OPEN Magazine 1 September 2014

INDIAN JIHADI GOES GLOBAL

l i f e

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t i m e s .

HARISH KHARE WHY NATWAR SINGH DISAPPOINTS

e v e r y

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INSIDE AMIT SHAH’S SECOND MISSION

JIHAD AN INDIAN 1 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

LOVE story

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Volume 6 Issue 34 For the week 26 August—1 September 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover design Anirban Ghosh

1 september 2014

G venkataraman

The ‘Freedom’ issue of 25 August 2014 made for good reading, especially articles pertaining to Dandi, Vedaranyam and Chauri Chaura. Martha C Nussbaum has written about the freedom of expression. I personally feel very angry when some MPs shout slogans and prevent the Parliament from functioning. Is this the freedom of expression one wants? Why don’t our learned MPs put their feelings on paper and write well researched articles in Why don’t our learned newspapers or magazines, which will reach a MPs put their feelings wider audience? I have on paper and write well rarely seen any article researched articles written by our legislain newspapers or tors (except Mani magazines which will Shankar Aiyar’s). reach a wider audience?

Secondly, Nussbaum has written that Article 15 says that states must take measures for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes of citizens. Then why are we always harping about reservations for only OBCs, SCs, STs (and Muslims, Jats and Jains). Reservation must be for all socially and educationally backward families as defined by poverty line and not based on caste, creed or religion.  letter of the week Hues of Freedom

in the article ‘For an India of Equal Liberty’ (25 August 2014), Martha C Nussbaum wrote: ‘Rights are nothing unless remedies are provided whereby people can seek to obtain redress when rights are invaded.’ Indeed. But when fundamental rights conflict, how do we resolve? US Supreme Court has clearly ruled against unrestricted freedom of speech. It is easy to wax at length in high level academic discourses on freedoms and liberties, but the difficulty comes in the specifics of situations.

Discourse needs to get to this level for it to be useful. For example, it is right to restrict freedom of speech because the group offended will resort to violence? If so, are we not privileging the violent? Now,

the business world. As more women come forward to take on new challenges, one hopes that society and the State will help them reach their goals.  Mahe sh Kapasi

Rebuild Old Delhi

that is worth a discussion.

How about using out-dated blasphemy laws (in India) to restrict freedom of speech only against minority religions?

Once again, that is worth a discussion. In both these cases, we have freedom restricted to groups. Such arbitrariness needs to be challenged. 

the article ‘Power and Glory’

by Sunil Raman (4 August 2014) takes readers to the glorious past of Shajahanabad (Old Delhi), which was once the seat of power for Mughal emperors, but is now filthy and overcrowded. I can visualise how Shahjahanabad and Chandi Chowk would have been during the peak years of Mughal rule, how the British demolished Mughal landmark buildings and how they looted the royal treasure.

It is a tragedy that Old Delhi has become densely populated and represents an ugly picture to tourists who come here to see the Red Fort. At least for the sake of tourists and to promote tourism, it is incumbent upon the Central and State governments to rebuild Old Delhi without altering its basic structure and without relocating its people. 

R ohit Kanji

MY SHARIFF

Time for Fair Play

unless women are recognised for their achievements, no country can make progress (‘She Is on a High’, 25 August 2014). Some nations and societies are still backward because their women are not given the respect and the opportunities they deserve. A lot of young women are now discovering their own strengths. Many of them are making a mark as leaders in

Smooth Operator

this refers to ‘It’s the Popularity, Dammit!’ (18 August 2014). Intellectuals in India can’t stand Narendra Modi. Secularists even less so.

But the Aam Aadmi of the country have high hopes from him. And he is moving on with a sense of purpose; but much to the chagrin of the media, he is doing this away from its gaze.  subhasis ghosh

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A coffee planter displays white stem borer larvae

A Looming Crisis in Coffee A pest menace has led coffee planters to burn over 35 lakh plants, endangering India’s coffee output B a n g a l o r e A crisis is brewing in the coffee industry. A pest called white stem borer, which attacks the soft stem of the Arabica variety, has led to the destruction of plantations. Damaged crops have to be pulled out and burned and planters will then have to plant afresh. The first yield is only expected in about four to five years from now.

Coffee Board chairman, Jawaid Akhthar, says that an unprecedented 35 lakh plants have been destroyed this year. “Normally, in a year 1 september 2014

four to five plants had to be removed and replanted per acre. This year, the white stem borer has severely affected 48 per cent of the total plantation in Kodagu, Hassan and Chikmagalur districts of Karnataka where a majority of the country’s coffee is grown,’’ he reveals.

The white stem borer has been around for almost a century, causing limited damage. Over the last two years, however, drought and lesser rainfall have led to its proliferation. “Global

warming... has also contributed. Planters, too, are partly to blame as they supplement income with pepper twines for which shade is cut helping the borer proliferate,’’ explains Akhthar.

Arabica is grown in higher altitudes—1,500 feet above sea level. It fetches more than the Robusta variety and is used widely as blends in Europe.

“Today, there is a real danger of Arabica plantations being wiped out. We are following the Board’s advice on how to control it, like using phero-

mone traps which target egglaying females. But it is taking time. This pest has started to attack even one-year-old plants which does not bode well for the future,’’ says Bose Mandanna, a planter.

A new plant takes hits a peak in its yield only after eight years. Planters in some belts are switching to Robusta. Karnataka Planters’ Association chairman D Govindappa Jayaram hopes that the board constitutes a research panel to contain this pest. n Anil Budur Lulla

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Rajendra Jadhav/REUTERS

small world

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contents

18

cover story

34

Jihad: An Indian Love Story

exorcist

Demon slaying in Kerala

bjp

Amit Shah’s next battle

6

open essay hurried man’s guide

Censor Board corruption

The rise of ideological jihadists

26 bangalore

On the brink

person of the week irom sharmila

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The Iron Lady of the Northeast A court calls for her immediate release. She will probably be rearrested and quickly forgotten, but her indefinite fast of nearly 14 years will go on Lhendup G Bhutia

t has been nearly 14 years since Irom Sharmila from Manipur went on a hunger strike. In this period, no morsel of grain or a single drop of water has touched her lips. Her voice, as evidenced on the rare occasion a TV channel interviews her, is frail. Her body is now a wasted mess. And they say her menstrual cycles have long stopped.

Yet the single-largest insult to this superhuman effort is to not accord it its due recognition. Sharmila began her indefinite strike as a 28-year-old when 10 civilians were allegedly shot down by troops from the Assam Rifles in Malom, a town in the state. Her strike is against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), the draconian act in Manipur and other parts of the Northeast that gives the Army the power to use force, arrest or shoot anyone on the mere suspicion that someone is about to commit or has committed an offence. The government will not admit it, but thousands of people from Manipur and other parts of the Northeast have been arrested and killed in extra-judicial killings under this Act. The Army is loathed in these parts and there is a strong resentment against the Indian state. But the government calls Sharmila’s strike an attempt to commit suicide. She has been slapped charges under IPC’s Section 309 (attempt to commit suicide) and confined to a hospital room at Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital in Imphal, where she is force-fed through a tube.

A Sessions court in Manipur has now found the charges of attempt to commit 4 open

suicide baseless and called for her immediate release. It is unlikely that she will be free for long. Over the years she has been released many times, only to be re-arrested.

Sharmila’s story wraps us all in a stifling blanket of guilt. The tube that juts from her nose is a constant reminder of how all of us, the government and the citizens, have failed her. There has been no mass protest to ensure her freedom or a greater debate on her demands. No reconciliatory measure by a leader or government to bring her fast to an end.

Bullu Raj/ap

She even sneaked into Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in 2006 in the hope that her protest in the Capital would yield better results. But save for the police that swooped down to arrest her, she and her demands were largely ignored.

It is remarkable how Sharmila has carried on this lonely and painful journey of 14 years. According to some reports, she has fallen in love with a man named Desmond Coutinho from Goa. But she is now too many things to too many people, from the symbol of Northeastern resentment to the saintly embodiment of a romantic’s insincere involvement with India’s marginalised.

AFSPA is likely to stay for a very long time. The same President when he was Defence Minister had rejected the withdrawal or dilution of the Act on the grounds that the Armed Forces needed such powers to function in disturbed areas. The Indian state and its Army will continue to be hated in Manipur. Sharmila will probably die at some point, either from the fast or naturally, and her objective of seeing the repeal of AFSPA will never be realised in her lifetime.

But the incredible spirit of Sharmila that has so far defied all human limitations of endurance and willpower will continue to serve her. There will perhaps never be a glass of orange juice to signal the end of her fast and the world at large may ignore her. But the Iron Lady will continue what is definitely one of the greatest acts of civil disobedience in the 21st century. n 1 september 2014

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mumbai police

c cinema

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Decoding Mohit Suri

Sex, lies and scandals

f food

books

f o r ordering a controversial

survey and then comparing himself to Hitler After ordering a controversial household survey—called ‘Samagra Kutumba Survey 2014’ (Intensive Household Survey)—in Telangana, supposedly to ensure better distribution of services in the newly-formed state, Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao

Tabu’s bold comeback

Molecular Indian cuisine

recently said that if people were comparing him with Hitler then he was not ashamed about it. The comment came in the wake of apprehensions that the survey was designed to identify those who were from Seemandhra in Telangana so that they could be harassed into leaving the state.

Filmmaker Ram Gopal Verma called him ‘Hitler’ for conducting this survey, which cost the newly-formed state Rs 20 crore. In a press conference, Rao retorted, “One says KCR is Hitler, another says KCR is dictator; KCR is definitely Hitler for thieves. I want to be Hitler for the corrupt. I don’t feel shy.

KCR is Hitler to stop injustice. I can even be Hitler’s grandfather.” The problem, of course, is that Hitler is identified with the holocaust of Jews. As KCR stoked sentiments against Seemandhra settlers ever since Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated, allusions to Hitler will only make them more insecure and frightened. n

Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi altered his claim about paying a bribe to settle an inflated electricity bill two years ago, when Nitish Kumar was the CM TI M E DI S TORTION

“The electricity department had sent a flattened bill of Rs 25000... My family members had to cough up Rs 5,000 as bribe… to get the bill rectified even though I was a minister...”

“The incident I referred to was of 1994”

— Jitan Ram Manjhi to PTI, 12 August 2014

— Jitan Ram Manjhi to PTI, 14 August 2014

turn

o■ ar Ra asekh r r t d is n a in e h ■ KC hief M gana C Telan

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Why Natwar Singh disappoints

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

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

around

Pakistan Can’t Straddle the Fence N e w D e l h i Candle-light peaceniks on the Wagah Border may be disappointed.

But India’s decision to call off foreign secretary-level dialogue with Pakistan cannot be seen as a setback. The government’s move has only drawn a Lakshman Rekha for future negotiations.

Foreign ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin summed up the Indian argument when he said, “They (the Pakistani High Commission) were told that the meeting (of separatists) was unacceptable to us but they chose to go 1 september 2014

Aman Sharma/ap

ahead with it... Under the circumstances, there is no use of sending the foreign secretary to Islamabad.” He was commenting on Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit’s invitation to separatist leaders from Kashmir to meet for talks, the first of which was held in New Delhi.

Islamabad must respect India’s concerns, as according to past accords, the two countries alone are stakeholders in the Kashmir dispute.Pakistan has to negotiate either with India or with the militants. There can’t be two options. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to Censor Board corruption Rakesh Kumar, the CEO of the country’s censor body Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), along with an advisory panel member and an authorised agent for censor certification, were recently arrested by the CBI in a bribery case. The CBI claims that the trio had demanded a bribe for clearing a film.

According to the CBI, an authorised agent for censor certification, Praveen Mohare, had approached the CBFC on behalf of a producer of a regional film, Mor Dauki Ke Bihav, from Chhattisgarh for its early clearance. But the duo of Shripati Mishra, another agent for censor certification, and Sarvesh Jaiswal, CBFC advisory panel member, allegedly demanded a bribe of Rs 70,000 to issue the certificate.

After the two were arrested by the CBI, they confessed that they were acting at the behest of Kumar. Kumar is a 1997-batch Indian Railway Personnel Service officer who took charge as the board’s CEO in January this year.

The CBI conducted a search at Kumar’s residence and found Rs 10.5 lakh in cash, apart from gold jewellery and property documents.

The CBI found Rs 10.5 lakh in cash, gold jewellery and property papers in Kumar’s residence

raul irani

The CBI apparently had prior information about Kumar’s demanding of bribes. Kumar

A worker in front of a CBFC screen-shot at a theatre

would allegedly delay issuing censor certificates to filmmakers unless they approached the CBFC through select agents. In the recent past, some industry professionals have also spoken about the censor board’s inconsistent rulings.

Earlier this year, filmmaker Hansal Mehta claimed the CBFC was discriminating against his film Shahid by allotting it an ‘Adult’ certificate when many other films got a more lenient treatment. He even filed an RTI query to highlight this issue. Media reports state that the CBI knows a number of top Bollywood producers who have paid bribes to get their films cleared in time. n

The Iyengar Art of Living Notes from a meeting with BKS Iyengar, the yoga teacher M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

I

n 2006, when I met BKS

Iyengar, the yoga teacher who passed away on Wednesday, he was 88 years old. I was interviewing him for Reader’s Digest in the library of his residence-cum-yoga centre in Pune. In the notes that I looked up after hearing about his death, I had written that the interview happened at 3.35 pm and by then Iyengar had finished his daily practice of three hours of asanas and an hour of pranayam—not bad for someone just short of 90.

Iyengar was one of the first to popularise yoga in the West. Yehudi Menuhin was his follower. He had made the Queen of Belgium stand on her head when she was 84 years old (she insisted on doing shirsasan and he obliged). He had taught the philosopher J Krishnamurthy and also Jayaprakash Narayan. But, after I discounted his self-evident success, a couple of things struck me. One was that he was self taught to a large extent. As a child, he lived with his brother-in-law T Krishnamacharya, a great yoga teacher himself, but who was reluctant to teach the boy because he considered him physically weak.

It was only after another student left without warning and there was no one to give a demonstration that Iyengar’s lessons began. When a few women wanted to learn and could not be taught by a man in those days, as a boy he began to teach.

His obsession with yoga was complete. He would practice like a maniac for hours. His guru wouldn’t teach him pranayam even when Iyengar was an adult and a teacher.

Iyengar learnt it by hiding and watching him practice. The entire interview was punctuated with him talking about overcoming pain on different occasions at different stages of his life. There was also self doubt right up to his august years. In 1958,

he suddenly felt like he had no control and it took a year to get it back. After a scooter accident in 1979, he was told he would never be able to practise but he taught himself all over again.

The other thing that struck me was how he never made that natural leap to a godman. He had disdain for them.

Baba Ramdev was just becoming nationally popular then and, on a question by me, Iyengar asked me how many times had I seen Ramdev correct someone—how could a teacher teach without correcting even once? He dismissed the instant yoga of television; results took time.

He turned to a woman there and asked how many years With a disdain had she for godmen, practised. She replied, “11 Iyengar asked years”. He told me how many that it was times had I seen me only this year Ramdev correct that she learnt someone—how that the back of her knees were could a teacher not straight. He teach without said it took 11 correcting? years of practise to just know the back of her knees, how ridiculous was it to think that you could learn anything in a few days.

And, of course, I asked him about death—how did he visualise it? “My friend, 10 years ago I was in a death bed at this place only. My vital energy had sapped to such an extent that I could not come to class because I could not climb staircases. I was always [in] bed, 24 hours I was coughing. I had two heart attacks. In 1991, and four years after that. And still I am doing the most difficult poses,” he said. Death, of course, would come calling but he was probably too busy with Yoga to think about it. n 1 september 2014

open essay

By Tufail Ahmad

The Rise of Ideological Jihadists And why India should be really worried

A

lmost all terror attacks in Jammu & Kashmir and elsewhere in India could be attributed to the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, as well as to major Pakistan-based terror organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. Wait, that is no longer the case. India is now witnessing Tufail Ahmad the rise of a new generation of jihadists, is a former who identify themselves with groups journalist with the based in the Middle East. They are BBC Urdu Service motivated by the ideology of jihad— and Director of both through social media networks South Asia Studies as well as by local recruiters—and Project at the are not sponsored by Pakistan. As per Middle East Media intelligence estimates that appeared Research Institute, in the media in July, up to 80 Indian Washington DC Muslim youths are reportedly fighting alongside jihadists in Iraq and Syria. The argument that Indian Muslims are not part of Osama bin Laden’s global jihad now stands invalidated by the turn of events.

In the summer of 2013, a new anti-India group began coming to the fore: Ansar ut-Tawheed Fi Bilad Al-Hind (Supporters of the Islamic Monotheism in India). It released a number of videos in which nearly a dozen youths from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh were shown training somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. On 18 July this year, the 20th of the fasting month of Ramadan, a jihadi account on Twitter released a photograph of Anwer Bhatkal, a relative of Indian Mujahideen co-founder Riyaz Bhatkal, announcing his death while fighting in Afghanistan.

These Muslim men are being recruited both internally in India and from abroad. As reported by journalist Praveen Swami, four Muslim youths from the suburbs of Mumbai— Arif Majeed, Fahad Sheikh, Shaheen Tanki and Aman Tandel— flew on May 23 for Baghdad as part of a group of 22 Shia pilgrims and joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the terror group headed by jihadist commander Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

A few youths from Tamil Nadu who were based in Singapore were recruited by jihadists and are now fighting in Syria, notably Fakkurudeen, who took his wife and three children to the jihadist battlefield.

In addition to the ideological jihadists who may or may not be recruited by Pakistanbased groups, the arrest in April—along with the Chennai train blasts in May—of Sri Lankan national Shakir aka Zakir Hussein

by Chennai police revealed transnational terror links involving Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan and Malaysia to target Israeli and US consulates in Bangalore and Chennai, hatched by Pakistan’s ISI and involving a Pakistani diplomat in Colombo.

On 29 June, an audio statement was issued

by Al-Baghdadi. He declared himself as the Caliph, or head of the Islamic State, and

demanded bai’yah (an oath of fealty) from all Muslims. Among the jihadists, the position of Caliph, known formally as Emirul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful Muslims), was until now held only by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader from Afghanistan. Al-Baghdadi’s ISIS has released a global map where it aims to enforce the Islamic sharia rule. The map includes the land of Khorasan, which covers Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka.

