OPEN Magazine 15 December 2014

MODI’S NORTHEAST PUSH

l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

BN GOSWAMY ON 101 INDIAN MASTERPIECES

e v e r y

w e e k

1 5 D e c e m b e r 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

E H T IS IT OF THE END ULLAH ABD ASTY? DYN

why raghuram rajan is wrong

AN ICON JUST GOT LARGER

THE NEW NAVITIMER 46 mm

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Volume 6 Issue 49 For the week 9—15 December 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover photo PTI

15 december 2014

sam

Aatish Taseer appears to ‘get it’ in flashes during the conversation, and, yet, in the end he clearly just doesn’t get it (‘Modi Must Provide an Intellectual Alternative’, 8 December 2014; web exclusive). Toby, as depicted, might be a reflection of Taseer after all; forever [distant from] the ‘temple-goers’ while appreciating the civilisation that sustains them, but seeking to divorce their beliefs from this unique wayof-life and obliquely Perhaps this is only still looking for some kind of validation from Aatish Taseer’s the West. For all his early-Naipaulian phase appropriate contempt and he will eventually for the parvenu shed his Lutyens’ Lutyenites, he appears baggage when tragically unable to he matures escape his own pedigree in that swamp. Perhaps this is only his early-Naipaulian phase and he will eventually shed his Lutyens’ baggage when he matures. Incidentally, the Rajiv Malhotra acolytes only damage their cause when they distastefully harp on Taseer’s antecedence. He has been scathing in his writings about Pakistan and his father’s weaknesses, and doesn’t deserve the pro-Pakistani label.  letter of the week Raphel’s Record

robin raphel was not talking to Sikhs but ISI-funded and armed Khalistani terrorists whose reign of terror I suffered (‘The Lady India Loved to Hate’, 8 December 2014). My 15-year-old friend was shot dead by these terrorists. She was organising these terrorists just like she advised Kashmiri groups into a Hurriyat entity so that she could sell them easily in Washington DC. Just like she did her best to sell the ISI’s Afghan proxy, the Taliban, in Washington DC and the UN. I have a feeling that the enquiry against Raphel is going nowhere because of her connections with Hillary [Clinton]. Just like Kissinger is protected from facing up to his war crimes just because he is American. The same way Warren Anderson was

choose to buy a single cigarette once a week from the kiosk at the end of the street. Now, they’ll be forced to buy a whole pack. That’s actually reinforcing the tobacco industry. And yes, the right to informed choice is important. However irritating it may be, buyers should be informed each time about the possible health risks of smoking. And within a timeframe, those working in the tobacco industry and tobacco farmers should be [redeployed in] other sectors.

Otherwise, it will continue to flourish covertly. I don’t expect policemen to come to every street kiosk and stop people from buying loose cigarettes.

That would be both fascist and futile. Awareness is the only way to out of this cul-de-sac.  masha

shielded in the Bhopal gas tragedy case. Americans are hypocrites when it comes to applying their war crimes and human rights rhetoric to their own people.  Chopra TP

Loose Measure

from the viewpoint of a smoker, a ban on sales of loose cigarettes is a real disservice (‘All Smoke, No Fire’, 8 December 2014). Many people trying to give up smoking

Symbols of Civilisation

the indus valley symbols do not represent any language or script. It was essentially a non-literate—no written language—civilisation (‘The Eternal Harappan Script Tease’, 8 December 2014).

There were many great civilisations without any script/writing. It is futile to seek literary meanings in the Harappan symbols.  Arun Murthy

The Open feature ‘Buddha’s Orphans’ (10 March 2014) by Sohini Chattopadhyay (left) has been adjudged the best entry at the 2014 International Committee for the Red Cross and Press Institute of India awards for humanitarian reporting.

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The Yerwada Prison

Live from the Jail: Welcome to Radio YCP In a first, Yerwada Central Prison in Maharashtra starts a community radio for and by prisoners Twelve noon to 1pm is lunch break for the 3,500-odd inmates of Yerawada Central Prison in Pune, but something is occupying their attention in that hour these days. When a baritone voice rings out “Welcome to Radio YCP” over the public address system, the prisoners gravitate to various points in groups to listen to a community radiocast.

Radio YCP (an abbreviation for Yerwada Central Prison) is a unique community radio venture in the country, an initiative of the jail’s 15 december 2014

superintendent Yogesh Desai.

Two RJs, both convicts, anchor the show in Hindi and Marathi. A mini studio has been constructed within the prison premises. “The prisoners themselves write the script. The programme has a different theme everyday,” says Desai. Radio YCP is interactive and includes songs on demand, devotional songs, studio interviews of invited personalities and other informative programmes. A show to solve the varied problems of prisoners will have the in-

mates writing in their queries and issues, which will be aired and discussed by counsellors without naming the inmates.

Another programme will focus on legal issues. The prison’s officers and legal experts will be educating prisoners about their rights, laws and amendments. The live programme is expected to turn into a forum for prisoners to air their creative talents, says Meeran Borwankar, additional DGP, Prisons. If the idea clicks, other jails may take it up as well.

The RJs had a two-stage selection process. “The notice for auditions had excited the prisoners and informal trials for voice modulation could be seen at all the barracks,” says Desai. Fifteen convicts were shortlisted in the first round and two were selected.

Actor Sanjay Dutt, in jail for five years in connection with the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts case, is also in Yerwada; he’d played a Radio co-host in Lage Raho Munna bhai, but he reportedly declined to play RJ here. n Haima Deshpande

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SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images

small world

contents 6 hurried man’s guide

10

cover story

End of Kashmir’s Abdullah dynasty?

32

8

29

open essay locomotif

In praise of a renaissance mind

A matter of good taste

SpiceJet crisis

14

24

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Spent force

Disillusioned Jihadi The 22-year-old from Mumbai went to join ISIS but beat a hasty retreat because of working conditions Madhavankutty Pillai

here are many lessons that Areeb

Majeed can draw from his brief encounter with global jihad. The first is that you need to be on the right side of history. A thousand years ago, if he had volunteered to be part of Saladin’s army as the great Sultan drove the Crusaders out of Palestine, then Majeed would have been a hero. Even in defeat, he could have made a name like those intellectuals and artists who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and lost. But because they were in the forefront of a modern liberal world, what they did seems foolhardy but admirable.

Majeed, however, chose to take up arms in service of the most retrograde armed religious terrorist movement in the world, whose ideas are drawn from a thousand years ago. What worked for Saladin will not work for ISIS because it is an anachronism riding on the wings of fanaticism and since such an apparition is a global threat, the whole world will gang up to destroy it. Majeed was lucky or belatedly wise in running away. But all actions have consequences and his problems are far from over. He is now neither a martyr to that side nor trustworthy on this side.

What makes a bunch of youths who meet up after evening prayers in a far-flung suburb of Mumbai talk of a war raging in distant lands and at some point find the chatter turning into yearning?

How does a 22-year-old engineering student like Majeed look towards Iraq and Syria, ignore the beheadings and

4 open

And the hi-tech toilet boom

shiv sena northeast

The Modi package

person of the week areeb majeed

swachch bharat

wanton slaughter, develop complete contempt for all that makes society egalitarian, and decide that there is a better world to be fashioned out there?

To then, without any guide, wade through the internet and after relentless searching finally find a lead and then craft a plan to reach that scarred, embattled and dangerous land?

He does so believing in a higher calling and that God is fighting along with him.

And he does so, like the Communists

once did, because he thinks victory is inevitable. That is what makes someone like Osama bin Laden move from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan and fight the Russians when the Soviet Union is one of two superpowers and then fight the United States when it is the only superpower. Majeed’s faith was not so unshakeable. In fact, from May when he set off under the pretext of a pilgrimage, to November when he returned to India, his faith was less than six months strong.

He is now being interrogated by the

National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and news leaked by its operatives are all that we have to go by on what made Majeed turn back. One report says that it was his family that made him come back even though they thought him dead. Another says that he didn’t get to fight and was made to clean toilets and ferry water, something that doesn’t fit in with the ambitions of a man who is out to change humanity’s character. And yet another news report says that he was shot and close proximity to death does make one rethink the promise of immortality. And one more report professes him as not being averse to get back to ISIS. We have no way of knowing the truth to any of this because these leaks that emanate from the NIA are hearsay and never verified by the media. Majeed is, however, going to be under the scanner of security agencies for years. His life is not going to be easy. One of the charges that is said to have been made against him is waging war on the country.

It is hard to see how that fits, given that he was waging war against Iraq as a soldier of ISIS, which is an occupying force in much of Syria and Iraq. He is technically not a terrorist but someone who took sides in a civil war in another part of the world even if it is the same ideology that fuels terrorism. His present miserable situation at home is much better than his fate as an ISIS soldier where the probability of death is far greater. You could call him a coward, but cowards stay alive longer. n 15 december 2014

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bull

The world’s most virile

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books

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BN Goswamy on 101 masterpieces

m art

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■

Moha

mmad

Akil M

alik

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f o r slapping actress Gauhar Khan because he didn’t like her dress sense

Mohammad Akil Malik’s rationale for having slyly crept up to the actress Gauhar Khan when she was hosting a reality show in Film city, Goregaon (located in the western suburbs of Mumbai) and then slapping her is that he was attracted to her. That, he believes, gave him the right

The musical legacy of Mandolin Shrinivas

to decide what she should be wearing, to get onto the sets of a reality show and express his disapproval. When her attire and his vision of her didn’t match, his response was violence. According to the tabloid Mid-Day, Malik’s police statement states that he intended the slap to be a lesson for all women who wore short skirts because such clothes had a damaging influence on the brains of young people like him. And crime would also decrease as skirts got longer. Malik would be a good participant in a theatre of the absurd if not for the fact that a large number of men in India subscribe to his view.

Recently, a Hindu Mahasabha spokesperson said jeans were okay but wanted to ban half-jeans. Possibly, he has an allergy to knees. Such people, of whom Malik is one representative, claim ownership over the bodies of all women because they are afraid of the illness that festers inside them. n

63

Ready to roll

During a Delhi election rally, a BJP Union Minister made a derogatory reference to those who will not vote for her party and then apologised later self-reproach

“Aapko tay karna hai ki Dilli mein sarkar Ramzaadon ki banegi ya haramzaadon ki (You decide whether the Delhi government will be of the descendents of Ram or the illegitimately born)”

“I had no intention of hurting anyone but what I said I regret from my heart” — Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti in the Lok Sabha, 2 December 2014

— Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti , during a rally in West Delhi, 1 December 2014

turn

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

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

music

Christie’s second auction in India

around

Grow Up, Comrades pti

Political untouchability

Narendra Modi with Manik Sarkar 15 december 2014

which has a premium in the country’s political discourse, got a royal snub in Tripura. Of course, it was downplayed by the CPM, but its Chief Minister and Politburo member Manik Sarkar invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address the state cabinet on the issue of good governance, giving weightage to Modi’s brand of politics of development. Modi was in Tripura to inaugurate a 726 MW gas-based thermal power project. Sarkar is the sole Marxist CPM Chief Minister in

India. Sarkar, the poorest CM in the country, donates his salary and allowances to his party, which pays him Rs 5,000 a month. In his affidavit to the Election Commission, Sarkar had declared Rs 1,080 in cash and a bank balance of Rs 9,720. “What is wrong in inviting the PM to meet the ministers of my cabinet?

Every state has its own specific problems, characteristics, advantages, disadvantages—the decision is for every respective state to take on its own,” Sarkar was quoted as saying by a TV channel. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the SpiceJet crisis India’s second largest budget carrier, SpiceJet, seems to be in danger of joining the long list of companies that burnt themselves out in the Indian aviation sector. In the last few weeks, SpiceJet has displayed all the symptoms of an eventual collapse—mass flight cancellations, thinning fleet, delayed staff salaries, lack of investors, dipping stock prices and mounting losses since March this year.

The airline was believed to have been facing a financial crunch for some time now. The crisis started affecting its operations around mid-November when the airline suddenly cancelled SpiceJet saw 50 flights, of the 300 that almost a dozen of it usually runs, without its Boeing 737s informing passengers. being taken back SpiceJet saw almost a by lessors due to dozen of its Boeing 737s which it had to being taken back by cancel a large lessors due to which it number of flights had to cancel a large number of flights. The airline puts the number at over 50, reportedly claiming that it needs more funds, but the promoter, Sun Group chief Kalanithi Maran, has not been able to find an investor.

dhiraj singh/bloomberg/getty images

The cancelled flights come in the wake of the airline selling cheap tickets in flash sales held earlier this year. Many stranded and angry passengers have now been forced to buy expensive

A SpiceJet aircraft prepares to land in Mumbai

flight tickets at the last minute. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has ordered a probe of the matter after many passengers lodged complaints against the airline.

The crisis deepened on 1 December with reports of the airline delaying salary payment to its 5,000-odd employees for the first time.

The current crisis is already being seen as a repetition of the Kingfisher fiasco which began with the same symptoms. According to analysts, the losses due to the cancellations could run into Rs 15-30 crore by month end, which means the airline is losing anywhere between Rs 1.5 crore and Rs 2 crore per day. n

The Sense of a Meaning A survey says one-fourth of India practises untouchability, but uses a loose definition for it M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

T

here is an interesting con-

flict happening in Kuppegala village in the school that Karnataka’s Chief Minister Siddaramaiah went to. Some ‘upper caste’ students don’t want to eat the mid-day meal because a new cook is a Dalit. This might seem outrageous but essentially the ‘upper caste’ students will have to bring their food from home, or, as some parents have threatened, they will not send their children to school. Indulging in this discrimination only serves to complicate the lives of the ‘upper caste’ students and parents. What is unlikely is that the cook will be asked to go.

The incident is distasteful, but note that it is not a prejudice that the society or state is colluding in. Also, contrast even such a regressive mindset with an earlier age. For instance, ask those who have been to an institution like Banaras Hindu University in the 50s and 60s and they will usually have a story of witnessing a Dalit student not being served food by waiters in the canteen. There is a difference between an ‘upper caste’ man not eating food served by a Dalit in a public place and an ‘upper caste’ man not serving food to a Dalit in a public place. It is the distance that India has travelled in its journey of eradicating untouchability.

That is one reason to not get carried away on reading a recent edition of The Indian Express which ran a story with the headline, ‘Biggest caste survey: One in four Indians admit to practising untouchability’. The survey was conducted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and University of Maryland, US, after interviews with 42,000 households. According to the Express report, ‘Surveyors asked respondents, “Does anyone in your family practise untouchability?” and,

in case the answer was “No”, asked a second question: “Would it be okay for a Scheduled Caste person to enter your kitchen or use your utensils?”

Across India, 27 per cent respondents agreed that they did practise untouchability in some form.’

Brahmins lead the pack, but curiously, even 15 per cent of Scheduled Castes and 22 per cent of Scheduled Tribes were found to practise it.

The question, as it is framed, was always going to be contentious. No one likes strangers entering their kitchens, toilets and bedrooms and you don’t need to be a Brahmin to refuse this No one likes access. A simpler strangers question would entering their be: ‘Would you kitchens, touch a Dalit?’ because that, toilets and literally and bedrooms unambiguously, and you don’t is untouchabilineed to be a ty on test. But Brahmin instinctively we know that the to refuse answer to that this access question is rarely going to be a ‘No’. And no one would be lying because in an urbanised world you often can’t know who is a Dalit and also because exhibiting such behaviour gets serious social disapproval. Even if someone considers another person an untouchable, he knows there is shame in announcing his mindset.

Caste has multiple nasty dimensions to it. Untouchability is its very extreme but it can’t be an umbrella term to denote everything.

It denotes, and we associate it with incredibly cruel practices; not allowing someone into one’s own kitchen in 2014 is really not in that category. n 15 december 2014

lo co m ot i f

A Matter of Good Taste S PRASANNARAJAN

T

he stereotype still prevails: the cultural vulgarity of your average politician.

He of crude sociology incompatible with the attitudes and aspirations of his country. You see him on the stump, spewing nouns and adjectives of hatred for the enemy imagined as well as real. You see him in his everyday banalities as an epitome of kitsch, which, as the novelist Milan Kundera said in the context of pre-89 Eastern Europe, is “the aesthetic ideal” of communism. In India, though, it is not ideological excesses that bring out the perversions and pathologies of politics— or the power of kitsch. It is a sense of privilege and autonomy that makes such a politician immune from cultural sensibilities. He can make, for instance, the most insensitive remark about women and get away with it because the English media or the English-speaking class doesn’t understand the raw wisdom of the countryside. He can be an unapologetic casteist because he alone reads the social affinities and intimacies of sub-rural India. In 21st century India, where the buzz is all about being modern, he is not an anomaly, not an exception; he is an inevitability in a place where politics is one ‘profession’ where being in power is being out of the decencies and dignities of a social animal.

Particularly so in the age of Jitan Ram Manjhi, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti and Mamata Banerjee. The Chief Minister of Bihar, and worthy successor to the great value-based politician Nitish Kumar, and also a Maha-Dalit, the lowest of the under-classes, continues to pop up on front pages for all the right reasons from his perspective, which happens to be different from mine and yours. So, he alone knows what could happen to the women of Bihar when their husbands leave them behind and travel to other states for work. He alone knows, or maybe he alone has the political freedom to declare, that ‘upper caste’ people are foreigners and only Dalits and Tribals are Indian. Manjhi has previously spoken on other topics as varied as corruption and the marital morality of his son, drawing instant media attention. Why is it that this man can afford to be so crassly brazen about being offensive?

You may say that it is the politics of a provincial socialist, a master of kitsch. Just to cite one example, think of vintage Lalu Prasad Yadav, whose long reign in Bihar was a badlands vaudeville starring a ruler of great comic possibilities, till the

8 open

joke was on him and the morality of the show was unsustainable even among the shirtless he thought would never abandon him. The ruler as entertainer played with the mass mind, till the entertainment became too boring—and expensive—to be sold. It is not that political vulgarity is the preserve of only heartland socialists; the cardboard politics of Dravidianism and the comic-strip class wars of Indian communists (currently oxygen-less) are replete with salvation motifs of kitsch. Or look at the so-called lunatic fringe of Hindutva, perennially in need of a phantom enemy. Or, imagine what someone like Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, a minister of state, who has divided Indians between Ram’s descendants and the illegitimate others, can do to the modernisation project of Prime Minister Modi. Or think of Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s ‘bamboo’ obscenity. Bengal renaissance is memory; Bengal vulgarianism rhymes with Mamata’s politics.

Manjhi and the Sadhvi—and other occasional artists of free speech in public life—tell a larger story of politics. It is one arena where sophistication of the mind is most required, and it is where some of the crudest minds are at play. I am sure this observation will be read as elitism— and challenged by those who see the raw vulgarity of certain politicians as an aspect of empowerment. It is not. It is all about politics and good taste. When Václav Havel, still a bit apologetic about being the president of what was then Czechoslovakia after years as a dissident and critic of power, was given an honorary doctorate by New York University, he made a speech about why good manners are essential for politicians. A good education in political science and law may be invaluable for a politician, but that is not the most important thing, he said: “When a man has his heart in the right place and good taste, he can not only do well in politics but is even predetermined for it. If someone is modest and does not yearn for power, he is certainly not ill-equipped to engage in politics; on the contrary, he belongs there. What is needed in politics is not the ability to lie but rather the sensibility to know when, where, how and to whom to say things.”

Good taste in politics is not about class or caste; it is not about educational qualifications either. It is about refinement, about being sensitive. Professional anti-elitists will argue that this is democracy—take it or keep quiet. Not really. The politics of bad taste is the sewage system of democracy, and in India, it is broken and open. It stinks. n 15 december 2014

open essay

By SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

IN PRAISE OF A RENAISSANCE MIND

Remembering Tapan Raychaudhuri (1926—2014), historian, storyteller and friend

T

apan Raychaudhuri dozed

off during the seminar at St Antony’s College, Oxford, to launch my book, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim. Afterwards, he walked slowly to where my wife was sitting with some copies of the book and insisted on buying one. When she demurred at taking his money, he explained patiently that people Sunanda K Datta-Ray didn’t often realise how much hard is a columnist and work went into writing a book. The author of several books effort alone deserved some recognition. He then told her she was sitting in the wrong place to attract custom, and had her and her desk, chair and little stock of books shifted to the more public atrium outside.

