OPEN Magazine 28 April 2014

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EXCLUSIVE WHAT MODI SHOULD LEARN FROM 2009 ESSAY BY THE POLITICAL EDITOR OF THE ECONOMIST

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WELCOME TO OUR WORLD

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CHRONOMAT 44 FLYING FISH

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Volume 6 Issue 16 For the week 22—28 April 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

bal govind

This refers to ‘Hollow Man’ (7 April 2014). I do not agree with this observation because it is not Manmohan Singh but Sonia and Rahul Gandhi who have destroyed the Congress. They forced their schemes on the Government in the name of social welfare and wasted the exchequer’s money, and sadly Manmohan Singh obeyed his party chief’s order silently despite not being convinced himself. And see what MGNREGS gave our nation: more corruption scams. And it is an irony that Congressmen also It is an irony that keep looking up to a Congressmen also Gandhi to lead the party keep looking up to a lest it gets shattered Gandhi to lead the party completely, and the lest it gets shattered Gandhis know it well completely and exploit this to the tilt. So it would not be right to crucify Manmohan Singh for something he is not entirely guilty of.  letter of the week Our Pseudo Democracy

in all honesty, this does seem to be a rather vacuous bit of writing (‘Fear and Loathing in Lutyens’ Delhi’, 7 April 2014).

It is a description of the feudal system that our pseudo-democracy is—from the viewpoint of a socialite. The observations are accurate but hardly insightful and completely redundant. And what does not make any sense is the assertion that Narendra Modi is not a part of the political elite because he does not speak a lot of English. One expects better of our journalists.  Bashuman Deb

imagine for a second, if instead of Nehru it was the Sardar who had become our first Prime Minister. India would have succeeded without dynastic overtures. Now, after so many years we are about to get a second chance at this. The fact that Narendra Modi is running this campaign not from Delhi but from Gujarat kindles some hope in me.  Shashank

28 april 2014

Lessons for the Media

i appreciate Shekhar Gupta for this article (‘CBI to Probe Headless Body, CAG to Audit Topless Bar’, 14 April 2014).

Sane words, irrespective of when they come out, have their positive impact. They sooth those who suffered humiliations heaped on them by the media and sometimes even worse—abandonment by their own organisations unfairly. The conscience of all media persons is not dead and hopefully many will see lessons in the thoughts expressed in this article.  KR Sridhara Murthi

Karunanidhi’s Crisis

much damage has been caused to the DMK given the state’s highly fragmented electorate.

In this hour of crisis, any defence or brave face put up by Karunanidhi is not going to alter the ground realities substantially enough to help the party. With Karunanidhi already finding himself isolated, it will not be surprising if the patriarch enacts a new drama like what he has been doing earlier to keep the interests of his family intact and paramount, because his thoughts always echo only selfishness, vengeance and the welfare of his family rather than the well-being of people.  KR Srinivasan

Sweeping under the Carpet

this article ‘The Unwelcome Mat’ (14 April 2014) reminds me of Rahul Gandhi’s speech where he blames the system and talks of how it should be functioning, willfully ignoring the fact that his own party has been in power for the last 10 years. This article by Shashi Tharoor is a similar attempt, albeit in a glorified manner, to hide the failures of his own government.  Lalit

as sibling rivalry has now slowly turned into a cold-war threatening the DMK party’s electoral prospects in southern Tamil Nadu, there is no doubt that the DMK patriarch is a worried man (‘Patriarch in Pathos’, 21 April 2014). After having failed to set his house in order, Karunanidhi’s rhetoric rings hollow. And with Alagiri toughening his stand after his suspension from the party,

sadly, this is no joke but evidence of a dysfunctional government. The argument that terrorists or criminals are in any way impeded by draconian visa protocols is hilarious and without any evidence. It is really a way to persuade potential visitors to India to visit Sri Lanka and Thailand instead where visa restrictions are fewer.  Sholto

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Protesting in Memoriam demand

Homi Bhabha’s bungalow is to be auctioned off but atomic energy employees want it as a memorial

the nuclear physicist Dr Homi Bhabha’s palatial bungalow in Mumbai is expected to fetch a record price. Called Mehrangir—a combination of Bhabha’s parents’ names, Meherbai and Jehangir—this three-storey bungalow on Malabar Hill where Bhabha spent much of his life is to be auctioned on 18 June. A reserve price of Rs 257 crore has been set for it, but it is expected to fetch a lot more.

News of the auction has, however, sparked off a protest. Employees and scientists working for India’s

The sale of

28 april 2014

Department of Atomic Energy and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which Bhabha founded, don’t want the bungalow to be sold to a private body but preserved as a memorial. After having written to Ratan Tata, former chairman of the Tata Group, and the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), which belongs to the Tata Group and is the current custodian of the bungalow, members of the National Federation of Atomic Energy Employees (NFAEE) have started an online petition ap-

pealing to the two not to auction the bungalow.

According to Prashant Worlikar, president of the NFAEE-affiliated Atomic Energy Workers and Staff Union, employees working for DAE have volunteered to contribute a minimum of two days’ salary to raise money to bid for the bungalow.

But according to their estimates, they will be able to collect only about Rs 30 crore. “If there can be temples for gods and memorials for leaders, why can’t Mehrangir be converted into a memorial for Dr

Bhabha. For us, he is our god,” Worlikar says.

The bungalow has a builtup area of 13,953 sq feet and a plot measuring 17,150 sq feet. After Dr Bhabha’s death in 1966, his brother Jamshed Bhabha became the custodian of the property. In 2007, the property was passed on to the NCPA, which Jamshed had set up with JRD Tata.

The protestors will soon approach the chairman of DAE and politicians standing in the South Mumbai Lok Sabha constituency to intervene. n Lhendup G Bhutia

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vikas munipalle

small world

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contents

18 cover story

odisha

Navin Patnaik’s mystique

amritsar

Jaitley goes native

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hurried man’s guide to India’s

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open essay

recognition of a third gender

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Lessons from 2009

28 amethi

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The poetry of dynasty

What is past is provocation

person of the Week vijay seshadri

A Poet’s Victory A brief look at what makes the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet of Indian origin deserving of the honour divya guha

‘This is you as seen by them, from the corner of an eye (was that the way you were always seen?)’

—from The Disappearances

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Bangalore-born boy has entered a small temple as a high priest of the greatest of literary arts. He has been blessed by that most American of compliments: The Pulitzer Prize, an award set up by a Hungarianborn American newspaper proprietor and editor given only to Americans.

This award, for his collection 3 Sections: Poems, yanks him out of the annals of obscurity and upgrades him to the big league where he has for company great American poets such as Franz Wright, Paul Muldoon, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell—all Pulitzer winners.

Literary critic and poet Ranjit Hoskote says he is in awe of Vijay Seshadri’s work, his ability to play with nature, ‘American pastoral’ and urban and vernacular language, integrating different types of speech. He adds that it is the greatness of the American canon to be so absorbent.

“He is a fine, accomplished poet,” he says.

One must dispel a cynical view bound to do the rounds: this award is not an American nod for the poem Disappearances, his most celebrated and well-known of works, written in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy in New York, where the poet now lives with his wife and son.

Seshadri, 56, has lived in America for all but five years of his life. Always a bookworm, he was bitten by the 4 open

Parnassian bug in his late teens, at a time when we are neither children nor quite adults, and time, though short, seems endless, to misquote a line from his Long Meadows.

Seshadri has published three collections of poems in his career and teaches a poetry and non-fiction course for the Masters in Fine Art at Sarah Lawrence College. Among his students has been poet and Man Booker Award-shortlisted author Jeet Thayil.

“His achievement is the voice,” says Thayil, “formal and casual, serious, playful, supremely intelligent. He takes important risks—the risk to mix so many registers, sometimes in the space of a single stanza.”

These lines from Descent of Man might illustrate what Thayil means: ‘My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately,/ I can’t walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.’

This change of register also comes across in Survivor, which begins: ‘We hold it against you that you survived./ People better than you are dead.’ And similarly, in This Morning , where foreboding uncertainty—‘First I had three apocalytic visions, each more terrible than the last./ The graves open, and the sea rises to kill us all’—rapidly gives way to the immediate and tedious—‘Then the doorbell rang, and I went downstairs and signed for two packages.’

And from Memoir, there is the horribly and fascinatingly astute: ‘Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life./ The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.’

The most important thing Thayil says he was taught by Seshadri (“one of the best teachers I’ve had”) was that “the border between poetry and prose is not rigidly policed, it is breachable and porous.”

Seshadri’s poems describe the grown up tensions of a child, resolution but little resolve, a worldly problem nearly solved, a defeat accepted, or meeting the everyday-ness of everyday with a narcissism undercut by loneliness.

Thayil says Seshadri has expanded his range and found his material: “Wild Kingdom”—another collection by Seshadri—“is an entirely different enterprise from The Long Meadow, and that’s as it should be.” n 28 april 2014

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social media

books

Survival of the savviest

A family of fine taste

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f o r not speaking against a

publisher cancelling a book written by a pro-Modi writer While there was a lot of justifiable hand-wringing and talk of fascist elements in the Hindu right when Penguin pulped Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, there has been very little discussion of Indian publishing house Navayana’s decision to cancel publication of an English translation of Tamil writer Joe D’Cruz’s

Play it again, MTV

2005 novel, Aazhi Soozh Ulagu (Ocean Ringed World), after the author’s public endorsement of Modi. The book itself has nothing to do with Modi. In a statement, publisher S Anand said, among other things, that “there cannot be a place for such an author in a political publishing house like Navayana … we are glad we came to know Joe’s stand before the novel was published.” Most publishing contracts include the publisher’s right to refuse a title if it falls short of editorial standards, and Navayana is perhaps legally well within its rights to cancel its contract with D’Cruz. But what Navayana has effectively done is not very different from Penguin’s decision on Doniger’s book. They are both equally guilty of self-censorship. But you wouldn’t hear that in newspaper and TV commentaries. For those from the so-called liberal spectrum, it appears censorship cuts only one way. n

A few days after the Congress praised former BJP PM Atal Behari Vajpayee, who once wanted Modi to resign as CM, the party called him ‘the weakest Indian PM’ reverse dharma

‘No leader in the BJP can match the stature of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’

—Congress website www.inc.in, 10 April

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Moody Saif

music

Mirror detox

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

‘The weakest PM ever was AB Vajpayee, who wanted to sack Mr Modi for the ghastly Gujarat massacre, but succumbed to BJP bullying’

—Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha on Twitter, 16 April

around

Modi and the Mass Media continues to attract criticism for not talking to the media as often as other politicians do. The BJP’s PM candidate has come under attack for being selective in giving exclusive interviews, which he did many times this week, on certain TV channels.

The Gujarat Chief Minister’s reluctance to appear on major mainstream TV channels has been projected as a weakness. Several columnists have seen merit in Rahul Gandhi’s disastrous interview with Times Now’s Arnab Goswami

Narendra Modi

28 april 2014

compared with Modi shunning some celebrity interviewers.

Modi’s interviews this week trended on social media and made newspaper headlines. This could be frustrating for TV channels competing to improve TRP ratings and interviewers overconfident of their powers of persuasion.

The media has largely been unsparing towards Modi, and having overcome these odds it is not surprising that Modi feels that the media needs him more than he needs the media. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to India’s official third gender

Action Replays

In a landmark judgment, the Indian Supreme Court recently recognised transgenders as a third sex, the first formal recognition of this group in the country. This move will accord a number of benefits to a community that has long been shunned by mainstream society.

This judgment was made in response to a case brought in 2012 by a group led by transgender activist Laxmi Tripathi in Mumbai. Change has been in the offing for a while. In 2005, the Government introduced an ‘E’ category for eunuchs on passport forms. The Election Commission already recognises an ‘O’ (other) category and Aadhaar a ‘T’ category.

Delivering their judgment, the bench said: ‘By recognising TGs (transgenders) as a third gender, this Court is not only upholding the rule of law but also advancing justice to the class, so far deprived of their legitimate natural and constitutional rights. It is, therefore, the only just solution which ensures justice not only to TGs but also justice to the society as well.’

Transgenders will be considered a socially and educationally backward class and have access to social welfare programmes

biswaranjan rout/ap

The bench has instructed the Centre and state governments to implement its judgment

within six months. According to the court order, transgenders are to be considered a socially and educationally backward class and thereby entitled to social welfare programmes like other minority groups. They will have access to all rights under the law, including the right to marriage, adoption, divorce, succession and inheritance.

The judgment has received mixed responses in the LGBT community on account of its inconsistency with the SC’s recent decision to uphold Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code— which effectively criminalises homosexual sex— and because it applies only to transgenders, not to gays, lesbians or bisexuals. n

The déjà vu around the fall and rise of BCCI administrators M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

A

s the seventh edition of the Indian Premier League takes off in the United Arab Emirates because of the Indian election, Lalit Modi will again be remembered for his organising talent. Five years ago, because of the 2009 election then, the IPL had been forced to shift abroad to South Africa.

And it was extraordinary how successful the event was with so little time for preparation. It contributed to the Modi cult, with he himself becoming enamoured of his own genius, and his hubris eventually leading to his fall.

The culture of crony cricketing capitalism he fomented might have sparked off a series of further scandals but the attraction of the game itself has continued as before.

To the viewing public, all the scandals, the corruption, the betting, haven’t mattered as long as the spectacle was maintained and there were enough sixes, fours and close finishes.

Two events this week indicate that in the backroom of cricket there is a revolving door that ensures that things remain the same the more they change. One came by way of N Srinivasan, the ex BCCI chief who oversaw Modi’s humiliation.

Srinivasan’s cricket team, the Chennai Super Kings, remains shrouded in an aura of betting thanks to his son-in-law’s indictment by the Supreme Court-appointed enquiry commission. The court as good as sacked Srinivasan by its observations, leading to Sunil Gavaskar being appointed interim president.

This week, the Court revealed that the enquiry commission report names Srinivasan too. A day earlier, he had filed a plea asking for his reinstatement as President because he had been unjustly removed.

Predictably, it was refused. If he had been a cricketer, this never-say-die attitude would have been admirable.

But in the present case, with the overwhelming mountain of

evidence, he just seems to be adding insult to arrogance. One would think his days as a cricket administrator are numbered.

But they are not if you consider the second event; that is, the simultaneous return of Lalit Modi by way of the Rajasthan Cricket Association elections. Modi has most probably won the election that was held some time back, but the results have been put on hold following a case filed by the BCCI. The Court is expected to release the result soon. When it does come, it could mean Modi once again occupying centrestage in Indian cricket.

Srinivasan and Modi have no love for each other and the latter celebrates every court ruling against the former with a series of tweets. But that the fall of Srinivasan should be Those on top accompanied by go from king the rise of Modi to thief as soon would be quite a as their throne coincidence if we didn’t know is uprooted, but inevitably that this is the usual character claw their way of BCCI politics. back to favour Those who occupy its higher echelons find themselves suddenly getting a radical image makeover from king to thief as soon as their throne is uprooted and then they inevitably claw back into favour.

In 2005, cases of financial misappropriation were filed by the BCCI against Jagmohan Dalmiya, arguably the most powerful man in Indian cricket then, soon after his bloc was ousted by a group led by Sharad Pawar. Dalmiya, exonerated by the courts, is now back at the top rung.

Modi, whose fall was so steep that he had to get out of the country itself, is almost at the doorstep of Indian cricket. Srinivasan is in a hole that is getting deeper by the day, but give or take a couple of years, don’t be surprised if he too is back and singing homilies to cleaning up the game. n 28 april 2014

business

The Call of the Cloud Adobe, the world’s No 1

28 April 2014

david paul morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

s o f t ware

graphics software maker, will not sell shrink-wrapped software in India anymore. Instead, the graphics major is offering its tools on rent through an online ‘cloud’—a vast virtual warehouse of servers run by it and other firms based in California and elsewhere. After its launch of Creative Cloud for the individual user in May 2013, Adobe has just stopped selling past versions of its wares wrapped in boxes in India. All its tools are now available at Adobe.com, the website that grants access to its cloud.

Confirming the development, Umang Bedi, the director of Adobe Inc and its South Asia managing director, tells Open that from 1 June 2014 onward, the company’s latest Creative Suite 6 version of graphics software, which is popular among such folk as magazine designers, will no longer be available in the Indian market through its Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP) or Transactional Licensing Program (TLP), the usual outlets so far. In fact, it will not be selling ‘packages’ as we know them anymore, just need-specific online applications that can be downloaded for everyday use.

So what does it mean for the Indian graphics software consumer? “When people hear ‘cloud’, they relate it to applications running in a web browser, similar to [what’s usually offered by] a software-as-a-service delivery mechanism.

While that may be the case with other cloud offerings, Creative Cloud is different because the user can download and install these apps (such as Photoshop and Illustrator) directly on their computers.

They won’t need an internet connection to use them on a daily basis,” says Bedi.

In other words, users may run the applications offline. But they will also need to go online to verify their subscriptions once a month (or, in the case of yearly subscribers, every 99 days). Subscriptions cost $20 to $50 a month, and include several features, such as 20GB of online storage, apart from the use of such Adobe products as Photoshop, InDesign and Premiere.

Will this subscription strategy, which is also aimed at countering software piracy, work in India? “India has witnessed remarkable growth post the launch of Adobe Creative Cloud, and we clearly [understand] that the biggest opportunities here are [large] enterprises and small and medium enterprises,” Bedi replies,

head in the cloud Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen is confident of the firm’s all-new strategy

“We are growing with huge penetration within the infotech segment, media and publishing, but more importantly, pharmaceuticals as well as e-tail, e-commerce, telecom and large banks which are growing leaps and bounds. Also, consumers, ‘pro-sumers’ and students want to dabble with our software, and we think that we can capture that share with our affordable price Adobe will only points.” offer its Bedi mentions software on an MakeMyTrip and online cloud Jabong among India’s and no longer leading-edge internet sell CDs. Is this a firms that are active smart strategy users of Adobe Markefor India? ting Cloud. Touted as a huge success by Adobe’s managers, this cloud offers a set of business applications that help marketers do everything from measuring the success of social-media campaigns to managing content across digital platforms.

While Adobe is optimistic about its switch to cloud subscriptions, some of its software’s users have expressed some apprehension in response to the news. A petition signed by around 5,000 users on Change.org wants the company to keep selling its products on physical discs.

‘Due to the ‘upgrade at gun point’ nature of the change, and the forced ‘renting’ of software at prices that could be jacked up at any time, I will not continue with the Adobe brand,’ wrote one angry user who signed the petition.

Such grumbles, however, have not had any negative impact on Adobe’s share price. Over the past 12 months, it has risen by 63 per cent. Global investors, it would seem, remain bullish on its market prospects in general and ability to retain customer loyalty in particular. Last month, Adobe’s President and CEO Shantanu Narayen revealed that more than 1.8 million users had signed up for its Creative Cloud, an increase of 405,000 over the previous quarter’s count. For the first time, declared the company, over half of Adobe’s quarterly revenue of $1 billon came from recurring channels such as software subscriptions and maintenance contract fees.

Adobe’s competitors, such as the cheaper Photoshop alternative Pixelmator and open-source image editor Gimp, must be watching the company’s moves closely.

In India, a market that often resists forced upgrades, they may now have it easier swinging customers away. n ARINDAM MUKHERJEE open www.openthemagazine.com 7

lo co m ot i f

What Is Past Is Provocation S PRASANNARAJAN

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here are two kinds of yesterday in

politics. One is perfumed memory. Here an exaggerated sense of greatness prevails. Its best—or worst—expressions are found when a faith is in power. When gods, springing up from misread scriptures, take control of men’s actions in the ghettoes of dispossession and anger. Such upsurges, mostly staged in ‘secular’ (what a profanity!) dictatorships, uniformed or otherwise, are invariably immortalised as revolutions, and they usually come accessorised by the adjective of a religion. We have been there before, the alternative of the Book. It was an alternative that found the present an evil imposed. It found in the freedoms of men the footprints of the devil. So, in its search for the sacred idyll, it banished—or executed—the wayward children who strayed from the edicts of the divine.

Then there is the other yesterday: the past as a Great Hurt.