The jihadist threat to India is real

Al-Baghdadi is considered a terrorist by all good-intentioned people in the West and the East, including by a large number of Islamic clerics across the world—except by Indian cleric Maulana Salman Al-Husaini Nadwi. In early July, Nadwi, an Islamic scholar at the Nadwatul Ulama seminary of Lucknow, wrote an open letter greeting him on his assuming the role of Caliph. In the letter sent via messaging service WhatsApp and in later statements in Hindi and Urdu, Nadwi referred to Al-Baghdadi as Emir-ul-Momineen and prayed—‘May Allah protect you’, spoke of ‘good news of victories’ in Iraq, urged jihadist organisations in Syria to sink their differences and forge unity, and advocated that Muslims ‘abide by’ the Emir-ulMomineen ‘if he follows Allah’s sharia’.

Nadwi’s message is certain to motivate hundreds of Indian Muslim youths on the path of global jihad, especially because the cleric heads an organisation of Muslim youth called Jamiatu-Shabab-il-Islam, which must now be placed on the watch of Indian intelligence agencies. An especially worrisome fact is that Nadwi wrote another letter to Saudi Arabia requesting the Saudis to train five lakh Sunni Muslim youth from India to fight against Shia militias in Iraq, according to the media reports emerging in July.

Anjuman-e-Haideri, a Delhi-based organisation of Shia Muslims, placed advertisements in Urdu newspapers calling on volunteers to defend holy shrines in Iraq. Ali Mirza of Anjuman-e-Haideri said his group will register one million volunteers. One lakh Shias registered; of them, 6,000 volunteers have applied for Iraqi visas. The volunteers say their mission is humanitarian. Zeeshan Haider, a youth, described his trip as “a religious duty”. Haji Mirza Qasim Raza, a volunteer, said: “There is nothing that I will not do to protect Karbala... including laying down my life.” Jahan Ara, a widow with failing eyesight, said: “There’s no better way to spend one’s last days”. 25 per cent of the volunteers are women. Iran-backed Shia cleric Kalb-e-Jawwad supported women’s participation in battlefields, arguing: “There are misconceptions about Islam being very limiting for women”. The risk is that Indian Shias visiting Iraq could be recruited by Iran-backed Shia militias. For Shia nurses, doctors and others, the best deed is to help the sick in India; or, they should go as part of Red Cross, not led by sectarian group like Anjuman-e-Haideri.

Social media reports and images indicate that some public demonstrations in favour of the Al-Baghdadi-led ISIS took place in the

A few youths from Tamil Nadu who were based in Singapore were recruited by jihadists and are now fighting in Syria

1 september 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 9

Jack Garofalo/Paris Match/Getty Images

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi preaching at a mosque in Mosul in July 2014

states of Tamil Nadu and Jammu & Kashmir. According to one report, nearly two dozen Muslim youths posed for a picture wearing ISIS T-shirts in front of the ‘Periya Pallivasal’ (Big Mosque) in Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu, from where some youths have already gone to fight in Syria. Reports from Jammu & Kashmir reveal that masked Kashmiri youths held at least two public demonstrations carrying ISIS flags in Srinagar: the first was at the Jamia Masjid on 11 July and a second was on the day of Eid-ul-Fitr, 29 July. There were reports in the Indian media that Muslim youths from Kerala could be headed to join groups like ISIS. In recent years, Al-Qaeda has carried out a considerable media campaign to recruit youth from India. In June 2013, Al-Qaeda had released a video—titled “Why is there no storm in your river?”—in which militant cleric Maulana Asim Umar expressed exasperation that while Muslim youth from all over the world were fighting in Syria and elsewhere, Indian Muslims were not.

Last June, Al-Qaeda released another video devoted to the Kashmir issue, in which Asim Umar exhorted: “Who took away Kalashnikovs from the hands of my Kashmiri Muslims and handed them stones and pieces of soil?”

Not All Terrorists are Jihadists or Islamists

India now needs to worry about the threat from ideological jihadists. There are clear indications that the ISIS is attracting 10 open

jihadists from Pakistan and India. Their guiding philosophy is rooted in Ghazwa-e-Hind (the Battle of India), a statement in which Prophet Muhammad prophesied that two groups from the Ummah will be saved from the fire of Hell—one group will rise from India and march on to join the forces of the second group led by Jesus who will be reborn in the present-day Israel to establish the global Islamic rule. The Ghazwa-e-Hind prophecy is widely quoted in the literature and videos of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s Pakistani commanders as well as by mainstream Pakistani jihadist ideologues such as Zaid Hamid, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Jaish-eMuhammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar. Now, India is seeing the emergence of this class of jihadists who ideologically connect with those in Iraq and Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Five Arguments on the Roots of Jihadism

After 9/11, Western commentators and liberal Muslim writers sought to dismiss the reality of jihadist terrorism by arguing that the terrorists were inspired by Egyptian jihadist theorist Syed Qutb and Jamaat-e-Islami founder Syed Abul A’la Maududi. Those among the liberal commentators who sought to criticise Islamists and jihadists were rejected, ridiculed and accused of spreading Islamophobia by those who are soft on the Islamists. However, a review of videos and publications released by jihadist organisations reveals that these groups do 1 september 2014

not mention any of these scholars. Invariably, the jihadist literature and videos justify jihad on the basis of teachings from the Koran, the Sunnah (traditions of Prophet Muhammad) and precedents established by the four Righteous Caliphs who succeeded the prophet. Let’s take up some arguments being debated regarding jihad.

Argument 1 Islam promotes pluralism and co-existence Whenever a terror attack takes place, notably on Sufi shrines in Pakistan or on Shia Muslims elsewhere, critics of Islamism are told to shut up by supporters of everyday Islamism who argue that Islam promotes pluralism and co-existence. They cite the Quranic verse: ‘To you your religion, and to me mine’ (Verse 109: 6). However, this interpretation is rejected by the jihadists. Nawa-i-Afghan Jihad (Voice of the Afghan Jihad), an Urdu-language magazine published from somewhere in Pakistan, carried an article titled ‘The Success of ‘Democratic Islamists’ in the Elections of Tunisia and Egypt’, written by Hafiz Ehsanul Haq. It argued that the concerned verse was revealed not to promote pluralism but to ensure that the Islamic way of life did not mix with the lifestyles of nonMuslims of Mecca.

Haq explained how Prophet Muhammad rejected an offer from non-Muslims of Mecca to live together and share power: ‘Addressing all faithful Muslims, the Quran has said with full clarity that Allah has chosen the complete religion—Islam— for them. Prophet Muhammad was sent with the religion, and spent his days and nights for the implementation of that religion only. He rejected an offer from kuffar [infidels/polytheists] of Mecca to rule [in collaboration] because it is impossible to run a polytheist system along with Islam based on compromise.’

Argument 2 Suicide attacks are not permitted In Pakistan, the Taliban have bombed a series of mosques, shrines and holy places belonging to Ahmadi Muslims, Shias and Sufi mystics. In 2014, their ideological cousins in Iraq and Syria are demolishing historical mosques, tombs of prophets and shrines revered both by Shias and Sunnis alike. However, a key argument by those who fail to condemn the jihadists is: bombing mosques is un-Islamic and suicide attacks are not permitted by Islam. This argument has become a firstline defence in our societies for jihadists. However, the jihadists are themselves overturning this argument by citing incidents from early Islamic era and based on authentic Islamic literature.

In 2013, the jihadist website Minbar AlTawhid Wal-Jihad published a fatwa about the permissibility of bombing synagogues and churches, written by Mauritian radical cleric Sheikh Abu Mundhir Al-Shinqiti. He summarised Islamic jurists’ opinion that attacking houses of worship is illegitimate, based on the Quran: ‘Had Allah not defended some men by the might of others, the monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which His praise is daily celebrated would have been utterly destroyed’ (Verse 22:40).

However, Al-Shinqiti went on to reject this argument, citing medieval scholar Ibn Al-Qaym Al-Jawziyya’s opinion, that the verse refers only to pre-Islamic era, and adding that since Judaism and Christianity lost their validity with the birth of Islam, their houses of worship also lost their protected status. Al-Shinqiti explained that only two types of worship places are protected by Islam: those belonging to (non-Muslim) monotheists living as dhimmis (second-class subjects) in a Muslim state, and secluded monasteries; but depending on circumstances, churches and synagogues of Christians and Jews can be attacked. It can be inferred from this interpretation that if polytheist Hindus were living in a Muslim state as dhimmis, their temples will not be protected because such protection is available only to monotheist non-Muslims.

In December 2013, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP or Movement of the Pakistani Taliban) released a posthumous video of its commander Qari Hussain Ahmed Mehsud. In the video, Mehsud answered popular criticism of the Taliban by Pakistani writers over the bombing of mosques, noting: “Prophet Muhammad declared jihad in Madina, demolished mosques of the munafiqeen [hypocrites].” The issue of mosques built by the munafiqeen in Medina has been discussed in verses 107-110 of the Quran’s chapter Al-Tawbah.

Citing incidents from the era of Prophet Muhammad, the jihadists are also rejecting the argument that suicide bombings are not permitted. Most Islamic scholars, including the jihadists, are unanimous that suicide for personal reasons is not permitted in Islam. However, the jihadists argue that suicide bombings are permitted for establishing sharia rule. Writing in a Taliban magazine in 2013, Islamist writer Muhammad Qasim cited two Quranic verses to rationalise ‘martyrdom’ attacks: ‘‘And this life of the world is only amusement and play!

Verily, the home of the Hereafter, that is the life indeed, i.e. the eternal life that will never end...’ (Verse 29:64); ‘Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive, with their Lord’ (Verse 3:169).’

Argument 3 Islam is a peaceful religion Soon after Prophet Muhammad died, a war for succession and bloodshed began. In a message to his followers at a place called Ghadeer—the veracity of which is accepted by all scholars but Sunnis interpret it differently—the prophet had nominated his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib as his successor. However soon after the prophet’s death, his companions argued that the successor (caliph) be chosen through consultation. Abu Bakr became the first caliph, followed by Umar ibn Khattab and Usman ibn Affan. When the time came to choose the fourth caliph, there was disagreement and the caliphate went to Ali. This dispute led to the birth of two sects of Islam: Sunnis who believe in that succession under which Ali is the fourth caliph and Shias who believe that Ali is the first caliph, succeeded by an entirely different set of imams (leaders).

This led to a bloody struggle in Islam.

Suicide for personal reasons is not permitted in Islam. But jihadists argue that suicide bombings are permitted for creating Sharia rule

1 september 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 11

Except for Abu Bakr, all the caliphs and twelve Shia imams were murdered or poisoned in the wake of the war at the Battle of Karbala.

Today, most of the jihadist bloodshed that has emerged can be attributed to this conflict: Sunni versus Shia. The conflict is forged by Iranian and Saudi roles in Muslim countries, especially in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran.

Iran, predominantly Shia, has nurtured a number of terrorist groups including Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia, primarily Sunni, has backed Sunni jihadist groups across the world to counter the Iranian influence. US President Barack Obama’s decision to alter the course of American foreign policy in the Middle East made the Saudis so insecure that Riyadh backed jihadist groups like ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The current wave of bloodshed in Syria and Iraq can be attributed to Tehran and Riyadh, along with the US. In the early Islamic era, Prophet Muhammad himself took part in 27 wars. It is often argued that the prophet upheld compassion and justice for all; and indeed there are incidents Manjunath Kiran

NIA personnel escort a hooded suspect believed to be Yasin Bhatkal in New Delhi on 30 August 2013

from his life to prove that. However, a major argument forwarded by apologists of Islamism is that the Prophet pardoned everyone after the Victory of Mecca. This is historically incorrect, or only partially true. In 2012, Al-Qaeda released an audio lecture of Ustad Ahmad Farooq, who heads Al-Qaeda’s Preaching and Media Department for Pakistan. In the lecture, Farooq lauded Malik Mumtaz Qadri, an elite security commando who was deployed to protect Punjab’s liberal governor Salman Taseer but instead assassinated him for advocating reforms in Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

Farooq criticised enemy forces for advocating that the Taliban and other jihadist forces should show patience and register their protests peacefully. ‘This is not the path that the Prophet himself taught us,’ Ustad Farooq noted: ‘On the Day of Victory of Mecca, when all people were granted amnesty, the prophet was informed that there were about 10 people, including women, who had committed blasphemy against him. He ordered that even if they are found hanging on the curtains of the Kaaba (the Holy Mosque of Mecca), they deserve no respect, and 12 open

their blood should be spilled; and indeed it was spilled’. This blasphemy law has become a nightmare for Christians, Ahmadi Muslims and others in Pakistan and other Islamic countries.

Argument 4 Jihad means personal striving In purely etymological terms, jihad means striving. Islamic scholars have argued that jihad means striving to become a better Muslim. It is true that jihad also means striving but in popular Muslim imagination it carries only one meaning: military fighting to establish Islamic rule. Almost every video and e-book released by jihadist groups quotes directly from the Quran to argue that jihad means to procure arms, to train and be prepared, to fight and establish the rule of Allah on earth. A verse frequently cited in jihadist videos is: ‘Fight them until no corruption (kufr) exists and all religion (worship) is for Allah’ (Verse 8:39). This verse was cited in a 2013 video from the Manba-ul-Jihad Studio of the Haqqani Network of the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Mohammad Omar.

There are similar verses being cited by the terrorists. In 2013, a TTP video cited a verse: ‘Fight against them.

Allah will torment them at your hands and will humiliate them, and will help you against them, and will heal the breasts of the Muslims’ (Verse 9:14). Last year, the Qaeda al-Jihad fi Bilad-eKhurasan (Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan) released a video lecture of militant cleric Maulana Asim Umar in which he cited Koranic verses arguing that Islam should prevail over all other ways of life: “And if Allah did not check one set of people by means of another, the Earth would indeed be full of mischief. But Allah is full of bounty to the alameen” (mankind, jinns, and all that exist) (Verse 2:251). Umar explained the meaning: “If jihad is not performed, everything on Earth would be filled with corruption.”

Those who argue that Islam teaches moderation cite a Koranic verse: ‘there is no compulsion in (acceptance of) religion’ (Verse 2:256). However, the jihadists are arguing that this verse is applicable to non-Muslims who must live under sharia rule. A year ago, the TTP released a video of a Pakistan-based Burmese militant scholar Mufti Abuzar Azaam, who clarified that as per this verse, no Christian, Jews, or non-Muslim can be forced to accept Islam but went on to argue that when Muslims go to war, they first do dawah (invite non-Muslims to the fold of Islam). Arguing that only Islam offers the principle of ‘live and let live’, he however insisted that there is indeed compulsion for Muslims. He quoted Prophet Muhammad as saying: ‘Beat up your children when they are 10-years-old to offer their

Videos and e-books released by jihadist groups quote from the Quran to argue that jihad means to procure arms, to fight and establish the rule of Allah on earth

1 september 2014

prayers if they do not do so’. Azaam’s interpretation means: a) there is indeed compulsion in religion insofar as Muslims are concerned; b) non-Muslims cannot be forced to convert to Islam, but must live as dhimmis (second-class subjects) under the Islamic rule, the only permissible system of governance on the earth of Allah and their security will be guaranteed in lieu of jizya (tax on non-Muslim subjects).

In June 2013, Asim Umar argued in an Al-Qaeda video that non-Muslims cannot be forced to accept Islam but went on to argue that Islam must prevail over all other systems of government, which means that Islam does not imagine a situation in which it can coexist with non-Muslims in power. Umar cited the Koran: “And if there comes any power in the way [of establishing an Islamic sharia system] then it was ordered [by the Koran]: ‘whoever comes in the way of this system, do qital [fight to kill] against them until their power is broken, their rule gets ended, and then establish the lifestyle world over in accordance with this Koran’ (Verse 2:190).” An internet forum on Facebook associated with the TTP, in a post dated 5 March, rejected the argument that there is ‘no terrorism in Islam’. It quoted a Quranic verse: ‘If anyone killed an innocent it would be as if he had killed the whole of mankind. And one who saved a life would be as if he had saved the lives of whole mankind’ (Verse 5:32). In jihadists’ perspective, jihad simply is fighting to establish the peace of Islam to save mankind from polytheism and other such corruptions.

Argument 5 Islam protects minorities; Koran advocates peace If one criticises Islam, the pro-Islamists in our neighbourhoods retort that Islam protects minorities. This retort is indeed correct, but a deeper examination reveals that in order to enjoy the protection of Islam, non-Muslim minorities must live under the Islamic rule and pay jizya. In other words, nonMuslims cannot be rulers. This is the precise jihadist argument based on which a number of Muslim countries do not allow their non-Muslim citizens to become the head of the state.

Under the constitution of Pakistan, a non-Muslim Pakistani citizen cannot be the head of the state. Under a constitutional amendment in 2008, the Maldives barred non-Muslims from becoming citizens. For several decades, Egypt has constitutionally barred its non-Muslim citizens from occupying top positions in government. Several Islamic countries do not permit their own non-Muslim citizens to become the head of the state.

This is also exactly the case with blasphemy laws prevailing in several Islamic countries form Sudan to Pakistan, with Islamists arguing that blasphemy of Prophet Muhammad cannot be even pardoned by him.

Islamic clerics and average Muslims argue that the Koran advocates peace. Indeed, it does. There are hundreds of verses in the Koran that advocate love, peace and brotherhood. Islam is a peaceful religion, and the majority of Muslims are peaceful.

However, the majority does not exist meaningfully: it takes just one cleric to stand up, deliver a lecture and shut up an entire village; the majority ignores him, thereby allowing him to rule over them; and a few who follow him truly could become jihadists.

While there are hundreds of verses in favour of peace and brotherhood, there are also numerous Islamic justifications for armed fighting and capture of women in the times of war, as 1 september 2014

Boko Haram demonstrated in Nigeria. So, there are others who argue the need for admitting this duality of the situation: Islam is and isn’t peaceful—both at the same, as is illustrated in numerous verses.

The Case for Islamic Reform

In Islam, the concep of god is dual: as Rahman and raheem (gracious and merciful), and as jabbar and qahhar (mighty and punishing). The need of the hour is that Indian Islamic scholars sit down and think through the relevance of the Quranic verses for the modern age, and assess what kind of teachings Muslim youths, attracted to jihadist forces like ISIS, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, are imbibing from some verses. For meaningful Islamic reformation to begin, Islamic scholars and collegegoing Muslim youth must admit that there are two types of verses: those advocating peace, love and pluralism; and those that contradict these teachings.

Fortunately, India has a strong legacy of Islamic reform. After the Fall of Delhi in 1857, there were two responses from within the Muslim community to revive the fortunes of Indian Muslims: one group of reformers was led by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan who stressed the need for learning European sciences and for promoting a scientific temperament among Muslims; he wrote an interpretation of the Quran and established a college for modern education, now known as the Aligarh Muslim University. The second response was led by Maulana Qasim Nanautavi who believed in Islamic revivalism as a panacea for the problems of Muslims and established the Darul Uloom Deoband, the seminary producing obscurantism and antiwomen fatwas. In the post-Independence era, Maharashtrabased reformer Hamid Dalwai articulated a better model of reform as a liberty project for Indian Muslims by incorporating enlightenment ideas and arguing for the need to think beyond the frameworks of secularism and minorityism.

