OPEN Magazine 29 September 2014

DESPATCH FROM SRINAGAR AMONG THE CASTAWAYS

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AMITAV GHOSH ON THE SEPOY AND W W I

2 9 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

XI CHANGE? A high profile visit and a problematic relationship A Tale of Two Leaders Let’s Read the Tea Leaves The Tyranny of Comparison

Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad on 17 September

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor PR Ramesh Deputy Editors Aresh Shirali, Ullekh NP art director Madhu Bhaskar Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai Associate Editor (Web) Vijay K Soni assistant editors

Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Chinki Sinha, Sunaina Kumar, Rajni George, Kumar Anshuman Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra, Shreya Sethuraman senior copy editor Aditya Wig copy editor Sneha Bhura Assistant Art Director Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNERs Anup Banerjee, Veer Pal Singh assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani photo Researcher Abhinav Saha Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Karl Mistry (West),

Krishnanand Nair (South)

National Head—Distribution and Sales

Rahul Patnekar

This is indeed a superb article (‘Thankless India’, 22 September 2014). This goes to show that Indian intelligence agencies are not laggards, but it is the system that is pulling them down. Because of the efforts of the agents who work selflessly despite low levels of motivation, meagre pay and political interference, India is still holding out against Islamist and Naxal terror units.

Indian intelligence The working conditions of India’s paramilitary agencies are not soldiers and policemen laggards, but it is the engaged in counter system that is pulling terrorism operations are them down really bad. The important part is, despite the hardships, they risk their lives to defend our country. We must salute them.  letter of the week

remember that they are meant to report facts and not misuse freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under the Constitution by distorting truth in order to get higher TRP ratings.  kr srinivasan

Bloody Political Rivalry

Ajay Gupta regional heads—circulation D Charles

(South), Melvin George (West), Basab Ghosh (East)

Head—production Maneesh Tyagi pre-press manager Sharad Tailang cfo Anil Bisht hEAD—it Hamendra Singh publisher

R Rajmohan

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Reproduction in any manner is prohibited.

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Volume 6 Issue 38 For the week 23—29 September 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

Cover Photo Amit Dave/Reuters

Symbiotic Relationship

this refers to ‘Soulmates of the East’ (22 September 2014). If Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a departure from tradition and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Kyoto in place of Tokyo, it seems to suggest that he is ready to walk an extra mile in bilateral relations between the two countries. A MarutiSuzuki kind of arrangement could be in the offing with Japanese companies helping spur growth in the Indian defence sector. Besides this, the offer to help clean up and make Varanasi a ‘smart city’ is also welcome. And there are other areas like in infotech, ocean technology, clean and renewable energy, where the two countries can cooperate for mutual benefit. It is the need of the hour to develop strong ties between India and Japan to balance China’s dominance in the region.  Bal Govind

maybe modi is trying to follow Netaji Subhash Bose, who was the first modern Indian leader to recognise the importance of Japan. However, relations between countries should not 29 september 2014

be built around personalities but around shared interests and common goals.  Jitendra De sai

Don’t Kill the Messenger

political figures must be prepared to accept bricks and bouquets gracefully for the survival of democracy (‘Those to Whom Evil Is Done’, 22 September 2014). The recent incident where Telangana Chief Minister Chandrasekhar Rao gave direct warnings to TV channels TV9 and ABN Andhra Jyoti for showing Telangana people in poor light and then going to the extent of threatening to break the necks of journalists and bury them 10 km underground, is deplorable. It is an uncalled for interference in the functioning of the fourth estate.

Publicly threatening mediamen of dire consequences also constitutes a serious offence under the provisions of the Constitution and criminal laws of the land. Even if the channels had made derogatory remarks, the best recourse would have been to lodge a complaint with the Press Council of India. At the same time, the media should

given that the very narration of violence affects social harmony, it is better if the media refrains from publishing sensational reports like this (‘The Blood Sport of Malabar’, 22 September 2014).

The article serves nothing much, except fan animosity among those who take cover under the disgraceful shield of political rivalry. The lack of initiative on the part of leaders to strike a note of peace is disappointing. Such political rivalry had taken its toll earlier and deserves all condemnation. Let us also not forget that cases which are deemed to have been closed still carry unravelled mysteries. The needle of suspicion still points to many a leader of national stature, who have been acquitted for some reason or the other. Hopefully, the law will punish the offenders, irrespective of their background.  Chandrasekaran

Kudos to Our Sleuths

this refers to ‘Thankless India’ (22 September 2014). It was a commendable job by our brave and committed IB officers who faced all those difficulties and still came up with a victory for which all Indians should be grateful and proud.  sagar bhandare

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The 5.6 km long bridge that links Bandra with Worli

Mumbai’s Bridge Too Far Police take anti-suicide measures as people jump to their deaths from the city’s Bandra-Worli Sea Link The BandraWorli Sea Link, a landmark in Mumbai, is fast becoming a hot spot for people deciding to kill themselves. Since 2009, there have been nine suicides, the last early this month. Peculiarly, those who commit suicide here are mostly of well-off families. Seven of the nine were businessmen suffering depression on account of losses.

There is now increased police patrolling here by personnel picked from Bandra and Worli as the Sea Link is moni-

Mumbai

29 september 2014

tored by police stations under both these jurisdictions. It is reported that security guards tend to question anyone who stops nearby. “I am new to this city. I have read so much about the Sea Link that I came down here to see it. But these security guards keep asking us why we are standing here,” says Tapas Maitra, an advertising professional.

Police say that it is easy for people to climb up the railings and jump into the sea below. “Preliminary investigations after the suicides reveal

that these people suffer from depression or had a fight with a family member,”says inspector Rajendra Kane of the Bandra Police Station, who is probing a recent case.

The state government has been issued a notice by the Bombay High Court after a PIL on the suicides was filed.

The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation Limited (MSRDC) has initiated efforts to prevent further attempts. MSRDC will now increase the height of the railings, post more security guards

and increase the number of CCTVs (from six to 64) on the bridge. According to an official of the Mumbai Entry Point Limited (MEPL), which maintains the bridge, it is extremely difficult to prevent suicides.

“People who are determined to kill themselves may continue to jump off the bridge, but the presence of guards will be a deterrent,” says the MEPL official.

Other suggestions include levying a penalty on motorists who stop at the Sea Link and placing safety nets below the bridge. n Haima Deshpande

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dinodia photos

small world

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contents

cover story

Romancing the dragon

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kashmir

Among the castaways

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hurried man’s guide

Android One’s maiden launch in India

14

locomotif

A tale of two leaders

open essay

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Let us read the tea leaves

poll Results

Lessons for BJP

person of the week deepika padukone

The Accidental Feminist The film star’s upbraiding of a newspaper over its description of her photograph earns her widespread support Madhavankutty Pillai

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here is a traditional pact

between the gossip pages and the film celebrity—the former will write anything and everything without attribution or substantiation, often salacious, and the latter will tolerate it as the going price of being a public figure.

Deepika Padukone decided to break that agreement last Sunday.

To a tweet by Times of India’s entertainment handle @ToiEntertain: ‘OMG: Deepika Padukone’s cleavage show’ accompanied by an image of her cleavage and a link to the report on its website, she replied with a tweet of her own, ‘ YES!I am a Woman. I have breasts AND a cleavage!

You got a problem!!??’ And immediately overnight, she became a feminist icon.

Actually she made a series of three tweets. The other two were, ‘Supposedly India’s ‘LEADING’ newspaper and this is ‘NEWS’!!??’ and ‘Dont talk about Woman’s Empowerment when YOU don’t know how to RESPECT Women!’.

And in reply @ToiEntertain further dug its own grave with this tweet, ‘It’s a compliment! You look so great that we want to make sure everyone knew! :)’.

Since then the whole of Bollywood, from Shah Rukh Khan to Nimrat Kaur, has came out in support of Deepika. On Facebook and Twitter, women and men are going ecstatic over what she did. This is, however, hardly the first time that the media has made capital out of the body of film stars.

The actress Dia Mirza aptly put it while tweeting her thanks to Deepika. She said: ‘Entertainment ‘news’ has rarely ever

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treated women with much respect. I’m surprised by the surprise. For once some1 decided not to let it go.’

What is also true is that Bollywood itself also fuels the habit—aspiring stars court the media to get noticed, and within the industry, filmmakers routinely exploit the body to seduce audiences: otherwise you wouldn’t have wet saris and rain dances and item numbers. This too, it is often argued by people like Shabana Azmi, is demeaning because it objectifies women.

The Times of India’s tastelessness is part jewel samad/afp

of a culture firmly entrenched for decades. And not just them, all publications do it on a daily basis in the form of baseless rumours of relationships or semi-erotic images.

It will be too much to expect a burst of anger by Deepika to now call that equation into question. Life will go on because the media and the film industry leech off each other.

Last year, a newspaper broke the news about Shah Rukh Khan’s surrogate baby but got it totally wrong when it reported that there was sex determination done.

The superstar was furious but soon peace was made and Shah Rukh even wrote a column for it later under his byline. Likewise, there will be interviews again of Deepika in The Times Group’s publications.

What the incident indicates is Deepika’s own position in Bollywood.

She is in the middle of a golden run with a series of huge blockbusters behind her.

And she has just got critical acclaim for Finding Fanny, a movie far removed from the traditional commercial fare of Bollywood but which is doing well at the box-office anyway. It is a movie where she is cast with true acting greats like Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapur and has still managed to hold her own.

Deepika is the biggest female star in the country at present and when someone like that gives the media a dressing down, India will stand up and clap even as people go back to looking at cleavages in the next day’s newspaper. n 29 september 2014

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NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

books

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The Indian sepoy in the First World War

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

REVIEW

Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen

Death of a beloved watchmaker

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arts

hmt

alik

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f o r waylaying relief material in Srinagar

Jammu & Kashmir is witnessing the biggest crisis it has seen in modern times. Most of Srinagar has been flooded for days. People who have lived there throughout their lives are finding it hard to recognise the areas that they were born and grew up in. One would

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Sunanda K Datta-Ray on World War books

think that in the face of such a calamity, the last thing that would be on anyone’s mind would be petty politics.

When Chief Minister Omar Abdullah first said that the episode of stone pelting of rescuers was part of a deliberate ploy by anti-social elements, he was thought to be making excuses for people’s anger. But what Hurriyat Conference leader Yasin Malik did on 3 September gives plenty of substance to Abdullah’s charge. Malik was caught on camera waylaying supplies from a boat that was engaged in relief work. His argument was that he had the first right to carry out relief operations in that area. This is probably an instance of reaching the absolute rock bottom of petty politics. That such an incident should happen in a region that is experiencing so much misery is almost surreal.

There is plenty of time for playing politics in the future, but in the middle of a disaster, it’s appalling. n

After suggesting support for the BJP in forming a government in Delhi, former Congress CM Sheila Dikshit said she had been misinterpreted second thoughts

“In a democracy, elected governments are always good as they represent the people. If BJP has reached such a situation that it can form a government, it is good for Delhi”

—PTI, 11 September

turn

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AB Jr: Dr Know-it-all

“I took a constitutional position, if they (BJP) have the numbers.

Because without the numbers, whether you have support or not, you cannot form a government” —NDTV, 15 September

around

What Indians Should Learn from Pakistanis IN S PIRATION Pakistan is a country on the brink, having housed Osama bin Laden before and after 9/11, and until that moment when a Navy Seal sprayed three bullets into his body. It is home to bloodthirsty dictators, unscrupulous politicians and subversive elements exporting terror to India and elsewhere.

There is hardly anything like propriety that the country has to offer. Wait.

There’s one tip that Pakistanis have

Former Pakistan interior minister Rehman Malik Faisal Mahmood/REUTERS

29 september 2014

given the people of India, known for politicians holding things to ransom.

Instead of suffering in silence, Indians should take inspiration from Pakistani travellers who threw former interior minister Rehman Malik out of a Pakistan International Airlines flight for forcing them to wait for two hours.

In a video that has gone viral, posted on Daily Motion and reposted on YouTube, Malik is seen shooed away by angry passengers at the entrance of the aircraft. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to Android One Sensational phone launches by multinationals like Apple take months to snail their way into India. But that just changed this Monday.