Here the back pages of national biographies are entirely about vandalised civilisations and displaced gods. About lost empires and the invader’s bloodlust. It is this kind of yesterday that drives nationalist alternatives to the extreme. Aren’t we familiar? We have seen charioteers racing through the anger and agony of the believers. When the foot soldiers of religious nationalism brought down the dome of the invader’s faith, it was an act of simulated rage that sought to restore a wounded god. Here too, the memories of yesterday result in the horror of the present. And they all require a convenient bogeyman to legitimise the terror; so it could be the invader or the infidel. These two versions of yesterday differ only in details; both are the creations of men who prefer mythology to history. They are expressions of power, and power for men swayed by the fantasies of lost empires and damaged deities requires a rewriting of the present and mythification of the past.

These two versions are a historian’s worst scenario. Writes Romila Thapar in her new collection of essays, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History (Aleph): ‘If those who constitute both the political leadership as well as the rank and file of political parties today took the trouble to read, they might begin to understand that serious historical interpretation is not just a game of adopting this or that ‘…ism’, but of attempting to use a method of analysis in interpreting the past. Gone are the days that one could talk intelligently about history to a Nehru or a Maulana Azad. They are not made like that any more.’

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The lamentation of Thapar, our most venerable historian, is understandable: philistines have come to dominate the political space. The age of the philosopher king is gone; today it is all about spin and sound bites. Thapar is particularly provoked by the attempts of the BJP government (1999 to 2004) to ‘silence historians’. She means historians such as herself, making sense of our past with a Leftist perspective. In her view, the Right wanted fairytales. They wanted to terminate the ‘intellectual efflorescence’ that was there till the barbarians stormed the salons. And the trigger, she argues, was the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

You may not be able to disagree with Thapar when she says that ‘the past cannot be changed, but if we intelligently understand the past, then the present and the future can be better directed.’ For a long time in this country, history writing was an analytical enterprise on the Left side of the argument. To be precise, there was no other side; the Establishment of Ideas was linear and Leftist. Under the sheltering shadow of Nehru and later of Indira Gandhi, it grew in size as well as in influence. There was hardly any voice from this Establishment of the Mind questioning the perversions and pathologies unfolding in the distant fatherland of the Indian Left. They romanced the lie, and the argument became increasingly dogmatic and didactic—and history became the profession of pedagogues. They monopolised the argument, and, it must be said, there was no counter-argument, not even a bad one.

When there was some sort of a counter-argument, the socalled homespun argument, it sounded less sophisticated, and more cottage industry. The alternative historians who found a voice during the BJP regime were no match for the seasoned rhetoricians from the bastions of Leftist discourse.

Such historical service to the nation only added to the ire of historians such as Thapar. The citadels of thought were challenged, no matter how clumsy—and at times unsustainable—the challenge was. The Right perspective in India, a country so conditioned by the ponderous Left, remains underdeveloped. Exceptions are caricatured and attacked by the righteous legion from the other side, the dominant side. That is why we are in a country where you can be an admirer of Pol Pot or Stalin or Mao and be a thinking humanist, but you just can’t endorse the One Whose Name Cannot be Spoken. And that is why history in India is not storytelling but an analysed position—and our influential historians are not a Fernand Braudel or Simon Schama. What is past is prologue, says Antonio in The Tempest. For us it’s provocation. n 28 april 2014

open essay

By JAMES ASTILL

WHAT MODI CAN LEARN FROM 2009 The Political Editor of The Economist returns to the last General Election to make sense of India 2014

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he view from Chiranjeevi’s dent—a regrettable mess, in some ways, but also a disaster magshoulder was of an unbroken nificently averted. It is too dysfunctional to celebrate fulsomely; ocean of humanity, rippling with I have never been one for the carnival-of-democracy claptrap. love and adulation, and stretching far But for its astonishing ability to function and save Indians from into the offing. This had been planned a worse fate, India’s political system is remarkable—and that is as quite a modest rally, Chiranjeevi had no mean feat. Democracy, wrote the polymath Australian Clive told me, as we flew by helicopter togeth- James, is always better justified by what it prevents than what er from Hyderabad to Rajahmundry a it does. And long before Mrs Gandhi proved the point, it was few hours earlier. But I had never seen, hard to imagine India holding together under any more-preJames Astill indeed could scarcely have imagined, scriptive, less-negotiable arrangement. Indian democracy opsuch a crowd as this. Later estimates sug- erates because it can, but also, in such a vast, poor and cacophois the Political gested it was one of the biggest rallies for nous country, because it must. India’s integrity depends on it.

Editor and the the 2009 Lok Sabha election, attended by Bagehot around 400,000 people. columnist of he 2009 election encouraged such abstract thoughts.

Most had stood sweltering for hours The Economist.

Because it was hard to see much of a clear, India-wide story for a glimpse of the star of 148 Telugu He is the author and Hindi films, whose political debut in it. Of course, no Lok Sabha poll is merely an accumulation of of The Great had introduced new confusion into a state-level contests, any more than even the most sweeping— Tamasha: Cricket, state that could well decide the make-up in 1972, 1977, 1980—were purely national votes. The result is Corruption and of India’s next government. As my first always a mix of national sentiment, local issues and the politithe Turbulent major rally of a campaign that I would cal happenstance that comes from the world’s most convolutRise of Modern cover vigorously for its duration, criss- ed electoral arithmetic. That is why the pollsters are so often India crossing India from Kashmir to proved wrong, as they would be in 2009. Indeed, it was more Chennai, to attend meetings and rallies than usually indeterminate, and, for a hard-travelling foreign with campaigning politicians or in the crowd, it was an exhil- correspondent, often perplexing.

By this time in the campaign, five years ago, there was a gatharating start. It was also, for quite a few of Chiranjeevi’s devoering consensus that the Congress was coming back to power. tees, nearly calamitous.

It was midway through the film star’s long and rambling But it was not a confident one. On my periodic returns to Delhi, speech, as darkness descended, that disaster struck. One of the back from Pune, Kolkata or Bihar, I was routinely quizzed by lighting towers, a vast assemblage of metal scaffolding rising more sedentary friends on what the mood had been here or 30-feet up from the crowd at its densest place, had been over- there. Among the Indian commentariat, I sensed an unusual loaded with men and boys clambering up for a view of the me- diffidence, a reluctance to predict. Yet, within that uncertain ga-star. As he forged through a long list of promises—free food, context, the election would be overlaid by three or four Indiafree shoes, free land to the poor, and better everything—it be- wide themes, which became clear on my travels—and which gan toppling backwards, slowly at first, then quickening. may be instructive in considerIt was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen. At the microphone, Chiranjeevi Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP briefly froze, then clutched his head in his hands, and staggered as if he had been shot.

He was not acting. The tower, it appeared certain, was about to crush hundreds of people and, being festooned with live wires, perhaps electrocute as many again.

But it did not happen. Within a second of a hysterical clamour erupting beneath the falling hulk, and as bodies dropped like stones from it, hundreds of eager hands reached up and caught it as it fell, rippling along its length, from the foot of the toppling construction upwards. Thus cushioned, its descent was slowed and controlled. With a ghastly thump, it was brought down to earth on bare ground.

No one was killed. It was the most remarkable act of collaborative self-preservation imaginable.

Indian democracy, it often struck me during the 2009 campaign, is a lot like this inci-

T

In Manmohan Singh and Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, India was saddled with leaders who would respectively prove to be undemanding, unwell and unfit

28 april 2014

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Octogenarian LK Advani had never been charismatic, even when riding a chariot. In 2009 he seemed old and weak, a poor successor to Atal Behari Vajpayee ing the current election and hopes for change that attend it.

One was the remarkable weakness of the BJP. This was not for want of effort by Narendra Modi, who addressed an estimated 270 rallies during the campaign. But when I went to hear India’s most skilful demagogue in Meerut, it yielded a stark image of his party’s weakness. The large roped-off compound in the middle of the city had been filled the previous day, when 100,000 turned out to see Sanjay Dutt campaign for Amar Singh. But barely 5,000 turned up to hear Modi. Even in safe saffron territory, Indians didn’t seem terribly interested in what his party had to say.

Part of the reason for that was its leader, LK Advani. The octogenarian had never been especially charismatic, even when riding a chariot, and in 2009 he seemed old and weak, a poor successor to Atal Behari Vajpayee. In the salons of Delhi, abuzz with political gossip, the old pugilist was spoken of with new, ever so slightly ironic, deference—“Advani” was now “Advani-ji”.

But it seemed that hardly anyone could imagine him as India’s next leader. Perhaps even more than any personal failing of Advani’s, the problem was ideological. Having failed to frighten Indians in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks—the BJP’s blood-spattered campaign literature hardly moved voters in the state-assembly elections that followed it—the Hindu party ran an aimless campaign. It downplayed Hindutva and communalism (Varun Gandhi was a dishonourable exception). At the same time, however, Indians had little enthusiasm for the liberal economic reforms which had become, almost by accident, the party’s alternative guise.

There was a sense of unenthusiastic, yet palpable, national goodwill towards the Congress. Many gave Rahul Gandhi, the party’s most prominent campaigner, credit for that—which was clearly nonsense. The Congress’ main achievement, at the helm since 2004, was to have ruled in lucky times—the swollen tax receipts that came from rapid economic growth having allowed the most enormous spending splurge. And how it had 12 open

The India Today Group/Getty Images

splurged; just one scheme, NREGA, the party’s subsidised ditch-digging scheme, claimed resources equivalent to around 1 per cent of the GDP. And then there were the rural electrification schemes, the fuel subsidies, the widows’ pensions.

Sadly, new roads, power stations and railways, infrastructure that was badly needed to sustain the growth spurt, were much harder to find.

But almost no one was thinking of that. Manmohan Singh was still respected as an economic manager—chiefly on the back of a budget speech given almost two decades before.

Congress allies had no complaints—for which many greasypalmed reasons would soon emerge. And in these propitious circumstances, the Gandhis were also an advantage. Even awkward Rahul was, as I saw from amid a crowd of poor farmers who greeted him at a rally in Vidarbha.

As the dauphin’s helicopter buzzed down from the skies, it was greeted with profound interest by thousands of silent faces. And when Rahul spoke, he was listened to in an atmosphere of peculiar intensity. The Gandhis were long since fallen saviours—no one really loved them. But all important things being equal, the average voter seemed unusually willing to give them his attention. Opinion polls confirmed that. Asked by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies who they would choose as Prime Minister, 38 per cent of respondents chose either Sonia or Rahul Gandhi, or Manmohan Singh. Advani polled 14 per cent—Modi, only 2 per cent.

And then, there were the dogs that didn’t bark in this election.

Strange to recall, Mayawati, the diamond-loving Dalit leader, was one of the big stories in the run-up to it. On the back of her 2007 surge to power in Uttar Pradesh, she put up candidates and campaigned across India. She hoped to win 50 or so seats, sufficient to play kingmaker to either of the big parties, and so become India’s first Dalit Prime Minister. But in the event, the BSP won only 21, including just one seat outside UP. For those who suspected this showed the limits of her narrow 28 april 2014

Vajpayee achieved a lot more, with fewer seats, than the Congress has.

Perhaps Modi could, as so many hope, replicate that success

Adnan Abidi/Reuters

caste-based appeal, Mayawati then offered additional evidence, sacking 100 senior civil servants who she had charged with delivering her victory.

These were dramatic developments. The demise of caste and communally-based parties, if that was what we were witnessing, would bring to an end the dominant themes in Indian politics over two decades. For those, including most of the Delhibased commentariat, who ached for this, the results lent superficial support. Indians, many thought, had cast a vote for a national, unifying government—the age of unruly coalitions was coming to an end. But unfortunately, this was nonsense.

In many places, voters had preferred the Congress to the BJP, and in UP, some even returned to the Congress from the BSP. But overall the combined vote-share of the two main parties continued its historic fall, to 47.3 per cent. And the rise in Congress’ share, from 26.5 per cent in 2004 to 28.5 per cent, was modest considering that, having fewer allies, it contested 23 more seats. Its tally of 206 seats—on the face of it a tremendous result, representing the biggest share of seats secured by any party since 1991—owed more to the vote-splitting effect of an ever crowded field than a Congress surge. That was Chiranjeevi’s main contribution in Andhra, where the Congress won a staggering 33 seats; the film star’s Praja Rajyam Party didn’t win even one.

Given its genesis, hopes for UPA-2 were exaggerated from the start—certainly by the Bombay Stock Exchange, which leapt by 17 per cent on the morning of its formation. There was, in fact, no reason to expect the liberal reforms that investors craved. There was reason to hope that, less encumbered by troublesome factions—including the Left, who were smashed in this election—the Government would be more harmonious and efficient than its predecessor had been.

But there were also, in retrospect, serious reasons to doubt that—of which weak leadership loomed largest. In Manmohan Singh and Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, India was saddled with 28 april 2014

leaders who would respectively prove to be undemanding, unwell and unfit.

L

ooking ahead, with another turn in the Lok Sabha’s pen-

tennial cycle of damnation and redemption upon us, what lessons does the 2009-2014 revolution offer? An obvious one is that the size of the ruling party matters less than the quality of its stewardship; Vajpayee achieved a lot more, with fewer seats, than the Congress has. Perhaps Modi really could, as so many hope, replicate that success—even if he has shown nothing of Vajpayee’s skill at calm consensus-building.

Another lesson is that the Gandhi dynasty, whose electoral potency has for so long been exaggerated by its acolytes, really should be done with now. But it probably will not be. India is still too fractured, vast and poor for any irrevocable shift in its voting patterns. Caste, feudalism, patronage and corruption have not gone away, so governments are bound to disappoint.

Whatever progress transpires in this election will be to some degree reversible, therefore. If Modi sweeps this time, even Rahul could sweep next. But change, though partial and slow, is still coming to Indian democracy. The demanding urban middle-class vote, for prosperity and stability, went to the Congress in 2009; in 2014 it may go to the BJP. What is more important, for India’s long-term improvement, is that it will be much bigger.

On a personal note, the 2009 poll, unlike the Congress, was anything but disappointing. Nothing in world politics is so engrossing and satisfyingly perplexing as a Lok Sabha election. In Indian public life, nothing—not even the cricket World Cup— exposes the vastness, endless variety and common purpose of the nation more clearly. To cover the election was a joy and a privilege. I will have many more occasions to sit with ordinary Indians, talking politics, for this is my delight. But I may never again fly over the parched expanses of Andhra with an amiable mega-star, talking movies, prohibition and free shoes. n open www.openthemagazine.com 13

Aatish Taseer a bend in the ganges

Mogambo in the Sacred City

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he wait is over. The Congress Party has found a man to fight Modi from Benares. I was in interior Mirzapur, with Congress people, when I heard.

It was a hot desolate morning. The countryside was very poor and arid, and past a sloping expanse of fields, solid gold with ripened wheat, an ancient and arresting vision:

the white sands and distant glitter of the Ganges. The road rose and we came upon the Congress campaign. There was something almost quaint about the sight of the Congress tricolour in the little village of Kamarian. It was like one of those flags, which when ubiquitous and powerful had offended the eye, but now, absent long enough to be robbed of its associations, brought up—as with the hammer-and-sickle— a feeling almost akin to nostalgia. The candidate was a political heir and the son of a family friend. A handsome man, he sat on the floor among a smallish crowd of people with a Congress cloth, lined saffron and green, tied like a turban round his head. He was soft spoken and listened attentively to all that was said. Later, in the car, on the way to another meeting, he said, in reply to a question about why he wanted to be in politics: “A while ago, I had an accident and broke my femur. I was in bed for three months and began to think about what I would really like to do. And I realised that I wanted to do something for the people here. I know I can’t change India, but I would like, on a personal level, at least, to do politics in a different way.”

A general observation: this is the kind of man—sincere, hardworking, with a certain fineness of sensibility—that the Congress, much more than the BJP, is able to attract. The tragedy is that it is never able to do anything with this talent.

Dynasty is to blame. Every Congress leader, as with certain bonsai, comes with, or will cultivate, a self-dwarfing mechanism. He can grow, he knows, but never too big. He must be careful not to put the heir in shadow; and, when the heir is something of a bonsai himself, this is not always easy. It takes a real invertebrate like Manmohan Singh to meet the party’s idea of what the stature of the extra-familial leader should be.

In such an atmosphere, where illusions must be kept alive, and where great lies have routinely to be told, there are always men to tell them.

It was from one such man—obscenely fat, and dressed in a white kurta with jewelled buttons—that I first heard the 14 open

Congress had found a man to put up against Modi. The Congress supporter described the new candidate as really someone to put the heat on Modi. Ajai Rai, he said, was a five-time MLA and a local hero—so loved and admired that, at the age of 26, he had defeated the nine-time sitting CPI MLA Udal. “He might not win against Modi,” he said, “but Modi will have to work very hard now.” I listened with one ear, I confess, because this large man’s credibility was in doubt.

Some minutes before, egged on by a couple of flunkies, he had been saying there was no Modi wave; the BJP would get somewhere between 160 and 180 seats; and, most outlandishly of all, even if the BJP were to win, Modi would not be Prime Minister, but someone like Manohar Parrikar. What does one say in the face of such madness! I hoped only that his lies were for my benefit, that he did not believe them himself. And leaving him there, in the shade of those mango trees, from whose knotted branches, some moments before, a blue loudspeaker had blared a folk panegyric in praise of Sonia and Rahul, I returned to Benares.

A couple of days later, he called. The Congress was inaugurating its central election office, he said. Ajai Rai would be there. Would I like to meet him? I agreed, but, in truth, I was now a little reluctant. I had done some research of my own, and the name of Ajai Rai in Benares, though it came with qualifications—such as ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘champion of the poor’— never failed to bring up one word: ‘criminal’. So much so that the good people of Pappu’s chai shop, who had spoken so boldly against the tallest leaders in the land, begged anonymity when it came to Ajai Rai. The next day, the Congress supporter came to pick me up from Assi Ghat. In the car, on the way to the opening of the election office, he told me his fears about Modi, fears of authoritarianism and creeping fascism. What did he have in mind? Well, he said, every time he criticised Modi on Twitter, he was immediately shot down. An unpleasant experience, no doubt, one with which many, including myself, are familiar, but did 28 April 2014

anand singh

high stakes race Congress candidate Ajai Rai coming out of the district court in Varanasi after filing his nomination papers on 17 April

this qualify as fascism? I didn’t understand, he stressed: in a group of some dozen or so people, he was now the only one left with anything negative to say about Modi. But, surely, the reverse was true too. I myself had been at dinner parties in Delhi, with TV anchors and famous lyricists, where not one word of nuance was possible when it came to Modi. In fact, the word drawing room Delhi used most often to describe Modi was ‘evil’. My large friend, now frustrated by my objections, expanded on his fears. He said it was not Modi that was the problem, but his supporters. They would be emboldened by his election. He gave, as an example, a cultural festival he organised in Benares. He wanted this year to invite Wendy Doniger… But now he feared that would not be possible. Wendy Doniger in Benares!

Would that have been possible even under a Congress government?! What about Vikram Seth, he said, on same-sex love?

I had no answer for him. But I felt instinctively that it was not Modi or his supporters that were preventing him from holding these events; it was the reality of small town India, of Benares, where Vicky Seth talking about gay

love would always have felt like a provocation. Still, these fears did constitute another of the great silences this election—the silence of the silent majority!—and no one seemed exactly to know what kind of India Modi, if he came to power, would bring into being. Would it be a very different India from the one we knew? Would it be one in which a voice like Vicky Seth’s would be silenced? That would certainly be sad. And did Muslims or homosexuals or liberals have anything to fear from Modi? Or did Modi’s opponents use this fear to demonise him? It was impossible to say. But I, for my part, was not willing to take the Congress’ word on the matter. And the BJP, either from unwillingness or incompetence, had done too little to allay these fears.

As far as the voter went, he spoke mainly of vikaas. But there were others—like Ghanshyama, the boatman—who said: “Jab Modi aayega toh angrezon ki sarkar ko bhagaa denge hum. Sab kuchh Hindi ho jayega.”

This fault line between the drawing room classes, of which the fat man was a representative, and the rest of the country, was one line of tension.

Another, far more tense, was the line between majority and minority. And,

When I asked my new friend about Rai’s reputation for criminality, he said, “I will say this much: to take on gundas like Modi and Amit Shah, Ajai Rai is enough.”

Mogambo khush hua…

28 April 2014

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at the opening of the election office, which had something of the air of a mushaira, the Congress worked hard along this line. The cemented area where we sat, open to the floodlit evening sky, was a sea of white skullcaps, dotted now and then, as in a pointillist painting, with the odd red turban. On the stage, Muslim leaders recited Urdu poetry; and the mahant of the Kashi Vishwanath mandir swore that he would never let Modi—“that ahamkari Ravana”—destroy the secular fabric of Kashi. Toofani Nishada of Machli Shehar—you can’t make this stuff up!—said: “They tell us there is a wave.