Currently, a host of Islamic scholars and activists such as Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, late Asghar Ali Engineer, Daud Sharifa, Shaista Amber, Zeenat Shaukat Ali, Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, Uzma Naheed and others are working for reform: their work is essentially within the framework of Islam. However, Muslims must also realise that change comes from external forces: interaction through foreign ideas generated by travel, globalisation, wars and technologies. The current waves of conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan-Pakistan region should also remind Indian Muslims that Islamic reform is urgent, and such a task must be accomplished by Islamic scholars from India.

This is because India is the only country where Muslims have consistently experienced democratic values for more than half a century. There is absolutely no Muslim nation that can compare with this extraordinary experience of Indian Muslims on almost all conceivable parameters: political and religious freedom, educational and economic opportunities, freedom of thought and expression, individual liberty or right to form political association. The constitution of India contains hugely relevant ideas from the Enlightenment to address Muslim issues.

However, given this context, it is a tragedy that nearly one hundred Muslims from India are fighting alongside jihadists in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Indian Muslims must admit that there is a problem of jihadism in our midst. n open www.openthemagazine.com 13

The Shah Commission The warrior president of the BJP is all set for his second battle. Inside the new saffron high command BY PR RAMESH AND ULLEKH NP

O

n the ground floor of Gujarat Bhawan, located in Delhi’s diplomatic enclave of Chanakyapuri, BJP president Amit Shah sits relaxed in a conference room, giving off a confident and in-control demeanour. He doesn’t harangue party colleagues and ministers, most of who have to compulsorily meet him once a week to brief him about their work. But everybody knows that the hardnosed politician doesn’t condone anyone dawdling through work or engaging in empty talk. Which is why they say Shah, the youngest-ever BJP president at 50, has gone for a shock therapy of sorts within the party: he brooks no delays or lame excuses, and loathes the typical trappings of ‘Delhi durbar’, known for its ravenous desire for power, prestige and pelf.

The younger, new team that Shah has put in place as he forges ahead with expanding the party’s presence to states considered fallow for the BJP is a testimony to his deep dislike for what pundits call extraneous considerations. “He has chosen people he is comfortable working with. He has no political linkage or highlevel recommendations to influence him, it seems,” says a person close to the matter, emphasising that many of the new office bearers—eight general secretaries, 11 vice presidents, 14 secretaries and 10 national spokespersons— are below 50.

Notably, the talk within the BJP is that those who have ‘toiled in the trenches’, and not those who have ‘lounged in the splendour of Delhi’s power circles’ have been named to the top echelons of the party. Another section suggests that the new team marks the decimation of the 14 open

anti-Modi camp in the party. . The only exception is LK Advani loyalist Ananth Kumar who has been pardoned: he is expected to continue in the crucial parliamentary board of the BJP, says a BJP leader Among dropped names are SS Ahluwalia, Balbir Punj and a few others considered ‘quintessential Delhi types’, according to a senior BJP leader. JP Nadda, who has emerged as the second-most important person, or Shah’s chief of staff, will soon make it to the top panel.

Another casualty was 34-year-old Varun Gandhi, son of Union Minister Maneka Gandhi, who was earlier general secretary. Gandhi, whose mother publicly peddled the idea that he could be pitched as the Chief Ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh, enjoyed former party president and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s patronage. That Maneka made such a suggestion didn’t go down well with party cadres and leaders in Uttar Pradesh, where Shah now enjoys tremendous clout thanks to his role in pulling in votes and ensuring the biggest-ever victory in the country’s most populous state.

“Such writs don’t seem to run any longer,” notes a political analyst who has watched the BJP for long—a party where veterans have called the shots since its inception in 1980. A joke doing the rounds within the party about Varun is a comment by a senior leader who said, “The Congress is under compulsion to accommodate the Gandhis, but not the BJP.” Shifting Gear

Without doubt, there is a major change in the behavioural pattern of the party, notes an RSS leader based out of Mumbai. “And

I feel it is for [the] good. I think money, proximity with leaders and other factors did not contribute to naming a person an office bearer this time around. What is bad about that? [But], of course, we have to always make room for accommodating people from certain backgrounds who need to be empowered,” he adds.

The inclusion in Shah’s team of Ram Shanker Katheria, a member of Parliament from the Agra Lok Sabha constituency, reflects that logic. After all, the recent Lok Sabha elections in which the BJP won a resounding victory, catapulting Narendra Modi to power at the Centre, saw the Dalits voting en masse for the BJP. Says Laxmikant Bajpai, the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh state president: “The 2014 elections were a watershed in state politics and elsewhere. It saw people who were for long affiliated to caste parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party veering towards the BJP and voting for the cause of ensuring that Modiji became PM.” RSS leaders contend that like the OBCs, who have increasingly been accommodated in the ranks of the BJP over the past decade thanks to overwhelming support for the party from the caste base, Dalits, too, who have over the past few years joined the league of ‘mainstream Hindus’, will get far higher representation in party forums.

With the BJP under Shah tapping more into the RSS for cadres, the mother of all Hindutva organisations in the country continues to enjoy tremendous clout within the party. Shah’s affinity for RSS leaders like Dattatreya Hosabale and Suresh Soni is well-known and his naming Ram Madhav as a general secretary 1 september 2014

raul irani

The Shah Sena

hav Mad Ram

shows that he is keen to borrow well-networked leaders from the parent organisation. “Ram Madhav is a modern-day RSS leader who is suave and well-connected.

His services will be of great use for the BJP at a time it is looking to spread wings in states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu besides strengthening itself in other states,” avers a Delhi-based BJP leader who views the ‘so-called cultural shift’ within the organisation as ‘a much-needed one’.

He points out that in the early days of the BJP, party leaders blindly followed the Congress’s organisational model, hiring people who were close to them and remaining largely Delhi-centric. “I don’t know how it happened. The Congress was such a large entity then, and so our leaders aped them with the aim of fighting them,” he suggests. That trend continued under the presidency of LK Advani, and later Nitin Gadkari, N Venkiah Naidu and Rajnath Singh.

“That trend is changing and I am glad,” the BJP leader declares. Modi and Shah don’t want social climbers and elitists in the higher echelons of the party, he adds.

Mu ra lid ha rR ao

kar Katheria Dr Ram Shan

The ABVP Club

16 open

av Yad a dr pen u Bh Rajiv Pratap Rudy

Several senior BJP leaders, including several Union ministers, are members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, and pundits suggest that this offers a lot of advantages. First of all, most of them have worked together for long and understand each person’s strengths and weaknesses.

This mean deputing jobs on the basis of a person’s strength is easy for Shah. Most of the leaders are from across the country and have worked at the grassroots level, unlike some previous nominees who had mostly been Delhi-based leaders. Shah’s new team includes Nadda, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Muralidhar Rao, Madhav, Saroj Pandey, Bhupendra Yadav, Kateria, Ram Lal, all of whom are general secretaries.

The new vice-presidents are B Dattatray, BS Yeddyurappa, Satpal Malik, MA Naqvi, P Ruppala, Prabhat Jha, Raghuvar Das, Kiran Maheswari, Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, Renu Devi and Dinesh Sharma. Besides these, Shahanawaz Hussain, Sudhanshu Trivedi, Meenakshi Lekhi, Sambit Patra, MJ Akbar, Nalin Kohli, BS Shastri, GVLN Rao, Anil Baluni and L Kumarmangalam will be the party’s national spokespersons. While Abdul Rashid Ansari will continue as the BJP Minority Morcha

chief, Anurag Thakur will remain Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha chief.

Interestingly, in a neat ruse, Shah retained certain leaders in top posts of feeder organisations so that he would not be forced to dishonour requests of close friends within the party to offer them senior party posts.

For his part, Nadda says the new team is far more representative than ever. “We have included the representatives of all the states and communities,” he says.

Another senior BJP leader says that the choice of the new leadership puts on full display “the ruthless clarity of the president of the party who doesn’t

tolerate shirkers or people who want to be in the party for glamour quotient”. He didn’t elaborate.

Cracking the Whip

Indeed, Shah’s actions speak loudly.

Recently, he insisted on an austerity move, asking senior leaders to use regular flights and save on costs for chartered airplanes. It meant that a leader as senior as Advani himself had to toe the line because Shah was in no mood to dole out concessions to anyone. Repeated requests were rejected, including efforts to impress upon him through intermediaries. He is reported to have put his foot down, saying 1 september 2014

a dd Na P J

Ram Lal

kers who until recently held tremendous sway over the ruling dispensation. A well-networked senior leader has often been heard saying that “while I know some 490 of the 500 people who hold the reins of power in Delhi, Shah seems to know all of them”.

According to a senior government official, the BJP president also seems to be hands-on in tracking information and leakage of information within the government, effectively transforming the government into “a no-nonsense administration where work, and not media interaction and claims of doing work are what matter”. He adds that unlike in the time of the Congress, no bureaucrat gets to “settle scores with a rival or another ministry official through selective leakage of news”. Recently, trouble-shooters of the BJP tracked the source of leakage of a conversation between a minister and an official. “All this prevents unnecessary rumours and half-truths being circulated in the media. They might want to call it opacity, but we in the government are more interested in work and not in talking too much at a time when we should be busy with our work. We will talk, but later. Amitji’s actions are in line with this spirit,” argues a BJP leader.

Preparing for Polls

y de an jP ro Sa this was no time for embellishments and ostentatious displays of power and opulence. “He means business. There is certainly fear of breaking new guidelines that are in place,” says the second BJP leader, adding that ‘pull and pressures within the party’ are things of the past.

As the second-most powerful person in the NDA, Shah can afford to crack the whip. After all, Modi, the National Democratic Alliance’s CEO, trusts him wholeheartedly. Shah, despite being a rank outsider until a few years ago, is also very clued in when it comes to the goingson in the national capital, both within the government and among power bro1 september 2014

A hard task master, Shah, who has catapulted himself from a state-level leader to a national figure within two years, instils fear in the minds of party workers who come unprepared for meetings. “You can’t go and make perfunctory statements about the state of affairs of the party in your state. He is someone who has direct contact with grassroots-level workers and therefore any such general statements are snubbed,” says a Bhopal-based BJP leader.

These days, at meetings presided over

by Shah at 11 Kautilya Marg—where Gujarat Bhawan is located—attendees churn out data and specific information about each unit under discussion, especially those from poll-bound states of Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir and Jharkhand. Shah, who has engineered crucial realignments in the run-up to the polls in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, had brought the opposition to a naught with his political dexterity and acumen, winning accolades within and without. Leaders from these four states

have been asked by Shah to classify regions based on penetration of media of all kinds—print and digital—besides making preparations for Modi rallies. “A lot of data analysis is involved, both inside and outside of meetings. He wants data and analysis, not philosophy about chances of the BJP’s win in these places. One has to be very, very prepared when you make a presentation,” says a leader from Jammu & Kashmir. “I am floored by his quickness at giving solutions to problems and his election-management skills. He is an outand-out political animal, [who] breathes, sleep and eats politics. He has changed the grammar of political discussions within the party,” he laughs. Shah is cool, but very firm when he has to be, says another state-level leader.

A Mumbai-based BJP leader is of the view that Shah has also clipped the wings of wannabes in the party who had ‘come out of the woodwork’ just ahead of the polls, hoping to secure benefits once Modi is elected to power. Certain selfconfessed Modi-acolytes such as Bihar leader Rameshwar Chaurasia also suffered a similar fate. “He was hoping to manage a position within the party. But then Shah had other ideas,” says this leader. “Many such ‘microphones’ have been sidelined by Shah,” he adds, but doesn’t offer names. He merely says, “Look around, you’ll see.”

For Shah, the top priority now is to put governance on the fast track and to speed up projects in sectors such as railways, water and power. He may appear nonchalant serving you upma and tea at his office, but Shah closely monitors the progress of key government initiatives, including the ambitious project to link the Char Dhams (the four holy Hindu pilgrimage centres in the Himalayas) through a railway network and also in enlisting support from various arms of the government not known to be involved in major civilian projects so far.

He has been accused of being dictatorial, but Shah appears completely tuned into a task-specific mode. With two secretaries who take shifts to accompany him 24x7, be it at his Jangpura home or at Gujarat Bhawan, and armed with close to a dozen mobile phones, Shah looks ready for consolidating gains.

Nothing animates Shah as the pleasures and possibilities of impending wars.n open www.openthemagazine.com 17

an indian Once it was a raging controversy in Kerala and Karnataka. What has come to be known as Love Jihad today divides western Uttar Pradesh along communal and political lines. Kumar Anshuman travels through the so-called love-infested terrain photographs by raul irani

love story A

s you travel on the Meerut-Hapur road, around 25 kilometres from Meerut city, a small lane on the

right takes you to Sarawa village. Police pickets all through its dingy lanes confirm that you are at the right place. It is a small village of around 100 houses. Sixty per cent of the population are Muslims; the rest Hindus, mainly Tyagis. Because they are a majority, only Muslims get elected as village pradhans.

The villagers say there has never been any strife between the two communities; they have co-existed in peace. Recently, however, Sarawa’s communal dynamics changed completely, and we are guided to the house of the girl who was the reason for this.

A Hindu teacher at the village madrassa, she alleges that she was kidnapped, gang-raped and forcibly converted. She managed to escape from a madrassa in Muzaffarnagar and return home to narrate her story to her family. They filed a police case and those named in the FIR have been arrested. This includes the village pradhan Nawab, Sanahullah and a local girl, Nishat. You can sense an undercurrent of fear among Hindus: that once the police forces are removed from the area, Muslims might retaliate.

The girl’s father appears, from a wrecked house. He is followed by two women police constables posted there to guard the girl. Fear is written on his face, but he soon collects himself and relates their story. During the next half hour, he mentions the term ‘Love Jihad’ almost ten times.

“This is nothing but Love Jihad,” he says. “Muslims are behind this conspiracy of luring Hindu girls with money and dreams of a good life, and later selling them to Gulf countries. They had told my daughter too that she will be sent abroad.” He had no idea that such a term existed until his daughter’s return. He now speaks with complete 20 open

certainty—Love Jihad is more than a catchphrase for him. Like many Hindus here, he sees it as an attack on their existence.

The phrase Love Jihad has found a place in every Hindu dialect of western Uttar Pradesh after the communal riots last year, following an eveteasing incident involving a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy in Shamli in late August. A mahapanchayat organised in Muzaffarnagar on 7 September coined a slogan, Beti Bachao, Bahu Bachao (Save Your Daughter, Save Your Daughter-in-Law); highlighting what it saw as an immediate threat. Since then, 1 september 2014

A girl who was allegedly raped and forcibly converted to Islam, at her home in Sarawa

FORCED CONVERSION “This is part of a global

Love Jihad that targets vulnerable Hindu girls. The BJP will oppose forced conversions and intervene on behalf of the victims�

Dr Chandramohan, spokesperson for BJP in UP

a number of incidents have led to the establishing of the phenomenon in the minds of Hindus in the region.

Last year, a case (CC-28/13) in Kharkhoda Police station was registered against 30-year-old Rahimmudin, a mistry from Pipli Kheda who is married and has three children.

Rahimmudin had gone to perform repair work at a Hindu house in Phaphunda village, and eloped with the 19-yearold girl in the family. They did a nikaah and the couple filed a writ of habeas corpus at Chandigarh High Court to protect themselves from detention by the police (in such cases usually the girl’s family files a missing person report and the accused file a habeas corpus). They are staying together now.

“Going by his economic conditions, he is not so well off as to file a habeas corpus from Chandigarh. Where did he get all the money?” asks Krishan Pahal, an advocate fighting the case on behalf of the girl’s family. “Someone is helping him. I can understand if a young boy of the same age falls in love with a girl. But a married man with such an age difference does it intentionally.”

In a similar incident, Sajid, another 30-year-old married man with three kids, eloped with a Hindu girl early this year. A case (328/14) was registered against him at Meerut’s Parikshit Garh police station. Sajid drove a tractor and was engaged by the Hindu farmer family. The girl was 20 years old.

Such elopements have occurred in the past too. In 2008, a labourer named Haseen, 32 years old and married, eloped with a 14-year-old Hindu girl in Atalpur village under Kithore police station of Meerut. The girl was rescued by the police. She is an adult now and married, but makes it a point to attend the hearing of the case. It is only now that such incidents are being perceived as an organised conspiracy.

“This is part of a global Love Jihad that targets vulnerable Hindu girls who are entrapped and forced to convert to Islam. The BJP will oppose forced conversions and intervene on behalf of the victims,” says Dr Chandramohan, BJP’s UP spokesperson.

Pahal says that in his entire career he has fought 50 to 60 such cases from Meerut alone. On an average, he gets five to six cases every year. “In most of the cases, 99 per cent of the accused come from the labour class and are married.

The age difference between the accused and the victim is very high,” he says. “They target Hindu girls from farmer families who are not very well off. They gift mobile phones, good clothes and promise a better life. It is not difficult for a girl to get trapped. By the time she realises the mistake it is often too late.” According to him, for every reported incident, there are at least 50 incidents that remain hidden because of social stigma and fear.

L

ove Jihad may have gained prominence only now in

North India but in the deep south, especially Kerala and Karnataka, it has been a controversial subject for 22 open

Maulana Masood Madani of the Tanzeem Abnaye Darul Uloom Deoband

many years now. In August 2009, the Kerala High Court asked the state government to consider enacting a law prohibiting it. “Under the pretext of love, there cannot be any compulsive, deceptive conversion,” said Justice KT Sankaran of the Kerala High Court, while rejecting the bail applications of two people accused of Love Jihad. He went on to say that after going through the case diary of such cases, it was clear that there was a concerted effort to convert girls of a particular religion to another with the blessings of some religious outfits. The Court pointed out that there were 4,000 to 5,000 religious conversions due to love affairs in the last four years in Kerala alone.

Two weeks later, the Karnataka High Court also directed the state government to order a probe into Love Jihad 1 september 2014

JUDICIAL INTERVENTION “If there are cases of Love Jihad then I

demand that such cases be investigated by the judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court. Who are RSS and VHP to pass a judgment?”

Maulana Masood Madani, President of Tanzeem Abnaye Darul Uloom Deoband cases. The order came during a hearing on a habeas corpus petition filed by the parents of a girl who had eloped with a Muslim boy from Kerala. In October 2009, the Karnataka Government ordered a Crime Investigation Department (CID) probe into the matter. In 2010, then Kerala chief minister VS Achuthanandan called Love Jihad an effort to turn Kerala into a Muslim majority state.