Android One, a new platform by Google for cheap high-quality smartphones, was launched in India—a first of its kind. Three phones have been unveiled—by Spice, Karbonn and Micromax—running on the platform, all priced between Rs 6,300 and Rs 6,500.

What Android One does is set a minimum hardware and software specification for manufacturers, giving Google control over the quality of the smartphone. So, what one expects of high-end smartphones will now For about $100, go down to the bottom the phones will of the rung. For about now feature a $100, the phones will quad-core now feature a quadprocessor and a core processor, a long long battery life, battery life, dual SIM with Google’s cards, automatic assurance of quality updates to Android, a Newsstand that can download Hindi publications, plus an ability to download YouTube videos and more.

anindito mukherjee/reuters

This is all done with a view to tap the phenomenal mobile phone user market in India and other emerging countries. If Google succeeds, then there is a river of gold waiting for it, considering the millions of potential users.

It is also the reason that India was chosen to

Android One based mobiles on display in New Delhi

launch Android One. Rs 6,500 might still be out of reach for the vast majority, but with prices dropping and wages increasing, a mass smartphone revolution is not far away and Google wants Android One to herald it.

Android One is helmed by Sunder Pichai, senior vice president of Google, who is of Indian descent. In his blog, he wrote about the future of Andorid One: ‘We expect to see even more high-quality, affordable devices... Finally, we plan to expand the Android One program to Indonesia, the Philippines and South Asia.’ n

Death by Absence of Generosity What happens when Mumbai’s municipality decides to outsource its ambulances M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

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he telephone number 108, that connects to an ambulance service, is the closest that India has to a universal emergency response system. It is a non-profit initiative by state governments along with a private company. One of the things 108 has become famous for are the number of deliveries of children that happen inside ambulances because it takes time to transport expectant mothers from rural places to hospitals and the baby doesn’t have the patience to wait. All in all, the service touches lives.

And therefore, consider the recent odd report in DNA newspaper that 108 had refused to ply patients to a municipal tuberculosis hospital in Mumbai. An anonymous senior doctor was quoted saying a patient had even died because he couldn’t be shifted to another hospital in time.

Our immediate reaction would be to castigate the ambulance service, but it is not really to blame. The 108 ambulances are air-conditioned and ferrying tuberculosis patients would mean risking infections to other patients later.

The real culprit lies hidden in the question of how TB patients got transported earlier.

The answer is that the hospital had its own ambulance. But recently, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) decided that it didn’t want to replace its ambulances whose lifespans were ending and would start banking on the state government instead. And so, this hospital’s retired ambulance has no in-house replacement.

How does one of the richest civic bodies in India with a large number of hospitals under its management decide that it doesn’t want its own ambulances? That’s a question whose answer will be buried in a file noting under a mountain of paper as big as the Shivaji statue that is being

planned on the sea outside Mumbai.

But it probably has something to do with only the poorest coming to these hospitals and they really don’t deserve anything more than the bare minimum.

The bureaucracy, it is often said, is mired in corruption and incompetence, the combination of the two leading to black holes from which it is impossible for trapped individuals to escape. But the case of the Sewri hospital is somewhat different because an improvement in the quality of service—an air-conditioned ambulance—has led to the trap. No bureaucrat foresaw that there would be a category of patients who couldn’t travel by air-condiHow does one tioned of the richest vehicles. This leads to a third civic bodies in characteristic India with a the large number of of bureaucracy— hospitals under absence of its management generosity.

The idea that decide that they could do it doesn’t both, use the want its own ambulances of ambulances? the state government as well as have their own, just didn’t occur to them because they are trained to think like machines. That is why you see people floundering for years to get a simple little pension cleared: because the fear of cheating makes the government demand enormous paperwork. Generosity should trump such pettiness.

Enormous losses are accepted when it comes to scams of businessmen, but for old, retired and sick people, the system is made impossibly rigid. A hundred ambulances more are never going to go empty in a city that reeks of filth and disease. But it takes a heart to know it. n 29 september 2014

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S PRASANNARAJAN

A Tale of Two Leaders

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illustration anirban ghosh

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i Jinping will have gone home by the time you read this. The images of another Asian romance featuring two powerful men, the music of another diplomatic duet, all the pledges and commitments, remain. When it is China, India reacts from extreme national, or even emotional, positions. It is not just another country; China is the name of an obsession, source of a fear, model of an aspiration, and always, a struggle of comprehension across seminar rooms. No country in modern times has rattled the so-called international order with its paranoia, with its exaggerated sense of historical grudge, as China did. And no country in our time has become an easy synonym for fast growth, extra-territorial aggression, controlled minds, free markets, national pride and global distrust. China is a permanent discovery, a ceaseless astonishment, and one of the oldest ideas of turning the memories of submission into an inspiration of empire-building.

So all that dazzle during the visit of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president and leader of the Communist Party, was perfectly understandable. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi was dazzled, what with the dinner on the Sabarmati, in a Gujarat that is being praised as the Guangdong of India. I am sure Modi, while welcoming the new helmsman to India in its most developed state, did not mean that Ahmedabad was worthier than Delhi of the honour, though five years later, it could change. In the end, in spite of all the hosannas evoked by the new HindiChini bhai bhai, it was not a repeat of the Modi-Abe tango, for the Chinese don’t dance to other people’s music. Still, the three days of Xi and Modi gave us a comparative study in leadership from Asia’s two disparate powers—controlled social capitalism and democracy wide open.

In the story of ascent, Xi is different, and more privileged than Modi.

He is the princeling, which means one of the chosen few with a political ancestry. In the People’s Republic, the market may have forced Big Marx to subsist on Big Mac and Mao may have taken refuge in souvenir shops, but the power of pedigree remains unchallenged. Today, if there is a power struggle, too subterranean to be reported by the media, it has to be between those who can claim to have a bloodline going back to the founding revolutionaries of the republic. The recent eruption of the Bo Xilai scandal, in spite of its subplots of murder and corruption, is a cautionary tale about a flamboyant princeling who flew close to the sun too fast. The princelings who inhabit Zhongnanhai today are not the children of the Revolution; it is not the legend of the Chairman, an amateur poet from the farmlands of Hunan, that drives them but the hardcore realism of Deng Xiaoping, China’s most acclaimed bridge player who turned Mao and other ideological deities on their head by singing that it was glorious to be rich. Xi is the winner in a

29 september 2014

generation that enjoyed the freedom and competitiveness of the marketplace but did nothing to liberate the fettered mind, be it a painter or blogger or a ‘counterrevolutionary bad egg’ feted by the Nobel Committee. The new paramount leader, too, does not want the idyll of the Middle Kingdom to be shattered by questions.

Set against him is Modi, and he is where he is today not because of ancestral advantage but the power of ambition. A lesser man would have perished in the embers of Gujarat 2002. It was the story of a lone man, whose backstory was a hazy narrative of dispossession and indoctrination, overcoming the worst instincts of his own party and a show trial by the secular militia. It was a paradox that was not yet comprehended by a section of Indian drawing rooms when a man caricatured by the same militia as a four-letter synonym for monstrosity turned out to be the only moderniser who had the mind for a conversation with the future of India. When he won India after one of the longest campaigns in modern politics, it was also a celebration of the innate strength of the much-abused Indian democracy: the will to win. In a country where ‘power hungry’ is a term of moral derision, he made his hunger for power a struggle against hunger. If democracy is an idea that works best when it is made use by the smartest politician, Modi is the best at work today.

He can be undone only by himself.

Which cannot be said about Xi, the supreme leader of a country where democracy is a Western virus that needs to be prevented from infecting ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. China loves, secretly, everything about the West, in spite of the historical memory of gunboats and humiliations, and the skyward progress of China is inspired by—what else?—America. It loves everything except the most enduring export from the West: democracy, or what the dissidents, cyberspace being their last refuge, call the Fifth Modernization. The still swelling Oriental Gulag beyond the glitz of the Chinese mall only tells us that what the paranoid state fears most is some of its own citizens who refuse to mortgage their conscience to the state. Here Xi has a chance to catch up with Modi.

Wasn’t he trying for a while? His much-publicised ‘Chinese Dream’ was an audacious slogan coming from a leader whose ultimate strength is still drawn from a party apparatus that is purely Leninist. It may be an outright copy of the ‘American Dream’—which is not at all surprising— but dreaming is not what a Chinese leader dares to encourage. When the Chinese youth dreamed in Tiananmen Square 25 years ago, Deng sent tanks to crush the blasphemy. In China revolutionary soundbites matter, and no one has surpassed Mao on this yet. So, will Xi update a classic by the Chairman: Let a billion dreams come true? That will be a Xi change, the moderniser taking Dengism to its logical conclusion.

Modi harvested the dreams of India’s youth; Xi still holds the key to the dreams of the Chinese who want more than the happiness rationed by the state. Xi should be wiser after the epiphany by the Sabarmati. n

So will Xi update a classic by the Chairman: Let a billion dreams come true?

That will be a Xi change

29 september 2014

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open essay

By SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

let us read the tea leaves Times have changed since Mao told Richard Nixon (and Deng Xiaoping repeated to Rajiv), “Business?

Discuss with the premier. Here we discuss philosophical matters”

S

omeone in Narendra Modi’s

Government has taken seriously Mani Shankar Aiyar’s mischievous comment that China has brought such spectacular change to Tibet that impoverished Indians in the underdeveloped Northeast wonder why fate cast them on the wrong side of the border. That must explain the bonanza of a Rs 4,754-crore power Sunanda K Datta-Ray transmission scheme for Arunachal is a columnist and Pradesh and Sikkim on the eve of author of several books Xi Jinping’s visit. Arunachal is, of course, ‘South Tibet’ to the fanciful Chinese. They are less blunt about Sikkim. As Shyam Saran reminded a Delhi audience, China conceded Sikkim was Indian during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s visit. Although it went further two years later when Wen Jiabao came here and handed over maps showing Sikkim as part of India, this was never explicitly acknowledged in writing.

“Recently, some Chinese scholars have pointed out that the absence of an official statement recognising Indian sovereignty leaves the door open to subsequent shifts if necessary,” Saran warned. American sinologists make the same point. David Scott argued in Sino-Indian Territorial Issues: The ‘Razor’s Edge’? that the 2003 Declaration on Principles for Relations and Comprehensive Cooperation between India and China ‘shows a one-way agreement, one-way obligations and one-way con-

cessions’ by India. Chinese recognition of Sikkim’s status is ‘implied rather than explicit, de facto rather than de jure’. As if to bear Scott out, China claimed northern Sikkim’s Finger Area tract in 2008. Yang Shengkun, China’s octogenarian president, had turned a deaf ear when Rajiv Gandhi brought up Sikkim in the Great Hall of the People in 1988. What might the sceptics not have concluded had they known that when the last Chogyal of Sikkim’s Tibetan-born sister-in-law wanted to visit her mother in Lhasa long after Sikkim became an Indian state, Chinese diplomats gave her a laissez-passer saying a Sikkimese royal couldn’t travel on an Indian passport.

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he Chinese can be confusing. We still don’t know for instance whether Mao Zedong actually smiled at Brajesh Mishra in 1970 or only shook hands and said India and China couldn’t go on quarrelling forever. Perhaps the Great Helmsman merely looked his usual happy self so that Mishra of the stern visage, as befits a highly-placed Indian, thought he was smiling. K Kamaraj was even more bewildered when a visiting Chinese official he tried to garland in what was still Madras vehemently resisted the courtesy. No “Parkalam … Let’s wait and see”—Kamaraj’s favourite phrase—this time. Being big and burly, he forced the garland over the reluctant Chinese head. After all, the man had just done the same to him! Not that man, murmured Kunwar Natwar Singh, who was officially in attendance. Chen Chen Tho, the vice-minister leading an official Chinese delegation touring India, had garlanded Kamaraj

prashant panjiar/the india today group/getty images

Rajiv Gandhi with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1988

29 september 2014

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“What are a few thousand square miles of territory compared to the friendship of 600 million Chinese?” Marshal Chen Yi asked Dr Radhakrishnan during Zhou Enlai’s last visit to India. India’s scholarly vice-president was too polite to retort it depended on who owned the land. Instead, he countered, “What are a few thousand square miles compared to the friendship of 400 million Indians?” who had, in turn, garlanded Chen’s interpreter. He couldn’t tell them apart. The Chinese needed 1962 to recover from the floral insult. No wonder the Chief Minister was Kamarajed out.