Waves are things of seas and rivers.

They say there is a wave on the street.

No matter. I am the son of a fisherman, I know how to navigate a boat through a wave!”

In the middle of this great love-in, some important news broke: the brother of Mukhtar Ansari—a powerful Muslim leader, who was in jail—had just announced that Ansari would not stand against Rai. Which meant his share of the Muslim vote was now floating. My fat friend was beside himself with excitement.

“Where’s my PA?” he said. “I need my phone. I need to call Delhi. This is big.

This means three lakh votes go straight to him.”

Him? Ajai Rai, of course. He had appeared now on the stage in a shiny yellow kurta. And he made a startling impression. But it was reassuring to know that Rahul Gandhi’s naïve and well-meaning influence on the Congress Party’s selection of candidates had not resulted in someone too effete or faint-hearted for the badlands of eastern Uttar Pradesh. For, truth be told, the Congress candidate, with his shaven head beaded with perspiration, his hard snakish eyes and handle-bar moustache, was the kind of man you could use to frighten children with at night. I mean, a full-scale Hindi-movie villain straight out of Central Casting. And appearances were not the half of it; he had seen some bad things in his time. His brother, when he was only 22, was rumoured to have been killed by the very same Mukhtar Ansari who had just withdrawn from the race. Nor was the Congress under any illusion as to why they had picked him. When I asked my new friend about Rai’s reputation for criminality, he said, “I will say this much: to take on gundas like Modi and Amit Shah, Ajai Rai is enough.” Mogambo khush hua…

And then, very shortly afterwards, I was seated next to Mogambo, in a convoy of black SUVs, speeding through the Benares night. In between aides handing him phones from news networks, I said: What a big contest you’ve found yourself in Ajai saab? “No big contest,” he said gruffly, “we’ll defeat him

and send him home. That’s all.” I tried another line. How does it feel to have the support of a man who killed your brother? Is it an emotional moment for you? “Emotion! What emotion! It doesn’t feel like anything. Anyone with the national interest at heart is free to join us.” And what about you? You were once a BJP man.

Have you had to make ideological adjustments in moving over to the Congress? “Ideology,” he said, almost laughing out loud.

“What ideology do they have? To divide the country. That is their ideology.” End of conversation.

When I looked up, I saw that the cavalcade of SUVs had driven into the compound of a vast and magnificent house. A palace, with a raul irani large porch of trefoiled arches and Corinthian columns. We were, I soon learned, in Raman Niwas. The house of Radha Raman, a Benares grandee and a lifelong Congress supporter, with memories of Gandhi and Nehru. Here, in this genteel setting, with the ghosts of those great men gazing benevolently down upon us, our candidate, a local thug in the construction mafia, was to receive the blessings of this great figure of Benares society. We found him, the old man, slightly batty and full of laughter, in a vast room, sparsely furnished, with a single portrait hanging from the wall.

Mogambo, looking at me, then down at the frail old man, said: “He is a pillar of Benares.” If all this was not surreal enough, some junior members of the Raman family began distributing a box of radioactively green mithai, which, my fat friend, though he did not touch any, identified, with an ache of longing, as parval ki mithai. Then Mogambo, with all the formality of an investiture, was introduced to the grandee by a senior Congressman as ‘aap ka candidate.’ No sooner had the words left the Congressman’s mouth than, thinking perhaps of Arvind Kejriwal’s imminent arrival in the city, he made a joke. “Can’t even bloody say that anymore,” he said, laughing. “AAP ka candidate!”

And, with the completion of this little ritual, my time with the Congress in Benares came also to an end. She was a stylish cynical old bitch, the Congress Party! One was almost sorry to see her go. But the entropy I witnessed in Benares was everywhere, tied too intimately to the decay of a defunct elite.

Every successive generation did not just lack the talent and intelligence of the one that had come before; they seemed even to lack the charm. n

Truth be told, the Congress candidate, with his shaven head beaded with perspiration, hard snakish eyes and handle-bar moustache, was the kind of man you could use to frighten children at night

16 open

Aatish Taseer’s new novel, The Way Things Were, will be published at the end of this year.

His weekly despatch from Benares will appear through the elections 28 April 2014

MOB

POWER SHIFT IN Once the Mumbai don took refuge in Uttar Pradesh after a hit job. Today it is the criminal politicians of UP who use use Mumbai as a safe house.

S HUSSAIN ZAIDI, India’s foremost chronicler of the Underworld, writes on the new balance of power in the ever-expanding mafia world

“I

f a single bal (strand of hair) is touched on the head of Bal Thackeray,

then I vow to kill Dawood Ibrahim in less than 24 hours in Pakistan,” said Pawan Kumar Pandey. This pledge, made in a packed press conference at the Mumbai Press Club in the mid-1990s, was intended both as a challenge to the Underworld and as proof of loyalty to the Shiv Sena founder.

Pandey, who was a Shiv Sena member of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly from Akbarpur, was reacting to a veiled threat issued by Chhota Rajan to Thackeray in an English weekly.

Chhota Rajan had picked up cudgels on behalf of his mentor, Dawood Ibrahim, soon after the serial blasts of 1993 in Mumbai when Thackeray had gone full throttle on the “deshdrohi Dawood Ibrahim” theme, calling the gangster a betrayer of his country. In righteous indignation on behalf of his boss, Chhota Rajan had been sending missives to newspapers. “Old man Thackeray should mind his business and not meddle with the Underworld,” he said in one interview.

Pandey, of course, got away with his posturing. Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan dared not touch a gangster-turned-politician. It was Pandey’s criminal legacy in UP that had got

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28 April 2014

GANGSTER LAND 6

5

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the big bhais 1 Brij Bhushan Singh 2 Arun Gawli 3 Ajai Rai 4 Dawood Ibrahim 5 Chhota Rajan 6 Pawan Kumar Pandey

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him his political legitimacy: 30 cases in all, of which seven were for murder, five for attempts to murder, and the rest for assaults, kidnapping of women and violations of various laws under India’s Arms and Gangster Acts.

Shiv Sainiks in Mumbai were glad that Pandey had spoken up for their venerated leader. What they could not figure out was how Pandey, with his criminal antecedents, had won an election on a Shiv Sena ticket in UP. In a state where politics is the last resort of scoundrels and where the maxim ‘bullets for ballots’ often prevails, Pandey was hardly a trendsetter. He

would have won with any party’s patronage. After his short dalliance with the Shiv Sena, he moved on to the Bahujan Samaj Party and is currently contesting a parliamentary seat—Akbarpur’s.

The might-is-right model of UP and Bihar is getting harder to use in cities like Mumbai, given the heightened vigilance of the Election Commission (EC) and security apparatus. So much so that NCP leader Sharad Pawar was recently heard griping about the EC’s all-pervasive reach after its officials started stopping vehicles to check for unaccounted cash.

With thuggish tactics under closer watch

SEBASTIAN D’SOUZA/AFP

dawn of the dons Arun Gawli after being elected an MLA in 2004; Gawli spent 10 years in prison on charges of murder, kidnapping and extortion; (bottom) Brij Bhushan Singh of the Samajwadi Party once stated he is a don with 40 cases against him and not a politician

than ever before, the emphasis now is on the process of electioneering more than booth capturing and ballot-box stuffing.

Until a couple of years ago, the big trouble spot for the EC was South Mumbai.

Booth capturing was usually reported from Umerkhadi, Khetwadi and Nagpada areas, all of which could be broadly classified as Dongri. The trend here was set by a Maulana turned politician, the late Ziaud-din Bukhari. It was he who started using muscle power to ensure electoral victories in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was done indirectly—with goons from Teli Mohalla working under the command of Baashu Dada, who issued all the tough directives even as Bukhari laughed all the way to the Assembly (and went on to set up a colony called Millat Nagar in northwest Mumbai).

In return for his services, Baashu Dada had a simple expectation. The winner in that constituency had to pamper him with money and loads of respect. On one occasion that Bukhari failed to do so, Baashu Dada made his displeasure evident—and Bukhari lost his next election in 1972. So much for a people’s mandate.

Furious at having his political career nipped this way, the Maulana hatched a Machiavellian plot to dislodge Baashu Dada’s hold over the area and its electoral preferences. He roped in a budding don called Dawood Ibrahim and his raucous gang to form a group called the Young Party. As Bukhari planned it, this formation’s aim was to take Baashu Dada’s influence down a peg or two. But to the Maulana’s consternation, this gang—far from turning into his stooge—went on to become a Frankenstein’s monster. So while the Maulana wanted to smite Baashu Dada, what the city got was a new don, Dawood Ibrahim.

PRAKASH SINGH/AFP

E

ven until the late 1990s, long after Baashu Dada vanished from Teli Mohalla and Dawood Ibrahim had flown the coop, South Mumbai candidates had to hire local goons for support during elections. Among those who protested against this was the late Abdullah Shahadat, a rare politician who deserved his reputation as a clean leader. As a Congress candidate for Maharashtra’s Assembly polls in the late 1990s, he spoke up against Bashir Patel’s high28 April 2014

rizwan mithawala

Z handedness and the Underworld’s role in elections in Umerkhadi.

The 1990s also saw the gangster-politics nexus take a daring turn. Until gangster Arun Gawli contested polls on his own and the Shiv Sena gave a ticket to don Ashwin Naik’s wife Neeta Naik in the 1990s, Mumbai’s mafia had always lingered on in the fringes. Gangsters were on-call but kept a safe distance.

However, they could not stay away from the actual rough-and-tumble of politics.

As in UP and Bihar, Mumbai graduated to having its own local dons preside over the city’s affairs.

When Arun Gawli first got 1,000 votes in an assembly election, an alarmed IPS 28 April 2014

ia-ud-din Bukhari hatched a Machiavellian plot to dislodge Baashu Dada’s hold over the Dongri area and its electoral preferences. He roped in a budding don called Dawood Ibrahim and his raucous gang to form a group called the Young Party officer, the late Hemant Karkare, said of Gawli’s support base: “Today, it is 1,000, tomorrow it will be 10,000 and later the figure will keep increasing. We might even have him as our home minister one day, who knows?”

It was the fear of law-enforcers that drew mafia dons into politics. They were being gunned down left right and centre in encounters. Gawli was running scared and so were many others. Police encounters—or extra-judicial killings—were the norm for almost two decades. This had its effect. It sent the mafia reeling.

When Ashwin Naik’s wife was contesting civic elections for the first time in the early 1990s, she said she was in the fray

only because she was tired of “midnight knocks by the police”.

In 2004, taking a cue from Arun Gawli, Iqbal Kaskar, Dawood’s brother, filed his papers to contest Assembly polls from Umerkhadi. In no time, the gang’s ‘boys’ had zeroed in on the rival contestant Bashir Patel, the incumbent MLA who was fighting on an NCP ticket. Patel was an old hand in the dirty tricks department, having used the same boys to help him score victories in the past.

However, Kaskar, who was in jail at that time, withdrew his nomination. It transpired that the police told Kaskar they would tighten the noose of a chargesheet on him that would make his open www.openthemagazine.com 21

life miserable if he insisted on contesting the polls. Willy-nilly, Kaskar withdrew from the fray.

“The mafia does not resort to strongarm tactics anymore,” says Prem Shukla, political analyst and editor of the Hindi eveninger Dopakar ka Saamna, “Their coercive tactics has become much more subtle and sophisticated.”

E

ver since electoral fortunes got in-

extricably linked with a candidate’s personal fortunes, local dons have become political parties in their own right.

Bhai Thakur of Vasai-Virar and his brother Hitendra Thakur are an example. Land prices in Mumbai having gone through the roof, people are looking for affordable homes in the distant suburbs—in the vast swathes of land in Nalasopara, Vasai and Virar, where the Agri community holds sway because of their ancestral links and hold over villages. Ditto in Thane and Kalyan, Dombivali, Bhiwandi and other areas. Many years ago, an IPS officer from Thane told me horror stories of murder and mayhem involving local corporators and MLAs of the Agri community, even as he bemoaned his lack of proof to prosecute any of them.

Right from the mill territory of south central Mumbai to the huge pockets of land beyond Thane, the dynamics of electoral politics in the city now hinges on real estate. Exceptions apart, the police, builders, corporate houses, politicians and mafia dons are all part of a vast power matrix that dictates the way we live and the way we vote.

The experiment was first started by the Shiv Sena, which still calls the shots at the civic level by running the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, whose annual budget is bigger than that of several small states of India. Very little of that money is spent on city infrastructure. Likewise, on the outskirts of Mumbai, local civic bodies are floating on a pool of cash even as local dons prefer staying in their own fiefdoms, fighting civic and assembly elections to consolidate their hold over the territory in their constituencies. Ganglord Bhai Thakur’s brother Hitendra Thakur has his own party, the Bahujan Vikas Aghadi, which in 2009 bagged 55 of the 89 wards in civic polls. His son Kshitij Thakur is an MLA

22 open

who recently roughed up a traffic cop for pulling him up for speeding.

The mafia is embedded in politics and the financial stakes are high. For local-area and state elections, it is the builder’s lobby and its mafia associates that play a big role in shaping outcomes, while in general elections, it is corporate entities—including builders or their agents—that have begun to influence popular choices. Election campaigns, including ads on TV and the internet, are typically sponsored by corporate houses that have huge sums of money at stake.

With their graduation to the big league, the mafia has given up on some of their petty earnings. Extortion calls from dons and their henchmen are few and far between. Instead, they prefer direct ownership of property and other stakes in lieu of their services. What they do to earn their share may include suppressing an ambitious candidate who can cause an electoral upset, and drawing an influx of votes to engineer a turnaround in the fortunes of a favoured candidate.

The favoured lot know what the game is and are expected to work for bigger goals.

S

station. He did not end his fast till Gawli’s mother offered him a glass of juice. At his annual Dussehra speech at Shivaji Park, Bal Thackeray would routinely call the Maharashtrians among these mobsters ‘Amchi muley’—‘our boys’.

Once in a while, you hear stories about the underworld planning a hit on some erring politician or the other during election time. In early 1999, the Mumbai Police were once left scratching their heads, unable to fathom a firing incident on a yacht during the birthday bash of Sanjay Nirupam, who was then with the Shiv Sena and had yet to jump ship to join the Congress. The party thrown by him was in full swing on a yacht off Madh Island when a man opened fire at someone.

The incident remains shrouded in mystery, but it was alleged that Rohit Verma, Chhota Rajan’s ace lieutenant, was present on the yatch and it was he who had dared do it. The Mumbai Crime Branch investigated the case, but nothing of substance came of it.

Later, Verma fled to Bangkok, where he got killed when Chhota Shakeel’s hit-

o if Arun Gawli and Geeta Gawli discover a love for Congress candidates, you may ascribe it to behind-the-scenes machinations of the mafia-politician nexus

Where there are deals, there are shifts in favour. So if Arun Gawli and Geeta Gawli suddenly discover a love for Congress candidates, you may ascribe it to behindthe-scenes machinations of the mafiapolitician nexus.

In the 1990s, former Shiv Sena MP Mohan Rawle attended the funeral of gangster Amar Naik after he was killed in an encounter on 10 August 1996. Rawle’s loyalty to the mafia cut across gang rivalries. In 1997, when Arun Gawli was booked under the National Security Act, Rawle went on a hunger strike in protest for eight days outside the Agripada police

men made an audacious attempt on Chhota Rajan’s life at Verma’s Sukhumvit Soi residence. While Verma died, Chhota Rajan lived to tell the tale.

The lack of delineation between the mafia and politicians in UP helped the Mumbai mafia in the 1990s. The city’s mobsters would find easy refuge in UP after having committed some crime or the other in Mumbai. And most of the time, the person offering them such safety was a Hindi-belt politician who was also part of the mafia. One of these, for example, was Brij Bhushan Singh, the Samajwadi Party’s MP from Kaiserganj who had fa28 April 2014

sanjay sonkar

once a don Pawan Kumar Pandey campaigns on the streets of Akbarpur on 13 April. He is contesting a Lok Sabha seat on a BSP ticket this time

mously stated that “I am a don and not a politician. I have 40 cases against me, so that makes me a mafia man.”

For once, Singh was neither lying nor exaggerating his connections with the Underworld. For many years, Singh was known in UP as a ‘Dawood man’. His huge house in Gonda district was a safe house for Dawood’s goons on the run.

Singh’s name figures prominently in the statements of Dawood’s killer duo— Sunil Sawant alias Sautya and Subhash Singh Thakur. (While Sautya was killed in Dubai by Chhota Rajan’s men, Thakur is lodged in Fatehgarh jail.)

In fact, Singh’s house in Gonda played a vital role in the famous 1993 split between Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan. Before the two parted ways, Kim Bahadur Thapa, a Shiv Sena corporator who was close to Subhash Singh Thakur of the Dawood gang, was gunned down near Mangatram petrol pump in Bhandup by Rajan’s men. The killers escaped from Mumbai and took refuge in Kathmandu.

28 April 2014

However, at the behest of Thakur, Sautya called them to Singh’s farmhouse in Gonda. Thakur, who was at the time hiding in Singh’s Delhi house, reached Gonda and killed Rajan’s sharpshooters, Diwakar Churi, Amar Avtu and Sanjay Raggad. Later, Singh’s men dumped their bodies in the Sharayu river.

Brij Bhushan Singh, then a BJP MP, was charged under TADA and sent to Tihar.

But in UP, jail is rarely how a mafia career ends. His wife stood in his place and won subsequent elections for him.

H

ere, I should mention Ajai Rai, a member of a gang led by Brijesh Singh (involved in Mumbai’s JJ shoot out of 1992) who has got a Congress ticket for Varanasi this election, pitting him against Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi in this high-profile constituency.

Another gangster, Mukhtar Ansari, with a stack of criminal cases against him, has withdrawn from the fray in favour of Rai, who has won five elections so far and was

once a UP cabinet minister in Rajnath Singh’s BJP government.

Incidentally, while Mumbai gangsters would once flee to UP for refuge, the pattern now works in reverse. The state’s criminal-politicians send their hitmen off to Mumbai after a hit job, to lie low.

In UP, ‘bahubali’—or ‘strong man’—is the euphemism in use for dons with criminal records. Currently, 11 such bahubalis are in the fray for Parliament seats, fighting on behalf of assorted parties in UP. As somebody who can sniff a bahubali from a distance, I would say they are in action all over India in some guise or the other, masquerading as agents of change. According to the Association of Democratic Reforms, one-third of the candidates announced by all political parties till 2 March 2014 have criminal records. Watch out! n S Hussain Zaidi’s recently released book Byculla to Bangkok chronicles the evolution of Maharashtrian mobsters in Mumbai with the tacit patronage of political parties open www.openthemagazine.com 23

HOMECOMING

The Veteran Debutant Arun Jaitley plays the Punjabi to perfection in his maiden parliamentary battle from Amritsar. INDRAJIT HAZRA gets a ride in the BJP leader’s campaign Toyota

A

run Jaitley is fighting a tough contest and a bad throat. There’s a palpable look of worry on his face as the first-time candidate in the Lok Sabha polls fishes into his kurta pockets, comes out empty and asks his fellow passengers inside the white Toyota SUV for throat-relief lozenges.

As a minor panic ensues, with two of his people in the backseat trying to conjure the much-needed palliative from thin air, I check my pockets to see whether I can provide some succour to the man 24 open

being considered the BJP’s second-most important poll candidate. I have no Vicks or Halls lozenges on me and even before Jaitley tells me that he’ll need something sugarless—he is diabetic and has high blood pressure—I put the Alpenliebe caramel toffee back in my pocket. The BJP’s star candidate from Amritsar, embroiled in a high-stakes battle with the Congress’ Amarinder ‘The Captain’ Singh, will just have to grin and bear it as he sets off on another day packed with campaign meetings and roadshows that will hope-

fully pay off on 30 April, Election Day. Earlier, I had noticed a stone pillar bang in front of the entrance of Chadha House, the sprawled-out building on Dhuni Chand Road in central Amritsar that’s usually hired out for parties and weddings but which has since 18 March become the campaign headquarters of Team Jaitley. ‘Har samasya ka hal 100% guarantee sey (For every problem, a solution, 100 per cent guaranteed),’ the vertical scrawl on the pillar reads. In the car next to Jaitley, I wondered whether the 28 April 2014

welcome mat Arun Jaitley is greeted by party supporters on arriving to campaign in Amritsar on 18 March 2014

(corruption) rent the air. It’s a loud auto plastered with Aam Aadmi Party posters and a non-stop blaring message that phutphuts outside Jaitley HQ. I am suddenly made aware that it is election season in Amritsar, with other parties swimming out there.

