OPEN Magazine 14 April 2014

5 Anniversary Collector’s Edition th

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

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai assistant editors

Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Aastha Atray Banan, Mihir Srivastava, Chinki Sinha, Sohini Chattopadhyay Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra Assistant Art Directors Tarun Sehgal, Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNER Anup Banerjee photo editor Ruhani Kaur assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani Editorial Researcher Shailendra Tyagi asst Editor (web) Arindam Mukherjee staff writer Devika Bakshi Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Rajeev Marwaha (North

and East), Karl Mistry (West), Krishnanand Nair (South) Manager—Marketing Raghav Chandrasekhar

National Head—Distribution and Sales

Ajay Gupta regional heads—circulation D Charles

(South), Melvin George (West), Basab Ghosh (East) Head—production Maneesh Tyagi pre-press manager Sharad Tailang cfo Anil Bisht hEAD—it Hamendra Singh publisher

R Rajmohan

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Volume 6 Issue 14 For the week 8—14 April 2014 Total No. of pages 90 + Covers

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ournalism suffers from calendar fetish, and commemorative moments are its most obvious manifestations.

Here at Open , we are in such a moment: a bit of navelgazing, and a bit of crystal ball gazing as well. As editor, I’m only two months old in a magazine that has just turned five, and I can only say that I have inherited an idea in Indian journalism whose time has not passed. And I would say that the possibilities of that idea make my job all the more interesting. Five years ago, when it began, India was, as it is today, in the middle of an election campaign. In retrospect, the name of the magazine added a sense of unintended irony to the campaign that would launch the second part of the Manmohan Singh saga. Our fifth birthday party coincides with, in all probability, the funeral rites of the Manmohan regime.

Lots of things have happened in between, and mostly for the worse. The journey of Open began with Dr Singh Rearmed.

Expectations were high, of the magazine as well as of the Prime Minister. The latter was a huge let down (see our last cover story), and his fall was to a great extent explained by the absence of openness in governance, by the overwhelming opacity that characterised decision-making—and quite a few of those decisions were in conflict with the interests of the nation. At times, it seemed, we were accidental spectators in a pantomime, far removed from the ideas and attitudes of twenty-first century India; it was as if India had travelled back in time. We were, suddenly, democracy’s most unappealing address in this part of the world. We deserved better.

It was a systematic negation of the essential decencies of public life, of the foundational tenets of a civil society. When power abhors questions, and when paranoia becomes the natural trait of the ruling class, it is a measure of our fall from the ideals of democracy. The velocity of our fall only highlighted an India in regression. It was a paradox India could have lived without: even after 66 years of freedom, we, frequently cited as a Babelic example of cultural and political pluralism, were the sum total of varying degrees of unfreedom. In politics, what concentrated the mind of our average pol was not the future; he was caught between yesterday’s obligations and today’s secrecies. India may take pride in showcasing the most disparate ideas in politics, from sub-rural salvation theories to sub-nationalist vulgarities, but variety is not an alternative to values. Many of our regional parties are too backward in their outlook to represent a modern democracy.

Their idea of India is lesser than the shrinking size of their mofussils. Most dangerously, they rule their satrapies of unfreedom as the presiding deities of captive ghettos. Their powers have not diminished.

India of the closed mind was on display, resisting the temptations of a globalised society. We make a lot of noise about the powers and possibilities of Asia’s most stable 14 april 2014

democracy. We are proud to be feted at Davos and elsewhere as the other Asian miracle, as a counterpoint to China. There was of course some justification in that description because those who suffer from a China complex continue to overlook the fettered mind and praise the free market. We have come this far in spite of being a badly managed democracy—or maybe because of it. We could have gone further. We no longer believe in fair play—which demands transparency—in the marketplace. Protective of our corner kiosk and paranoid about the intruder, we are as resistant to the free flow of goods as we are to the free exchange of ideas. The last five years vindicated this trend as Dr Singh, once a market reformer, behaved like a Latin American socialist-nationalist when it came to foreign investment. The man who, towards the end of his first term, put the Marxists in their place—a redundant corner in history—seemed to be borrowing desperately from the book of his erstwhile tormentors. He was not alone. The

some of us inhabited, the India on the go, young, ambitious, inventive—and dreaming. Their India was so fragile that it could have collapsed under the weight of a book or a canvas.

That was the Soviet India. Or the Hindu Republic of India. Or the Islamic Republic of India. Considering the distance between the ideal and the existing, there is much to be desired from democracy as a form of governance. So democracy in many places doesn’t rhyme with liberty or constitutionalism.

The illiberal instincts of Indian democracy bring out the pathologies and perversions of our politics.

Perhaps we should blame it all on the Indian growth rate of freedom. Slow and unsteady. We may have come a long way from the socialist loftiness of Nehruvian vintage; we may have also come out of the comfort zone of anti-Americanism. Not fully; self-restricting Third Worldism is a mindset in certain parts of the establishment, and the West—read America—is a convenient antagonist. It is inevitable when a nation is

Last Supper: Gaza by Vivek Vilasini

political class was in it together. India in retreat was a country that shut its door on ideas.

Our phoney culture wars were further indications of an India uncomfortable with ideas that challenged, teased, mocked, or led to a realm beyond dead certainties. We saw vigilantes of religion positioning themselves as tastemakers and proofreaders and literary critics. We saw men from nowhere coming to the rescue of endangered gods. We saw book burners and other culture terrorists on the street. They never went away, those who never had an argument but had answers to questions they never comprehended. Their India, sustained by mythologies and ideologies, was not the India 14 april 2014

beholden to ideology and resistant to ideas. One is restriction, the other is liberation. This special edition of Open is a celebration of arguments, and we have invited some of the brightest from the world of ideas to make the name of this magazine the abiding ideal of India. Five years ago, the birth of a magazine coincided with the inauguration of perhaps India’s worst government. We would like to believe that, as India is all set for what everyone calls a history-shifting election, on the pages of our birthday edition lies the idea of an India that is as Open as what you are holding in your hands.

S Prasannarajan open www.openthemagazine.com 5

contentS 18

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run of the mill | Patrick French

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decolonisation of the mind

India pays lip service to a 19th century European idea of liberty that is of little relevance today

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Priyamvada Gopal

A question for Lord Macaulay’s children

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the unwelcome mat | Shashi Tharoor

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cbi to probe headless body, cag to audit topless bar

India can’t play out its soft power on the global stage if we continue with our restrictive visa policy

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Shekhar Gupta

How can the media help a society become more open when it shuts the door on facts?

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another gold brick in the wall |

Bennett Voyles

Why democracy and protectionism don’t mix

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urgency of the alternative |

Ananya Vajpeyi

What does an AAP candidate say about Indian democracy?

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very humdrum, sir | Sunanda K Datta-Ray

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in praise of the androgyne

The last Englishman could still be an Indian

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Tishani Doshi

An elemental reunion of the sensuous and the erotic 70

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may the joke always be on us |

Jug Suraiya

How the politically incorrect ethnic joke keeps us together in the great fraternity of laughter

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not people like us | Rajeev Masand Our columnist on Bollywood stars and style 14 april 2014

CONTRIBUTORS Patrick French is a writer and historian, and the author of awardwinning books such as The World is What It Is, India and Liberty or Death page 18

Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament

from Thiruvananthapuram and Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development, is the author of 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century

page 42 Shekhar Gupta is Editor-in-Chief of

The Indian Express and the Express Group of publications. A selection of his weekly column ‘National Interest’ has just been published in the form of a book, Anticipating India

page 52

Priyamvada Gopal is a historian and

cultural critic who teaches at the Faculty of English at University of Cambridge. She is the daughter of historian S Gopal and granddaughter of the late Indian President S Radhakrishnan

page 30 Sunanda K Datta-Ray is a journalist and author of several books, including Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India and Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, a revised edition of which was released recently after 30 years of its suppression page 76 Ananya Vajpeyi is a historian, an associate fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, and acclaimed author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India page 70

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14 April 2014

CONTRIBUTORS Jug Suraiya is the author of ‘Jugular

Vein’, a satirical weekly column in The Times of India. He is also the author of several books, including his memoir, JS and the Times of My Life: A Worm’s Eye View of Indian Journalism

page 86 Tishani Doshi is a poet and novelist based

in Tamil Nadu. She was lead dancer with the Chandralekha troupe of Madras for over a decade. Her latest book, Everything Begins Elsewhere, is a collection of poems

page 82 Bennett Voyles is a long-time contributor to a number of American, European and Asian business publications. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The New YorkTimes and Paris Tech Review page 60 Riyas Komu is a Mumbai-based artist who thought organisational skills were the monopoly of politicians and bureaucrats until he co-founded the Kochi-Muziris Art Biennale.

Why are my works so grim? Because I always want to have the last laugh, Komu says pages 30, 42, 52 Bandeep Singh is a fine art photographer

whose images primarily explore eroticism from an Indological perspective. Some of his works are on display at Vienna’s Essl Museum of contemporary art. The images in this issue are from his series Sa : the feminine

Cover image and page 82 Vivek Vilasini is a Bangalore-based artist

who trained as a marine radio officer and studied political science before picking up the art of sculpture from traditional artisans. He draws inspiration from South Indian performance art

pages 5, 60 12 open

14 April 2014

illustration by anirban ghosh

7 april 2014

an open republic Shades of an illiberal society are still visible in one of the world’s most volatile democracies.

Ideologies that restrict modernity are prevalent. Ideas of change are hard to come by. On the fifth birthday of the magazine, the following pages carry fine minds at their argumentative best.

A portrait of an India more open than it is today

liberty

BY Patrick French

Run of the Mill India pays lip service to a 19th century European idea that is of little relevance today

I

f Narendra Modi moves to Race Course Road this summer, India is set for an epic culture war. Even if he remains as cautious in office as he is being as a prime ministerial candidate, a future BJP-led government in New Delhi would chill India’s beleaguered liberals to the bone. They are already on the backfoot, since over the last ten years Congress has not shown the slightest interest in protecting, for example, the individual’s right to free speech. Nor has it reconsidered how a commitment to the separation of State and religion might be updated for the 21st century. The idea of offence and blasphemy in India remains old-fashioned, with both offenders and offended following an imported 19th century script. As the original Penal Code of 1860 states, imprisonment will be the punishment for anyone who ‘with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of any person, utters any word or makes any sound in the hearing of that person’.

For decades now, the idea of personal liberty in the form of Nehruvian secularism and freedom of expression has failed to gain much popular traction. This is not to sug-

gest any infringement of freedom of belief would ever be tolerated by India’s citizens, or that Indians lack the right to openly express an opinion in a way that remains forbidden in many countries, but rather that the current form of the debate remains elitist and abstruse, and is often confined to the English-language media. Thus a ban on a film or book may get reported around the world as an attack on freedom, but it will rarely draw an Indian crowd onto the streets. A dispute over the upkeep of the Dargah Shah-e-Mardan, on the other hand, will, for example, produce over 25,000 passionate protestors, as happened earlier this month in Delhi; but it will barely be reported in India and will be ignored internationally, as if it were of no consequence.

More than a century-and-a-half ago, when the mutineers of 1857 marched on Delhi, enraged at the injustice with which they were being ruled, John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor were busy writing the essay On Liberty. Mill tried to get round the inconsistency of promoting liberty only in what he called ‘mature’ societies

by arguing that while British rule in India was admittedly despotic, it was held to the standards of representative government by the House of Commons. Like many 19th century European thinkers, Mill’s life was fatally bound up with the elite hypocrisies of Empire; he worked for more than three decades for the East India Company in London, and the opening line of his Autobiography states that he was ‘the eldest son of James Mill, author of The History of British India’ —a voluminous and influential book whose accuracy (with its talk, for instance, of ‘a general disposition to deceit and perfidy’ in a chapter titled ‘Of The Hindus’) was undone by the fact the author had never in his life been to India.

The younger Mill was, by the standards of his time, shall we say, liberal. In a footnote in On Liberty, he denounces British evangelicals for displaying ‘the worst parts of our national character on the occasion of the sepoy insurrection’. He objected to their missionary desire to spread the Christian religion to India’s Hindus and Muslims, calling it an ‘imbecile display’ to suggest ‘all who do not A ban on a film or a book believe in the divinity may get reported as an of Christ are beyond attack on freedom but will the pale of toleration’.

Mill’s comparative rarely draw a crowd onto radicalism on matters the streets. But a dispute of belief and personal over the upkeep of the liberty should be seen in the context of Dargah Shah-e-Mardan Europe’s long religious will produce over 25,000 persecutions. Just two passionate protestors centuries earlier in England, the mutilation and slaughter of religious dissidents was still a mainstream part of state and church activity. Lollards, Unitarians, Wycliffites or Quakers might have had their tongues slit or their bodies branded with red-hot irons. In Goa during the Inquisition, heretics and apostate Catholic converts would be executed. Europe’s torturers believed they were doing God’s work: in their rigour and zeal, they were not unlike today’s Taliban, convinced of their divine righteousness.

Only in the late 17th century had an idea developed in England that members of other faiths (and specifically Jews and Muslims) could be holy. The toleration of religious minorities—a negative liberty, allowing people to be left alone—became state policy. Freedom of thought and public discussion began, tentatively.

Mill (aided by Mrs Mill, though her name does not appear on the title page) took this a stage further in the 19th century: instead of toleration meaning the right to practice an alternative, dissenting version of Christianity, he proposed the toleration of individual liberty of con20 open

science. So people would not merely have the right to freedom of religion, but, if they so wished, freedom from religion. The concept of apostasy, which needed to be punished either by torture on earth or by damnation in eternal hell-fire, was slowly disappearing.

In one sense, this profound and emotive philosophical argument was of no relevance to the majority of Indians, who were practising their local or family variants of Dharma. Hinduism had no set of regulations from which a person could apostasise, nor a clerical hierarchy that could impose sanctions. More importantly, India had no real historical tradition of religious killing. This is not to say it never took place: the ancient conflicts between Buddhism and Brahminism, forced conversions and the destruction of Hindu and Jain temples during the early Islamic invasions, or the strictures of caste control could all be characterised as violent. But the idea of killing heretics as a matter of religious duty forms no part of Hinduism.

So while the debate going on in Europe had social and political influence on groups such as the Arya Samaj or Brahmo Samaj, and on kaala paani-crossing individuals like Gandhi, it meant little to those who had never thought of tormenting apostates. Like the foreign taxonomies introduced in the 18th and 19th century which obfuscated Hindu practices into a ‘religion’, with terms like ‘priesthood’ and ‘deity’ that corresponded to Christianity, the term ‘toleration’ had little resonance in India. But where it was of vital and enduring importance was in the attitude the Indian state developed towards different religions after 1857, lasting up to the present day.

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hat passes for secularism in India—which in

practice is often a system whereby political parties secure Muslim votes by wooing hereditary and religious leaders—has its roots in the shift away from reform and conversion in the wake of the great rebellion.

Queen Victoria, influenced by her well-educated German husband Albert, had an aversion to Christian bishops and a great dislike for missionaries. She even objected to her children’s governess telling them to kneel while saying their prayers in the evening. Why couldn’t they just lie in bed and pray? The settlement after 1857, with power passing from the East India Company to the British Crown, was a way to maintain British power at a time of weakness, but it was also a statement of Victoria’s own beliefs.

Against the advice of her ministers, Queen Victoria made amendments to a proclamation of future government policy, stating that from now on, nobody in India would be ‘in any wise favoured, none molested or disquieted by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief 14 April 2014

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or worship of any of our subjects’. This was—in an era to appear secular. This showdown, with its rival interprewhen Britain still had legalised discrimination against tations of liberty, can sometimes seem to be as much a class war as a culture war.

Jews and Catholics—quite a step to be taking.

Individual freedom of conscience came first: missionary organisations quickly flooded Windsor Castle with hen it comes to electoral politics, the assertion letters of complaint, but Victoria did not budge. The of secular values is even more skewed. Indian toleration of the Indian state was guaranteed. More than 150 years later, the royal proclamation of 1858 forms Muslims still suffer from social exclusion, lack of secure the basis of India’s policy of freedom of belief. In Pakistan, employment and chronic tokenism. the situation reversed: the state legally discriminates Earlier this year, I spent time with a Muslim leader in central India who had an iron grip on his community: he, against heretics.

The difficulty with the shape that toleration now takes or his family, had control of access to places at an engiin India is not the theory, which remains admirable, but neering and medical college, the opportunity for individthe practice. If artists are in trouble with outraged mem- uals to stand for election, and even the chance to start a bers of a religious group, they are at risk. If a film or a book business. If an outside politician wished to hold a meetis suppressed for spurious reasons by a politician or a ing in the local areas under his control, they had first to court order, the state will do nothing at all to protect the seek the leader’s permission. In his own view, and it was right to liberty of expression. If Salman Rushdie appears not wholly without foundation, the power he wielded at a public event, no ‘secular’ leader will go near him, for was necessary to protect the minority community from fear of contagion. A supposedly hostile communal forces. representative Hindu opponent He spoke of progress. Would it Like the foreign not be helpful, I asked, if India had of an academic book will use outmoded and imported Christian ara single law that applied equally to taxonomies introduced guments against impiety, and igall citizens on matters such as in the 18th and 19th nore the expansive, eclectic marriage, inheritance and the century, obfuscating traditions of Hinduism—in adoption of children? Absolutely which devotion is too intense to not, he answered, as I had expectHindu practices into a be troubled by the petty misrepre‘religion’, with Christian ed. But the present divided syssentations of others. tem, a leftover from earlier times, terms like priesthood A beleaguered liberal, asked significantly weakens personal and deity, the term liberty by subsuming individuals what should be done about this into a system of control based on impasse, will generally answer toleration had little compulsory group identity. that the Indian state needs to inresonance in India Indian Muslim women, for extervene legally or physically at ample, can still be divorced by the times of threat, and securitise the right to freedom of speech—while utterance of the triple talaaq. In knowing this is a political imposmany Islamic countries, this has sibility. What seems to happen remarkably rarely (and been prohibited as archaic. Even across the border, the trimuch less, I think than it used to in the post-indepen- ple talaaq was abolished under the Pakistani Muslim dence years) is direct engagement between the opposing Family Laws Ordinance in more liberal times in 1961. In sides of such arguments. It is striking that both Hindu and India, it remains firmly in place.