That was in Michaelmas Term last year, which makes it all the more remarkable, for Raychaudhuri was 87 years old then.

I wondered if another Indian historian of equal standing, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, say, or Dr RC Majumdar, would have been similarly solicitous. Would either have taken the trouble at that great age and with an ailing wife at home to attend the event at all? But, then, Hashi, a gastronome like her husband (they jointly wrote ‘Not by Curry Alone’ in an anthology that Alan Davidson edited) but probably more deft in the kitchen and certainly an excellent hostess, had as a young woman known my mother. That was during World War II when we were evacuated to Lucknow. She would have insisted on her husband gracing my launch with his presence.

That could be one reason. Another was that St Antony’s was home to him. He had succeeded the legendary Sir Penderel Moon (whose controversial exit from the ICS prompted The Statesman to write a leader titled ‘Lunar Eclipse’) as Reader in Modern South Asian History at Oxford in 1973. In 1993, the year before retiring, he was given an ad hominem promotion to Professor of Indian History and Civilisation. He was also Fellow of St Antony’s during his full teaching stint and remained an Emeritus Fellow until his death on 26 November.

I like to think he also came because, slight though our connection was, he liked me. It added to my sense of gratification that a man of his age and eminence had taken the trouble to make an arrangement with someone with a car because he no longer took the wheel himself.

He was a child of the Bengal Renaissance, inheritor of the legacy of such nineteenth century pioneers as Ramtanu Lahiri who publicly discarded the sacred thread of his caste, Rasik Krishna Mallick, who refused to swear by the waters of the holy Ganga, and of Radhanath Sikdar, who created a sensation by rejecting an arranged match with a child bride. The Young Bengal movement that Henry Vivian Louis Derozio and others launched has been

compared to a mighty storm that tried to sweep away everything before it, lashing society with violence. It caused some good, and, perhaps naturally, also some discomfort and distress.

Chatting with Tapan Babu in the book-lined comfort of his Oxford cottage was a reminder that even if the storm had ceased to blow at gale force, it still inspired constructive thinking among a few stalwarts whose intellectual lineage was rooted in that churning of Indian and European thought. About him and Hashi and their bubbling exuberance clung a whiff of the defiant non-conformism of an era when, so Peari Chand Mitra tells us in his Life of David Hare, when modern youths encountered ‘a snanshuddh Brahmin with the sacerdotal mark on his forehead, they danced round him, bawling in his ears, ‘We eat beef. Listen, we eat beef’.’

A comparison might be sought with another man who also enjoyed my affectionate respect. Nirad C Chaudhuri also emerged from East Bengal, broke journey in Delhi, and ended life in Oxford. Wherever he might now be, Chaudhuri will probably damn me with bell, book and candle for saying Tapan Babu had the edge with his grand zamindari background (his father used a bag of gold guineas for small change) and impeccable formal education. But Nirad Babu could not be matched for his grasp of a vast range of minutiae about English life and letters long before he set foot on English soil.

Attending my seminar at his old college was not Raychaudhuri’s first act of benediction. When Oxford University’s Centre for International Studies invited me to speak on another of my books, Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India, in March 2010, the Raychaudhuris invited my wife and me to stay with them. My son turned up, too, but they weren’t flustered. There was only one guest room, but a sofa in the living room could always be turned into a bed.

Formality didn’t restrict their hospitality.

Apart from similar acts of graciousness, I remember him best for the puckish humour that also reflected many of his abiding beliefs. He was a raconteur. Some of it percolated into his writing and enlivened the dry chronology of history. For instance, when he meets a young American whose PhD was in butchering technique, he murmurs, “It is not clear if Bush used his discoveries in Iraq.”

Superficially, that comment might appear to fix Raychaudhuri’s position in the political firmament. But such a superficial judgment could not be more wildly off the mark. For he emphatically asserted he was not anti-American. He wrote admiringly of young Americans who were ‘aware of their role on the world scene as citizens of the world’s most powerful country’. He could say in all honesty, “I admire profoundly the civilisation that is America.” But he could add in the very next sentence and with equal sincerity, “Only, that admiration does not extend to the country’s foreign policy in Asia, Africa and Latin America or to politicians like George Bush and his

Tapan Raychaudhuri was a child of the Bengal Renaissance, inheritor of the legacy of such nineteenth century pioneers as Ramtanu Lahiri, who publicly discarded the sacred thread of his caste

15 december 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 11

cohort.” The intellectual in him distinguished between nations and governments, between people and politicians.

He would certainly deplore what Eric Hobsbawm called the impressive return from Mauretania to India of politics formulated in terms of religion; indeed, beliefs apart, he had personal reason to do so. He believed that his directorship of the Delhi School of Economics was truncated because the Jana Sangh, which had captured the Delhi municipality, was “not happy to see a person with radical sympathies” at the helm and pressured the vice-chancellor, Dr BN Ganguli. Delhi’s loss was Oxford’s gain.

Although his Oxford DPhil was on the Dutch East India Company’s trading activities (the resultant book was titled Jan Company in Coromandel) and he edited (with Irfan Habib) the first volume of the Cambridge Economic History of India, his forte was social history. It allowed a mingling of academic rigour with a lively personal interest in the surrounding humanity that produced some scurrilous stories about people of consequence in private conversation but serious analyses in public discourse. As a result, his recent works—the anthology called Bangalnama, his autobiography in Bengali, and two nonspecialist works in English, The World in Our Time: A Memoir and Europe reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal—probably best give the flavour of the man’s wit, erudition and incisive insight.

Books provided the common plank for our meetings. Not just my books or his but when a friend in Kolkata, Jolly Mohan Kaul, once a luminary of the undivided Communist Party of India, wrote his memoirs, In Search of a Better World, he asked Tapan Raychaudhuri to release it and me to preside over the ceremony. The Kashmiri Jolly and his deceased Bengali wife, Manikuntala Sen, a former West Bengal legislator, believed in Communism but no longer in Communists.

Raychaudhuri says he and another Oxford graduate who, sadly, squandered his talents dropped in at my parental home in 1960 or thereabouts. I have no recollection of that visit.

Our first meeting so far as I am aware was more than 40 years later when in a fit of liberalism influenced by its president, Sir Keith Thomas, author of the magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, Corpus Christi College elected me its first as I call it Blue-collar Fellow. Since the experiment was not repeated, I can only suppose Corpus Christi repented of its brief encounter with the non-academic world. But even if Tapan Babu and I got to know each other so late in the day, there were around us some friendly and familiar, if slightly risqué, ghosts of the past.

His youngest brother Apu had been my colleague on The Statesman and married, divorced and remarried a daughter of Samar Sen whom some considered the finest Bengali poet since Rabindranath Tagore. Hashi’s beautiful sister Sonali became a cause célèbre when she left her filmmaker husband Harisadan Dasgupta to elope with Roberto Rosselini who was then married to Ingrid Bergman. Rossellini was 52 to Sonali’s 27. Her mother pleaded with Jawaharlal Nehru to impound Sonali’s passport but in vain. Nehru had himself

invited Rosselini to India.

Hari was a gifted man who had studied filmmaking in America. His sensitive last feature film titled Eki Angey Eto Roop was screened at the Edinburgh Festival under the title, if I am not mistaken, So Many Faces of Eve. He wanted me to write the English sub-titles but other factors intervened. He accused Satyajit Ray of delaying the film’s release through his hold on the stars. My last conversation with Hari was when he hobbled into my office one day leaning heavily on a stick. Ingrid Bergman, whom he had known well, had just died and he wanted to write a tribute. Alas, the few lines he produced were gibberish. I was living in Singapore when he died. He had probably never recovered from Sonali’s defection.

When she died earlier this year, AM—one suspects the initials make a pretence of masking the identity of West Bengal’s former Marxist finance minister—wrote in The Telegraph, ‘A similar furore was sought to be raised by a section of self-appointed social nitpickers when, a few years later, Sonali’s elder sister, Hashi, who had lost her husband a few months previously, decided to re-marry; her choice fell on Tapan Raychaudhuri, the historian. She left her father-in-law’s

But even if Tapan Babu and I got to know each other so late in the day, there were around us some friendly and familiar, if slightly risqué, ghosts of the past

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house to join Tapan. The scandal-mongers could not directly object to her re-marriage; thanks to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s efforts, it was legally sanctified almost a century ago. Their grouse was based on two hypotheses: (a) she should have waited a while; it was unseemly for a woman to re-marry so soon after the husband’s death; and (b) even though the husband was dead, the father-in-law—the venerable lawyer—was still living, her decision must have shocked and pained him.’

Hashi may feel all alone now. But she isn’t really. She has the garden she tended so lovingly, growing exotic Indian vegetables in unkind English conditions. Many of the Oxford dons who gave Tapan Raychaudhuri a grand dinner on his eightieth birthday are also still there, though not Richard Symonds, a wise and witty Quaker who had been with Gandhi in India and who organised the event. Richard’s wife sent me the obituary Tapan Babu penned a few years ago. But there are others who appreciated the Raychaudhuris not only for their scholarship but because they were such good company. They are there for Hashi at the end of a telephone line.

She has never been shy of using the instrument even across continents. I can still hear her thin voice quavering through the ether. n 15 december 2014

jammu & kashmir

t

roar

is it the end of the abdullah dynasty?

he last Omar Abdullah addresses a campaign rally in Srinagar

By PR RAMESH in srinagar

O

n Friday, 11 June 2010, 17-year old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo, playing cricket at the Gani Memorial Stadium in Srinagar, was killed by a teargas canister fired by Indian security forces at protestors.

They were demonstrating against the ‘encounter’ deaths of three Kashmiri civilians from Rafiabad who had been dubbed Pakistani infiltrators by the Army and were alleged to have crossed over in the Machil sector of Kupwara district. At last official count, the turmoil that engulfed the state that year, part of a vicious cycle of violence between the armed forces and agitating civilians, took a toll of 110 lives and left 537 injured between May and September. An estimated 1,274 CRPF men and 2,747 police personnel were injured across the Valley during the period.

It was Kashmir’s worst year after 1989. When it spread across the Valley, the country’s youngest Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, was away on a holiday. For four days, he was nowhere to be seen even as his state bled. One bureaucrat recalls that a helicopter did nearly nine sorties to ferry the Abdullah family to Ladakh. From

pti

ap

times content

The valley and the tale of two dynasties

1950s

Titans at Play

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the Sher-e-Kashmir, was against a ‘dominant-subordinate’ relationship between New Delhi and the Valley. Troubles began when he insisted on equal terms

there, Omar and family flew to Manali after the violence started in Srinagar. Most of Omar Abdullah’s own government remained clueless about his whereabouts.

A full 96 hours after the beginning of that summer of discord, the state’s Chief Minister returned to its capital Srinagar, held a review meeting of top officials, directed the removal of the police commissioner, and then went right back to vacationing in a popular hill resort in Himachal Pradesh.

A disturbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is believed to have advised Omar Abdullah to resign as Chief Minister as a way to blunt the resurgence of an antiIndia furore in the Valley. His father Farooq Abdullah, however, opposed the suggestion, and he stuck on. An anti-India group even created a special community page in 2011 called ‘We are all Tufail Ahmad Mattoo’. It didn’t get many followers, but the message hit home. Come 2014 and Tufail Ahmad Mattoo would return to haunt Omar.

Another issue that would torment Abdullah junior, it was clear, was the 9 February 2013 hanging of Afzal Guru in Delhi’s Tihar Jail, code-named Operation Three Star.

Very few people knew of the impending execution for fear it would trigger widespread violence in the Valley; among those kept in the dark was Guru’s own family. A day before the scheduled hanging, the then Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde informed Omar Abdullah of the Centre’s decision. Although it would have had adverse reaction in the Valley, the UPA hoped to garner support elsewhere in the country through this move. Apparently 16 open

1980s

Wrath of the Lady

Farooq Abdullah blamed Indira Gandhi for the death of democracy in Kashmir. According to him, the plot to depose him was hatched at Mrs Gandhi’s home in Delhi

unfazed by the news, Omar remained in Delhi, choosing to dine at an eatery in Khan Market with friends rather than rush back to put out the fire in his home state.

Before he took office in Srinagar, Omar’s popularity among Delhi’s jet-set had been growing steadily, aided by his social media presence in later years (he has 715,000 followers on Twitter and more than 7,000 tweets to date).

In 1998, he had already cut his teeth in electoral politics as a Member of Parliament from Srinagar. Omar’s political credentials were sound, and he was seemingly invincible as a leader. At 29, the 1970-born had became the youngest junior minister, and then the youngest Union minister in 2001 when he became a Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in the Vajpayee Government; in 2002, he resigned from the post after the Gujarat riots, and later that year, took over as President of the National Conference (NC), the party founded by his grandfather Sheikh Abdullah, hailed in the Valley as ‘Sher-e-Kashmir’.

Omar had already taken a big leap forward in charting a definite political course for himself when he met Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad in 2006 despite the Centre’s disapproval. He returned home to a hero’s welcome after what was seen by many Kashmiris as a bold and historic attempt by a regular state politician to talk directly with the Pakistani regime to resolve the Kashmir issue peaceably. Before he moved to Srinagar lock, stock and barrel, Omar had won laurels in the eyes of one and all, most notably when he gave a stirring speech on being Indian in the Lok Sabha during 15 december 2014

Fayaz Kabli/REUTERS

2000s

watch and enjoy sitcoms like Mind Your Language sent across by their English relatives.

In the 2008 Assembly elections in J&K, Omar was not the first, nor even the second or third, choice for Chief Minister after the NC won a big cache of seats and allied with the Congress to stake claim to the top post. “That election, the NC raked in votes at the hustings in the name of Farooq Abdullah; Omar is not seen as a people’s politician here, and was not in the picture frame as Chief Minister, but Kashmiris were made a fait accompli to the decision. People voted for three CM candidates in the last election: Farooq Abdullah, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and Ghulam Nabi Azad. But after the votes were counted, a fourth person was made CM: Omar,” says a disgruntled NC politician.

S Sons Who Squandered

Omar saw the National Conference-Congress alliance as one between him and Rahul Gandhi just as he described the one with the BJP as a family relationship with AB Vajpayee

the July 2008 trust vote over the Indo-US Nuclear Deal, even as he outlined the evolving socio-political aspirations of the Kashmiri youth and the state’s relations with the rest of the country.

At the end of 2008, when he contested Jammu & Kashmir’s Assembly polls, the state’s electorate accepted it sanguinely though he was virtually being foisted on them as Chief Minister by virtue of his illustrious lineage, being the grandson of Sheikh Abdullah, held in reverence

by Kashmiris for speaking up for them in the days before Independence and after. But that hereditary sheen had already begun to fade, and Omar was becoming aware, as was a restive electorate, that the cosmopolitan outlook and political nobility that he took for granted could only take him thus far and no further if he were to prove incapable of effective governance.

Faced with the harsh realities of running a state, Omar found the political terrain harder to handle than he’d expected, and found himself a target of the local media as well as political detractors. The latter, especially in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), missed few opportunities to taunt him about his half-English birth and moorings besides his inability to connect with ordinary Kashmiris. In one interview, Omar admitted that he considered himself as English as he was Kashmiri, and that the English relatives of his mother Mollie did play a role in his life. When his father Farooq Abdullah came back to Srinagar in the 70s, Omar recalled that despite all the turmoil in the state, the family would 15 december 2014

ix years after that election and several weeks after

the most devastating floods on record in the state—an event that showed up the worst in a government that all but abandoned its responsibilities of rescue, relief and rehabilitation—negative perceptions of Omar Abdullah persist and grow even as the NC’s governance rating hits rock bottom in the state. Ranked high on the list of issues that could result in the death of the Abdullah dynasty and the NC, many feel, are both the mishandling of the 2010 violence and the non-starter that the state government’s flood relief efforts proved to be, week after week, except in Srinagar’s posh downtown areas.

“Anti-incumbency against the NC is at the highest even in Kashmir, and, irrespective of whether the voter turnout is high or not, this election will see the NC getting a drubbing for its policies, or lack of them. The government did try to amend this later, but this is too little too late, and nothing can change the writing on the wall for the NC and the Abdullah family,” says an observer.

The recent floods, for instance, have left a marked impact on Kashmiris. In Srinagar, the ruling party’s office shows no sign of an election being contested; the name board hangs forlorn, the musty smell is overwhelming, there are no ticket seekers around, not even party leaders in confabulations, no flags, no NC posters, nothing. For Omar’s party, it is almost as if the die has long been cast. At the nearby Radio Kashmir building, damp furniture, weakened by flood waters, are piled one upon another in various states of disrepair. In parts of the capital not known for affluence, flood water is still in evidence in all its undrained glory, threatening disease.

“He may be Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson, but he has not worked at keeping his political spurs by getting his hands dirty,” maintains a PDP spokesman. “Sheikh Abdullah was a class apart. He was a magician who ruled the hearts of the people. His was the best attended funeral in this part of the world.” For the Sher-e-Kashmir, though, that was hard-won adulation, politically and personally. The man who in 1932 started Kashmir’s first political party, the open www.openthemagazine.com 17

Fayaz Kabli/REUTERS

is widespread speculation that for Omar, whose party has governed J&K almost without a break—it has been out of power for only brief stints—since the Indira GandhiSheikh Abdullah accord of 1975, the election results could script a political epitaph.

“Omar never studied or even skinned his knees in Kashmir, never imbibed the smells and sensed the moods in the bylanes of Srinagar, Sopore, Anant Nag, Baramullah or Shopian. Never roamed the streets of Budgam or Pulwama. Even Ghulam Nabi Azad, who has often been criticised for being only a symbolic Kashmiri, was considered a choice for the CM’s post ahead of Omar,” says an NC leader, once seen as one of Omar’s point persons in the family political fiefdom of Ganderbal.

The roads of Srinagar today teem with popular discontent over the NC’s inability to get its act together.

What rankles most is the virtual desertion by the state government during the recent floods. Omar himself was highly defensive when he argued that many officials were unable to attend offices that were themselves several feet in water, and that with communication down in several parts of the state, relief and rehab operations could begin properly only after the waters

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s inability to connect with ordinary Kashmiris could cost him dearly in the polls Muslim Conference, and later transformed it to the more inclusive NC, spearheaded a popular agitation for the exit of the Dogra rulers on the lines of the Quit India movement against the British, and rooted for a plebiscite in Kashmir—after which Jawaharlal Nehru, who he considered a friend and likeminded traveller, took the Kashmir issue to the UN, and first unseated and then jailed the Sher-e-Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah was the Prime Minister of J&K between 1948 and 1953, and later became Chief Minister of the state in 1975 and 1977.

Today, many feel that Sheikh Abdullah’s legacy alone can no longer help Omar take on the political odds. The ailing Farooq Abdullah can’t do much either except watch. For the so-called ‘First Family’ of J&K and the NC itself, this election could well be the final whimper. Most Kashmiris know well by now that the Abdullah scion— who became the state’s 11th and youngest Chief Minister—sorely lacks that instinctive political connect with the people that his father Farooq Abdullah, for all his faults, possessed. And that with him at the helm, the NC may never again be electable.

One analyst contends that calling the NC’s survival challenge an ‘uphill’ task would be “grossly understating” the fate that awaits the dynasty at the hustings. There 18 open

receded. What made his position weaker was the diligence shown by the politically savvy Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who promptly directed the Army to remote areas of the state for flood relief efforts.

C

ompounding Omar’s problems are some key

factors in the ongoing Assembly polls that have come a full 25 years after Kashmiri Pandits first started fleeing the valley. Not least of the NC’s problems is the majority BJP Government at the Centre led by a proactive Prime Minister who has succeeded in ousting Congress regimes in states such as Maharashtra and Haryana.