Sri Ram Sene, a Hindu outfit, even runs special helplines in Kerala and Karnataka for alleged victims of Love Jihad.

In western Uttar Pradesh, fear has become a vital ingredient in fanning mistrust among the two communities.

In the last few years, Hindus of the area have observed the rise of Muslims’ economic status and political power.

Muslims have a population of over 52 per cent across the 1 september 2014

22 districts of Western UP. New mosques and madrassas are coming up in nooks and corners of Harit Pradesh, a proposed new state in India that will be made up of the Western parts of UP. “There are areas where you will find only small kutcha (temporary) houses but there will be stately mosques and madrassas. Who is funding this?” asks Sudarshan Chakra, Meerut zonal secretary, Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

Every village with a Muslim population has at least two madrassas and two mosques. Some villages such as Khujnawar in Saharanpur district have more than 20 madrassas. Some locals attribute this rise of funds coming to Muslims in western UP to meat exports. Buffalo meat accounts for 86 per cent of the total meat export from the open www.openthemagazine.com 23

country and a lot of this comes from abattoirs in western UP. The exporters are mostly Muslims. “They get higher price[s] for the meat they export and they use this extra money to fund other activities like building new madrassas, mosques and even funding illegal activities,” says Sandeep Pahal, a lawyer and RTI activist in Meerut. He is preparing to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court against meat export from the western UP region.

With madrassas increasing, there are also frequent arguments between temple and madrassa managements over the morning loudspeaker chants and namaaz drowning each other out. “They have money, power and support from the government. We cannot fight with them,” says the father of a Sarawa complainant. Hindus in the village are worried about the future. “When our girls come back home and complain about a Muslim boy [eveteasing or harassing], we first try to ignore it. We are simple farmers and don’t want to get into a fight,” says a villager in Sarawa.

“But if it continues we get scared as even the police hesitate in registering complaints.”

Some politicians are even wary about openly admitting that they believe in Love Jihad’s existence. Raghav Lakhanpal, the BJP MP from Saharanpur, says, “There are

of the streets and you could not say anything because the street doesn’t belong to anyone. Now with gates, the unwanted entry is restricted,” says a resident of the area.

A

ny communal tension offers fertile ground for po-

litical parties to exploit the situation. Recent riots in UP, especially after the Samajwadi Party (SP) came to power in 2012, have provided parties like the BJP an opportunity to polarise voters. On August 10, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) started a week-long awareness drive in western UP. RSS workers visited all the villages tying rakhi to Hindu men and women and pledging to protect them from Love Jihad. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has started organising special seminars where they brief Hindus about the danger from Love Jihad.

“We will be doing 300 seminars across several districts of Western UP,” says Sudarshan Chakra. The bypolls for 11 Assembly seats are scheduled in September and this would help the BJP in consolidating Hindu voters. Other parties like Congress and the SP are banking on consolidating Muslim votes.

Before the 2014 general elections, voters of western UP, largely Jats and Muslims, did not vote on communal lines.

ENTRAPMENT “This is nothing but Love Jihad. Muslims are behind this conspiracy of luring Hindu girls with money and dreams of a good life and later selling them to Gulf countries” the father of a victim in Meerut individual cases of love affairs between boys and girls and I don’t see it as a trend.” His family runs an NGO, Mahila Sahyog Samiti which has been set up to counsel the alleged victims of Love Jihad but Lakhanpal denies it. “It is open for all the girls who need some counselling on these issues [dealing with runaway girls after they come back home],” he says.

Sixty-one-year-old Baba Rijak Das is seen as a guru in Saharanpur and adjoining areas by locals, who swear by his name, and Hindu families take their girls to him, saying he can cure them of Love Jihad. His disciple Baba Gopal Das refutes the claim. “Baba offers Prasad to everyone who comes here. The media is trying to malign his image.”

In some parts, Hindu families have devised their own solutions to keep Muslim boys and girls separate. In Meerut’s Prahlad Nagar area, the two communities live in close proximity, with a road dividing their residences.

Last year a Muslim boy, son of a popular local doctor, fled with the daughter of a Hindu businessman. The doctor was pressurised by both communities to sever the match, and the girl came back. Since then, iron gates have been installed on all the streets where Hindus reside. “The [Muslim] boys used to come on bikes just to take a round 24 open

Both communities, being predominantly agriculturists, stood behind the region’s farmer leaders. In the late 70s, Choudhary Charan Singh, a Jat leader and father of Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) president Ajit Singh, managed to forge a strong alliance of Jat-Muslims in the region. In the eighties, another farmer leader, Mahendra Singh Tikait of Bhartiya Kisaan Union (BKU), became their leader and he turned the votes to the political party of his choice. Ajit Singh too tried to lead the two communities but after he forged an alliance with the BJP in 2001, his vote share in the region began to decline. In 2012 Assembly elections, the RLD could win only nine seats.

With the decline of Ajit Singh, Jat voters started looking towards BJP because Muslims were with the ruling SP. The Muzaffarnagar riots last year completely divided Hindu-Muslim voters in the area and Hindus came out in full support of the BJP. The most important aspect of the political transition was the Dalits of the region voting for the BJP. For the first time, the Jats and Dalits have come together after the riots (post the Shamli case, there were some incidents where Dalit girls were being harassed by Muslim boys and Jats stood up for Dalits): this combination was politically formidable. The Bahujan Samaj Party 1 september 2014

An elderly Muslim man in Sarawa village

(BSP), whose very existence is dependent on Dalit votes, also first witnessed an erosion of their votebank during the 2012 Assembly elections. In 2014, it was completely wiped out, not wining a single seat from the state. The bypolls are a litmus test for the new BJP president Amit Shah, and fear of Love Jihad will come in handy for the party to garner Hindu votes.

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ost leaders from other political parties see Love

Jihad as a propaganda war engineered by the BJP and likeminded non-political outfits. “If a Hindu girl marries a Muslim boy, they call it Love Jihad. But when a Hindu boy marries a Muslim girl, it’s a matter of pride. What kind of ideology is this?” questions Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh. “There is not an iota of doubt that BJP is fanning this spineless and concocted figment of imagination for political gains. On the other hand there are some Muslim extremist organisations who are exploiting it for their vested interests.”

Maulana Masood Madani, president of Tanzeem Abnaye Darul Uloom Deoband, also blames the RSS and VHP. “The recent statements by their leaders clearly show that they

1 september 2014

want to make India a Hindu Rashtra. If there are cases of Love Jihad then I demand that such cases be investigated by the judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court. Who is RSS and VHP to pass a judgment?” he says.

Madani also raises a different sociological point. According to him, poverty in villages and usage of mobile phones are two prime reasons for these unions across religions. “Poverty doesn’t see whether the person is Hindu or Muslim. Additionally, the mobile phones have completely destroyed the purdah system in both the communities. Boys and girls can remain in touch even without meeting each other, through a mobile phone,” he argues.

Some feel that Muslims have changed with the times, but that Hindus still take pride in controlling girls. “A lot of honour killings are reported from this region and it’s a completely Hindu phenomenon,” says Mufti Yade Ilahi Quasmi, general secretary, Tanzeem Abnaye Darul Uloom Deoband. “It shows that they have not moved with time.”

The Muslims in Sarawa village claim that the girl who made the charges was in love with a Muslim boy of another village, and that even her family was aware of it; they are communalising the incident to save their honour in the village. “Two years back a Hindu Tyagi boy married a Muslim girl, both from Sarawa. They even have kids now. But we never raised a flag as it is their individual choice,” says an elderly Muslim of Sarawa.

It is not that the issue of Love Jihad only affects rural areas or society’s lower strata. Tehseen Poonawala, a Congress sympathiser and one of the party’s prime time advocates on TV, was targeted on social media over his affair with a Hindu girl. “I constantly received threat messages on Twitter with the hashtag Love Jihad,” he says. “But I am not going to let them be successful in their vicious conspiracy.” Tehseen has registered a website called-www.lovejihadisfalsepropaganda.com and is collecting information about several Love Jihad cases that he thinks are false. The website will be launched on 2 October, in the presence of some eminent Hindu-Muslim couples.

Whether it is a conspiracy against Hindus or a social malady, what is evident is that Love Jihad is distorting the social fabric of western UP. n open www.openthemagazine.com 25

26 open

1 september 2014

illustration anirban ghosh

DREAMING AND DYING in Bangalore Bangalore is India’s Silicon Valley—at a price. Are its suicide levels, higher than elsewhere in urban India, any indication of its future? Sunaina Kumar

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he office of SAHAI helpline

for Suicide Prevention and Emotional Distress is located in Frazer Town, a quiet neighbourhood in Bangalore. Part of the cantonment area established by the British, Frazer Town, with its neatly laid out streets and lush green cover, is a remnant of the old, vanishing city.

Residents are unfamiliar with its new name, Pulakeshinagar, imposed some years back as an assertion of Kannada identity. Here, in an old-style colonial bungalow, from one tiny cubicle—with two chairs, a desk and a phone—a group of volunteers, mostly retired professionals trained by psychiatrists, run the helpline through the day.

This is perhaps the only space in the city where institutional proof of Bangalore’s reputation as the ‘suicide capital of the country’ (an epithet the media loves to trot out every so often) is to be found. Pieces of paper are pinned on the wall behind the desk; the numbers for psychiatrists, hospitals and police helplines are marked in bold; one paper is titled ‘Subscales of Hopelessness’, with subheads like ‘Poor Distress Tolerance’

1 september 2014

and ‘Perceived Burdensomeness’; a graph illustrates the triggers and predispositions to suicide.

It is the afternoon shift, and 56-year-old Anita Gracias, a volunteer, is filling out a register where the database of callers is maintained. The most committed and effective emissary for the helpline since it started, she has a sociable air and a cheery voice. “People always assume that certain personality types will be depressed and suicidal. That gregarious, outgoing people—someone like me—will never suffer depression, but that’s not true. I was deeply suicidal myself. I have been in a deep hole and came out of it only because I had some people who believed in my story and held me up. So, I do this for others.”

The helpline was started in 2002 by a retired resident of Bangalore, KK Rajagopal, as a joint project of the Rotary Club and NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences), when it was noted that the rate of suicide was rapidly climbing in Bangalore. Rajagopal himself has suffered from depression, after losing his young daughter to an accident. He says that most of the calls come from men and women employed in the IT sector

and students, but over the years, the age group of callers has widened; now ranging from the really young to the elderly.

The data from September 2012 to February 2014 at SAHAI shows 1,100 cases, of which 580 are women, 475 men; 55 are those under the age of 18. The callers share stories of loneliness, depression and frustration. Gracias says, “My job is a form of emotional nursing. We’re not giving prescription or medication, we’re just holding up people. It is important for us as volunteers to earn the trust of our callers. When they call here, they share with us problems that they can’t share with people who are known to them, so they call a helpline and share with a total stranger.”

She brings out her phone to show us the photograph of Madhu (name changed), whom she calls her biggest success story.

Madhu was 15 when she connected with Gracias on the helpline number for the first time. The young girl, attractive and smiling into the camera, looks like any girl of her age, beaming, with not a care in the world. The first time that Gracias met her, she had multiple slit marks on her wrists from previous suicide attempts. open www.openthemagazine.com 27

Metro construction opposite the Vidhana Soudha, the state Legislative Assembly building

“I was going through a bad phase and I saw no choice but to end it,” says Madhu, when she agrees to talk with us, on the phone. She is 23 now, and works in the IT sector. She speaks slowly and softly.

“I was not able to make friends, I was doing badly in school. When I reached out to my parents, I was ridiculed and abused. I was told I should pray and study harder. I needed someone to understand my fear and insecurity.”

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bout two months back , on 13 and 14 June, Bangalore made a record of sorts, with 10 suicides over two days—the most talked-about of which was the suicide of a software engineer, who was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his parents’ house. A rash of headlines on Bangalore as the suicide capital of India followed. A few days later in June, a professor committed suicide in Indiranagar; newspapers reported that he was allegedly upset his wife was not joining him for dinner. In July, a 35-year-old techie from Kolkata, 28 open

who lived alone in the city, committed suicide at his home in Indiranagar. In August, two women from the city, both middle-aged—one who worked at a private company and the other a teacher— were rescued after they jumped into the river at the Dharmasthala Temple, which is on the outskirts of the city. A few days later, a 22-year-old medical student from Bangalore committed suicide by hanging herself from a ceiling fan at her college, near Bellur.

Crime reporters in the city tell will you that reporting on suicide keeps them on their toes, most of the time. For the better part of the last decade, Bangalore has held the position of having the highest number of suicides of all Indian cities. To put things in perspective, if we look at the year 2013 the suicide rate in Bangalore, at 23.9, is much above that of Delhi at 10.7, Mumbai at 7.2 and Kolkata at 2.7, according to the statistics of National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB). The peak in Bangalore came during a five year period, from 2005 to 2010, and these years also coincided with exponential growth:

in 2008, the rate of suicide was at an alarmingly high 42.1.

In the last two years, however, Chennai has overtaken Bangalore as the city with the highest number of suicides; Bangalore recorded 2033 suicides last year, compared with Chennai’s 2183. Dr Lakshmi Vijayakumar, a suicide prevention expert and founder of Sneha—a suicide prevention centre in Chennai—says that the drastic changes in Bangalore, as it began to rapidly expand to become an IT hub, combined with migration from rural and urban areas, connect to higher suicide rates. “It’s interesting to note that Chennai is where Bangalore was five years back, in terms of employment, infrastructure and IT boom, so the rate is going up.”

If suicide is a social fact, then the findings of the NCRB in India, which have pointed toward a higher rate of suicide in all four southern states, become all the more intriguing.

Of course, this has all often been brushed away with the explanation that higher literacy rates and better gover1 september 2014

Bangalore city has gone amok, we need to reclaim it, participate in governance, be a potential force,be a lobby of educated people” TV MOHANDAS PAI nance in the South mean that maintenance of records is better than it would be, say, in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; many cases there must go unrecorded. While this must be taken into account, the Million Death Study (the largest study of premature mortality conducted in India) has established a definite North/South divide in suicides.

Vikram Patel, joint director of the Centre for Global Mental Health, who has published a widely regarded paper on suicide mortality based on the Million Death Study in The Lancet, explores possible explanations. “Some people believe that there is greater acceptability for suicide in South India, as part of the culture. The main reason according to us is the greater gap in education and aspiration between the South and the North. When younger people with better education and aspiration, as in the South, find their expectations are not met, they are drawn towards self-harm.”

Importantly, Professor Patel also says that suicide is the leading cause of death in young people in South India (aside from accidents), and will soon be the leading cause of death for young people in the rest of the country as well. “In India, suicide has been a socio-economic and political issue with farmer suicides. We also

I was deeply suicidal myself. I have been in a deep hole and came out of it only because I had people who believed in my story and held me up. So, I do this for others” ANITA GRACIAS

Anita Gracias (foreground) with Thilaka Baskaran, who is a counsellor at SAHAI

take a very moral and social stand on suicide. What we need is a public health strategy for suicide. The rest of the world is tackling the issue of suicide on a war footing, but we have no strategy for it.”

Have we focussed on rural suicides at the cost of suicides in cities?

S

Bangalore is Karnataka’s cash cow. We need to invest adequately; all the challenges that face Indian cities are concentrated here” SRIKANTH VISWANATHAN

The Bangalore I was born in was a sleepy, languid place. We cycled to all places, wore woolens in summer, the air was cleaner, the weather was kinder” PREM KOSHY 30 open

omething is rotten in the city

of Bangalore. It can be read in the fatigue that citizens express with the state of things. The population has exploded; the 2011 Census showed the steepest rise in population growth rate in the country in Bangalore. Traffic woes have mounted, trees have been cut down and bungalows have made way for high rises.

The city goes by many names: ‘pensioners’ paradise’ and ‘garden city’ derived from its history, ‘air-conditioned city’ inspired by its climate,‘IT capital’ and ‘pub capital’ taken from its contemporary representation. All these names are intrinsically linked with a culture that is young and liberal, intellectual and invigorating. Its equable climate and cosmopolitanism make it the most congenial of all our cities.

On St Mark’s Road, Koshy’s, an old Bangalore institution and an adda for the people of the city—many of them artists, writers, performers, activists—since the 1940s, remains reassuringly unchanged: the same wood-panelled walls and blackand-white sketches of the city from an era gone by. Prem Koshy, proprietor and raconteur, remembers with nostalgia the city that is depicted on the walls of his restaurant. “The Bangalore where I was born was a sleepy, languid place, we cycled to all places, wore woolens in summer, the air was cleaner, the weather was kinder and nothing much happened, life went on. Everybody knew everybody.

Yet, it was a truly modern city, with a mix of local and Western culture.”

Writer Anjum Hasan, who comes from Shillong and has made Bangalore her home—and her muse in some of her writing, like her last collection of short stories, Difficult Pleasures—speaks of the changing identity of the city. “Some cities— Bombay, London, Shanghai—have historically been centres of economic and political activity over centuries, and attracted people from everywhere.

Bangalore is interesting because there has

always been something low-key about it.

It does not have the grand colonial architecture of Bombay or the historical architecture of Delhi; its cosmopolitanism is unshowy, not a self-regarding kind, and it was not the centre of any crucial battle and does not have a particularly strategic location. And yet, unlike Bombay or Calcutta, it was very much a city before the colonisers got here.”

Artist and performer Pushpamala N, born and brought up in Bangalore, is the face of the art scene of the city. She feels that the city has been “uglified”, but simultaneously become far more vibrant. “I feel it is the most contemporary city in India. It has an intellectual atmosphere that nurtures science and technology, and is also supportive of the arts. Bangalore has a lot of interesting people of the finest calibre, and yet it is an informal and fun city.”

Old timers will say that the city grew up too fast, after the IT boom of the ’90s, which was the beginning of the change.

They will tell you how the city once had no traffic problems and no pollution, affordable housing and easy availability of services. These factors turned it into a crucible for startups and home for migrants and expatriates from around the world.

“This cosmopolitanism does not mean tensions don’t exist in the city,” says Hasan. “It definitely contains an older, modern in its own way, Kannada—or more broadly South Indian—world, and a westernised world, which once had an Anglophone, ‘cantonment’ culture and is today driven by an Americanised global business culture.”

As Bangalore turned to boomtown, the fairytale began to pall. The evidence of this can be found in the name which has stubbornly attached itself to the city in the last couple of years as its waste disposal crisis has mounted: Garden City has become Garbage City. The garbage crisis of Bangalore is by now a political issue as much as it is a civic issue, and has been covered around the world.