Muslim traditionalists complain privately of being exIf any of these myriad areas of contention are to be imcluded from any opportunity to discuss what it is that of- proved, the change has to come from what in India is fends them, and feel they suffer if their command of perhaps inaccurately called the left: secularists, progresEnglish is shaky. sives, liberals and former and current communists.

Except for TV debates, when the participants are usu- Were a BJP-led administration headed by Narendra ally not in the same room but shout at each other from ri- Modi to try installing a uniform civil code, for instance, val squares on a screen, there is little exchange of opinion the country would turn into a sea of protest; coalition or attempts to reach common ground. In most places in partners would fall away, probably bringing down India, you notice people whose dress or appearance sig- the government. nals a religious affiliation, but it is possible to attend a A new theoretical framework is needed that speaks to book launch, a film opening or a literary festival and see contemporary India. The idea of liberty promoted by John nobody (Sikh men excepted) who displays their faith. A Stuart Mill had its time and place, and arose out of a relicentury ago, Indian intellectuals travelling abroad were gious context that today makes little sense. India pays lip obliged to look like saints and promote ‘Eastern’ thought: service to a 19th century European idea of toleration that today, if they want attention in the West, they are obliged is of little present relevance. n

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14 April 2014

watches calvinklein.com +91 9820078660/9871123247/9900940400

best of

17 October 2009 | R a h u l Pa n d i ta

11 April 2009 |

“We Shall Certainly Defeat the Government”

Sandipan Deb

The Answer Jayanta Shaw/Reuters

How good is Mahendra Singh Dhoni as a captain, really, and how much is plain damn luck?

His unflappable demeanour gave a new twist to the mythology of Captain Cool

So what’s with Dhoni? The Indian

cricket team has clearly regained the spunk and attitude that were its hallmarks during Sourav Ganguly’s heyday.

Yet Dhoni’s captaincy style is totally different from Ganguly’s. As a friend put it succinctly: “Ganguly captained like a monarch, there was no question that his and no one else’s writ runs. Dhoni’s is a much understated style.”

Dhoni’s greatest skill, everyone agrees, is man management. Players like Tendulkar and Dravid, who have been playing for India since the days when Dhoni was in shorts (Dhoni was eight when Tendulkar made his debut, and 14 when Dravid turned out for the country) don’t have any problems playing under him.

No Indian captain ever empowered his teammates like Dhoni has. For instance, on the field, it’s more likely to be Zaheer Khan and not Dhoni who advises the other fast bowlers. Dhoni recognises the skill sets his people have, and utilises them to the hilt. There is no use of abuse

24 open

by the captain on the field, maybe just a glare or two, very infrequently. Criticism is left for after the game. As a result, each player, even those on the bench, have equal ownership of the team, as much as Dhoni. Like Steve Waugh’s great Australian team, this team too often looks like they believe they can’t lose.

There is something gracious but instinctive about some of the things the man does. After winning the Twenty20 World Cup, as he was walking off the field, he took off his jersey and gave it to a child. Fine. But he did not just give it, as we have seen so many soccer players do.

He helped the child put it on. In Ganguly’s last test match, he handed over the captaincy to him six overs before close of play. When he went up to receive the Border-Gavaskar Cup, he made sure Anil Kumble, who had captained in the first two tests, came with him; they took charge of the cup jointly. I think that these are gestures that show that in a world where “gamesmanship” is the norm, Dhoni is a sportsman. n

Somewhere in the impregnable jungles of Dandakaranya, the CPI (Maoist)’s supreme commander spoke to Open on a range of issues Q: But not so long ago, the CPM was your friend. You even took arms and ammunition from it to fight the Trinamool Congress. This has been confirmed by a Politburo member of the CPI (Maoist) in certain interviews.

And now you are fighting the CPM with the help of the Trinamool. How did a friend turn into a foe and vice-versa?

A: This is only partially true. We came to know earlier that some ammunition was taken by our local cadre from the CPM unit in the area. There was, however, no understanding with the leadership of the CPM in this regard.

Our approach was to unite all sections of the oppressed masses at the lower levels against the goondaism and oppression of Trinamool goons in the area at that time. And since a section of the oppressed masses were in the fold of the CPM at that time, we fought together with them against Trinamool. Still, taking into consideration the overall situation in West Bengal, it was not a wise step to take arms and ammunition from the CPM even at the local level when the contradiction was basically between two sections of the reactionary ruling classes.

Our central committee discussed this, criticised the comrade responsible for taking the decision, and directed the comrades concerned to stop this immediately. As regards taking ammunition from the Trinamool, I remember that we had actually purchased it not directly from the Trinamool but from someone who had links with the Trinamool. There will never be any conditions or agreements with those selling us arms. That has been our understanding all along. As regards the said interview by our Politburo member, we will verify what he had actually said. n 14 april 2014

best of

4 April 2009 |

Manu Joseph

The Power of Nonsense Bullshit as a cultural force The economic might of pure rubbish becomes apparent when we consider that a sizeable portion of the Rs 1,300-crore television news business comes from covering the story a Kuni Lal who predicted the exact time of his own death (TV crews waited outside his house for the moment which passed without his demise), or the stories of scores of people who have had past-life experiences, or a car that travelled in Delhi without a driver (one channel had a panel discussion in which a member discussed the science of invisibility), or the discovery of a giant human face on a Martian mountain (a channel began to claim that life has been discovered and beamed a passionate ticker, ‘Kab hoga jung’), or the endearing tale of one Gajraj who claimed to have met the god of death, Yamraj, due to a clerical error on the part of Yamraj’s office.

Gajraj even recalled that when the death god realised that the wrong man had been brought to him, he scolded his attendant, “Ullu ke patthey, yeh kisko uttha laaye ho?”

All this, on primetime national news channels.

Rajdeep Sardesai, editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN, says, “We cannot run away from the fact that today entertainment is a powerful part of our lives, and news has become that. But I am not among the people who say there is no choice. I believe serious journalism matters. The farcical side of television news will eventually die

25 April 2009 | C P

once people see through it.”

But the greatest impact of nonsense in modern cultural transaction has come in the form of political correctness. So, Obama is not Black, he is Afro-American; an actress is “an actor”; a prostitute is a sex worker; a housewife is a homemaker; and if you do not believe in global warming, the beautiful liberals have said explicitly, you are an idiot. Do you have the right any more to suspect global warming? Are you allowed to say that global warming is a natural geological phenomenon, that even back in 1912 when the Titanic sank, glaciers were melting faster than they should? Can you say this today and hope to secure the love and respect of any of those beautiful girls in FabIndia salwars?

In some schools in England where gender equality is taken very seriously, the parable of Three Wise Men has transformed into Three Wise Women, and baby Jesus in the crib is a baby girl.

Today the best desk editors anywhere in the civilised world are under pressure not to use the pronoun ‘he’ as a neutral reference to God (the devil may be

referred to as ‘he’). And ‘man’ cannot be used anymore to refer to humans.

This is a moronic pretense to modernity because, as historian Jacques Barzun has explained in his book, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, the word ‘man’, like many other words, has two meanings. One is male, and the other is human. In fact, the most demeaning word in the English language is ‘woman’ because, from an etymological point of view, it refers to someone whose existence is defined by a relationship with a man. Also, it is astounding that when there have been so many brilliant women writers who have created remarkable prose about women, the feminist slogan that has stood out is: ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’.

Popularised by feminist Gloria Steinem, the slogan not only reeks of a certain literary impoverishment, but is also not factual as evident from the lives of almost all the women we know, including Gloria Steinem who in the year 2000, at the age of 66, to the resounding gasps of impressionable girls, married David Bale, the father of Batman, Christian Bale. n

Surendran

Giving Kasab a Chance We are looking for a way to kill Ajmal Kasab. But the case for keeping him alive is equally strong 26 open

illustration shyamal banerjee

To give a man a name and hang him is easy. But to keep him alive despite himself and despite ourselves needs courage. Certainly our sense of justice would need to be better honed... In a recent interview, Shantanu Saikia, husband of a 26/11 victim and father of two children, said he forgave Kasab. That he doesn’t want to see him hanged. There is not likely to be a debate on this. The generosity of Saikia’s muted position is beyond the understanding and, therefore, the tolerance level of most of us. Yet, the bare truth is, only in life will Kasab discover his humanity, not in death. The test of our civilisation is to try and give him a chance to redeem himself. Who knows, when Kasab is 90, he may turn a saint and sing to the birds. We may not live to see that change. But our children will. And they will wonder why a man like this would kill when he was a boy. n 14 april 2014

DHARMENDRA KHANDAL

best of

The present Ranthambore tigers (above) come from a source population of 14 tigers in the mid-1970s. Yet officials did not bother to conduct DNA tests or any spatial study before taking away tigers to Sariska

18 July 2009 |

J ay M a z o o m d a a r

Conservation: the New Killer Siblings may mate but neighbours must not. If habitat loss, conflict and poaching don’t finish off the tiger, crippled genes will When PCCF Mehrotra and

his men were preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the world’s first wild tiger re-introduction two weeks ago, my investigation for a national daily revealed that the three tigers were picked up without DNA tests or even territorial analyses. The

15 August 2009 |

fertility and sperm viability, lower birth rate, higher infant mortality, slower growth, smaller adult size, fluctuating facial asymmetry, weak immunity, etcetera. The effects of inbreeding are nullified in a bigger population through natural selection of the stronger gene. But if we

try to generate a new population through inbreeding, as in Sariska, it will have no longterm viability. The selection of two tigresses for Panna was as random, but Panna is secure because it is sourcing tigers from two populations— Bandhavgarh and Kanha— to ensure genetic variation. n

Sebastian Horsley

Why I Slept with 1,300 Women The price of love, above all, is monogamy. One man decided to break free. This is his story 28 open

randomly selected tigers, as luck would have it, came from the same father. But why is it dangerous to introduce halfsiblings as a founder population? Because, in a small population, their inbreeding can lead to the death of the offspring. Over successive generations, it causes reduced

The problem with normal sex is that it leads to kissing and pretty soon you’ve got to talk to them. Once you know someone well the last thing you want to do is screw them. I like to give, never to receive; to have the power of the host, not the obligation of the guest. I can stop writing this and within two minutes I can be chained, in the arms of a whore. I know I am going to score and I know they don’t really want me.

And within 10 minutes I am back writing. What I hate are meaningless and heartless one-night stands where you tell all sorts of lies to get into bed with a woman you don’t care for. The worst things in life are free. Value seems to need a price tag. How can we respect a woman who doesn’t value herself? When I was young I used to think it wasn’t who you wanted to have sex with that was important, but who you were comfortable with socially and spiritually. Now I know that’s rubbish. It’s who you want to have sex with that’s important. In the past I have deceived the women I have been with. You lie to two people in your life; your partner and the police. Everyone else gets the truth. n 14 april 2014

independence

BY Priyamvada Gopal

Decolonisation A question for Lord Macaulay’s children

M

irror, mirror on the wall, who is the least independent of us all? Or, to put it in more familiar terms, Macaulay ke asli aulad kaun hain (Who are Macaulay’s real children)? The question of whose minds are still colonised is a provocative one but one worth asking right now. If each election poses the question of what sort of polity we want to be living in nearly 70 years after India’s independence from Britain, it’s time to assess which of the political options before us proffers a genuinely freestanding, decolonised, expansive, unique and compelling vision of the future, one that is not parasitic on the legacies of 200 years of colonial rule. From the decriminalisation of homosexuality to sedition charges to the suppression of highly-regarded scholarship, questions have been raised about the extent to which the Indian Penal Code relies on anachronistic Victorian values and legislation. Charges of suffering from a ‘colonised consciousness’ were levelled against those who came to the defence of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. Whatever our position on this, perhaps we can agree that it’s worth taking seriously the question of the extent to which both our minds and our politics remain in thrall to colonialism. Who, then, might give us an India that is truly decolonised and ready to transform itself for the better?

The party which lays loudest claim to having a distinctive vision of India is the one slated to win the single largest number of Lok Sabha seats, whether or not it wins a majority or forms the next government. The BJP and its Sangh Parivar allies have made careers out of accusing various pet antagonists—from secularists and socialists to feminists, human rights campaigners and environmentalists—of being beholden to pernicious Western influences. They claim, by contrast, to stand for original Indic values that best suit an Indian ethos. But is this true?

The heady cocktail the BJP offers is a combination of hyper-nationalism and hyper-capitalism (‘development’) which now merge in the form of Narendra Modi, who has been turned into an archetypal Indian hero, complete with Amar Chitra Katha-style comic book. The trouble, 30 open

of the Mind

fit to frame Riyas Komu’s installation, Keep Cooking, from his Blood Red series

of course, is that both neoliberalism and nationalism premised on the dominance of the majority religion, however ‘tolerant’ of minorities it claims to be, are part of the legacy and afterlife of the British Empire.

The Raj, which prided itself on incorporating India into its booming capitalist growth story, began with the East India Company, described by economist Nick Robins as the world’s first multinational corporation, running riot across the land. While there was much indigenous resistance to British rule, the idea of the modern nation-state was certainly derived from nineteenth-century European ideas where the ‘nation’ was imagined as based on single homogeneous categories like religion and ethnicity. This was totally unsuited to the plural Indian context which, even Macaulay admitted, was one ‘which resembles no other’. It’s no accident that the idea that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations emerged out of the colonial experience, as did the glorification of India’s supposedly purely Hindu past.

The British Empire also bequeathed to India the apparatus of a strong centralised state that It is no accident that the could crush challenges. The BJP’s vision of idea that Hindus and a militarised, nuclearMuslims constituted two capable state run largeseparate nations emerged ly by autocratic Hindu out of the colonial caste elites would have made Macaulay proud. experience, as did the An English chauvinist glorification of India’s to the core, he advocatsupposedly purely ed strong government and a uniform represHindu past sive code of laws, the Indian Penal Code, which came to include, of course, Section 124A (sedition), Section 295A, which forbade outraging the religious sensibilities of His Majesty’s subjects, and Section 377, which outlaws homosexuality; the BJP is the only major party that has explicitly declared its commitment to upholding the latter. It’s also no surprise that the Sangh Parivar ideal of a Hindu Rashtra finds some of its most shrill adherents—not to mention substantial funding—from Britain and US-based Hindu NRIs and PIOs: the jingoistic BJP view of India is one which they can use to assuage their sense of being treated as second-class citizens who come from a less developed culture. Aggressive nationalism based on a uniform ethos combined with unbridled corporate growth is a language the West invented. In speaking it so fluently, the BJP would undoubtedly emerge as Macaulay’s favourite latter-day son.

What of the Congress, which nervously awaits a tryst with voters understandably fed up with long years of cronyism, dynastic politics, insiderism, incompetence and 32 open

lack of vision? Its claim to an Indian vision draws on the weight of history. Its ancestor, the Indian National Congress, began as a genteel campaigning lobby for loyal ‘upper-caste’ Indians who wanted more say in governance. Under Gandhi, it became an all-India body, which was periodically able to mobilise the masses including the rural poor and oppressed castes against British rule.

Against the wishes of many, including Gandhi, Nehru and his adherents turned it from a freedom-fighting organisation to an electoral party. After Independence, working in a diverse coalition, the Congress participated in creating a blueprint for India which was necessarily attentive to different social and economic pressures including the need for an inclusive polity that would not privilege one religion over another.

Under the supervision of Dr Ambedkar, the Indian Constitution emerged as a fairly enlightened document, underscoring the secularism that the Congress party continues to tout as its unique selling point. The trouble, of course, is that in addition to being perfectly capable of playing communal forces against each other when it suits it—recall its shocking role in the anti-Sikh pogroms on 1984—the Congress too has never broken from the British colonial model of a strongly centralised state in which a linguistic and religious majority, and caste elites, call most of the shots despite some managed pluralism.

This, by the way, is a model that is being challenged in the United Kingdom itself as Scotland prepares to vote on whether to secede from the Union. Rather than addressing the root of problems, the Congress is also culpable of having used some of the worst inheritances from the colonial state, including brutal and excessive military force against Indian citizens, to crush insurgency whether secessionist movements or in the form, most recently, of Operation Green Hunt. The indefensible Armed Forces Special Powers Act, against which the remarkable Irom Sharmila has hunger-struck for years, is also directly derived from British rule.

Having failed to marry capitalism to socialism, despite some necessary measures which kept the poor in mind, the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi ‘liberalised’ India by opening the way to the full incorporation of India into US-led global capitalism, adopting the ‘growth’ mantra that its first generation of leaders had rightly been wary of. Liberalisation has made for a prosperous middle-class but despite populist rhetoric and commitment to a measure of social welfare, the Congress has ultimately failed to alleviate deep-rooted problems of distribution, exploitation of labour, poverty and hunger. Largely maintaining hierarchies of wealth, caste and power, the party repeatedly risks reducing important caste and communal questions to vote-bank politics. With questionable compromises followed by full capitulation to an economic model first propagated by the West, its story is of missed opportunities to craft something visionary and different in the wake of Independence.

14 April 2014

The constitutional Left parties did have a vision of social justice, made important contributions to India’s freedom struggle and achieved much in some areas, not least land reforms and mass literacy. They have failed, however, to emerge as a national force with wide grassroots support. The CPM, while rhetorically condemning Western imperialism, did not distance itself from the toxic legacies of Stalinism, hardly less repellent than imperialism.