No such blunder marred Xi Jinping’s first visit to India as China’s president which resembled Lee Kuan Yew’s first visit to China as prime minister of Singapore. A certain unspoken dissonance mars both relationships. At their first official meeting Lee’s opposite number, Premier Hua Guo Feng, gave him a copy of Neville Maxwell’s contentious book, India’s China War, saying it was the “correct version” of the 1962 war. SR Nathan, later Singapore’s president, who was present, says Lee returned the book after a cursory look at the cover. “This is China’s version of the war,” he said politely. “There is another—the Indian version. Singapore is in South-east Asia. We have people of Chinese, Malay and Indian origins. Singapore has no direct interest in such wars.”

It was a serious rebuff by a tiny city-state to a formidable power, known to be touchy about protocol and prestige. Nathan recalls that “the foreign minister [the late Qiao Guanhua] was taken aback.” However, Hua took the insult in his stride.

There was more cause for heartburn when Singapore lost heavily on its $30-billion investment in the 288-sq-km Suzhou Industrial Park, pride of the Sino-Singaporean connection.

Suzhou was planned as a self-contained manufacturing, urban and high-technology centre replicating Singapore’s capitalist efficiency in Communist China’s industrial heartland. It would also be a model to attract foreign investment. That’s where things went wrong because China created another park nearby, state-owned but with a similar name. As Lee said, China was “using us to get investors in, and when investors came in, they said: ‘You come to my park, it’s cheaper’.” In short, China took Singapore for a ride. The scandal was exposed three years later when Suzhou’s Singaporean CEO said the annual loss of about $23.5 million would spiral to $90 million by the end of 2000.

Yet, never did I see or hear any breast-beating over China’s perfidy. Singapore’s media scarcely mentioned the event. The figures quoted are from Michael Richardson’s report in the old

International Herald Tribune published in Paris. Singapore remained China’s closest friend and supporter. Trade between them boomed. So did investment. Floods of tourists flowed in both directions. One rotten kiwi fruit wasn’t allowed to infect the rest. Lee even ascribed the fraud to vigorous competition between the central and provincial governments. A Chinese colleague cited the Yuan dynasty proverb ‘Tian gao, Huangdi yuan’ (Heaven is high and the emperor is far away) to explain the tense rivalry between Beijing and provincial capitals.

Lee was less indulgent in private. “We have to diversify, we can’t put all our eggs into China and it is bad for us” he told me for my book, Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India. “We want India to succeed and, anyway, if the Chinese know we have an alternative that will make sure they don’t try to squeeze us.” Ambitious schemes like the Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park in Ho Chi Minh City or the Madras Corridor which was on the anvil for many years ensured China couldn’t again pull another fast one like Suzhou.

N

ow, too, seven Indo-Vietnamese agreements, a joint an-

nouncement upholding freedom of navigation in the East Sea/South China Sea, Australia’s promise of enriched uranium and Japan’s pledge to invest $35 billion, all on the eve of Xi’s visit, probably spoke louder than anything Modi muttered in Japan about “18th century ideas”, “expansionist” tendencies and “encroachments” in alien waters. As Liu Youfa, China’s outspoken consul-general in Mumbai, pertinently pointed out, Xi had decided even before landing at the prime minister’s birthday party in Ahmedabad to nibble khaman dhokla amidst embroidered torans and carved furniture from Sankheda, that he would invest three times the amount Shinzo Abe had promised. It’s back to Cold War competition when non-alignment— lacking finesse, down-to-earth Americans called it ‘neutralism’—meant collecting dividends from both sides.

That’s diplomacy. Modi’s “very cool” says Salman Khan; he’s also “the most hardworking politician” the actor has seen. In fact, he worked hard not only at juxtaposing the Japan,

The Chinese can be confusing. We still don’t know for instance whether Mao Zedong actually smiled at Brajesh Mishra in 1970 or only shook hands and said India and China couldn’t go on quarrelling forever. Perhaps the Great Helmsman merely looked his usual happy self so that Mishra of the stern visage, as befits a highly-placed Indian, thought he was smiling 12 open

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(From right) S Radhakrishnan, Indira Gandhi and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai celebrate a round of success in the Sino-Indian border talks of 1960

Australia and China dates but also at his birthday coinciding with the worship of Viswakarma, the divine architect who built Krishna’s capital, the holy city of Dwarka, naturally in Gujarat.

Being adept at improving His gifts with man’s work, as Milton might have mused, Indians of all political shades expect the Chinese to be equally creative. “What are those hills?” Dev Kanta Barooah once inquired at Beijing airport. When the interpreter said they were the Western Hills, the ebullient Congressman who hadn’t yet decided that Indira is India and India is Indira asked, “Before or after liberation?” Being a consummate diplomat, Barooah was encouraging his hosts to pass off the Western Hills as another product of Mao Zedong Thought.

The Chinese call it ‘mutual accommodation’. They love the phrase but Rajiv didn’t when Prime Minister Li Peng proposed it in 1988. Rajiv suggested “mutual acceptability” which Li shrugged off, saying “Words are not important substance.”

Neither, it would seem, is land. “What are a few thousand square miles of territory compared to the friendship of 600 million Chinese?” Marshal Chen Yi asked Dr Radhakrishnan during Zhou Enlai’s last visit to India. India’s scholarly vicepresident was too polite to retort it depended on who owned the land. Instead, he countered, “What are a few thousand square miles compared to the friendship of 400 million Indians?”

There we still stand like the two goats trying to cross a narrow bridge from opposite sides, with which Liu Shuqing, Chinese vice-foreign minister in the late 1980s, compared India and China. He told Dawa Tsering, Bhutan’s longtime foreign minister, the goats would stand with locked horns until one agreed to back out (the dreaded mutual accommodation!) or was 29 september 2014

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pushed off. Modi has given a new twist to the stalemate.

Whatever the face-off in Ladakh, his somewhat baffling slogan, ‘Inch towards Miles’, apparently means India and China should make a beeline for the ‘Millennium of Exceptional Synergy’.

George Fernandes’ ‘Chase China’ slogan, coined after visiting the country he once called “India’s Enemy Number One”, made simpler sense. There’s plenty to chase. India and China enjoyed economic parity in 1980, but China’s growth has outstripped India’s fourfold. Cambridge has three times as many Chinese students as Indian. The PLA reportedly outnumbers Indian troops 3:1 in Ladakh.

Not that we haven’t done any catching up. The Greater Mekong Subregion scheme in which China was prominent inspired the Mekong-Ganga project. China’s Maritime Silk Road prompted India’s Project Mausam. One of these days, perhaps, Modi will startle everyone by appearing in a Western lounge suit as Premier Zhao Ziyang did. But it might not go down too well with his saffron lobby. The popularity of Zhao’s posthumous autobiography Prisoner of State can’t compensate for being purged politically, kept under house arrest for 15 years and denied an official funeral.

It would pay Modi more to take serious note of the strictures

by Marten Pieters of Vodafone and Honda’s Fumihiko Ike about doing business in India. Times have changed since Mao told Richard Nixon (and Deng Xiaoping repeated to Rajiv), “Business? Discuss with the premier. Here we discuss philosophical matters.” The emphasis of a visit that started as Viswakarma puja was being celebrated had to be on business, which should be the keynote of Sino-Indian relations in the 21st century. n open www.openthemagazine.com 13

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ROMANCING THE DRAGON Modi played the indulgent host to perfection as he tried to bond with the visiting Chinese president Xi Jinping. Can the mutually suspicious Asian powers overcome the trust deficit? By Ullekh NP

Narendra Modi with Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan at the Sabarmati riverfront, Ahmedabad

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he construction of façades to

hide ramshackle slums and shabby colonies on the way to the Sabarmati Ashram from Ahmedabad’s Sardar Patel Airport was in full swing a few days ago. Cheerful sanitary workers of the Amdavad Municipal Corporation, thrilled by the prospect of a visit to their city by a leader advertised as the ‘world’s second-most powerful’, were busy clearing plastic waste and cow dung from traffic dividers. Huge banners welcoming Chinese president Xi Jinping in English, Gujarati and Chinese attracted a lot of interest. A few local residents near the city’s Hyatt hotel where Xi was to stay were asked to shift to their relatives’ home for a day or two over security reasons, but even they weren’t complaining much. Their small sacrifice was perhaps the best gift they had in mind for local boy Narendra Modi who, on his sixty-fourth birthday, hosted Xi in their city, before the Chinese Communist Party heavyweight left for Delhi on a three-day India tour.

“There was a sense of pride at the newfound recognition for Ahmedabad,” gushes a state official, calling it Amdavad. “After all, it is the Prime Minister’s home city.

I don’t remember the last time we hosted such a global dignitary,” continues the official, who was happy to follow instructions to polish his shoes, tuck in his shirt and look immaculately dressed while Xi was in town.

Xi, born to communist parents in Beijing in the turbulent 1950s when Mao Zedong was consolidating power through land reforms and eliminating counter-revolutionaries in an impoverished China, cannot be a stranger to slums, but then, sweeping dirt under the carpet by banishing beggars and cordoning off heavy-traffic routes is par for the course when a tall leader comes visiting, especially when what Modi wants to do is to leave nothing to chance in leveraging the hostilities between China and Japan to maximise gains for New Delhi. The logic that runs deep among India’s mandarins is that since Japan— during Modi’s visit to Tokyo and other cities a few weeks ago—promised to invest $35 billion in the country through public and private funding over the next five years for various works, including the building of smart cities and cleanup of the Ganga, China, competitive to the core, can’t offer less. And the Chinese dole-out is crucial for Modi, who wants to use the funds to rapidly modernise the country and create highly skilled jobs as part of meeting poll promises.

Which explains why Modi spent many hours on his birthday with Xi—who wore an off-white khadi jacket gifted to him by Modi—and his dashing Chinese folk singer wife Peng Liyuan at the Sabarmati Ashram and at his showpiece Sabarmati Waterfront. Xi smiled genially as he watched Indian cultural dancers, took a break sitting on a traditional swing, and also tried his hand at a spinning wheel. Modi presented the Chinese leader a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in Chinese, along with some 16 open

Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping in Ahmedabad

books on Gandhi. Clearly, Modi’s body language revealed it all: he was aching to build a personal relationship with Xi—something that he has done, with great success, with Japanese leader Shinzo Abe.

The Game of Perception

China, India’s biggest trading partner with annual twoway commerce of more than $65 billion, is looking forward to investing in Indian infrastructure and related segments. Michael Zhang, a Shanghai-based foreign policy analyst at China Market Research Group, a policy consultant, notes that India has a lot to gain through cooperation in infrastructure, including high-speed trains and industrial parks for car production, manufacture, etc.

“Compared to Japan, China has advanced technology in these segments. India is going to gain more benefits from China’s help and China will enjoy a good return on investment because of the large market potential in India if both India and China can deepen economic cooperation,” he points out.

But, as with anything to do with China, concerns abound.

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A section of Indian diplomats view Beijing’s efforts to invest huge sums of money in India as a deft move to buy its silence over China’s expansionist designs in the region.

India has been anxious that China is building ports and other facilities throughout South Asia, employing what has been called a ‘string of pearls’ strategy, to militarily surround the country.

Which is why the Chinese will never stop trying to woo countries with money, reasons Edward Luttwak, US military historian and author of The Rise of China Vs the Logic of Strategy, “Yes, money talks.

The Chinese think India (like countries like Sri Lanka and other smaller nations in the Indian Ocean) can be easily bought. Huawei (a Chinese company which has been doing business in India for long) has convinced the Chinese authorities that Indian officials can be easily purchased,” he adds. Open couldn’t independently verify this claim.