O

Rana Simranjit Singh/Express archives

services of Bijli Pahalwan, whose problems-solving advertisement I had read on the pillar an hour before, could have come handy for Jaitley.

In a starched white kurta, Jaitley looks under the weather. For the BJP’s top strategist and organisational man, fighting his first parliamentary election means straddling the two disparate but intersecting worlds of state and national politics. Even as a former Cabinet minister, the leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha must have had to shift a gear or two to get the hang of being the proverbial bride and not the bridesmaid for a change.

“I may have not contested in an election before,” he replies, looking sideways at me, “but I have not been alien to elections or to public meetings and rallies.

But yes, this time it means addressing rallies, meeting people and reaching out myself. It’s enjoyable.” And a bit tiring for a 61-year old who has been attending, on average, some 10-12 programmes a day 28 April 2014

since he landed in Amritsar from his hometown Delhi on 18 March. Tiring at least for the throat.

Back in Chadha House, as Jaitley was still getting ready to hit the road, there was a pre-wedding sangeet (musical gathering) aura to the whole proceedings.

People walking in and out, sitting on black cloth-covered sofas in the shamiana (tented) area in the back, cooling themselves with the gusts from pedestal fans, and women’s voices calling out for ‘Nita Mausi’ and ‘Naveen Uncle’.

I spot a heavily made-up woman in heels and what looks like bridalwear walking slowly with Jaitley’s 30-year-old lawyer daughter Sonali as two cameramen accompany them like speech bubbles. I am told she is Ruby Dhalla, the Sikh Canadian parliamentarian who has been hired by Times Now to host the show Politics Uncut. Even as Sonali is replying to Dhalla’s permanently smiling face, I hear a din with the word ‘bhrashtachar’

n Sunday 13 April, the spread-out

lawns and footpaths of Jallianwala Bagh are filled with people: families, couples, friends, schoolchildren. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that 95 years ago at 5.30 pm this same garden was littered with bodies and filled with cries of the dying, all gunned down by Indian soldiers after receiving orders from a representative of the British Raj. I overhear a young man joking with his friend as both stand in front of the preserved wall with bullet marks framed in white paint: “If I paint white frames like these around the holes on our wall, our house can also become a museum.”

There’s a children’s sit-and-draw contest taking place under a shamiana commemorating the 1919 Baisakhi Day massacre and former Punjab Health Minister Laxmi Kanta Chawla is giving a sound bite near the main memorial. Sonali Jaitley, spearheading a BJP youth campaign programme, had earlier come to distribute yellow roses.

Outside the brick wall facade of Jallianwala Bagh, in front of a Pizza Hut outlet, two strapping policemen with their semi-automatics dangling are cracking jokes with a youngster selling T-shirts from a makeshift table. I see the T-shirt seller crumple a Rs 100 note and push it into the palm of one of the policemen. The other cop has already moved on to the next roadside stall.

Farther up the road, away from the nearby Harmandir Sahib, youngsters in yellow T-shirts with Narendra Modi’s stencilled face printed on them are hanging out like college students making some pocket money. They yap with each other as they stand under the shade of big saffron-coloured umbrellas, the kind you see next to hotel swimming pools. Except these ones again bear Modi’s face and the open www.openthemagazine.com 25

slogans ‘Har har Modi; ghar ghar Modi’ (vanquish evil, Modi; in every home Modi) and ‘Namo Namo, PM bano’ (Namo Namo, become PM).

Despite this cornershow of faith in the BJP prime ministerial candidate, here in Amritsar, it’s an old-fashioned two-way electoral fight between two ‘state’ leaders; the ‘Modi factor’, so prevalent in other states, is hardly visible. After he returns to the car having addressed a group of young BJP workers campaigning in slum areas, Jaitley admits as much. “It is a choice between two candidates, between two personalities: the Captain and me. So in that sense, this is a more assembly-style election.”

“But,” he adds, “the Narendra Modi factor does also impact voters. There’s a discernible groundswell of support for me

Congress, many are seeing Amarinder Singh as ‘the change’ here in Amritsar.

The ‘national leader’ turns to me in his seat looking discernibly the ‘Punjab politician’ now. “Look, there are certain features of all alliances that one must acknowledge. A large part of this constituency is rural. The Akali Dal has strong support all across these parts and it has the ability to transfer these votes easily. There may be some segments in the urban areas who are dissatisfied with the current dispensation. In the overall analysis, though, even as far as Amritsar city is concerned, the Captain is not liked,” he says, seemingly more out of faith than belief.

Ever since the Congress nominated a reluctant Amarinder Singh, the Amritsar seat has crackled with the promise of a Goliath versus Goliath contest that’s been rare in these Sameer Sehgal/Hindustan Times/Getty Images elections. The politics has also become, at times, singularly personal. If the Captain has accused Jaitley of being “an outsider”, the BJP leader has described the former Punjab Chief Minister as being “standoffish”, “remote” and “unapproachable”, as well as being an anachronistic exroyal participating in the rough and tumble of a democratic exercise.

But it’s somewhat evident that Jaitley has been affected by Amarinder’s barbs. He has accused the Congressman of cancelling amritsar adoptee Arun Jaitley enters his new home on Green campaign meetings and Avenue; (facing page) members of the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Brigade offer a mace to Jaitley can’t resist telling me that “the Captain doesn’t think anyone’s fit to contest from and the BJP. Also, 16 days away from vot- Punjab unless one has had a few Patiala ing day, as people realise that it’s reason- pegs.” He’s met Amarinder on a few ably certain that there will be an NDA social occasions and finds “his tu-tu, maingovernment at the Centre, voters here main (personal) attacks very surprising, would like someone with direct access to considering the kind of legacy he has. the Central Government in Delhi.”

I’d rather be talking about constructive I ask Jaitley whether he thinks he has issues, rather than engage in negative hitched himself to a ruling ally—the sev- campaigning.” en-year-old Parkash Singh Badal-led Jaitley speaks—and writes in his elecShiromani Akali Dal—that finds itself tion diary blog—quite passionately facing serious anti-incumbency senti- about the need to improve the roads and ments. After all, even with a nationwide infrastructure of Amritsar, to open up anti-incumbency wave facing the trade with Pakistan, and turn Amritsar 26 open

into a tourist destination a la Jaipur. As the car rolls down the highway, dusty streets and cratered side-roads running parallel, he points to a gorgeous, sprawling red stone structure on my side of the window. “Now look at that building.

That’s Khalsa College and to my mind it’s one of the finest educational institutional buildings in the country.” I look at the dusty, cobbled up field in front of the palatial facade. “I have been suggesting that this field be beautified and there be a son et lumiere show started there.”

The car turns moments later and we find ourselves at the mouth of a knobbly lane in the hardscrabble main market of Mustafabad in north Amritsar. Jaitley is ferried on to an open jeep bedecked with rose petals. In fact, the whole area smells of roses even as the lanes are lined by crumbly houses and shops from whose fronts and rooftops I see women leaning out to catch a glimpse of the visitor in his starched white shirt.

The dholaks (drums) that are rolled out to welcome the dignitary drown out all other sounds as a visibly cramped Jaitley sits next to the standing figure of state BJP minister Anil Joshi, whom I recognise from posters. I see a young girl placing her hand against her heart to feel it thump to the drum beats. She smiles at me, a confirmation that elections are also a festival. Even in this festive atmosphere, with buntings strung with fluttering BJP lotuses, posters of ‘Captain Maharaj’ look down imperiously from the walls of some of the houses. By the time Jaitley reaches the dais in a space that suddenly opens up, even the woman pictured on the packets of Ching’s Secret ‘Hunger ki Bajao!’ instant soups hanging from the KS Dairy & Confectionary shop seems to be shouting “Arooon Jaitleee! Zindabad!” The cries of “Ab ki baar...” (This time around...) seem rather wan in comparison.

“W

hy Amritsar?” I ask the man

who has left his home in Delhi’s Kailash Colony to pitch his tent in the Punjab battlefield, early in our conversation. “I’m firmly connected to Amritsar, culturally and personally. I’ve also been politically looking after this place for some time now. So when the party wanted candidates for constituencies in the 28 April 2014

north, the state also thought that I would be a good candidate.” I find his reply dry and tell him so. The sitting Rajya Sabha member from Gujarat becomes slightly more animated and tells me how he has “100 per cent Majhhis ancestry”, referring to his family’s origins in the Majha region of Punjab, of which the district of Amritsar is a part.

“Even though my father belonged to Lahore, my mother was brought up in Amritsar. My nana (mother’s father) was a textile dealer and importer here.

During Partition, in June 1947, my elder sister was born in Amritsar. We have a large family from my mother’s side and I remember as a boy coming here often.”

He seems genuinely excited to present to me another strand of his Amritsar connection. “Although my wife is from Jammu and Kashmir, my father-in-law’s family is from Majitha Mandi right here in Amristar. So you see,” he looks at me triumphantly, “I belong here from all possible sides.”

The previous day, I had gone across to the pleasant, quiet neighbourhood of Green Avenue. The usual dusty buildings of downtown Amritsar suddenly give way to large white bungalows reflecting the bright spring sunshine. Two days before the havan ceremony, the spanking new house, number 343, with its pyramidal dark wood-coloured facade top, is almost ready for its new owners to move in.

28 April 2014

“Perhaps my ability to win polls was earlier less than my utility to organise polls. I’m glad I’m contesting at last”

As I stood in front of the house, watching two men hose and wipe the front gates clean, I found the sticker posted on the entrance—with a picture of Jaitley with Anil Joshi, and small mugshots of Atal Behari Vajpayee, Narendra Modi and Parkash Singh Badal running along the top—spoiling the view. The two-storey house, with the plastic wraps on its ceiling fans yet to be taken off, is not suited to such poll-time vandalism.

A

s a Punjabi who “eats the language

and speaks the food”, Jaitley approves my choice of The Brothers’ Amritsari Dhaba near the Golden Temple. “Yes, Brothers’ is one of the better places to eat in Amritsar,” he tells me as I gorge on the thick, pillow-like Amritsari kulcha topped off with a glass of lassi.

But it’s at another of Amritsar’s famous

eateries that I later hear Jaitley being praised. “The auto-wallas (autorickshaw drivers) are lazy and are always whining, so don’t believe them,” says Surjit Singh, the genial owner of Surjit Food Plaza (earlier, the Makhan Dhaba) on Lawrence Street next to Nehru Shopping Complex.

He is replying to my query about why many people in Amritsar—at least each and every auto-driver I spoke to—insisted that ‘The Captain’ would win. Surjit is sure that what Amritsar needs is Arun Jaitley as its MP. That would give the city a much-needed direct connection with what he believes will be ‘the Modi government’. “Just look at the state of roads outside. Jaitleyji will bring in much development,” he says, adding with a broad grin that breaks out from under his Captain Haddock beard, “He comes here quite regularly.”

I leave the ‘World Famous’ institution carrying packets of fish Amritsari and mutton tikka dry. The picture of Jaitley’s face springing out of a BJP lotus cellophaned on the glass front of the restaurant is literally beaming. I can be pretty sure that Surjit Singh of truly and deliriously divine mutton tikka dry fame will be voting for Jaitley.

Earlier, back inside the campaign Toyota, I ask Jaitley, “Shouldn’t you have made your electoral debut earlier?”

He looks sideways at me, says nothing, and then, looking in front of him again as if speaking of his youth, says, “I can’t say I should have, but I can say I would have liked to have fought elections earlier. I was seriously close to standing for polls in 1977 when Atalji [Vajpayee] wanted me to be a candidate from East Delhi. But I was 24 years old and turned the offer down,” he says. He tells me that he was also, over a period, seriously involved in practising law. “And perhaps,” he says, emphasising the word as if he doesn’t really believe in it, “my ability to win polls was earlier less than my utility to organise polls. So my party decided on my political future. But I’m glad that I’m contesting at last.”

The proof of the pudding will be in the winning on 16 May. But no matter how Amritsar’s latest son fares, it’s impossible not to detect the boyish excitement in the voice of this veteran debutant, however sore-throated from making speeches it may be. n open www.openthemagazine.com 27

GANDHIS

The Poetry of Dynasty and the Prodigal Son

Where Rahul Gandhi is an ancestral memory and Varun Gandhi is the intimate Other.

CHINKI SINHA discovers the dynamics of dynasty as she travels through Amethi, Rae Bareily and Sultanpur photographs by ashish sharma

his father’s son A photograph of the late Rajiv Gandhi arranged on the Amethi-Sultanpur road on 12 April, for Rahul Gandhi’s arrival in Amethi

W

hen they came to annex Awadh,

the last Nawab of Awadh felt he wasn’t ready for badshahat and composed a song about nostalgia, and leaving his city Lucknow.

Babul, mora naihar chhooto jaye...

(Father, this ancestral land is slipping away) Wajid Ali Shah, who ascended the throne in 1847 and was loved by his subjects, might have lived in poverty then. In the divine theory of kingship, as Wajid Ali Shah’s mother said, kings were only answerable to the Almighty. In much of Amethi, not far from Lucknow, nostalgia for what is lost prevails. In their loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, people have forgiven the lackadaisical develop-

28 april 2014

ment in the region. Rahul Gandhi at 43 remains a young son.

In Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi, Amjad Khan, who plays the Nawab, says to his minister that he never told his people he was capable; they knew he was a reluctant ruler. Condemned for debauchery and praised for his love of the arts, the Nawab remains a controversial figure.

Like Rahul Gandhi, the reluctant prince.

Or his cousin Varun Gandhi, who is contesting from neighbouring Sultanpur, a poet, trying to come to terms with the ‘otherness of self’, the title of his debut collection of poems published in 2000.

They are all poets here. The masses, and their beloved rulers, including Rahul Gandhi. The election, and its side effects.

They won’t call them slogans. These are poems, they insist.

In this dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, they speak of Rahul Gandhi fondly. It is not his fault that they are poor, they say. He has a good heart. He has suffered the death of his father, and grandmother. Ultimate sacrifices. He didn’t choose politics as a career. It was his destiny, says Amrit Dubey, who lives in Sultanpur.

Sometimes, Rahul sports a beard. At other times, he is clean-shaven. He is almost child-like, earnest, when he is meeting people here. The women love him most. They call him ‘Rahul Bhaiya’ and tease him about getting a wife.

When they showered rose petals on his cavalcade on 12 April when he came to Amethi to file his nomination, he smiled, and folded his hands. Sometimes, an eager man or woman would reach out, and he would take their hands in his, and utter words of solace, or promises.

People here attribute everything to the Gandhi dynasty. The list starts from the Sharda Canal on the Sai river in Rae Bareily. In these parts, they are the photogenic poor, for whom India’s welfare schemes matter. Like the Right of All Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, the MNREGA, free rations under the BPL scheme, etcetera.

Development is a matter of perspective.

The welfare state, or overall growth?

In urban elite circles, this is being debated. Such questions elude most here.

Democracy, or dynasty. Rulers aren’t always tyrants, they say. Like Wajid Ali Shah, says Dubey. When he was crowned the Nawab, Awadh was well past its days of glory.

O

n 12 April, they stood at the Amhat

air base with withering rose petals in their hands. From time to time, they would cover it with the loose end of their synthetic saris, and wipe the sweat off their foreheads. The women had come from various villages, and were part of the ground cadre of the Indian National Congress in Amethi, the Nehru-Gandhi bastion in Uttar Pradesh. The plane that was carrying Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi was delayed almost two hours.

Someone told me to write there were ‘10 lakh’ people who had gathered to welcome the prince when he came to file his open www.openthemagazine.com 29

nomination papers. But there were only a few hundred.

In spite of the heat, Krishna Devi, 55, had turned poetic. “Khaye Congress ki, duhai kare doosre ki. Nahin nahin (They eat off the Congress, but they speak of others.

No way, no way),” she says, and other women cheer her on.

She is in a polyester-blend purple sari with sequins, like the others in synthetic saris. We can’t afford ‘khadi’, she says and winks. That’s a luxury of the rich. “The Gandhi family has given us their blood.

We should be able to give them our sweat.

We will wait until he comes,” she adds.

“Udhar hunkaar rahegi, idhar jhankar rahegi (The roar might be there, but the tinkle is here),” she goes on. She has travelled almost 30 km in the morning to reach the Amhat air base.

The women gathered are part of the Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana, a rights-based welfare scheme that has been dismissed like many others for having failed to uplift the poor. Under the scheme, women run self-help groups which involve micro-finance. Here, in Amethi, more women have gathered than men.

“Soch ko badlo sitarein badal jayenge.

Nazar ko badlo, nazarein badal jayenge.

Kashtiyan badalne ki zaroorat nahi. Dishaon ko badlo, kinaare badal jayenge (Change your thought, and your stars will change.

Change your perspective, and your vistas will change. There’s no need to change the tides. Change your direction, and the shores will change),” she said, adding this is what Rahul Gandhi had said.

That poetic note again.

Krishna Devi dismisses the other candidates with a wave of her hand. AAP candidate Kumar Vishwas, who has been attacking the dynasty by calling himself a commoner, the son of a school master, can’t convert them. “Kumar Vishwas ko apne upar vishwas hai, janta ko nahin (Kumar Vishwas believes in himself, but we don’t),” she says.

The BJP has fielded Smriti Irani in Amethi, but as the election approaches in this Nehru-Gandhi bastion, she is beginning to fade out.

When Rahul Gandhi finally arrives, an iron gate separates them. Through the chinks, they see him, and the steel grey roads turns pink as Rahul Gandhi along with his mother Sonia Gandhi and sister 30 open

Priyanka Gandhi and her husband Robert Vadra set out on a 40-km road show to Gauriganj in Amethi, a constituency that was handed to him by his mother. Almost 16 kilometres of this falls within Sultanpur constituency, where his estranged cousin Varun Gandhi is contesting the election on a BJP ticket.

At some point, Krishna Devi is pushed to the second row. Rahul Gandhi doesn’t stop here. The SUVs roll out. One by one.

Covered in rose petals. A glimpse of Rahul Gandhi. Nothing more. Perhaps he saw her, she said.

Sultanpur was once Sanjay Gandhi’s constituency. This is a story of dynasties, and their reluctant heirs, lonely too, pitched in battles of claims and ideology.

They say there is a wave. A Modi wave.

Like a tsunami, it has come to claim them. Like the British came for the last Nawab of Awadh. They said he was unfit to rule. They said he hadn’t cared much for development. Sonia Gandhi is a reluctant politician, they say. They are grateful she has come with her son. They will resist the wave.

So far, the cousins have stayed out of each other’s way. But Priyanka Gandhi tells the people that Varun Gandhi has gone astray, and urges them not to vote for the BJP in Sultanpur. That sets off a battle of words in Delhi. Later, Varun would say in Sultanpur that his decency should not be mistaken for weakness, and that he hasn’t crossed the “Laksman rekha”. He is there to work, he said.

It is time he returned, they say in Sultanpur. In this constituency, he is pitched in battle against Rani Ameeta Singh, the second wife of Sanjay Singh, the erstwhile king of Amethi who is con-

People here attribute everything to the Gandhi dynasty. The list starts from the Sharda Canal on the Sai river in Rae Bareily. In these parts, they are the photogenic poor, for whom the welfare schemes matter

testing on a Congress ticket. He is now a Rajya Sabha MP from Assam. But the Singhs must lay claim to the land of their ancestors. The hangover is too much for democracy to fix.

Near the barricade at Gauriganj in Amethi, people have gathered again. A lone man is deriding the dynasty. The women chide him, but Ram Awadh Yadav continues. “Have you seen Chandigarh? I want the formula from Rahul Gandhi,” he says. “Rahul Gandhi drives his Fortuner. We have to walk in this heat and dust.”

“Why don’t you fight then?” Rita Devi mocks him. “He gives us something each time he comes. You are standing on the road that was built by him,” she says.

“Seven national highways intersect here.

He gave us a Central Reserve Police Force centre, two units of Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd, et cetera...”

As Rahul Gandhi leaves, they turn poetic again. “Hawa mein bindaas udd raha hai Modi. 16 May ko ruk jayegi hawa.