The Modi Government has also been taking a tough line against secessionists who have been rushing to the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi for discussions. The Centre has stalled talks with Pakistan for hosting ‘Aazadi’ demanding Hurriyat leaders, and this has effectively also nixed Omar’s electoral promise—which he’d refused to view as ‘anti-India’—of facilitating talks between these leaders and New Delhi. The Centre remains clear that the Pakistan regime could either talk to marginalised separatists or India’s Government on matters related to Kashmir, but not both.

Then came the controversial debate over the return 15 december 2014

E

lectorally, the NC is already being seen as having

few options to retain its political relevance—among them, getting enough numbers to at least ally with other parties once again to form a government in Srinagar. With the PDP also going to the polls with the same objective but ruling out the BJP firmly, the NC would have to woo it again for any chance of power.

Failing that, it would have to keep its doors open for the BJP. The NC does have experience in working with the BJP, albeit in the Vajpayee regime.

Modi is perceived as a man who plays political hardball on the issues of development and economic growth. This could force the NC’s hand. The Prime Minister’s poll rallies in Srinagar and Anant Nag towns, scheduled for 8 December (with polls due on 14 december), are set to highlight these themes, and have resulted in calls for a statewide shutdown from hardliner separatists such as Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who has also called for a bandh to protest polls in Budgam, Pulwama and Baramullah districts, part of the third phase of polling. A jittery PDP has already raised the bogey of a possible Hindu Chief Minister being forced upon the Muslim-majority state,

15 december 2014

something that most analysts reject, as does the BJP. “That is out of the question in the current context. However, we do need friends in the valley, and yes, Sajjad Lone is among them,” says a BJP leader.

By desisting from playing the communal card in an already cleaved-apart society and nudging the state towards its economic potential, Modi may yet be able to shift the dominant discourse in the Valley for the first time in decades. For the key players in Kashmir, the Prime Minister’s determination to forcibly change the popular narrative from Kashmir’s political status to issues of development won’t be easy to deal with. It’s a medium of appeal these players have not tested in decades now, and if Modi succeeds in transforming the contours of J&K politics, it could well weaken the autonomy slogans that have conveniently been raised by them along their campaign trails.

PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti addresses a rally in Tsimer (below); BJP president Amit Shah in Salehar village, Jammu (bottom)

Yawar Nazir/Getty Images

and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits. A seemingly hush-hush meeting of leaders from the BJP’s satellite organisations and non-state players in J&K (that left Omar in the dark) on the issue set off much discussion over the BJP’s 1990 promise of resettling Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley and a package-in-the-making within a timeframe. Suddenly, a sleepy saffron party pushed to margins in the Jammu region awoke to become the spine of the BJP’s ‘Mission 44’: a victory target of seats that would give it a simple majority in J&K’s 87-seat Assembly. Says Avinash Khanna of the BJP, “The issue is not whether the BJP will actually hit the goal of 44 seats. That may still be a tall order. But the main issue is the act of curing the state BJP’s political sleep apnoea and going ahead full throttle.

The BJP may get only 30-32 seats, but with independents and some friends, it will make up that number, and that in itself will be historic. There is new hope and excitement all over India over both the economic and social rejuvenation [of the country] with the arrival of Modi, and this is an opportunity for the people of Kashmir, beleaguered by violence and insurgency for years and then by ineffective governance, to participate prominently in the mainstream.”

Indeed, today, business as usual seems to be the street mood in Srinagar. No anti-India posters, no slogan-heavy festoons, and no fury-filled pamphlets. Debilitated by violence and insurgency, not to mention acute penury, with an education system in ruins, a social fabric in shreds, devastating floods and downbeat future prospects, Kashmir’s Gen-X appears, for the present, eager to move on and establish a New Order that would make the most of new economic opportunities.

Nitin Kanotra/Ht/Getty Images

“Omar is not sure what the PM will do, but he is certain that as long as he is in Delhi, he will do something,” maintains a Kashmir observer. “By deliberately downplaying the divisive card and playing on development instead in a state mostly driven by violence and poor governance, and where corruption, both state and nonstate, has felled several victims, Modi will focus on sectors like tourism and regional infrastructure, which will galvanise the economy and the lives of thousands. These are the pressing issues of today.”

A study in contrast, a Union Minister suggests, is the election campaign conducted decades ago by another strident Prime Minister, one of Kashmiri lineage, Indira Gandhi. In June 1983, on her last election trail before her demise, Ms Gandhi launched one of the most bitter and communally divisive Assembly poll campaigns ever, camping for almost nine days in Jammu alone to whip up passions. In his book, Nice Guys Finish Second, her cousin BK Nehru suggests that the odious communal tone to the campaign was driven by Ms Gandhi’s loathing of Farooq Abdullah and an abiding urge to unseat him from the throne in Srinagar. He suggests that she could not stand Farooq’s ineffective governance of Kashmir inasmuch as she hated his fawning ways in front of her, always followed by doing things in utter defiance of her wishes once he returned to Srinagar. Neither, however, was seen as a good enough justification for a vitriolic campaign against him, and a highly divisive one at that.

Indira Gandhi’s strategy of competitive communalism, tried out for the first time, failed to pay her the expected dividends, although she painted herself as a ‘champion of rapprochement with Pakistan’ in the Valley while posing as a saviour of Hindus in Jammu. She had, though, one small point of satisfaction: of swamping the BJP in Jammu. Commenting on the election results, the RSS publication The Organiser stated: ‘The Jammu and Kashmir elections have left a bad taste in every mouth.’

M

aking the NC jittery could also be the BJP’s cosy-

ing up with the People’s Conference leader and once self-confessed separatist Sajjad Lone, even while the saffron party soft-pedals one of its core manifesto goals: the abrogation of Article 370 that grants special status to Kashmir. The BJP’s subtle calibration of its position on Article 370 and its bonhomie with Lone have left even smaller parties like the JKNPP rattled and resorting to divisive poll rhetoric for fear of losing its space.

The JKNPP’s president Balwant Singh Mankotia , at a rally in Udhampur, has accused the BJP of being opportunist and “forging an alliance with the separatists in Kashmir” to accomplish its ‘Mission 44 plus’ in the ongoing Assembly polls. “The BJP has become the new avatar of the Hurriyat and is raising divisive and anti-national slogans, besides promoting separatist and fundamental organisations in the state,” alleged Mankotia.

20 open

Besides these overarchingly adverse issues dominating the political discourse, including the 2010 unrest and the flood relief debacle, the corruption bogey raised by Prime Minister Modi has also hit home, forcing Omar to go on the defensive on one or all of them. “The truth is,” says a BJP leader from Jammu, “that the Gen-X in the state, irrespective of community, are not stuffed with hostility towards the BJP any longer. They are willing to give divisive poll rhetoric the go-by, and more importantly, willing to give the economic growth goal a chance in pursuit of peace and prosperity. Modi has not just introduced a new variable in the poll ecosystem of the state, he is the new variable. His is an open invitation to the younger generation in the state to close the door on the turbulent politics of the last two-and-a-half decades, and grab today’s opportunities with both hands. And all the players there are acutely aware of this and apprehensive of how well this may work.”

In his book, Transforming India, Sumantra Bose of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) argues that ‘despite the tortured history and uncomfortable present of their relationship, the Kashmir Valley will have to live with the Indian Union, and the Indian Union will have to live with the Kashmir Valley’. But any reconstruction, Bose says, will require both the Valley and Union to modify dogmatic positions and go beyond formulaic proposals: ‘Were the glimmer of possibility to be acted on, it will attenuate the Achilles’ heel of the world’s largest democracy, and help India’s emergence on the global stage.’

Former Prime Minister Vajpayee recognised this and attempted a Northern Ireland kind of settlement for the Kashmir issue. Most political parties in the Valley acknowledge Vajpayee’s initiatives in positive terms.

According to Bose, the driver of the Valley-Union coexistence will have to be economic because the clientele for what the Valley produces exist outside the Valley.

Tourism can flourish only if there is peace in the region.

And that is what Modi has been talking about in his rallies.

W

hat may drive the last nail in the coffin for Omar’s party, under pressure now to either toe the BJP line if it manages to get decent numbers or go politically bust, is the absence of his father Farooq in the election scene. “Farooq Abdullah is a man of great colour and a politician with his ear to the ground. In Kashmir, he personally knew several people. If he entered a gathering in a room, he would know most of them by first name. Lack of advice from him would sorely tell on Omar’s own campaign,” says Kashmir resident Haseeb Naqshbandi. Omar has admitted as much recently. “Sheikh Abdullah was loved by the people of Kashmir and he ruled them both from within jail and without,” adds Naqshbandi, “Farooq Abdullah’s biggest contribution in modern times to the politics of the Valley was to bring it in sync with that of 15 december 2014

Altaf Qadri/AP

Protestors in Srinagar

The death of teenager Tufail Ahmad Mattoo at the hands of security forces in 2010 has returned to haunt Omar the mainstream, the rest of India. In the late 80s, he organised various opposition conclaves in the state and played a pivotal role himself. Although he came to the political scene on an anti-India platform, he later calibrated his position to an anti-Centre line. And that works in the Valley.” The senior Abdullah, Naqshbandi contends, would have oozed charm and used personal equations to smooth differences within the NC leadership in Ganderbal.

Somewhere, echoes of the negative sentiments within the NC must have reached Omar Abdullah’s consciousness when—with his father having opted out for health reasons —he decided to switch away from the Ganderbal family bastion in November. Fearing a debacle after falling out with his own party leaders in the constituency, he announced his candidacy from not one but two seats: Sonawar and Beerwah. But Omar is staring at defeat in the former, although it is his home constituency, with a large part of the electorate furious with the mismanagement of flood relief efforts here and elsewhere in the Valley. In 2008, Farooq Abdullah won in Sonawar by a mere 94-vote margin. Curiously enough, Beerwah, in the central Kashmir district of Budgam, created in 2002, has been a PDP stronghold.

That move has betrayed Omar’s nervousness, observers say, and even its tactical wisdom is being questioned.

NC leaders Sheikh Rasool and Sheikh Ghulam Ahmad Saloora, considered key persons in Omar’s 2008 win in Ganderbal, have both quit the party since—in protest against his decision. It was no small decision either: in 15 december 2014

1977, Sheikh Abdullah contested again from Ganderbal and won. After his death in 1982, Farooq won the seat in 1983, 1987 and 1996. Not surprisingly, when Omar decided to enter state politics, he chose Ganderbal. He lost to Qazi Mohammad Afzal, but made up by defeating the PDP contestant decisively in 2008.

Reacting to criticism, Omar tweeted that he had taken the decision two years ago and would continue to work for Ganderbal’s development. He also tweeted to ask why when a Prime Minister switched constituencies, it was lauded, but if he did it, it was considered a weakness. And campaigning in Beerwah recently, Omar decided to keep his chin up in the face of stiff odds to tweet: ‘I know this is an election I’m supposed to lose if I believe the experts but someone forgot to tell these people.’ That line, ending with a smiley, was posted with an accompanying picture of crowds thronging to hear his address.

In a recent interview with the UK’s The Telegraph, Omar Abdullah admitted that for him, life outside his usual security shield could cause him more anxiety than the threat from Kashmir’s militants at home in India. “When I go to England….the first few days I’m nervous when I’m driving around there because I’m just not used to being on my own. And I don’t have anything, that’s when it becomes strange: getting on to a bus, travelling by Tube, buying myself a train ticket and hopping on to a train, these are things that I never get to do,” he said.

Soon, the current Chief Minister of J&K may have to get used to that part of his life. n open www.openthemagazine.com 21

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Dhiraj Nayyar

Why Raghuram Rajan Is Wrong F

inance Minister Arun Jaitley does not usually lose an

argument. Except, it would seem, to RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, who not for the first time snubbed the Finance Minister by refusing to heed his call for a reduction of the central bank’s key interest rate in its latest Monetary Policy Review of 2 December. Of course, Rajan is acting within his rights: the RBI has the autonomy to set its policy rates. But is he acting on evidence? No. It must disappoint the lawyer in Mr Jaitley.

Jaitley has all the evidence he needs to ask for a rate cut.

Inflation has fallen to its lowest in several years—for the month of October, it was just over 5.5 per cent, which happens to be lower than RBI’s target of 8 per cent for January 2015, lower even that its 6 per cent target for January 2016. At the same time, India’s economic growth has clearly not picked up. The latest GDP figures for the July-September quarter of 2014 show a growth rate of 5.3 per cent, a fall from the 5.7 per cent recorded in the April-June period. The statistics for industrial production are similarly stagnant. The positive sentiment that accompanied the arrival of the Narendra Modi Government has prevented any further slide in India’s economic fortunes, but the growth engine needs the stimulus of lower interest rates to start revving again.

Rajan believes that it is too early to be complacent about inflation. For him, it is too risky to cut rates now. The reality is that Rajan isn’t likely to get a more benign scenario for a rate cut. One of the crucial determinants of inflation in India, global oil prices, has come crashing down. Since OPEC, the group of major oil producing countries, has decided not to cut output in the near future, there is little risk of global oil prices shooting up. Now, there is always a theoretical risk that something may change this reality—say, ISIS invades Saudi Arabia— but the RBI Governor must be realistic in his assessment. He cannot let paranoia become the basis of policymaking.

The other positive fallout of lower oil prices is that the Government’s subsidy bill will fall dramatically. This will help rein in its fiscal deficit, another reason inflation should continue to fall. In any case, the incumbent NDA Government seems far more committed to fiscal consolidation (and less populism, especially) than its UPA predecessor. Rajan doesn’t seem to have recognised this either. The best central bankers in the world are those who are ‘ahead of the curve’. A good governor doesn’t wait for inflation to hit rock bottom before he starts to cut rates, just as he doesn’t wait for inflation to hit the roof before he starts raising rates.

On present evidence, Rajan is being too 22 open

hawkish and overcautious. It will cost India economic growth.

The stand-off over interest rates between Jaitley and Rajan— as has happened before between other governors and finance ministers as well—raises a troubling question. Should an unelected technocrat, no matter how stellar a reputation he has, have the authority to overrule an elected government?

Who decides how much inflation is acceptable and at what level growth is too slow? The answer is simple. The elected Government must decide what an acceptable level of inflation is. That said, the Government cannot continually change the goalposts depending on interest group pressures or political convenience. It is therefore equally important that once the Government has set goals for the RBI, it be allowed to pursue those goals in a completely autonomous fashion.

That is the monetary policy framework which the Government and RBI must strive towards. Right now, the RBI sets the targets and then pursues them as it sees fit, while the Government watches from the sidelines. That must change. An argument between the Finance Minister and RBI Governor cannot solve the problem. It requires institutional and legislative change. Jaitley has promised a new monetary policy framework in his next Budget speech. It is the perfect opportunity to enshrine by way of law a new working relationship between the RBI and the elected Government. It will bring much-needed transparency to setting monetary policy. All stakeholders will clearly know what the targets are and it will force the RBI to explain its own policy decisions to the public. It would be a good idea for the new framework to divest the RBI Governor of the power to determine interest rates. That job must be handed over to a monetary policy committee of which the Governor can be a member. That will bring some checks and balances into decision-making. The Governor should also be asked to testify regularly in Parliament on how the targets on inflation and growth are being met. The Finance Ministry will also have to learn to deal with this new reality. Once it has set the target rate of inflation (with Parliamentary approval), it will have limited space to crib as long as the targets are being met.

Both the Finance Ministry and RBI will lose some of their untrammelled powers in a new monetary policy framework. At least the economy will be spared futile shadow boxing which only adds to uncertainty and does little to either control inflation or promote growth. n Dhiraj Nayyar is a Delhi-based commentator on politics and the economy 15 december 2014

BIJU BORO/AFP/Getty Images

Prime Minister Narendra Modi poses in traditional Naga costume with a ceremonial spear and machete at the inauguration of the Hornbill festival at Kisama village in Nagaland on 1 December

NorthEast

Power and Persuasion on the Frontier

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Northeast push is spurred by political and military reasons

By ULLEKH NP

W

hen BJP leader Padmanabha Balakrishna Acharya was named Governor

of Nagaland this July, it was, without doubt, a reward for the long years he spent drafting people of the Northeast, especially students, to the party fold. As founder General-Secretary of Student Experience in Inter-state Living (SEIL), a student exchange programme with branches in ‘seven sisters’—Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur and Meghalaya—he brought students from the region to cities such as Mumbai and Delhi, housed them with BJP families and financed their education. For years, several students lived in his Mumbai home, starting from the late 1960s. His efforts were in line with the RSS mission of integrating the region with the rest of the country and keeping alive its Hindu traditions, something that was reiterated early this year by Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS sarsanghchalak, who rued: “The nation knows that the region exists, but fails to realise that it’s a part of the country.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, no stranger to the RSS’s decades-old political agenda in the region, this week announced various initiatives for the region besides flagging off new trains and promising to build new roads in the region. In Guwahati, Assam, he flagged off the first passenger train from Mendipathar to Guwahati that virtually put Meghalaya on the railway map of India; the Prime Minister also laid the foundation stone of the new

15 december 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 25

photos Anupam Nath/AP

‘‘

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Hornbill festival

It is believed in Vastu Shastra that the northeastern part of the house must be proper. Then things will be good at home. If we take good care of the Northeast, the entire country will move ahead

‘‘

Narendra Modi

broad-gauge railway line from Bhairabi to Sairang in Mizoram. Later in Kohima, capital of Nagaland, where Modi appeared in public wearing the traditional Naga costume while inaugurating the Hornbill Festival, he talked about the need to bring in development and to create an economic zone in the region. He also reminded the people of the region that his government has earmarked Rs 53,000 crore in the Union Budget for development of the Northeast. Besides, Rs 28,000 crore has been earmarked for construction of new railway lines, Rs 5,000 crore for improvement of intra-state power transmission systems and Rs 5,000 crore to improve mobile connectivity in the region.

As usual, Modi played to the gallery and declared, with a touch of philosophical flourish: “It is believed in Vastu Shastra that the northeastern part of the house must be proper.

Then things will be good at home. If we take good care of the Northeast, the entire country will move ahead.”

Unlike the Rest

Dr Rajen Singh of Manipur University says that the RSS and the BJP are aware that the aggressive Hindutva politics practised elsewhere won’t “wash” in the Northeast. “They should work as meaningful agents of social change, as social workers, perhaps with the purpose of spreading Hindu values that are not valued by the next generation of Hindus in the region,” he says. Professor Sajal Nag, a professor of history at Assam University who has extensively studied the political under26 open

currents of the northeastern region, agrees.

Which is why, he avers, organisations such as the BJP are more focused on development of the region so as to secure acceptability. After all, despite numerous incidents of forced conversions to Christianity in some states and an influx of illegal Muslim migrants in states like Assam, aggressive posturing by proHindu outfits haven’t produced much results across Northeast, he points out.

Argues Nag: “Remember, Hindu Mahasabha made very early inroads into Assam in the 1930s, when it tried to communalise the Muslim immigrants issue but failed completely. Actually Assam should have emerged as the stronghold of Hindutva politics right from the 1930s given its geopolitical situation. Assam was plagued by immigrants of Muslims from erstwhile Bengal districts. The entire politics in that period was dominated by this one theme— Muslim immigrants. Assam was the only province that had three successive Muslim League ministries. It was a province, which despite being Hindu majority, was demographically transformed and was demanded [by the Muslim League] in the proposed state of Pakistan. Other than Bengal and Punjab, it was the only province which [directly] experienced Partition. Yet despite very early and strong initiatives, neither would Hindutva politics take root in Assam nor were there any communal riots until a minor one in 1950.” The historian says it is a tribute to the secular character of the people of Assam and Tripura that despite having all the potential of Hindutva politics, 15 december 2014

they remained steadfastly unmoved by any communalist propaganda or mobilisation.