Michael Kugelman, Senior Program Associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has no doubts about Modi’s well-meaning efforts to attract Chinese funds and get Beijing to address New Delhi’s trade imbalance concerns. He believes that on the economic diplomacy front, Modi has remained true to his initial intentions: to re-engage with India’s neighbours in a way that highlights the country’s desire for economic partnerships and more allaround diplomacy, while also portraying itself as a strong state internationally. “Yes, the Prime Minister is doing the tightrope balancing act. He established good ties with his neighbours, and the highlight, of course, was the invitation to his swearing-in to Pakistan president Nawaz Sharif. He was sensitive to China’s worries and didn’t invite the Dalai Lama for the swearing-in. There

N arendra Modi was trying to leverage the hostilities between China and Japan to maximise the potential gains for New Delhi

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has been a lot of symbolism. Now, after rubbing shoulders with Japan—which he believes will add to India’s weight—he is looking at engagement with China,” says a senior foreign ministry official.

How Easy Can it Get?

A US diplomat based out of Delhi avers that getting Chinese money for rebuilding the country’s creaking infrastructure in is not a bad idea. “India and China must trade aggressively, but empirical evidence shows that China can’t be trusted with military and border disputes, and such frictions will end up hurting commercial ties. It is a tough thing to manage that country where the belief in democracy and transparency are very low,” he argues.

Shanghai-based analyst Michael, too, concedes that India-China ties are problematic—to the extent that it is not easy for Modi to strike up a good working relationship with Xi as he did with Abe. Robert D Kaplan, who has argued in several of his books that the centre of world power has been quietly shifting from Europe to Asia and that the ‘greater Indian Ocean’, which stretches from the 18 open

Red Sea to the South China Sea, is now on the global centre stage, in fact, doesn’t see anything strange or interesting about the bonhomie on display at the Sabarmati.

“There is nothing new here. India and China are playing a great game of influence throughout the Indian Ocean’s maritime Silk Road. These tensions will be hidden somewhat when the Chinese leader visits India, for the leaders of both countries will try their best to put a positive public face on their relations.” China and the Gujarat government signed three MOUs on the first day of Xi’s visit alone.

China’s unpredictability over border disputes with India has been giving local authorities the jitters. More disquieting are its ‘non-transparent’ setting up of ports and infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka. Xi’s suggestions of a “Twenty first century maritime Silk Route”, linking China to Europe through the seas, have sparked anxieties among the neighbours; Silk Route derives its name from the lucrative trade in Chinese silk that started before a few centuries before Christ and lasted several centuries.

The concept of a maritime Silk Route sounds luring.

However, pundits feel the Chinese naval strategy and 29 september 2014

Modi with Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan (facing page); The Chinese first lady watches folk artists perform at the Sabarmati riverfront

amit dave/reuters

designs are misplaced and wily. The Chinese Navy prefers a two-ocean power, with multiple access routes between the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific to ease its dependence on the Strait of Malacca. In effect, it involves pushing back US and encircling India on the way to the Middle East and East Africa. Beijing’s hurry in signing maritime pacts with the likes of Mauritius, Maldives and Seychelles proves just that. “Both strategies are wrongheaded because China is quarrelling with most countries [like Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines] in between [the Silk Route], which all open their ports to US, Japan and India and close them to China,” explains Luttwak. He goes on, “The problem is that the Chinese confuse sea power [building ships, etcetera] with maritime power, which involves getting access to friendly ports.”

Warmth Ain’t Enough

Behind the smiles, red-carpet blitzes and firm handshakes lurk deep suspicions.

Michael says that territorial dispute is a vexed one 29 september 2014

T he concept of a maritime Silk Route is attractive. But there are fears that China will use the new trade route to further its expansionist drive

however hard one tries to hide it at high teas and ceremonial dinners. “As far as I know, just a few days ago, Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj claimed that if China wanted the favour of India in One-China Policy, China must support One-India Policy, which [means] China should admit that Southern Tibet belongs to India. By no means would the Chinese government agree with the claim, and the sovereign rights in these regions,” he says. The last time India and China fought a war was way back in 1962, but skirmishes on the eastern border are common—China stakes claim to the state of Arunachal Pradesh and has maintained that residents of the Northeastern state didn’t require anything more than stapled visas to visit the Middle Kingdom.

“That problem [raised by Swaraj] would have a bad effect in bilateral ties. Maybe to Indian officials, it is not a big deal, but for the Chinese government, the territory is one of the biggest issues. So in my opinion, such claims

by Swaraj and the previous Japan visit would influence Xi,” Michael adds. Beijing has always looked at India’s open www.openthemagazine.com 19

ties with Japan with scepticism, fearing that the two countries would work towards creating a military bloc as a counterweight. Modi, during his Japan visit, had made a veiled attack on China’s aggressive military posturing.

“The world is divided into two camps. One camp believes in expansionist policies while the other believes in development. We have to decide whether the world should get caught in the grip of expansionist policies or we should lead it on the path of development and create opportunities that take it to greater heights,” he had said.

A Myanmar-based Indian diplomat, meanwhile, feels that Modi’s push to “leverage ties with Japan to extract investment promises from rival China would work”. But he emphasises that uncertainties would still persist.

Which is why Michael thinks it is really hard for Xi to form a close relation-

ship with Modi in a short time. It cannot be like the one between Modi and Abe, he says.

True, the past four months have seen hectic diplomatic activity, especially to make Xi’s visit a great success.

After Modi was sworn in, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was among the first foreign leaders to phone and congratulate him. Keqiang had visited India in March 2013 and the countries signed eight agreements at that time. The two had hit it off well, and to underline the importance of Indo-Chinese ties, the newly elected Indian Prime Minister told Keqiang that seventh-century Chinese scholar Hiuen Tsang had even visited his village Vadnagar in Gujarat. Besides, this time around, after choosing the venue of the Chinese President’s arrival himself, Modi had entrusted his close aide in the PMO, Arvind Kumar Sharma, to oversee the preparations for the high-

Modi’s personal rapport with Abe and plans for military cooperation with Japan haven’t gone down well in China

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Xi Jinping inspects the guard of honour at his reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan (facing page); President Pranab Mukherjee with the Chinese President at the welcome ceremony (below)

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profile visit. “The Prime Minister is extremely keen that India be showcased beyond Delhi,” says Syed Akbaruddin, spokesperson for the External Affairs Ministry. “We will be having many other such occasions where visitors from outside will be hosted in other places beyond Delhi,” he adds.

Xi is no Abe

Building relationships amid heightening of hostilities along the border will not be easy though.

“The personal rapport between Modi and Abe can be traced back to seven years ago, when Abe was in his first term as Japan’s Prime Minister. At that time, Modi was shrouded in negative news about Muslims being attacked in Gujarat, and was rejected by many countries when he wanted to visit them. However, Modi succeeded in visiting Japan. Besides, Modi insisted on visiting Abe on his second tour to Japan in 2012, when Abe had stepped down as Prime Minister over a corruption scandal,” says the Shanghai foreign policy expert. India’s proposed deal with Japan to buy 15 Japanese amphibious US-2 29 september 2014

aircraft as well as potential military cooperation with Vietnam, including joint exercises off of Haiphong, have piqued China. India and China don’t share ancient hostilities, and they have common interests being members of the BRIC bloc. Separated geographically by the Himalayas, their rivalries are new, but with China encroaching onto main sea lines of communication at a time in history when 90 per cent of all commercial goods travel inter-continentally by sea, India will find Chinese designs disconcerting.

For the moment though, amid photo-ops and razzmatazz, everything looks hunky-dory, giving the impression that ties between the two Asian economic powerhouses are getting warmer and warmer. Xi’s bigticket announcements on his tour do offer rays of hope of greater cooperation between the world’s two fast-growing major economies, yet the huge gap between an unabashed democracy and a totalitarian regime with inviolable hierarchies remains un-bridged. n With additional reporting by Kumar Anshuman open www.openthemagazine.com 21

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mODEL ANALYSIS

The Tyranny of Comparison The look-at-China syndrome makes no sense, argues SUHEL SETH as he weighs Asia’s two biggest national brands

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he venerable Alexander

Pope once said, ‘For forms of Government let fools contest, that which is governed best is best’: never has a saying been so true when it comes to comparing India and China. There are many reasons why we love to compare these two countries. More often than not, we Suhel Seth blame our lack of progress on the is Managing democracy we have given ourselves.

Partner of We have always argued, erroneousCounselage ly as well, that we cannot compare India and can be ourselves to China because China reached at is not a democracy. We believe that suhel@ democracy gives us the licence to counselage.com postpone progress, arguing that the aspirations of the people are reflected in the chaos we have created for ourselves. Nothing is more dangerous for India. We cannot forever tout our democracy for ‘enduring failure’, as also my belief is that we cannot let the civil liberties of a few deprive the many of real-time progress. Today we are energy deficient; we encourage crony capitalism as also the unholy nexus between politics and industry only because it is expedient for the brand of politics we follow. There are several realities we need to contend with when we compare Brand India with Brand China. The first is that we will never be a country which understands the importance of scale. We believe scale to be a waste until we are faced with the realities of shortage. This is evident in the way we build ports, roads, highways and airports. We plan for today. China plans for 10 years hence. They understand that scale gives them two kinds of cushions: value for money and hedging against future shortages.

Consider this: we were the country that imposed travel and trade embargoes when South Africa was subjected to apartheid, and yet today, China does more business than we ever can, not just with South Africa but indeed the entire continent of Africa. While we are still battling with coal linkages and energy alternatives, China already has enough supplies of coal and lithium to meet their ever-burgeoning demands. Financially too, we don’t compare with China. Given their bullying nature, they 24 open

have managed to keep their currency stable. Being the largest holders of US Treasury bonds, this helps them maintain a ruthlessly dominant position in world finance. But that is not the important thing.

A country comparison is essentially a people’s comparison. Our DNA is distinct from that of China’s. We have managed to infect every element of our lives with politics. We have had a scourge of corruption which has gone unpunished, whereas the Chinese have begun the purge and made public noises about it as well. If this is not good governance then what is? It is easy to say that we have an independent judiciary in place, but do we ultimately seek an independent justice system or do we wish to exude fairness in our courts? Can we afford to be a country where the justice system crawls for years on end, rendering justice impotent as it were? We believe there is a human rights paradox prevalent in China, but then my question is: do we actually have real-time human rights in India?

And are human rights as esoteric as many limousine liberals would have us believe? My belief is that we have deprived swathes of our people in India of basic rights and these all constitute human rights in my book. The denial of education, of sanitation, of drinking water, of redressal in police stations; of the huge number of under-trials languishing in prisons only because of a snail like justice system, are equally violative of the enshrined principles of human rights as envisaged by our Founding Fathers in our Constitution. So then what democracy are we talking about and who is benefiting from this conceptual political identity except those academics and liberals who revel in believing that we are genuinely free? Ask the Maoists in India if they really believe we are a democracy. Ask the displaced tribals, or for that matter the suicide-driven farmers if they really care about their franchise every five years.

Democracy cannot exist as a concept alone. It is in its implementation and benefits for the people it serves that it really creates an enduring impact. We talk about China’s inequalities and about mini revolutions being snuffed out. We are doing the same thing with displaced segments of our society. But this essay is not about how flawed our democracy is: it is about this odious comparison that we often make between China and India.

The idea is to see both these brands in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.

