according to a new study published in PLoS One, the Neanderthal diet was rather varied.

Besides meat, they also consumed vegetables, nuts and tubers.

Researchers from MIT in the US and the Spanish University of La Laguna made this discovery by examining traces of Neanderthal faeces. Five samples of ancient poop, at least 50,000 years old, found at a cave in El Salt, Spain, were put under the scanner, with analysts looking for biomarkers that showed what Neanderthals ate. While all samples contained signs of meat consumption, as expected, two samples showed significant traces of plants, the first such direct evidence of Neanderthals being omnivorous.

The researchers write in the journal: ‘Dietary differences between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans have been claimed to be one of the possible causes of their disappearance. The complex spectrum 60 open

of food sources exploited by the latter could have represented an adaptive advantage compared to a more restricted Neanderthal diet based on high meat intake… [New evidence presents] a completely different image of Neanderthals as a population that exploited and cooked a wide range of plant species.’

In the past, when scientists tried to reconstruct the Neanderthal diet, they used analysis of bone fragments for carbon and nitrogen isotopes, which could show which meats were consumed more than others. The flaw here was that such data could only differentiate between protein sources, and thus did not factor in the likelihood of plant consumption.

Expound the authors in their report: ‘Neanderthal dietary reconstructions have, to date, been based on indirect evidence and may underestimate the significance of plants as a food source. While zooarchaeological and stable isotope data have conveyed an image of Neanderthals as largely carnivorous, studies on dental calculus and scattered palaeobotanical evidence suggest some degree of contribution of plants to their diet.’ n

German researchers have found evidence that attaining a higher level of education and spending more years in school are two factors associated with a greater prevalence and severity of nearsightedness, or myopia.

Researchers at University Medical Center in Mainz, Germany, examined myopia in 4,658 Germans aged 35 to 74, excluding anyone with cataract or who had undergone refractive surgery. The results of their work show that myopia appears to gain prevalence as education levels rise: of those with no high school education or other training, 24 per cent were found to be nearsighted; among high school and vocational school graduates, 35 per cent were; and among university graduates, 53 per cent. n

Sozzled to Death

According to a study published in Preventing Chronic Disease, excessive alcohol use accounts for one in 10 deaths among adults (in the 20-64 year bracket) in the United States. Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths per year from 2006 to 2010, and shortened the lives of those who died by about 30 years. These deaths were due to the ravages of drinking too much for too long, with breast cancer, liver and heart disease claiming some; and also due to the ill effects of drinking too much too quickly, with violence, alcohol poisoning and vehicle crashes claiming others. In all, 2.5 million man-years of life were lost each year due to excessive alcohol intake. About 70 per cent of the dead were males. n

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in-plane switching panels These ‘IPS’ panels boast of superior image quality, a better contrast ratio and wide viewing angles of up to 178°.

IPS panels are well suited for graphic design and other applications that require accurate and consistent colour reproduction

tech&style

LG 84UB980T It’s not just a top-end smart TV, but an experience that’s as immersive as it gets gagandeep Singh Sapra

TAG w Heuer New Aquaracer Lady

Rs 14, 99, 990

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t 84 inches, this huge TV set

envelopes you and puts you right in the centre of action. Its ultra highdefinition resolution of 8 million pixels and 10-bit colour display that renders over a billion colours combine to offer you vividity and contrast as close as possible to real life. And its IPS (In-Plane Switching) panel makes any seat the best in the house, with a clearer and more consistent image at wide viewing angles compared to conventional screens. And just in case you don’t have a 4K feed, this TV set can upscale your high-definition feed to 4K, letting you enjoy every bit of that soccer match like never before.

Equipped with a Triple XD Engine, the most advanced level of image processing that LG has to offer, this smart TV provides picture clarity of the sort few have dreamt of. If you want to get closer to all the World Cup action in Brazil, just switch on its 3D mode, wear your 3D glasses, and watch yourself duck as the ball shoots out at you before you realise that it’s all virtual.

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This TV also support LG’s Web OS, which makes the use of its smart features awfully easy. You can pull content off Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video or Vudu by using the simple-tooperate LG remote control unit. With its Harmon Kardon 5.2 speaker sound system, this television offers awesome audio output too.