One can also turn to Namma Metro, the city’s metro system, which came into being in 2011. The construction of the first phase was mismanaged from the start: thousands of trees were cut down and long swathes of road were dug up unnecessarily, to cover less than seven 1 september 2014

Students of CMR college at an awareness rally to observe Suicide Prevention Day

kilometres. Unlike Delhi, where the Metro is a rallying point for citizens, for the people of Bangalore the Metro is a sign of everything that has gone wrong with the city. At 8.30 in the morning, MG Road Station—which is the heart of the commercial district of the city—wears a ghostly look. No pushing and shoving; instead, a few office-workers leisurely get on and off the trains.

What the city lacks in infrastructure, it makes up for in its tradition of volunteering: citizens who act as custodians of the city. Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based NGO that focusses on improving the quality of life in urban India, has tried to tap into this spirit to start a distinctive project which uses technology to address civic issues. ‘I Change My City’ is a website that brings citizens, corporators and civic officials together on a Facebook-like platform, where citizens can directly highlight problems in their areas and demand change by voting.

The public platform forces civic agencies to act promptly to complaints, top among them garbage disposal.

“Bangalore is Karnataka’s cash cow. We need to invest adequately in its infra1 september 2014

structure to retain global talent. All the challenges that face Indian cities are concentrated here,” says Srikanth Viswanathan, coordinator at Janaagraha.

To find out what ails Bangalore, we met one of its most prominent citizen activists, TV Mohandas Pai, former board member at Infosys, who co-founded BPAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee) with Kiran MazumdarShaw: a citizens’ initiative to promote better quality of life in the city. At his office in central Bangalore, Pai speaks of the context for banding together as citizens under BPAC. “Bangalore city has gone amok, we need to reclaim it, participate in governance, be a potential force, be a lobby of educated people. The city has changed radically over the last ten years, it’s become a bigger city, more areas have been added to it, we see a great influx of people, crime rates have gone up, policing and governance have come down.”

According to him, the city is suffering the consequences of prosperity combined with a lack of planning and investment. There is no political will to invest in the city, even though it yields maximum dividends. He lists the woes of the

city: the municipal corporation is broken down and is seriously understaffed, with no new appointment for the last 20 years; there is a real estate mafia, garbage mafia, water tanker mafia; and there is a weak government which simply does not care.

F

rench

sociologist

Emile

Durkheim, in a study on suicide in 1897, said that suicide tells as much about individual struggles as it does about society and social groups. Ironically, the very foundation of Bangalore is steeped in a mythical story of suicide.

There is a debate amongst historians in Bangalore about the role of Lakshmidevi, the daughter-in-law of the founder of the city, Kempe Gowda. (The Public Works Standing Committee has recommended, this week, an award in her name to recognise 10 exemplary women.) It is said that in the sixteenth century, when Kempe Gowda was building a fort in the city, the wall kept collapsing; a priest was consulted, who recommended human sacrifice. Lakshmidevi jumped down from the wall of the fort. The city was built, but a life was lost. n open www.openthemagazine.com 31

The Exorcist The dark art of healing is thriving in Kerala. Shahina KK meets those who promise freedom from death, disease, demons, enemies—and their victims

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his is how 26-year -old Haseena died: one day last month, she was forced to lie down on her stomach, her body bent backwards to make her toes touch the back of her head, and then kicked on her spine—which broke, leading to internal bleeding. The man who did this to her was invited by her family into their home. He had promised to exorcise the djinn that they thought had gotten into Haseena’s body.

The exorcist, Mohammed Sirajudeen, a native of Alappuzha, has been in the profession of casting out spirits for over a decade. He has since been arrested, as have two touts who used to help Sirajudeen find clients. But what the family is still grappling with is that Haseena’s father, Hassan Kunju, is also in police custody. All he was trying to do was get his daughter cured, they say; he intended no harm, and obeyed Sirajudeen blindly only because he wanted his daughter healed.

It was a gloomy Sunday, five days after Haseena’s demise in mid July, when I visited her former home. There were a number of frightened veiled women who all went inside upon seeing me. The only reason I was not asked to get out was because I was a woman. (The local journalist who took me to Haseena’s house in Thazhava, Kollam district chose to stay in the car, because this was a highly conservative Muslim household where women seldom stepped out.) Neighbours said that they had not seen

photos ima babu

George Kutty of Ayur in Kollam district, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant and miracle worker who called himself Father George, claimed to be the last prophet referred to in the Bible. Judgment Day arrived, but only for him, on 14 August

Haseena for a long time, prior to her death.

The family is yet to emerge from the shock of the murder. Rahmath, Haseena’s elder sister, agreed to tell me their story and it was as heartwrenching as anything anyone could imagine. Haseena had stopped going to regular school at 13, though she continued attending the madrassa. When she was 14, her teacher there raped her and it marked the beginning of the end of her life. She gradually sank into depression. “In the beginning we were not able to notice the changes in her behaviour. She slowly stopped talking after the incident in the madrassa. She started showing increasing signs of abnormality. We took her to several hospitals, met many doctors, but she showed no signs of improvement,” says Rahmath.

This was when her father’s friend, an Arabic teacher, introduced him to the exorcist Mohammed Sirajudeen. “We believed him because he appeared to be an Islamic scholar. He promised to cure her completely by a month-long treatment.

We all, especially our father, trusted him blindly. The women in the house were not allowed to witness the rituals performed by him. So, I don’t know what exactly he had been doing. But he was in a closed room with Haseena and we could hear her crying. He told us that she was crying because the spirits were being pushed out of her body,” says Rahmath.

Sajida, Haseena’s younger sister, is 17 years old and studies the Koran at a religious institution. She says she knew that Islam does not promote exorcism.

“Initially I was against it, but he brainwashed our father. At some point of time, I too started believing him hoping that I would get my sister back,” she says.

A

ccording to the police and lo-

cal journalists, there are around ten such exorcists—both men and women— in Kollam claiming supernatural powers to cure diseases, bring welfare and annihilate enemies. This is a phenomena spread across Kerala.

Stories of demonic possession and rituals to drive out evil spirits have long spread across religion, caste and class.

The rituals often involve physical torture, and while death is an exception, the fallout can often result in serious trauma to the victim; who might, like Haseena, 36 open

already be suffering from a mental ailment. There are hundreds of exorcists in Kerala with roots in Hindu, Christian and Muslim communities.

When I met George Kutty of Ayur in Kollam district, he claimed to be the last prophet referred to in the Holy Bible. He averred that Judgment Day is not very far away, quoting the Gospels of Mathew and Luke as evidence. The last refuge for good men on that day, he said, would be the Jerusalem Devalayam (Jerusalem Church), being built by him. He claimed to be able to do everything from casting away evil spirits to curing physical and psychological problems, and spoke about a majority of physical and mental ailments originating from the Satan within each person.

It was raining heavily when I reached his Jerusalem Devalayam, and because of this George Kutty had no clients and was sitting lazily in a chair. There were huge lamps in the church; everyone going there is asked to light one to keep evil spirits away from the premises. I too lit one.

I told him I was a journalist, and that I had come not only to write about his miracles but to seek a remedy for a family problem; that I had no children despite having been married for more than 10 years. (I am actually the mother of an eight-year-old.) George Kutty, who calls himself Father George, said he had had prior knowledge that I would come on that day. He made some predictions about me, which were all false. He said that my husband is a drunkard, and that this was the reason for my not having a baby. He asked me to come here with my husband and promised to make him a teetotaller.

He also said I would soon be blessed with a baby, but that I would have to spend Rs 10,000 to 15,000 for the ‘treatment’.

Moreover, he claimed that he had once made a deaf and dumb person speak; a slightly modified version of the incident in which Jesus Christ is supposed to have cured a demon-possessed man of blindness and muteness.

I asked him for the contact details of the patient, but he evaded me, continuing to quote the Bible instead. As it turned out, Kutty was not able to even foresee his own future; I learnt, later, that he had died of a heart attack a month later, on 14 August. Judgment Day arrived, but only for him.

Niyas, known as Kalavoor Baba, comes from Alappuzha and has hundreds of clients. He ‘cures’ all mental and physical problems, including infertility, and specialises in driving out evil spirits.

People even go to the Baba to locate missing persons and he will predict their approximate locations, it is said. Nobody can actually see Kalavoor Baba, of course, because he sits behind a curtain.

Who is he? He is just 22 years old, married and has a daughter. His father Khaleel, who was a fisherman, claims that the boy was possessed by a Holy Spirit at the age of 13 and had a divine revelation. For those who come to his ashram seeking solutions, this is sufficient proof of his efficacy—rationality is alien to those who fall at his feet.

Kerala’s northern districts hold the most exorcists. Kannur, for example, has a number of them despite it being the nerve centre of CPM in the state.

Manimalarkkavilamma is one of them.

She uses Hindu rituals to cast away demons, though it is not necessary that you be possessed to meet her; any person with any kind of problem can go and she has readymade solutions. Her ashram is locat1 september 2014

Thalassery Amma, aka Swamini Amma, is a nomadic woman wandering in and out of town. People believe her very presence brings prosperity and helps drive out evil forces ed in Thalassery, within two kilometres of the town, a tiled house in the middle of a paddy field. When I arrived, she was sitting in a huge chair, wearing a bright peach-colored saree. It was remarkable how she aped Mata Amrithanandamayi, the famous godwoman of Kerala, in both body language and delivery.

This time, I cooked up a story in which my husband was being solicited by another woman. I told Manimalarkkavilamma that he had stopped caring for me and my children, and that I wanted him back.

Typical of all those in this business, she had some understanding of human psychology and knew how to offer hope without specific commitment. After consoling me, she promised that all my problems would come to an end in five years. She promised to remove the concubine from my husband’s life completely, prescribing regular poojas to get things right, and saying that my husband was having a bad time which would continue for five more years. This, of course, also meant that I would have to keep paying her for the pooja for five years: I was being made a captive customer.

Not every such godman or godwoman 1 september 2014

is out to con; some may have their supernatural abilities thrust on them by desperate believers. Thalassery Amma, aka Swamini Amma, is one of them. A nomadic woman wandering in and out of the town, she actually does nothing, but people believe that her very presence brings prosperity and helps drive out evil forces. She has been in Thalassery for 20 years. Nobody knows her name or where she has come from.

When I was in town, I learned that she was staying with Beena Kondoth, a devotee who invited us to her home to wait for Amma to return. I decided to do one more round in town, and at one corner, the auto driver suddenly shouted with joy. I saw a very old woman in a brown, blackbordered saree, worn without a blouse, walking slowly towards us from the other end of the road. The driver stopped the vehicle and, rushing towards her, fell at her feet. Her face remained expressionless and she walked ahead. We followed her for some time and I witnessed many people similarly falling down at her feet.

The driver told me people often took her home, because it brought them good fortune. “She is very divine and has

extraordinary powers. It is not very easy for ordinary human beings like us to understand her divine strength,” says Kandoth, who has written poems about Amma and her miracles.

But such benignity is rare. Across districts like Malappuram, Kozhikode and Wayanad, the norm is people like George Kutty and Manimalarkkavilamma, who prey on the insecurities of people. Dr RVG Menon, a political thinker and social activist, thinks that exorcist practices have always had a wide market in Kerala.

“Blind faith in supernatural powers and exorcism had been very much there in our culture and tradition. The only difference is that we are being more informed over the past couple of decades. Also, resistance against such practices has become feeble. One reason is that atheists who challenged superstitions behaved like fundamentalists and showed little tolerance [to believers]. It only helped to make people run away from them.”

In fact, in Kerala a Muslim exorcist has no scarcity of Hindu or Christian devotees, and vice versa. Exorcism is a terrain in which all religions coexist peacefully and harmoniously, it would seem. n open www.openthemagazine.com 37

Long on Sleaze, Short on Duty

The lives of many policemen in Mumbai are riddled with sex, lies and scandals.

Haima Deshpande investigates

F

or long, tales of police bravery have inspired Bollywood movies. Lately, there has been a twist in the tale. All the debauchery, hookups and promiscuity that Bollywood is known for appear to have spilled over into Mumbai’s police forces, engendering a controversy: how are the illicit relationships of men in khakhi hurting their efficiency?

Going by the unofficial statistics given in confidence by the Home department, Open finds that four out of 10 policemen are involved in extramarital affairs. The state home department feels this is a ‘delicate’ issue and has to be dealt with caution. A highly placed source from the Home department says that the Mumbai Police is now a much weakened entity compared to what it was a few years earlier, thanks to these excesses, which can often lead policemen astray.

“Our men are busy fighting their own private wars,” says one officer. “So stressed are these men due to their emotional entanglements that staying sober has become a huge challenge. Alcoholism is high amongst them,” he says, emphasising that each police station in the city is a 38 open

storehouse of stories, linking policemen with commercial sex workers, housewives, female witnesses and complainants forming part of the sex supply chain.

While ‘quickies’ with commercial sex workers form an integral part of nightshift duty for the police, many policemen have also made it their day-time routine, say people in the know. Official vehicles are zealously misused for the purpose, they add. “It is getting increasingly bad.

This is a malaise that has hit every police station. Unless there are complaints it is difficult to prove their sexcapades,” a senior police officer admitted.

The ‘dutiful officer’ image the Mumbai police often flaunted in the past has suffered a huge battering over the past few decades. In recent weeks, it touched new lows after Sunil Paraskar, a Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of police, was accused of rape. The irony is inescapable: Paraskar is the man in-charge of civil rights protection in the state. The woman who accused him of rape is a 26-yearold model who had approached him seeking help in a case. She has filed a new case, charging the DIG with rape and molestation and forcing Paraskar to seek

Anshuman Poyrekar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

judicial recourse.

Granted anticipatory bail by the lower courts, Paraskar continues to be in service but has been on leave since 24 July, a day after the model lodged a complaint.

According to Sanjeev Dayal, the state’s Director General of Police (DGP), suspension is compulsory only if a police officer is arrested. Dayal noted that if Paraskar is arrested, he will be suspended.

With the Shiv Sena backing him “as he’s a Marathi manoos”, neither state Home Minister RR Patil nor Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan seem to be in a hurry to initiate action against Paraskar.

Indeed, as former Mumbai Police Commissioner Julio Ribeiro notes, it is political backing that allows policemen to beat the rap despite their behaviour.

1 september 2014

DIG Sunil Paraskar, who stands accused of rape by a Mumbai-based model

Though the Mumbai Crime Branch has stated before the court that the department requires custody of Paraskar to interrogate him in the case, Judge Vrushali Joshi has refused to grant permission.

W

hile the DGP can use his discretionary powers to suspend or dismiss Paraskar, pressure from the Shiv Sena coupled with Patil’s hesitation has forced Dayal into a corner. In a past, former DGP D Sivanandan had used his discretionary powers to dismiss senior inspector Arun Borude of the LT Marg Police station over a case involving the rape of a minor girl. A complaint was registered by the Powai Police on 17 November 2010. Sivanandan acted swiftly after then

1 september 2014

Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar pulled up the then police commissioner for not taking immediate action against Borude.

A former Crime Branch officer, Borude is said to have taken a 15-year-old to a house in Powai repeatedly and raped her.

It was only after she got pregnant that a case was filed against him.

Several policemen told Open that sexual exploitation by policemen is rampant in Mumbai. “They are doing all this during their work hours. Detection has suffered as instead of being on the job, these policemen are busy having sex,” one police officer says. Though Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria has tried to clean up the force he commands, it is not an easy task as more than 50 per cent of his men are “politically” connected and

flaunt it too.

Sexual liaisons have resulted in deaths, too. Last December, Baburao Gaikwad, an Assistant Commissioner of Police, shot himself with his 9 mm service revolver at the Dahisar Police Station (in the northern suburbs of Mumbai). He was allegedly in a relationship with a housewife who had blackmailed him into marrying her.

A few months ago, a police patrol vehicle saw what looked like a regular patrol van parked in a quiet lane near Shivaji Park in Dadar (in the city’s central suburb). The patrol team found a couple in a compromising position inside the van. Investigations revealed that the driver of the van was letting it out to couples on an hourly basis for a price. In another instance, again some months open www.openthemagazine.com 39

ago, a senior policeman was caught in the act inside a police van with a commercial sex worker. This van too was parked in a shaded area of Dadar, and was spotted by a patrol team.

To check the menace, the Mumbai Police have started organising religious discourses on sexual propriety. As part of this morality enhancement initiative, Mumbai’s northern region cops had attended “a sermon” last year by Sakshi Ramkripalji of the Sci-Divine Foundation.

The guru attributed the problem to a combination of stress, long duty hours and days away from family. “Policemen need to be strong,” said the guru, speaking to an audience of 550 officers, constables and their families, “They need to understand the importance of moral behaviour, given the power they wield.”

Meanwhile, Susiben Shah, chairperson of the State Women’s Commission, has demanded immediate action against policemen involved in extramarital affairs. According to her, the Commission has received complaints about policemen reneging on promises of marriage or financial security.

Many policemen are suspected of secret partnerships with “dance bars” and of acting as part-time pimps for bar girls. Says a cop, “If RR Patil pays a surprise visit to any police station at night, particularly in interior Mumbai, he will be shocked at what’s going on there.” The demand for morality sermons, it would seem, is far from exhausted yet.

For his part, former police commissioner M N Singh attributes the problem to acute housing shortage. With redevelopment in Mumbai and neighbouring Thane on in a very big way, finding cheap housing is not easy. As over 65 per cent of Mumbai’s policemen live in cramped slums without basic amenities such as water, toilets and bathrooms, many others prefer to leave their families back in the villages.

Even most of the lower level police personnel who live in quarters are unhappy.

These rented accommodations are often cramped single-room apartments with a common toilet. After a tiring day at work, policemen have hardly any opportunity for privacy, let alone intimacy, with their spouses. This often leads to unhappy marriages. “Once you have children, it is goodbye to privacy,” says an assistant 40 open

Shripad Naik/SOLARIS IMAGES

Julio Ribeiro (centre) with Rakesh Maria (left) in 2013

“Political connections help Mumbai’s policemen commit vices and still walk away with impunity” Julio Ribeiro

former Mumbai police commissioner sub-inspector who lives in the Naigaum police quarters.

He is in a relationship with a woman who had been a complainant in a case.

“The relationship started much later. I don’t think it affects my work,” he says.

When asked how he manages time for two women and a job with no fixed hours, he says that so far he had managed.

“My wife is my security. The other is my need,” he said.

Over the years, senior officers who have been posted as head of the Police Housing Corporation have treated it as a “punishment posting”. Either they retire in a few months or lack the interest to see projects through. But the state govern-

ment plans to resolve the housing problems of policemen; the housing department is working on a proposal to redevelop the police quarters in the city.