While it has acted to check some of the privatisation excesses of its political partners and stood behind anti-communalism and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, it has also to answer for its own shameful exercise of brutal state power at Nandigram and Singur, where much like the BJP in Gujarat and Odisha and the Congress in Maharashtra, it has enabled Special Economic Zones to be established at the cost of agricultural land, kowtowing to corporate conglomerates like the Tata Group. SEZs are one example of how India is being recolonised by multinationals using standard colonial techniques including displacing populations, suspending constitutionally guaranteed labour protections and operating outside of state law. It should come as no surprise that the land grabs routinely undertaken by large corporations were facilitated by colonial-style legislation in the form of the Land Acquisition Act. Combine this with AFSPA and actual colonial-era statutes such as Section 295 and Section 377 and what we have is a nation that is in a state of arrested, though not yet failed, decolonisation.

We come finally to the Aam Aadmi Party, a new force with demonstrable appeal to an electorate thirsting for a meaningful alternative. Does the AAP offer a democratically decolonised vision for the future, one which takes India’s diverse religious and cultural traditions into account but also enacts much-needed transformations in our economic landscape, eliminating widespread malnutrition and yawning inequalities? That remains to be seen though the fact that the party has been joined by respected campaigners for economic and environmental justice like Medha Patkar, Rachna Dhingra and Soni Sori signals interesting possibilities. However, by emphasising the ‘crony’ element of capitalism rather than systemic inequalities that have everything to do with how corporations make ‘legitimate’ money, the AAP has so far echoed a line beloved in the West: that theirs is a ‘clean’ way of doing capitalism while Asia and Africa are ‘corrupt’. As many in the West now realise, it is perfectly possible for corporations and wealthy oligarchs to siphon off huge profits at the expense of ordinary people through technically lawful means including the removal of labour protections, weakened environmental regulations, displacement, cheap and inadequately scrutinised loans, government subsidies, tax shelters or loopholes as well as keeping wages low or extracting natural resources cheaply. Privatisation of public utilities and resources, including roads and ports, a defining feature of Modi’s Gujarat, is in itself corrupt, a form of theft. ‘By good gov14 April 2014

ernment we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government,’ wrote Macaulay, but post-colonial governance doesn’t just have to be ‘cleaned up’: it needs to be radically overhauled and democratised to throw its weight behind the disenfranchised. To not become just one more variation on the neoliberal theme of deregulation and good governance, aam shouldn’t just apply to individuals but should ensure the public good by stripping unfettered capitalism of its khas status. And while we’re talking about decolonisation, let’s hope that the nasty anti-African racism of some AAP leaders in Delhi doesn’t resurface. Let’s also agree that ‘good governance’ should mean that any leader or official under whose watch any kind of carnage takes place is automatically disqualified from holding office.

How then, to use a term coined by Nigerian scholar Biodun Jeyifo, do we undo India’s ‘arrested decolonisation,’ yet to be fully envisioned by any of the major contenders for national power? It won’t come from cynical appeals to religious pride and fomenting hatred for minorities while lying prostrate before the The BJP’s vision of gods of big business, allowing them to ride a nuclear-capable, roughshod over the militarised state run by health and well-being autocratic Hindu caste of the vast majority of elites would have made this country while ‘developing’ the bank balMacaulay proud, for ances of the super-rich he advocated strong and the middle-classgovernment and a uniform es. Without necessarily emulating them, a repressive code of law more fully decolonised vision can draw inspiration from the manifold instances in Indian history where individuals and groups have challenged the concentration of power, wealth and privilege in a few hands, whether that power is derived from caste, kingship, landlordism or religion. Relatively recent history gives us, to name but a few, kisan sabhas, Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party, JP Narayan’s call for sampurna kranti, the Self-Respect Movement, the Dalit Panthers, a recharged longstanding women’s movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the National Trade Union Initiative and Adivasi resistance to dispossession. Now is a good time to reflect on the colonial racism which infects mainstream India’s view of Adivasis as primitive savages who can be deprived of land and livelihood with impunity. Dalit and Adivasi perspectives should not be footnotes to envisioning a decolonised India free of hunger, disease, environmental degradation and deprivation: they should be central to it. Only then will we have a truly independent country with no family resemblances to the late Lord Macaulay’s vision. n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

afp

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By 2020, India’s urban population would have risen from 285 million currently to 540 million

10 July 2010 |

S u d e e p C h a k r ava r t i

India’s Demographic Tsunami A think tank report warns that India is poised on the brink of anarchy, that we could hurtle very fast into an ungovernable mess it is becoming increasingly

clear that, unless addressed quickly and emphatically, India’s inherent national crisis will witness greater churn in the next 25 years, and could easily extend to the next 50.

This churn will mainly be on account of population pressure; mismatch of aspiration and reality; and

21 August 2010 |

will continue to exacerbate these lamentable deficiencies.

There is a high possibility of continuing identity-related conflict, especially in northeastern India. Several of these issues are likely to be influenced by external factors, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and in the foreseeable future, Nepal and Myanmar.

There is the equally high possibility of change in neighbouring countries affecting the internal dynamics of contiguous areas in India. For instance, a breakdown in Nepal’s political and social fabric will directly affect the bordering Indian states of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. n

Arindam Mukherjee

Almost Dead in Leh In an unexpected twist, this enthusiast saw his rafting trip on the Zanskar turn into a struggle for survival against floods and landslides

36 open

roots of conflict such as caste-related and tribal alienation. India will also continue to have to deal with several movements that, like the present cycle of Maoist rebellion, will be rooted in issues of right to livelihood; defence of property; delivery of law and order; and justice.

India’s embedded corruption

In minutes, our rafting adventure had turned into a thin red line—one that blipped dangerously. If a similar rockslide happened on the camp side of the river, our tents would become gunny bags. We cringed and crept into our sleeping bags for the night. With bated breath, we prayed for the morning to bring safety. Tethered below in the river were two oblivious rubber rafts bouncing happily against each other in the pouring rain, waiting for another rendezvous with nature. The river, perhaps they knew, was the only way out.

Captain Gunpal Rawat, the raft leader, put his thumbs up and signalled the end of our treacherous fiveday rafting trip in Zanskar valley, Ladakh. A big smile broke on his face, and we all breathed a collective sigh. He had smiled like that for the first time in five days. That smile meant that we had finally emerged unhurt from the most volatile portion of the Zanskar river, conquering both the elements and the terrain. And so, at a time when people were dying all around us. Our team mantra—you giveth the river what you want it to give back to you—had brought us to safety. We were alive. All 12 of us. n 14 april 2014

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9 May 2010 | ritesh uttamchandani

Bilal Nisar of Varanasi photographs the dead for a living.

“When I click the dead I do it as an art.

After all, it is the last time the family will get a chance to be photographed with that person”

9 October 2010 |

V i ja i M a h e s h wa r i

Gold-Digger Nation The former editor of Russian Playboy on Ukraine’s distinction of the highest number of gorgeous women per square kilometre Massage parlours, broth-

els, strip bars and other dens of iniquity have turned Kiev into a low-key version of Bangkok.

Meanwhile, the city’s glamorous nightspots are packed with jetsetting Europeans and Americans hoping to snag a model-like babe and throw

2 October 2010 |

States call it. What’s more interesting, though, is how this global craving for hot Russian girls has transformed the mentality of your average Ukrainian girl. What does it do to the psyche of a gorgeous girl when she realises that her beauty is more valuable than any-

thing else she possesses? And when she realises that lovely as she is, there are thousands upon thousands of girls just like her—sexy, starved to perfection, and waiting for a prince to rescue them from penury? Dear reader, what would you do in her situation? n

M a d h ava n k u t t y P i l l a i

The Fastest Indian From 1996 to 2008, Anil Kumar, national record holder for both the 100 and 200 metres, had little competition from anyone in India

38 open

their single friends back home into a jealous rage. It’s all a bit like Moscow in the 1990s, when the city was relatively poor and undiscovered, and Russian girls weren’t yet the rage they are now.

It’s insane. It’s a pink gold rush as my mates from the

Usually, good athletes reserve their best for the finals. The heats and semis are run to qualify. “I ran everything like the finals. I ran without calculating,” says Kumar. “They started getting absurd timings like 9.99, 10.00 [all timings logged on handheld devices, which don’t make it to the record books]. They were confused how this was happening. At the same time, they could see I had a wide lead.” So they did what perplexed people do—they measured the track to see if it really was 100 metres. It was.

The fastest Indian is 35 now and not running anymore. He still holds the national 100 metres record of 10.30 seconds. It’s way behind Usain Bolt’s 9.58, but still the best that anyone in this country of one billion plus has run. He has run the 200 metres in 20.73 seconds—another national record—and that was a record Milkha Singh previously owned for 39 years. From 1996 till the time he hung up his running shoes in 2008, Anil was the national champion in both events without any real competition. And yet, asking “Who is the fastest Indian?” on Kaun Banega Crorepati would be a Rs 1 crore question, right at the end, among the impossible answers. n 14 april 2014

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20 November 2010 |

J a i d e e p M a z u md a r

The 1962 Jailing of Chinese Indians Revelations of India’s official attitude towards people of Chinese origin within its borders are too shocking to ignore

4 December 2010 |

In November-December 1962, thousands of Indians of Chinese origin were arrested and sent to a prison camp at Deoli in Rajasthan, where they were kept in terrible conditions for three to five years. That’s not all—many were forcibly deported to China. Those who were allowed to return found their homes and business establishments auctioned off, looted or occupied forcibly.

Shattered and depressed, they started rebuilding their lives, and while some have managed to spring back, many others languish in poverty and neglect. But what unites them all, from Kolkata in West Bengal to Tinsukia in Upper Assam, Shillong in Meghalaya, to other places across the country, is their fear—palpable in how they recount their horrific experiences to ‘outsiders’, unsure if they have said too much for their own good, unclear what point speaking up serves, and uncertain what the Indian State has in store for them. n

Dhirendra K Jha

It Happened One Night How a group of religious activists placed an idol of Ramlalla under the main dome of the Babri Masjid on 22 December 1949 At a distance, at Ramghat, Avadh Kishore could not sleep a

rajesh kumar singh/ap

wink after the dramatic departure of Abhiram Das. “Around five o’clock in the morning (of 23 December 1949),” he says, “I reached the Janmabhoomi. It was still dark, but I didn’t have much patience after what Abhiram Das had said at night and the way he had left the Ramghat temple. From the bustle of the previous few days, I could make out that it was something

to do with the Babri Masjid, but I did not know exactly what they were up to.” He was to find out soon.

Curiosity led Avadh Kishore to the site. “When I reached, it was quiet everywhere. The flickering light of a lamp was visible inside the mosque. I went closer and saw Abhiram Das sitting on the floor, tightly holding the idol of Ramlalla in his hands.” n

VISA

BY Shashi Tharoor

The Unwelcome Mat India can’t play out its soft power on the global stage if we continue with our restrictive visa policy

pride in pluralism A wooden sculpture by Riyas Komu titled My Father’s Balcony on a beach in Saint-Tropez, France

T

he roots of India’s pluralism and warm wel-

come to foreign cultures run deep. With our inimitable confluence of breathtaking vistas, delectable cuisine and cultural experiences to whet the heart and soul of the most intrepid and varied traveller, India is often truly Incredible in every sense of the word.

India benefits from the international appeal of its traditional practices (from Ayurveda to yoga, both accelerating in popularity across the globe) and the transformed image of the country created by its thriving diaspora. Our rich history, unique blend of cultural diversity, traditional wisdom and natural beauty are an undeniable draw, not only for non-Indians, but also for Indians overseas and many foreign citizens of Indian origin with roots in our country.

It is a source of immense pride that, over millennia, our civilisation has offered refuge, and more significantly religious and cultural freedom to Jews and Parsis, as

well as different denominations of Christianity and Islam. Chinese scholars travelled to study and teach at our ancient universities. The Italian adventurer Marco Polo, the Moroccan-Turkish scribe Ibn Batuta, the Chinese Admiral Zheng He and the French priest Abbe Dubois all visited and wrote vivid accounts of the India they saw—which we might never had enjoyed had the India of their times adopted the kind of visa policies we have today.

Ironically, 21st century India is one of the world’s largest economies, a proud player on the global stage with a long record of responsible conduct on international matters. The country has been attracting tremendous interest from foreign investors, with India home to the target consumer not only of multinational corporations, but also foreign governments and sovereign funds through bilateral cooperation in energy, infrastructure and even education.

Riyas Komu

The world is well and truly watching India, and is eager register her arrival. On each occasion she was turned back to engage constructively with us. However, our visa sys- with instructions to add new supporting documents or tem—in both concept and practice, from regulation to replace existing ones. Our system needlessly imposed a application—ensures we continue keep the world at an long and harrowing process that could have been avoidarm’s length. If soft power is about making your country ed entirely by the official looking at all her documents in attractive to others, the Indian bureaucracy seems deter- one go and advising necessary changes. Over three sucmined to do everything in its power to achieve the oppo- cessive days spent at the office, she drew solace from the site effect in the way it treats foreigners wishing to visit wry observation that she wasn’t the only repeat customer. The FRRO has acquired a reputation among foreigners or reside in India.

Visa processes, viewed as time-consuming, unnecessar- in India as a cross between Purgatory and Hades—hardily demanding and expensive, have become far more ly an appropriate image for a nation that ought to treat cumbersome as a result of the Government’s reaction to others as we would wish our own diaspora to be treated.

26/11. For instance, a rule imposed in 2009 restricted travellers on tourist visas to return to India for a period of at he irony becomes stark when you ask yourself what least two months after a previous visit. The rationale for this rule was to prevent a future David Coleman Headley, it means to be a young person in urban India today. It whose frequent trips to India—interspersed with trips to can mean waking up to an alarm clock made in China, Pakistan—laid the groundwork for the heinous attack in downing a cup of tea from leaves first planted by the Mumbai. As usual, the reaction was misplaced and target- British, donning jeans designed in America and taking ed the wrong people. While Headley travelled on a busi- a Japanese scooter or Korean car to get to an Indian colness visa, and not a tourist visa, lege, where textbooks might be the terrorists of 26/11 applied for printed with German-invented With a frankly tiresome, no visas at all. Restricting visas is technology on paper first pulped not an answer to terrorism. in Sweden. The young Indian inconvenient and The initial application of the student might call his friends on unimaginatively-applied rule also made victims of a wide a Finnish mobile phone to invite system of rules, India’s them to an Italian pizza while pasrange of legitimate travellers. visa bureaucracy sends sionately following the fortunes Some examples include tourists of a favourite English football who wished to make India their out the message that club! And yet we remain suspibase for journeys across the ‘winning friends and Subcontinent; a man who had viscious of foreigners and not grainfluencing people’ is not cious in extending a safe welcome ited India to visit his ailing mothto them. er was not allowed to re-enter the a part of its ethos With a frankly tiresome, inconcountry to attend her funeral bevenient and unimaginatively-apcause two months had not plied system of rules, India’s visa elapsed since his previous visit; a couple who left their luggage in Mumbai while making bureaucracy sends out the message that ‘winning friends an overnight visit to Sri Lanka were not allowed to come and influencing people’ is not a part of its ethos. As a reback to reclaim their belongings; and a Non-resident sult, the potential of sectors that are impacted by our visa Indian who had come to India to get engaged was not per- policy remains unfulfilled. One such example is the tourmitted to return for his own wedding! ism sector, which has a lot of ground to cover. This is only These might have been extreme cases, but our general reaffirmed by the fact that in 2012, around 6.6 million forpolicy approach is no better. We make it difficult, time eign tourists visited India, whereas the top tourist desticonsuming and procedurally irritating to travel to India. nation in the world, France, with a population and size a We don’t allow foreigners to work easily in our country fraction of ours, attracted around 83 million. unless they earn a much higher salary than most Indians, Though some halting progress was made in the past by and we make it impossible for their spouses to get work extending visa-on-arrival facilities to a handful of foreign permits. When they get here, we put them through the nationalities, even these were available only at a few airnightmarish experience of dealing with the Foreigners’ ports, so tourists had to arrive at the right airport to avoid Registration Office (FRRO), which ranks easily among our being turned back! In recognition of this gap, the United least-known and most-resented government institutions. Progressive Alliance Government at the Centre has poA recent example that I have been made aware of is that tentially assured a massive boost to the country’s tourism of a young American development worker with expertise sector by extending its ‘visa on arrival’ scheme to visitors in civil engineering and road reconstruction. Having en- from 180 countries at a larger list of airports—a sign that tered India with the objective of working on development our attitudes might be changing. How it works in pracprojects, it took her numerous visits and wasted hours to tice, however, remains to be seen.

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14 April 2014

The importance of travel that deepens meaningful culIt is also important to acknowledge this from the pertural exchange, appreciation of other traditions and spective of the economy. In recent years, India has sufhumanism in general should not be underestimated. fered, like most developing countries, from declining forFrom time immemorial, the accounts of travellers and eign investment, poor export performance and a scholars have been instrumental in bringing civilisations depreciating currency. The Government’s decision to percloser together. One might argue that the advent of the in- mit foreign direct investment in civil aviation and multiternet age with digital technology and social media has brand retail, pursued even at the cost of losing a recalciaccelerated the global exchange of ideas (or even the trant coalition ally, are examples of signals that encourage ‘clash of civilisations’!). However, the virtual cannot re- useful business engagement. Yet, business is done with place the experience of living and breathing the vitality people, and if we are unwelcoming before they step onto of a distant land. In this light, academic exchanges that our shores, it will only be to our detriment. grant scholars and intellectuals access to our country are also imperative.

Despite India’s democratic traditions of a free press, fort the level of the individual, idealistic young teacheign scholars and journalists wishing to write about India ers as well as writers or even business executives lookhave to face several unreasonable hurdles to secure a visa. ing for early work experience in a prominent emerging Getting into the country becomes an even bigger chal- market (which they can get in China) are being denied lenge for those academics and reporters who are deemed work permits here because their salaries aren’t high to be insufficiently friendly to India. A record of having enough to meet the Home Ministry’s arbitrary standexpressed criticism of the country, irrespective of the mer- ards. If they are willing to live on Indian salaries to get its of the argument, can result in to know our country and make a being placed on a negative list and contribution here, why on earth To allow any selfthe denial of a visa. This is deeply do we deny them? disappointing in a democracy.