Gir jayega Modi (Modi is fluttering high in the breeze. This breeze will stop on 16 May and he will fall flat),” says Rehaan Zaidi.

About 177 km from here, the BJP’s Narendra Modi is contesting from Varanasi. But ‘the wave’ has skipped these parts. Those who ride the wave have lost the ground beneath their feet, Rita Devi says.

Priyanka Gandhi returned to Amethi on 15 April. She has been planning the campaign strategy at Munshiganj. She will start from Rae Bareily, her mother’s constituency. Her unwillingness to enter politics has made them want her even more. She, who looks like her grandmother in her cropped hair and cotton saris, is the one they want to see, touch, and talk to.

“T

hey come to learn politics in

Rae Bareily,” says Munawwar Ali of Narai village in Sonia Gandhi’s constituency. “Even Indira Gandhi lost here once.” That was 1977.

They are sitting at a chai stall.

Nostalgia, which is in abundance here, makes them recount stories. “Rajiv Gandhi had come here on a visit before he was killed. He was in an open-air jeep. Our Congress leaders are simple 28 april 2014

A grand welcome Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi are greeted with a shower of rose petals in Amethi, the latter’s constituency, on 12 April

people. See, the Vidhan Sabha election in UP is a different game. That’s when local issues take the forefront. But when it comes to the Lok Sabha, we are fiercely loyal,” he says.

Not far from Azizganj in a village in Bachrawan, Ram Narayan lives here in a ramshackle house. The walls have crumbled. There is no roof. His daughter dropped out of school to look after his three children after their mother died. He is a daily-wage labourer and survival is an uphill task. But he says the Congress has come to their aid. With the NREGA and BPL cards. At least, there’s some food, he says.

Ram Ketar is sitting outside his home in the village. He is disillusioned. “What has the Congress done?” he asks. “I will not vote. There is inflation. How do we go on?”

There is dissent, but in Rae Bareily, Sonia Gandhi holds her ground. “Like Indira Gandhi served us, her daughter-inlaw is doing the same,” says Shivkesh Kumar, a truck driver in Dalmau. In 198182, he says, Indira Gandhi laid the foundation of a bypass from Dalmau to Fatehpur. Two years ago, Sonia Gandhi completed the project. “They remember.

We remember too,” he says.

28 april 2014

When Indira Gandhi lost the election here in 1977, the BHEL plant was shifted from here to Jagdishpur. For 15 years, nobody asked after them, says Ratnesh Shukla, a jeweller in Munshiganj market in Rae Bareily. He counts the industrial units that have been set up because of the Congress: ITI Limited, Rail Coach Factory, Birla Cement Factory, Indo Gulf Fertilisers, NTPC Ltd, Reliance Cement, etcetera. “We have a NIFT (National Institute of Fashion Technology), and AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) is coming up,” he says. In Lalganj, the Rail Coach Factory employs about 2,000 people. It is the benevolence of the dynasty. That’s how they see it.

I

n one of the poems in The Otherness of Self, Varun Gandhi compared himself to a kite caught in the skies. This was when his mother started introducing him in the political circles.

In this karmabhoomi, blood and estrangement are invoked. In case of Varun Gandhi, they speak of how his mother waited on the side of the road with four suitcases and a child who was running a high fever. He was just 100 days old when his father Sanjay Gandhi died.

“She was just kicked out of the house.

Akbar Ahmed (Dumpy) helped her,” says someone. “I know the story. My heart bleeds for Varun Gandhi.”

Alay Rasool says he is an avid reader of national history, and knows his facts.

Now that Varun Gandhi has come to claim what is his legacy, people will return to him his rightful place. Just then, the shopkeeper hands over a print of a newspaper article in Rashtriya Sahara about the prophesies that have come true. It says how in 1980 Maneka Gandhi had predicted on a visit that her son would one day stand from Sultanpur. We have been waiting since, Rasool says.

Anurag Raghuvanshi says Varun is just like his father. Once Sanjay Gandhi had visited his house in 1980. He was a young boy then. The people of Sultanpur owe it to the only son. Why should Rahul and Priyanka get everything?

Yet again, the roads are paved with rose petals. Not orange genda flowers. All of a sudden, the fragrance of roses assail the air, and 34-year-old Varun Gandhi emerges, atop an SUV. Here, they were only trying match the scale of welcome accorded to Rahul Gandhi. Rose against rose. Brother against brother. Dust and petals. Cheers and slogans. The son has open www.openthemagazine.com 31

the other gandhi Varun Gandhi addresses a meeting in Sultanpur on 15 April after filing his nomination Vishal Srivastav/Express Archives

returned. There is jubilation.

Outside the Sanjay Gandhi Guest House in Munshiganj in Amethi, people have gathered because Priyanka Gandhi is holding meetings with grassroots workers inside. A man slips in a piece of paper with a poem, written by one Rajrani Pal, a former block leader in Amethi. It is titled ‘Maa Bete ka Balidan’ (The Sacrifice of Mother and Son).

Nehru ji ki gulab vatika mein do aise phool khile hai Mata Sonia-Rajiv ji ki godh mein khele khaye aur pale hai Bamo se chithre hue pitaji, yeh baat Priyanka ko bahut khali Rahul kehte dil na toote, desh na toote, chaahe jitna ho balidaan Bacha lo apna Hindustan, sambhalo apna Hindustan.

(Two flowers blossomed in Nehru’s rose garden They played and grew up in mother Sonia and father’s Rajiv’s laps The father was blown to pieces by bombs, this affected Priyanka a lot Rahul says the heart mustn’t break, the country mustn’t break, no matter what the sacrifice Let’s save our Hindustan, let’s take care of our Hindustan) One heir is forgotten—Varun Gandhi.

A

fter Varun exits the stage, a local

BJP worker takes over, and shouts ‘Jai Shri Ram’ from the stage. Rose petals in

32 open

the air, lotus flags shimmer in the sun.

During his short speech at a meeting in Sultanpur, he had said religion should not be a discriminating factor. Only a fleeting reference to Modi was made. A man comes forward and says Sultanpur will do justice to Varun Gandhi.

A BJP MP from Pilibhit, Varun Gandhi invokes his father’s name. They haven’t forgotten him, have they? He is their son.

They should treat him like one.

“Vanshvaad kam karna parega,” he shouts.

Dynasty must decline.

“I have seen ups and downs. More suffering than happiness,” he goes on.

“Politics isn’t everything. My dharma is service of this country.”

Such towns are stuck in a time warp.

On the crumbling walls, there is a film poster of Inquilab starring Ajay Devgn.

Elsewhere, there are films like Queen that celebrate women’s empowerment. But here, in this dusty town in the hinterland of UP, things move slowly. Or not at all.

Once they had seen glory. It seems like Sultanpur is pitched in a battle of fame against Amethi.

Like Amethi, Sultanpur doesn’t have much to show for itself. But Amethi became famous because the Gandhis made it their constituency, Anurag says. “Now, it is Sultanpur’s turn,” he adds.

Over SMS, Varun Gandhi says he doesn’t give interviews to the media.

He shall speak to the people. Unlike Rahul Gandhi, Varun has rented a place in Shastri Nagar in Sultanpur, and stays

back for meetings. After his hate speech debacle in the last Lok Sabha election, Varun doesn’t invoke religion. It is the family name that will do it for him.

In the last Lok Sabha polls, the BJP candidate polled only around 45,000 votes.

Sanjay Singh won in Sultanpur on a Congress ticket in 2009. The BJP had won the seat thrice between 1991 and 1998.

The BSP won in 1999 and 2004.

But in Varun Gandhi’s ‘karmabhoomi’, the others may fade out this time.

His father had represented Amethi from 1980 to 1981 before his death in a plane crash. Rajiv Gandhi won the seat in the 1981 by-election. Both families kept out of each other’s ways after 1984, when Sanjay Gandhi’s widow Maneka Gandhi contested the seat as an Independent leader of the Sanjay Gandhi Vichar Manch against Rajiv Gandhi but lost to him by a huge margin.

In 2009, Varun Gandhi rose to prominence after he won from Pilibhit. After he praised Rahul Gandhi’s work in Amethi, he was criticised. That’s how it is. On one side, there is the estranged family. On the other, the political family, the Sangh Parivar. The self, and the otherness of it.

Sometimes I wished I lived alone and no one came by my thoughts trapped in confusion Like a kite in the sky Imagine being caught in the sky...

Wajid Ali Shah lives on. In the two heirs who invoke their legacies. One, a reluctant heir, the other, also a poet. n 28 april 2014

FIEF

The Enduring Mystique of Naveen Patnaik As the Odisha Chief Minister is all set for a fourth term, ULLEKH NP, travelling across the state, finds out why one of India’s suavest politicians is the smartest as well

MANEESH AGNIHOTRI/India Today Images

T

he weather is extremely humid

and the afternoon scorching here in the small town of Brahmagiri, near Puri, the coastal Odisha city considered holy by Hindus. People, mostly poor and emaciated, had crowded hours earlier alongside several shacks selling tea, and when the chopper appeared in the sky a little further, their faces lit up.

It landed 10 minutes later, kicking up a storm of dust with the vigour of its rotor blades. When the man in white kurtapyjama and chappals stepped out, people craned their necks, let out screams of joy, and surged forward to see the state’s most high-profile leader of his generation.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik was soon on a road show, waving and smiling. Then he spoke pithily through the microphone in accented Oriya: “The BJD (Biju Janata Dal) has the blessings of the four crore people of the state and will perform well [in elections to both the state Assembly and Lok Sabha].” The crowd— including swarms of party workers who milled along the narrow roads of this dusty town—broke into applause. “He is different. But he wants to help us,” said Satyavrata Das, a first-time voter, after Patnaik was gone.

Chief Minister since 2000, Patnaik had been on the road for 21 days, visiting 21 Lok Sabha and 132 of the 147 Assembly constituencies in this eastern state. Some places, he visited twice, Brahmagiri among them. The 67-year-old, who is seeking re-election for a fourth term, is an oddball of a politician. The Doon School alumnus does not fit the usual mould of politicians who establish themselves as regional satraps. Unlike his father, the late Biju Patnaik, he is not a grassroots leader. Though he is warm, he is not someone who mingles easily with the masses. He is no good orator either.

His Oriya is not better than Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s Hindi, BJD leaders concede in a lighter vein. “All that is true. But people thought that unlike the leaders who spoke their language and looted them, including relief funds following the 1999 super cyclone, Patnaik is someone who is very different.

Until he came along, the state was ruled by middlemen who acted at the behest of politicians. The joke here is that it is good he doesn’t speak Oriya, the only language that middlemen knew,” laughs Political 38 open

Under Modi’s Spell BJP volunteers at a rally in Dhamanagar of Bhadrak district

Science Professor Narottam Gaan of Utkal University. In fact, a pre-poll survey by Chennai Mathematical Institute’s director Rajeeva Karandikar has reported that Patnaik as an individual enjoys more popularity than the state government led by the BJD, the party he founded in December 1997.

There is, however, talk that the party will likely score less than it did in 2009, thanks to anti-incumbency against Patnaik’s 14-year-rule and the rising popularity of the BJP’s PM candidate Narendra Modi—a phenomenon that is expected to have an impact on poll outcomes in this state as well, especially in its western region comprising Kalahandi, Bolangir, Bargah, Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Mayurbhanj and so on. This is a region where sentiments of being ignored by coastal Odisha run high. It is also an area that the BJD had let the BJP focus on, back when the two parties were allies (it was an alliance that ended a month before the 2009 elections).

Political analysts say the BJP might gain in strength here this time around. In the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the BJD won 14 of the state’s 21 Lok Sabha seats and secured 108 of its 147 Assembly seats. The Congress won seven and the BJP none.

P

rofessor Gaan feels the BJD’s tal-

ly may come down, but it will most likely retain power in the state. He agrees that the key to such prospects is the mystique that surrounds Patnaik and the perception that he is pro-poor. “It may have waned a little over the years, but it is still there,” he notes.

Is there a ‘Naveen mystique’?

Yes, of course, says a former bureaucrat based in Cuttack who has closely watched Patnaik for years. “Biju Patnaik himself never thought that his son would make it big in politics and therefore didn’t launch him in politics. Maybe he wanted to keep his family away, but it’s no secret that he thought Naveen un28 april 2014

organisational matters of the BJD in the state. “This was because Naveen knew nothing and we had to handle things for him. Maybe after I have left the BJD, he had to work a little and adapt himself to the new situation. Otherwise he knew nothing about Odisha and its people,” alleges this former Patnaik confidant who, after resigning from the BJD two years ago—following a coup attempt to unseat Patnaik while he was away in London—formed a new political outfit, the Odisha Jana Morcha.

Two BJD leaders Open spoke to contend that Mohapatra did “have a lot of responsibilities in hand” while he was with the BJD. They argue that it doesn’t mean that Patnaik was unaware of what was happening. As Panda points out, the BJD president had won two general elections before Mohapatra began to associate himself closely with the BJD. Being Biju Patnaik’s personal secretary, Mohapatra knew the lay of the land and was undoubtedly of great help to Patnaik, who bestowed a lot of powers on him, says Panda. “But that doesn’t mean Patnaik hadn’t adapted to new situations,” says the Kendrapada MP, em-

fit for politics,” he says. Some other BJD leaders that Open spoke to subscribe to this view. One of them, asking not to be named, says, “It only proves that Naveen is here on his own, not because he was promoted by his father. That he inherited his father’s legacy is altogether a different matter.”

Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda, a BJD Member of Parliament from Kendrapara who was one of those who helped Patnaik found the BJD, admits that the CM has endeared himself to the masses partly because of what people don’t know about him. “I think [the mystique] does work.

He is an introvert (unlike Biju Patnaik), and people gave him a lot of benefit of doubt initially … he soon adapted to the life of a politician,” avers Panda.

Opinions on his adaptive ability cut both ways. Pyarimohan Mohapatra, the discredited former BJD leader who enjoyed sweeping powers in the Patnaik regime until 2012, has long claimed that he was the one who stepped in to handle 28 april 2014

isters very often and that leaves ministers and other leaders a little fidgety when it comes to committing anything wrong, be it questioning Patnaik or indulging in corruption,” he adds.

Patnaik’s strategy seems to have paid off, says a senior BJD leader, speaking on condition of anonymity: “He could even be mean to some of his loyalists just to create an aura of unpredictability about himself.” Patnaik, it is alleged, has lately been cold to Panda, a loyalist and family friend. “It is Patnaik’s way of keeping his own people on tenterhooks and demanding further loyalty,” says this leader.

Panda rubbishes such talk, saying, “I have also heard of this rumour. Such rumours were there when my Rajya Sabha term ended and when I was looking for a Lok Sabha seat.” Kendrapada is one of the safest seats for the BJD in the state—even in the elections held after the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress couldn’t make inroads here.

Yet, there are murmurs. Says another bureaucrat, also speaking anonymously, “Naveen doesn’t trust many people for a long period. He runs affairs with the help of a few.”

“

I think the mystique does work.

He is an introvert, unlike Biju Patnaik, and people gave him a lot of benefit of doubt initially Jay Panda BJD MP

phasising that the Chief Minister had overcome the crisis of Mohapatra’s coup attempt even though he was overseas. “I was in Australia and [Patnaik] in London, but he worked so hard to defuse the crisis, and he did. I coordinated closely with him throughout,” says Panda, seated in a village home in his constituency hours before the election campaign is to end.

Meanwhile, Professor Gaan says that Patnaik uses a “certain strategy” to “demand extreme loyalty” from his party leaders so as to consolidate power. “He shuffles the cabinet and council of min-

E

ver since he parted ways with

Mohapatra, Patnaik has in place some senior bureaucrats who even BJD ministers say call the shots in the Odisha government. In fact, it is not unusual to run into ministers in Bhubaneswar who say that they just hold ceremonial positions, while the real responsibilities of governance rest with these bureaucrats.

“Senior IAS officer VK Pandian is the new Mohapatra,” says BJP senior leader Dharmendra Pradhan. The BJP had lodged a formal complaint with Odisha’s Chief Electoral Officer against Pandian, open www.openthemagazine.com 39

Biswaranjan Rout/AP

slipping away Rahul Gandhi waves to the crowd as he arrives to address a public meeting at Bhatapada in Cuttack district

accusing him of managing the entire election campaign of the ruling BJD and functioning like an office-bearer of the party. In a letter to the election commissioner, the BJP’s state unit had said that Pandian was misusing his official power and machinery in violation of the Model Code of Conduct for elections.

Besides Pandian, other bureaucrats who are close to the CM include Chief Secretary BK Patnaik, Principal Secretary AP Padhi, and Home Secretary UN Behera. Pandian and others have denied the charges.

Anoop Mohanty, a Bhubaneswarbased driver who has driven Patnaik around on campaign trails, says that the Chief Minister may be stern and ruthless with his colleagues but is warm and unassuming with the common man. “He would sit in the front seat next to me and take my permission before lighting his favourite Triple Five cigarette. He also enquires after members of my family and asks if I have eaten or not,” says he.

Several Odisha voters who Open met— in Dhamanagar, Bhadrak district, and Phulbani in Kandhamal, apart from Balangir—feel that Patnaik is revered 40 open

by the common man largely for his ‘simple ways’. This perception helps, BJD leaders say. Patnaik, a man of taste, may look modest thanks to his attire and composure, but the leader is highly Westernised and has expensive tastes, agree party leaders.

He can get as dismissive and enigmatic as anyone, adds a person who has been close to the Chief Minister. Some time ago, at the end of a ‘briefing’ by a bureaucrat who passionately narrated a major crisis and differences of opinion among senior bureaucrats, Patnaik is said to have asked the officer whether he liked the new curtains in his office that he had handpicked himself.

Some of his close associates say there

is more to his behaviour than meets the eye. “Which perhaps explains his evolution to maturity as a politician,” says a powerful bureaucrat, asking not to be named because he is not authorised to speak to the media. After all, for someone who used to zip in and out of the country frequently and had in his charmed social circuit celebs such as Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, to name a few, Patnaik travelled abroad only once after taking over as Chief Minister. It was when he was away to hardsell the state as an investment destination in 2012 that the coup attempt was made.

The eternal bachelor’s reluctance to travel abroad has been ascribed by his

“

We are no longer interested in a [post-poll] tie-up with the BJD and will have no truck with this gentleman (Patnaik) KV Singh Deo STATE BJP PRESIDENT 28 april 2014

rivals and some of his partymen to his lack of trust in people around him. But BJD leaders such as Panda find the accusation weird. So does Professor Gaan, who reasons, “He has inherited Biju Patnaik’s legacy and whether he is insecure or not, it is not easy for rivals within or outside his party to pin him down.” Patnaik, party insiders say, gets ‘political advice’ from his older sister Gita Mehta, wife of Sonny Mehta, head of the Alfred A Knopf publishing house, and other intellectuals based in India and abroad. Open could not independently verify these claims, though it is widely known that Patnaik was a literary type popular in American and British intellectual circles before he assumed his political avatar. He has three published books to his credit as an author: A Second Paradise: Indian Country Life 1590–1947; A Desert Kingdom: The People of Bikaner, and The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India.

A senior Congress leader from Odisha agrees that his party is in a bad spot. It is riven with factionalism, and desertions to the ruling party camp have hurt morale.

In early March, rendering a huge blow to the party, Odisha opposition leader Bhupinder Singh (and its legislature party secretary), joined the BJD. “The wind is clearly blowing against my party,” admits the Congress leader. BJP leader Pradhan says that the very fact that Srikant Jena, once a tireless anti-Congressman, is at the helm of affairs of the Congress in the state speaks of the party’s predicament.

The decline of the Congress seems to worry some BJD leaders in western Odisha who fear that with Modi being the favourite for PM, the BJP would replace the Congress as its main rival in the state and gain an edge in the Lok Sabha polls. Political analysts have suggested that Odisha, which usually votes ‘in a similar pattern’ in both Assembly and Lok Sabha polls, may not do so this time round. “There is a Modi wave in some parts of Odisha,” agrees Niranjan Rai, a Congress symapthiser from Jagatsinghpur, where a Rs 52,000 crore POSCO project is slated to come up soon.

“If the BJP had put up better candidates, they would have stood a better chance,” he adds. According to projections by Rajeeva Karandikar, 33 per cent of voters in Odisha back Modi for PM while only 12 per cent support Patnaik.