Nag has a point. And certainly, the RSS and the BJP were aware of it. The likes of Acharya were not aggressive proponents of Hindutva politics. “Instead he was someone who tried to counter the way Christian missionaries whispered the Gospel of Christ into the ears of people by educating them and by co-opting them to the Hindu scheme of things,” notes a BJP leader who has known the Nagaland Governor for a long time. According to his own brief bio, Acharya was actively engaged in ‘My Home is India’, a project run by the BJP’s student arm, ABVP. He was also active with the publication wing of the pro-RSS NGO, Indian National Fellowship Centre, which has over the decades brought out 10 booklets on Tribal nationalist leaders such as Rani Ma Gaidinliu (Manipur), U Tirot Singh and Jaban Bay (Meghalaya), Dr Daying Ering and Narottam (Arunachal Pradesh) and also published Tribal proverbs, folk-tales and poems. “When in the Northeast, do as the northeasterners do. That is the RSS-BJP policy,” insists the BJP leader.

Phairembam Newton Singh, who teaches at Sikkim University, partly agrees, “Maybe this is why the BJP is using the ‘development’ card [rather than the religious one] in the region with all these sops [announced in the budget specifically for the region].”

Strategic Interests

There’s certainly more to Modi’s interest in the Northeast than mere party politics, says Dr Nag. It is no secret that the RSS had prepared the ground for the BJP’s spectacular performance in Lok Sabha polls in the Northeast in a subtle fashion. Modi’s outbursts against illegal immigration from Bangladesh enhanced his popularity among the locals. The BJP secured half of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Assam and opened its account in Arunachal Pradesh by winning one constituency. The BJP won as many as 36.6 per cent of the votes polled in Assam. “The RSS worked silently and Modi’s stellar image also worked wonders at least in Assam,” another BJP leader recalls.

While Nag may be right about the failure of the politics of aggressive posturing, ever since the resounding Lok Sabha poll triumph, the RSS has been busy instilling ‘nationalist pride’ in the Northeast. In July this year, RSS chief Bhagwat told members of its education wing, Vidyabharti, that the organisation should work towards “spreading the feeling of nationalism” in the Northeast. He had commended the ‘success’ of a Sangh-run 15 december 2014

school in Nagaland in ‘binding’ the people of that state with the rest of the country. “Five years ago, we started a Vidyabharti school in Nagaland. Today, the children are speaking in Hindi and we are glad that we have been able to spread the spirit of nationalism there.

Tomorrow, they will be fearless and defend every inch of this country. Our vision is not restricted to just these areas,” he had said.

The attention being shown to the Northeast is not new, however. Since the region had been a Congress stronghold, all non-Congress coalitions have made efforts to establish a foothold in the seven states. “From the time of Prime Minister Deve Gowda, Northeast India has been receiving continuous attention. Atal Bihari Vajpeyee was not far behind. In fact, although the Northeast has been the traditional stronghold of the Congress, it was always the other parties that gave more attention to Northeast. Modi’s sops are not new but a continuation of that tradition,” says Nag. The difference now is that the Modi Government is giving more importance to the Northeast as a strategic frontier region with China. According to him, the new NDA Government has shown more than enough signs of departing from the age-old policy of keeping frontier areas backward. It should be so, says American military historian, Edward Luttwak, who adds that the Arunachal Pradesh he saw is “roadless and abandoned”, to the extent that there is no way India could resist an attack from China. The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) has come under sharp attack for providing poor-quality infrastructure for the Indian forces in areas near the Chinese border.

True, Modi’s thrust on developing the region

t

he Centre has shown enough signs of departing from the age-old policy of keeping frontier areas backward.

Modi’s thrust on developing the region stems from China’s aggressive military posturing

pib

Narendra Modi flags off the first train from Guwahati to Mendipathar in North Garo Hills, Meghalaya

m

MANPREET ROMANA/AFP/Getty Images

ohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, has rued that the nation knows the Northeast exists, but fails to realise that it is a part of the country

RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat at a press conference in New Delhi

stems primarily from China’s aggressive military posturing. For his part, Harsh V Pant, a professor of International Relations at King’s College London, has termed Modi’s push on the security front as “a new purposeful response” against China with a focus on border management and defence acquisitions. Modi’s strategy for the Northeast, pundits outline, is in sync with his assertive foreign policy, which, according to renowned strategist Brahma Chellaney, has a two-fold focus: regain India’s clout in its strategic backyard by reaching out to smaller neighbours that have traditionally been in India’s sphere of influence; and gaining closer engagement with the great powers.

Michael Kugelman, Senior Program Associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has often noted that, for Modi, issues of mistrust and latent hostility often constrain the pursuit of cool-headed diplomacy with countries like China.

Modi knows that he could be tested through Chinese provocations in contested territory, Kugelman maintains. In September, the Prime Minister had to bluntly tell visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping that Beijing’s intransigence on the border could impact bilateral ties. “Yeh chhoti chhoti ghatnayen bade se bade sambandhon ko prabhavit kar deti hain. Agar daant ka dard ho toh saara sharir kaam nahin karta hai. (Even such small incidents can impact the biggest of relationships just as a little toothache can paralyse the entire body),” Modi had cautioned the Chinese leader when China refused to pull back troops in the Chumar sector of eastern Ladakh even 24 hours after Xi said the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had been asked to withdraw. It is in this context that votaries of closer military collaboration between India and Japan argue that China, which often does not take Indian warnings seriously, cannot ignore an Indo-Japanese coalition. “The India-Japan relationship is a logical partnership—two countries linked by concern about China’s rising influence in the region. There is also a very heavy trade dimension to this relationship. Modi will want to deepen ties with Tokyo for sure,” Kugelman says.

Making better roads and bridges in the border areas of the Northeast is crucial for India’s military preparedness, and Modi knows that very well, says a government official. “At the moment, we have traipsing roads that are one above the other, like in any hilly terrain. We will need to develop the entire Northeast and also build its infrastructure and straight roads

as part of our new strategy,” says the official.

The logic is that straight roads can be rebuilt easily following an attack, while roads built one above the other take an awful lot of time considering BRO standards.

N

ag emphasises that Modi’s political

design is, therefore, “not so much with an eye to have few more seats in the Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha”. The Northeast has only 25 MPs. And a large number of them are already with BJP. “The new dimension of the policy is with an eye towards China and its aggressive posturing towards India. The development initiatives are to integrate the Northeast more strongly with India through a network of railways, roads and other such infrastructural networks. That is why the sops are not in terms of doles but railways, roads, river projects and so on,” asserts Nag. Meanwhile, the RSS would continue to work ‘silently’ among Tribals of the Northeast. Nag notes that the RSS is most active in Tripura, Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and among the Reang tribes of Mizoram. “They have several Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (BJP’s feeder organisation that works among tribals) units working among these people. The good point about their work in this region is that unlike other areas of the Indian mainland they don’t try to communalise them here. They concentrate more on apprising them about the rest of India and try to infuse ideas of Indian nationalism in them,” says Nag. He feels that the problem with this approach on the part of the RSS and BJP is that they start with a presumption that most Tribals in the region nurture an anti-India, anti-Indian attitude.

“This is completely absurd. The other problems with this approach are that they work among those tribes or peoples whom they consider close to Hinduism or those who follow some kind of Hindu practices,” the historian adds.

A BJP leader who has long worked in the region concedes, “Politically, cracking the Northeast code isn’t easy. What is important now in the face of the growing Chinese threat is to aggressively develop the region and integrate people there with the rest of India.

The threat from China is very real.” “The sight of the Prime Minister wearing a traditional costume is therefore very symbolic,” he adds, accusing the Congress of alienating the region from the rest of India. Clearly, the Northeast is hot for Modi, and he, a tireless campaigner, knows when to combine action with symbolism. n 15 december 2014

maharashtra

The Sena That No Longer Is

Uddhav Thackeray’s party is back with the BJP, but as a significantly weakened force

by HAIMA DESHPANDE sachin kadvekar/fotocorp

Uddhav Thackeray (left) with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis

A

bout

a

month-and-a-half

ago, they broke a 25-year-old alliance because neither wanted to play the junior partner. They fought Maharashtra’s Assembly polls against each other. Now, after the results have settled the issue of which is the bigger force, and a bout of prolonged wrangling over power-sharing, the Shiv Sena and BJP are in the process of joining hands again. The Sena is set to join the Devendra Fadanvis government of the BJP—largely on the latter’s terms.

This would be their second shot at sharing power in the state government, the first being back in 1995 when the Sena was led by its founder Bal Thackeray.

This time, the party is under his son and successor Uddhav, and its diminished stature and clout vis-à-vis the electoral victor, the BJP, has never been quite so glaring.

Yet, reality often takes a while to sink in. Though it was amply clear right from the start that the Sena was keen on joining the government, its chief had tried to create the impression that power sharing was not the party’s ultimate goal.

Ononehand,itsleaderswouldsaythatthey were willing to be the Assembly’s main opposition party (they even occupied those benches for the November vote-ofconfidence), while on the other, the same leaders would deliberate power-sharing equations with the BJP. Eknath Shinde, the Sena’s Leader of the Opposition, was attacking the Fadanvis government for its alleged ‘anti-farmer, anti-poor open www.openthemagazine.com 29

kalpak pathak/ht/getty images

and pro-rich’ policies even as Uddhav’s emissaries Anil Desai and Subhash Desai (not related) were busy trying to bargain for as many cabinet portfolios as possible.

Shinde was apparently in the dark about the negotiations, and gave up his diatribe only after he learnt of it from the press.

This is how the Shiv Sena now functions, and party sources say that it will be increasingly difficult for Uddhav to keep his men in check. They have also had to pay a price for the party’s arrogance. The Sena has lost even its pre-poll chance of having a deputy CM. From the first hour that Fadanvis was anointed Chief Minister, he made it clear he would have no deputy. But the Sena kept demanding that post, apart from that of Speaker and a third of all ministerial berths (including Home). The BJP refused to oblige. Then Uddhav scaled back his demands, asking for a Central Cabinet berth and one-third of all Maharashtra’s ministerial portfolios. Again, the BJP rejected this formula, forcing the Sena to give up on Home. Now, as Open goes to press, Uddhav appears ready to accept anything as long as his humbled party can join the state government. Where this climbdown leaves the Shiv Sena—and his leadership of it—is a good question.

R

two parties remain strained. “For 25 years, the BJP endured the bullying of the Shiv Sena,” says a senior BJP leader, “We were treated terribly and had to run to Matoshree (the Thackeray residence) all the time. No more. We’ll budge no more.”

Many Sena leaders still feel that the party, with its 63 seats to the BJP’s 123, could play a strong opposition—something they reckon the NCP and Congress, having ruled for 15 years, are too discredited to do. This, they say, would revive the Sena as a regional force. But given Uddhav’s lack of confidence—he is said to fear his MLAs would be poached by the BJP—and dismay at the prospect of another five years in opposition, it was an unlikely option. Besides, he does not want to lose power in the cash-rich Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), which his party has ruled in alliance with the BJP for nearly 17 years.

Ruling the local body is crucial to the elations

30 open

between

the

Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray at Shiv Sena Bhavan

Sena’s scheme of things.

Uddhav’s pre-poll bravado is all gone, leaving his party in a state of confusion.

This is evident at the Sena’s shakhas, baffled by conflicting signals from the top. Sainiks cannot comprehend the power equation with the BJP. “First we fought against the BJP and now we are trying to befriend them,” says Subodh Ahire, a card-bearing party member, “Uddhav saheb should tell us where we

The political grapevine, meanwhile, is abuzz that Uddhav is uneasy of his assets coming under scrutiny by Central agencies if he angers the BJP

stand.” Even after reviving the alliance, Uddhav has been hinting at some kind of sustained oppositional role.

Making matters worse, Anant Geethe, Union Minister for Heavy Industries in the Modi Government at the Centre, does not seem to know what his role is. During a recent session of Parliament, Uddhav’s stand was that his party would vote against raising FDI limits in the insurance sector. Did this mean he had to vote against his own government? “He has to decide whether he will follow the party line or the Government’s pro-foreign line,” retorted a senior Shiv Sena leader.

The political grapevine, meanwhile, is abuzz that Uddhav is uneasy of his assets coming under scrutiny by Central agencies if he angers the BJP. According to Manikrao Thakre, chief of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee, “Uddhav and Raj have never disclosed any details of the properties they hold. The Centre can initiate investigations and the findings may be shocking.”

15 december 2014

As a move to reclaim space lost to the BJP, Uddhav has lately tried to revive the party’s Hindutva slogans, but this attempt impresses nobody

The BJP, sources say, has reason enough for anger against the Sena. The former’s partymen have not forgiven Uddhav for calling them ‘Afzal Khan ki fauj’, a snide reference to an enemy of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the region’s 17th century king from whom the Shiv Sena derives its name.

T

here are many leaders in Uddhav’s

own party who want to see him fail, and his political moves suggest that he is playing right into their hands. He has depended more on local emotive issues than any strategy to counter the BJP’s rise in the state. The electorate, it turned out, wants proper development, not vada paav stalls and zhunka bhakar kendras that the Sena has been offering in its name. Narendra Modi has swung the Marathi middle-class away with his talk of vikaas vaad over praant vaad, bhaasha vaad, jaati vaad and other such narrow agendas. The aspirations of the Marathi

15 december 2014

manoos have shifted and it has caught the Sena unawares.

A party once feared for its violent fringe is now a mere caricature of itself, riddled by divisions and unsure of its future. It is no surprise that yet another faction wants the party to merge with the MNS, a Shiv Sena breakaway led by Uddhav’s cousin Raj Thackeray who has tried hard to appropriate the late Bal Thackeray’s political legacy.

As the inheritor custodian of the aspirations of the Marathi manoos (sons of the soil), Uddhav is also faced with criticism for ignoring the advice of those who had worked with his father on that agenda. “His use-and-throw policy is not acceptable to us,” says a senior Shiv Sena leader, “We are leaders who have built the Shiv Sena along with Balasaheb and now we have no role to play. Had he involved us in his plans, the Shiv Sena would not have lost self respect in this manner.”

All this heightens the party’s identity crisis. Playing a regional party requires that it retain its distinct voice, which is difficult now that it is a junior ally. Simply tagging along with the BJP, some Sainiks fear, would reduce the Sena to irrelevance.

“If they are back to their alliance, then in the next elections the BJP will take 175 seats, leaving the Shiv Sena with 100 or lesser seats,” forecasts Abhay Deshpande, political commentator.

Already, the BJP has moved aggressively into the Sena’s political space. The national party, for example, has adopted as its own the latter’s icon, Shivaji. Fadnavis’ decision to expedite a memorial for the Maratha king in the Arabian Sea has also not gone down too well with Uddhav, who was keen to keep it a Shiv Sena affair.

Bharatkumar Raut, a former Rajya

Sabha MP of the Shiv Sena, is also worried about the party playing second fiddle to the BJP. Through numerous Facebook posts, he has been consistent in his stance that the party must not compromise its self respect at any cost.

The BJP, on its part, is in the process of setting up shakhas on the lines of the Shiv Sena’s, all over the state. Though the BJP has ward offices, these contact points are meant for mass engagement. According to sources, the BJP also plans to replicate the Sena’s network of reading centres that have Marathi periodicals and books available at street corners.

As a move to reclaim space lost to the BJP over the years, Uddhav has lately tried to revive the party’s Hindutva slogans, which had been left aside since he took over as its chief and sent inclusivist signals at odds with the party’s record under his father. But this attempt impresses nobody.

Dr Kumar Saptarishi, a political commentator and the founder of the erstwhile Yuva Kranti Dal, has closely followed the Shiv Sena over the years.

Uddhav, he believes, can do little for his party. “There is no gameplan; Uddhav is not a man who has tactics up his sleeve,” says Dr Saptarishi, “The Shiv Sena has always been in search of a partner. First it joined hands with the Socialists then tried to get onto the Janata Party [bandwagon], but that did not happen. Then they went to the BJP, which was a small party and stayed with them for 25 years.”

And the BJP it is again, on current indications. Observers of the Shiv Sena, however, have been watching political developments in Maharashtra with dismay. Amar Khamkar, 40, a Mumbai businessman who has seen the Sena transform from an aggressively unruly party to its present moderate avatar, has lost his conviction that Uddhav was doing the party a good turn. “Uddhav should have been firm and stable in his stand on the BJP. Had he decided to sit in opposition from day one, he would have been much stronger and more respected,” Khamkar says, “He’s just a caricature now.”

Public perceptions of honour matter to every leader, and Uddhav, though back with the BJP, may not prove as easy a partner to deal with than Fadnavis would like. How smoothly Maharashtra’s government functions is now under watch. n open www.openthemagazine.com 31

NEW MARKET

It’s Clean Business

The Swachch Bharat Mission has spawned innovative sanitation start-ups, writes AANCHAL BANSAL

W

hen a 700-kg Indian-style

toilet-shaped cake made an appearance in Delhi last month, it seemed that toilets had finally arrived on the big scene.

The giant cake prepared by students and faculty chefs at the International Institute of Culinary Arts in Delhi was commis32 open

sioned by Bidheshwar Pathak of Sulabh International, popularly known as ‘Toilet King’ in India, and was displayed at the Constitutional Club in Delhi on the occasion of World Toilet Day. With pictures of the strawberry and chocolate cake generously dotted with dry fruits being cut by the King surrounded

by a motley crowd of city politicians and school students popping up in newspapers and social media platforms, Pathak and the staff at the institute are now looking at being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having prepared the world’s heaviest cake. An elated Pathak says that two or three years ago, even the 15 december 2014

A 700 kg cake commissioned by Sulabh International to comemmorate World Toilet Day on 19 November

rajeev tyagi

thought of a cake in the shape of an Indian style latrine would have evoked revulsion.

“This is all because the Prime Minister of India decided to pick up the broom himself,” says Pathak, who in 1970 founded Sulabh International, a non-profit outfit that now runs over 10,000 units of payand-use toilet facilities across the country.

“With the Prime Minister bringing up the issue of sanitation on his diplomacy visits abroad and launching the Swachch Bharat Mission, sanitation has become a key point in India’s agenda, enough for us to have a cake that resembles an Indian style toilet made and be photographed having mouthfuls of it,” he chuckles.

The Swachch Bharat Abhiyan was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 2 October this year at Rajghat, when he himself took up a broom and 15 december 2014

swept a street in a Valmiki colony, home to safai karamcharis (sanitation workers).

The campaign, aiming to enrol at least 3 million government employees and school students, not to mention building 1 billion toilets by 2019 in rural areas and schools, is estimated to cost over Rs 1.9 lakh crore and aims to put an end to openair defecation in India in the next five years. As per World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates, of the 1 billion people in the world who have no access to toilets, about 600 million live in India.

Apart from the Prime Minister setting the agenda and the large budget, wielding a broom himself and nominating celebrities like Sachin Tendulkar, Salman Khan, Anil Ambani and even Baba Ramdev to the campaign, the Government has also set up the Swachch Bharat Kosh for big and small corporations to contribute funds to the cause as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) responsibilities.

This seems to have created a stir in India Inc, with both corporates and private entrepreneurs expecting a new lease of life in the sanitation sector. While industry body Assocham has urged its 400,000 strong membership to ‘find an opportunity’ and look at working on solid waste disposal mechanisms in Tier I and Tier II cities, small time entrepreneurs are already looking at the initiative as changing the approach and parameters of sanitation and business in the country.

According to Namita Banka, founder and CEO of Hyderabad-based Banka BioLoo, the Swachch Bharat campaign is ‘exciting’ for private entrepreneurs like herself. “Sanitation is like a revolution in India. Of course it does not take only one person to bring about change, but with the Government talking about toilets and sanitation, it has clearly rolled out great scope for our market,” says the 41-year-old Banka, who formerly worked as a jewellery designer in Surat. The now Hyderabadbased entrepreneur was the first person to have secured a licence, two years ago, to commercialise the bio digester technology developed by India’s Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO), meant to convert human waste

into reusable water and gas in the extreme climes of Siachen. As Banka explains, the technology works on the basis of anaerobic digestion in which microorganisms break down the waste in the absence of oxygen. The bio-digester tank, which can be replenished with inoculated bacteria, can be attached to the toilet unit.