The impact of our visa policies appointed arbiters of Worse, it is counter-productive: is not limited to foreigners enterIndian culture to impose the intention to keep negative ing India on business or travel. their hypocrisy and views on India from appearing The reciprocal nature of visa ardouble standards on the abroad results in precisely that. rangements means the more reA manifestation of this inabilistrictive we become, the tougher rest of us is to permit ty to accept a different point of will be for Indians to travel or them to define Indianness itwork view and defend freedom of exfreely abroad. When, on an down until it ceases pression is also visible in society official visit to Colombia, I was at large. The recent withdrawal of urged by Indian companies to ask to be Indian a book by an American Indologist for more generous work permits under relentless pressure by selfto Indian business executives in appointed guardians of the Hindu that country, it was pointed out to faith, many of whom haven’t even read the book, is one me that Colombia’s seemingly unreasonable restrictions such example. Whether or not the criticisms of her work on such visas for Indians were still about ten times more of scholarship are justified is not the point; it is the denial generous than the rules India applied for Colombian citiof the right to have an opinion that is detrimental to zens in identical circumstances.

India’s image. While India, always fiercely independent, This critique may seem odd coming from a government has no obligation to pay obeisance to academics of any minister, but it is not aimed at any specific government. country, this refusal to engage intellectually with an ar- The policies and attitudes I have criticised here have been gument and reluctance to allow the physical entry of followed by every government since Independence, of all those with possibly inconvenient views, is detrimental political hues; they are a reflection of the system and not to the goodwill the country engenders as a democracy. To of specific political choices by any party. Our bureaucraallow any self-appointed arbiters of Indian culture to im- cy, as custodians of our national ‘unwelcome mat’, has far pose their hypocrisy and double standards on the rest of more to answer than the ministry of the day. It will take us is to permit them to define Indianness down until it nothing less than a national consensus within our sociceases to be Indian. ety to make the changes I am advocating here.

India’s ability to promote and leverage its soft power in To wield soft power, India must defend, assert and promote its culture of openness against the forces of intoler- the world will get a boost only if and when the country’s ance inside and outside the country. The alienation and visa policies are thoroughly re-examined and revised. We antagonism this generates among people, who, for the must live up to the cultural heritage that this magazine’s most part, start off being generously well disposed to very title embodies. Only then can Incredible India become Credible India in the eyes of the world. n India, is considerable and entirely unnecessary.

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14 April 2014

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best of

22 Aug 2011 |

ashish sharma

Kashmiri Muslim women raise their hands to pray as the head cleric, unseen, displays a holy relic believed to be a hair of Prophet Muhammad’s beard during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan at Hazratbal Shrine, Srinagar

17 September 2011 |

Shahina KK

‘I’m Not Pleading for Mercy but for Justice’

An exclusive interview in Vellore Central Jail with those sentenced to death in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case There were other

visitors coming in.

Santhan and Murugan moved to meet them.

Arivu sat in a chair close to mine. He spoke in an even tone, mixing English with Tamil.

My Tamil is sketchy; he sensed it. He paused between words to give me time to follow what he was saying.

Arivu, prisoner number 13906, spoke of the loneliness of the death row inmate, on the loopholes in the charges against him, and how isolation actually turns into strength at some point.

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How were you implicated in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case?

I was 19 when I was picked up, doing a course in Electronics in Chennai. It is true that I handed over the battery to Sivarasan [one of the assassination squad, who later committed suicide. Arivu knew him through Bhagyanathan, brother of Nalini, who was part of the conspiracy and is serving a life term.

Arivu’s father used to write poems printed at Bhagyanathan’s press]. I used to record and edit

television news bulletins of important incidents, using an instrument called ‘character generator’ [The prosecution says Arivu did this for the LTTE, but, note, it was not a banned outfit at the time; LTTE was banned only after the assassination].

The equipment was powered by a 9 volt battery. So, I had a collection of batteries.

Once Sivarasan asked for a battery and I gave it to him. What is so wrong about that? That was my crime. I had no clue it was going to turn my life upside down. n

13 August 2011 | Anil Budur Lulla

The Crossborder Cattle Caravan To contain the smuggling of bullocks, India is better served tackling corruption than shooting at suspects By dusk, Rehman expects to reach the Indo-Bangla border, where a group of smugglers will hustle the cattle across the river Padma in Murshidabad district of West Bengal. Today’s walkathon began 220 km north of Kolkata.

It will end 55 km from the city at a cattle shelter on the border. Are you not scared of getting caught? We ask Rehman. “Amra symbolpeye gachchi (We have a symbol),” he says. The animals have been marked in advance.

Rehman’s lead pair bears a painted ‘plus’ symbol in a circle, an unofficial passport that smoothens the journey all the way to the border. It’s a sign that all authorities en route have been paid off. n 14 april 2014

best of

31 March 2012 Sohini Chattopadhyay

The Birth of a Male Contraceptive

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

An IIT professor, who has developed an original drug, has been waiting 33 years for the Government’s approval

Laser vaginal resurrection tightens the vagina to increase sexual pleasure. The procedure costs Rs 65,000–75,000 and comes with the risk of permanent scarring, rectal damage and nerve damage

16 June 2012 |

Sonali Kokra

The Vagina Wears Diamonds Mints, deodorants, diamonds, bleach—words we never thought would be preceded by the word ‘vagina’. How the vagina is going glam and why What’s new in sex? Remember that episode

in Friends when Rachel’s mother asks her this question and proceeds to announce that she’s going to try a homosexual relationship? I miss those days. These days, when I ask this question—on Twitter, at parties, on Facebook (and sometimes just to piss off the prissy aunty who keeps warning mum that no ‘decent’ guy will ever marry me)—I’m almost afraid to hear the answer. Because these days, more often than not, the answer falls somewhere between the asinine, the odd and the downright bizarre. Not surprising, considering that 60 per cent of women around the world think that their vaginas are ugly and

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disproportionate, according to the International Vagina Dialogue Survey in 2009. No wonder there are probably over 1,000 recognised euphemisms for ‘vagina’ in the English language (sticky bun, pecan pattie, sausage wallet, butter boat and whatnot). If we’re going to call our vaginas—or allow them to be called—all sorts of offensive names, we’re going to treat them likewise.

Eve Ensler, the director and writer of The Vagina Monologues, in an interview with Women.com, said that the story of a woman’s vagina is the story of her life and women want to talk about their lives… if only they had the opportunity. n

An original drug developed in India is extremely rare; one by an individual rarer still. In Indian medical lore, just two such drug molecules have been credited to individual researchers: Dr Amiyo B Kar’s Centchroman, the world’s first non-steroid oral contraceptive (marketed as Saheli), and Dr Upendranath Brahmachari’s Urea Stibamine to treat Kala Azar. Professor Guha’s Risug could be the third.

Guha’s PhD was earned in medical physiology.

He enrolled for an MBBS degree at the age of 39 (while already an IIT professor) to make up for the lack of a medical degree.

To work as a scientist in India requires not just the mind, but also a certain temperament. Sumana Das, a senior lab assistant with the Risug project at IIT-Kharagpur, calls it the ‘so what’ attitude. In the seven years she has worked with Guha, she has never seen him snap or fall ill. “So many permissions were due to come in, so much work could have been completed. At most, Sir keeps quiet for a couple of days.

Then he starts humming again,” she says. n 14 april 2014

best of

5 January 2013 | Devika Bakshi

A Woman in the City I am here. Get used to it

24 July 2009 SH O M E B a s u

Hanifa’s husband Farid Bhat crossed over to Pakistan in 1990 without telling her. After many years of silence, Farid finally called and asked her to join him. But Hanifa wasn’t able to manage a passport in time.

Bhat couldn’t wait any longer and sent her a talaknama (divorce document)

8 December 2012 |

Jat i n G a n d h i

The Death Lottery The case against capital punishment The government of India appears to be in no

mood to do away with the death penalty anytime soon. Though a majority of countries in the world have abolished capital punishment, India is among the 39 that recently opposed a United Nations resolution to that effect. Many argue that Indian society is not yet ready for doing away with hanging. From a victim’s perspective, awarding death to the perpetrator of a heinous crime might seem just. But the Indian justice system is designed in principle to be reformative and not retributive. In practice, though, it lies somewhere in the middle. There is also the argument that, acting in criminal matters, the State represents the conscience of society as a whole. In the opinion of Former Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam, “Death penalty in

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India is still a relevant punishment for the reason that there are certain kinds of crime which are so extreme and that are so abhorrent to the judicial conscience of civil society that death alone would be the just punishment.”

However, he cautions that such a sentence must be awarded only if “no other punishment can be awarded”. Yet, inordinate delays in executing those who are already on death row leads to a kind of double jeopardy, their trauma worsened by an almost unbearable uncertainty, which itself is an argument against capital punishment. The last man to be executed in India before Kasab was Dhananjay Chatterjee, a security guard accused of rape and murder, who was hanged in 2004. He spent 13 years in prison before he was hanged. n

My city is not mine. I have always felt this, but only realised it fully last week, when, in the aftermath of the unspeakably brutal rape of a 23-year-old woman by six men, I began talking to women around me about safety.

This is not a new subject. I have grown up and into an understanding that this city is hostile towards me.

My safety, my mother tells me, has always been a primary concern. No men in the house. A maid supervising the daily carpool to school. Boarding school and college abroad.

Having spent her youth getting pawed by men in DTC buses, once narrowly escaping an acid attack, she was determined to shield me from what she knew to be a harsh city for women. Every effort was made, every resource utilised to ensure I could circumvent the hazards of this city and be the independent person I was already becoming—elsewhere. I now understand that that alternative would have been to stay here, in the city but removed from it, skirting its edges, tunneling through it, being smuggled in a tight bubble between illusory safe spaces—ones with gates, or guards, or a cover charge—like so many young women I know whose parents can afford to keep them safe, to hold them apart from the city. n 14 april 2014

media

BY Shekhar Gupta

CBI to Probe Headless Body, CAG to Audit Topless Bar How can the media help a society become more open when it shuts the door on facts?

O

NLY Arun Shourie could be so reckless as to send a reporter just a few months over 23 to cover the Northeast, in January 1981, when four insurgencies were raging and Assam was paralysed, even pipelines bringing its crude to mainland refineries blocked. And this, when until then the only ‘action’ I had covered was in staid Chandigarh, which was then a six-murders-a-year city, a crime reporter’s nightmare. Another murder was almost something to look forward to, a moment of celebration. From there, it was sort of morbidly heady to be parachuted into a place where the dead, it seemed, were in at least two figures each day, until it got to four figures—in fact, 3,500 on a particular day in February 1983 in a place called Nellie, but that is another story. Nobody could have designed a better journalism school than the Northeast of the early 1980s. And one of my first lessons was, as today’s TV anchors would say, a real shocker.

My first day in Shillong, then the informal capital of the Northeast, began with an ‘on background’ press conference held by the local defence spokesman, a seconded PIB civilian in a major’s uniform, accompanied by a real major from the ‘Int Corps’ in mufti. They had received intelligence reports, they said, that a deadly clash had just taken place in Burmese territory adjoining Nagaland between BAs (Burmese Army) and UGs (our Naga Undergrounds).

It seemed, they said, that about seven BAs and 13 UGs had died and we were all free to use this information, attributing it to “sources across the border”.

I confess that for a starving reporter on a diet of one murder every two months, my eyes probably lit up.

But the veterans around me looked disappointed.

“Chhaddo ji, Major saab (Leave it, Major sir),” said the self-styled dean of the Northeast press corps. “This will not even be a brief on Page 9 in Delhi.” Then he suggested what may lift it to Page 1. “Why don’t we all agree to say 30 BAs and more than 50 UGs?” And then gave us all our moral justification: “Kede apne loki mare ne (it isn’t as if our own people have died), they are just BAs and UGs.” The majors smiled, shrugged,

and said something like, you got a point there, “What’s the odd zero between friends, but only as long as you keep us and our own soldiers out of it.”

I have used this story dozens of times while sermonising at journalism school convocations. So what am I doing repeating it yet again for Open magazine’s grown-up, intelligent readers? Because I have been reminded of it for more than a year now, ever since the terrible incident on the Line of Control (LoC) on 8 January 2013, when two Indian soldiers were ambushed and killed, one beheaded and the other disfigured.

It unleashed instant outrage in our media. We were told by authoritative anchors and commentators, in print and speech, that hapless Indian soldiers were being slaughtered by the dozen routinely and the Government was doing nothing about it.

Retired multi-star warriors, with moustaches to match the length of ribbons on their proud chests when liveried, told us our soldiers were being used as cannon fodder, poorly equipped, directed and betrayed by our leaders, enough was enough, and so on. The mood was serious: Sushma Swaraj wanted a dozen Pakistani heads in revenge, and our prime minister, even a sentence spoken by whom these past five years was an event, uttered one on the sidelines of a conference.

In the light of what had happened, he said rather menacingly, it couldn’t be ‘business as usual’ with Pakistan. That he indeed meant business, you got to know soon enough. Any hope that Pakistanis would participate in the 2013 IPL after their ODI series in India in December 2012—their last game was in Delhi two days before the LoC incident—that had marked a restoration of sporting contacts after 26/11 in 2008, vanished. It is a different matter, though, that we forgot to ban their umpires, one of whom, it later turned out, was busy subverting the IPL with our own ‘traitors’ and giving Indian cricket a bad name. He has since joined the list of famous people, starting with Dawood Ibrahim, that India’s police are looking for in Pakistan.

Riyas Komu

What is the connection between two stories more than three decades apart? Let’s check some facts. The beheading of one Indian soldier and the disfiguring of another was a terrible incident. But was this a routine happening on the LoC lately? If the LoC had been on fire as much as we whipped ourselves into believing, and so stirred even our prime minister into rolling up his sleeves, how many soldiers’ invaluable lives were lost in the preceding year on the LoC? A lot, you might think.

Think again.

The answer is three, if you include all incidents on and near the Line of Control.

Three Indian soldiers’ lives were lost in more than 12 months preceding this tragedy. This was one of the most peaceful years on the LoC since 1989 and a fine example of the gains of the peace process initiated by Atal Behari Vajpayee following the Lahore Declaration of 21 February 1999. Check some more facts. So how many Indian soldiers, in any uniform, OG or khaki, died in 2012 before this incident in Kashmir? Fifteen. Three of the Army, five of the J&K police, and seven of the central paramilitary forces. This was one of the Army’s most peaceful years since the outbreak of violence in 1989. But did anybody tell you any of this in that fortnight of rage?

Would anybody even dare to? You’d be called a traitor and risk getting your own head blown off. And if you were a journalist, you’d be lynched by your own fellow journalists and commentators. The counter-question was a WMD: are you defending Pakistanis who behead our soldiers? And so what if we exaggerate a bit? What’s the odd zero between friends? But now, even when your own soldiers are involved? We were far from perfect, even sensitive, covering our own country’s northeast in 1981 when we thought we were counting the bodies of ‘others’. By 2012, we had become so ‘evolved’ we could similarly confect page 1 headlines by adding a few imaginary zeroes to the bodies of our very own soldiers, thereby also intimidating our already quaking leaders and distorting our foreign policy and strategic discourse. This isn’t progress. And this isn’t the way any media contributes to making a society more open. If anything, therefore, large sections amongst us, the Indian media, have also contributed greatly to the closing of the Indian mind (apologies, Allan Bloom).

Because once you get into the game of overlooking fake zeroes, or decide not to be confused by facts in the quest for a bigger headline or ‘breaking news’, it demolishes the very basis of old-fashioned journalism, which is the only way good journalism should be. It should instead be about demolishing hypocrisy, exposing bullshit, and I use that expression carefully, believing that it is kosher to use in Open. But if you dump the first principles, you can keep adding the zeroes. Some examples: » The allocation of 2G licences was obviously a shameful scam. Several people, including India’s then telecom

interpolators Riyas Komu’s wooden sculpture titled Salt & Pepper

minister, are under trial, and, if found guilty, will deservedly go to jail. Somebody did steal a lot of money. But Rs 1.76 lakh crore? Could the value of that much spectrum be more than 4.4 per cent of India’s GDP in 2007? Could it be about twice more than our entire defence budget that year (Rs 96,000 crore)? If so, why don’t we abolish defence budgets? Our armed forces hold so much spectrum, they can keep auctioning a little bit of it every year and buying all the guns and planes and submarines they need. » The widely established folklore now puts the CWG scam at Rs 75,000 crore. The figure features in Arvind Kejriwal’s Swaraj, has been repeated by several politicians though none as often as Prakash Javadekar of the BJP, is routinely mentioned by many among us, and is almost never questioned. Now, some facts. In 2010, when the Games were held, Rs 75,000 crore was worth approximately £9.5 billion. In 2012, the total cost of the London Olympics was £9 billion. Now, a lot of money leaked and was stolen from CWG projects, and No society can become some people are being prosecuted while more open without decent, be. But could clean, honestly inquisitive, should the theft from our little courageous journalism, CWGbe more than the entire cost of the where the basic tenet is Olympics two curiosity, scepticism, even London years later? suspicion of all claims, » We know Adarsh was a shameful scandal including those made by of politicians, bureaufellow journalists crats and senior soldiers getting together to gift themselves cheap flats in one of India’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. But we quickly built, and equally conveniently embraced, the mythology that this land was reserved for Kargil widows. There is no document that says so, no evidence to that effect. The story was, in fact, broken much earlier by Samar Halarnkar for The Indian Express but didn’t have the same ballast as he was too good and honest a journalist to concoct a Kargil widows story. He, and the rest of us at the Express, should be feeling like idiots for having ‘missed’ such a brilliant story, if only we had cooked up one fact. But we didn’t. Yet, do a dipstick in any school or college, office, or even at a railway station, and you will be told this land was stolen from Kargil widows.