If you are wondering about its connectivity options, it has built-in WiFi, four HDMI 2.0 ports, a couple of USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, apart from a Component In as well as Shared Composite [AV] In, a LAN port and a digital audio out optical port. If you have something that needs an RF link, it has an RF In as well.

The set can be wall mounted or put on a stand. Irrespective of where you place it, this is one TV set that will have everyone’s eyes glued and senses engaged. Nothing can beat the immersive experience of watching World Cup matches with such intense vividity... unless, of course, you have box tickets right by the playing field. n

Price on request

More elegant and chic but just as robust as its original, the new Aquaracer Lady celebrates the active woman’s timeless relationship with water. The watch is as sporty as ever. Waterresistant to 300 metres, the Aquaracer Lady is an aquatic watch equipped with a unidirectional rotating bezel, a screwed-on crown and luminescent hands. Indexed for easy readability at the most murky and muffled of depths, it an ideal deep dive companion. The full diamond version has 30 of these stones swirling gracefully around the dial like a whirlpool. n

Oppo Find 7

Rs 37,990

The Find 7 supports a Quad high-definition [2560 x 1440 pixels] 5.5-inch screen that is one of the best for mobile phones. Battery time is now an essential differentiator and this is where the Oppo shines: a 30-minute charge using its proprietary charger gives the battery 75 per cent power, so you can always be sure your phone is ready to take on the day. It has a 13 megapixel camera at the back that manages to take some great pictures thanks to its f/2 aperture and fast Quad Core Snapdragon 801 processor.

Whether you like watching movies or playing games, or just browsing the internet, this phone grows on you. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

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CINEMA

debut role as inspiration Shraddha Kapoor, who played a singing sensation in the musical hit Aashiqui 2, marks her actual singing debut in Ek Villain. She has sung a romantic duet titled Galiyan, for which she was joined by its music composer Ankit Tiwari

Ek Villain This film is a badly written melodrama with misogynist undercurrents ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Transformers: The Age of Extinction Director Michael Bay cast Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz,

Jack Reynor

Score ★★★★★

dharth deshmukh, Si Cast Riteish or po ka ha dd ra malhotra , sh SURI MOHIT Director

T

his is a movie about redemption

for submissive husbands. On the face of it, that may sound like an amusing idea, but then you realise that the mutineer does not rebel against his own tyrannical wife. He loves her to distraction. He seems to relish her overbearing ways and showers her with jewellery stolen from anonymous women—after stabbing each of them with a screwdriver.

Clearly, this is an insurgency from hell. Director Mohit Suri has been inspired by some of the extreme violence in East Asian films and has applied it to the volatile sexual politics of presentday India. Ek Villain cannot be just dismissed as a badly written and confused melodrama, which, in fact, it is.

Whenever Rakesh Mahadkar (Riteish Deshmukh) kills the nameless women he meets, selecting the victims very precisely for what he perceives as their unwarranted rude behaviour, the scene is designed so as to empathise with the perpetrator, not the victims.

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There is an undercurrent in the film that suggests that disrespectful women are getting their deserved punishment.

To add to that is the casting of an actor who generally plays leading roles with aplomb and has a gentlemanly demeanour about him. Deshmukh’s skillful portrayal of the urban ‘Everyman’ in Mr Madhadkar, the harassed middle-class commuter and devoted husband and father, results in easy identification. So, though he is the ‘ek villain’ of the film, he wins audience empathy. It is the discourteous ladies— clearly earning much more than him— who are pains in the neck.

Technically, the film has a ‘hero’ as well, a gangster called Guru (Sidharth Malhotra) who falls in love with a terminally ill girl (Shraddha Kapoor).

This fellow serves the purpose of stopping the courtesy-demanding serial killer in his tracks, thus formulating the equation for a thriller.

An unremarkable film—but for that lethal dose of misogyny. n

Somewhere in the beginning of this movie, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), an inventor who looks for industrial-age junk to repair and restore, is told by a cinema owner that movies these days are mostly all junk—sequels and ‘crap’ like that. It is unlikely that this is a self reflective statement by director Michael Bay. Irony is not one of the strongest points of his directorial style.

Still, the film starts off in an absorbing manner, somewhere in the cornfields of rural Texas, when Yeager dismantles an old truck to discover that the vehicle is actually ‘Optimus Prime’, the charismatic leader of ‘Autobots’. It is a moment of epiphany, probably the only such instance in this entire three-hour movie.