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strengths Brand China l Has created a niche for itself as the factory of the world l Is noted for rigorous discipline and conformity with existing laws l Provinces have the authority needed to maximise investment and jobs l Competition between provinces increases revenue l The ruling elite are in complete control, offering clarity of thought l Has invested heavily in resources, power and energy efficiency

Brand India l Security of doing business; an independent legal system l A young population, which is also a weakness since their aspirations need to be met substantively l A new Government that has shown the kind of outreach that is needed to both inspire and attract investment l Has far better geo-political relations than China

Weaknesses Brand China Has a reputation of being a ruthless bully, which makes it an unattractive business destination l Has ignored basic individual liberties in favour of immediate commercial success l Because of its dependence on manufacturing, is perpetually at the mercy of price fluctuations l Predominantly export driven economies such as China are especially vulnerable in times of global financial crises

Brand India l Uses democracy as a crutch to postpone key decisions l Courts have power over areas in which they lack expertise l Political expediency slows down progress both in terms businesses and people l Has created a culture of indiscipline l Poor planning for the future; here the federal nature of the polity doesn’t seem to be helping l A lack of inspired leadership which will hopefully now change

Therefore, on balance, both India and China stack up equally on the scorecard side except that on date, China has a huge headstart. So it is not important for us to compare ourselves with China on all parameters except that it is critical to take the best in terms of learnings and see how two hugely populated countries can help meet the

aspirations of their people. While we need to recognise the importance of scale and size, as also effective decisionmaking, I believe China needs to learn compassion and inclusiveness from India. It is time for China to yet again embrace Bodhidharma while we wait for Narendra Modi to become our version of Deng Xiaoping. n

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The INVASION

We Are All Chinese in Some Ways How much China we take in our everyday life. GUNJEET SRA finds out

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t is a 6 AM on a Sunday morning and 35-year-old Rakesh Kumar is setting up his shop for business in a makeshift bazaar on a sidewalk in old Delhi. Like hundreds of other hawkers, he makes his living selling cheap goods—anything from feng shui paraphernalia to cheap plastic goods, from nail cutters to toilet cleaners, to shoes, bags, cosmetics and clothes. It is no secret that India is one of the biggest importers of small commodities from China. Last year alone 360,000 Indian traders visited the country and bought home goods worth $780 million. “Chinese products have changed the way Indian consumers think. If you can get [something] at a cheaper price, why will you go for something expensive?” says Kumar who has been in this business for a decade, “Earlier it was just the decorative items, but now they supply everything based on demand and it is working. They even make idols, firecrackers and Diwali lights, how can someone compete with their prices? ” he asks, as customers start to pour in. It is not just middle-class housewives looking for a good deal, however. There are groups of youngsters scouring the market too, looking for cheap clothes. Harried mothers accompanied by their children, looking for their weekly steals. Kamala Sharma, 37, who comes to the market weekly, states that, “While growing up in a middle-class home in Delhi, I remember constantly wanting all sorts of fancy things that my parents didn’t have money to buy. Everything was so expensive. I was always envious of the other children with fancy things.

My mother would take me to cheap Tibetan markets in the hills or occasionally to Nepal for bulk shopping.

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Today, I have to just step out and get anything that I need and it doesn’t even cost much.”

Sharma says that hers is a single income household that can get hard to budget for and that the only way she can fulfil all her family’s wants are through these weekly markets and hawker bazaars. She is not the only one.

Newlywed Farah Bashir, 28, who is just setting up her home is at the market looking for goods to decorate her modest home in north-west Delhi. “You don’t necessarily have to say where you bought it. As long as it doesn’t look cheap, who cares,” she says, adding, “that I am done spending money on big brands when everything looks the same and no one can really tell the difference.”

She was not always this way and spent a lot of money on things that she coveted. “I was obsessed with quality and about two years ago, after I’d spent almost half of my savings on a particular pair of sunglasses, I saw the exact same replica with a hawker for one-tenth the price. I felt very stupid at the time. They even had the detailing right. No one could’ve guessed it was a fake.” She has been shopping thriftily ever since. “The best thing about Chinese goods is that they are very trend centric. Earlier one had to rely on big retailers to bring home trends. But not anymore. If something is trendy, you will find it in one of these markets,” she says eyeing the food stall next to it selling cheap chowmein.

Meanwhile in Lajpat Nagar, the mecca of thrift shopping in the heart of South Delhi, the most popular hot spot remains the Chinese chaat corner: A small hole-in-thewall food stall that has taken two of the most popular 29 september 2014

Indian food choices and fused them. Middle-aged women and families line the corner and chow down chilli chicken and fried rice with the same comfort that they reserve for aloo chaat and gol gappe. “The reason I love Chinese food is because it is the only international cuisine that tastes as good as ours,” say 42-year-old Amrit Kaur Dhillon as she waits for her platter to arrive. There are over 5,000 Chinese restaurants in Delhi and most of them serve inauthentic Chinese that is also popular as ‘Chindian’ or ‘Chinjabi’. “The adaptation of our flavours is what makes it so popular. From the variety to great vegetarian options that have cauliflower to cottage cheese to the thick gravy, there is something absolutely lovable about this food,” says 32-year-old Arshan Marwah, who professes that, “Chinese now feels like Indian.”

O

utside the market, there is a lone rickshaw stand-

ing at the end of a busy road. Its owner, sprawled across it irreverently, is too busy staring at his small mobile phone screen to notice the blatant stares coming his way. Finally a girl walks up to him and asks gingerly, “Bhaiya, chalenge?” (Are you free?). After a couple of minutes, the man looks up at her, pulls out a ear phone from one ear and says, “Nahi, abhi hum kuch dekh rahein hain” (No, I’m watching something right now).

The mobile phone revolution is nothing new, but it is one of the small ways in which China has changed the way Indians live. This year alone over 12 Chinese handset brands have captured a little more than 10 per 29 september 2014

cent of the Indian handset market. Over 30 million smartphones are sold here annually, many of them being of Chinese make. “Their smartphones start from Rs 3,000 and go up to Rs 40,000,” says 42-year-old Atul Saxena who runs a shop in the mainland of Chinese mobile products in India—Gaffar Market, Karol Bagh. “It started almost five years ago with cheap replicas of popular phones that started doing the rounds, especially the iPhone. In an average week I sell at least up to 100 plus phones, most of them cheap smartphones.” Manufacturers in India are also importing Chinese goods and selling these under their labels (Spice phones, for example). In order to sell dual-SIM smartphones in India, China Wireless Technologies has tied up with Reliance Communications, India’s second-largest telecommunications service provider. “The fact that everybody has a mobile phone now wouldn’t have been possible without such mass imports at cheap prices,” says Saxena.

Delhi based trend analyst and market researcher Chanda Saxena says that this obsession with cheap products can be blamed on the rising aspirations of the middleclass in India and China’s ability to fulfill those at low prices. “There is no surprise really why so much of China is in our lives. They consistently deliver [to] their target audience things that they aspire to have, but at affordable prices. It is a win-win situation for everybody,” she says, adding that this market is only bound to grow.

“For anything that there is, there is a cheaper, almost authentic Chinese replica. A consumer is not going to think twice where they get it from as long as they get it cheap.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 27

by-elections

It’s No But letting the likes of Yogi Adityanath go berserk can ruin the BJP’s dreams of reviving a hollow organisation and sustaining the magic of Modi on the stump

BY Ullekh np

A

BJP President Amit Shah arun sharma/ht/getty images

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s the results of the

bypolls to 32 assembly seats across nine states held last week emerged, revealing an embarrassing setback for the BJP, which lost 13 of the 23 seats it had held in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat, a senior BJP leader noted ruefully, “You can’t talk ‘development’ in Delhi and ‘love jihad’ in Uttar Pradesh and still expect not to get the message clouded. In this age of 24x7 television news channels and effervescent social media, the bad-cop-good-cop strategy doesn’t wash.” He was referring to efforts by the ruling party headed by a man with tremendous reformist appeal, Narendra Modi, to pull in votes by polarising people along religious lines. “You are not the only party that can do it. And these results are lessons in humility, to say the least,” he warns.

Coming, as it does, some four months after a commanding triumph in the Modi-centric General Election, and after reverses in by-elections in Uttarakhand, Bihar, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the latest round of blows have fuelled talk of the Modi wave dissipating within a few months of its buffeting the country and shrinking the Congress party to its lowest tally in electoral history. While in Uttar Pradesh the BJP and ally Apna Dal lost eight of the 11 seats held by it to the 29 september 2014

t About Modi ruling party in the state, Samajwadi Party, in Rajasthan, the Congress, which was down in the dumps after the Lok Sabha polls lost it all Parliamentary seats from the state, claimed back three of four Assembly seats. In Modi’s home state of Gujarat, where the Prime Minister didn’t campaign for the first time in 12 years, the BJP lost three of the nine seats it had held last time to the Congress, boosting the latter’s morale after a resounding General Election defeat.

Another senior BJP leader and former Union minister concedes that the ‘polarisation pitch’ in UP, where the BJP won 72 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats this year, was neutralised by the SP which also fielded ‘Hindu names’ to counter the BJP offensive. Political pundits are of the view that the BJP had managed to woo Hindu voters in the state in the Lok Sabha polls thanks to a polarisation in the state after the Muzaffarnagar riots that saw massive Dalit participation in such violence for the first time. As a result, the pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party led by Mayawati drew a blank in the General Election.

“The SP was very much conscious of the BJP’s tactics this time around. And that realisation seems to have helped them in this election,” notes psephologist Devendra Kumar. In the face of inflammatory anti-Muslim statements by the likes of Yogi Adityanath, the BJP’s campaign spearhead in the state, the SP fielded more Hindu faces in this bypoll.

Though its strategy didn’t work in Saharanpur, where the BJP’s Rajeev Gumbar won, the SP’s decision to withdraw the candidacy of a Dalit Muslim and field a Hindu from Balha, a reserved constituency, paid off.

“What our party did was hit back with a bit of Hindutva,” an SP leader tells Open, emphasising that the strategy should force the BJP to desist from “too much of religion mongering” like what was seen in UP. Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, a star campaigner for the BJP along with Kalraj Mishra and state BJP chief 29 september 2014

deepak gupta/ht/getty images

BJP leader Yogi Adityanath (centre)

The SP blunted BJP’s religious polarisation efforts in UP by fielding mostly Hindu candidates. It helped that Muslims resorted to strategic voting to keep the BJP at bay Laxmikant Bajpai, had said that ‘love jihad’, a term to describe a deliberate attempt by Muslim boys to woo nonMuslim women with the intention of coercing them to convert to Islam, would be a major issue in the bypolls held on 13 September. Various other parties in the state had said that ‘love jihad’ was a

hoax perpetuated by the Hindu nationalist party to reap the gains of religious polarisation.

I

n a way, the poll setback was more of

a rejection of the aggressive posturing by the state’s BJP leaders than of Modi’s leadership and promises of focusing on development, skilling, women’s empowerment and a raft of other zealous reformist moves and shock therapies to transform the country into a global economic powerhouse. “Each time Adityanath made a statement, Brand Modi, created and sold to India’s people frustrated with the slow pace of growth and breakdown of public delivery systems and a lack of avenues for entrepreneurs to flourish, among others, got diluted. Modi the doer was a far cry from the agents of hatred who sought votes this time in assembly elections,” says a person who has closely worked with Modi in designing his campaign strategy. open www.openthemagazine.com 29

express archive

“The tit-for-tat by the SP doesn’t show that Modi magic is on the wane, but it shows that the kind of politics peddled

by BJP leaders in UP has no takers,” says Kumar, cautioning against running into easy and premature conclusions of an erosion of support for Modi’s vision for India. True, assembly election results, unlike those of the General Election, are not exactly indicators of what people think of the central leadership. People typically vote on local factors in state and other local polls.

But then there are many lessons for the BJP to learn from these results. Most importantly, the overwhelming support for Modi in the General Election shouldn’t have been read wrongly as an endorsement of Adityanath’s brand of politics, which feeds on dividing people along religious lines. Besides, the gains that the party reaped when the opposition was a divided house and the BJP a cohesive unit under Modi’s leadership can’t be expected if the opposition essentially ends up being a united force. Though the BSP is said to have appealed to its cadres to vote against the SP, the ruling party in the state stood to gain as the sole non-BJP alternative. The SP took advantage by fielding Hindu candidates. “The result was that Muslims of the state resorted to strategic voting, just as they will continue to do in other state elections: the SP not only won a good chunk of anti-BJP votes, including Hindu votes, because most of its candidates were Hindu. The Mulayam Singh Yadav-led party also kept its most visible Muslim face, Azam Khan, away from the poll campaign. Finally, it managed to secure Muslim votes, too, because they knew only too well that Muslim candidates were not pitched from many constituencies with the aiming of cannibalising votes the BJP won last time,” says a Lucknow-based SP leader of the Muslim community.