This is the most successful media-built myth in years.

And it is dangerous to question it. » Another ‘scandal’ broke in the same season where no loss could be less than tens of billions of dollars. In May 2010, even a newspaper as careful and respectable as The Hindu put the ‘loss’ from the so-called Antrix-Dewas scandal in excess of Rs 200,000 crore. The word ‘spectrum’ was involved, after all. For days, it blared off our front pages, screamed out at us from our TV screens, and then just as 54 open

suddenly disappeared. As it turned out, there had been no loss, and no scandal. At worst, a procedural irregularity for which no more punishment than a departmental reprimand is called for, if at all. But there was a ‘deal’ with a ‘private company’ and ‘spectrum’ was involved. It took a technologist as respectable as Kiran Karnik to scream that one kind of spectrum was not the same as the other. But by that time, reputations had been besmirched, a promising deal lost, and morale at ISRO so damaged, they’ll need to be bitten by a mad dog before they do something similarly entrepreneurial again.

Has any of us in the media apologised to anybody for this? Have we even looked back in introspection?

Nothing of the sort. We are the new conquistadors. We just march on, stepping over the bodies of our victims, admiring the skull mountains we pile up in our arrogant wake. No society can even hope to become open without decent, clean, honestly inquisitive and courageous journalism. But courage is not about decibels or the type-size of headlines after you have conveniently added a few zeroes to inflate facts. That is the exact antithesis of good journalism where the basic tenet is curiosity, scepticism, even suspicion of all claims, including (or rather particularly) those made by fellow journalists. Competing in journalism was never about who can shout louder, insult others more, or add more zeroes whether it is to taxpayers’ money or the bodies of enemies or even friends. That kind of journalism makes for a closed, oppressive, backward-looking society.

I know the perils of saying this when we the media are in such a self-congratulatory mood, fattened by a media boom fuelled by years of growth and economic reform and egos pumped with the heady helium of a weak government and furious audiences. I know also the questions I would be asked in return: so do I think that Pakistanis did not behead our soldiers; did I think there wasn’t a big scandal in 2G, CWG and Adarsh? I think I will be spared on ISRO-Dewas now. My answer to all of these will be the same: yes, each one was an awful event. But should that justify the hype, the exaggeration, what my brilliant colleague and Editor of The Indian Express Raj Kamal Jha calls ‘poutrage’? Does it justify adding those extra zeroes?

A

s journalists, our job is to question. There is a sto-

ry in every fact, event, claim or counter-claim. But you have to think like good, proud, even creative professionals. My favourite story on this, which again I use often in those convocation speeches, exploiting my avuncular status as the longest-serving editor of an English broadsheet after the venerable Benjamin Bradlee (whose stirring memoir, A Good Life, I gift along with their diplomas to students graduating from the Express Institute of Media Studies), is from the movie Indecent Proposal. And I use it knowing that most graduates of today were too young to be legally allowed to see it, though Woody Harrelson 14 April 2014

renting out wife Demi Moore to Robert Redford for a night for a million dollars is a yarn that must transcend generations, even if it outraged Art Buchwald back then: If Redford has to pay for it, there must be something wrong with America, he wrote.

Digressions apart, my favourite is the sequence after Harrelson separates from Moore and goes back to teach at a school of architecture. He lectures, holding up a brick for a class of curious young students. What is this, he asks, and when students say ‘a brick’, he says ‘no’. He quotes legendary architect Louis Kahn who said even a brick wants to be something, you just have to think creatively. Do Google that sequence. It’s an eternal YouTube favourite.

Then put any fact, any claim, any statement, any allegation in place of that brick. Each one of these wishes to be a story. You just have to think creatively—and with the courage to defy the herd, block out the noise, filter the static. Then we contribute to making ourselves a more open society.

I misuse my years and the hospitality of Open’s pages to submit that, of late, we haven’t done so. We have treated each claim, allegation, statement—particularly when it comes from fellow journalists—merely as something to amplify or magnify and, if possible, still convince audiences that it’s ‘exclusive’. In other words, call every brick, what else, a brick, but just be louder than others in claiming you found it or dug it out. This is dumb, and I can cite several additional examples to make that point.

We treat every CAG report as gospel. But do we realise it is the auditor’s job to nit-pick? Every organisation that employs journalists, who as a community are so brilliant at creative writing that they never submit their expense bills and vouchers less than six months late, will find in its internal audit reports several cases each year of staffers claiming 31 days of newspaper expenses for February. It’s bloody ridiculous, for sure. It tells us we are lazy, stupid and don’t know how to count. But do we then multiply it by the number of journalists in an organisation, further by the number of years they have worked, and then add a few zeroes to make a nice breaking-newsworthy scandal?

Then why do we accept so readily the fantasy that the 2G loss was twice India’s defence budget, 4.4 per cent of GDP? However buzzy it may look in Hollywood, a newsroom is a lonely place at night for an editor. You deal with many dilemmas and tough calls. But the lesson I have learnt over so many years is that for an editor, no power—and responsibility—is more important than being able to decide what is publishable and will be published, come what may. And similarly, what isn’t, won’t, come what may. It isn’t easy. I am not writing a definitive memoir yet.

So let me mention just one of these.

At the peak of the bad phase of the Kargil War, before our Army had started making any progress, the Pakistanis turned over the bodies of Captain Saurabh Kalia and five members of the patrol he was leading. An official statement wasn’t made, but Army ‘sources’ indicated that the 14 April 2014

bodies were badly battered and ‘mutilated’. Knowing the implication of the word ‘mutilated’ in the Subcontinent, given our nasty history, I asked Manvendra Singh, then our defence correspondent and one of India’s finest on the defence beat ever, if he was sure the bodies were ‘mutilated’ or if the soldiers had been battered to death. How did it matter, he said, we should just say ‘mutilated’. I argued it was wrong, and would be particularly unfair to their families as mutilation has an entirely different connotation.

We have to be clinical with facts, I said. How could we be clinical with the bodies of our own soldiers, he asked.

Rightly or wrongly, my editorial call prevailed, though I backed our story with a suitably angry front-page edit. But Manvendra did not lose that argument. He did not come to work the next day. But not in protest. He was also an officer in the Territorial Army (in the special forces, in fact) and surfaced the next day, in full uniform, in the Army headquarters. Actually, in the psychological warfare cell.

Manvendra, later an MP and now an MLA in The lesson I have learnt Rajasthan, remains a friend and our arguover so many years is that ment endures. I befor an editor, no power— lieve, however, that and responsibility—is both of us followed our dharma: I as a journalmore important than ist, and he as a soldier. being able to decide what In the course of that is publishable and will be unwinnable argument, I’d recalled the republished, and what isn’t sponse of the Managing and won’t, come what may Director of BBC Radio, Richard Francis, when the Beeb faced criticism for the clinical equidistance it was maintaining during Britain’s Falklands war against Argentina. “It is not the BBC’s role to boost British troops’ morale or to rally British people to the flag... The widow in Portsmouth is no different from the widow of Buenos Aires... The BBC needs no lessons in patriotism from the present British government or any other.”

If you are an Indian journalist, editor, star anchor, oped page ‘thoughter’, think about it. This was in May 1982.

Could one of us today show the courage to speak a line like this and live to tell the tale? You’d be called a traitor, a liar, a foreign agent, and quartered and hanged from an electric pole. And not just by the intellectual titans on Twitter, but by your own fellow journalists.

I apologise to those I am upsetting, but I’d rather echo the views of Time magazine essayist and reporter Aryn Baker who wrote that the media boom and rise of 24-hour TV had not been a force for liberalism or progress in Pakistan. Lately, it hasn’t been in India either. The media can’t help a society become more open if it chooses to be such a closed-minded, angry, unquestioning and hubrisdriven herd. n open www.openthemagazine.com 55

ruhani kaur

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Bir Bahadur sees in his elder daughter a reincarnation of his brave sister Maan Kaur who did not flinch at the sight of the sword

13 April 2013 |

Aanchal Bansal

A Father’s Decision The man who saw his father behead 26 women of his own family On 9 March 1947, Sant Raja

Singh and his younger brother Avtar Singh rounded up 26 women of the family in a haveli that belonged to their friend Gulab Singh. “They were women of ages ranging from 10 to 40 years, sisters, sisters-in-law, daughters, nieces and aunts. The rest of us, including my mother, were packed off to the rooms up-

9 February 2013 |

friends. But we did not trust him. We should have.”

A few days after the beheadings, the girl who was demanded in the trade-off eloped with her Muslim lover.

“She was alive, while we lost over a hundred women trying to protect their honour.

That ill-fated girl married a Muslim and brought us death,” says Bir Bahadur.

In hindsight, does it not seem like a tragic error of judgement? “Certainly not,” he says. “Had my father agreed to that arrangement, I wouldn’t have been able to face you or tell you my story.

Those girls could have fallen prey to the attackers later.

Many women did. It was the best they could do to protect their honour.” n

Ha i m a D e s h p a n d e

The Dark Side of Asaram Bapu His comments on rape were merely the tip of a sinister iceberg 56 open

stairs,” says Bir Bahadur.

“We treated Muslims very badly, sometimes worse than animals,” he says, turning reflective. “Our Muslim workers were very honest and reverential. But we treated them like untouchables. A backlash was bound to occur and we deserved it in some ways. We were offered refuge by one of my father’s Muslim

Vaghela can still vividly recall the harrowing sight—his son Dipesh’s arms were missing from the shoulder down. All the internal organs were missing, only the hollowed out ribcage remained. His left leg appeared to be cut off at the ankle, the right leg seemed burnt. His nephew Abhishek’s body was half burnt as well. Instead of helping the family, the policemen harassed them and refused to register complaints against Asaram and the ashram. Till this point, Asaram had enjoyed a cosy relationship with the media.

But when the media started reporting on the Vaghela case, many other skeletons started tumbling out.

Several women reporters were targeted and mercilessly beaten up. Kuldeep Singh Kalair, a reporter with Divya Bhaskar, was locked up in the ashram and beaten by sadhaks. He was rescued by the police.

The incident served to lend credence to the allegations of tantric practices by Asaram and his followers. The rumours had been around for a while, but before the deaths of these boys, these were mere whispers. n 14 april 2014

best of

22 June 2013 | Aresh Shirali

Marijuana Myths and the Mass Market This drug should be legalised

AMIT DHAR

20 April 2013 | L h e n d u p

G Bhutia

The Hills Go Red

Memories of an agitation unsettling the calm of Kalimpong and of a human head on a lamppost What is memory but a

collection of seemingly random incidents? Why is it that so many fall by the wayside, yet we retain some with such clarity and precision? I suppose it is because memory is rooted in feeling. Fear, love, anguish, whatever the feeling, collects these episodes and holds on to them. I can’t describe what I pre-

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cisely felt that day even now. I was too young to identify what a particular feeling actually was. But I remember that morning like it was yesterday. My mother was walking me to preschool. And as I walked, my hand in my mother’s, there it was, hanging on the lamppost in the town square, inside a polythene bag, surrounded by a

crowd of people—a human head. It had turned a purple-blue in the morning chill. And whoever did it understood the nuances of a public show. The head’s lips were painted red. Its hair was neatly combed, and its face was powdered.

It took a while for policemen to come and get a ladder tall enough to bring it down. n

In popular portrayals, it’s all the rage these days. In Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy, it features as something of a relaxant... a conditioner of calm (its role as a rouser of rebellion and an inducer of naivete, however, is rather too hallucinatory a reading). In Ayan Mukerji’s blockbuster YJHD, the drug appears in a Holi song-anddance sequence that pitches it as a reliever of inhibitions, perhaps even a stirrer of romance. What these books and movies are referring to is bhang, a mash of cannabis leaves that India’s Narcotics Act of 1985 does not outlaw, not hashish, the plant’s icky dark resin that has evoked images of menace in the West ever since its medieval association with Hashashins (from whom the word ‘assassins’ is derived).

Imagery, though, is not reality. As it happens, there is no real difference between bhang and hashish.

Both have the same psycho-active chemical, THC, and there is scant evidence that this stuff is either addictive or harmful. Which is why open-minded folk don’t see the point of retaining an orientalist old ban...

One doesn’t need one’s head dunked in icy water to concede that the odds of its legalisation are slim. But then again, with a General Election due soon, this is a good time to push for it. Arguably, a joint smoked openly by a rolling romantic is far less dangerous than a stash of opium hidden in a chaddi by some raving rabble-rouser. And if anybody should be keen on the mass adoption of a drug that causes short-to-mid-term memory loss, it’s the Congress. n 14 april 2014

MONACO

PROMOTIONS

Be Captivated

M

onaco, the second smallest country, is a tiny strip of land that nestles under the foothills of the Alps, bound by the French Riviera on the west. And yet the Principality of Monaco is world renowned for its leisure and business tourism, gastronomy and hotels, art and culture, wellness and world-class sports.

For the glitz and glamour, head to the restaurants, glittering casinos and flamboyant clubs. It is a country that has been seen in three Bond films - Casino Royale, Golden Eye and Never Say Never Again.

Some of the world’s best chefs are found in the 170 restaurants of Monaco, making it a gastronomes delight. Alain Ducasse’s exclusive restaurants, such as La Trattoria (in summer) or the three-Michelin-starred Louis XV restaurant at Hotel de Paris are a must visit. Under the direction of acclaimed chef, Joël Garault at Le Vistamar, Hôtel Hermitage, the diners fall under the dual spell of a Mediterranean-influenced seafood menu and the spectacular view of Monaco’s yacht-filled harbor.

Fashionistas can shop from brands like Chanel, Christian Dior, Celine, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Valentino, etc, and if you are looking for a spot of pampering, head to the world renowned Espa,

Thermes Marins Spa, Willow Stream Spa, and Spa des Cinq Mondes.

A trip to the Principality would be incomplete without a visit to the famous Casino de Monte Carlo, replete with its beautifully decorated stained glass windows, sculptures and unique allegoric paintings. Another must visit destination is the Opera House, designed by Charles Garnier, at the palatial Monte-Carlo. Chase the night with a trip to Jimmy’z, Sass Café or Buddha Bar to spot the stars.

Every spring Monaco hosts the Formula1 Monaco Grand Prix, the most demanding and glamorous race of the year.

The winding streets, the screaming engines, smoking tires and determined drivers make the Grand Prix one of the most exciting races.

Some of the other experiences to savour are the changing of guards, museums, Rock of Monaco, Exotic gardens and the Oceanographic museum.

Unlike other European countries, Monaco has a favourable climate through the year, so you could indulge in skiing or simply bask in the sun on the beach. Be it the luxurious spas or the magnificent Grand Prix or the mega yachts or the fashionable streets, the principality of Monaco never leaves an opportunity to captivate its visitors. n

www.visitmonaco.com

MARKETPLACE

BY BENNETT VOYLES

Another Gold Brick in the Wall Why democracy and protectionism don’t mix

Vivek Vilasini

T

o understand why India should further open its

in just two weeks the traffic would be backed up all the economy, you might want to go to El Paso, Texas, and way to Mexico City, 700 km away, according to an immisee a section of the five-metre high wall that now gration official quoted in Peter Andreas’ 2013 history, separates around 1,100 km of the long dusty border be- Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. tween the United States and Mexico.

The effort at the southern border has also encouraged El Paso’s wall is not much to look at. It doesn’t have the Canadian entrepreneurs. British Columbia is now a cenbrutal gravitas of the old Berlin Wall or the architectural tre of indoor marijuana farming—an industry now so character of the Great Wall of China. Considering it cost vast that one 2010 report estimates that the growers of the $600,000-$1.8 million per kilometre, Uncle Sam should extremely potent ‘BC Bud’ in British Columbia steal about have gotten more for his money than an overgrown ex- $100 million of electricity every year to keep their secret pressway barrier. But as a case study of what happens greenhouses lit. when a large and chaotic democracy tries to stop millions All in all, what HL Mencken said in 1925 of Prohibition of people in two entrepreneurial countries from doing is just as true of the US drug war as it moves into its second century:‘There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, business together, it’s worth a closer look.

Washington ordered the wall in 2006 to help stem two but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not problems: first, to stop Mexican drug dealers from fulfill- less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not ing the voracious US demand for illegal drugs, and sec- smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not inond, to stop undocumented workers who sneak into the creased, but diminished.’ country to do jobs no one else would do at wages no one It’s true that Colorado and Washington State have just else would take. legalised marijuana, but there In terms of meeting its stated are 48 states to go, and there is goals, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 no sign that the federal governIt’s true that Colorado has been a failure. On the south ment is ready to give up the powand Washington State side of the wall, the cartels are er and money the drug war keep have just legalised more vicious now—as many as bringing in.

100,000 people have died in wars Mexican labourers, meanmarijuana, but there are between drug cartels since while, are now reportedly either 48 states to go, and there leaving the vault to professional 2007—and the drugs they smugis no sign that the federal smugglers or just staying home. gle in are far more potent. On the north side, the country now keeps Free trade has created such a government is ready to around 2 million people in prisboom in Mexican factories that give up the power and on, many for drug-related offencthe opportunity to clean somemoney the drug war keep one’s pool in Malibu for less than es—25 per cent of all the prisoners in the world. minimum wage and a good bringing in However, considered as a busichance of forced deportation is ness in its own right, there’s only looking a lot less attractive now. one word for the government’s

long line in the sand: perfect.

rugs and illegal aliens are particularly colourful In fact, the wall is almost a perpetual motion machine commodities, but there is nothing special about the for political profit. First, there are the contracts involved in maintaining and monitoring the wall, including business opportunity the attempt to block their entry 20,000-plus guard jobs. Besides the usual opportunities creates for officials—any commodity for which there is for graft and bribes, the drug war in Mexico has also in- demand will do. A retired Texas sheriff told The Guardian creased US arms sales (gang members reportedly favour in 2011 that besides some extra money he made smugthe US arms market as it is much less regulated than the gling whisky and cigarettes into Mexico and people into Mexican market). The wall has also helped keep drug the US, back in the 70s he once brought sugar in from prices high, ensuring that economic incentives remain Mexico and sold it to a pie maker in Philadelphia. so attractive there is no reason to fear the country will ever A surprising amount of official energy goes into stoplack smugglers. ping this fairly plentiful white powder from getting into But rest assured that the wall is not really in danger of the country. In his book Republic, Lost: How Money actually disrupting the illegal commerce in any meaning- Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (Twelve Books, ful way. Mostly everything reportedly travels by freeway 2010), Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor these days. Thanks to the boom brought on by the North and campaign finance reform advocate, estimates that American Free Trade Zone, only a few trucks are inspect- although the sugar duty costs the American economy ed: the volume of commerce is so high that immigration about $3 billion a year directly (and indirectly, another officials estimated that if they tried to inspect every truck, $147 billion in medical complications wrought by the

D

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14 April 2014

substitution of high-calorie high-fructose corn syrup as at INSEAD in Singapore, who also studies the economa sweetener, which has helped make America fat), sug- ics of corruption. “Once you settle down into one of these ar producers hang on to their $1 billion benefit because outcomes, it’s very hard to move into another outcome.”