The sense of a human struggle in an automated age is abandoned once Optimus Prime loses his cover. The Kinetic Sciences Institute (KSI) hunts him down and the movie turns into a endless chase followed by a high-octane metal war. The KSI now controls ‘transformium’, the unstable metal that allows transformers to change their shape instantly, and it wants all the lucre that can be cranked out of it.

The movie is unending and you can only hope that the subtitle—‘the age of extinction’—refers to the end of the franchise and not of your being. n AD 14 july 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

To Be Pronounced Bride and Groom

Wedding bells are perhaps round the corner for Bipasha Basu and Harman Baweja. The actress’ friends have revealed that the couple have finally set a date for later this year. Only last weekend, the couple accompanied Bipasha’s visiting parents to dinner at a popular Mumbai nightspot along with the actress’ sister.

Some months ago, at a surprise birthday party for Bipasha, planned by her sister, the actress’ mother openly told friends that they were very happy with Harman and were convinced that he was a good match. Harman, who tended the bar at the do, appeared comfortable with Bipasha’s family and friends, but eyewitnesses reported that the couple pointedly avoided any PDA in the presence of her family.

Bipasha, who next appears in Vikram Bhatt’s 3D horror film Creature, recently signed a romantic thriller titled Alone opposite TV stud Karan Singh Grover. However, Harman is more likely to focus on film producing, now that his acting career appears to be well and truly finished after the box-office failure of Shilpa Shetty’s Dhishkiyaoon.

The Real Student of the Year

Varun Dhawan, Sidharth Malhotra and Alia Bhatt were launched amid much fanfare as Karan Johar’s ‘Students of the Year’, and the trio profess to be great friends. But insiders reveal that there’s no shortage of healthy competition between them either. By all accounts, it was Varun who the industry put its money on, given his family credentials and the fact that he had mentors in Salman Khan and other A-listers.

But it was Alia who graduated with honours before either of the boys’ second release could dazzle the box-office. She earned raves for her performance in Highway, even drawing comparisons with such greats as Shabana Azmi. Then Sidharth notched up a hit in Hasee Toh Phasee, followed by Varun who scored a six with Main Tera Hero. With the monster (unexpected) success of 2 States, Alia established herself as a major player.

No wonder Varun has reportedly asked for the promotions around his own next release to be amped up. Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania opens next 14 july 2014

Friday, and Varun is touring the country doing just about everything that can possibly be done to guarantee a massive opening. To be fair, the three actors appear genuinely happy for each other’s success. However, both Varun and Sidharth insist that when it comes to pure acting chops, Alia’s undisputedly at the head of the class.

Best Friends No More

They were once best friends, brothers in arms, but like so many film industry friendships, they fell out when money got in the way. After collaborating on three successful films, this pair—a director and a producer—ended their friendship and professional partnership rather abruptly, reportedly because the director believed he was being shortchanged by his buddy. Notoriously arrogant, the director apparently decided that he deserved a sizeable chunk of the profits that his films were generating for his producer friend, and was no longer willing to settle for an upfront directing fee alone. His pal, on the other hand, was apparently happy to increase his directing salary, but was unwilling to part with a percentage of the profits. And that’s when battle lines were drawn.

While the director had no problem finding an eager producer happy to fund his next film, the producer had no shortage of directors whose projects needed investment either.

For his own passion project, the producer signed his buddy’s ex-girlfriend as leading lady, and word in the industry is that this move was intended purely to piss off the director. Now the producer has announced the latest instalment of a movie franchise that his former director friend had kicked off.

Only, he’s hired the writers of the earlier films —without involving his buddy in any way—to helm the new project.

But the director has his own problems to contend with. The first film he did not direct for his producer pal tanked. The second has been anointed one of the worst movies to come out of the industry. The most crippling blow, however, seems to be the fact that he’s finding it hard to woo A-list stars. His producer pal, however, continues to rope in some of the biggest names. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

The Word on the Street

by AS H I S H sha r m a

Brij Lal, in his late fifties, sits outside the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, selling merchandise bearing party symbols. He has a handicapped son to support, he says, but it has been growing increasingly difficult to make sales. Demand for his wares has been low for some time now.

After the huge defeat that the Congress suffered in the General Election earlier this year, he adds, sales almost entirely disappeared, and even the number of visitors to the party’s Akbar Road headquarters has fallen substantially

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