“What’s key is that when you win an election, you shouldn’t infer too much from the victory,” says the first senior BJP leader. He avers that with opposition to the BJP gaining momentum across various states, the BJP can’t wait too long before “it pulls up its socks and acts”.

In Bihar, in a major realignment of forces, bitter enemies Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) had, 30 open

BJP leader Sakshi Maharaj

Inflammatory, antiMuslim outbursts from local leaders of the likes of Sakshi Maharaj seem to have cost the BJP dearly in the just concluded by-polls

after Modi’s stunning win, joined hands to serve a major blow to the BJP at the recent bypolls necessitated by many legislators becoming MPs. In Uttar Pradesh, though the BSP didn’t contest polls, a sizeable chunk of Dalit votes that traditionally went to the BSP went to the SP. “Why it didn’t go to the BJP is a sign of things to come,” warns the former Union minister, adding that when Modi is away from the thick of a campaign, the BJP ends up losing its edge. “The truth is that religious polarisation will now end up benefiting the BJP’s rivals because they 29 september 2014

will also resort to pro-Hindu polarisation by fielding candidates based on caste and religious congruities and will also secure Muslim votes en bloc as Muslims will always vote to defeat the BJP. They are increasingly going to be masters at strategic voting,” he argues.

While party leaders hasten to state that the setback in Uttar Pradesh— where the BJP has improved its vote share compared with the last Assembly polls—could be attributed to organisational weakness, and in Rajasthan, to infighting within its ranks over seats, the saving grace for the ruling coalition leader was that it opened an account for the first time in the West Bengal Assembly. The BJP won the Basirhat Dakshin seat in West Bengal, a CPM stronghold where Muslims account for 63 per cent of the electorate, and Silchar’s in Assam.

But then no celebrations were in sight with the BJP losing badly, especially from Rohaniya, which falls under the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat that sent Modi

The saving grace for the BJP was that it opened an account for the first time in the West Bengal Assembly.

It won the Basirhat Dakshin seat, a CPM stronghold to Parliament with a huge victory margin. A few BJP leaders from UP argue unconvincingly that the lower voter turnout was a major reason for the dismal performance of the party. The BJP, meanwhile, managed to win the Vadodara Lok Sabha seat vacated by the Prime Minister; in two other Lok Sabha bypolls, Mainpuri in UP and Medak in Telangana, necessitated by the vacation of seats by SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and TRS leader K Chandrasekhar Rao, the ruling parties retained the seats.

29 september 2014

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he over-reliance of the party on

the ‘Modi factor’ will definitely make the Prime Minister more powerful, but then the stakes are high for both him and his closest aide and BJP President Amit Shah in the upcoming Maharashtra and Haryana elections in October.

“See, the organisation is largely hollow, and the victory in the last Lok Sabha was made possible thanks to the hype built around Modi. Now Shah will have to mend the organisation if he has to ensure that the BJP wins state elections. Let’s not forget that this one is the third round of poll setbacks since the NDA was re-elected to power after a gap of 10 years. I am

Devendra Fadnavis had gone to the extent of stating that the strike rate of his party was much better than his ally’s, resulting in major sabre-rattling and a hardening of stance by the BJP over the CM’s post and seat-sharing formula. Now, the Sena will drive a hard bargain. Worse, a Bihar-style consolidation of non-BJP parties is likely in the polls due in various states. Besides Maharashtra and Haryana, Jharkhand will also go to the polls this year, and the poll schedule for Jammu & Kashmir is likely to be postponed due to its devastating floods.

“In politics, we should never let ourselves be carried away by either a win or

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee

rupak de chowdhury/reuters

appalled by a lot of vanity on display,” the first BJP leader says.

The vanity on display that the BJP leader talks about was most visible in Maharashtra, where the BJP was locked in bitter seat-sharing wrangling with its recalcitrant ally, Shiv Sena, which had attacked the coalition leader with risqué comments. In July, emboldened by the landslide victory in the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP unit in Maharashtra had suggested snapping ties with its long-time ally Shiv Sena and going it alone in the Assembly polls. Maharashtra BJP chief

a loss,” offers the former Union minister.

Which means Amit Shah, who had spent sleepless nights closely monitoring the 2014 General Election, will not be able to sleep easy yet. Mending the organisation is expected to be a tougher task than imagined. Shah’s office at 11 Kautilya Marg in Delhi—where Gujarat Bhawan is located—will see more action. After all, the poll losses have brought to the fore the fragility of his party’s organisational apparatus and also upped the ante by setting more complex challenges ahead.

The campaign is not over yet. n open www.openthemagazine.com 31

In the valley after the deluge, the struggle of the living, the abandoned and the orphaned, is all

listens to the sighs, sorrows and anger of a people still submerged in the

Shiv Mandir in Abiguzar, where flood waters left houses all around in ruins

about survival and coping with the loss. CHINKI SINHA in Srinagar

memories of what one Kashmiri calls the ‘blood flood’ photographs by ashish sharma

DESPATCH

AMONG THE CASTAWAYS

F

rom a distance, they look like sacks. Because

we are in a translucent city. Everything is blurred here. Only when you get closer do you notice the bulbous eyes, the upturned feet, and the hiss of gas from the bowels. The stench is unbearable. It makes the stomach churn, the smell of decomposing flesh. There are carcasses all over what used to be called Sena Farm near Srinagar’s Bemina Woollen Mills.

Some 320 cows were trapped here during the deluge in the Valley last week. Only seven survived. The people here watched their life ebb away. Just like that. As if someone had told them they were going die that evening, and a cow sacrifice was an omen of death. No one went to untie them.

People heard them through the day as they tried to break free.

But the river swallowed them. They climbed onto their roofs, and waited for death—or a miracle. They kept themselves alive. But there will be an epidemic. It could be cholera. It has been almost 10 days since the Jhelum, the river that crisscrosses the city, breached its banks and flooded the state capital, bringing life as people knew it to a halt.

Gulzar Ahmed comes here most afternoons from his house near the Idgah in the old city, and wades through this water, with cow corpses all around, to look for the body of his nephew Mansoor. Sometimes, he takes a small boat and floats among the dead. A few bodies have been recovered. They say seven people went missing. They found four bodies, but it takes more than human courage to look for the dead here. The stare of the cows’ blank eyes is hard enough.

On Sunday, Gulzar Ahmed is here again. Short, and thin, with creases around his glassy eyes, he narrates the story of his loss. Mansoor, his nephew, worked at a hotel here. A week ago, when the waters began to rise, he started to rescue those who were trapped. Like most others, he had hoped the waters would recede. They hadn’t witnessed any floods in 60 years.

He was trying to save his friend, whose wife was pregnant. He rescued him, but was trapped himself. The waters claimed him, they suspect.

Mansoor lost his father long ago. His mother, and his wife, and his two small children, wait for the uncle to find the body.

Because there’s some hope in the ‘missing’ tag. Perhaps he was washed away, and will return.

A dog hops on the bodies of dead cows. It is trying to stay alive. But the waters are dark, and threatening. Chances are it will not make it.

A group of migrants who work here have been trying to rescue the cows that survived. They led them through the fetid waters by ropes. “Who knows how they survived? God’s will,” one of them says.

Haji Abdul Razaq Dar, an old man who rows a shikara, puts on his skull cap and says this is qayamat. The end.

“Where are the boats by the government? Where is the Army? Why have we been abandoned?” he asks as he wipes away tears.

Around 25 shikaras, donated by a local named Abdur Rashid Lami, are being used in Al Shariq colony adjacent to the dairy farm to ferry residents.

No relief has reached here.

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“We live among the dead,” he says.

A carcass had floated across to the front yard of a neighbour’s house. They hope the epidemic doesn’t arrive too soon.

Elsewhere, they say the city is strewn with corpses. Like Jawahar Nagar, and Batamaloo. A few more days, and when the water has finally left for other places, they will know who all went under.

Saiful Gulzar, a high school student, learnt from the old man how to muscle the oars, and now spends hours ferrying people from their half-submerged homes to the side of a road from where they go to the city centre to find food and medicines. They won’t leave their homes. Because that is all they’ve got.

There’s a log of wood in the boat. “This is for a poor man whose daughter was to be married next week, but now it has to be postponed. He lost everything. We collect what we can for him,” he says.

Gulzar doesn’t get angry, like many others. He says people think they can continue being here, and manage. He knows they won’t. Pride gets in the way of survival, he says.

“There’s too much politics in this flood,” he says, and continues to steer the rickety shikara towards the carcasses.

A fight breaks out between Haji Abdur and the migrant workers who are trying to rescue the cows. Slowly, they pull them out.

“Get them out of here. Why did you not save them?” he says.

“Why couldn’t you save them?” Dinesh Kumar says.

Around 30 workers lived in huts at the farm. What remains are half roofs, and distorted antennas.

“We survive on kindness of people here. We are trying to do our job but it isn’t easy,” Kumar says. “Even we are human.”

They have been given refuge by a Kashmiri family at the back of their farm. To haul out bloated bodies, they need more than a boat, and their hands, and their courage.

“Besides, where should we take them?”

Tempers are running high. They shout, and then break down, cursing their fate. Why did this tragedy befall them?

They ask.

Back in the car, a friend says it is “blood flood”. He remembers a song.

Tide out, tide in, a flood of blood To the heart through the fear slipstreams —Bloodflood by Alt-J

T

here are too many narratives. The truth lies somewhere in between. In a state that has clamoured for freedom for long, suffered Army excesses, the flood narrative has been hijacked. You could take sides. It is people versus the state.

Everything is spoken of in extremes.

You oscillate. For an outsider reporting on floods, it is confusing.

“What are you going to write about the Army?” they ask.

On Monday, Colonel RR Jadhav says Army operations have been suspended. The orders came from the higher authorities. “It is tragic. Everyone suspects us. We even donated 1,100 kg of rice [as relief] from own rations,” he says. “It is a call of 29 september 2014

A soldier on a ‘rescue and relief’ operation in Srinagar’s Jawar Nagar

Army personnel make their way through flooded lanes looking for people who may need food, water, medicines and other items

duty. Whether people appreciate, or throw stones at us, it doesn’t deter us.”

He goes on to say it is nobody’s fault. The failure of communication led to chaos. Phones had stopped working, and people got impatient. There have been reports of stone pelting at Army choppers and boats of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF). He confirms this. People have been alleging the armed forces are dropping expired chips and biscuits, and milk.

“It is sad,” Colonel Jadhav says. “How can we give expired food? We get relief material from elsewhere. Our job is only to distribute.”

Another Army official tries to break it down: it is ‘rescue and relief’ first and then ‘rehabilitate’. “The floods here are a challenge. The choppers can’t fly very low because of the wires and the poles, and then there are dynamic forces like birds. We can’t pull our people from the second floor. If they are on the roof, we can get them out. Then, there are those that tell us to go back,” he says.

Here, the Jhelum flows through the city, and there is 29 september 2014

construction all around it, he says. “Kashmir is like a bowl.

There is no proper drainage here. The Wular lake in Kupwara, where the Jhelum dumps its water, is full. We built bridges, fixed the roads. In my 30 years of being in the Army, I have never seen anything like this,” Colonel Jadhav says.

The Army has pressed 29 choppers into service, he adds.

Over 226,000 flood-hit people in Jammu & Kashmir have been rescued by the armed forces and NDRF, but the Defence Ministry has said that water-borne diseases could break out as flood waters recede. The death toll is not established yet. It could run into hundreds or thousands.

You hear the drone of relief planes in the mornings and afternoons. It mingles with the horns of trucks and human voices. It’s like being in a war zone with no rations, no money.

This is it then. You don’t blame anyone. You only hear their stories and hope the boundaries between the truth and rumours aren’t so blurred.

But there is humour too.

There are stories they tell of a man who swam across flood waters in Raj Bagh to get cigarettes. They speak of a 50-yearopen www.openthemagazine.com 37

Locals walk through a water-logged street in the Jehangir Chowk area of Srinagar

old man who floated through the Raj Bagh area on a plank of wood and people applauded him for his courage. He is rumoured to have said that if he was going to die, his death should be heroic.