At some point, if the rules get complicated enough, it generates a steady—and steadily rising—source of campaign contributions. As of 2010, the sugar industry only the best-connected and most sophisticated players invested nearly $6 million a year in Congress, and the can navigate them, Nye says. And at this point, it beheavily subsidised corn lobby chipped in nearly $20 mil- comes a barrier to entry (for other would-be players) that lion more. ‘There is no explanation for protectionism to- incumbents will fight to preserve. day that isn’t tied to corruption,’ says Lessig in an email.

Such rules can end up creating cynical sorts of alliancStrictly speaking, campaign contributions are not es. During Prohibition in the US, for instance, ‘bootlegcorruption. The US Supreme Court says that people are gers and Baptists’, members of a teetotalling religion, just exercising their constitutional rights to speak to were said to be the two constituencies that most wanted their representatives. But a few academics have argued to keep the temperance experiment going.

The impact of this kind of corruption goes far beyond that the traditional definition of corruption is too narrow: instead of thinking of corruption as simply being the industry and officials in question. “One of the bythe relatively inefficient business of greasing a few products of that habit is that it undermines the genuinepalms to get their way, the powerful pay legislators to ly good things that government does… you create cynichange the law. In the last analysis, whether something cism which treats all the rules as fungible,” Nye says. is legal, write Daniel Kaufmann and Pedro Vicente in This link isn’t an entirely new observation. The British economist Alfred Marshall, John their 2011 paper ‘Legal Corruption’, is merely ‘a decision Maynard Keynes’ mentor, visited variable of the elite in power’.

The traditional definition the US in the 1870s to study the American tariff system and came Kaufmann, now president of of corruption may be back convinced they were a bad the Revenue Watch Institute, a too narrow: instead of idea—less for economic than culNew York anti-corruption think tank, and Pedro Vicente, director tural reasons. At the time, the tarthinking of corruption of the Nova Africa Center for iff system had made the customs as simply being the office hugely profitable to the Business and Economic relatively inefficient government and customs offiDevelopment in Lisbon, calculate that from this point of view, business of greasing a few cials, who gained both on a share fines and forfeitures and the Land of the Free starts lookpalms to get their way, the of ing kind of expensive. Kaufmann through bribes. powerful pay legislators and Vicente rank the US right In his book Smuggler Nation, Andreas describes how this made around Angola, Nigeria and to change the law Kenya if you combine illegal corthe collector of Customs in New ruption and what they define as York a coveted position, said to be second in prestige and influence legal corruption—and that’s only to a Cabinet appointment. Chester Arthur, the chief based on 2005 data. customs officer in New York and later President, once

earned $56,000 on a single bust—more than the ome economists argue that tariffs are almost inher- President’s annual salary at the time. ently corrupting. “In theory, a tariff should be just like Marshall later wrote, ‘I found that, however simple the any other tax,” says John VC Nye, a professor of economic plan on which a protective policy started, it was drawn history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. on irresistibly to become intricate; and to lend its chief In practice, though, tariffs tend to work out different- aid to those industries which were already strong ly, he says. Importers try to evade the tariff by working enough to do without it. In becoming intricate it became around the definition. This leads authorities to add more corrupt, and tended to corrupt general policies.’ definitions to close the loophole, which in turn leads to Or as Jagdish Bhagwati, the Columbia University econmore creative evasions and more attempts to close the omist, has observed in a discussion of how the Licence new loopholes—and new opportunities for corruption. Raj gradually corrupted the Indian Administrative “Each set of evasions creates new rules, which then lead Service: ‘Where substantial corruption can unambiguto new levels of corruption,” Nye explains. ously be found, as it often can, one must recognise that “If everyone around you is corrupt, your chance of be- it is not a cultural given. On the contrary, often it is the ing caught is low; if everyone is honest, it’s expensive, result of policies that have fed it.’

In other words, every country is a land of opportunity. and [you] will tend to be honest,” explains Pushan Dutt, an associate professor of economics and political science The only question is: for whom? n

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Arman Zhenikeyev/Corbis

best of

27 July 2013 |

A a s t h a At r ay B a n a n

That Elusive Orgasm Many women in India do not climax, and men alone are not to blame As party conversations go, this one has taken an interesting turn.

We are talking of the female orgasm—or lack thereof. “My grandmom told me when I was 17 that women often have the best orgasms when they pleasure themselves,” says the screenplay writer, “I think she said it so I wouldn’t go and fornicate at that age, but today, I feel she is right.”

She then rolls her eyes. “No way, I told her then; I was going to have mind-blowing sex. But it’s a lot of work. Faking it just seems so easy.” n

5 October 2013 |

K a l p i s h Ra t n a

Misogyny, Rape and Medicine Close encounters with doctors

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But there is collateral damage to be considered. The dehumanisation of a woman’s body has a definite mirror effect. The examining doctor is dehumanised in tandem. One way or the other, the patient escapes the system, and recovers her humanness. The doctor does not. His (or her) dehumanisation is permanent. North of the pelvis, things are no different.

I’m reminded of an eminent paediatrician, now happily dead, who lectured us on breast-feeding. At his clinic that day, the subject was a frail young woman, close on starvation. She was practically a living skeleton, her dark skin ashen from anaemia. She had a baby at her breast.

The Professor detached the baby and squeezed the mother’s breast to demonstrate a drop of milk at the nipple. “Look at the Indian mother!” he raved. “I want you to remember this woman. She is starving.

She is dying. But her breast continues to produce excellent milk. This drop has 1.1 per cent protein, 4.1 per cent fat and 7 per cent sugar. She will die with the baby still at her breast and that last drop will be as sweet as this one.” And he licked his finger appreciatively.

The woman snatched the baby from the professor and stormed out, her face burning. n 14 april 2014

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5 October 2013 |

M i h i r S r i va s tava

The Sex Lives of Godmen Of spiritual healers, hypnosis artists and sexual exploiters Gurus who prey on their disciples often pretend to be spiritual healers who, inspired by a higher purpose, insist on the use of their sexual organs to bestow them with beneficence. They draw strength from superstitions, thrive on the naivete of those who see them as godly, and pose as mediators of divine favour. Their seduction scripts may vary but are always purposive and well-rehearsed with spiritual talk to trap gullible children, women and men...

After a brief sermon on the merit of ‘letting go’, the

session started. As it went on, the lights grew dimmer and the music deafening till the point that the Sharmas could neither see nor talk to each other. Like everyone else, they were swaying with the rhythm, and were soon separated in a maze of dancing silhouettes. It was now a hallful of warm bodies, a sort of single organic mass with all identities blurred, as everyone began hugging, patting and kissing someone or the other. The Sharmas did, too—who, they did not know. n

Pallava Bagla/Corbis

27 November 2013 |

Gunjeet Sra

Child Brides India has an estimated 24 million of them. We meet a few

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She spots a young man and runs into his arms in an uninhibited display of affection. With the young man, there is an older balding man to whom she nods. The young man is her 22-year-old brother Sonu. He is accompanied by her 40-year-old husband Vinay Kumar, a mechanic at a spare parts shop, who introduces himself as a 24-year-old. Priya laughs at his introduction and he slaps her. She calms down. She understands that she is married to a man thrice her age by force of circumstance. She even understands the violence. “I always knew I was poor, but I wanted to work, save up and eventually marry later when I had learnt how to cook and clean. Right now, I don’t know anything and this makes my husband angry. He slaps me when the food is bad and I fall short on my wifely duties,” she says. “But I never cry. No matter what. The other day he hit me when I asked if I could borrow his mobile to play some songs.” One of the women in her entourage, unhappy with the revelation, nudges her, then disappears in search of something. The latest figures from the United Nations Population Fund show that 14.2 million girl children are married off annually; that makes 39,000 daily. n 14 april 2014

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7 May 2010 |

Ruhani Kaur

As India gets ready to welcome Commonwealth Games delegates, 3 million people are likely to be homeless by the end of this 15-day extravaganza. On 15 April 2010, this entire Madrasi jhuggi cluster was demolished to make way for the Barapullah Nullah Bridge, which will connect the Games Village with venues in Central Delhi

23 November 2013 |

S h a i l e n d r a T ya g i

Reliance as a Defaulter The grand fight over KG Basin gas may finally have to be resolved by the Judiciary While it takes two hands to clap, it takes only one to slap.

Riled by the mysterious fall in gas production at the Relianceoperated KG Basin gas field, a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas has recommended that the private producer be treated as a ‘defaulter’ for its failure to stem falling gas output. The ‘geological complexities’ that Reliance cites as a reason for the choke-up have always had few takers. Ever since the CAG’s indictment in 2011 of the Centre for its dubious role in having tilted the relevant gas production contract in Reliance’s favour, the KG Basin has generated more controversy than gas for the energy-starved country. The 68 open

Government, stung by that criticism, stopped reimbursing the company its contractual dues on the grounds that it had fraudulently ‘gold-plated’ expenses (as the CAG alleged). This triggered a tussle that is far from over.

Despite the penalty, some observers suspect that while Reliance and the Government appear to be engaged in a bruising battle of wills over the price of gas, scheduled for revision in 2014 (with the company looking for three times the earlier State-approved price of $4.2 per unit), the two combatants may ‘settle’ for a deal if a way is found for the country to bear a hike in price. n 14 april 2014

DISSENT

BY Ananya Vajpeyi

Urgency of the Alternative What does an AAP candidate say about Indian democracy?

Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

I

n India at the time of a national election, it’s usually considered fair for politicians and political parties to make promises that everyone knows will not necessarily be kept; for electoral contestants to make claims, counter-claims and allegations that are exaggerated and sometimes completely preposterous; for ticket-seekers to switch parties and allegiances at the last minute depending on the patronage they receive or are denied; and in general, for language to be used loosely, excessively and rhetorically during campaigning. The usual rules about how we speak and what we mean are suspended for a few months, after which things once again return to normal.

Odd as that sounds, the exceptional use of language is part of the routine of any big Indian election, and this is probably true in most other democracies as well.

But the 2014 Lok Sabha election in India appears to be unfolding in a way that distorts the use of campaign language as well as the language of election analysis more than usual. It is not just about exaggeration, false accusations and dithering, but rather about serious ideological about-turns and self-censorship on the part of many contestants as well as commentators. Thus a BJP victory and a Modi-led government are spoken about as foregone conclusions; a new party like the AAP is judged negatively and written off preemptively even though it has been in existence for a very short time before having to go into campaign mode at the national level; and pundits are busier making their own preferences and loyalties clear to those they imagine will assume power in short order, rather than actually doing the hard work of gauging and analysing the nation’s mood.

Opportunists of every type are jumping into the electoral fray, be it prominent journalists, controversial activists or hitherto untested politicians. Election surveys, that in previous polls seemed like a reasonably good measure of how things would play out, now appear designed to confirm whatever opinion-makers want the public to believe, rather than providing any genuinely new data on which way people are likely to vote when they rationally correlate their lived socio-economic conditions with the ballots they will cast in coming days.

Most worrying, however, is the growing list of topics that the media seems wary of tackling, whether on television or in newspapers. Thus despite a growing body of evidence on the Gujarat government’s culpability in the 2002 violence, there is no urgent insistence on an acknowledgment from Narendra Modi himself or from anyone in his administration at the time, nor is an apology forthcoming. Those in the press who ought to be stubborn about demanding some explanation, some ownership of responsibility for what happened, are in a hurry to move on from this subject rather than undertake any kind of serious confrontation with the Modi camp.

Similarly, news and debate around a range of issues, from corporate corruption to crony capitalism, to the Muzaffarnagar riots, to rape laws, to the Ishrat Jahan encounter killings, to permissions for mining in ecologically sensitive zones around the country, all seem to be shrinking and shutting down rather than becoming much more vigorous and transparent.

As time comes to take stock of how various leaders and parties have performed in the past five or ten years, and to make up our minds about whether or not they deserve to be voted back into office, the media—especially the commentariat—is increasingly reluctant to speak truth to power. Whether this is because of explicit political pressure to remain silent and compliant, or because of an internal calculation of self-interest on the part of various editors, media barons and pundits, the overall effect is to create an impression of consensus or clarity where in fact none exists. A ‘wave’, a ‘surge’ and an overwhelming 72 open

‘mandate’ for change are notions that get bandied about when we do not really have any reliable way to measure, calculate or predict what voters are thinking and feeling, and how they will behave at the moment they reach the ballot box. Not just statistically based and frequently updated election surveys and opinion polls, but old-fashioned indepth and long-term economic, social and political analyses, too, look more and more predetermined, rigged and vacuous—unable or unwilling to engage seriously with the realities and possibilities of democratic decision-making.

H

ow did we arrive at the point of such a comprehen-

sive failure to make sense of our own democracy, of its processes of self-renewal and self-transformation, and of its radical potential that surely lies buried beneath the avalanche of fake news, bought opinion, advertorials and manufactured consent? Intense and escalating conflicts over resources, and serious and growing divides of class, caste and religion, suggest that ‘the public’ is very far from being on the same page on almost any issue of local, regional or national importance.

That such a huge, diverse and divided electorate will vote for (or against) any one person or party—that Indian democracy is in fact recasting itself as an American-style presidential race—seems to me a false assumption, and one that will not be borne out by the results of this year’s election. Merely because one contestant has been projecting himself as a prime ministerial candidate, and one party has been campaigning as though every seat in the Lok Sabha depended on the name and track-record of just this individual, doesn’t mean that practices of electoral choice, and habits of political judgment that have been in place for the past seven decades will suddenly disappear overnight and yield a new kind of democratic system.

This is wishful thinking on the part of Narendra Modi and his campaign managers, and we should not grant that he is right simply because he says he is.

The Congress is campaigning in more or less its usual way—with a mix of large rallies, small meetings, some press and some advertising. Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and other senior leaders put in their usual face time, nothing beyond what they might have done in any previous election. The BJP, on the other hand, has conducted both massive public meetings with appearances and speeches by Modi, and an aggressive and expensive ad campaign.

In addition, it has systematically bought huge amounts of network time, and now as the election actually approaches, Modi has started to give highly contrived and tightly controlled interviews to his chosen coterie of admirers and supporters.

The AAP’s strategy is in fact the most interesting, because it must proceed with practically no funds, all new party-members, campaign volunteers and election candidates, and a complete lack of infrastructure, cadres or 14 April 2014

other sorts of resources to put up a viable contest in any Its dissent consists in a thorough-going critique of polconstituency anywhere in India. The three parties are like itics as usual, and attempts, howsoever chaotic and somepersons belonging to three distinct generations—the times unsuccessful, to do politics differently; indeed, to aged Congress, the middle-aged BJP and the youthful AAP. re-imagine politics in India as it was once sketched by The Left and regional parties, including the CPM, SP, BSP, Mahatma Gandhi, an outline of swaraj. Arvind Kejriwal’s RJD, Trinamool Congress, DMK, Shiv Sena, National 2012 book, titled simply Swaraj, does not resemble MK Conference, etcetera, have their own styles and stories, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj of 1909, except in its underlying imbut for the moment let us set them aside and focus on the pulse to re-orient the relationship between self (swa) and national players. sovereignty (raj), and thereby transform the very nature The AAP is so small, so raw and so inexperienced com- of the Indian polity. True dissent is constructive and not pared to the Congress and the BJP that its main plank is to just about demolishing what exists and dominates; it is remind the nation of a possible—future—alternative, about painstaking efforts to build something unpreceand not a realistic prospect of victory this time round or dented, to emerge out of a moral deadend and crisis of leeven any time soon. It is not contesting to win, and nei- gitimacy of the kind that engulfs current Indian politics.