The department is planning to rope in the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) for the project. The police quarters are spread across 100 acres in various parts of the city. These include a 42-acre plot at Pochkhanwala Road in Worli, which is dotted with 30 three-storey buildings.

P

olicemen from the smaller towns

or villages are easily bowled over

by Mumbai and the easy availability of sex in this city. It is easy to have an extramarital affair as women are willing partners too, says a former encounter cop whose exploits with the revolver has been made into films.

“Policemen have to be very careful.

Affairs could also be honey traps,” says Dr Neelam Gorhe, activist and member of the Legislative Council. “Women are being used as spies and Mumbai is a very sensitive zone due to the terror threats.

Even lower level policemen are privy to information. Such affairs must be looked into and the state has to take a serious view of the issue,” says Gorhe.

Easier said than done. n 1 september 2014

books

mindspace

Harish Khare on Natwar Singh’s controversial memoir 42

Through new eyes

63

o p e n s pa c e

Tabu Rani Mukerji

62

n p lu

Singham Returns Guardians of the Galaxy

61

cinema review

Leica M Anniversary Edition Aquaracer 300M; Bezel 27 mm XOLO 8X-1000

60

tech & style

How we judge others ‘Talking’ turtles 9/11 affected pregnancies

59

science

Healthy lifestyle for a sound heart

56

wellness

Molecular Indian cuisine

55

food

Hum Aapke Hain Corn

52

roug h cu t

Decoding Mohit Suri

cinema

One Life is Not Enough

by K Natwar Singh My Struggle

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

42 64

Neeraj Priyadarshi/ Indian Express Archive

books One Book Is Not Enough The controversial memoirs of the ex-confidant of Sonia Gandhi entertain but fail to deliver the Kissinger-esque history lessons the former foreign minister, a skilled storyteller, could have given us Harish Khare One Life Is Not Enough

K Natwar Singh Rupa Publications | 464 pages | Rs 500

N

atwar Singh owed us a better book, more substan-

tive and more thoughtful a work than One Life Is Not Enough.

Let me elaborate.

I belong to a very large gaggle of his friends and admirers.

He is one of the very few men in public life who are at home in the world of books, ideas and imagination. Jaswant Singh is perhaps the only other contemporary political figure who qualifies for his company.

I remember borrowing, many years ago, a book from his well-stocked library—Isaiah Berlin’s collection of essays, entitled The Proper Study of Mankind. No easy reading, but Natwar Singh’s copy was extensively marked with annotated notes in the margins!

Over the years I reviewed, favorably, many of his books, and came to value him for his chutzpah, style, verve, and, for that rare, storytelling gift of a raconteur.

He was always delightful company. Urbane, gracious and, if the occasion permitted, a bit naughty. My friend Jairam Ramesh and I had once nicknamed him ‘the elegant Jat’. Very appropriate.

It was Natwar Singh (apart from ML Fotedar) who assiduously “sold” me (and many others) Sonia Gandhi: as authentic goods, as a worthy successor to the Nehru-Gandhi family mantle. He was her promoter-in-chief.

Around 2000 Natwar Singh got very annoyed with me when I wrote that Sonia Gandhi would not—and, should not—make it to the Prime Minister’s post. He was so cheesed off with me that he almost called for my social boycott among friends. For almost two years, he cold-shouldered me.

All in defense and honor of Sonia Gandhi.

Above all, Natwar Singh has a sense of history, with a special eye for rites and rituals of power. That is why many of his friends and admirers will find this book a trifle disappointing; it falls halfway between an autobiography and a memoir. And, most of the stories have been written and published before—of course, with familiar elegance and style and wit.

When a man so widely read and so well-versed in the 42 open

forces that constitute the stuff of history puts his pen to paper, the expectations are high; the reader has a right to feel that he ought to be treated to insightful lessons in the ordeal of decision-making at the highest level, and a peep into what constitutes that elusive but vital knowledge called statecraft.

On that count, One Life Is Not Enough falls short.Neither a young IFS probationer nor a future Prime Minister can profit much from it. People like Natwar Singh owe it to us to educate the nation in the complexities of governing and diplomacy in a very complex world. Alas, there are no Kissinger-esque history lessons here.

Y

et, this is a very readable book on many counts. To begin

with, the pages on Pakistan are rather enjoyable. Singh’s appointment as High Commissioner to Islamabad was perhaps the most substantive assignment he has had in a long innings as a foreign service officer; as an envoy in an important country, with total confidence and access to the Prime Minister of the day.

His considerable talent for pen portrait delights: ‘The President [Zia] has power, but not personality. There was something misshapen about it.’ He presciently notes: ‘His lack of charisma was made up for by a stunning display of tahzeeb, tahammul and sharaft [politeness, patience and civility]’.

Natwar Singh displays his analytical wares very well when he dissects Zia’s ‘four instrumentalities to retain control’ over Pakistan. ‘Firstly, as Supreme Commander; he had full support of the armed forces; secondly, he assiduously cultivated religious leaders and orthodox religious parties; thirdly, he received considerable funds from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to open large number of madrasas; and, finally, he fully exploited the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan which he projected as an attack on Islam.’ A masterly analysis. No Foreign Office can ask more of its ambassador.

The book is noteworthy on another count. Perhaps unwittingly, Natwar Singh has opened a window. Dispersed throughout this episodic book are disturbing snatches of the relationship between the armed forces and the political leadership. Sample a few: ‘Her [Indira Gandhi’s] instructions were that on no account should the Golden Temple be fired upon. These were ignored.’

‘The Chief of Army Staff boasted that he could take care of the LTTE and Prabhakaran in two weeks. It was a 1 september 2014

Sonia Gandhi and Natwar Singh at 10 Janpath courtesy 2014 rupa publications 1photos september

open www.openthemagazine.com 43

foolish boast.’

Some pages later, he talks about Operation Brasstacks: ‘I told Rajiv Gandhi in my capacity as Minister of State for External Affairs, that the Ministry of External Affairs knew nothing about this. The Prime Minister said that neither did he. I was appalled. Apparently, Arun Singh and General Krishnaswamy Sundarji had acted without his approval.’

These incidents took place when we had two strong Prime Ministers—and, reveal an unhappy pattern of machismo, bragging and incompetence.

There is an important lesson here: Prime Ministers who choose to rely on the army to solve intractable political or diplomatic problems end up paying a heavy price. Yet, our foolish and divided political class continues to pamper and molly-coddle the armed forces; a Prime Minister who does not give in to the army brass’ bluff and bluster gets painted as a weak leader, gets accused of being un-mindful and unappreciative of ‘national security’. The latest manifestation of this foolishness is the BJP leadership’s infatuation with retired General VK Singh.

‘The Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement was the logical though somewhat unexpected culmination of the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) which India and the US had committed themselves to during the earlier NDA government and President Bush’s first term... the UPA government continued this engagement with the US.’ Pray tell, if the UPA was merely carrying forward the commitments made by the previous government, how could it or its Prime Minister be accused of departing from the national consensus? The departure had already been made, and Natwar Singh himself had eloquently spoken against Jaswant Singh’s pro-American tilt. But, in One Life Is Not Enough, Natwar Singh cannot bring himself to be critical of his new political friends.

Nor, for that matter, does Natwar Singh tell us why the entire Congress leadership—including Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Natwar Singh, Murli Deora and RP Goenka—travelled to Washington in June 2001. It was not a sightseeing trip. Was it not to mend fences with the ‘Americans’?

It is his basic contention that because he was implacably anti-American, the ‘US Lobby’ had the knives out for him— first ‘they’ opposed his induction as Foreign Minister and then ‘they’ used the Volcker report to ease him out. There may be an element of truth in this contention, but he provides no convincing evidence to support this charge. It is only after he was made to leave the Cabinet that Natwar Singh became loud and clear in his reservations about the nuclear deal.

Natwar Singh has quite a bit to say about Sonia Gandhi. It is the section on Sonia Gandhi, in this book, that has been most talked about—as perhaps he and his publishers had intended all along.

No one is in a position to contest Natwar Singh’s recollection of his relationship with Sonia Gandhi. His memory and facts must be respected. Nonetheless, it is rather late in the day for him to complain about Sonia Gandhi and her inadequacies. After all, he has had a very crucial and significant role in promoting her, just as he helped manufacture the myth of the Nehru-Gandhis. As early as 1967, he had already decided to declare the family ‘an institution’. The book is littered with instances of occasions and techniques he used to help craft a public persona around Sonia Gandhi, after Rajiv’s death.

Importantly, Natwar Singh also attests to her character flaws—traits that can become evident to only those who work together closely.

It is rather late in the day for Natwar Singh to complain about Sonia Gandhi. He’s had a very crucial role in promoting her, just as he helped manufacture the myth of the Nehru-Gandhis

I

t would appear that Natwar Singh has two major scores to settle. One with his last Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh and, second with his political boss, Sonia Gandhi.

Natwar Singh would like his readers to believe that somehow it was Manmohan Singh who was the first to depart from a national consensus in order to cozy up to the Americans: ‘There was a broad national consensus on foreign policy till Manmohan became Prime Minister. He leaned backwards to accommodate the US, even when they displayed indifference.’ This is revisionism, pure and simple. In the process, Natwar Singh contradicts himself.

Indeed he argues that it was he—not Manmohan Singh— who did the heavy-lifting in taking forward the Indo-Nuclear deal negotiations, citing Condoleezza Rice as his witness.

Yet, the onus for departing from the ‘national consensus’ is placed at Manmohan Singh’s door.

Not only that, a few pages earlier, Natwar Singh writes: 44 open

1 september 2014

(Left) Natwar Singh with Rajiv Gandhi and Fidel Castro in Havana; (below) Natwar Singh and Hem, with Indira Gandhi as a witness at their wedding in 1967; (facing page) Sonia Gandhi and Natwar Singh laugh with US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Delhi

In the book, Natwar Singh reveals an episode in 1997 involving Sonia, himself and the former Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda. It is an embarrassing kerfuffle.

And, he concludes: “Sonia was deliberately capricious. It was unbecoming of her. The Kaunda incident left a bad taste in the mouth.”

Yet, he continued to be a willing, cheerful and enthusiastic member of her entourage. And he continued to subscribe to the myth that by virtue of her marriage to Indira Gandhi’s son, she had naturally internalised, imbibed and acclimatised herself in all virtues—the wisdom of a Jawaharlal Nehru and the political virility of an Indira Gandhi. He continued to intrigue on her behalf in the Congress Party.

The break came in the wake of the Volcker row-de-dow.

There is a touch of pathos in his lamentation: ‘My relations with the Gandhi-Nehru family have begun in July 1944; at least I should have been given the benefit of doubt by the party chief [Sonia Gandhi].’

The crux of this lament is contrary to the advice he gave Rajiv Gandhi. In January 1986, Natwar Singh had advised the Prime Minister that he should sack Arun Singh, the Minister of State for Defense. The Prime Minister’s response was: ‘Arun Singh is a friend’. To which, Natwar Singh, the bright student of history and statecraft, offered a wise riposte: “Sir, you are not the President of the Old Boys’ Association of Doon School.

You are the Prime Minister of India. Prime Ministers have no friends.”

Now, in his own case, Natwar Singh appears to be favoring the principle of personal friendship [with the family, Sonia] over the unsentimental demands of realpolitik.

N

o one will ever know the true nature of the falling out

between Sonia Gandhi and Natwar Singh. But it is sadly clear that in the process of getting at Sonia Gandhi, Natwar Singh has regretfully devalued his own life-long accomplishments. What is most glaring is that this proud, educated, urbane, self-confessed Nehruite should have travelled all the way to Ahmedabad, in what could only be a journey of obeisance, to call on Narendra Modi, even before he got elected as Prime Minister. Not only that, he chose to include in the book a photograph of this visit to Modi. He can expect his friends to understand his disenchantment with Sonia Gandhi; he cannot expect them to approve of this lapse of judgment.

Natwar Singh has had the satisfaction of getting back at Sonia Gandhi. He has practiced, with aplomb, what that fictitious character, Jorge Luis Borges, calls, in Luis Fernando Verissimo’s delightful and hilarious book, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, ‘the dangerous art of the written word’.

Nonetheless, one is tempted to ask an obvious question: why did Natwar Singh not publish the book when Sonia Gandhi was still in ‘power’?

More to the point, had he, for example, disclosed Rahul Gandhi’s stand on his mother becoming Prime Minister, perhaps the Congress Party would have gathered its collective wits, drawn appropriate lessons and projected someone other than Rahul Gandhi as its 2014 Prime Ministerial mascot. n

It is sadly clear that in the process of getting back at Sonia Gandhi, Natwar Singh has regretfully devalued his own life-long accomplishments

1 september 2014

Harish Khare is a senior journalist, scholar and commentator based in New Delhi open www.openthemagazine.com 45

books An Ordinary Phenom Cult writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s powerful memory electrifies the mundane and turns it into the stuff of literary best-sellers Ullekh NP

C

ritics and readers have devoured Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part series of memoirs, My Struggle, three of which have already been translated into English from Norwegian, attracting plaudits that have lasted. Knausgaard is a rising star in the global literary firmament. The Norwegian, now living in Sweden, is the author of two bestsellers prior to his latest book, Boyhood Island (Harvill Secker, 496 pages) out this summer.

Along with worldwide praise, however, came snubs from his family; because he didn’t bother to write facts through fiction, as writers often do in the telling of inconvenient truths, he incurred the wrath of his close relatives.

His second wife, writer Linda Boström, told him, after reading the second book—A Man in Love (2013)— that he was free to leave her (the couple is still married). His mother asked him to stop writing after it came out. His uncle hit out at him in the media for the portrayal in the first book, A Death in the Family (2012), of Knausgaard’s strange relationship with his estranged, alcoholic father, who left the family when the writer was a teen.

The 45-year-old’s books reveal that he is a difficult man, someone who can’t be bothered too much with mundane tasks involved in raising his four children, though he tends to enjoy their company on and off. He doesn’t understand the idea of holidays because he tends to work seven days a week. In fact, he comes across as a real bore, a wife-baiter, anti-social, conceited, ideologically opposed to pushing prams carrying his child.

But nothing succeeds like success.

And it isn’t an exaggeration to say the literary world seems to be divided between two kinds of people: those who have read Knausgaard and those who haven’t.

I asked a bookseller on Karl Johans 50 open

Gate, Oslo’s main street—a stone’s throw from Norway’s yellow-brick Parliament—whether it was a sin not to have read Knausgaard. “He is a sensation now. Some people in this country say he was very hard on his own family by being ruthlessly frank.

Buy it, you won’t regret it,” she replied, pointing to the book. On the back cover, it said: “fiction”. What an irony.

In Norway, a country with a population of 5 million, more than 500,000 copies of the My Struggle series have been sold so far. Some employers were forced to declare ‘Knausgaard-free’ days so that people don’t spend a lot of time talking about his works at office.

Earlier novels such as Out of the World (1998) and A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven (2004) began his career.

The bearded, handsome writer whose

English translations began appearing in 2012 (the original series was published between 2009 and 2011) has brought the power of memory back to literary fiction with a bang.

K

nausgaard has been hard on himself, too, dwelling at length on his inferiority complexes, his fears, his failure as a father and a husband, his troubles with neighbours and

misunderstandings with friends. He describes himself as someone who feels awkward in the presence of strongbodied people.

“Once I had been to a party in Stockholm at which a boxer had been present. He was sitting in the kitchen, his physical presence was tangible, and he filled me with a distinct but unpleasant sensation of inferiority. A sensation that I was inferior to him. Strangely enough, that evening was to prove me right,” he writes in A Man in Love, referring to a situation, in his inimitable, addictive style—which seems to flow unhindered from a source of unending inspiration—in which his wife gets locked in a bathroom and the door has to be kicked open.

The writer also cracks a joke or two about well-meaning friends. He argues that people who do not have children seldom understand what it involves to invite a family with kids over to stay: “We asked if she knew what it was like living with children, and whether she was really sure she wanted us there, but she was sure… the intention had been to stay there all the week, but three days later we packed all our stuff and headed south again, to Mikarla and Erik’s obvious relief.”

What is remarkable about Knausgaard is his honesty and his obsessions: he is enamoured of Fyodor Dostoevsky and gorges on The Brothers Karamazov, from which he seems to have imbibed great powers of literary intuition with which to negotiate back and forth with sub-plots. For a student of creative writing, taught to edit whatever he writes after short spells, the writer is an iconoclast who once said in an interview that he had started to trust in quantity of writing much more than quality. But he seems to have maintained a balance, and an excellent one at that.

In his most recent installment of the My Struggle series, Boyhood Island, 1 september 2014

Readers may go red in the ears while the author tramples upon the intensely private details of others. In a sense, Knausgaard’s books are a classic case study for the debate on whether personal memoirs impinge on the rights of other characters in a narrative.

These are real people after all. And they didn’t grow old, fall in love, become alcoholic, have children or fart in the open to be written about.

W

Orjan F. Ellingvag/corbis

which has taken Europe and America by storm—Knausgaard’s book readings in New York are reported to allow standing room only—he recaps his childhood with great innocence, leaving one to wonder how one could remember so much: the situations, the words uttered, the fun, the fear and the rage of the past: ‘I watched dad. Sweat was running down his forehead. I rubbed my palms 1 september 2014

against each other several times. He leaned forward. Just as he was grabbing the log and about to straighten up, he farted.

Caught in the act.

“You said we should only fart in the toilet,” I said.

At first he didn’t answer.

“It is different when you are outside in the open air,” he said, without meeting my gaze. “Then you can, well, let your farts go free.”’

hile that criticism on viola-

tion of privacy stands valid, even the boring bits of life get their due from Knausgaard, earning him comparisons to the literary genius of Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust. The My Struggle series are a tribute to Knausgaard’s own photographic memory. He himself writes about it in A Man in Love: ‘The schools, the swimming baths, the sports halls, the youth clubs, the petrol stations, the shops, my relatives’ houses. The same applies to the books I had read. What they were about was gone in weeks, but the places where the plot had taken place had stayed with me for years, perhaps forever, what did I know?’

In exploring childhood romance and adventures, the Norwegian goes Proustian and narrates, with ease, his first kiss; with so much passion that he takes reality into a realm of greater reality, using his micro-focus on detail. The teenaged Knausgaard asks his girlfriend whether he can time how long they kiss. She agrees. His aim: to beat his friend Tor’s record of 10 minutes.

‘Actually we didn’t need to continue for more than ten minutes and one second to meet Tor’s record. And that was now. We had beaten him now. But we could beat him by a large margin. Fifteen minutes, that ought to be possible. Five left then. But my tongue ached... ’ English language fans will have to wait for three more of Knausgaard’s My Struggle books to be translated.