There is a complete suspension of what makes up modern life. Nothing works here except courage. There is a return to an age of waiting. Through the night, and through the day.

There is no electricity, and phones don’t ring anymore.

‘W

e don’t need Indian choppers. We, the Kashmiris,

are, and will unite to solve the situation.’ The undersigned is KK Sokhta. This is the old city. This is where loyalties are fierce.

On the side of the street, they are collecting money for victims of the flood that they say has destroyed their paradise.

They are angry. We are told to be careful. But they tell us their narrative over kahwa. They mutter that the Indian state wants Kashmiris dead. But they will live. They have survived guns and tear gas. They will survive the flood, too. Then, they will unite to boycott the state.

“There will be riots,” a man says. “Go, tell Indians we suffer.

We will come out of this.”

The list of the missing gets longer. They hope, they pray, and they wait for news of those of family, and friends.

“It is Allah’s qahar (wrath),” Hilal Ahmed Malik, a Sokhta resident, says. “People were shouting from rooftops to save them when we went out in our shikaras on Monday. But the 38 open

state didn’t respond. We were left to die.”

A young man tells me this is zakaat. It is a Muslim’s duty to help the needy. “Hamare mazhab mein likha hai duniya fanaa honi hai (In our religion, it says the world won’t last). Why be afraid of what is in store for us?” he asks.

Here, they don’t ever blame God. His will must not be questioned.

In the distance, the shrine of Maqdoom Sahib looms. They say people would climb up the hill, mobiles in hand, trying to catch signal. But telecom networks had collapsed. For days, they alternated between hope and paranoia. That’s when anger began to find its way in the narrative.

“Hum toh waise bhi mazloom hai (We are victims of God’s wrath). Aur yeh zulm (And this brutality). But Kashmir never asks for help. We won’t beg,” Asif Ahmed Dar, a local, says.

“How could they give us food that had gone bad? We were treated worse than dogs.”

There are half-truths. These could go either way, depending on who you were. Kashmir is one place where identity is questioned, and retained. You must take sides.

T

wo men accompany us to a relief camp run by the

separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq of the Awami Action Committee. The media has been asked to exercise restraint. On TV channels, they have been showing the Army’s rescue efforts, they say. They have also alleged that Yasin Malik, a separatist leader, tried to hijack Army rescue 29 september 2014

boats. Again, the truth lies somewhere in between. But to get to it, you must ask uncomfortable questions.

The Islamia Higher Secondary School in downtown Srinagar—Shehr-e-khas as the locals call it—has turned into a relief camp. Here, they cook rice and curry. A bunch of young men eat in a corner, and on the lawns, women and children sit in the sun. Inside the auditorium, carpets have been spread. This school, which is run by the Anjuman-eNustratul Islam headed by the influential Mirwaiz family, is where victims were brought in and offered refuge. Outside, a banner hangs with pictures of Hurriyat leaders.

A few women are sitting near a window. Among them is Nusrat. “We are from Chattabal. When the sailaab came, we were having chai,” she says. “We were halfway through it when it felt like the river was coming towards us. We ran to the second floor, then broke the grill of the window, and got to a neighbour’s house, and from the other side, started wading through the water to reach dry land. We started walking towards Maqdoom Sahib’s shrine on Hari Parbat to find shelter when some volunteers found us and brought us here.

They gave us food, and clothes,” she says.

For eight days now, she has been here with her family. Her brother couldn’t get out, but camp volunteers went and brought him here. She tried going back once they said the waters had receded, but couldn’t reach her house.

“We just wait. What is the state doing? Will they come when we have all turned into corpses?” she wails. “When they could have saved us, they never came.

Kashmiris never discriminated when it came to rescuing others. They saved everyone they could,” she says. Other women look away. The anger runs deep.

And so does the sense of loss. There is an uncertain future, they say.

In the other building, a man is sorting out relief material sent in by the villages. The room is almost overflowing with bags of rice, biscuits, sugar, flour, blankets, and medicines. A man who calls himself Mansoor says they haven’t received any help from the government. They mobilised everything themselves. He says the news is being edited by the media to show the rescue efforts of the Army. But here, young men have risked their lives to rescue people on small boats. They, he says, are the unsung heroes of this tragedy. “There are a couple of boys who are missing from the rescue teams. We are still looking for them,” he says.

On the evening of 7 September, when the flood hit the town, 2,400 people had gathered here. They were refugees in their own homeland, he says. As he issues instructions to the volunteers, he turns and says he is grateful for the help of the people. “We don’t know how we get the energy. We don’t know how our kitchens are still running. We suffered His wrath. Now, we live at his mercy,” he says.

I ask them about the expired food packets. He says they burnt them in the stadium the day before.

There is no evidence. But there are testimonies. You can’t verify everything.

At the roadside relief camp, a man had said nobody would

go hungry once they evoked the name of Mirwaiz. It works like a currency too. Paper slips signed by Mirwaiz for flood victims can be use to get food here. Nobody will refuse, Asif says.

The Hurriyat leaders have said there are at least 25 relief camps run by them in Srinagar. The one at Islamia School is the centre, and symbolic of the family’s love for its people, Asif explains.

They say the old city was built after the great floods long ago, and it will never be devastated by a deluge. At the shrine, overlooking the city, an old man sits sipping tea. He is from the Maqdoom Sahib Welfare Committee, and says this was the first relief camp to be set up in the city. They offered refuge to those who got stranded in the rains on Saturday, and put together resources from the Zakaat fund and donations to set up a relief camp on the premises. “We have housed them in three buildings here,” says Awaaz Ahmed Raina, a committee member. Everything here is a donation by people who live far away. Like in Baramulla, Gandarbal, Dras and other places, he says.

There’s an announcement on the loudspeaker: “Give anything that you can spare for Kashmir. Even Rs 10 will help our brothers and sisters.”

There’s also the drone of a chopper. They say Omar Abdullah, Chief Minister of Kashmir, is dropping food items nearby.

“We threw them away. We don’t need India’s help. We will

Haji Abdul Razaq Dar, an old man who rows a shikara, says this is qayamat. The end. “Why have we been abandoned?” he asks as he wipes away tears

29 september 2014

stand on our feet once again,” a young woman says.

As the muezzin calls for prayers, her father takes out his jannamaaz, and puts a finger on his lips. In the end, you must turn to God, he says.

E

verything has turned into shelters here. Mosques,

Gurdwaras, schools, community centres.

A woman comes out of a marriage hall in Sanat Nagar Chowk, and wails.

“Go back,” she shouts.

When the authorities were refusing to open up the marriage centre set by the state government to run a relief camp, an angry mob had threatened to burn it down.

Hundreds of them huddle in the large halls that would have celebrated the bride-to-be’s new home at some other time.

Now, they mourn the loss of their home here.

Along with loss, they have suffered indignity, they say.

Yet another woman comes and says Kashmiris were always the ‘other’. “Since 1970, we have suffered the apathy of the state and the Indian Government,” she says. Kashmir knows it is an abandoned place, she adds. open www.openthemagazine.com 39

Volunteers from Kupwara with relief material near Srinagar’s Regal Chowk

Firdous Ahmed is from Bemina. “I only have what I wear on my body. I pay taxes. Where is the state?” he asks.

The narrative of the flood has been distorted to suggest all kinds of conspiracies. By everyone. Because there must be something to oppose. On either side.

O

n Saturday morning, we walk towards Lal Chowk.

Zahaan Khan and Mohsin Rashid Lone have to check on the families of their friends. At first, the water is knee-deep, and then it starts to get colder, and deeper.

There is an exodus. Human figures crisscross the streets.

Here, nobody knows where everyone is going. There seems to be an exodus in all directions.

We walk in a single file. There could be manholes, wires, or nails. They tell me to drag my feet, and we walk slowly. The water is full of dead rats, and one, bloated, and dismembered, flows past us. It is sewage water.

Near Saraibala, the green flags on a mosque flutter in the wind. On parapets of houses, where people watch from the windows, pigeons are drying themselves. They are the first messengers of better times.

Lal Chowk, the commercial hub of Srinagar, had drowned.

Nobody talks about the loss of goods worth crores. They don’t even talk about the dead. They just walk on. On either side. In a single file.

This could be the ‘return’ or the ‘flight’. Or both.

These weren’t questions worth asking. A bridge looms in the distance. To get to it, we have to go deeper into the water.

They caution against walking on the sides.

40 open

“Stay in the middle,” they shout.

A few of them smoke as they walk through water. Even in most unbearable situations, people laugh. They are neither optimistic nor pessimistic.

A vegetable vendor has opened his shop. Manzoor Fruits.

Maybe nobody will come to buy anything. Or if anybody does, he might just give away things free.

Mohsin wades through the water, and disappears into a lane. He has gone to check on a friend’s family.

The NDRF has pressed boats into service here. There are other kinds of boats as well. Like asbestos sheets with rubber tyres bound underneath to make them float, or planks of wood, or mattresses, or Styrofoam sheets. Basically, anything that can buoy a flat surface.

Under the bridge, they have been waiting a long time. This is where a photographer died the other day. Shafat Siddiqui had been chronicling the floods, and slipped off the bridge.

His body was found near the city centre. Here, death needs no condolences. It has become yet another number.

Kauser Ahmed’s family was stuck for days in the area. “I was halfway through my morning tea,” he says. “By the time I was about to finish it, the water had come up until the second floor. That’s when we started to run.” They ran upstairs, and remained there for three days. He says they even begged a chopper on Sunday to rescue them, but the officials said they were going someplace else.

A man walks by. “What’s the point of a story? Tell them we need water, and food. We are dying,” he says.

Hilal Ahmed has come to look for his sister here. “Our elders say nothing like has ever happened here,” he says. “The 29 september 2014

media should show the truth. They are embedded with the Army. They travel in choppers, and report what the Army shows them.” When Radio Kashmir shut operations on Sunday saying water had got into their equipment, people knew it was going to be bad. There have been reports of stone pelting by locals at soldiers, and Ahmed says the media is doing a disservice by showing clips from 2008.

“There is water all around us. Where will we find stones?” he says.

I

t is like a sea of apples. Grim water with ripples of red

and green. They flow past the men, and the women, and they pick them up, wipe them across their sleeves, and start to chew.

The waters are dark, and full of strange things that the flood has claimed. Any of it could kill you, they say. It is cold, and our knees wobble. But others are doing it, so you do it too. My mind feels heavy, and hazy. I imagine the ocean, mermaids and seahorses. That makes it easier. Beauty isn’t so hard to find except when you tell yourself it’s flood water and might be full of corpses, not mermaids.

When I stumble, a hand holds me.

I am told not to lift my feet. They offer me apples. A man calls out from a window.

Zahaan and Mohsin go closer. He coughs, and his daughter, by his side, says they need medicines. The man is an asthma patient, and they have run out of stock.

He stays at the window as his daughter shouts out the names of what he needs.

She then scribbles it on a piece of paper, and slips into a bag that she lowers from the second floor.

Mohsin goes looking for the medicines at a relief camp near Iqbal Park, and returns in half an hour with nothing.

Meanwhile, a truck rolls in from Uri. It is the first time they have been able to get here. Some of the flooding has eased, and the truck could reach the mosque. It can’t go beyond, but the men say they will wade through water to distribute relief material. They have been coming from Uri in Baramulla, which is about 120 km away from Srinagar, every other day with food, medicines, and water, and baby food.

Mohsin spots a chemist shop. It is on the other side, and he finally finds the asthma patient’s medicines. He and Zahaan return to the old man at the window, and give him what he’s been waiting for. Then they stay back in the area to help organise relief and rescue operations by the NDRF. On the side, Ravi of the NDRF says he has no idea about the lanes, but if locals help, they can do a better job.

of a week’s validity—without verification paperwork, their black market prices have shot up.

Crossing Solin, we come upon buildings that look like ghosts, with sad faces trapped in them. A washing machine floats underneath what could have been a balcony.

Flowers don’t bloom here anymore. Flower pots were turned upside down.

A few migrant children come by truck. They float on plastic buckets, and stretch out their hands to ask for food. They collect everything, and return.

They will wait it out, a man says.