Kejriwal’s decision to contest the Lok Sabha seat of ther the party’s leaders nor their likely voters have illusions on this score. The AAP has set itself the task of keep- Varanasi against Narendra Modi, and Yadav’s decision to ing alive the imagination of a different kind of politics, a contest Gurgaon, both demonstrate a willingness to updifferent language of public opinion, and a different type hold a principle even at the cost of personal power. The of ‘democratic upsurge’, to use its senior leader Yogendra probability that they will both lose these elections is high, Yadav’s well-known phrase from even if we grant that it isn’t over an academic article he wrote in till it’s over. Kejriwal wants to 2000. It is expressing a principled It is for all Indian citizens keep alive the vision of another opposition to both the Congress’ Varanasi, a multi-religious space to recognise that the work with inter-twined traditions of moribund way of doing politics, sought to be done by the Hindu and Muslim provenance; a and the BJP’s bid to hijack the pocivilisational hub with a long hislitical narrative of 21st century Aam Aadmi Party is the tory of inter-sectarian coexistence India, even though it is still hesiwork of dissent. And and dialogue that cannot be cedtantly and haltingly feeling its no matter how free and ed to exclusionary and majoritarown way forward. ian Hindutva politics. To do this, The AAP is not so much claimfair our elections, he must be the David to the ing to know how to set things democracy cannot Goliath that is Modi. right, as pointing out that things flourish without dissent Meanwhile, Yadav suggests a have gone badly awry, and need Haryana that is as much about rufixing. This is a courageous stand to take, all the more so because no ral society and agricultural proimmediate political rewards duction as it’s about urban develseem in the offing, despite the reopment and modern technology. cent stint in office in Delhi during Arvind Kejriwal’s In a sense, he wants to bring Haryana down to earth and short-lived Chief Ministership of December stem its growing class divides, its gender imbalance and 2013-February 2014. In fighting elections without much outdated patriarchal notions of village justice, its viohope of gaining power, the AAP is trying to suggest a new lence against migrant labour and the working poor. That paradigm for Indian politics, once that harks back in spir- he can actually do any of this in the face of powerful landit to the national movement and makes the current polit- ed caste interests, rich corporations, local oligarchs and a ical ambitions of the BJP look even more crass, cynical and deadly real estate mafia seems like a Quixotic ambition at lacking in idealism than they are already. best. It is only the moral conviction of the real dissenter, Some months ago in the run-up to the Delhi Assembly the determination to fight the good fight regardless of outpolls in late 2013, Yogendra Yadav had described the AAP’s comes, that can allow either of these AAP leaders to enter politics as being about “alternatives, not substitutes”. the electoral battles they have each chosen. These and During the all-too-brief tenure of the AAP government in other such contests are less important for the seats that Delhi, several observers called it ‘post-ideological’, since will be won or lost by the AAP, than they are as symbols of the party was distinguishing itself from the left, the right an alternative (not a substitute) political imagination. and the centre as conventionally understood, but still not Whether or not our local AAP candidate wins, it is for all clarifying a specific, separate, ideological position of its Indian citizens to recognise that the work sought to be own. Over time, the AAP is emerging as not merely ‘oppo- done by this fledgling party is actually the work of dissent. sitional’ with regards to ruling or hegemonic forces, but And no matter how regular, free and fair our elections, rather as ‘dissenting’ in the true sense of the term. democracy cannot flourish without dissent. n 14 April 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 73

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Watching television coverage of anti-rape protests in Delhi, Priya realised she was one of the cases being talked about

21 December 2013 |

ashish sharma

Neha Dixit

Fathers, Brothers and Other Demons Priya was raped by her father and brother for nine years—and her mother knew all along—till she saw on television the protests against the 16 December gang-rape That day after dinner, Priya and her two brothers waited patiently for a repeat telecast of the show. There were still twenty minutes to go. In the meantime, they watched the news bulletin, which included reports on the aftermath of the death of the young woman gang-raped in Delhi on 16 December 2012.

“There were two reports. First, that Nirbhaya’s father had immersed her ashes in the Ganga, and second, that there had been a fresh round of protest by young girls my age at India Gate in Delhi. As I watched, my mother scolded me for not listening to my father, who was calling me to his room. I didn’t want to miss 74 open

the show,” she says. That night, she was raped by her father, as she had routinely been over the previous nine years.

“While he was raping me on 1 January, while my entire family, my mother and two younger brothers, sat outside and watched Vardaat, the words of a boy from the India Gate report rang in my ears: ‘We want the rapists of Nirbhaya to be hanged. We have maa, behen, beti (mother, sister, daughter) too.’ It disgusted me,” she says, her facial muscles clenched in anger. “Was I not a behen or a beti? Do those who have behen and beti not rape? Am I the only one?” n 14 april 2014

ENGLISH

by SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

Very Humdrum,

The last Englishman could still be an Indian

Popperfoto/Getty Images

T

Sir

he 13th Duke of Bedford wrote that ‘living in an

English way is more important in India today than it was in the times of the British Raj.’ That was in the early sixties. It’s tempting to suggest that had His Grace been living (he died in 2002), he might have written that living in an Indian way is more important in England today than when India was the brightest jewel in the British Crown. But that would be political propaganda.

Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary, gained instant notoriety by declaring chicken tikka masala the favourite national dish. Immigrant voters, to say nothing of 1.2 billion Indians, lapped up the compliment.

They didn’t know that in wooing voters, Cook was also upstaging his boss’s wife, Cherie Blair, who had already endeared herself to South Asian constituents by draping herself in a sari. Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurateurs have been squabbling ever since over the copyright for chicken tikka masala but that’s another story. England is too secure in its cultural moorings to make significant concessions to foreign lifestyles, whereas India on the make knows that globalisation is Westernisation. Language is its simplest manifestation.

The wheel has turned full circle. In the high noon of Empire, anglicised Bengali barristers spoke lovingly of England as ‘Home’ while swadeshis chanted ‘Down with English imperialism!’ Now, the Delhi ‘puppy’ thinks salwar-kameez is exotic ‘ethnic’ wear and sneers at a bureaucrat as a ‘babu’ in the colonial idiom of ‘a native clerk who writes English’. With his intimate knowledge of England, VK Krishna Menon acidly remarked the English were obviously highly developed since they all spoke English.

We are catching up.

Indira Gandhi once mentioned two knowledgeable Englishmen in India arguing whether tashri or rakabi was the right word for a small salver. Unable to decide, they asked their bearer. “Huzoor” the man replied, “hum toh isko ‘palate’ kahte hain. (Sir, we just call this a plate)” In a not dissimilar vein, Chandra Shekhar once dismissed an Uttar Pradesh minister as a ‘stepney’ minister. For those who are not familiar with Hinglish, the target of attack was being derided as a car’s redundant fifth wheel.

The spread of English indicates I was mistaken some 50 years ago in pronouncing with the conviction of youth that India’s English-language newspapers were doomed.

I compared them to Delhi’s Red Fort or the Victoria open www.openthemagazine.com 77

Memorial in Kolkata, imposing monuments to alien grandeur with few links to surrounding reality. My mistake was to assume idealistically that survival depended on quality.

I had no idea then that the distinguished English critic and scholar Humphrey House, who worked in Calcutta and declared his Bengali was improving tremendously because he read the English-language Amrita Bazar Patrika every day, was the victim of a devious Bengali trick. Asked why his paper’s language was so appalling, the Patrika’s editor and owner, the venerable Tushar Kanti Ghosh, replied that the British were our enemies. Since he couldn’t hurt them in any other way, he was doing his best to destroy their language. In short, the empire was writing back.

John Wain, the novelist, would give Ghosh full marks for succeeding. In a 1961 article on Indian English in the monthly Encounter (defunct like the Patrika and damned since it was avowedly funded by the CIA) Wain argued that Indians had only an ‘insecure grip on the idiom’. He added that being the lingua franca, Indian English ‘lacks the finesse of nuance.’

He was right.

Asked why his paper’s The multitude has language was so no use for idiom or the finesse of nuance, isn’t appalling, the Patrika’s it? English bhasha is an editor and owner, Tushar Indian language only.

Kanti Ghosh, replied that When he was viceroy, Lord Hardinge of since he couldn’t hurt the Penshurst sent King British in any other way, George V what he he was doing his best to called an ‘oriental gem’. destroy their language It was a letter of apology that read: ‘Rajah Pyari Mohan Mookerjee regrets that the sudden aggravation of the pain in his legs caused by the proximity of the full moon prevents his attending the Levee.’

If India has 22 official languages and 398 others (including 11 that are extinct) it must also have 22 recognisable and 398 unrecognisable variants of English. The 11 extinct versions probably include the ‘English English’ free of the ‘corrupting influence of American English’ of Prince Charles’ dreams.

Familiarity with the vernacular helps understand Hinglish, Benglish and the other Englishes that have taken sturdy growth in native soil. Regional variations can sometimes hamper communication. People outside Bengal are convinced that Bengalis see red at the word ‘nonsense’. But nonsense has no special connotation, derogatory or otherwise, for English-speaking Bengalis. It is deadly abuse only for non-English-speaking Bengali equivalents of Mrs Gandhi’s bearer. Since class matters more than caste in Bengal, this can lead to serious misun78 open

derstanding, as when a well-meaning Delhi hostess asked a Calcutta memsahib if nonsense was a no-no word.

‘What nonsense!’ the Calcutta memsahib exclaimed, leaving the Delhiwalla (or should it be wali?) convinced she had given grave offence. There must be many such instances across linguistic divides since cadence and construction make Tamil English as different from the Punjabi brand as the Geordie dialect of England’s Tyneside from a Devon burr.

C Rajagopalachari shared my reservation about English-language newspapers, albeit for altogether different reasons. When the first edition of The Indian Express appeared on 5 September 1932, among the goodwill messages was one from Rajaji who wrote with his customary asperity: ‘If you had asked me for advice, I should have warned you against now putting money in the English language.’ He warned that the English readership was old-fashioned, timid and indifferent to public issues. The future belonged to the masses ‘and this means that the educational and news service must be in Tamil inside our own province and in Hindi outside.’ Since Rajaji himself wrote superbly lucid English, he had no inkling of the social aspirations that prompt ordinary folk to say ‘palate’ instead of tashri or rakabi.

Nor would he have understood the commercial and political dimensions of this yearning to be a sahib. If ‘the noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England’, the Devyani Khobragade controversy confirms that a flight to New York is the noblest prospect for many Indians. An American visa becomes much simpler if the interview can be conducted in English. Nowadays, Mamata Banerjee sounds quite fluent in her TV appearances, thanks, it’s whispered, to private lessons in conversational English. Can Narendra Modi be far behind?

The East India Company official who warned that the British were ‘paving the highroad’ for their own ‘return home’ by teaching Indians English didn’t realise that English education was another clever Bengali conspiracy. Raja Rammohun Roy and the Anglicists who outmanoeuvred the Sanskritists in lobbying Macaulay over the medium of instruction didn’t want to drive the British out of India. They were getting ready to drive Indians to America where they would be reborn first as NRIs, then PIOs and ultimately as OCIs which is an improvement, surely, on the merely twice-born?

That is why there are no takers for Raj Narain’s exhortation to ‘drop the tie and wear the loincloth’ because ‘otherwise the Indian culture will die’. Loincloths are not appropriate to North America, the home of India’s deathless culture. Groups like the Hindu American Foundation had to tip off the Shiksha Bachao Andolan here about Wendy Doniger’s blasphemy. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had this influential community in mind when he predicted Durga Puja mantras would one day be recited in English.

It might have been Persian at one time. Place names like 14 April 2014

reuters

dress diplomacy Former British first lady Cherie Blair trying on a Banjara outfit in an Andhra Pradesh village during Tony Blair’s 2002 visit to the country

Kolkata’s Sudder (‘Sadr’ from the Sadr Dewani Adalat) Street and a range of legal terms remind us that Persian was the court language under the Mughals. The Bengali pejorative ‘ujbok’—which my father hurled at me whenever I did something especially stupid as a boy—is another relic of that forgotten era. I realised it meant a duffer but no more until the erudition of the late Nurul Hasan, who died as governor of West Bengal, lightened my ignorance.

Apparently, the original Uzbek (‘ujbok’ is our Bengali mispronunciation) was the ultimate pejorative in the aristocratic (and racist) Persian’s vocabulary.

Our internalisation of the word isn’t the only evidence of unthinking servitude. PV Narasimha Rao told Singaporeans in 1994 that India had absorbed every conqueror, save the last. He should have added that roles were reversed and the last conqueror tried to absorb Indians but found them as indigestible as chicken tikka masala.

Zhou Enlai called language ‘a means of colonisation’. But with Queen Victoria learning Hindustani and Mahatma Gandhi speaking in English, the colonisation was halfhearted. Hence, the infelicities with which our newspapers are studded, the many examples of cultural disorien14 April 2014

tation and social insecurity, and the linguistic fumbling of upwardly mobile Indians.

Paying tribute to the noted anthropologist Verrier Elwin in The Telegraph on the 50th anniversary of his death, Ramachandra Guha wrote that ‘he came out to India’. Would a native English-speaker ever have written that Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru ‘came out to England’? No! Self-respect would never allow him to use a form of words that implies England is the Outer Darkness to which visitors ‘come out’ from the sparkling metropole to which they, as well as the writer, belong.

Only some Englishmen in India might use words that suggest a degree of contempt for the immediate surroundings. It would be deliberate. The Indian who does so either speaks ‘a mutated language’ (Patrick French’s description of the linguistic legacy of the Raj) or pretends to be what he is not. Either explanation points to crassness, justifying Malcolm Muggeridge’s mocking remark that the last Englishman would be an Indian. As the East India Company burra sahib told a young recruit who asked about the Company’s preferred language, it was ‘Humdrum’. And hum-drum it’s been ever since, hasn’t it? n open www.openthemagazine.com 79

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RAUL IRANI

Gurmeet Singh, 65, a long-time Congress supporter, worked in the transport business before he retired. Such was his fame that Dr Manmohan Singh (then Finance Minister) attended his son’s wedding

27 December 2013

C h in k i S in h a

Men, According to Prostitutes A primeval analysis endures But the ancient wisdom

of brothels is that youth isn’t forever. Use it to earn money, and don’t waste it on men who come seeking to prove their masculinity or discover themselves. In any case, they eventually become leeches.

Yet, many have fallen into that trap.

Zeenath Pasha, a eunuch who owns a brothel in Gulli No 14, says the men who walk up the stairs are not to be taken

22 March 2014

holding on to their sanity, before they are sent back to their world of morality with their urges taken care of.

Their kinks are safe with the women. They may be ugly, even diseased, but they are customers and they need to keep coming.

“What are they to us but customers? We take them to the rooms, service them, take our money,” Puja says. “The problem arises when a cus-

tomer becomes permanent.

Then, he wants your soul.

That’s not for sale.”

Others refer to men as passengers who ride them. They come and go, that’s all. … In this world, the men are indeed passengers. They come and go. But in these purgatories, they are purged of their most primitive desires so that women on the other side, back in safe homes, can get to make love. n

U ll e k h N P

Pilgrim’s Progress Hinduism’s holiest destination has become Indian politics’ hottest dateline 80 open

seriously. “There is no love here. Only sex. All kinds of sex,” she says, “There is no end to desire here. Brothels exist because we don’t judge.

Money takes away that privilege. We are only providers.” … Desire is primitive, and so is sex. And sex isn’t only about entering another. Or intercourse. These cramped quarters with their cages and berths are places where sex workers give men a chance of

“It is his faith in the gods that has brought [Modi] here. It is no coincidence. There are no coincidences in Varanasi. Call me superstitious if you wish,” offers this strong man with a squat gym physique, save for his ample tummy, referring to the Gujarat CM’s candidacy from this constituency that houses one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines, the Kashi Vishwanath temple.

Such a display of ‘faith’ is par for the course in Varanasi, where iconoclasm gets muffled by layers of myth. For Adi Shankaracharya, one of the greatest Hindu sages of all time, life’s four big wishes were to live in Varanasi, enjoy the company of good people, bathe in the Ganga and worship Shiva. Over the centuries, the historical and spiritual resonance of Varanasi, also known as Kashi, has drawn people here for their last earthly step in their quest for Nirvana—final freedom from a cycle of birth and death. n 14 april 2014

SEXUALITY

BY Tishani Doshi

In Praise Of PHOTOGRAPHS FROM SA - SERIES II by BANDEEP SINGH

An elemental reunion of the sensuous and the erotic

The Androgyne A

s a child I was often mistaken for a boy. My mother

was dictatorial in matters of coiffure. She kept my hair boy-cut short for reasons of practicality. When not in school, my uniform was a T-shirt and a scuzzy pair of Wranglers. And despite the small gold studs that gleamed from my earlobes, in the wilds of Tamil Nadu, where I grew up, I was routinely called ‘paiyan’. I relished most elements of boyishness—the bullying and bravado, the freedom to spend my time in trees. And while part of me—the deep, unsayable part—must have experienced some amount of shame, some angst at having failed at girlhood, I braved those androgynous years without accumulating too many scars.

One incident remains. The Van Allen Hospital in Kodaikannal. This must have been circa 1983. I’d been throwing up for days, and even though we didn’t do doctors in my family, after three days of vomitville I was carted off for inspection. The hospital smelled and looked like something from another century, when people used to die of straightforward diseases like whooping cough. The nurse administering my injection had a hard, fat face, and over the years I’ve unkindly ascribed Nurse Ratched-like characteristics to her. As she held the injection over my bottom—or was it my arm?—she looked at me sternly, and pinched my shoulder. “Be brave!” she snarled, “Little boys mustn’t cry.”

Of course, I bawled. I might have even kicked my legs and said, “I’m a girl, damn it, unhand me and let me blubber. It’s my birthright.” Over the years what has endured is the slow transformation of this memory from shredded pride to wonder. Is pain gender specific? Isn’t the need to express sorrow universal? Can anything ever restore your broken heart like falling to your knees and choking every blessed tear out? What a throwback. Even for India in the sticks, 1983, to think boys shouldn’t cry.

At some point between dreaming for breasts and hips as a teenager, and growing my hair out in a desperate bid for womanhood, this Nurse Ratched-Van Allen incident sidled from disgruntled childhood memory to becoming open www.openthemagazine.com 83

a pivotal psychological juncture at which I began to un- continues to criminalise same-sex relations. That while derstand my own sexuality. If we think of human sexual- the nation’s English language magazines spew out annuity as the capacity to have sexual feelings and al sex surveys informing us that we have never been responses, the primal instinct within us that draws us more emancipated because Indian women are nearly six toward one being or another, then surely any discussion times as likely as American women to have done the deed of sexuality must start with ourselves, our bodies. Before in a taxi, it takes an avalanche of gang rapes across the looking out to comment on society at large, we must country and a high profile news editor sticking his finfirst look in. gers into a colleague’s panties (twice) in an elevator, to In my body I see vast contradictions, a jostle between make sexual abuse a political talking point. male and female elements. Those early traumas have The problem with sexuality in India today isn’t so made it impossible for me to separate gender from sexu- much its inability to compete with the aesthetics of the ality. Penis-envy? Sure. Heterosexual? Disappointing, ancients, or even the lopsided visibility between urban and rural, it’s the utter lack of space for any discussion of but definitely.