While her start-up has been working with the Indian Railways and infrastructure companies that build schools, with DRDO issuing a licence to organisations such as Wockhardt International, Banka BioLoo had been expecting serious competition. Other small-time firms like Master Plannery in Bangalore are looking at producing cost-effective pre-fabricated units in rural areas. “The key to this technology is pre-fab installations that even a layman can set up using simple nuts and bolts, and can be used in water-borne, chemical as well as biological systems of pit latrines,” explains the firm’s proprietor Anand Kumar.

Even though India has been following a Total Sanitation Policy since the early 2000s, the loss of GDP due to lack of sanitation and hygiene is still pegged at 6 per cent. As shown by research over the years, lack of sanitation facilities and the consequent illnesses cause stunt the growth of children and leave them malnourished. According to Dr Sideek Ahmed of Kerela-based Eram Scientific Solutions, the biggest hurdle so far has been that there ‘were no large corporate houses in India [that] would have any commendable investment in sanitation.’ Eram, which won the global ‘Re-Invent the Toilet challenge’ rolled out by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation earlier in March this year, has supplied over 600 ‘e-toilets’ to 13 states since Ahmed, an entrepreneur with businesses in Middle Eastern countries and the UK, decided to set up Eram in Thiruvananthapuram four years ago.

The e-toilets, as explained by Ahmed, use water thriftily and are standalone units that open on the insertion of a coin. The user is even directed through voice commands, and water usage is automated.

While the company currently caters only to municipal corporations, it is now looking at rolling out commercial models with options for recycling. “While a project like Eram seemed laughable then, it now open www.openthemagazine.com 33

The Swachch Bharat Mission has brought innovation to sanitation, such as the e-toilets above, designed specifically for installation in schools

only sounds like a smart business to take up,” says Ahmed.

The business opportunities ahead are “mind-boggling”, according to Sudip Sen, vice-president of the Kolkata-based Stone India Ltd, which has recently bagged a Rs 2 crore project for the Delhi Development Authority to set up biotoilets across parks in various parts of Delhi, and from the Kerala government to install bio-digesters on house boats in the backwaters. The bio-digester technology was developed by the 80-year-old company that supplies hi-tech precision engineered components to the Railways; with the help of the Government of India, it has started supplying toilet units to the Railways as its first client. The firm, says Sen, is now eyeing projects in girls schools and urban slums where community toilets are essential.

I

is not just the hardware industry that is seeing a boom. With the Government encouraging CSR investment in the initiative, companies like Reckitt Benckiser and Dabur have also jumped on the bandwagon to sell their products in aid of the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan. While Reckitt has pledged Rs 100 crore to the initiative and signed up actor Amitabh Bachchan as brand ambassador for Dettol to promote the idea of hygiene and sanitation in 400 villages across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, Dabur is leveraging the concept to promote its cleaning agent brand SaniFresh under t

34 open

the tag-line of ‘Swachch Toilet, Swachch Bharat Abhiyan’. While the company has identified areas near Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, to build 50 toilet units for girls, it has also pledged Re 1 from each sale of SaniFresh towards the cause.

Even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has offered the Indian Government help by developinganappfor‘SwachchBharat’(perhaps sensing its popularity with stars and celebs that are supporting the cause and uploading their photo-ops online). Local players, however, have already beaten him to the punch. Several apps are doing the rounds online, one of them being Swach Bharat by Abhipray Foundation that was created for the Delhi BJP team to record the progress of its MPs, MLAs and councillors on the campaign in their respective constituencies. I-Clean India, which has an operational link with Bangalore Municipal Corporation, is an Android app that allows users to share and geo-tag unclean areas in the city and invite friends and contacts on Facebook

“This is all because the Prime Minister decided to pick up the broom himself,” says Bidheshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International

and Twitter to clean-up the area.

According to co-founder Prukalpa Sankar, the app will help mobilise people who want to pitch in but don’t know how to.

His start-up company raised Rs 2 crore this year and is looking at joining hands with other municipal corporations.

Amid the current fervour of the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan, Avinash Kumar, programme director at WaterAid India, a firm that works in the fields of sanitation and hygiene in India, cautions against the campaign being reduced to a Page 3 event. “It is great that the Government has managed to create interest and a stir, but we have to keep up with the realities around,” he says.

According to Kumar, the campaign is not only about wielding a broom and uploading a picture on Facebook or building rows of toilets. “It is way more complicated than that,” he says, “We need to look at solidwaste management and disposal schemes.

Even Delhi sewage treatment is managed only for half of the waste produced, and that’s where private corporations can pitch in.” Kumar claims that nearly 80 per cent of the toilets built as part of the Total Sanitation Campaign in the past are either just on paper or remain unused, and that the key learning from past mistakes is that the Government needs to invest in human resources. “We need to make people use them, independently monitor the construction of these units, and also educate people. Investment in human resources is more important than building hardware and that’s where the private sector should be tapped,” he says. n 15 december 2014

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epidemic

india pictures

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15 december 2014

Going Viral in Kerala Over 150,000 ducks have been culled around Kerala’s serene backwaters, but given the environmental degradation of the region, it was a tragedy waiting to happen.

The state has a fever—always By Shahina KK

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cross Alappuzha district in Kerala, thousands of ducks waddle into cages with little hesitation. They are literally walking into fire, because once inside, they are going to be burned alive. An outbreak of avian flu, detected for the first time in Kerala, has turned Alappuzha into a cemetery of ducks; 157,000 have so far been killed in a massive culling operation being carried out by the state Animal Husbandry department.

On the morning of 10 November, Kuttappan, a farmer in Nehru Trophy ward of Alappuzha noticed something unusual about his flock. Around100 birds showed symptoms of sickness, refusing to eat and appearing drowsy. By afternoon, one had died. Kuttappan took the corpse and one ailing duck to the Bird Research Centre at Thiruvalla. He was told that it was difficult to diagnose the disease by examining one or two ducks.

The next day, finding more birds dead in their cages, Kuttappan took ten sick ducks to the centre. While he was there, Kuttappan received a call from his son, who told him that the situation had gotten worse: 100 more ducks had died.

“A team of doctors came home the next day. They examined the ducks and prescribed a tablet which cost Rs 25. I bought a hundred tablets, the maximum that I could afford. Doctors suggested giving an injection to the rest of the ducks, which was also very expensive,” he says. Duck farming has been a traditional occupation for Kuttappan and hundreds of other farmers in Kuttanadu. He had been the owner of 25,800 ducks a month ago. Last Saturday, there was not a single duck left on his farm. Around10,000 died and the rest were culled, despite his having spent around Rs 1 lakh in a desperate attempt to save the ducks.

The samples collected were sent to the National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases in Bhopal. By then, cases of mass bird deaths had been reported from other areas of Kuttanadu. Panic had begun and more samples were taken and sent for tests. Confirming the worst fears, the first result from the Bhopal Institute had diagnosed the birds as infected with avian flu virus (H5N1). Among the ten tested samples collected from various locations, six turned out positive. A red alert was immediately declared across the 38 open

districts from where the duck deaths had been reported. This was followed by the formation of a Rapid Action Team and a declaration by the state government that there would be a culling of all ducks in Kuttanadu. There was little time for conspiracy theories or negotiation. Culling operations started on a war footing. The farmers had to be content with whatever compensation was awarded.

K

uttanadu is the rice belt of Kerala, an abode for migratory birds and a favourite destination of tourists. It was identified as one of three vitally important biodiversity sites in the world by the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty for the conservation of wetlands. The dying of birds en masse is not new to Kuttanadu, however. “It happens every year, but it is treated as the usual not-very-lethal plague commonly seen in birds. Only this year, the presence of avian flu was suspected,” says an officer engaged in culling operations.

Around ten years ago, fish had started dying in large numbers, creating panic across the state. Farmers in Kuttanadu still have fearful memories of thousands of dead fish floating across inland waters and paddy fields. Alappuzha was also the worst affected in 2011 when the state was hit by Chikungunya. When Japanese Encephalitis, a fatal mosquito-borne viral infection was detected in Kerala, Alappuzha again reported the highest number of cases. There are recurrent incidents of dengue fever as well. Every year, there is an ‘epidemic season’, mostly from the beginning of the monsoon, as the wetlands of Kuttanadu get hit by a variety of viral and bacterial infections.

“There is nothing to be surprised in this

Kerala has often come under sharp attack by the Comptroller and Auditor General for not doing enough to manage food waste

phenomenon,” says Gopakumar Mukundan, a member of Kuttanadu Lake Commission. “Environmental pollution has crossed all limits here. Around 500 tonnes of pesticide are being used every season. This is in addition to the chemical fertilisers being used. And lake water pollution by the countless number of houseboats—both registered and nonregistered—adds fuel to the fire.”

No one knows the exact number of houseboats afloat on Vembanad lake here. “It is definitely more than 2,000, both registered and non-registered,” says Deepak Dayanandan an environmentalist and a native of Kumarakom. Dr CS Vijayan, former chairman of the Biodiversity Board who had submitted recommendations in 2009 to control the contamination of the lake, says that there has been a record of consistently high prevalence of coliform bacteria in the water, and that the oil leaking everyday from hundreds of houseboats makes the lake unlivable. He adds, “We suggested implementation of stringent measures to regulate houseboats. A total ban on discharge of human excreta into the backwaters should have been implemented.

None of those recommendations were brought into practice.”

Kuttanadu is a waterlogged stretch of about 110,000 hectares, of which the low lying clusters of paddy fields cover an area of 50,000 hectares. According to a study conducted by Kerala’s Pollution Control Board, some 25,000 tonnes of fertiliser and 500 tonnes of highly toxic pesticides are used in the paddy fields annually, and their use is 50 to 75 per cent greater in Kuttanadu than in other regions. This has its roots in the Thanneermukkam Bund built across the Vembanad lake.It is the largest mud regulator in India and was constructed to prevent tidal action flooding salt water onto low-lying paddy lands.

“Conceptually, the bund was supposed to remain closed only for three to four months in a year, and the shutters would remain open during the rest of the year,” says Gopakumar Mukundan. But what happened was the reverse. Farmers no longer had to worry about salt water tides from the sea, and the season of paddy cultivation was extended. This resulted in the bund remaining shut for more than six months a year. The water, contaminated by multiple sources, now remains 15 december 2014

ima babu

A Rapid Action Team undertakes an emergency culling operation in Alappuzha

within the waterlogged areas rather than getting drained out to the sea.

Kuttanadu’s wetlands lie below sea level, causing massive deposits of garbage to flow in via the rivers Manimala, Pampa and Achankovilar. According to statistics of the Kerala State Pollution Control Board, the coliform bacteria count per 100 ml of water in the river Pampa at Sabarimala—a pilgrim centre visited by upto 700,000 devotees every year—is 200,000. Environmentalists say the tolerable level is 20 per 100 ml; and that in drinking water, it should be zero. “It’s well established that ecological imbalances are increasingly the cause of resurgent and emergent diseases. Hence, the development of Kuttanadu should mean the protection of the environment,” says Mukundan. Dr KG Padmakumar, former director of Kuttanadu Research Institute, who has also been part of the damage control operations, corroborates this argument. “Two-thirds of the Kuttanadu belt is water. The ecosystem is badly affected by the alarming heights of pollution. Only a long term strategy can cure the disease,” he says.

C

ulling operations have been carried out in seven locations in Alappuzha district, including the town; 45 to 50 teams of ten to 12 health and veterinary officers each are involved, though

15 december 2014

the chaos and confusion caused by the lack of time, experience and coordination is highly palpable. “In the beginning, the ducks were being buried, not burned.

Kuttanadu is a low-lying wetland that cannot afford such a massive burial.

There is water even ten feet below the ground level. They started burning [the dead birds] only after the people started resisting,” says Jayammaa, councillor of Alappuzha municipality.

The Rapid Action Team is wary of the media. When we reach Mukkail, a village in Ambalappuzha North Panchayat, the team is preparing to cull 30,000 ducks in the locality. They ask us to keep away, citing an order from the Collector not to allow media persons to the sites. “The reason is simple. The Government does not want the people to know what actually is happening in the bird flu hit areas,” says Dr TM Thomas Issac, Alappuzha’s MLA. “Alappuzha does not have sufficient firewood. Hence thousands of ducks remain half burned. They continue burying ducks in places where firewood is not available. Nobody is capable of giving any assurance that this will not lead to an outbreak of some other epidemic.”

Alappuzha has started stinking of death. Around 25,000 ducks have been buried in Nedumudi Panchayat.

A journey through the villages of Kainakari, Ambalappuzha, Nedumudi and Chennithala brings the foul smell of

burning flesh and nauseating sights of pyres on which hundreds of dead ducks remain half cremated. “The remains of the birds flow into the inland waters and paddy fields. The villagers use the same water for bathing and washing clothes because they do not have any other option,” says Gopakumar.

Incidentally, Kerala has often come under sharp attack by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) for not doing enough to effectively manage food waste.

The rampant dumping of waste in public places, especially carcasses and poultry litter, has posed all manner of health hazards in the country’s most literate state. Poor waste processing and badly outdated land-filling techniques have, over the past decade, repeatedly caused major health scourges.

Government officials carrying out the culling operations cite only one reason for burying the dead ducks. “We follow WHO guidelines that suggest [we] bury the birds,” says a veterinary officer leading a team. However, the WHO’s guidelines are for drylands, and it has not issued any guidelines on containing bird flu in wetlands.

Thankfully, the virus has only spread from bird to bird so far—though H5N1 can theoretically mutate or recombine with a human influenza variant to form a strain that could be transmitted easily from human to human. n open www.openthemagazine.com 39

ANIMAL SPIRIT

Not Just a Cock-and-Bull The world’s most virile bull, still a virgin at six, is more expensive than a Ferrari. In a remo SUNAINA KUMAR finds the loneliness of Yuvraj more expressive than the reproductive bu

Karamveer Singh with his prize-winning bull Yuvraj

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Story

ashish sharma

te village in Haryana, siness he runs

n Sunarion village, tucked deep

inside an agricultural belt somewhere in Babain tehsil of Haryana’s Kurukshetra district, if you ask for directions to Karamveer Dairy Farm, you are likely to get bemused looks. The villagers here are still not used to visitors from all over the country and beyond —from Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, from Canada, Australia and Venezuela—who flock to this sleepy little settlement with nothing out of the ordinary to recommend it, save for one famous denizen.

But first, a short history of how it all began. In the second week of October, the All India Cattle Show was held in the city of Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. As events go, this is not one that the media would take notice of, let alone go to any extremes to cover. The Show had cattle from all over the country, but its panel of ten judges was impressed most by Yuvraj, a big black bull of the Murrah breed (native to Haryana), 1,400 kg by weight and nearly 5 foot 8 inches in height. The bull was adjudged the Best Animal of 2014, and that would have been that.

What followed, however, was incredible. Karamveer Singh, the farmer who owns Yuvraj, was made an offer of Rs7crorebyafarmerfromAndhraPradesh for his bull. Even more astounding was the fact that it was an offer Singh could afford to refuse. It made Yuvraj, whose trophies outnumber his years (the sixyear-old has won eight championships thus far) among the world’s biggest bovine stars, his closest competitor being Miss Missy, a Holstein cow from Canada with a Wikipedia page of her own.

As a bull more expensive than a Ferrari, Yuvraj made international headlines.

What evoked curiosity was why the dairy farmer from Haryana was not impressed by the offer. He knows better, you see. He knows that this bull will make him as wealthy as a sultan, bring him untold riches and unbounded fame.

One day the illustrious animal may even lead him to his treasured dream: to buy a helicopter. The explanation lies not just in Yuvraj’s peerless pedigree (as the finest specimen of the Murrah breed, which has the highest yield of milk among buffaloes), but also his extraordinary virility (he has been called the ‘Vicky Donor’ of

the buffalo world), which earned Singh more than Rs 60 lakh last year by way of semen sales to farmers all over.

As the story goes, the legend of Yuvraj has been growing since early this year, when he was noticed at another missable event (at least for non-farmers), the Progressive Punjab Agriculture Summit in Mohali. Between these two outings, however, a star was born. If you google him and refine your search by adding ‘bull’ (to distinguish him from the cricketer), more than 300,000 results show up instantly. Yuvraj is now almost as famous as his namesake, the cricketer, after whom he is named; and just like him, the bull’s father too is called Yograj, as I am told by his doting owner. “He is Yuvraj because he lives like a prince.”

A

long a narrow road on the outskirts of Sunarion with fields of sugarcane on either side, a young man, holding a lathi in one hand while riding a bike, his face covered with a proud moustache and sleek aviators, looking every bit the stereotype of a Haryanvi Jat, directs us to a sprawling mud-coloured two-storey building that towers over the village.

Karamveer Singh’s precious cattle herd is kept in an open shed next to the house where he lives with his wife. Yuvraj, the pride of Sunarion, ‘Shaan-e-Haryana’ as some of his gushing online fans call him, is tied to a gatepost at the shed’s entrance.

He stands right in front, apart from all the others bulls and buffaloes, framed like a movie hero, and from a distance he looks like a great black truck.

A closer inspection reveals some of his finer features: the tightly curled horns, the coal black body glistening with oil that catches the afternoon sun, the tuft of hair on his forehead, his big mournful eyes and long eyelashes. On his right foreleg, a thick red thread has been tied to ward off the evil eye.

Singh, a squat man with a whimsical face, is giving instructions to his farmhands. A musky odour mixed with the smell of freshly cut grass and mustard oil, which is not unpleasant, clings to the place. Morning hours are the busiest of all at the farm. The animals are first fed, then given their daily bath with fresh tap open www.openthemagazine.com 41

Rs 7 crore is what a farmer from Andhra Pradesh offered Karamveer Singh,

the owner of Yuvraj. Singh turned down the offer water—never in the village pond, which is for ordinary cattle and not clean enough for Singh’s special bovines—and are then rubbed down with mustard oil for 20 minutes each, which gives them a shiny black sheen.

We sit down amid the brisk activity. “Yeh meri dairy hai, par lagta circus hai (This is my dairy, but it looks like a circus),” he begins, referring to how people come from far and wide to look at his collection of cattle. Singh has many other business interests and acres of land, but spends most of his time in the shed tending to his herd. “Yeh mera shauk hai, kaam nahin (It’s my hobby, not work).” At one point in the conversation, he professes to love Yuvraj more than he loves his own sons, who are studying abroad, pursuing professional degrees. His affection reminds me of Lord Emsworth with his passion for his prize-winning sow, the Empress, inasmuch as an earthy Jat farmer from Haryana can bear a resemblance to an upper-crust British peer.

The bulls and buffaloes at the farm, nearly 25, are all from the same gene pool as Yuvraj; they are the offspring of Yograj and Ganga. Singh tells me the story of how he discovered his passion and talent for breeding top-quality cattle. It started 14 years ago, when he happened to acquire Yograj as a seven-month-old calf from a distressed farmer in Rohtak. A combination of acuity and some luck led him to mate Yograj, an exceptional bull, with Ganga, an elite buffalo, who in her prime yielded 26 litres of milk a day, which resulted in what is now the first family of the buffalo world. An entire room in his house, which resembles a 1970s film set with its winding marble staircase, is taken up by trophies and shields that have been won by his herd at various shows, the most by Yuvraj, even though the younger ones are beginning to catch up.

Singh brings out his brood. There is Bhim, Yuvraj’s younger brother, an energetic young bull, a prodigy who is only two years old and is expected to 42 open

surpass his brother’s fame. And there is Saraswati, the one-year-old sister, substantial in size, who is vigorously chewing cud. Ganga, the mother, slowly ambles forward. She is pregnant for the sixteenth time, the gift that keeps on giving. Like a proud collector of rare jewels, Singh takes me around to meet each and every one of them, though, apart from Yuvraj who stands the tallest, it is impossible for me to tell the difference between the big black blurs.