28 april 2014

Pradhan says that the BJP will ben- of 1 per cent. Women’s self-help groups, efit from the Congress’ decline in the street vendors and small traders are also state and anti-incumbency against the to be offered subsidised loans if the BJD Patnaik government, even as a ‘Modi is re-elected. wave’ sweeps the country. According to Mohapatra believes such announceconservative forecasts, the BJP, which ments betray Patnaik’s insecurities as he lost all Lok Sabha seats it contested in faces the polls. “He has taken a lot of credOdisha last time, is likely to almost dou- it for Central schemes. It is a tragedy that ble its vote percentage (it won 17 per cent the Congress is so ineffective that it can’t of all votes in the state back in 2009). spread the word,” he charges.

For their part, BJD leaders are worried The BJD has campaigned tirelessly on that Modi coming to power may empow- its ‘record’ of having implemented federer the state BJP unit, which has been de- al schemes fully and properly. The ruling manding probes of alleged irregularities party has also showcased what it claims in the awarding of licences and reported were ‘highly effective measures’ that collusion of middlemen with the ruling saved thousands of lives when cyclone party. The BJD has denied any wrong-doing. Of late, hostiliDEA/G. NIMATALLAH/Getty Images ties have heightened between the two former allies. “We are no longer interested in a [postpoll] tie-up with the BJD, and will have no truck with this gentleman (Patnaik),” state BJP president KV Singh Deo said recently.

Diwakar Malik, who runs a grocery show near Chauliaganj in Cuttack, says that while the perception of Patnaik being pro-poor may draw voters, businesses in the state are feeling sideswiped by the Chief Minister.

“Entrepreneurs and businessmen find it extremely difficult to air their problems with the Chief Minister. He has his favourites and doesn’t entertain anyone else. There is hardly any access,” in the words of a senior corporate executive based holy city Temple of Lord Jagannath, Puri in Bhubaneswar. BJD leaders such as Panda dismiss such complaints as wild exaggerations, argu- Phailin hit the state last year.

The BJP is unimpressed. “He has all the ing that the BJD government focuses on both growth and development. He reels weaknesses of a regional leader who eiout numbers to establish that the state ther lets the family or a handful of buhad the fastest rate of growth on various reaucrats handle things,” says Pradhan, “There is no democracy here in this state.” social indicators under Patnaik’s rule.

Perhaps he is right. But if Patnaik is Patnaik’s efforts to prove his pro-poor credentials have prompted rivals to call even slightly nervous, he betrays no his party’s poll manifesto ‘an eyewash’. sign of it. As he smiles at people standThis document promises assistance to ing a short distance from Brahmagiri’s turn all makeshift houses into perma- famous Alarnath Temple, the once-renent structures. It envisages setting up a luctant politician looks pleased with shelter security mission. It also promis- himself—and ready for another term as es farmers crop loans at an interest rate Chief Minister. n open www.openthemagazine.com 41

MISSING

Searching for Sushma In a campaign that is outright macho, DIVYA GUHA in Vidisha is frustrated by an absence called Sushma Swaraj

T

o misquote The Beatles, here is a

nowhere man sitting behind his desk making nowhere plans for nobody. He has something of a marble wall about him, too. His starched white button-down shirt barely contains his motionless potbelly. The three-room outhouse where he has his office is walled off from Sushma Swaraj’s fabulously landscaped Bhopal residence, a governmentendowed residential estate in this City of Lakes. This Spartan annexe seems not so much an office for Satish Gupta, Swaraj’s Personal Secretary, or ‘PS’, than an outpost to keep trespassers—and nowadays especially the press—away.

I have travelled across the country at Gupta’s beckoning to see ‘madam’, as he calls her. This is where Swaraj is known to monitor her constituency of Vidishanagar, whose centre lies three hours away. Absences are bound to result from the division of her time between her duties as Leader of the Opposition and as an MP. A compulsive micromanager, she is said to have worked hard, though often by remote, for her constituency.

Gupta is blinking sanguinely, saying ‘they’ had no idea why madam cancelled plans to visit her constituency, and that he was under no obligation to give any further details. “She is not talking to the press until voting ends.” And that is that.

I am being stonewalled into dejection, and all I can really say is: “That’s a shame.”

This vexes him: “Please don’t use such a word. I find it offensive.”

“What word?” I ask, and with great difficulty, he says, “Sh-shame. This is not a 42 open

decent word.” I am nonplussed the way a child in 1930s Germany might have been on being called a ‘dirty Jew’, overtaken by incomprehension. “Oh, I mean it’s a pity.

Same thing. It’s just English,” I fumble in defence. In real terms, I have said nothing to offend, but the rules seem strange and new. Was he dodging the real issue, that of madam’s absence?

Maybe it is because of Swaraj’s openly secret ‘rivalry’ with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi that she is choosing to keep a low profile in the national media.

Swaraj is known to pick fights when troubled by her conscience; she often chooses to differ on issues such as less than squeaky clean members of other parties joining the BJP. Her gallant pluckiness seems to make her but also mar her. Widely appreciated for her oratory skills, honed since her teenage years growing up in Ambala Cantonment with her father, a prominent Rashtriya Swayam Sewak, it is not surprising that when she speaks, people listen. Self-possessed, dignified and often rather fearless, she is said to rile people with her forthrightness. But even she picks her battles, having recently been obliged to pull her punches at Narendra bhai, as she calls Modi.

idisha sabha is divided into eight villages and it takes approximately five hours to drive across it. It has within its boundaries 1.6 million voters, of whom just over half are men. The larg-

V

est group of men and women is aged 20 to 29 years, followed by the group aged 30 to 39 years. Like much of India, in this constituency, too, women aged between 20 and 29 are either being groomed for marriage or are young mothers. But in a not uncommon digression, Anita Jain is working and studying.

As she sits sharing a Rs 20 plate of sabudana khichdi with a classmate at Rajbhog Restaurant in Madhavganj, Vidisha’s town centre, Jain shares some thoughts on politics. She praises policies introduced by the state’s BJP Chief Minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan: the chaste sounding ‘Ladli Lakshmi’ (for poor urban families) or ‘Gaon ki Beti’ (for poorer villagers), and the ‘Kanyadaan or Nikaah Yojana’—schemes aimed at girls and their long-suffering parents, saddled with the responsibility of getting them good husbands at unaffordable expenses. The first offers lumpsum cash when a girl is born. The second sponsors mass weddings, where pandits or maulvis conduct nuptials for cash-strapped parents 28 April 2014

thumping? “Dabe toh huay hain (They are under pressure),” Jain acknowledges.

But, after some thought, he adds: “lekin agar dus-baarah Mussalman lathi le kar niklein, toh saari dukanein band ho jaati hain (but if a dozen or so Muslims come out with their sticks, shops shut down).”

I

standing, still Sushma Swaraj submits her nomination papers to the Raisen District Electoral Officer

on an auspicious date calculated with secular consensus. Cash-gifts of Rs 15,00025,000 are handed over to the families of girls, with the addendum that benefactors become BJP members.

The chatty and politically aware Jain travels daily from Lalitpur to Vidisha town—a three hour trip each way—for diploma lessons in higher secondary school teaching. She hopes that, at the end of the course, she will get a teaching job (‘all subjects’) that will pay her Rs 13,000, as compared to her current apprenticeship, which earns her a Rs 5,000 stipend. “In UP you get paid much more and the starting salary there is Rs 21,000,” she says, adding that a BJP government at the Centre might repair this discrepancy of pay across these neighbouring states and get a bigger share of the Centre’s kitty for schools. She does not blame Chouhan, though, and is grateful for his policy moves, saying that Swaraj should have been more active in her constituency. All in all, she is quite sure her vote will go to the BJP, and that Swaraj will become 28 April 2014

an incidental beneficiary there of.

Skulking about the eatery is its bearded seventy-something proprietor Vijay Kumar Jain, who sits down with me as we talk about the saffron fervour overtaking Vidisha town. Several BJP workers are milling about with orange dots on their foreheads, a mark of their belonging to the political club that seems to be having its day across the state.

As things stand, the advertising space in the town and on National Highway 86 seems to be dominated by BJP hoardings, with few Congress party ones. In Bhopal, Swaraj is nowhere to be seen in the BJP ads. And in Vidisha, Modi and Swaraj feature in several separate hoardings, but hardly ever together. On BJP hoardings across the region, Swaraj’s downwardtilted smiling face appears often next to Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s shining visage and even next to Vidhan Sabha candidate Kalyan Singh Thakur’s, but rarely near Modi’s.

Was the Muslim population in Vidisha at all discomfited by all the Hindu tub

n Vidisha’s bazaar, a crowd is gath-

ering. Traffic barriers are placed at one end of the narrow road in the busy marketplace. A man starts to beat his damru to draw attention to his magician’s act— part of the BJP’s effort to make its campaign ‘interactive’—during which he transforms a 100-rupee note in a velvet bag into a BJP flag.

Two Muslim girls also seem to be demonstrating Modi fatigue. They don’t stop to share their pre-election thoughts with me as they prepare to cast their votes on 24 April. “Not interested,” one mutters from behind her veil.

Not far, in Bajariya, a Muslim neighbourhood, I see several older Muslim gentlemen sitting outside their carpentry, auto repair and other shops offering handiwork services, but they, too, decline comment: “It is my kartavya (duty) to vote but it will not be right for me to discuss my choice and thoughts with you.”

Over at the BJP party office, not too far away, there is much activity in the corridors, and local journalists are buzzing about with cameras and microphones.

Party officials stand out as nearly all of them look like they just stepped out of a puja, foreheads resplendent with that ubiquitous orange tilak.

And what is Swaraj bringing to the campaign in this ‘safe’ BJP state, where the party has remained undefeated since 2003.

Not much, except her name and face. She could well be a hologram, not a successful politician who scored a massive victory in the 2009 election, taking nearly 80 per cent of all votes (the Congress runner-up got a paltry 4 per cent).

As in constituencies across the country, the candidate-shaped gaps in Vidisha, too, will be filled by Modi’s hologram— uber-realistic 3D shows lasting hours in which the mascot of the BJP campaign is ogled, venerated and thunderously applauded. n open www.openthemagazine.com 43

online

Survival of the Savviest Elections in the Age of Data Power Aanchal Bansal

“I

admit we resigned suddenly...

no one expected us to and people were shocked with that... the decision to resign was fine, but it came as a shock. If we had to go to the people and explain, they would have been fine with it,” said Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, in response to a question posed by TV news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai on his 49-day stint as Chief Minister of Delhi. Except, they were not on television. They were in cyberspace.

It was an internet discussion—a Google Hangout session.

Five years ago, this may well have been a TV studio affair. Viewers would have comfortably settled in their drawing rooms after a long day’s work in the April heat, and over dinner, or a drink perhaps, 44 open

watched Kejriwal dodge punches delivered by Sardesai and explain his association with gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari in his Lok Sabha contest against Narendra Modi in Varanasi.

This hour-long live discussion, however, was being conducted online on a Monday afternoon, set against a grainy pale wall and accompanied by a nagging hiss that often accompanies outdoor recordings. Also, it wasn’t just the TV anchor who had the interviewee on edge.

Kejriwal, looking tanned and somewhat haggard, had to volley a series of questions posed by net users who had logged onto Hangout to join the action live.

There was a data analyst working with an NGO, a media analyst, and a banker who recently moved to India from

Singapore, among others. In all, there were ten of them, politically inclined and internet savvy, and they had queries about Kejriwal’s economic vision, his stint as Chief Minister of Delhi, and the assorted slaps he has been subjected to.

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s India finds itself in the second

phase of 2014’s Lok Sabha polls, newsroom chatter and tedious discussions have steadily been replaced by relatively vibrant platforms on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google and even YouTube. The social media caters to an electorate that believes in instant messaging and ‘googling’ to find answers. With millions of first-time voters this time round and nearly 100 mil28 april 2014

S

ensing a revenue potential in online

ad material and publicity clips, many social media networking platforms have launched election-related features aimed

at galvanising public opinion and influencing the political discourse. While just over one-tenth of India’s voter population is estimated to be on Facebook, according to figures provided by the company, the platform has about 52,000 pages for politicians and political parties.

The company that runs this mega-website also claims that the BJP’s Narendra Modi has 11.8 million fans on Facebook, second only to Barack Obama, who has about 39.5 million fans—the highest among political figures in the world.

Other features provided by the platform include an election tracker and a feature called ‘Election Menu-Facebook’ that help keep tabs on all candidates and political parties, a feature called ‘Register to Vote’ that spreads awareness of voter rights, along with ‘Facebook Talks’ and ‘Political Lit’, which aim to initiate interactions with election candidates online.

Google’s Hangout session with Modi, the first used by an Indian politician, reportedly led to 166,000 clicks on Modi’s website and more than 70,000 tweets while the Hangout was in progress.

Twitter is virtually an online battleground for politicians and followers trying to outdo each other and taking pot shots at opponents in the 140-character format. Recently, a tweet by BJP leader Rajnath Singh of a poster of himself asking voters to vote for the BJP, and then its replacement with an image of Modi within 33 minutes of the tweet, created a media stir, sparking speculation of a rift within the party. While the IMAI estimates a user base of 33 million on Twitter, some of the most popular Indian hashtags on Twitter are #loksabha, #polls2014 and #elections 2014.

This is also the first time that affidavits declaring assets and other personal de-

tails submitted by Indian politicians had details of their Twitter handles and WhatsApp numbers. Those mentioning their social media details included the former Urban Development Minister and Congress candidate Ajay Maken (for the New Delhi constituency), who remarked last July that social media couldn’t change an election outcome as it hadn’t reached India’s common man.

He may have changed his mind since.

The apathy of the Sheila Dikshit government in Delhi, which failed to gauge the depth of the anger expressed by people via social media during the Anna Hazare movement—and after the Delhi gang-rape—contributed vastly to the rise of Kejriwal’s AAP and staggering defeat of the Congress in the Delhi Assembly polls last December.

“I don’t think the social media is the only reason for the reach that [AAP] has now,” says Shrivastav, who has a day job as director of a digital marketing and technology firm. “The party knows that nothing can replace groundwork done by party volunteers,” he says. “We have simply leveraged social media to achieve certain goals, which included spreading awareness of the party, communicating with state units, creating large scale interactions through Google Hangout and Facebook Live and mobilising resources for donations,” he says.

Through last year, Kejriwal reached out to people in India and NRIs in the US, Canada and Hong Kong through networks on Google+ to crowdfund political campaigns for himself and his party.

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he 2014 Lok Sabha election has also seen a slew of start-up ventures and a band of young political entrepreneurs

illustration by anirban ghosh

lion users active on Facebook and Twitter in India, as estimated, social media sites have attracted much discussion and attention in this election.

But it is not the ‘swing’ effect of firsttime voters alone that is expected to influence the election. According to Ankur Shrivastav, an AAP volunteer who manages the social media platforms of the party that owes a large chunk of its following and popularity to its online presence, says that the 16-35-year-old age bracket dominates the internet. “Nearly 70-75 per cent of social media traffic comes from this demographic,” he says.

According to a 2013 study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI), of the 543 parliamentary constituencies in India, nearly 160 are ‘high impact’ constituencies where social media may not only influence voter turnout, but also have a 3-4 per cent vote impact.

In tight races, that is enough to influence the final results. High-impact constituencies are not limited to the metros because it is estimated that towns with populations of less than 500,000 now account for a third of India’s social media traffic. Instant, free-messaging platforms like WhatsApp have 40 million users in India alone.

Given a huge and dynamic electorate online, politicians and political parties are awakening to social media platforms, uploading their political rallies on YouTube, attending Hangouts and live talks on Google and Facebook, and posting images of posters on Twitter.

emerge who are using technology to engage their political universe and converse with fellow online voters. Most of them have sprung up over the last couple of years, with the rise of social media, and have gained momentum this election season. Some of these ventures include IForIndia.org which is a web-based rating platform for local MLAs and MPs, Frrole, a social media consultancy that analyses tweets to generate market insights by understanding their context (and has struck big-ticket media alliances with the likes of Headlines Today and The Times of India), Jhatkaa. org, which mobilises protest petitions the way Change.org does in the US, and MumbaiVotes, a non-profit portal that keeps track of promises kept or broken by people’s representatives.

While social media platforms have been an effective tool to get unmediated access to voters, Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a research organisation based in Bangalore, believes that unlike Barack Obama—whose online campaign is globally considered the gold standard for political campaigns—most Indian politicians seem unaware of the most effective techniques of using various social media platforms; they still talk down to the electorate, just as they typically do through newspaper ads and television messages. “We often talk about how many followers a particular politician has. But we never count how many people he or she is following,” Abraham says, “Politicians need to listen more if they want to engage in a truly democratic exercise.”

While data analysis and collection ventures have sprung up overnight in the run-up to this General Election, Abraham believes that politicians are yet to use it optimally. “During Obama’s campaign, every letter that went to the voter was well-informed. They knew everything, from the zipcode to their political leanings, their racial lineage and even the brand of cereal that voters endorsed. We are yet to utilise the ‘big data’ 46 open

infrastructure made available to us,” he says. ‘Big data’ here refers to the vast and complex data collected online to study user profiles on social media platforms.

While social media usage in India is largely seen to be in a nascent stage, the one acknowledged downside of it is that it functions only as a transient platform, and that too, one that airs the voices of the most impulsive and aggressive.

Consider, for example, the abusive campaign launched online against Jnanpith Award winner UR Ananthamurthy, who criticised Modi and threatened to leave the country if Modi were ever elected Prime Minister. What followed was a

Google’s Hangout session with Modi, the first used by an Indian politician, reportedly led to 166,000 clicks on Modi’s website and more than 70,000 tweets while the Hangout was in progress hate campaign against him, with Modi fans starting a mock fund to buy him a one-way ticket out of the country. A Facebook Live chat between journalist Madhu Trehan and BJP leader Arun Jaitley held last week saw several abrasive comments exchanged between AAP and BJP supporters on the website of Newslaundry.com, which carried a video clip of the interview.

“That is a downside that we have to face online,” says Nishith Sharma, co-founder of the Bangalore-based Frrole, “but you have to understand that there’s a huge chunk of online users who remain silent and simply watch. It comprises almost 40

per cent of the traffic online, so we cannot discount the opportunity to influence this group.”

According to Hatim Baheranwala, director of ‘capacity building’ operations at MumbaiVotes, India’s online constituency is simply too big to ignore, even if only one of every 13 internet surfers in India uses social media. MumbaiVotes has seen three elections since its inception in 2009. “We see huge—and active—online campaigning as well,” says Baheranwala.

“The interesting voter is the undecided voter who may have pre-existing views but is still looking for more information to make a choice.”

Shrivastav believes that social media is playing a far larger role in this election than most candidates realise, even those who are relatively clued in. And in new ways, too. Delhi’s brief AAP experiment offered glimpses of the scrutiny that online crowds can subject governance to.

Social media platforms were abuzz with every move made by this fledgling party, with highly vocal online activists raising questions on all kinds of issues. “Those elected have to address questions in real time; voters constantly question your stand, and you have to be answerable,” says Shrivastav, “I think all this is very good for a healthy political discourse within a democracy.”

Not everyone, however, is entirely optimistic about the impact of social media on Indian politics. With ‘big data’ ventures springing up and organisations like Facebook using data analytics to draw up profiles of target audiences that politicians can track and address, Abraham draws attention to the neglected issue of internet-user privacy.

“Facebook ad networks and user trackers are capable of producing a granular picture of the average user by tracking his or her activities on the internet,” he says.

“There is a possibility of manipulating the social media and using it for propaganda. There has to be more media literacy and plug-ins to counter propaganda and offer context to ideas.” n 28 april 2014

true life

mindspace Is It a Glazier? Is It an Electrician?

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O p e n s pa c e

Rishi Kapoor Nawazuddin Siddiqui Saif Ali Khan Farhan Akhtar

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n p lu

Bhoothnath Returns Oculus

61 Cinema reviews

Pentax Q7 Premium Kit Arceau Lipstick Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2

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Tech & style

Retention of the Relevant Fruit Flies’ Amazing Manoeuvres New Hepatitis C Treatment

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Science

The MTV Reboot

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Music

A Family of Fine Taste Redemption for Gothic Fiction

books

Mirror Detox

50 64

graham dean/corbis

the girl who looked away A month without looking at a mirror as an act of self-love 50

true life

I Don’t Look, Therefore I Am Giving up mirrors for 31 days gave Sonali Kokra the time and space to reflect upon and reclaim her life.