When I look out to the vast sexscape of India, I see dan- the erotic. Eros without sex might have been something gerous terrain: syndromes and psychoses, landfills of re- Plato advocated, but he also wanted to chuck women and pression, lakes of voyeurs, wells brimming with female poets out of the Republic. He also aspired to idealised nofoetuses, coastlines of creepy octopus-armed uncles, a tions like Truth and Beauty. damaged limbic system unable to send or receive signals, In our Republic we have police chiefs advising us to carand a thick, red line of HIV, colouring its way like a river ry chilli powder in our purses for self-defence, and god across the country. But things are getting better, I’m told. men telling us to call our rapists bhaiya so they may be Certain women in certain big cities can wear shorts in brought to their senses. We have an aspiring Prime malls without being lunged at, Minister attributing female maland men are dealing with emasnourishment in his state to girls In my body I see vast culation issues by channelling being beauty conscious, even contradictions, a jostle though most of these girls are unShah Rukh Khan.

Your body is the universe, says between male and female der five. And for all the fingertowards the West for the Dhyana Shlokam, which elements. It is impossible pointing Bharatnatyam dancers invoke in bringing rampant sexualisation for me to separate gender to our shores and corrupting rodevotion to Nataraja before they begin. His body, which you hope bust Indian values, what bothers from sexuality. Penisis manifest in your body, contains me most is that sex has become envy? Sure. Heterorivers and mountains; his speech such serious business. sexual? Disappointing, is the language of winds; his ornaGoogle ‘India sexuality news’ ments, the moon and stars. and you’ll find nothing but troubut definitely ble. Violence, rape, homophobia, This sounds less like esoteric killing. Not a word about pleamumbo jumbo these days when you have black hole theories that sure or desire, or the implicit sensuggest we can fit the entire human race inside the vol- suality contained in hibiscus flowers, the deep shade of ume of a sugar cube. The implication is profound: if you a forest, earth wet from monsoon rains. can access the marvels of your own body, you can someFor a country whose creation myth insists that sexual desire is the origin of the universe, whose abstractions of how connect with the greater cosmos.

It’s a terrific leap between sexuality and spirituality, the divine are yoni and lingam; for all the pluralistic, gensomething the Bhakti poet-saints understood perfectly. der-bending traditions we come from, where the union But what’s the point in bringing them up? Or the Gita of Shiva and Vishnu can produce an offspring and noGovinda, or Muddupalani, or Vatsayana, or any talk of body bats an eye—how on earth did sex in this country stop being sexy?

Indian ars erotica? The reality is far more banal.

So much of understanding sexuality has to do with sexThe reality is that we rely upon busty Bolly-KollyTolly-wood belles, who resemble a series of Warholian iness. And this comes back to the body. The image we silk screens, to sell us bathroom tiles and biscuits, be- have of ourselves measured against the images we recause sexuality has become, as advertising has long ceive from the world around us. “Anatomy is destiny,” hoped for, a bona fide consumer product in and of itself: Freud said, no doubt fixating as usual on how gender deA homogeneous brand of Fair & Lovely beauty feeding termines personality, and how this in turn is the key to understanding sexuality. into homogenous ideas of sexuality.

I wonder what Freud would make of the fact that of all The reality is that while countries like Mexico and Argentina are legalising gay marriage, the Supreme the people who live in conditions of slavery today, almost Court of India refuses to review a 153-year-old law that half of them can be found in India. Fourteen million peo84 open

14 April 2014

catching up with the body Tishani Doshi performing her guru Chandralekha’s Sharira

ple who have no autonomy over their anatomy.

Or what he would make of the changing anatomies of those of us who do have control of our bodies. Nips and tucks and dumbbells in an effort to have Sridevi’s nose (joke), or Hrithik Roshan’s biceps; a billion people luxuriating in a Bollywood wet dream of sameness.

I wonder what he’d make of the proliferation of surrogacy clinics, where babies can be made with no exchange of bodily fluids, where women gestate together like hens in exchange for money.

And while all these things are written and spoken about—sex and violence, sex and power, sex and money, cheap sex, paid sex, dirty sex, depraved sex—what remains a complete mystery to me is what regular consenting Indian adults do in their bedrooms, or backyards, or indeed, in taxis. Is there such a thing as sweet sex, sexy sex? And if so, between which bodies is this happening: how and where, and what words are said?

T

hings save you. My salvation happened three years

ago in an apartment in Venice, watching a horror movie, Don’t Look Now, with the most delectable sex scene of all time—Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland

14 April 2014

going at it, their bodies like planks; lean, hardened, digitally unaltered 1970s bodies. It’s where the ghost of my boyishness, that little paiyan, stood still, watched and finally smiled. The utter beauty of Julie Christie’s infinitesimal breasts, bared so candidly, the thin arms and legs, capable of as much sringara as any Khajuraho sculpture.

It took arriving at thirty-five, in a strange land and a borrowed apartment, to come to terms with my body. A decade of working as a dancer—grinding my pelvic bones into stone; trying to personify Shakti, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding; drawing all the energies within: sex, sense, spirit—to understand the body’s possibilities and limitations, its many pleasures and betrayals. And for all that work, I’m still catching up with my body.

Sometimes she lags behind, sometimes I must catch up.

The androgyne is within us all, whether in the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, or as in Ardhanarishvara, part Shiva, part Parvati. Male and female elements halved, conjoined, forever seeking the other. And part of what I’ve understood about sexuality is that it’s a coming together, a wholeness—first within our own bodies, then with another’s, then with the land around, the trees, the sky, outward and outward. n open www.openthemagazine.com 85

HUMOUR

By JUG SURAIYA

May the Joke Always Be on Us

How the politically incorrect ethnic joke keeps us together in the great fraternity of laughter

W

hen Khushwant Singh was editor of The to all live together and collectively call ourselves Indian.

Illustrated Weekly of India, the publication sold Much more than officially approved mantras like more copies than ever before or after. One of the ‘Unity in diversity’, it is the decidedly unofficial and often secrets of his success was a series of articles he commis- politically incorrect ethnic joke that helps keep us togethsioned on the various communities—Punjabis, Gujaratis, er in the great fraternity of laughter.

Bengalis, et al—who make up the many-hued mosaic of It is a fraternity that today is more endangered than it has ever been, threatened by a surging tide of intolerance repthe republic.

The series, which highlighted the foibles of each com- resented by regional and religious chauvinism, which ofmunity, proved once again that what Indians most like to ten takes violent forms. Intolerance—the greatest enemy talk about, and joke about, are other Indians. If we all joke of the fellowship of laughter—has many ugly faces, be it about each other we are laughing not at each other, but those of the racists who assault people from the Northeast with each other. And who better than an eminent living in Delhi, or of Raj Thackeray’s goons who go on the Sardarji—famous, among other things, for his Santa- rampage against ‘outsiders’ from Bihar, or of the bigots Banta jokes—to champion such a who intimidate publishers to comedic camaraderie? withdraw from the market books If intolerance is the Being what might be called a which take a less than reverent professional joker, I’m often view of Hindus and Hinduism. great enemy of laughter, If intolerance is the greatest enasked by po-faced interlocutors laughter is the antidote emy of laughter, laughter is the whether Indians have a sense of to intolerance. As Freud most effective antidote to intolerhumour. A serious question to almost put it, the first ance. As Freud almost put it, the which I give the most serious anfirst person to hurl a quip instead swer I can think of. Which is that person to hurl a quip of a stone at his adversary was the if we Indians don’t have a sense of instead of a stone at inventor of civilisation. Humour humour, we’d better go and get his adversary was the is the substitute stone without ourselves one. Because it’s only a which no society worth its name sense of humour that will enable inventor of civilisation so many people, of so many differcan exist. ent castes, creeds and convictions, In his ponderous—and decid-

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illustration by anirban ghosh

edly unfunny—treatise on the subject, Henri Bergson calls laughter ‘a social gesture’. Without using the term, he tends to liken the effect of laughter to what the ancient Greeks in the context of tragedy called catharsis: the purging of the negative emotions of hate and fear through the witnessing of tragic drama.

By juxtaposing opposites—the fat man and the thin man, the clever mouse and the stupid cat—humour reconciles polarities, not by ignoring them but by highlighting them to the level of absurdity and creating a mechanism for conflict resolution. By an extension of such logic, the more pluralist a society—the more varied the individuals it can accommodate—the richer must be its fund of ethnic humour.

Why are Sikhs the butt of so many jokes in India, with Sikhs themselves—like Khushwant—cracking ‘surdee’ jokes with the greatest gusto? With their willingness to go anywhere and undertake anything (remember the cartoon of Americans landing on the moon to discover a Sardarji has set up a dhaba there?), Sikhs could represent potential competition on the employment market to local populations in much the same way as the Irish and, latterly, the Poles and other East Europeans do in Britain.

Such perceived ‘threats’ are rendered harmless by turning them into amiable clowns, with not much in the brains department.

The business-savvy Gujarati—exemplified by the resident of Antilia, the world’s most opulent private resi14 April 2014

dence—is cut down to laughable size for his supposed fondness for eating ‘snakes’ between meals, and those who would shake hands with the canny Sindhi are advised to count their fingers after doing so.

The pushy Punjabi is put in his place by having it said of him that he has no culture except agriculture, and the intellectually snooty Bengali has his nose put out of joint by being parodied for his passion for ‘pheesh’ (fish) and ‘phootbaal’ (football) and the proclivity to burst into ‘Robindrosongeet’ without provocation. The ‘Mallu’— the Sikh of the South, who’ll go anyway, work at anything—is lampooned for his spelling out of the word ‘banana’: ‘Bee-yay-yen-yay-yen-yay’.

In all these cases, laughter is a left-handed compliment.

We laugh at people whom we suspect can out-rival us in getting jobs, or making money, or being socially assertive, or showing off their cultural credentials. Laughter whose subject is the underdog is cruel; laughter aimed at a selfproclaimed topdog is admirable, and is deemed to be so not least by the one who is the subject of such humour. If I’m worth making jokes about, I must be doing something right. So, to rephrase that old national integration chestnut, the next time you see a snake and a Sindhi, please don’t kill either of them. Instead make up a new joke about snakes and Sindhis—or whatever and whoever you like— and send it to be published as a Letter to the Editor in Open.

It’ll help us show that, against all odds, India can still have the last laugh on—what else?—us Indians ourselves. n open www.openthemagazine.com 87

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Spoilt for Choice

You’d think that with great success came great luxury. But Ranveer Singh, fresh off two back-to-back blockbusters, is a stressed-out fella. Turns out the actor has had a tough decision to make. Having committed to starring in both Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani and the Karan Johar production Shuddhi, 2015 could’ve been the year of Ranveer Singh, but as luck would have it, he’s had to choose one of these two A-list projects.

Shuddhi, billed as an ‘epic dramatic film with substantial action elements’, was originally intended as a starring vehicle for Hrithik Roshan, who walked out of the project, reportedly over creative differences with his Agneepath director Karan Malhotra, who also helms the new film. Shuddhi is slated to go on the floors in a little over eight weeks, in June. And Johar has already announced a 25 December 2015 release date.

Bajirao Mastani, which apparently requires Ranveer to shave his head, is scheduled to go on the floors in January next year, with a—wait for it—25 December 2015 release date in sight.

And since it’s unlikely that Shuddhi would have wrapped principal photography by January, Ranveer found himself in the sticky situation of having to choose one of the two films. With shooting dates for both overlapping, and with Bhansali in no mood to delay his schedule, there was no option but to make a choice.

Sources close to the actor say he sought the advice of his mentor Aditya Chopra to help him make the decision. Not that the Band Baaja Baaraat producer was much help, though. Adi reportedly told Ranveer that Bajirao Mastani is the bigger project of the two, and that the actor ought to show his loyalty to Bhansali, who signed him for RamLeela when he was only two films old. But, at the same time, Adi is famously close friends with Johar, and couldn’t advise Ranveer to ditch his buddy at the eleventh hour either.

Earlier this week, Ranveer reportedly made his decision public, bowing out of Shuddhi for the sake of Bajirao. Like us perhaps he’d heard that in the last 88 open

two weeks, Bhansali had reached out to Shahid Kapoor and Sushant Singh Rajput as possible replacements for Ranveer.

But industrywalas are saying this messy situation could easily have been averted if either Johar or Bhansali had set aside their egos and adjusted their schedules so Ranveer could do both films. That’s what he’d been counting on too.

A Narcissus by Any Other Name

Nargis Fakhri, leading lady (the word ‘actress’ seems wrong) of Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, reportedly gave the makers of Shaukeen sleepless nights with all her constant dithering over dates. First, she was thrilled to be cast opposite Akshay Kumar in Rumi Jaffrey’s remake of Basu Chatterjee’s 1982 comedy. Then she asked the makers if they could move their dates to accommodate an American film she’d been offered.

They agreed. Then she came back to them in a few weeks, asking if they’d be willing to move her dates again. This time they balked.

Nargis, you might remember, was meant to star opposite Akshay in Khiladi 786, but dropped out when the actor insisted she sign a three-film contract with his production outfit. She appears to have irked the star again, this time by putting her Hollywood film before Shaukeen.

Lisa Haydon, fresh off rave reviews for Queen, will now star opposite Akshay in Shaukeen. But Nargis is not upset about losing the film. Her friends say she’s clear about pursuing opportunities in the West where she’s more comfortable with the language, and believes she might have more scope to find material suited to her skills.

“Sure she’s happy to be in a Hindi film, but she has no illusions about the fact that they only want her to shake her booty in Bollywood,” a friend reveals.

Did boyfriend Uday Chopra use his connections to snag Nargis the Hollywood film? That’s a question she won’t answer. Nor, sadly, will her friends.

Relegated to RomComs

Three duds in a row appear to have cost Imran Khan dearly. The Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na star once took pride in never signing too many films in advance (a ploy usually adopted by actors to secure their future), but that working style may have backfired. After Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, Once Upon Ay 14 april 2014

Time In Mumbaai Dobara, and Gori Tere Pyaar Mein all crashed and burned at the box-office, Imran didn’t have a single ‘go project’ to fall back on.

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Bhavesh Joshi was in early stages of pre-production, but it is now clear the film will be made without him.

News has leaked that the makers have roped in Hasee Toh Phasee’s Sidharth Malhotra to replace Imran in this DIY superhero film, which Motwane described to me as “an angry young man story… of an everyday Gujarati boy frustrated with the system who becomes a vigilante”. It’s well known that Imran had been working on his character in Motwane’s film, beefing up for the part, following a strict diet of low-cal steak, even offering inputs on the character’s costume and look.

But all is not lost. Nikhil Advani recently signed Imran for a rom-com he will produce. Barfi star Ileana D’Cruz is expected to star opposite. However, the actor will begin shooting for the film only towards the end of summer, after his heavily pregnant wife Avantika delivers the couple’s first baby.

Why Sanjay Dutt Won’t Talk

Among the many things Sanjay Dutt reportedly did while out on parole recently is meet with publishers who’ve been pursuing him for his autobiography. The star allegedly asked north of Rs 3 crore to pour out his controversial life story in print.

One publisher who claims he met Dutt at his Bandra home over an afternoon drink says he painstakingly explained to the actor that publishing isn’t a lucrative business, and even bestsellers have a hard time recovering that kind of investment. But Dutt apparently insisted that he wasn’t going to sell himself short.

Previously the actor had hired a research agency to put together a study that calculated the estimated business that a book on his life could do. He apparently referred to that study again in his meeting with this publisher, who describes it as “bogus research” that was “obviously conducted by people with no idea of the business”.

When the publisher appealed to Dutt’s emotions, saying it was an opportunity to record his memories and experiences for posterity, the actor allegedly spat out angry Hindi cusswords, saying he had no interest in sharing his traumatic life experiences with the world, “fukkat mein” (free).

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Executive Exodus

The big development that everyone in Bollywood seems to be talking about is the mass exodus from a prominent film studio recently. As many as five top executives at one of the industry’s leading studios have handed in their resignations to the MD within the past few weeks, creating a shakeup seldom seen before at a Bollywood corporation.

At least three creative heads, one distribution head, and one marketing head are reportedly moving on. And the reason appears to be a colleague who until recently worked parallel, but has now been promoted over them. The lady in question is being groomed for the currently vacant CEO position.

Easily among the most respected studios in the business, with a long history of nurturing both commercial and indie projects, it was acquired by a Hollywood giant some years ago.

There are murmurs among ‘suits’ in the industry over the fate of the studio. But the film trade doesn’t seem particularly perturbed, given the strong reputation that the MD enjoys and the relationships he’s built with filmmakers and actors over the years.

Whither the Expense Account?

Meanwhile, at another film studio, internal gossip all involves the stingy ways of its new honcho. The most frequently discussed incident is one from last year when the studio boss travelled to an overseas film festival along with a bunch of filmmakers whom the studio was hosting and whose latest works the fest was showcasing.

According to at least two executives employed at the studio who claim to have witnessed the incident personally, the studio head surprised his filmmaker guests by asking them to split a “measly” coffee bill amounting to approximately ¤80. The story goes that the contingent—which included the filmmakers, the studio boss and a bunch of his executives travelling with him—ordered coffee and light bites at an airport café while heading back to Mumbai. When the bill arrived, the big-shot reportedly pulled out a ¤10 note and asked the group to split the balance. Too shocked, one of the filmmakers apparently reached for the cheque and insisted on paying it in full. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 89

best of

13 MAY 2013

by raul irani

Another Love, Another Taj

After the demise of his wife, Tajammuli Begum, 78-year-old Saidul Hasan Qadri put his entire life savings of Rs 10 lakh in creating a replica of the Taj Mahal in the town of Dibai in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh. From his home, the former postmaster of Dibai has a clear view of the monument where he wants to be buried alongside his wife

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14 april 2014

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