L

ike many high achievers, Yuvraj

leads a regimented life. He begins his day with 10 litres of milk at 6 in the morning, which is laced with various proteins and tonics to protect his liver.

After a few hours, he is given 5 kg of apples, and after his bath and massage, he’s left to sun himself in the dirt corral in the middle of the shed. In the evening, he goes for a brisk walk of 4 km around the village escorted by two minders, as he cannot be allowed to become overweight.

At 1,400 kg, is it not a little late to worry about his weight? While he seems a big boy, it turns out he is actually quite fit. After his walk, he consumes another 10 litres of milk and about 15 kg of cattle feed. His daily upkeep costs Rs 2,000. “He must have been a raja maharaja in his past life, look how pampered he is,” says Singh with a smirk.

When it is time for the photo shoot, an outdoor setting is sought that matches the glory of Yuvraj, and so we set off for a walk in the village. Four of his minders appear, two at the front to pull him by thick ropes and two at the back. Passersby crane their necks when they spot him, a group of school children stop in their tracks to stare at him. Our pace is languorous and we stop at least three times as Yuvraj decides to alternately take a dump and then a leak. This is where the two minders at the back efficiently step in. They walk with buckets of water and cloth rags to clean him.

Singh’s young nephew Vikrant, who breeds dogs, has joined us for the walk and he is full of useful information. “He is very clever, he likes to go outside and never in his own shed, which he keeps very clean.” “Look how he poses for the camera. Iska apna style hai (it’s his own style), he becomes smarter, like a showman.”

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ow all this fuss may seem absurd, but it is serious business. Murrah is considered one of the world’s finest breeds of buffaloes, and there is a growing demand for the kind from across the world. Such buffaloes account for more than 56 per cent of India’s total milk production. Poonam Sikka, principal scientist at the Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes (CIRB) in Hisar, has spent 30 years researching the animals and is extremely passionate about her subject. She says, “It is a species which is famous all over the globe. Through artificial insemination, Murrah has been exported to China, Brazil and Western countries, where they are raising herds. It gives the highest milk production, which is also of the best quality, very high in nutrients and vitamins. It is also famous for its quality of meat.” On the website of CIRB, which also sells frozen semen to farmers, the rates start at Rs 15 per dose and go up to Rs 100 for all bulls, except Yograj and Yuvraj, whose semen is sold at Rs 500 a dose.

Later, when I sit with Singh in his trophy room where the light bounces off the gold of the trophies, he tells me the details of how he is making his fortune. Yuvraj’s semen is collected through a scientific method that uses an AV (‘artificial vagina’), then frozen and sold. The potential risk of disease is too high to allow the purebred to mate naturally with a female. It’s time for the big reveal: Yuvraj is a virgin. This then is the ultimate irony. The most procreative bull in the world must remain a prisoner to his own virility. n 15 december 2014

A RT

The Persistence of Sound The Carnatic Mandolin after U Shrinivas 48

A beautiful crown

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o p en s pa c e

Aishwarya Rai Ranbir Kapoor

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n p lu

Zed Plus The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1

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CI N E M A R E V I E W

Bose Cinemate 130 de Grisogono Allegra collection Nikon 1 V3

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TECH & STYLE

The homosexuality effect The key to infant memory HIV gets less virulent

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SCI E N C E

The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works

by BN Goswamy 2014: The Election That Changed India by Rajdeep Sardesai

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books

The carnatic mandolin’s future without U Shrinivas

Music

The Christie’s auction

44 64

mindspace

art

Tyeb Mehta I Falling Bull I Acrylic on canvas I 175.3x150.2 cm I Estimate: Rs8,50,00,000-12,00,00,000 I $1,385,500-1,956,000

Jehangir Sabavala I The Green Cape I Oil on canvas, 1974 I 76.8 Estimate: Rs1,20,00,000 – 1,80,00,000I $200,000-300,000

Master Class Christie’s second auction in India featuring rare works by the masters takes place in a resurgent art market Rosalyn D’Mello

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t is perhaps only in translation

that the local, organic inflections underlying the occidental term, ‘market’ are revealed. In fact, the very word ‘market’ is a misnomer in a country as ancient as India, whose cultural heritage dates back several millennia, whose cartography was punctuated for centuries by ancient trade routes, and whose bustling stock market—Asia’s oldest—traces back to 1855, when a bunch of five brokers began trading under a banyan tree in British colonial Bombay. The Persian-origin ‘bazaar’ is possibly more accommodating of the chaotic, informal and sometimes superstitious

44 open

mechanisms that orchestrate the commercial enterprises contained within its ecosystem. To describe the dealings that transpire when works of art change hands within the Indian artist-gallerist-collector-auction housecollector nexus as the ‘Indian art market’ is to obfuscate its resilient, resistant, multi-cellular, regenerative character that may have had its formal beginnings as a consequence of the country’s liberalisation policy of 1991, but has, in some sense, perpetually persisted on the fringes of the larger economy, and has survived and even resurrected itself despite the lack of infrastructural support and restrictive,

outdated laws.

After almost six comatose years, during which the necessary process of price recalibration has been underway, a concerted, collective attempt to never again succumb to the careless speculation that resulted in the deathly thud of the 2008 crash — the Indian art market finally displayed symptoms of resurrection on 19 December, 2013, with Christie’s inaugural auction on Indian soil, at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal, when an untitled non-representational painting by VS Gaitonde sold for a historic Rs 23.7 crore ($3.8 million) to a US-based collector in anticipation of a planned retrospective of the late artist’s 15 december 2014

x 127.3 cm I

works at the Guggenheim, New York, in October 2014. ‘This auction feels like an adrenaline shot into the heart of the art market,’ art critic Girish Shahane had posted on Facebook soon after the sale, which had attracted buyers across Asia, America and Europe, and grossed a total of Rs 96,59,37,500 ($15.4 million), doubling pre-sale estimates, with 98 per cent of the lots sold.

The high from the secondary market was pervasive, feeding the cautious optimism of the 2014 edition of the India Art Fair and sustaining the market through the following months.

Mid 2014, confidence in the market surged to 74, its highest reading since October 2007, jumping 41.9 per cent from the last reading in November 2013, according to the ArtTactic Indian Art Market Confidence Indicator, a possible consequence of the swearing 15 december 2014

Francis Newton Souza I Indian Family I Oil on board, 1947 I 119.7 x 117.2 cm I Estimate: Rs4,60,00,000-6,20,00,000 I $750,000-1,010,600

in of a new central government and a projected growth rate of 5.4 per cent.

One year later Christie’s has returned with its second auction on Indian soil, slated for 11 December, at the same venue as its inaugural sale. The enthusiasm is palpable. The timing couldn’t be better; one day later the international art world will descend on the quaint town of Fort Kochi for the second installment of India’s very first Biennale, curated by Jitish Kallat, featuring 94 artists from around the world. Logistical frenzy aside, the Kochi Biennale Foundation team is currently soliciting donations from school children to the art cognoscenti to Bollywood superstars, and strangely enough, the response has been unprecedented. The catalytic effect of crowd-funding initiatives like this and those planned by other not-for-profit organisations like the Delhi-based

artist residency, Khoj, and the Mumbaibased Mumbai Art Room is that they cumulatively highlight the significant need for support from the private sector and individuals in order to sustain the art economy. Christie’s kicks off its second auction within this new climate of freshly infused frenzy and cautious optimism, which has learnt from the mistakes it made that led to the 2008 slump. “The KochiMuziris Biennale is due to open shortly and the successful India Art Fair held earlier this year are all indicators that this market is finding a new momentum,” says Amin Jaffer, head of Asian Art, Christie’s.

Following last year’s record-breaking sale, among the star lots is a brilliant untitled 55-by-40-inch work by VS Gaitonde, painted in 1998, making it one of a small handful made by the abstract artist before his death in 2001. open www.openthemagazine.com 45

Vasudeo S Gaitonde I Untitled I Oil on canvas, 1998 I 139.7x101.6 cm I Estimate: Rs5,50,00,000-7,00,00,000 $880,000-1,100,000

“The activities of galleries and collectors, alongside auction houses, provide a nurturing environment in which the market can flourish” Amin Jaffer head of Asian Art, Christie’s This meditative piece, executed in languorous hues of green, and quartered in the centre by intersecting tantric symbols, is being auctioned for the first time on behalf of its owner, a private collector, and is estimated to fetch between Rs 5,50,00,000 to Rs 7,00,00,000 ($896,500 to $1,141,000).

The sale of the lot coincides with ‘Painting as Process, Painting as Life’, the ongoing Gaitonde retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, which, among numerous other examples, is revealing of the West’s growing interest in Indian Modernist art, which is certainly fuelling sales, according to Jaffer. Alongside the Gaitonde show in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London staged an exhibition of late works by Husain from Usha Mittal’s collection, Jaffer says. “Add to these the activities of the many galleries, collectors and institutions, who, alongside the auction houses are working together to provide a nurturing environment in which the market can flourish.”

The 80 lots on sale are representative 46 open

of the important art movements synonymous with the country’s Modernist legacy and include some exceptional works by its pioneering practitioners. “When selecting works for the sale we do try to represent all of the key artistic movements and those artists that are always most admired,” says Sonal Singh, head of Christie’s Mumbai department. “It can take many years to consign a work and we are always happy to wait—ours is a longterm business where relationships with clients are critical.” The process is fairly long-drawn, says Singh. “Once we have seen a work and decided that it

would be a good piece to include in the sale, the job of researching begins. It can take many months to properly research the history of the piece, checking on the provenance, seeking advice from external specialists on the work of the artist, convening opinion from colleagues … all of these aspects are critical as we have to provide ourselves with the reassurances we need that a work is genuine, before we accept it for sale.”

An unexpected standout among the 80 lots, and perhaps a testimony to Christie’s due process, is an early, 1957 work by Tyeb Mehta titled Girl in Love, which had been acquired in the 15 december 2014

1990s by its owner directly from the artist, based on the advice of his contemporary, MF Husain. Estimated at Rs 70,00,000 to Rs 90,00,000 ($113,933 to $146,485), this oil-oncanvas piece portrays a melancholic female form afflicted by love. Mehta’s 1999 canvas, Falling Bull, though, is leading the sale with its estimate of Rs 8,50,00,000 to Rs 12,00,00,000 ($1,383,469 to $1,953,132). Never known to be prolific, Mehta is credited with triggering the six-year-long Indian art boom when his triptych

Celebration sold for Rs 1.5 crore ($300,000 at the prevailing rate) in 2002 at Christie’s, making it the highest sum for an Indian painting at an international auction then.

Les toits de la rue St. Jacques, an early work by a fellow member of the Bombay Progressive, SH Raza is another enviable lot on sale. Estimated at Rs 3,00,00,000 to Rs 4,00,00,000 ($488,283 to $651,044), this streetscape, punctuated by the contours of rooftops against a sienna sky, was first exhibited at Galerie Lara Vincy in 1958.

“In the past three years, the Indian buying spend at Christie’s has increased by 85 per cent. Over 2,000 people joined us during our first sale” Sanjay Sharma, Managing Director, Christie’s INDIA Bharti Kher I Hyperbolic Spiral I bindis on mirror, 2011 I 59.7 x 59.7 cm I Estimate: Rs25,00,000-35,00,000 I $40,800-57,000

A pocketbook with the initials ‘RN Tagore’ is another unique lot.

Maintained in Bengali between 1889 and 1904, the journal comprises the Nobel Laureate’s poetry, drawings, and introspective musings as well as records of land transactions and taxations, and was given to Tagore by Subodh Chandra Mazumder, a teacher at Santiniketan. This historic pocketbook, which birthed poems from his ‘Sonar Tari’ (Golden Boat) series and 19 poems from the ‘Swaran’ series, is estimated at Rs 40,00,000 to Rs 60,00,000 ($65,200 to $97,800).

Christie’s is certain its second auction will attract both existing clientele as well as new buyers, a category it feels has been consistently growing. “The first sale in India attracted an even greater number, with 35 per cent of those who bought with us new to Christie’s,” says Sanjay Sharma, Christie’s Managing Director in India. “Over 2,000 people joined us during our first sale and previews in India in 2013. In the past three years, the Indian buying spend at Christie’s across all categories in all salerooms has increased by 85 per cent.” These ground realities have prompted the international auction house to set up a second office in New Delhi. “We have made a significant investment in our business here in India, and these two statistics are an indication that this was a wise decision,” Sharma says.

Quiet optimism is how Jaffer describes the mood in-house. “We have just closed the New Delhi exhibition of highlights from our second sale and have been greatly encouraged by the reaction from our collectors,” he says. Propelling this enthusiasm is the emerging awareness of art as more than just capital. “I very rarely hear my clients talk about buying art as an investment, says Singh. “Collectors buy because a work of art has a deep meaning to them, and, in my experience, this is the essence of why people buy art wherever you are.” n Rosalyn D ’Mello, former editor-in-chief of Blouin ArtInfo India, is a Delhi-based freelance writer. Christie’s The India Sale is on 11 December 2014 in Mumbai open www.openthemagazine.com 47

music

photos nathan g.

V Shoba

Mandolin U Shrinivas

times content

A Broken Record The rarefied world of the Carnatic mandolin, orphaned after the untimely death of its pioneering exponent U Shrinivas, faces an existential crisis

UP Raju and his wife Nagamani teach children at their residence in Chennai

I

n an ivory kurta, his long hair parted like curtains to frame a warm smile, U Rajesh bears a striking likeness to his brother, Mandolin Shrinivas, who died prematurely on 19 September this year, shocking a legion of fans. On a Sunday evening at a small venue in Bangalore, Rajesh takes the stage with celebrated chitravina exponent N Ravikiran to play his first formal tribute to the prodigy who had startled the world of Carnatic classical music with his gorgeously introspective art and his technical mastery over a new instrument. The concert starts off with a classic invocation to Ganesha, and closes with a jugalbandi in raga keeravani, a beloved staple from Shrinivas’ repertoire, with several solos in

15 december 2014

Mandolin Sisters: Sreeusha (left) and Sireesha

between. This last piece is tumultuous, the brisk movements of the mandolin segueing imperceptibly into Ravikiran’s melodic flourish, and both sounds disappearing like a mirage into deep, lingering notes as though the two musicians were contemplating a world without Shrinivas. But this is not an elegy. Nor is it an impersonation. “I want this concert to be a celebration of his music,” Rajesh tells the audience.

“Because there was, and there will be, only one U Shrinivas.”

In the conservative tradition of Carnatic music, where the voice reigns supreme, instruments are fragile commodities, dependent on the patronage of history or the succour of a disruptive genius to keep afloat. Unlike the violin, which was assimilated into

the kutcheri format as a worthy accompaniment, or the veena, venerated as Saraswati incarnate, exotics such as the saxophone and the guitar have relied on indomitable personalities to vault them into the classical mainstream.

In the early 1980s, one such instrument from the lute family with origins in Italy was redeemed by a boy of five who wanted to play classical music on it. Undeterred by its ‘foreign’ sound, he perfected Carnatic gamakas (ornamental phrases) on a special, five-stringed electric mandolin and began playing to rave reviews. “When Shrinivas started performing at such a young age, listeners and critics fell under his spell.

They did not seem to mind that he used a guitar’s pickup and that the sound was electric. His brilliance won him open www.openthemagazine.com 49

jyothy karat

Mandolin U Rajesh (third from the right) and Chitravina Ravikiran (fourth from the right) perform at a tribute concert

acceptance among peers, and just like that, the mandolin became a Carnatic instrument,” says TM Krishna, a leading vocalist.

A Columbus on the high seas of classical music, Shrinivas charted a new course and dozens of others have since signed up for the voyage. Rajesh was among the first to make the journey, even if reluctantly. “I am an incidental musician. At the age of eight, I was inclined to be a pilot when my brother took me under his wing,” he says, with a humility one associates with his brother. A self-taught musician, Shrinivas expected his protégé to practise scrupulously as he himself did, but Rajesh, being nine years younger, remained playful. “I have played with him for two decades and it was always extremely challenging to be on stage together. He was such a genius,” he says. Though firmly rooted in the Carnatic style, Rajesh, a musician in his own right, flits between genres, experimenting with the sound of the instrument. “That is what hurts me now. I was never as serious a musician as he wanted me to be,” Rajesh says. Incidentally, the last time they performed together, in August this year, was at the Shakti Ganapati temple in Vadapalani, Chennai, where Shrinivas had played one of the first 50 open

concerts of his musical career. The two also recorded an album, titled Timeless, that is up for release later this month.

O

f course, Shrinivas had never

planned for any of this to happen— his own precocity, the life of celebrity and global acclaim or the blind date with death. Happy to play a staccato instrument in a system that valued the lengthy note, he did not chase some grand, illusive virtuosity.

“I wanted to make music. Things just happened naturally,” he once told the misinformed hosts of a Tamil TV talk show who kept calling him ‘Srinivasan’.

But one wonders if he could have done more. Besides Rajesh, to whom he bequeathed much of his technical prowess, the maestro taught the mandolin to about 40 students, most of them in their teens, at his home in Vadapalani. “There are another 40-50 students, scattered across the world,” says Rajesh, adding that his priority now is to teach more. A few of Shrinivas’ students perform solo concerts, but whether any of them was able to fathom the depth of his repertoire is anybody’s guess. “A guru inspires his students, but it is also the other way round,” says Chitravina Ravikiran, whose name, like Shrinivas’, is synonymous with the instrument he

wields. “With Shrinivas, though he had students, I don’t think anyone with the right wavelength came along to inspire him to share everything.”

But genius is a wonderful thing, tempting and teasing you to emulate it, Ravikiran points out. At the cusp of a busy concert season in Chennai, Sreeusha and Sireesha, 20-somethings who perform together as the Mandolin Sisters, talk about how they took up the instrument. “As children, when our father went to work, we would play with his guitar, but we soon realised it was too big for us. He introduced to us the mandolin, which had already seen a star in Shrinivas sir, and we started learning music in earnest,” says Sreeusha. The sisters wear matching outfits, share the same circle of friends and even play as one, their fingers sliding in perfect unison over their fretboards. “Sometimes when we play back recordings of our concerts, I am not sure if I played a particular alap or she did,” Sireesha says, pausing in the midst of a muchrehearsed piece in raga kedaram in the living room of their apartment in Vadapalani. Studying music under a vocalist who told them to treat the instrument as an extension of the voice, they have been touring and playing concerts for a decade, but it 15 december 2014

is impossible for a mandolinist not to be aware of the weight of time and of Shrinivas’ legacy. “He will remain the touchstone, the gold standard. Children learning the instrument are under serious pressure to match his talent at a very young age.

If you have crossed 20, you are already too old to be a genius,” says Aravind Radhakrishnan, a parent from New Orleans whose 12-year-old son Pranik is a “casual player” of the Carnatic mandolin, coached by a violinist.

Can this generation of mandolinists, playing under duress to a cynical audience, guarantee a future for the instrument in the Carnatic ecosystem?

“You may as well ask what will happen to the saxophone if Kadri Gopalnath stopped playing,” says Ravikiran.

“Such instruments have few practitioners, and certainly none to rival the star status of these pioneers.”

A

ll their lives, Shrinivas’ second cousin UP Raju and his wife Nagamani were seen as playing second fiddle to his genius.

Accomplished players who independently mastered the nuances of the instrument, they struggled, on the one hand, to emerge from Shrinivas’ aura, and on the other against the relative

15 december 2014

obscurity of the instrument. “If there is a Tendulkar in the team, no one looks at a Kumble or an Azharuddin,” says Raju, who came to Chennai in the late 1980s to learn music, mentoring Nagamani in turn. Now they play as a duo, mostly because there aren’t enough slots at Chennai’s concert houses for two mandolin solos, Nagamani says. “At wed-

classical style, one must learn to play it with restraint,” he says. Playing a chauka kala kriti—a slow, lingering composition that delves into the secrets of a raga—on the mandolin is one of the tests of a true master. “It took me a decade to hone my skills, but the learning never stops. We are trying to pass on this knowledge to the next generation and hope they do something magical with it.”