What began as an experiment in self imagery turned out to be an unexpectedly radical act of self love

I

t started in October last year. I’d

spent months preparing for those dreaded three months—the Indian shaadi season; that time of the year when you’re supposed to paste millionwatt smiles on your face and feign excitement over the impending nuptials of your third cousin, whose ‘friend’ request you accidentally on purpose ‘not now’ed. Nevertheless, you’ll resignedly scrawl ‘sangeet practice’ in your planner across all weekends until the end of December.

New appointments with old dieticians are hastily booked. Yoga pants that were hitherto being used as nightwear finally see the inside of the yoga studio you have a lifelong membership at. Which is great; if the fear of the zipper of your wee-bit tight lehenga giving way mid-dance is what it takes for you to adopt a healthier lifestyle for a quarter of the year, it’s probably worth the heartache.

What’s not worth it is the never-ending scrutiny that girls like me have learnt to accept. It’s easy to identify the culprit when it’s an outsider.

Every man who sees you as disembodied parts—full breasts, never-ending legs or a hot piece of ass—is a jerk, undoubtedly; but who do you blame if you’re the one looking at yourself not as a weird and wonderful mix of ideas, eccentricities and imagination, but 50 open

as a pair of dimpling thighs, a too-wide smile or a frustratingly flabby tummy? Who is going to protect us from our own scorchingly critical gaze? For a long time I thought of this gaze as one of the constructs of my gender— I didn’t question or dispute its existence because I don’t remember a time when things weren’t this way. I’ve always thought of my body as this oddly-misshapen clay vessel that needs just a little more time on the wheel to achieve its perfect shape. Someday, I was going to love my body. Just not now, not today, not while it looked like this. Instinct tells me I’m not the only one who plays this waiting game with the body.

But something changed during Wedding No 3 of Month No 2 of the 2013 shaadi season. It was my second straight week on the wretched GM diet. Before that had been one week of near-starvation. And before that, obsessive amounts of cardio for two weeks.

That’s over 30 days of hunger, weakness and exhaustion. My body was unhappy, but I refused to listen to it. And then, a ‘compliment’ and an overheard conversation did me in. An aunt waddled over to chat, “Haaye, you have reduced quite a bit. Very good, beta.”

After that, I floated on a cloud reserved for those who’ve been awarded the mother of all honours: ‘Thou hast lost

weight, thou art now healthy.’

Healthy. That was the other big word I was forced to confront that night. I overheard a long-lost aunt selling the idea of me as an ideal daughter-in-law to the highly sought-after species that is the proudly smirking mother of an IIT-IIM son. IIT and IIM. In the Indian parental stakes, that’s the equivalent of Sachin’s ton of tons.

“Hamara beta is quite fair. Uska rang kaisa hai?”

“Colour is wheatish fair only… But she is really very intelligent. Achchhi jodi rahegi.”

“Slim-trim toh hai na?”

“Thodi healthy hai,” she admitted apologetically. (What is it they say about eavesdroppers never hearing anything good about themselves?)

T

hat night, as I stood in front of my

mirror, the two conversations kept playing in my head. That’s when I realised what was wrong with those two narratives. At what point had I become okay with the glory of ‘reducing quite a bit’ eclipsing everything else that had happened in my life in the past twelve months—an impending book launch, a double promotion, an invitation to teach a Master’s programme at a reputed college, a three-month life-changing travel sabbatical? It was true; I had 28 April 2014

Graham Dean/Corbis

reduced quite a bit: I had reduced the value of my life and all its wonderful experiences by allowing a number on the weighing scale to become the talking point of my year.

Theoretically, I knew I needed to stop obsessing over what I saw in the mirror, but practically, each time I looked, I only saw more flaws.

Dissatisfaction with my physical being was so deeply ingrained that I didn’t know who I’d be if that feeling deserted me. It was like being in an unhealthy-but-addictive relationship— you know you’re better off without it, but you somehow can’t walk away.

And when you finally do, you wonder what took so long. That’s exactly what happened with me—I went cold turkey on my mirror for a full 31 days. It was just one month of my life, but it felt, and still feels, like my most radical act of self-love so far.

The first week was unalloyed agony. When I started the experiment, the full import of what it meant to not look at yourself had not quite registered. It didn’t mean not looking at just mirrors, it meant no stopping at glass doors, no selfies, no peering at cutlery.

It meant trusting my judgement because there was no way to conclusively know if the outfit I had assembled in my head really worked once I had put it on. And most terrifyingly, it meant being okay with the vulnerability that comes with not being able to control every variable in your obsession. I had to re-programme my thinking to accept the possibility that I might appear phenomenally stupid in public.

And even if that happened, it wouldn’t change who I really was.

As I got more comfortable with myself, I began to see just how much I had aligned my world to fulfil this need for self vigilance. I realised I knew exactly how many jewellery stores in the vicinity of my home had mirrors that faced the road. Once, while sitting on a sofa in my own living room, it occurred to me that despite all my wealth, physical comfort remained a luxury I enjoyed only sparingly because each time I’d catch myself in an awkward posture, I’d rearrange my limbs to adopt a more visually appealing pose. It was as if I was living life one Facebook photograph at a time. In 52 open

the second week of my mirror detox, I realigned my world with my natural state of being. My life wasn’t a stage where I must play a part.

By week three, I realised that if I could attend family functions, show up for dates and make it to investor meetings without caving in, I really was going to come through on my promise to myself. Because I couldn’t see myself anymore, I started believing in others more. When I asked people if I looked okay and they said ‘yes’, I took

Since I wasn’t

hung up about my appearance anymore, I stopped looking at others through that lens as well.

I lost the urge to bitch about an attractive woman because I was no longer feeling inadequate in contrast. In small imperceptible ways, my relationship with the people closest to me improved

their word for it without double and triple-checking to make sure. I trusted people to tell the truth. And even if their version of it differed from mine, I learnt to recognise it as a perceptual gap and not an attempt to mislead me. Since I wasn’t hung up about my appearance anymore, I stopped looking at others through that lens as well.

I lost the urge to bitch about an attractive woman because I was no longer feeling inadequate in contrast. In

small imperceptible ways, my relationship with the people closest to me improved. Not looking at myself helped me reclaim all those forgotten bits of my life that I had trampled upon while chasing an idea of perfection that didn’t exist. Nothing could stop this cheese from moving.

As clichéd as it sounds, I was literally looking at trees and noticing flowers. I could recall details and pay attention to conversations because I was no longer distracted by myself. What’s more, I read more books in that one month than I had in the three before it.

But my biggest act of reclamation was the relationship with my body. I finally stopped treating it like a work-inprogress. During work-outs, I focused on how it made me feel instead of how it made me look. The act of eating was relieved of the trauma of counting calories. I bought clothes I liked instead of covering myself in colours and silhouettes that had a slimming effect.

For the first time, I was happy with my body, despite its many flaws as decreed by the fashion gods.

O

f course, at the end of 31 days,

I did look at myself. I’d expected to feel an intense mix of emotions— dread, excitement, perhaps even pride; but all I felt was curiosity. Were all the studies true? Did the feel-good-to-lookgood affirmation really work? When I finally looked into the mirror, I didn’t see anything spectacularly different. I looked happier, for sure, and the lines on my forehead didn’t crumple like a walnut at the sight of my midriff, but physically, I looked more or less the same. That was a relief because it made me realise that body-love didn’t mean being sucked into a whirlpool of unhealthy behaviour; it simply meant I had decided to treat my body like a partner I was in a respectful relationship with. And that if I really want my body to change, for whatever reason, being blissfully happy with it is not going to cut it. I’m going to have to work at it.

A few days ago, I met well-meaning aunt No 1, and she said, “Aur thoda reduce kiya hai beta, very good.” She’s right this time too. But this time, only weight reduce kiya hai, not my sense of self. n 28 April 2014

Books A Family of Fine Taste An unlettered carpet merchant and art dealer in Amritsar chanced upon the Pahari school of painting. His son keeps the legacy going with his prized collection of traditional painting, sculpture and textiles Sohini Chattopadhyay A Passionate Eye: Textiles, Paintings and Sculptures from the Bharany Collections

By Giles Tillotson Marg Foundation | 160 pages | $99.75

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o discover a thing of beauty without setting out to

look for anything is the ambit of the love story. The trajectory of the professional enterprise is not quite as marvelous: when Christopher Columbus and crew sighted the shores of what are known as the Bahamas on 12 October 1492 and discovered the New World per chance, he may have set sail to find an alternative route to Asia, yet he was, nevertheless, on a quest. Nearly every journalist on the ground finds the shape of a pursued story is quite distinct from the idea pitched earlier in the editorial meeting (as does every graduate student on the field). The enterprise of inquiry thrives on the chance discovery, but there is at least the setting forth on a quest.

But to discover a school of painting without embarking on a search, without a map of formal knowledge, without the GPS of suggestion or guiding questions, is that not how love goes?

This is how it was with Radha Krishna Bharany, the unlettered son of a carpet merchant, who is credited with ‘discovering’ the Pahari school of painting in a new book edited by Cambridge-trained historian Giles Tillotson. In his essay in the book, art scholar Pratapaditya Pal writes that though the well-known historian and philosopher of Indian art Ananda K Coomaraswamy is known to have written the pioneering work on Rajput painting (which includes the Kangra and Kullu schools of Pahari painting), it was from Bharany that he sourced many of the paintings which went to become part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

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Bharany ran a shop in Amritsar, where he traded in Mughal jewellery, Mughal miniatures, Kashmiri shawls, Persian carpets, metal, wood and ivory wares and a multitude of beautiful things, according to an advertisement his son Chhote Lal Bharany has preserved. “My father could sign his initials RKB but that was the extent of his literacy,” says CL Bharany, 87, who inherited his father’s discerning eye and has nurtured a prized and important collection of Indian textiles, painting and sculpture himself. The book, A Passionate Eye: Textiles, Painting and Sculpture from the Bharany Collections, celebrates the seminal role of the father and son in the shaping and appreciation of Indian traditional art. “You could say we were a family of reasonable wealth.

But my father had no education. He used to tell us, ‘Dekho yeh Radha ki kahani hai, yeh Ram ki kahani hai’ and show us paintings. That was his template of reference. But he was undoubtedly a lover of art, and his taste was whetted and refined by his customers, many of whom stopped by the shop on their pilgrimage to Amritsar’s Golden Temple, and came back again and again. Indeed, the shop in Amritsar became something of a pilgrimage stop itself, for collectors, scholars and lovers of Indian art.” ‘..it was really Radha Krishna Bharany who single-handedly ferreted out the pictures from the then hill states of Punjab (now integrated mostly into the Indian hill state of Himachal Pradesh). Without his sagacity and aesthetic sensibility, his adventurous spirit and his industry, we might not be admiring the styles of painting that became familiar under such rubrics as Basohli or Kangra,’ writes Pal in his chapter, ‘Collecting Art in British India’. Apart from Coomaraswamy, the Parsi collector brothers Sir Dorabji and Sir Ratan Tata, and the Tagore brothers Abanindranath and Gagendranath Tagore who were artists and collectors, also bought Pahari paintings from the senior Bharany. Other than the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Pahari paintings also found their way to the Victoria and Albert Museum 28 april 2014

a room of beauty Chhote Lal Bharany in his office in Delhi, surrounded by pieces from his collection; (facing page) his father Radha Krishna Bharany

ashish sharma

“We tend to hear about art dealers, in the press especially, in negative terms. Like the recent story about the stolen Shiva idol in the National Gallery of Australia”

in London, among other public and private collections in the country and overseas. The senior Bharany’s purchases included works by the acclaimed 18th century Pahari master Nainsukh, one of the most celebrated artists of the country and the subject of an eponymous film by Amit Dutta that has won rave reviews.

How does a man untrained in line or form play such a critical role in identifying a school of painting?

“Rooting around in my father’s shop after school, I used to listen to my father speaking with customers,” says CL Bharany. “Some of them were scholars and collectors; they would point out similar motifs and patterns.

He would ask his ‘runners’, as suppliers were called then, to look out for these. Remember also that he was also a trader trying to gain business. He must have learnt to discern the style gradually after seeing literally thousands of similar paintings,” says CL Bharany.

In that time, the early 1900s, suppliers went on foot from house to house, knocking to ask if there were ‘paintings, drawings, papers’ to sell, writes Bharany in his chapter titled ‘Recollections’. That is why they were known as runners. (Even today, a dealer in Pashmina shawls might knock your door of an afternoon if the security guard allows, making his/her way from door to door in the colony with a soft 28 april 2014

white potli of fine wares. Typically, they ask if you have anything old and beautiful to spare, and the deal is struck with an exchange of cash and kind.

But such visitors are growing rarer, or perhaps we are not home on afternoons anymore.) Amritsar was close to the Kangra Valley, a major reason that the senior Bharany had access to so much, and such valuable, Pahari work.

Bharany writes that the owners of the Pahari paintings were blue-blooded but they had little idea of the art of their ancestors. Mostly, they sold the heirlooms because they were so hard up that they needed the pots and pans the runners offered, or the rupee or two.

“My father had chests full of paintings,” says CL Bharany. “A lot of it was not good work but he bought to ensure the runners kept bringing in stuff.”

In the book, he narrates a rather fetching episode about the time his father was suffering from a ‘severe’ headache. He asked if he should call the doctor but the senior Bharany refused. Some time later, he beckoned to Chhote Lal, and asked for the ‘Devi paintings’. ‘After some time I was surprised to see that he felt and looked better…

I cannot say whether the headache and fever had subsided, but one thing I remember distinctly is that looking at the paintings had made him forget all his physical discomfort,’ he writes. open www.openthemagazine.com 55

In 1976, CL Bharany made a donation of hundreds of items, numbering approximately 170 art objects and 685 coins, in the memory of his father to the National Museum in Delhi.

He has also donated exhibits to the museum on other occasions, at the request of the museum’s officials.

“We tend to hear about art dealers, in the press especially, in negative terms,” says Dr Giles Tillotson. “Like the recent story about the stolen Shiva idol in the National Gallery of Australia. [The art dealer in this case, Subhash Kapoor, was detained by German immigration authorities in Frankfurt in 2011 and extradited to India in 2012. Kapoor’s trial began in Chennai on 7 March this year.] A dealer is taken as synonymous with ‘smuggler’ or ‘thief’. But there are also honest dealers who are passionate collectors and respected experts.

Bharany is one such. People give credit to scholars such as Ananda Coomaraswamy (for helping shape appreciation for Indian traditional art). But without the Bharanys, they would not have had the material to work on. What comes across in the book is the extent of collaboration between dealers and scholars,” he says.

In this sense, this is a highly unusual book: a book devoted to a duo of dealers; though CL Bharany is a collector, he was a dealer first. In the caste system of Indian art, the stars are art practitioners and scholars; books are written about them, and by them.

Collectors and patrons come after, and dealers, much like traders were in the caste system, are seen as mere middlemen, men of numbers and deals and banal concerns, who do the mundane groundwork of sourcing works of art.

This book opens a window to this aspect of art as well: how works are obtained and traded. This is of particular interest in traditional art whose market is not as organised as that of modern and contemporary art; there are fewer galleries here. Here, business is more informal, organised through suppliers and ‘runners’ who come knocking if they know you are looking. In a sense, the discerning ‘eye’ becomes even more important here.

Calcutta on 15 August 1950, for which he began acquiring a range of traditional art works. The next year, he took over a jewellery showroom at the Grand Hotel in Calcutta which did well in spite of his inexperience. Over the years, jewellery came to be his main line of business, though he remained an art dealer for several years, driven possibly by his personal interest as a collector. Collectors often work as dealers to fund purchases, to ‘upgrade’ their collections as it were. His sons now run the successful jewellery business at a handsome store in Delhi, designing and crafting Mughal-style jewellery. Their clients include the Italian designer Oscar de la Renta. Clearly, they have inherited the family legacy of fine taste.

The Bharany collection includes Mughal miniatures, Kashmiri shawls, Kantha embroidery from Bengal, and Phulkari and Bagh from Punjab, wood carvings and bronze statues from Kerala, and more recently, tribal art and calendar art. “It is remarkable for its range, including folk arts and courtly arts, recent as well as ancient, and for the quality of individual places in all categories,” says Tillotson, who has seen the Bharanys’ private collection as well as made trips to the National Museum to view exhibits of his donation.

“That greed for acquisition is gone now,” says CL Bharany. “Now I rarely feel the urge to buy. But I feel happy looking at my collection. In the middle of the night when I wake up, I look at the works around me and I feel a deep love.”

What, in the end, is the role of dealers and collectors like the Bharanys, whose work is not as creative or apparent as that of artists and scholars?

Where would we be without them, without their loving, painstaking, unreasonable accumulation? The answer is: probably not a very self-aware place.

With their discerning eye and generous spending, they preserve beauty and the artistry that produces it, they remind us often of ritual and tradition. Would the Kantha embroidery of rural Bengal, for instance, produced by women in the form of gifts within the family, have survived without the collectors and art teachers who were struck by the loveliness of the quilts? Where would the cool, drowsy rooms of our museums source their exhibits from? And what reference would Sanjay Leela Bhansali take for his peacock heroes’ clothes?

(Would we only be left with the American high school look without Bhansali?) They nurture the things we are not able to afford or appreciate, the Bharanys of the art world. And in so doing, they remind us of what we have and where we come from, of culture and context; they give us a sense of the people we are. n

What, in the end, is the role of dealers and collectors like the Bharanys, whose work is not as creative as that of artists and scholars?

C

hhote Lal Bharany has been a dealer and collector of art

for six decades; between father and son, they have collected art for over a century. He began this work in 1942 when his father died suddenly, leaving behind chests full of painting. Most of these were Mughal miniatures, his “first love” . He worked first in Calcutta, where he was studying at Calcutta University with the intention of being trained by the art historian and ballerina Stella Kramrisch.

Funded by the sales of these paintings, he opened a shop for Indian handloom artefacts in the Great Eastern Hotel in

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28 april 2014

Books The Anti Twilight A new novel offers redemption for the gothic novel, taking us back to a time before vampires were kind, romantic and vegetarian GUNJEET SRA

The Quick

Lauren Owen Jonathan Cape | 528 Pages | Rs 650

‘You will travel to Victorian England, and there, in the wilds of Yorkshire, you will meet a brother and sister alone in the world, a pair bound by tragedy. You will, in time, enter the rooms of London’s mysterious Aegolius Club—a society of the richest, most ambitious men in England. And at some point, we cannot say when, a trapdoor will open, the contours of reality will change, and the secrets of The Quick will reveal themselves.’

S

tories from 200 years ago—when Lord Byron

read ghost stories with poet Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori at his summer home, Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva—are proof that long before Stephanie Meyer woke up from her dream to pen the popular young adult vampire drama series Twilight, a certain English literary set was already obsessed with the macabre idea of the undead.

Polidori’s short story The Vampyre was the product of these conventions and may be considered, along with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, a precursor to Meyer’s romantic vampire fantasy and other modern genre fiction. It was Polidori who successfully recast the character of the vampire from a common folk figure into an aristocratic fiend that preys on innocents. Lauren Owen, a student of Victorian literature, borrows heavily from such old-school gothic novels in the narrative style of her debut novel, The Quick.

Set in 1892 in London, the novel starts innocently enough with themes of parental alienation and the isolated life of a pair of siblings—James and Charlotte—in a ramshackle old house in the English countryside. The house is locked up after the children are orphaned and the story moves on to London. Having attended Oxford, James, now a shy wannabe poet, finds lodging with a gregarious aristocrat. His new friendship introduces him to the inner circles of high society and even love. Then he vanishes.

Distraught, his sister Charlotte sets out from their derelict country estate in search of him. Through her journey, the author paints a sinister portrait

of London’s labyrinth. She uncovers secret after secret and meets some unforgettable characters through the mucklined back-alleys and filth of the city’s under-sprawl. But the secret to her brother’s disappearance lies behind the closed doors of one of the country’s most prestigious and mysterious institutions, The Aegolius Club, whose members include some of the most influential and dangerous men in England. Told from multiple perspectives, the novel has many voices and it takes a while for the reader to figure out how each voice fits into the story.

The 19th century was an interesting time in England. It was a time when the privileged feared what they thought was the disintegration of society; when Oscar Wilde went from being a celebrated artist to a persecuted degenerate; when women were expected to conform to Victorian ideals of femininity—despite steadily building dissent. It is fascinating to read a 19th century tale from the perspective of a young woman author, who brings a unique perspective to the time and has created strong female characters who play realistic roles in the plot.