Their thoughts are best voiced by writer Zadie Smith in her now famous utterance: “I need the next volume like crack.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

Cinema

usters, director kb oc bl ck ba o-t ck ba o tw ith The Copycat Hitmaker W Mohit Suri is finally the talk of the town. His films follow a fixed formula of doomed love, lilting music and derivative story lines. But is there more than meets the viewer’s eye ?

ritesh uttamchandani

M oh in i Ch au dh ur i

B

arely two weeks into its release this July,

Ek Villain touched the magic 100 crore number. In no time, producer Ekta Kapoor whipped up a soiree to ensure the feat hadn’t gone unnoticed. The starfilled guest list featured everyone of note in filmdom and they turned up in droves to toast the star of the film—director Mohit Suri. Success is not a stranger to Suri; the soundtrack of his last outing, Aashiqui 2, is still playing on loop on every radio and TV channel. But success parties are another matter. “This was the first time other people from the industry came to celebrate my success and it was a weird feeling. I’d never been into a big bungalow with the press outside. This is a new experience for me and a new stage of life,” says Suri.

It has taken three days to pin down a jet-lagged Suri, after his return from a month-long vacation in the US. The 33-year-old director is sleepy when we meet, but usually works at a breathless pace. He debuted in 2005 with two back-to-back releases, Zeher and Kalyug, both pacy thrillers featuring relatively unknown actors, best remembered for their hummable songs. Since then, he’s had a release almost every year, silently creeping up the ranks of Vishesh Films, the production company owned by his maternal uncles Mukesh and Mahesh Bhatt.

“I was a glamourised peon, probably the only one who could speak English,” he announces proudly. At 16, the first assignment entrusted to him was to patiently wait at the T-Series office to collect the audio tapes of Sangharsh, which Mahesh Bhatt wrote. He was paid Rs 3,500 per month. “I had this great pride about myself. I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. I had influential uncles but I chose to live in a PG [paying guest] accommodation in Bandra,” he says.

Within a year he was promoted to assistant director on Vikram Bhatt’s film Kasoor, his salary bumped to Rs 25,000. He was shooting 20 days a month, had saved enough to get himself a car and managed to do quite decently in college too, which he completed on his father’s insistence. “I was a science student but I had to shift to business management. I was great at presenting because that was the job I had as an assistant director— narrating scenes to actors. I was a good guy to have on the team. The rest would do the project and I’d come in after the shoot and just present it well,” he says. He adds in disbelief, “Actually, I was quite good with the books.”

Actor Shaad Randhawa, who has played pivotal roles

I was a glamourised peon, probably the only one who could speak English. Within a year I was promoted to assistant director” MOHIT SURI

in four of Suri’s films, became friends with the director during regular trips to Vishesh Films in search of work. “I remember the time when the Bhatts were making a film called Tumsa Nahin Dekha, directed by Anurag Basu. He fell seriously ill so Mohit and Mahesh Bhatt had to complete the film. Mohit was just 21 then but I knew he would go on to become a big director some day,” he says.

Films churned out of Vishesh Films are made on tight budgets and rarely have the luxury of a big star to ride on.

In the absence of these two essential commodities, the team devised a basic recipe: high drama and great music with generous helpings of sex scenes.

Suri mastered this formula in no time, making a string of low-budget movies with second-tier actors like Shiney

the French drama, The Intouchables.

“I offered Mohit a three-film deal back in 2007 when I was in Viacom18 but he wasn’t ready then,” says Tanuj Garg, the CEO of Bajaji Motion Pictures, which produced Ek Villain.

Now, “At 33, he has nine talked-about releases under his belt. Not many can boast of this.” Garg distributed Awarapan, one of Suri’s least successful films, in the international market, and the two have been close friends since.

Some time after his movie Crook bombed and way before the release of Aashiqui 2, Suri finally gave in and signed a film deal with Balaji, his first venture without his uncles by his side.

Infamous for his fiery temper on set, Suri admits he was more conscious of his behaviour during the making of Ek Villain: “The Bhatts are extreme-

nia. Suri called up film critic Rajeev Masand, who he didn’t know then, and said, “Please come and watch my film.

Rip it apart if you don’t like it and if you do, please review it and support it,” he recalls. Masand confesses he was a tad cynical, but complied. “I was struck by the depth and maturity of that film. It was remarkable coming from a director who was barely 25,” says Masand.

Yet, the film ran to empty theatres.

Since then, Suri has focussed on a string of sequels to franchises like Raaz, Murder and Aashiqui. His works have two running motifs: a doomed love story and a plotline brazenly ripped off foreign films, Korean ones in particular. He doesn’t deny the charge.

“I’m not pretending to be an original filmmaker. Everything I’ve made so far has been from books and mov-

Suri’s works have two running motifs: a doomed love story and a plotline brazenly ripped off foreign films, Korean ones in particular Ahuja, Kunal Khemmu and Adhyayan Suman. The bigger stars he worked with, his cousin Emraan Hashmi and Kangana Ranaut, were still struggling to gain a foothold at the time.

Aashiqui 2 was meant to be a love story between an older man who had seen life and a younger, upcoming singer. “I was having a problem casting. Maybe I was not that big and people didn’t want to work with me at that time,” he says. He went ahead and made the film with Aditya Roy Kapur and Shraddha Kapoor, two actors with less than impressive resumes. The risk paid off; the film made stars out of all three of them.

In October Suri begins work on his next film, Hamaari Adhuri Kahaani. The film has an enviable cast: Vidya Balan, Rajkummar Rao and Emraan Hashmi.

Its director says the biggest hero of the film is its “fuck-proof” screenplay by uncle Mahesh Bhatt. He’s also in meetings with Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions for an official remake of 54 open

ly possessive about me. I’m like a child with them. I keep crying, pushing and throwing tantrums. Mukhesh ji calls me ‘Shekhu’ which is what Dilip Kumar was called in Mughal-e-Azam because he’s a spoilt child. Here, I have to behave myself and keep my guard.”

He had a new boss in Ekta Kapoor, a more generous budget at his disposal, a decent cast in Shraddha Kapoor, Sidharth Malhotra and Riteish Deshmukh, and was being exposed to more forceful marketing techniques.

“He had to live up to the expectations of Aashiqui 2. I remember him telling me that this film can’t do lesser than the one that had no stars,” says Milap Zaveri, who wrote the film’s dialogues.

Way back in 2006, Suri made Woh Lamhe, which has probably been his best-reviewed film till date. Inspired by the tapes that the late yesteryear star Parveen Babi had recorded for Mahesh Bhatt, the story was a dark take on the actress’s lonely battle with schizophre-

ies I’ve liked,” he says. Yet, he refutes allegations that his last film is a watered-down version of I Saw the Devil, saying the film has obvious references to TV shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad, which people missed. “To his credit, Mohit manages to Indianise a lot of these films by adding masala and makes them watchable,” says Masand.

Suri is gradually finding his place amongst the fresh crop of directors; those who started out at the same time have either fizzled out or are way senior. “I don’t know where I fit in. But I’m happy I’ve grown organically. Maybe if this had come to me earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it,” he says.

Randhawa sees no perceptible change in his friend, from the time of their early days together in Woh Lamhe to now. “It’s just that now the world is looking at him differently.”

In Bollywood, sometimes having the right people notice you is all you need. n 1 september 2014

rough cut

Hum Aapke Hain Corn How HAHK, India’s greatest hit in 1994, causes ‘haha’ in 2014 Mayank Shekhar

A

sure-fire way for society to signal that you’re old

ed—had the lead character called ‘Prem’. He said the characis if the music that was hot off the shelf when you ter is the same, why change his name? Prem, self-admittedly, bought it, and movies that opened at a theatre near was supposed to be Sooraj Barjatya himself. you, are considered ‘retro’ and ‘classics’ already.

Nonetheless, HAHK had managed to draw in middle class This bumping up of a movie into a classic ensures nobody families that had abandoned seedy theatres altogether in the has to critically evaluate it anymore. Nostalgia explains its ‘80s. Exhibitors were asked to spruce up their cinemas beexistence. Spoofs sustain it. Rajshri heir Sooraj Barjatya’s fore they could release Barjatya’s film. Audiences may have Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (HAHK), the biggest hit of 1994, is enjoyed Prem’s antics. But they noticed the purple ghagra on now a classic, celebrating 20 years of its release as I write this Nisha. HAHK was Madhuri’s film, although one could see far piece. I tried to sit through the film right now and gave up more Pomeranians like Tuffy in the neighbourhoods in the on the 57th minute—the performances are dated, the interi‘90s than we do now. ors are garish, there are 14 songs, everybody looks like their Women embraced HAHK. Satellite television thereaf‘Happydent’ Facebook profile pics for the most part, while ter brought home kitchen politics through daily soaps pinothing really happens. I mean, who are these people? How oneered by producer Ekta Kapoor. Barjatya’s Hum Saath many bathrooms are there in their house? It’s certainly not Saath Hain (1999; a remake of Ramayan) hardly did as well as the same film I saw twice when it had opened at Chanakya in HAHK, although screenwriter Salim Khan feels it’s his son Delhi. Yeah, I know, I am old.

Salman’s finest performance yet. Mein Prem Ki Deewani Hoon What was so special about HAHK? It redefined films in (2003) with Hrithik as Prem bombed. Rajshri Productions many ways. When the movie’s hero Salman struggled with which stories to reproduce.

Khan first heard its script, I’m told, he was Their last landmark picture was Jaana in splits. Here’s a three-hour-plus movie that Pehchana (2011), where their 1978 film When Salman has no conflict, and by extension, no plot, up Aankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se plays in flashKhan first heard until almost the last half hour. People probablack with 20-year-olds Sachin Pilgaonkar the script of HAHK, bly went in several times over to catch the anand Ranjeeta in the lead, alongside Sachin he was in splits. takshari, songs, wedding rituals, family crickand Ranjeeta in their 50s now. It’s classic Here’s a three-houret matches and furtive glances between Prem mild. You have to smoke it to know it. plus movie with no (Salman) and Nisha (Madhuri Dixit), or unBy the early 2000s, materialism and married chachaji (Alok Nath) and his samexposure, mainly inspired by malls, conflict or plot, up dhin (Reema Lagoo)—who he apparently multiplexes, jobs in ‘MNCs’, cable TV, until almost the last had the hots for in college—while the huscondos, and the internet had made metrohalf hour band (Anupam Kher) monkeys around by politan audiences far more questioning of her side. joint family values and the traditional ‘forHAHK was a remake of the Rajshri production Nadiya Ke mula’ in their films. The mid 90s, that way, was an inflecPaar (1982), which was based on Keshav Prasad Mishra’s novtion point. It’s the only time one could shell out a hardcore el Kohbar Ki Shart. It was nothing like either though. Young Salman and Shah Rukh reincarnation drama, Karan Arjun Barjatya’s biggest challenge, according to him, was to pull off (1995), with a straight face and get away with it (Om Shanti a script without a tight three-act structure (of a beginning, Om in 2007 was a spoof). middle and an end). He hit jackpot, and how! HAHK, comBy 2014, Barjatya, 49, would have rethought the commanding after Maine Pyar Kiya (rich boy, poor girl romance), had ments in his rulebook. He went to Salman with an updatturned Barjatya, 29, into a god of some other kind of filmed version of his successful ‘Prem’ pictures. Salman sent him making. There was apparently a Rajshri rulebook. One of back, asking him to do what he knows best. He said, “Chalo, the many commandments was that films should have no ansharmate hain, payr padte hain (Let’s become shy, let us fall at ti-hero—‘circumstance is the villain’. Violence, if necessary, our elders’ feet).” That film, Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, is currentmust not exceed, ‘14 punches’. I asked Barjatya if this was ly being made. Oh, I am so looking forward. n true. He didn’t deny it. I asked him why all his movies—Hum Mayank Shekhar runs the pop culture website TheW14.com Saath Saath Hain, Mein Prem Ki Deewani Hoon, Vivaah includ-

1 september 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 55

FOOD

Back to the Lab Molecular cuisine is trying the affordable route in India as it recreates desi classics—but what of its future?

Sneha Bhura

O

n a humid Thursday afternoon

in early August, a young woman, perhaps in her late twenties, is being served dessert. A mixture of thick sweetened milk made of puffed rice with a sprinkling of pistachio and batasha (crystallised sugar) sits pretty on a white slab. But when the waiter pours a misty rush of liquid nitrogen— bubbling at -200 degree Celsius in a sizzling jar —over this pristine whiteness, finishing liberally with thandai cream, she purses her lips. The woman’s partner is amused, daring her to take a bite.

She forces a grin and proceeds, wavering, to take a spoonful; together, they devour the dish. Meet Phirni Oxide, one of the stars of Indian molecular cuisine. No culinary science-fiction, it is served up at the newly opened Indian bistro Farzi Café in Gurgaon’s DLF Cyber Hub for a mere Rs 450.

Chefs in India have been reinventing our cuisine in contemporary ways to keep up with the well-travelled desi and their adventurous palate. Just when we thought that restaurants like Indian Accent exemplified the acme of modernisation of Indian cuisine, molecular cuisine appears to be a newcontender in jazzing up Indian dishes in a hyper-modern avatar. Molecular recipes sublimate current research in food science and lab technologies to create culinary masterpieces which defy all

Phirni Oxide; (facing page) Raj Kachori with Okra Salad (top) and Mishti Doi Spheres at the new Farzi Café in Gurgaon

common expectations, to sum it up for the uninitiated—though by now, these are few and far between, among winer-diners.

The technique has had a complicated history in India. First introduced in India in 2007 at Taj Land’s End in Mumbai, molecular recipes failed to catch on and is reported to have stalled in 2009. Chef Abhijit Saha’s restaurant Caperberry opened its doors in Bangalore in 2008 to present European cuisine using molecular transformations, but this restaurant too downed its shutters last year.

Gresham Fernandes of Mumbai’s Salt Water Cafe fame tried molecular concoctions with Shroom which opened in Delhi two years back. This attempt, too, failed to make a mark, ending with the exodus of Fernandes. Masala Library and Spice Klub in Mumbai and Farzi Café in Delhi are the latest (and the only) entrants experimenting with molecular techniques on Indian food.

While the former two serve Indian molecular recipes in a fine dining format, Farzi (by Massive Restaurants, the same hospitality group which owns Masala Library) is seeking to redefine Indian haute cuisine by offering a culi-

ed with chutney foam, which bursts in the mouth pulsing with the tangy flavour of tamarind. The chemical ingredient soy lecithin is the foaming agent used to create the chutney foam. The same chemical employs fresh lemons and green chillies to work its magic on tempura fried prawns tossed in homemade mayo, resulting in Prawn Bhaja with Nimbu Mirch air. Chemical compounds like liquid nitrogen, sodium alignate, zanthum gum and calcium citrate have entered the kitchen at Farzi Café and are used to transform the texture and meaning of food we have always taken for granted. Take their complimentary amuse-bouche, featuring the delightfully quivering orbs called Mishti Doi Spheres (products of reverse spherification made using sodium alignate), topped with strawberry jelly. Time is of the essence here, as these nifty little white spheres need to be gulped down as soon as they arrive.

Once in the mouth, they explode with the familiar flavour of sweetened curd and a hint of ginger.

Zoravar Kalra, son of Jiggs Kalra— better known as the founder of Punjab Grill, a chain of restaurants offering gourmet Punjabi food—is the man be-

Farzi is seeking to redefine Indian haute cuisine by offering molecular cuisine without the elitism of a fine dining set-up nary experience without the exclusivity, elitism and pricing of an ultra fine dining set-up. Employing techniques from molecular gastronomy, this bistro seeks to manipulate our senses with unconventional expressions of food we have grown up eating at home and at neighbourhood stalls, while keeping it affordable and accessible.

So, the ubiquitous and simple chaat dish, Raj Kachori, transforms into a recipe which demands the rigour of a scientist at Farzi Cafe. Crispy mini shells stuffed with pumpkin and pomegranate are served with a profusion of crispy okra salad and supplement-

hind Farzi. Armed with an MBA from Boston University and an incurable love for Indian food, he is also a technology enthusiast whose love for hitech gadgetry inspired him to play with Indian food using molecular techniques, even while respecting India’s illustrious food traditions. Inspired by highly futuristic restaurants like Alinea and Moto in Chicago, he is certain a molecular approach to Indian cooking can mainstream Indian cuisine, like Chinese or Thai food, in the international culinary universe. “You cannot fight technology. It is the future and will always win. Although regu-

lar Indian food will never die, in order to take it to the next level, you have to take recourse to technology,” he asserts.

Zoravar Kalra’s Masala Library, launched early this year in Mumbai’s swish Bandra Kurla Complex, has been applauded as the most innovative restaurant in India today, both locally and in The New York Times. Kalra’s widely reported ambition is to attain the coveted Michelin star for a restaurant in India. The chefs behind Masala Library have descended upon Farzi’s kitchen to reinvent traditional recipes like sarson ka saag and makki ki roti: Farzi offers a deconstructed version in Sarson Ki

A freezing jar of liquid nitorgen being poured over phirni. Phirni Oxide is the exclusive molecular invention of Farzi Café

abhinav saha

“Molecular gastronomy is not a new age gizmo to impress our guests but a weapon to decode our cuisine,” Chef Gaggan Anand Galawat, Corn and Cheese Tostadas— with the sarson carved into kebabs topped with cheese and accompanied by yogurt spheres, popcorn and little parcels of wheat bread stuffed with cheese and corn—for just Rs 275.

Farzi’s team of young chefs, Himanshu Saini and Saurabh Udinia, share the vision of their employer.

“Even though molecular techniques are no longer popular in the West, middle class Indians will get a great opportunity to experience this concept with Indian food today,” says Saini, while Udinia wanted a “bigger kitchen to conduct more molecular experiments.”

Zoravar Kalra plans to take Farzi to other metros of the country and beyond as an international chain.

He’s not the only one with an eye on this market. Spice Klub, an all-vegetarian restaurant, has managed to garner some appreciation for their molecular takes on Papdi Chaat, Vada Pav and Kulfi, amongst people in Mumbai.

While its efforts at making vegetarian food more edgy have been appreciated, several food reviewers have panned it as gimmicky and tasteless with many needless interventions.

Are there myths associated with this kind of cuisine? “ ‘Isse pet kaise bharega?’ I think is the biggest concern I’ve seen amongst Indians. Well one big portion or ten tiny portions will fill you 58 open

up equally. It’s only about the perception,” says 26-year-old TV chef Saransh Goila, who anchored the popular food and travel show Roti, Rasta aur India.

Although a proponent of authentic Indian food, he is greatly enamoured of the dramatic spectacle which a molecular recipe whips up and believes there will be takers in India amongst those “who treat food like luxury and a medium for entertainment.”