Real magic can happen when you have talent, direction and the luxury of time, says Ravikiran. “I was homeschooled till the age of nine. Mandolin Shrinivas never went to school. If you look at the lives of eminent musicians—Pandit Ravi Shankar, flautist Shashank Subramanyam—none of them went to school and got normalised. They had the whole day to explore music. That is the level of commitment that takes you to international levels.

Unfortunately, few parents are willing to take this plunge today,” he says.

It took a century and the pioneering work of three stalwarts—Baluswami Dikshitar, the brother of Muthuswami Dikshitar, Varahappa Iyer, a minister in the Thanjavur court, and Vadivelu, of the Thanjavur Quarter—to adapt the violin, a Western instrument, for

Can this generation of mandolinists, playing under duress to a cynical audience, guarantee a future for the instrument in the Carnatic ecosystem? ding concerts, people still walk up to us and ask about this strange instrument.

So we have started talking about it and bringing out DVDs to introduce it to potential learners,” she says. When they are not touring, the couple dedicate a chunk of their time to coaching 25-30 students, including their 10-year-old son, at their house in Valasaravakkam, a suburb of Chennai.

Playing a concert on the mandolin is equivalent to playing several on a guitar, says Raju, whose first mandolin, in 1989, was an 800-rupee appurtenance that left his fingers sore. “The mandolin is an instrument with flair. In the

the Carnatic paradigm. The mandolin is still young, and it now finds itself at a critical juncture. Rajesh, Shrinivas’ sole confidant and the custodian of his musical legacy, knows he has a role to play. “There is tremendous responsibility on my shoulders,” he says,feeling like someone asked to write a book with a long-dead author. “On theconcert front, I am taking it slow. I do not want to spoil my brother’s name.” As Shrinivas’ life and work continue to pluck at heartstrings, other mandolinists must rise above poor imitation and do what he did best: enjoy making music. n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

books

‘Engage With the Mind of the Painter’ BN Goswamy, India’s foremost art historian, shows us how to appreciate a painting in an accessible new book which explains 101 masterpieces. The scholar in conversation with RAJNI GEORGE

BN Goswamy ashish sharma

“W

hat is art meant to do to the viewer? There is

an expansion of the heart, agitation and so on, finally ending up with vibration. It is simple; you go to a concert, bahar log niklengey, aur bolengey ki ras nahin thha. But it is also complex,” says the old master. “What is important for me, as an art historian, is how to make a visual entry into a work of art; you enter a work of art and you see it from within. I might see a particular painting on the wall for a tenth of a second. But what can I get out of it unless I enter it? Unless I somehow come into contact with the mind of the person who made it... did he succeed? Dates and places matter to me; if you have understood the temper of a particular period, you have done well. And that’s what I find matters to me.”

A hail of praise anticipates The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works, 1100–1900, BN Goswamy’s 25th book. The prettily designed (and variously underwritten—Jnana-Pravaha, IndiGo and The Raza Foundation are noted as sponsors) text, glowing in peach and pistachio, is set to be a modern classic in that sub-genre that is popular art criticism; Goswamy is popular, even beloved, in the contentious world of art history and appreciation. “BN Goswamy’s work has a broader significance in matters of art and what he has to say is applicable not only to classical Indian art and miniature painting but to a great deal of art being executed today,” says artist Krishen Khanna; “No one knows more about Indian painting than BN Goswamy,” says Glenn D Lowry, American art historian and director of the Museum of Modern Art; “Close to half a century ago, it was BN Goswamy who revolutionised our perception of Indian paintings, taking these ‘miniatures’ not simply as decorative items produced for some royal patron’s fancy, but as master-works in their own right, in the process restoring to the artist the honour that belonged to him,” says Eberhard Fischer, president of the Rietberg Society.

Professor Emeritus of Art History at Punjab University and a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, Goswamy lectures widely and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Heidelberg, Pennsylvania and California. Among the major exhibitions of Indian art he has curated internationally is Masters of Indian Painting at the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, and at the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

When Penguin Books India’s Nandini Mehta approached Goswamy, she was looking for a book that would show us how to see Indian paintings, where. in he would write as he spoke in his acclaimed lectures. “I wanted to show the range of Indian painting, and chose a time frame of 1100 to 1900, because it leaves BN GOSWAMY out the mural tradition,” he says, sitting

by an advance copy of his book in a room at Delhi’s India International Centre. Smiling, his stronger ear tuned to questions, the elderly man is a more affable variety of the art historian than is usually encountered. “I decided to cite four examples, from the beginning. It’s very artificial and nobody has to agree (laughs). I’ve divided them in a broad fashion: vision, observation, contemplation and passion. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ anyone can turn around and say. It is all very personal. And if you ask me how many paintings I can recall, sitting and talking to you, they are thousands, not hundreds, not scores.”

How to select from among this bounty? “There is a Bengali proverb, bash maneh dom khana; in a forest of bamboos, the bamboo cutter goes nearly blind, unable to cut or leave.”

What Goswamy has done is see through the thicket, setting valuable lessons down in chapters meant to be read and appreciated individually. From Jain paintings to the rich treasures of the Shahnama, Firdausi’s Persian epic to the forgotten labours of the carpenter community, this mostly traditional selection is a primer in measured, thoughtful understanding. But the selection is also instinctive. “I think it was Philip Roth who said, when you listen to music, an Indian stringed instrument like the sitar for instance, there are obvious ways in which you can see the fingers touching the strings, but underneath those fingers are fingers you can’t see, in that air—it resonates,” says Goswamy.

We turn to one of the most unusual selections in the book, a great example of this resonance: a 17th century work called The Cosmic Egg. It is one of the latest in this selection, and terribly modern in comparison. “How did it all begin? A golden egg, golden germ—hiranayagarbha—that which has in its womb gold. It starts by floating on water—not a Western point of view,” says Goswamy, pointing out the large eddies of water which also appear as rings of time, whorls on a tree. He elaborates: “One of the mistakes we make essentially is assuming that paintings were meant to be hanging on the wall.

They were not, they were meant to be looked at in the hand—at a 75 degree angle, which allows a personal connection with the painting, and also allows you to manipulate it. The moment you shift it a little, the gold glistens. Those could be running waters, a pool—but it’s a vast ocean with no shores. It’s startling, really startling. I’m intrigued, and I’m working on this artist.”

The artist behind the work is a key concern. “One of the things I’m very keen on is that we underrate the painter. Because the tradition is nameless, I wonder: whose son was he, where did he earn, what kind of person is this man?

I’ve spent three years of my life trying to trace the genealogy of certain artists,

“One of the mistakes we make essentially is assuming that paintings were meant to be hanging on the wall They were meant to be looked at in the hand”

15 december 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 53

hardcore historical research—not air fairy. We may feel these artists must be placed on a pedestal, but they weren’t then.

They were poor people. The poor man stands with a petition in his hand. These people got nothing.”

What is the value of giving them recognition and ownership now? “I believe the painter has mostly been taken for granted. He’s not a craftsman, he takes great decisions all the time—I’m talking about great painters, not hacksmen. I want to let people engage as much with a work of art, as with the mind of a painter,” says Goswamy. The painter has a valuable role to play in our understanding of our place in the world.

“Time—what is the painter’s notion of time? In painting, there is no connection to time,” says Goswamy. “But there is an understanding of time, as in The Cosmic Egg. Within the same frame, in the Hindu Rajput Jain tradition, the same figure will appear frequently a few times; a man entering the door, then sitting in his chamber. Time is fluid in the Hindi/Jain mind. The jati of kala—it’s flexible, like putty in your hand. How differently the Indian mind can conceive of time—it’s cyclical, and it can happen diagonally.”

There was puzzlement over these representations in some quarters. “In the entire range of Mughal paintings, I can’t see of two or three paintings where you can see the multiplicity of action. Nothing is rigid, time is malleable, flexible, can turn back. If you start believing in it, the more you think about, the more you start wondering what is real, what is unreal. It gives you a different perspective on life, and the life hereafter. The treatment of space, which I’ve drawn attention to, as well. Our eyes are ruined by photography, its fixed point of perspective, in the European perspective. But you don’t keep standing on that spot. Space is not manipulable.”

Remarkably, Goswamy had no formal training in his rigorous discipline. “We had no art in the family, virtually none.

Except for some European prints or a panoramic view of Lahore, I had little exposure. All art history I know I taught myself,” says Goswamy. “I have not studied a day.” The art

historian first studied history, and joined the IAS. “When I resigned, I wanted to do something different. ‘What kind of society threw up these paintings?’ I wondered. What community does it belong to? I read a book about Professor Randhawa, and got more interested in social history. At that time I had very little interest in art as such. But gradually, I got drawn into the foreground of art. After my PhD, I went abroad. I was teaching in Germany, and was blown away.

Here, we have just a few museums, and half the time they are closed, chaabi nahin hai and so on.” He has also referred several times to differences of opinions within his professional community, and he laughs now when I bring it up.

“I’m a bit suspect in the eyes of my colleagues. No one understands what you’re saying, so therefore we appear very learned. Accessibility is important—unless you are able to bring your viewer to the subject at hand, you might as well be doing botany.” He also tells me the story of his enjoyment of William Archer’s work, an ICS officer who got interested in India while posted in Bihar; now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, he has the mind of a poet, says Goswamy, who got to know him as the examiner of his dissertation. The differences came, predictably, with cultural slippage. “Slowly I started discovering that he was not able to get rid of the European way of looking at things. What I was doing flew directly into the face of what he was doing, and I still believe in it—that the family is the unit. The style develops within the family.”

We move to a beautiful painting, inscribed on a palm leaf, which Goswamy says has a strong connection with works in Ajanta, with mural painting. “In Orissa, they continue to paint on the palm leaf. It has a tiny breadth, two inches wide, though it is longer (demonstrates with fingers). Within that, to make a statement is not the easiest thing in the world.

Most are meant to accompany text, there may be hundreds within one. But then these are to be concentrated on; dhyana is concentration. Meditation, concentration, whatever it is. The intent of the scribe or the painter is to capture the essence of the teaching.” n

E X C E R P T There are things, some of them passing strange, that happen when you confront a work of art: (i) unfolding of the heart; (ii) its expansion; (iii) its agitation; and, finally, (iv) vibration.

—From a reading of Kavyartha

I

ndian paintings have been variously described: as layered objects in which one thing, or thought, is gently laid upon another; like schist rocks, foliated and iridescent; like a couplet in Persian or a doha in Hindi, terse but meaningful; like a great floral carpet that lies rolled up but can be spread out endlessly, revealing new things with each mellow unfurling.

Each description is seductive, and contains much truth.

They are also in their different ways saying a single thing— a painting presents to us a layered world of meaning. One 54 open

needs to, thus, make an effort to receive from it all the riches that reside within. We must first summon utsaha—energy, enthusiasm, the excitement of anticipation. Then we need to make what can only be described as a visual immersion in the work. Thereon much can be expected—the joy of discovery, stimulus to reflection, visual excitement and, finally, heightened delight.

To attain delight one must then learn to read a painting. To begin with—oddly, to be sure, for this book is about painting—a relatively small south Indian bronze of c. fourteenth century, that the noted art historian Stella Kramrisch called ‘The Tree of Life and Knowledge’. There is allure in the form: a tree with a slender, straight trunk from which curving branches issue forth with symmetry and evenness, first dipping low as if borne down by their weight and then rising 15 december 2014

slightly at the bud-like tips. Each branch is connected to the one above or below it by carefully spaced single, flame-like leaves, creating a latticework effect. In the centre of the tree’s crown sits a curled naga with many hoods. Just below the naga, but also set against the trunk is a layered, ribbed disc, looking like the solid wheel of a chariot.

Lower down stand two crowned monkey figures, clinging to the trunk but each with one hand raised, a wondering finger to the lips. And at the base two small cows, one on either side, flank the trunk. Higher up, almost merging with the swelling bud-tips, sit small hamsa figures at the very edge of the branches, as if weightless, their upraised tails brushing against the buds.

It takes a while to take in the form in its entirety, and its grace and sophistication. Then one begins to wonder what the figures on the tree stand for. What did the maker of this bronze have in mind? Is the mythical many-hooded naga in the tree one of those serpents celebrated in the Puranic texts: Vasuki, Shesha, Muchalinda? Is the disc the Sudarshana chakra of Vishnu? Where do the crowned monkey figures

Folio from a Gita Govinda series, opaque watercolour and gold on paper

come from—the Ramayana? Are the cows at the base of the tree waiting for Krishna?

The hamsa figures eventually intrude upon these questions. By including the birds in the bronze, is the sculptor drawing our attention to the old myth where the hamsa is the ultimate symbol of discernment? In traditional belief, the bird has the neera–ksheera viveka—the ability to separate milk from water, drinking only the milk, and leaving the water behind. Or do the hamsas allude to some yogic practice, the syllables ham and sa standing for incoming and outgoing breaths?

Many such questions arise, as one stands looking at the sculpture, admiring its skill. But are there any answers? Was the maker of this piece creating a riddle for his audience to solve? Was its description by Stella Kramrisch as ‘The Tree of Life and Knowledge’ purely intuitive, or was it based on some obscure text that only she knew of? One does not know, but one is repeatedly drawn back to the bronze, as one is drawn back to all great art: with the hope of understanding it yet being ready for failure.

15 december 2014

Abu’l Hasan, that great painter at the Mughal court— Nadir-al Zaman is the title that the emperor Jahangir conferred upon him, meaning ‘Wonder of the Age’—moved away in one of his works from the glitter of power and opulence to paint an old, fragile man. The tone of the painting is hushed and one falls silent looking at the lone, hesitantly moving figure. The man—an old pilgrim perhaps or, possibly, a mendicant who has seen better days—stands barefoot, leaning on a thin, long staff.

The body bears marks of the ravages of time: the hunched back, the stooped shoulder, the snow-white beard, the lean, desiccated frame. But one can see, from the look in the eyes, that the mind is still keen and the bent of mind religious— he holds prominently a rosary of beads in his bony right hand and wears one round his neck. There are signs of indigence everywhere. The lower part of the body is bare, the feet are unshod, and the coarse apparel he wears consists mostly of a rough cloak used as a wrap, a folded shawl-like sheet thrown over the left shoulder, and an unadorned tightly bound turban.

Technically, the work is brilliant. One notices the roughness of the skin at the knees; the thinness of the fingers; the rendering of the beads in the rosary, each shrivelled and varying in size; above all, the face with its lines of age and experience. The painting, though, is as moving as it is skilful and it fills the viewer with questions. What did Abu’l Hasan intend by this picture? Did he know his subject? It is most unlikely that the painting was done for the man, but then—used as he must have been to royal commissions and grand themes— why did Abu’l Hasan pick him?

Was it simply a portrait or was the artist addressing an abstract idea? Whatever the case, Abu’l Hasan seems here to infuse a universality of feeling into this figure. Poets have spoken much about old age. It is the time when the meaning of things begins dimly to unfold, when the hollowness of life makes itself manifest. For the man of God, it has been said, there comes a time when he has to sit out his years with submission rather than defiance, for he knows that this edifice of life is built on walls that are but sand, and rests on pillars fickle as the wind. Is this Abu’l Hasan’s response to the subject, a painter’s intimations of mortality?

Now to a celebrated early Bhagavata Purana series, datable to the first half of the sixteenth century. The series as such is well known even though where it was made, who its painters were, and its precise date have been the subject of debate among scholars for years. What has never been questioned, however, is its remarkable quality: the verve, the spiritedness, the devotion, the emotional fervour, the glow of the painters’ conviction that what they were visualizing is the only way things must have happened in the past.

Each leaf is a celebration of the life and the deeds of Krishna and is accompanied by an excerpt from the original text of the Purana on its verso. To identify a scene, therefore, is easy.

What is less easy is to decipher the visual language and the vocabulary that the painter/s use. For they play and trifle with natural appearances and abandon them at will in favour of poetically conceived conventions. It is all done assertively and open www.openthemagazine.com 55

with flamboyance—the lines soar, the colours sing.

Boldly distinctive figural types are established both for men and women— sharp profiles, large, languid eyes, heroic chests in the case of men, full ripe breasts in the case of women; generally lithe forms, cadenced stances, clear gestures that seem to come from the world of dance. The painters claim for themselves complete freedom in the rendering of dresses, furnishings and architectural details; sky and water and rocks are all depicted in an imaginary way; backgrounds are established through seemingly arbitrarily chosen colours. It is the sum of these parts which makes for the magical effect. They beckon and lead us in, challenge our ideas about the nature of appearances, establish startlingly different ways of seeing, and all the while quietly illumine the viewer’s surroundings with the glow and intensity of colours.

In this particular painting Krishna, having accomplished his mission on this earth by having killed Kamsa, decides to not return to Vraja to his beloved gopis but sends his close friend Uddhava instead with his message. It says that they will have to forget him, for he is not going to return to them. Uddhava’s therefore is not an easy task. When he breaks the news to Krishna’s many beloveds, they complain and shed bitter tears.

How can He do this, they ask? Do you think that it is easy to let go of memories of Him? In this painting Uddhava appears twice: once on the right and then again on the left, as if turning to listen first to one gopi and then to another, for each of them has her own thoughts, her own pain, to share with him. The two gopis on the right make emphatic gestures and even show him the footprints He had left behind as a promise, Tree of Life, Bronze close to the trunk of his favourite tree. Two other gopis follow Uddhava as he is led away by another gopi. She is pointing to a cow that is standing atop a rocky ridge, craning her neck as if searching for Krishna.

For anyone who understands the context, especially for a devotee of Krishna, there is great beauty in the rendering.

But the painting has also to be read with care. It is all emphatically but very subtly done, the painter taking every possible liberty in the process. The verdant groves of Vrindavan are reduced to three elegantly articulated trees. The Yamuna flows at the bottom of the page, astir like a pond with aquatic birds and blooming lotuses. The monochromatic colours in the background change from blue to orange to green in order to establish different spaces. The women are as beautiful and stately as ever, and the dark sky with its wavy horizon holds everything together. Floating above everything, however, the mauve-pink rocky ridge with its scalloped ends stands suspended in the air, asking pointed questions.

As a last instance, in this attempt at emphasizing the need to look at paintings with more care, and greater intent, than we generally do, one can turn to a leaf from a celebrated eighteenth-century Gita Govinda series from the Pahari area.

Jayadeva’s poetic text in Sanskrit is famous for its celebra56 open

tion of the love of Radha and Krishna. ‘If remembering Hari enriches your heart / if his arts of seduction arouse you,’ the poet says at the beginning, then ‘listen to Jayadeva’s speech / in these sweet soft lyrical songs.’

Countless people, over the centuries, have listened. This leaf comes almost at the beginning of the poem. Nanda, Krishna’s foster-father, is out grazing cows when he suddenly sees ‘clouds thicken the sky / tamala trees darkening the forest’, and becomes concerned about young Krishna, for the thunderstorm and the approaching night might frighten him. He asks Radha, who is a little older than Krishna in this narrative, to take ‘the boy’ home. But then, as the two head homeward along the banks of the Yamuna, their love begins to unfold, their ‘secret passions . . . triumph’.

In the painting, stars have begun to appear in the darkening sky, the Yamuna, almost unnoticed, flows quietly in the background, the dark forms of the ‘tamala’ trees and palms loom over the scene. Against this are placed the illuminated forms of the two lovers. Krishna has thrown his left arm around Radha’s shoulder and gently reaches out to touch her breast with his right hand; she makes futile gestures, restraining his left hand and pointing with her own right hand towards the path that they should take. But there is no conviction in her resistance. She turns back, and gazes lovingly into Krishna’s eyes, standing elegantly like a dancer, left leg lightly crossed against the right, one toe barely touching the earth. It is a wonderfully quiet moment.