What makes The Quick different is not its plot but the author’s ability to transport you back in time. Unlike most period novels, not once does the novel give you a glimpse of any modern writing sensibilities. It is this obsession with detail that makes the book irresistible. Especially striking are her scenic descriptions of the fog that shrouds London, a dramatic backdrop used to hide and reveal the story.

Ironically, the weakest link in the novel also comes from the author’s ability to lay down so much. She introduces too many characters and fails to connect them to the story, or induce any empathy or understanding of their predicament.

But the novel quickly recovers, thanks to its engaging story.

Despite the popularity of the genre, The Quick is not for everybody, in part because it takes you back to a time long before vampires were kind, romantic and vegetarian. Owen draws heavily upon the macabre gore and suspense of the gothic novel, perfectly fused together to offer you the horrors of an underworld full of feuding, aristocratic and merciless vampires.

Owen’s book is a redemption of the gothic novel genre and should be treated as such. Although its leisurely pace may deter some readers, those who read it will remember it for how effortlessly it places itself in its time and setting, and the terrifying fate of its central character. n

The Quick borrows heavily from old school gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre

28 april 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 57

music

Play it Again,

MTV The music channel returns to glory with the launch of MTV Indies AASTHA ATRAY BANAN

T

he first video I watched on MTV, in 1996, was Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train. It gave me a peek into American culture, though it wasn’t pretty; the song was about kids running away from home and landing in all sorts of trouble. Then came Ugly Kid Joe’s Cats in the Cradle, which was about parental issues. America seemed to be going through some issues of its own, but MTV India was heaven to 14-year-old me. Michael Jackson and Madonna videos made me a pop tart for life.

Discovering MTV was a defining moment in my teenage life. I was finally 58 open

a part of the MTV generation, which was defined by the music they listened to. But somewhere down the line, the music ceased to matter. Indian pop artistes came and vanished, and Bollywood became the only music that was viable on TV. Then came the era of reality TV on MTV, and most of my generation stopped watching the channel.

But with the launch of Pepsi MTV Indies (backed by Viacom 18), now on air, MTV is having a homecoming of sorts. It’s coming back to the music—all Indian, but music alright. MTV India

Business Head Aditya Swamy, however, says it’s not about coming back to the music, it’s just about giving viewers what they want. “When I first went to college, I was asked what music I listened to. Now that was a loaded question, as it defined you. But later, the youth was defined by much more than just their choice of music, and that’s how MTV changed. That explains the success of Roadies.”

What Swamy started when he took over three years ago—MTV Roots, Coke Studio and Sound Trippin, for example—grew to become Pepsi MTV Indies. “MTV India is about pop culture, and MTV Indies is about sub culture. We want to showcase things like graffiti art, fashion, filmmaking, stand-up comedy—the works.

This channel is not meant for the core Indie fan, who already knows [his or her] music. It’s meant for the Bollywood fan, who suddenly switches over and discovers something new.”

Switch on Pepsi MTV Indies and you are struck first by its cool design. It’s got cutting-edge graphics and a new-age look. There are no VJs, just a lot of music, and Pepsi ads, as it is the main sponsor. There are segments called Don’t Kill My Vibe, The Art Behind the Music and Balcony TV (where bands play in open spaces). The music is varied—from the Raghu Dixit Project to Delhi-based Them Clones to metal band Scribe and Ankur & The Ghalat Family (also Yo Yo Honey Singh).

The channel’s mantra seems to be non-Bollywood. Some music is great—for example, the mellow Zephyretta by Them Clones will delight you—and some needs serious work, like Thermal and a Quarter and Bay City Lights’s Needy Greedy, which tries to be a Timberlake production and fails.

But Programming Head Ankur Tewari says it needs to be ‘honest’. “That’s my filter as programming head—that your music needs to be honest. Indie to me is honest art not governed by the logistics 28 April 2014

of financing. I like artistes being honest and then becoming commercial, but don’t try and be commercial under the garb of being honest.”

Tewari says the channel’s office has been inundated with videos, films, etcetera, and that the whole team watches everything. “We want to showcase graphic artists, filmmakers, musicians—everybody who is doing something creative. It can be a fashion trend, you know? Many people like Only Much Louder (the guys behind NH7) and bands like Pentagram had already started the Indie wave. We are just taking it ahead.” Pepsi MTV Indies will have a web presence as well as a social media one, but, as Tewari says, “It’s quite exciting for a young band to be on TV, and MTV, Pepsi and Viacom just give so much credibility.”

Surojit Dev, drummer of Them Clones, whose Zephyretta is a track you need on your iPod right now, still remembers going to his neighbour’s house to watch MTV on cable, growing up in the 90s. “Along with the music, I loved MTV News, which glamourised rock and pop stars and everything associated with them. Then there were VJs such as Danny McGill and VJ Nonie—they were so fascinating.” The fact that their song is now playing every few hours on TV has brought the band attention. “People are noticing it. We have got reactions on social media. But that’s what a channel like this can do—anything non-Bollywood needs a platform like this. There was a time when we were struggling to play all originals on a set, but the Indie scene has really picked up and this is adding to it.”

OML co-founder, consultant to the True School of Music and member of the popular but now defunct Mumbai band Zero, Girish ‘Bobby’ Talwar remembers MTV being his only association with non-commercial music as he grew up.

“I remember watching the video of Indus Creed’s Pretty Child and it’s etched in my memory. It was awesome that an Indian band was playing good music and had a great video. MTV was a godsend.” Talwar, who has played a major role in spreading the culture of music festivals in India, thanks to NH7, feels that Pepsi

MTV Indies is vital because “the minute a large media house or known entity backs a moving culture, everybody else notices it as well. They pay heed and now others will pay heed.”

India’s indie scene is full of young acts, some of whom never saw the original MTV India and have only heard urban legends about it. They are the reality TV and YouTube generation, who seem to think that though Pepsi MTV Indies could be a boon, it may have come too late. Abhinav Krishnaswamy, 24, guitarist of Chennai band The F16’s, says that no one really watches TV anymore. “I am glad there is a channel like this, but is anyone watching TV anymore? Everything is online. Also, we need much more content— right now, the same playlist gets repeated every few hours. And then there is Punjabi music!” But as a member of a band, Krishnaswamy is glad for all the avenues Indie music can get. “It just becomes easier for us if there are more platforms like MTV Indies.”

Rohan Rajadhyaksha, a 20-year-old vocalist for Mumbai-based Spud In The Box, agrees on the futility of TV, but says that since Pepsi MTV Indies has a great online and social media presence, it’s a great avenue. “They are strictly sticking to the music, which is what musicians need.” Asked if commercial backing by a brand like Pepsi dilutes one’s Indie status, Rohan laughs, “No way. I need to get my music out there and I need resources for that. I need a brand for that. I don’t pretend to be a hipster who is making music but doesn’t want to collaborate with a brand. We as a band are not too cool to ask people to buy our music or come for our shows. We want people to hear us, and brand association is necessary for that. That’s the way it works.”

As I watched Pepsi MTV Indies, it reminded me of the good old days when music channels were all about music. It sets the stage for all the non-Bollywood, non-commercial music and art India is producing, and that is why we should care. The rest is just logistics. n open www.openthemagazine.com 59

Retention of the Relevant Why we switch off our sensory systems now and then

Fruit Flies’ Amazing Manoeuvres

tudies have shown that sleep

deprivation can contribute to a number of problems, from weight gain to high blood pressure, even a weak immune system. But what exactly is the physiological purpose of sleep? One of its chief uses, it has been suggested, is as a consolidator of memory. Some years ago, a study reported in Science found that people tend to perform better on a memory test after taking a quick nap. One perplexing question, however, is why the brain seems to shut out sensory information during periods of deep sleep. Now, a new study not only establishes the important role that sleep plays in memory storage, it also offers an answer. According to this study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, sensory information is shut out because it compromises the ability to draw into one’s consciousness recently formed memories.

For the research, a group of lab rats were studied. First, the rats were conditioned to associate a specific odour with a mild electric shock while they were awake.

After the rodents learnt to make the association, demonstrated by enhanced fearful behaviour, the odour experience was re-created when the

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rats were in slow-wave sleep, a phase of deep sleep. When the rats during this phase of sleep received a replay of the odour experience they had learnt while they were awake, they demonstrated an increased memory of the odour in comparison with those in another test group that received a similar replay of the odour while awake.

However, when the dozing rodents received new odour information as they slept, they demonstrated greater difficulty in distinguishing the learnt odour they were previously exposed to while awake, compared to others.

The researchers claim that this—the difficulty of telling a new odour apart from a learnt odour when asleep—is the reason that brains shut out sensory information while sleeping.

Donald Wilson, one of the researchers on the project, says, “We know that during slow-wave sleep, the brain’s sensory systems are far less responsive to normal inputs… Our data suggest this sensory isolation may help allow replay of learned information in the absence of external interference, providing strong, precise memory of important information.”

One occasionally needs to switch off to retain what’s relevant. n

According to a study published in Science, when startled by predators, fruit flies respond like fighter jets, employing screaming-fast banked turns to evade attacks. In the midst of a banked turn, these insects can roll on their sides 90 degrees or more, almost flying upside down at times. Researchers used an array of high-speed video cameras operating at 7,500 frames a second to capture their wing and body motions as they encountered approaching predators. How the fly’s brain—the size of a salt grain—and muscles control these remarkably evasive manoeuvres is the next thing that researchers plan to investigate. n

New Hepatitis C Treatment carol & mike werner/corbis

S

michael durham/corbis

air stunt Fruit flies normally flap their wings 200 times a second and can alter their flight course in less than one one-hundredth of a second—50 times faster than the blink of a human eye

thomas barwick/getty images

science

Twelve weeks of an investigational oral therapy cured hepatitis C infection in more than 90 per cent of patients with liver cirrhosis, according to a global study.

Earlier, interferon was the only effective agent against hepatitis C, but patients often relapsed and the therapy caused multiple side effects. The new regimen is interferon-free and comprises several agents—ABT-450/ritonavir, ombitasvir, dasabuvir and ribavirin. Twelve weeks after the last dose, no hepatitis C virus was detected in 91.8 per cent of patients who took the pills for 12 weeks. Among patients treated for 24 weeks, 95.9 per cent were virus-free 12 weeks after the therapy. The medication regimen is expected to reach the market as early as end-2014 or very early 2015. n 28 april 2014

raw format This format for raw images saves data obtained from camera sensors with minimal loss of information, while also capturing the ambient conditions—‘metadata’—of images. RAW files are so named because they are not yet processed and are thus not ready to be printed

tech&style

Pentax Q7 Premium Kit A limited edition of the world’s smallest interchangeable lens camera system gagandeep Singh Sapra

Arceau Lipstick w

$1,199.95

Rs 46,950

Hermès introduces two steel models with matt white dials: one with a 28 mm case and the other with a 32 mm one. Both models house a self-winding movement that runs a central seconds hand and a date display at 3 o’clock.

These watches boast smooth lipstick pink calfskin straps graced with a toneon-tone interpretation of the emblematic Hermès saddle stitching. The diametre of the movement is 19.4 mm, its thickness, 3.6 mm, and it offers power reserve of 40 hours. The models have glareproof sapphire crystal glass and are water resistant up to 5 atmospheres. n

Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2

P

entax, on 18 April , will start selling its Q7 Premium Kits— only 1,000 units of which will be available. Each kit will include a Pentax Q7 Body, Pentax 01 Standard Prime lens, Pentax 02 Standard Zoom, Pentax 06 Telephoto Zoom and a Pentax 08 Wide Zoom. The kit also has a black metal hood for the 01 Prime, which has been designed exclusively for this kit, apart from plastic hoods for the 02, 06 and 08 lenses. In addition, the package has a Pentax-100 polarising filter and a O-CB133 camera.

So, is there any reason—other than its scarcity value—to buy this kit?

Well, first of all, bear in mind that Ricoh Imaging’s Q7 is a truly compact interchangeable lens system camera. Weighing a cool 198 gm, it is easy to carry around too.

The Q7 allows you to shoot images in both RAW, which can be processed in-camera, and high-quality JPEG formats. Its rendition of colours and the exposure on JPEGs are on par with 28 april 2014

more expensive cameras. Its ‘quick dial’ mode may be customised, and together with its ‘manual exposure’ mode, you will be able to use it the way you like with ease.

For people who love Instagram, the Q7 offers in-camera art filters as well as an HDR mode. There is even an inbody sensor shift image stabilisation option that lets you capture some sharp results even if you—or your subject—are not on stable ground.

The 01 Prime lens is superfast at F/1.9 and is a great add-on with normal focal length. However, not everything is great about this camera, as it is a compact unit and often acts like one (leaving a purple fringe on your photos, for example). Also, its video quality is amateurish, and since this is an entry-level camera, you will only be using it under good lighting conditions; the moment you go beyond an ISO 800 setting, the images start getting grainy. It has no viewfinder and this can limit your ability to compose a picture. n

$850

Samsung’s Note Pro 12.2 is a large tablet that runs several apps simultaneously. It is designed to replace your laptop, packed as it is with all kinds of business tools. Its large screen allows you to watch television and videos, or read magazines, or work on documents and spreadsheets. The on screen keyboard also supports CTRL+C and CTRL+V shortcuts for copy and paste, and has arrows to move the cursor around. Samsung also has a stylus that may be used for its proprietary features, or to draw and sketch. This tablet runs Android, which is a bit of a let down. I would much rather it ran Windows. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

Shah Rukh returns too Shah Rukh Khan played a cameo in the first Bhoothnath film back in 2008.

Some five years later, the actor returns to reprise his cameo in the sequel of this Amitabh starrer

Bhoothnath Returns Bachchan and the kid pull off some funny scenes, but then it gets all preachy on us ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Oculus Director Mike Flanagan cast Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites,

Katee Sackhoff Score ★★★★★

rth bachchan, pa shra Cast amitabh ani, sanjay mi ir n ma bo , bhalerao i ar tiw Director nitesh

L

ike the recent Hindi film Youngistan

released a few weeks ago, Bhoothnath Returns is a movie in general election mode. It speaks of the need of ordinary citizens, possessed with civic zeal and integrity, to play a part in electoral politics. Mr Bhoothnath—to recap his exploits—was once an ordinary ghost, unsuccessful in scaring people. In fact, by the end of the first Bhoothnath, he wasn’t even able to frighten a child. He was laughed at for this.

This time round, Bhoothnath (Amitabh Bachchan), who was Kailash Nath before he shuffled off this mortal coil, descends to earth and befriends a boy called Akhrot (Parth Bhalerao).

They form a successful real estate partnership. Their core expertise lies in persuading troubled ghosts to stop haunting buildings under construction in Mumbai. Having made enough money from builders for this yeoman service, they decide to do something meaningful for the slums of this overcrowded metropolis. So Bhoothnath decides to stand for an election.

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The problem is a legal one: how does a ghost do the paperwork for filing his nomination? They consult a lawyer (Sanjay Mishra), and this wonderful actor pulls off a few funny scenes with Bachchan. During the scrutiny of Bhootnath’s nomination papers, for example, the electoral official is nonplussed. The rules say nothing about a candidate having to be alive; besides, the late Kailash Nath never had a death certificate issued certifying his death, so his name is still on the voters’ list.

The film turns into a Kafkaesque rendering of the Aam Ghost Party, and this is quite amusing... until the preaching starts. The movie takes a serious turn and we are given lectures on electing honest candidates and the importance of casting our votes. By the time Shah Rukh Khan and Ranbir Kapoor turn up—in guest appearances—to endorse this noble message, the movie has lost its audience.

Still, Bhoothnath Returns has a few nice Chaplinesque turns by Bachchan and ‘The Kid’. n

Oculus avoids the old cliches of horror movies and approaches the supernatural with a relatively ‘scientific’ outlook. This is actually a trend in contemporary films in the genre, and the hugely successful Paranormal Activity series and the more recent The Conjuring owe a lot to this idea of documenting ghostly activities with film, video and CCTV footage.

In this film, a brother and sister relive their traumatic childhood by getting hold of an antique mirror that triggered off a series of events that killed their parents.

Oculus is actually an architectural term for an opening in the ceiling that lets light into a building. This mirror has a similar oculus that allows a supernatural force to enter the lives of those who own it.

The sister (Karen Gillian) calls the brother (Brenton Thwaites) and arranges a set-up with the deadly mirror— electronic equipment positioned in front of it—while the movie flashes back and forth seamlessly between their past and present. This match- editing is the best part of the film.

But what the movie lacks is context.

Shot almost entirely in one location, with characters who have no interesting emotional or psychological life, Oculus is just too clinical to watch. The film has no passion. But it succeeds in constructing a commercial oculus, one that will allow a sequel to follow. n AD

28 April 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Rishi Kapoor Dismisses Nawazuddin

Apparently Ranbir Kapoor is deeply embarrassed by his dad Rishi Kapoor’s recent outburst in a film glossy against Gangs of Wasseypur star Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Kapoor Sr was quoted attacking Nawaz, hollering that “You have neither the image nor the talent to do romantic films”, in response to Nawaz’s statement in an earlier interview that romantic roles were relatively easy to do.

Taking affront to the comment, Rishi Kapoor, easily Bollywood’s most successful and popular romantic hero, lashed out: “My friend, my dear Nawazuddin, I’m not demeaning your talent... I’ve even seen one or two of your films, in which you were just average. But it takes hard work to do what others are doing. You haven’t done it in your life; neither will you get a chance to do it. And you aren’t capable of doing it either.” Ouch.

Kapoor Jr, who famously declared last year that Nawaz’s performance in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs films was the best acting he’d seen in a long time, reportedly explained to Nawaz that his father had a hot temper and a tendency to shoot off his mouth. Ranbir also may have had a chat with his papa, who has since insisted he was misquoted in the interview. Nawaz too has apologised for offending the senior star, insisting that he wasn’t dissing Rishi Kapoor, whose lifelong fan he remains.

Back in Farhan’s Camp

Thirteen years since his breakout in Dil Chahta Hai, Saif Ali Khan has apparently signed on to make a new movie with Excel Productions, the banner headed by Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani, who gave him that early hit. The 43-year-old star will appear in Talaash director Reema Kagti’s thriller, expected to go on the floors later this year after Zoya Akhtar wraps principal photography on her Ranveer Singh-Priyanka Chopra starrer that Kagti has co-written.

Saif’s had a bumpy relationship with the company after Dil Chahta Hai, having committed to star in Zoya’s debut film Luck By Chance but pulling out at the last minute and causing much bad blood between old friends. Although more than one male star had okayed and then dropped out 28 april 2014

of the film during its seven-year incubation, Zoya has reportedly told friends she was particularly disappointed in Saif for the ‘cut and dry’ manner in which he left the film, and for expressing no apology for the inconvenience he’d caused.

Industrywalas, however, snigger that there’s a long time until the film goes into production, and the famously moody star cannot be trusted to stick to his word. The actor’s movie choices, after all, are often knee-jerk reactions to the box-office fate of his last film. It appears that after the failure of the heartland-set Bullett Raja, Saif has decided that he ought to ‘secure’ himself with a handful of A-grade urban films that are his comfort zone. But he’s got at least two releases (Sajid Khan’s Humshakals and Happy Ending with Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru) lined up between now and when he starts Kagti’s film. And that’s enough time for a change of heart.

The Son No One Wants

Mr Moneybags Producer, once a leading name in the biz, is reportedly desperate to place his son in a ‘big’ film, but can’t seem to find anyone who’s willing. Not even a director he’s paying a fat salary for helming a multi-starrer comedy being made under his banner.

The producer has already launched and relaunched his son four times over in ‘smaller’ solo ventures, but the kid hasn’t landed a single project outside of daddy’s company. From splurging on the rights to an international pop number to hiring respectable supporting actors for each of these movies, daddy dearest has dipped deep into his pockets each time. But it’s become clear that the only thing that might actually help his son ‘succeed’ is riding piggyback on the popularity of real stars in a multi-hero project.

Word on the street is that the producer has failed twice to convince a big-name director into casting his son in the two films he’s made for his company. The latest movie, a comedy with three male leads, would have been an ideal project to slip his son into, but the director reportedly insisted there was only space for ‘stars’ in his film. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Is It a Glazier? Is It an Electrician? by r i t e s h u t ta m c h a n da n i

No, this is an Independent candidate from Mumbai South, Gaurav Sharma, who has modelled himself as Superman. To canvass votes, Sharma is going window to window, literally

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28 april 2014