Kolkata-born chef Gaggan Anand, who trained under renowned ‘extreme’ molecular chef Ferran Adrià (who famously decided to close his Barcelona restaurant el Bulli when he felt his work was done) is a pious molecular practitioner. His eponymously titled restaurant, Gaggan, which opened in Bangkok in December 2010, is listed as the 17th best restaurant in the world, regularly frequented by Hollywood A-listers like Renee Zellweger and Zach Galifianakis—and he believes restaurants in India practising molecular techniques are still behind the curve as they try to woo audiences with outmoded gimmicks. Gaggan does not subscribe to half-hearted, play-safe attempts. “Indian chefs have to understand the magic of this type of cooking.

It is not a new-age gizmo to impress our guests but a weapon to decode our cuisine. There is no going 50/50 in this cuisine. You either go all the way or you

don’t,” he says. It looks like he is certainly attempting to: Gaggan is now planning to expand his research and development facility from 15 square feet to a 600 square feet space by the end of 2014, to make deeper forays into ultramodernist Indian cuisine.

P

urists and traditionalists who are proud of their culi-

nary heritage still outnumber avantgarde gastronomes in India. As Sourish Bhattacharya, of the popular blog Indian Restaurant Spy, points out, “Molecular gastronomy, like all culinary fads, is going out of fashion across the world.

Heston Blumenthal, the other icon of molecular gastronomy, has moved away from molecular gastronomy to rediscovering the old recipes of Britain. The chefs who have just started experimenting with molecular gastronomy in the country are clearly behind the times.” On the subject of new restaurants like Farzi Café, Bhattacharya says there are only some dishes that incorporate elements of molecular gastronomy at the cafe, such as the chutney foams. He personally believes that their best dishes are more in the mould of “inventive Indian” rather than “molecular Indian” like Bhoot Jholokia Spare Ribs, Chilli Duck Samosa with hoisin chutney and the Galouti Burger with Mutton Boti.

It is uncertain what role molecular techniques will play in the evolution of modern Indian cuisine; whether it will spawn further mutations, or give way to another trend. But, whatever the outcome, there is an eager restaurant-goer waiting in Indian cities. n 1 september 2014

wellness

Every Heartbeat Matters A healthy lifestyle is the key to a healthy heart Dr Issac Mathai

C

ongenital heart diseases, as such, are few. Most ing outdoor games improves cardiac output and blood cirdiseases are developed gradually over the years as a reculation. These activities improve metabolism, help dissult of stress and other lifestyle-related issues. Thus, it solve accumulated fat and improve oxygenation. These are is relatively easy to prevent these diseases through lifestyle also great stress-busters as they aid the release of endorphins changes and stress management. and serotonin. Regular exercise, for 45 minutes to an hour at Stress, bad eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle contribleast five days a week, is recommended. ute to impaired fat metabolism. The food we take is high in Diet plays a very important role too. We have already mensaturated fats. This includes white bread, pastries, red meat, tioned the role of saturated fats in causing heart diseases. The frozen food and the so-called fast food. Mayonnaise, margafat deposited on the walls of blood vessels is called an atherorine, lard, etcetera, are added for taste and flavour. Digestion ma or atheromatous plaque. When stuck to the arterial wall, of this food is difficult and the fat is not metabolised. This this fat causes a narrowing of the arteries—and sometimes fat tends to clog the blood vessels, thus narrowing its lumen this plaque could get inflamed and disintegrate too, causing and obstructing the blood flow. The flow of both impure as embolism. This does not mean that fat should be completewell as pure blood is affected, leading to lowered blood oxyly eliminated from the diet, just that the sources of fat should gen concentration and reduced blood supply to muscles and be healthy. Unsaturated fat could be consumed through lean organs, including the heart muscles and the brain. The body meat, vegetable oils and whole milk. The HDL, or the highinitially tries to compensate for the reduced supply, but over density lipoprotein, should be increased through consumpa period of time the functions are affected. Sometimes, a tion of oily seeds and nuts, fish such as tuna, mackerel, sarpart of the heart's muscles stop working (as in myocardial dine, herring and salmon. LDL (low-density lipoprotein) infarction) causing severe pain, breathlessness and exhausshould be reduced by eliminating red meat, margarine, maytion. The blockages in the blood vessels could be complete onnaise and hydrogenated oils. One should also inculcate and this could turn fatal. Genetics plays a strong role in the healthy cooking methods like steaming, grilling, baking and occurrence of heart diseases, but the risk rises with stress stir-frying, apart from consuming whole grains with fibre. and an unfavourable lifestyle.

The liquid intake should also be adequate. Eight to ten glassA proper combination of rest, relaxation, exercise, diet es of water with thin soups, buttermilk, vegetable and fruit and healthy habits ensure a sound juices, and tender coconut water are illustration anirban ghosh heart. Stress does a lot of damage to recommended. The food we consume the body's organs. Cardiac muscle acshould be low on sodium and spices. tivity gets sluggish with stress. There Timely meals are to be taken. A is less oxygen supplied as a result minimum gap of two hours should of the shallow breathing caused by be maintained between dinner and stress. High blood pressure and elevatsleep. It is better to restrict the intake ed blood sugar levels caused by stress, of coffee and tea; but green or herbin turn, reduces cardiac function. al teas with tulsi or mint are advisable.

It is therefore important to prevent One should abstain from habits such and manage stress. Simple steps, like as consuming alcohol and smoking. eight hours of sleep, practising relaxThese are seen to increase the risk of ation techniques like yoga nidra and plaque formation and the narrowing shavasana, meditation, breath awareof blood vessels. ness, pranayama and breathing exerPrevention is certainly better than cises, reading good books, listening cure. Why not practice a healthy lifeto music and changing one’s attitude style if it could prevent an illness that to stress will go a long way in curbing could handicap your life? n heart conditions.

Dr Issac Mathai is the founder of the Regular exercising like walking, well-known holistic health centre Soukya yoga, swimming, jogging and play-

1 september 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 59

turtle tale The Giant South American river turtle is the largest of the side-necked turtle family and grows up to nearly three feet in length. The species is only found in the Amazon River basin

Snap Judgement How we judge others in a fraction of a second

‘Talking’ Turtles

H

ow do we form our opinions of

others? Are our opinions on, say, the trustworthiness of an individual always formed over time, or do we rush into judgement? According to a new study, our judgements are made in less than a fraction of a second after meeting someone. Our brains decide if someone is trustworthy or not, says the study, at the first glance at an individual, even before consciously perceiving their faces.

For the study, published in Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from New York University’s Department of Psychology tracked the activity of a region of the brain, the amygdala, responsible for social and emotional behaviour. Previous studies have shown that this region of the brain is linked to the processing of facial cues, including how trustworthy an individual is.

The researchers conducted a pair of experiments to monitor the activity of subjects’ amygdala while they were exposed to a series of facial images. These images had been modified to enhance features like high inner eyebrows and well-defined cheekbones, known to signal trustworthiness, and the opposite to signal untrustworthiness. Another group of people were asked to evalu-

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ate the same faces on how trustworthy they found them, in order to ensure that the assumptions made by the previous group were correct.

During the experiment, when the brain activity of participants was being monitored, the participants had to view the images during a process called backward masking. This process, used in cognitive experiments, involves showing two images, or an image and another form of stimuli, in quick succession. This is done so as to mask the content of the images.

In the current experiment, the faces were masked to ensure that while they were exposed to the facial images, the participants were actually not aware of the faces. The researchers found that although the participants could not see the face consciously, the brain exhibited activity that indicated it was tracking the general trustworthiness of it.

The authors write in the journal, ‘The findings demonstrate that the amygdala can be influenced by even high-level facial information before that information is consciously perceived, suggesting that the amygdala’s processing of social cues in the absence of awareness may be more extensive than previously described.’ n

DeAgostini/Getty Images

science

According to a study published in Herpetologica, Giant South American river turtles actually use several different kinds of vocal communication to coordinate their social behaviors, including one used by female turtles to call to their newly hatched offspring.

Working on the Rio Trombetas between 2009 and 2011, the research team identified 270 individual sounds made during 220 hours of recording. Sounds made by the turtles while migrating through the river or basking tended to be low frequency sounds, possibly to facilitate contact between turtles over longer distances. Vocalisations made during nesting tended to be of higher frequency sounds. n

9/11 Affected Pregnancies Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images

Pregnant women living near the World Trade Center during 9/11 experienced higher-than-normal negative birth outcomes, according to a new study by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The collapse of the two towers created a zone of negative air pressure that pushed dust and smoke into the avenues surrounding the site. Using data on all births that were in utero on 11 September 2001 in New York City and comparing those babies to their siblings, researchers found that, for mothers in their first trimester during 9/11, exposure to this catastrophe more than doubled their chances of delivering a premature baby. Of the babies born, boys were more likely to have birth complications. n 1 september 2014

tech&style

Leica M Anniversary Edition A full-frame camera, with one of the sharpest lenses in the market gagandeep Singh Sapra

I

n 1914, Oskar Barnack construct-

ed the very first Leica, the Leitz camera, marking the birth of 35 mm photography. A hundred years later, celebrating its anniversary, Leica has released a version of its legendary rangefinder camera with the top plate engraved with a ‘100 years of Leica’ logo. It comes in silver chrome and black versions and is technically identical to the current model of the Leica M. The anniversary edition is limited to 500 units.

The Leica M is a mix of state-of-theart digital technology and the decades of experience that Leica has in making cameras. The camera comes with a 24 megapixel full-frame Leica Max CMOS sensor that works with both the M and the R lenses.

Its viewfinder shows you the action outside the actual frame, letting you compose with more direct interaction with your subject. There is also a Live View feature on its scratch resistant, high resolution 3-inch screen that helps you get a better exposure.

1 september 2014

If you want more control over your pictures and want to zoom in while you focus, Leica M has an additional electronic viewfinder, Visoflex EVF2, that lets you zoom 5x to 10x into the image, and a multifunctional handgrip with an integrated GPS module that lets you expand the camera as you go along. You can also add a microphone adapter set for some great sound recordings.

At less than 42 mm depth, a quiet shutter, and 500 shots on a single charge, the Leica M is an ideal partner for travel as well as candid photography. It also boasts one of the sharpest lenses in the market. Intuitive controls and a simplified menu let you concentrate on capturing great pictures instead of losing you to complex technology. No wonder that some lensmen call the Leica M the best system built for photographers.

The price of this limited anniversary edition hasn’t been announced, but you can make a rough estimate— the standard Leica M camera comes for $7,995 and more. n

EVF2 This 1.4 megapixel electronic viewfinder allows through-the-lens viewing when using Live View for both photography and video. It simply slots onto a hotshoe and into the small interface slot under it. It can also be tilted 90 degrees, allowing for low angle work with comfort

Aquaracer 300M w Diamond Dial and Bezel 27 mm

Price on request

TAG Heuer has taken a fresh look at the Aquaracer Lady collection and remodelled it completely.

Exclusive new finishings make these watches more refined, without forgetting the Aquaracer’s sporting features like the unidirectional turning bezel and water resistance to 300 meters.

The 300M Diamond Dial model’s alternately fine-brushed and polished steel case is 27 mm in diameter and studded with 30 top Wesselton diamonds. The watch also features scratch-resistant sapphire crystal with anti-reflective treatment. n

XOLO 8X-1000

Rs 13,999

This ‘made in India’ phone runs on an Octa Core Media Tek processor, has 2 Gigabytes of RAM and 16 Gigabytes of storage that can be upgraded to 32 Gigabytes. It comes with an 8 megapixel rear camera with an aperture of f/2.0 allowing you to get some great shots even in low light, and a 2 megapixel front camera. Since the phone is made for India, as Xolo would like to call it, it also features a dual SIM capability. The phone has a rated talk time of about 7 hours on a 3G network and 11 hours on 2G network. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

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CINEMA

rambo rambling?

Sylvester Stallone, who played John Rambo­—a disturbed Vietnam War veteran—in the celebrated film series Rambo, has been quoted praising Ajay Devgan in Singham Returns as the ‘Indian Rambo’, in an interview with a film critic for a leading daily

Singham Returns With a shocker of a villain, this sequel barely matches the dynamism of Singham ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Guardians of the Galaxy Director James Gunn cast Chris Pratt, Vin Diesel, Bradley

Cooper

Score ★★★★★

, kareena Cast ajay devgan ole gupte kapoor khan, am shetty Director rohit

T

he original Singham was a cop and

goonda movie designed to be a little out of the box. It got a forthright police officer posted in the backwaters of the Maharastra-Goa border to realise that with the nexus between politicians and goons being what it is, the only alternative for effective law enforcement was to function, for short periods of time, outside the system. So inspector Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgan) inspired the entire police force to unite, take off their uniforms, fix things forcefully, put their uniforms back on, and then present a fait accompli to the political system. The film was loud and dramatic, but it worked.

In Singham Returns, the same proud Maratha officer is posted in Mumbai—a fish out of water. No matter. Warrior bugles play intermittently while he slaps the denizens of this city around and shouts instructions to his men in chaste Marathi. His love interest earlier was a somewhat

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rustic lady called Kavya Bhosle. But since being transferred to Mumbai, he has moved a little upmarket and his new girlfriend is called Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan). Her major interest in life, apart from coquettish intimations about a possible marriage plan, is food.

But the real shocker is the villain. He is an evil Godman, simply called Guruji (Amole Gupte). He is the clown in this movie, clearly taking off on the characteristics of the Godman, Asaram Bapu.

In one scene, Singham marches Guruji on the streets of Mumbai to the High Court, much like the familiar images of Asaram Bapu being escorted to prison.

This is precisely why this sequel does not work at all. For an inspector in the countryside to inspire an insurrection of the police force when faced with complete lawlessness in Mumbai, you need an antagonist more threatening than a comical Godman. The choice of villain has knocked the sails out of Singham Returns. n

This is easily the most entertaining superhero film in recent times. While giving you beautifully designed Space Age cities and cultures in 3D, it is witty and capable of laughing at its own absurdities of invention. It plays on the English language, and jokes about characters who don’t understand the use of metaphor and interpret everything literally.

The various degrees of metaphor begin with ‘Groot’, a tree-like creature that can grow branches, flowers and roots. His vocabulary is restricted to three words—“I am Groot”. But since he is so innocent, loyal and loving, the words take on several meanings during the course of the movie. Groot is one of five characters that are led by a mercenary called Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). Quill has got hold of an ‘Orb’ that can control the universe and wants to sell it at a price. But first he has to outwit all the outlandish pirates and warlords who are after it.

Dialogue is the key. The more complex a character, the more extensive his language skills. A genetically engineered raccoon called ‘Rocket’ is the fastest talker. But on one occasion someone calls him a ‘rat’ and he is ready to kill, till Quill explains, gently, that ‘rat’ is only a metaphor!A hugely entertaining movie, indeed. n AD

1 september 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

How to Be a Bold Young Mother to a Grown Man

Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Kay Kay Menon, Shahid Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor…Vishal Bhardwaj assembled a terrific cast for his Hamlet adaptation Haider, but contrary to what one would imagine, not every actor was drawn to the project like bees to honey. The director revealed to me that it was hardest convincing Tabu to take the role of Hamlet’s mother: “She refused the film twice, insisting she wouldn’t play mother to Shahid Kapoor.”

He understands her reluctance, he says. “There is a tendency in this industry to stereotype actors. And naturally she was concerned that if she played mother to a grown man once, she’d be approached only for mother roles here on.”

But the project needed a solid actor in that role, so the options were limited. “When I went back to her for the third time, I asked her to see the character as Gertrude from Hamlet, not Shahid’s mother,” Vishal explains. “There’s so much to Gertrude, and she’s crucial to the story.” Tabu relented subsequently, and Vishal insists her performance is what holds the film together.

Not one to shy away from uncomfortable material, Vishal embraced the Oedipal undertones in the relationship between mother and son. In one scene that I was invited to watch, Shahid’s Haider enters Tabu’s room as she sits before the mirror beautifying herself. She reminds him how as a boy he’d insist on sleeping between her and his father, and would get upset each time his father so much as touched her. “And now my uncle touches you,” he replies stingingly, while lovingly applying perfume to her neck. Her wordless reactions alone may be worth the price of a ticket. Pretty bold too for a commercial Hindi film, you’d have to agree.

What Vishal didn’t tell me however, but I learnt from asking around, is that Tabu took the part only after the director agreed to make the character Haider’s stepmother and not his birth mother, thereby conveying to the audience that she was considerably younger than his father, and not necessarily much older to him.

Shrewd.

1 september 2014

The Courage to Trust

Karan Johar probably won’t be thrilled to hear this, but Rani Mukerji and Aditya Chopra weren’t entirely sure they could trust him with their secret.

When the couple decided to marry in an idyllic town in Italy in April, only very close family and friends were informed and invited. That included Karan, who is childhood buddies with Aditya, and who is close to Rani too, who he directed in her breakout film, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai; incidentally, on Aditya’s recommendation.

The actress revealed to me that the couple wanted to keep the date and other details of their nuptials a secret (particularly from the media) until the deed was done, and begged their guests to respect their request for privacy. “We were only worried about Karan,” Rani admitted. “But he surprised us.

He didn’t talk about it to anyone. And that must be a record for him,” she added jokingly.

The news of the marriage didn’t reach the tabloids until the day after the couple had tied the knot and via a press release from Yash Raj Films, Aditya’s production banner.

The couple had managed to hold on to their secret, and Karan had kept his word.

The Wayward Son

The director of an unreleased big-budget blockbuster film is reportedly losing hair because of an undisciplined young actor and his surprising lack of commitment. The filmmaker has apparently complained to friends that the actor, sprog of a respected veteran talent, often goes uncommunicado without warning, thereby causing the filmmaker “too much stress”.

Defending his admittedly erratic behaviour, the actor’s camp insists he’s never been a part of such a major production and is merely overwhelmed. “He isn’t used to being on call 24 x 7, but he’s learning,” a source close to him explains. “He’s grateful for the opportunity, but he’s figuring things out as he goes.” n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN

open space

Through New Eyes

by As h i s h s h a r m a

Aamir Kabeer, a resident of Baramulla, Kashmir, was returning home from a friend’s residence in September 2010 when, caught in the crossfire of civilian unrest being quelled by security forces, pellets struck his eyes. It cost him his sight. He was admitted to Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) in Srinagar and then referred to AIIMS in New Delhi, where he was operated upon. He was later taken to Indore and Chennai, where doctors finally gave up on him—for he had suffered severe retinal damage. His girlfriend Nadia stood by him all through, and despite her parents’ disapproval, married him last June. Today, he sees the world through her eyes

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1 september 2014