Time seems to have come to a stop, nothing else seems to exist for the two lovers.

The stillness is strangely affecting. As a narrative strategy, the painter’s decision to devote a whole page to this quiet, tender moment is brilliant, for soon energetic, frenetic passion will take over. There is going to be talk of the ‘tamala trees’ fresh leaves absorbing strong scents of deer musk’, of ‘budding mango trees trembling from the embrace of rising vines’, and of ‘yellow silk and wild flower garlands’.

We too get lost in the moment: the unfailing sense of colour, the fluency and the elegance of line, the unlikely mix of precise detail and loose brushwork, all create an image of great vividness. But there is more in the painting that needs absorbing. Against all laws of nature, while darkness falls everywhere, the forms of the two lovers, standing as if in a masque, remain dazzlingly lit. The painter, too, is playing with the forms of the trees. The tree in the back has its trunk split into two, each limb moving closer to the other and entering into a gentle embrace next to where the lovers stand; one of them lighter in skin than the other. Radha, gleaming like lightning, and Krishna, dark as a cloud. n Excerpted from ‘A Layered World’, the introduction to The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works, 1100–1900, by BN Goswamy, Allen Lane, 582 pages, Rs 1, 499 15 december 2014

books A Political Junkie’s Big Binge Forget the style and all those cliches, this book, written with the wonderment and adrenaline of a committed reporter, captures the drama of 2014 and the men who powered it Tunku Varadarajan

2014: THE ELECTION THAT CHANGED INDIA

Rajdeep Sardesai viking penguin india | 352 pages | Rs 599

R

ajdeep Sardesai is large (by Indian standards),

hearty, fizzing with words and information, and blithely devoid of subtlety. That is my impression of the man, one of India’s most prominent TV journalists, and it also is my assessment of his book, 2014: The Election That Changed India.

Do not misunderstand me: The qualities I mention are not bad ones in a man. They make him lively to observe, fun for gup-shup, and a great companion in the pub. I like Rajdeep, and have known him since he was a galumphing undergraduate and Oxford cricket Blue in the mid-1980s. In his book, too, these qualities are not all handicaps. Who would not want a constant volley of information— some of it fascinating, some of it unfiltered—in a book on an election? I had not known, for instance, that Amit Shah masterminded the BJP’s campaign in UP with such microscopic thoroughness that there was one volunteer for every 15 voters in the state. Or that when Bihari chieftain Lalu Yadav invites you for an 11 o’clock meeting he means 11 pm, not 11 am. After his interview with Rajdeep—conducted in a cowshed to broadcast the right ‘effect’— Lalu proceeds to teach the city slicker how to milk a cow. “Tum angrezi logon ko yeh sab seekhna chahiye,” he says, to a Rajdeep who is as comfortable with an udder in his fist as Suresh Raina is with a bouncer leaping at his throat.

Did you like the cricket metaphor in the last sentence? If you didn’t, be warned: Rajdeep cannot resist them. I counted 28 instances of cricket imagery in 350 pages of his prose, which makes for an average of one every 12.5 pages. There are three on page 135 alone: Narendra Modi’s confronting of Manmohan Singh in an Independence Day speech in

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Keshav Singh/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

2013 is a form of ‘bodyline’; Manmohan versus Modi is like ‘a Pujara v. Gayle battle in a T20 match’; and Advani tosses up a ‘googly’ at a party meeting by suggesting that BJP chief ministers other than Modi (for example, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh) ought to be considered for national leadership. None of those cricketisms is as awful, however, as Rajdeep’s description of Arvind Kejriwal’s meteoric arrival on the political stage as ‘a Sourav Gangulylike debut.’

But I’m not about to call for the DRS on Rajdeep. Put aside your aversion to clichés, and to writing that is occasionally so slapdash that even an India Today subeditor would blanch. This isn’t meant to be high literature, and we shouldn’t treat it as such. The book is a sturdy compendium of the events that led up to the 2014 election, as well as of those that shaped its outcome.

Obviously, it was written in a tearing hurry, but it has also been written with gusto and self-belief, and the author has drawn liberally on his impressive access to politicians of every ideology, caste and region.

There can scarcely be a neta in India with whom Rajdeep hasn’t had dinner—or a jovial wager, with dinner as the prize. He writes of Mamata Banerjee: ‘For some reason, Didi appeared to have a soft corner for me.’ She offered him a Rajya Sabha seat once, and even cooked dinner for him at her home in Kolkata. ‘The sight of the Bengal chief minister in the kitchen, her crumpled sari tied in a no-nonsense knot, sweat pouring from her brow, rushing between steaming pots of Bengali delicacies was, I must confess, more than a little disconcerting.’ For my part, I must confess to finding Rajdeep’s palliness with politicians a little disconcerting, too. But that appears to be the way of modern Indian journalism, at least as practised by its topmost editors, who seem to spend an awful lot of time ‘dining

with people they ought to be dining on’ (to use a phrase by Michael M Thomas, an acerbic American novelist and commentator).

The narrative structure of Rajdeep’s book cannot be faulted, nor can his magnified emphasis on the personalities who made the 2014 election so beguiling. In the history of democracy—and not merely in India—there cannot have been two leaders competing for victory who were as radically unlike each other as Modi and Rahul Gandhi.

Rajdeep has known Modi for a very long time, and relishes writing about the many occasions when he hung out with the man in the years before he was elected to office in Gujarat. Modi is a man of steel, a man of ambition, an unforgiving, vengeful man on a mission. Rahul, by contrast, is part milquetoast and part brat, entirely out of his depth in the akhara of Indian politics.

Although Rajdeep does not know Rahul personally the way he knows Modi—and, it should be asked, who really does, apart from Rahul’s own mother and sister (and a putative Latin American girlfriend)?—he is at his most acute when writing about the shehzada (Modi’s derisive term for the Gandhi scion). Ruthlessly, he picks apart the limitations of the man who led the Congress party into near-oblivion, the sheer insouciance of the heir to the throne. How could a man so inept and unprepared have been so cavalier, Rajdeep wonders, even as he marvels at the drive and panache of the man who would put the princeling in his place.

Other players walk on stage, and Rajdeep gives them their due: Kejriwal, Jayalalithaa, Nitish Kumar, Lalu, Mamata, Arun Jaitley, and, of course, Sonia Gandhi. His parsing of Amit Shah is, in my view, the most illuminating part of the book. The full cast of the 2014 election is varied, lurid, and eye-catching, offering the sort of rollicking drama that elections in other, less ungovernable lands simply do not have. Are Indians lucky to have this drama? I’m not so sure, and neither, I think, is Rajdeep. But he does always have the wonderment and the adrenaline of the committed reporter, and the constant, near-toxic high of the incurable political junkie. This book is his big, fat binge. n

I must confess to finding Rajdeep’s palliness with politicians a little disconcerting. But that appears to be the way of modern Indian journalism, at least as practised by its topmost editors, who seem to spend an awful lot of time ‘dining with people they ought to be dining on’

Narendra Modi

Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is working on a book on the political legacy of the Shah Bano case, The Divorce That Rocked India. He is a regular contributor to Open open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

matching Babies begin to learn about the connection between pictures and real objects by the time they are nine months old, according to a study by scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London

The Homosexuality Effect A study claims that gay social behaviour helps form bonds with others of the same gender

The Key to Infant Memory

H

A new study, published in Infant Behavior and Development, shows that babies are more likely to remember something if a positive emotion or effect accompanies it. Researchers performed memory tests with 5-month-old babies, and found that the babies better remembered shapes that were introduced with happy voices and faces.

“We think what happens is that the positive effect heightens the babies’ attentional system and arousal. By heightening those systems, we heighten their ability to process and perhaps remember this geometric pattern,” says BYU Psychology Professor Ross Flom, lead author of the study. n omosexuality has long con-

founded scientists. From an evolutionary perspective, since it cannot lead to reproduction, it seems to be of no use. Some scientists have claimed that it could provide an evolutionary benefit. They have argued that homosexual males are more diligent and caring as uncles compared to heterosexuals, while a few others have claimed that the genetic code for homosexuality is the same as what causes fertility in women.

Now, according to a new study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, by researchers from University of Portsmouth, England, homosexual behaviour may be helping us bond with people of the same sex.

The study, conducted on mostly heterosexual men and women, found that people with higher levels of the hormone progesterone, present in both sexes and linked to social bonding or affiliation, are more likely to have homoerotic thoughts.

Progesterone, produced mainly in the ovaries of women and in the adrenal glands of men, is known to contribute to the formation of social bonds, which have many adaptive benefits

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for humans. For instance, this hormone is one of the main ones responsible for caring or friendly behaviour, and levels rise when people have close and friendly interactions.

The researchers claim that there is a societal and evolutionary benefit in forming same-sex alliances. They write in the journal: ‘The frequency of homoerotic behaviour among individuals who do not identify as having an exclusively homosexual sexual orientation suggests that such behaviour potentially has adaptive value. Here, we define homoerotic behaviour as intimate erotic contact between members of the same sex and affiliation as the motivation to make and maintain social bonds. Among both male and female nonhuman primates, affiliation is one of the main drivers of homoerotic behaviour. Correspondingly, in humans, both across cultures and across historical periods, homoerotic behaviour appears to play a role in promoting social bonds… These findings constitute the first experimental support for the affiliation account of the evolution of homoerotic motivation in humans.’ n

HIV Gets Less Virulent

According to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the rapid evolution of HIV, which has allowed the deadly virus to subvert patients’ natural immunity, is also slowing the virus’ ability to cause AIDS. The research was carried out in Botswana and South Africa, two countries that have been worst affected by the HIV epidemic. Over 2,000 women with HIV took part in the study. Professor Phillip Goulder of the University of Oxford, says, “This research highlights the fact that HIV adaptation to the most effective immune responses we can make against it comes at a significant cost to its ability to replicate.

Anything we can do to increase the pressure on HIV in this way may allow scientists to reduce the destructive power of HIV over time.” n

15 december 2014

hdmi cec Any HDMI-CEC-enabled gear, when connected by an HDMI cable, can be controlled through a single remote handset without the need of any programming or setup process. Up to 10 connected devices, including the display, can be controlled via HDMI

tech&style

Bose Cinemate 130 A powerful home theatre system for a superb immersive sound experience gagandeep Singh Sapra

de w GRISOGONO ALLEGRA COLLECTION

Price on request

Rs 131,513

T

he Bose Cinemate 130 is a huge improvement over the Bose Cinemate 1 SR that was launched in 2011. Featuring a similar looking sound bar that can be wall-mounted or kept flat on a table, the new avatar comes with the new Bose Acoustimass wireless woofer, which can be placed anywhere in the room or hidden behind a curtain.

The massive sound stage is set up using six precisely positioned drivers that deliver detailed sound. The sound bar also has two phase guide radiators that make sure you are enveloped by the sound you are listening to.

The Cinemate 130 also comes with its own control console that can connect via HDMI to your game system, your satellite TV set-top box, and even your Apple TV. A Single HDMI output to your TV means no worrying about cabling. Hook the system up, run Adapt IQ, Bose’s audio calibration engine that fine-tunes the system performance to your room and the furnishings in it, and you are all set to go.

The control console not only acts as a single connection device, it also 15 december 2014

comes bundled with an infrared universal remote control. The console can be used to control all your HDMI CEC compliant devices around you. You can use it to change channels or the volume on your TV set, to select tracks on your DVD or Blu-ray player, and so on.

Bose has also remembered that there are people who store music on iPods, and has included a 3.5 mm jack for you to plug in any auxillary source. To stream music from the internet or your Mac/PC at home, you can add the optional SoundTouch wireless adapter.

The console is small enough to fit on your desk, and if all your devices support HDMI CEC they can all be kept away in a closed cabinet, leaving you with a clean console top.

The control console also has an Aux input over RCA, a coaxial digital audio input, as well as a fibre optic input for other audio sources.

Overall, the Cinemate 130 delivers on the classic Bose promise of a beautiful sound experience, one that assures a sense of one’s presence in the moment, and a clean setup that demands minimal wiring. n

This Allegra watch is a double square, a squared square, a square to the power of two. It encloses time in a fortress, and surrounds it with the dazzling fire, light and energy of precious stones. These gems sculpt the perfectly proportioned square of the case.

So much more than a watch, it’s a piece of jewellery that tells the time; but most of all, a bracelet that exudes feminine mystique. n

Nikon 1 V3

Rs 43,950

The Nikon 1 V3 promises picture quality and capabilities of a DSLR in a package that is portable, light and compact. It takes photos at 20 fps with full resolution and at full autofocus speeds. In fixed focus you can increase the burst rate to as high as 60 fps. It uses 171 AF points for detection and 105 AF points for phase detection. An 18.4 megapixel sensor with Nikon’s EXSPEED 4A image processor ensure all your images are sharp and vivid. It can shoot slow motion sequences up to 120 fps and also full HD 1080/60P videos. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

doctor director Chandraprakash Dwivedi, the director of Zed Plus, is hardly a tenderfoot in the entertainment industry. This actor-cum-director gave up his medical profession to pursue theatre. He later directed the 1991 television epic Chanakya, where he played the title role himself. His other major work is the Partition saga Pinjar (2003)

Zed Plus Even though its narrative is predictable, this film is a well performed political satire ajit duara

o n scr een

current

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 Director Francis Lawrence cast Jennifer Lawrence, Josh

Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth Score ★★★★★

in, Mona Singh, Cast Adil Hussa anda rb Kulbhushan Kha di raPrakash dwive nd Cha r to ec Dir

Z

ed Plus is an allegory on power and politics in India. It tells of how a special security detail granted is a symbol of wealth and position. The more unsafe and threatened you feel, the greater individual worth and substance you probably have. Zed Plus security marks the arrival of fame and fortune.

Aslam, an ordinary tyre puncture repairman in a small town in Rajasthan, is asked to preside over a local dargah on the day the Prime Minister is due to visit it. This PM (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) is running a coalition government and the rug is about to be pulled from under him. But on the day he asks for the blessing of the ‘peer’ of the dargah, his government is suddenly and miraculously saved.

All this while Aslam (Adil Hussain) has been at loggerheads with his neighbour, Habid (Mukesh Tiwari), mostly over an attractive woman both married men have the hots for. So when the grateful PM asks Aslam if

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he has any special requests, he blurts out that he is being threatened by his neighbour. This is immediately given a political slant and is interpreted as being threatened by Pakistan. Aslam is then granted Zed Plus security to protect him from a nonexistent Pakistani enemy. His life alters beyond recognition. Whenever he rides his scooter, the posse of armed guards following him make his visit to the paanwala look ridiculous. He has no privacy. He can’t even cheat on his wife properly, and his mistress is getting antsier by the day.

Though it is refreshing to watch a movie with an important political subtext, much of the narrative has a fairly conventional and predictable linear treatment. What stands out is the performance of Adil Hussain in the lead role. This actor from Assam has an understated conviction that is arresting.

Off the beaten track, Zed Plus is watchable. n

So intent is this movie on setting up the grand finale about to come next year, it abandons its own narrative and aesthetics as a separate identity. All the film does is give you a series of situations that indicate the revolutionary passion in the suppressed and suffering Districts and the preparedness of the rebel units for a final showdown with the Capitol. It lets you know that Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is being moulded into the ‘Mockingjay’, an inspiration for the revolution, and that the Districts will fight in her name. This is film marketing taken to a level so absurd, it actually turns counter-productive. What you watch here is a power point presentation, not a work of entertainment. The whole movie is a talkathon with just one dramatic situation, when Katniss shoots down a couple of planes that bomb District 8.

The most disappointing aspect of this film is the abrupt nature of the ending, almost in mid-sentence. Were Suzanne Collins’ book torn precisely in half, and the first half shot mechanically, page by page, this is what it would look like.

Furthermore, the greatest asset of the series, actress Lawrence, is reined in and kept in quarantine. This movie is, without a doubt, the dullest episode in the The Hunger Games trilogy. n AD 15 december 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Leading Role Nobody Wants

There’s a catty story doing the rounds in Bollywood circles about Fanaa director Kunal Kohli and his hunt for a leading lady for his new film Phir Se, which will star—umm—himself as the leading man. Turns out that before Kunal cast television actress Jennifer Winget to star opposite him in this love story between two divorcees, he’d approached a bunch of A-listers for the project.

He reportedly took meetings with leading star managers, including big-gun Reshma Shetty of Matrix, who represents Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Madhuri Dixit among others. At the time, Kunal wasn’t ready to divulge that he was starring in the film himself, and revealed only that he’d cast “a prominent Bollywood name who’s making his acting debut”.

By the time it became known that Kunal wasn’t just going to direct the film, he’d be playing the male lead in the movie too, any interest the top actresses may have had in exploring the offer apparently vanished, leaving him to scour the small screen for potential leads.

Getting Her Ducks in a Row

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, who’s been sitting it out since 2010, will likely have a busy year ahead.

The actress has reportedly green-lit a handful of movies that she’ll begin filming in the new year.

First, there’s Sanjay Gupta’s Jazbaa, an official remake of the Korean thriller Seven Days, for which she’s expected to begin a gruelling workout regimen. Earlier this week, Karan Johar announced that he’s cast Ash in his Ranbir Kapoor-Anushka Sharma starrer Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, which he’ll film in Delhi, London, Paris and New York. Ash will reportedly play an older woman that Ranbir’s character gets into an intense relationship with. There are also talks about a film with her mentor Mani Ratnam, and one Balaji project opposite Saif Ali Khan to be directed by Kahaani’s Sujoy Ghosh.

Gupta has said he’s keen to wrap production on Jazbaa as early as April 2014 so he can unveil the project at Cannes in May, where Aishwarya will flog global cosmetic brand L’Oréal. For Johar’s film, her scenes will be shot in London next summer.

There have also been some murmurs that Aishwarya is Rohit Shetty’s 15 december 2014

final choice to star opposite Shah Rukh Khan in the Chennai Express director’s remake of Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi. It’s no secret that Shetty had been discussing the project originally with his Singham star Ajay Devgn’s missus Kajol, but it appears now that Ash may take that role.

With her daughter Aaradhya a little older now, Aishwarya has told friends she’s itching to get back to the sets. She hasn’t entirely given up the idea of English movies either, but has clearly said she will not set up base in Los Angeles, where it’s easier to pursue a Hollywood film career.

In Desperate Need of a Comeback Flick

A prominent male star who suffered a crippling blow recently with the abysmal failure of his latest film, has been calling up industry bigwigs for advice on what his next move ought to be. His latest release was his fourth consecutive turkey, and the opening weekend collections of his films have been consistently declining—the new one taking in numbers so paltry that a rival star asked snarkily if a zero had accidentally gone missing from the figure. No wonder the poor actor appears to be seeking words of wisdom from experienced film industry folks on how to conduct his career hereon.

He called upon an A-list producer-director who’s a close friend of his wife, to help understand what might have gone wrong with his last release, a film that was in the actor’s comfort zone.

Apparently he has also been leaning on a superstar actor friend for guidance on how to navigate what’s left of his career.

Good thing he has a sense of humour that sees him through these challenging phases. The actor apparently told his friends he could always get a fancy corporate job if the acting gig doesn’t work out anymore. “I am, after all, well qualified, with a foreign degree… something I must thank my parents for ensuring that I pursued,” he’s believed to have joked. Fortunately for him, it’s unlikely that the curtains will come down on his career just yet. He has at least two big films slated for release in the months ahead— both done with promising directors—which may turn it around. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

A Beautiful Crown

by r au l i r a n i

Nazreen Ali, 21, adjusts her hijab at her residence in Meerut.

Nazreen, the only Indian Muslim girl to represent the country at the Miss World Muslimah 2014 contest held in Indonesia, was crowned 1st Runner Up. This annual international beauty pageant awards young Muslim women who have shown dedication, reputation and concern for Islamic values and community development. Nazreen dreams of opening a special madrassa where Muslim children would get advanced education

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15 december 2014