“Not that there is anything pleasant to return to my village.

Poverty is a curse everywhere,” a migrant from Bengal says.

A

cigarette dangles from his lips, and for a moment he is undecided whether he should throw them more packets of Parle biscuits. The raft is making its way through the narrow lanes of Batamaloo, which is one of the most affected neighbourhoods. They navigate through a mesh of wires, and steady the raft with oars that they push against the walls. The last time they came here, they had been rescuing people from the second floor. The water had been that high. They have a

“Hamare mazhab mein likha hai duniya fanaa honi hai (In our religion, it says the world won’t last). Why be afraid of what is in store for us?” asks a young man

A

nger simmers. Aircel was the only network that

managed to keep some communication intact. But in the end, that too becomes a business plan. Ever since the Home Ministry approved of the distribution of SIM cards—

29 september 2014

young pharmacist, Ubaid, who knows the locality and guides them through its maze of lanes. The brief is to get the rescue material to the people trapped here. They have biscuits, bottled water and medicines on a red raft named Owais.

Saddam Hussein Kitab, 32, is a businessman. Because everything has collapsed in his homeland, a place already fractured by questions of identity, belonging and misplaced narratives, he says he joined in to save whoever or whatever he could. They are two brothers. Early Monday morning, they had gone out into the deluge to Raj Bagh, a lone torch guiding them through the locality, and rescued a Sikh family.

That afternoon, Saddam jumps into the water, his Rayban shades firm on his nose, and a lit cigarette between his lips, and takes bottles to a house where a few women are standing on the second floor. He hurls them up for them. He speaks to the men, women and children in Kashmiri, asking them if they need any medicines. He returns to the raft, searches frantically in his bag, takes out some pills and tablets, and goes back.

They are hoping to keep an epidemic at bay. But they know they can’t. It spreads like the water that claimed the city, ravaging it so badly that they have begun to say that Srinagar is a lost city. He washes wounds, bandages them, tells people to go get vaccinations, and then gives up. They are a frustrated lot.

Earlier, they had hauled the raft on to the Winger, a large open www.openthemagazine.com 41

tourist vehicle, at Government Girls’ High School near Hyderpora, where a relief camp organised by journalists, locals, and volunteers, is working through the day and night.

Ubaid is angry. He rows the boat in silence, and then lights a cigarette and says this is unreasonable behaviour. These medicines can’t keep anything at bay. Then, to lighten the mood, he says they had declared him dead. When the floods hit, he lost his identity card, and someone found it and posted it on Facebook; people offered condolences, and prayers, and obituaries were carried in local newspapers.

A few women spot him from a window, and ask if he has returned from the dead. He says it was annoying at first, but in times like these, such talk is no big deal.

Saddam’s younger brother Omar Javaid Bazaz is a commercial pilot. He says it is Kashmiriyat that makes him do rescue work. “What face are we going to show Allah? He will ask…

‘You have two feet, and yet you didn’t do anything?’” he says.

He is tall, and lean, and rows the boat like an expert. He says it was in school that he learnt how to swim, and other survival skills. The brothers attended Tyndale Biscoe, a school that was established by a British missionary in 1880.

Its crest has two oars, and its motto says, ‘In all things, Be men’. They are being true to what they learnt years ago.

We pass by shuttered, submerged shops—Bike Point by Firdous Abad, Nisar Tailors and others. There’s another young man on the boat. He helps out with the rescue until he gets off and loads a bag of rice, and some water bottles on his shoulders, and wades across the lane. That’s his house. The raft moves on. Sometimes Bazaz and Saddam whistle so people can come out and ask for water, or medicines. They aren’t carrying much, but anything helps.

We pass by a couple of children who are rowing a makeshift boat of plastic bottles tied in a plastic sack held together by stings. For oars, they use logs of wood. Bazaz tells them they will get bravery awards for this. They say they don’t need life jackets. It is people like him who need them, they can manage just fine, and they laugh.

Majid Khan, a chartered accountant, and yet another Biscoe alum, is the fourth man on the boat. He had quit smoking, but now he says all he survives on is chai and cigarettes. The flood has been devastating. His house had been flooded. He got out, and then started to help out with the rescue work.

Here, water is waist-deep. People are wading through it. Old women, and men. Nobody comes into these lanes, they say.

The raft gets stuck, and they get off, and pull it. Majid keeps silent except to utter a few instructions on the directions.

They start out tense, but later relax. Some people ask them in for tea. They decline.

They fight, and then smile at each other. The boat swirls, and gets stuck, and Majid tells Bazaz to concentrate. There’s a wire that comes in the way. Already, it is quite a task to navigate narrow lanes. “I am doing my job,” Bazaz says, and Majid shrugs.

Their supplies are running out fast. Everyone wants something. A woman wants Digene but settles for pain killers. Another asks for insulin. They laugh. It eases the tension.

Before the raft hits a dead end, two women appear on yet 42 open

another innovative boat. Again, plastic bottles tied together, and firewood for oars. Haja has hurt her feet, and her wound needs to be bandaged. Saddam hauls her onto the boat, and cleans her wound, and applies antiseptic, and then ties it up. He advises her to go seek medical help at one of the medical camps. But Haja won’t leave her house. She is afraid of robberies.

They give them biscuits and medicines. Her son has got lung infection, but he won’t go either. They will stay here, and hope it is not the end of the world for them. But even if it is, they shall accept it with dignity. By their faith, the world shall end one day. If it is this way, it is pre-ordained.

There’s chaos. Everyone wants something. They throw the remaining bit of their supplies into windows, or hand them to whoever manages to reach their front doors.

Saddam opens a biscuit pack. “Tomorrow we shall come to Jawaharnagar,” he says.

There are more lanes to cover. But they have nothing more to give. A man points to a lane, but Ubaid says it is almost 1 km away. “One kilometre in water means five kilometres walking,” he says. “Besides, we have nothing more to give.”

They return.

A man comes out, and shouts. “Here, we are the government, and so is Pakistan,” he says.

Saddam shrugs. Bazaz laughs.

“Get out, and get vaccinations. Save your life,” he says. “Tell me, where is the navy? Are they fighting a water war somewhere else?”

At the relief camp, he limps. He has hurt himself. He sits down to have some tea before they offload the raft, and find another car that will take them someplace else.

H

e crouches, and holds his bag close to his chest. It

contains nothing except some clothes, and tools. In his pocket, only about Rs 200. He doesn’t know how to get home.

Or whether he should.

It is an Air Force base. He watches a plane intently. He is nervous, and he passes his time watching planes. The drone drowns his voice, but he keeps talking. He smiles often. He doesn’t even know where the plane will take him. If they take him to Delhi, he will try and find work, collect money and go home. A migrant’s narrative. One among others. A lost one among the more important ones like those of the separatists, and those who oppose the state, and those who reign here.

He doesn’t belong anywhere. He must leave because he isn’t a priority. Nobody has helped them, he says. They walked miles to get to an Air Force base, and had to stand in line for a long time.

These are meaningless words. Uttered by those that matter to nobody. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t blame anyone. He is only grateful to be alive.

They say they had nothing left to reclaim. They never had much. Nobody heard them out. They only wanted to go home somehow.

They walk miles to get to anywhere so they can go away.

They don’t blame anyone.

I am him. I know what he means. His is a floating identity.

29 september 2014

A woman makes her way through the flood water on a makeshift boat of plastic bottles in Batmaloo, Srinagar

There are other kinds of boats as well. Like asbestos sheets with rubber tyres bound underneath, or planks of wood, or Styrofoam sheets. Basically, anything that can buoy a flat surface

He is only wondering about the plane. He has never been on one.

He says he could have walked along the rail tracks like thousands of others who left in a daze. But he had no money for that long journey. He did not get his last salary. He knows his employer has lost everything.

A

t Qamarwari, near Sena Farm, Ayub, who is from Bijnaur in UP, stands watching the damage. He used to work as a tailor, and lived in Kak Sarai in Karan Nagar in a one-room tenement that he shared with his wife, and three children. An NDRF boat rescued them on Sunday. They had climbed on the second floor, and managed to get out in time.

They had nothing but a small bag with a few clothes, and their identity cards. They are living at his brother’s house in another neighbourhood, and looking for a way to return to their village. “My employer suffered damages. The banks are shut. I don’t want to ask for my dues,” he says.

A few Kashmiris gave them food, and he walks around the city trying to find some work with Mumtaz, 25, and Rihaan, 18, two young migrants from Lucknow who also worked in embroidery units here. “We have been sleeping on the streets

29 september 2014

for a few days,” Mumtaz says. “Sometimes, people give us apples, or biscuits.”

As soon as they attribute their escape to the Army, a local starts abusing the three, saying they are lying. Ayub is almost apologetic, and says he’d already said that Kashmiris helped them with food and water.

“The Army hasn’t done anything. The Hurriyat has come to people’s rescue. They saved us,” says Haji Abdul Razaq Dar, an elderly local from Al Shariq colony.

But beyond this, he can’t speak. His feeble voice can’t be heard above a barrage of expletives, and he walks away with bewildered eyes.

On Tengpora Bridge, there are hundreds of tents. These are migrants from Rajasthan, and elsewhere. They lived in huts next to the river. Nobody will take them in.

At Srinagar airport, a migrant asks for the price of an air ticket at the Indigo counter. For Delhi, it is about Rs 3,000.

He asks how much it will cost him to get to Jammu. He walks away.

Captain Oinam Samson says the Army can get them to Delhi, Chandigarh, Jammu. That’s all they can do.

But the poor are nobody’s burden. They can only be taken halfway home. The rest, they will have to manage. n open www.openthemagazine.com 43

Nostalgia

Time MACHINE RIP

HMT set the time for two generations of Indians. Aanchal Bansal on the death of India’s beloved watchmaker photos Prashant Pandey

46 open

29 september 2014

S

quashed in a grim alley between

the inner and outer lanes of Delhi’s Connaught Place—now known as Rajiv Chowk—the only showroom that sells HMT wristwatches in the city is hard to find, unless one asks for directions to a small mobile phone shop next to it. The half-broken ‘B_ackBerry’ billboard on top of the mobile shop’s entrance is evidently a bigger draw than the HMT shop, which looks decidedly dowdy in comparison with the glistening watch showrooms not too far away that display international brands.

This HMT shop was earlier located in the Life Insurance Corp building on Parliament Street, but Hindustan Machine Tools, as the company is called, shifted the showroom to its current location in 2004. It was getting tough to pay the rent, says the storekeeper. That it’s wind-up time for what was once India’s main watchmaker (though HMT also made tractors) is clear at first sight of the shop’s interior. It resembles a storehouse, with cartons and files occupying most of the space, and equipment that’s more than just a little dated. Sales inventory is managed on a clunky old computer with MS DOS as its operating system. Bills and other documents are printed on a noisy dotmatrix printer.

Relegated to a corner of the shop are two counters that have watches on display.

It feels like a throwback to another era.

Each watch is neatly packed in a transparent plastic cover, and it is the brand’s Janata series that dominates the display panels. One is nudged back to the present by a printout pasted on two walls of the shop, announcing the sale of watches online through the HMT website. This move was made only recently. The ‘Timekeepers to the Nation’, as HMT advertised itself in its heyday, was trying to keep up with the times.

It was just too late. On a recommendation of the Board for Reconstruction of Public Sector Enterprises, the Government decided last week to shut down HMT watches for good. The Bangalore-based company has reportedly been losing money since 2000.

Set up as a state-owned enterprise in 1960, HMT had a success run of three decades, with its watches seen as the touchstone of ‘affordable’ and ‘quality’ well into the late 1980s. It had a near29 september 2014

monopoly of the domestic market, and HMT was the first watch of almost two generations of Indians who came of age in that period. But then came Titan and a surge of fancy foreign brands. The old watchmaker had no chance.

R

eports of HMT’s shutdown have triggered a wave of nostalgia among Indians who fondly recall the glory years of the Maruti 800, Bajaj Chetak and Doordarshan. “It was as important and of equal prestige as owning a Maruti 800 in the good old days. HMT is very special,” says Bangalore-based collector Prashant Pandey, 34, who began collecting HMT watches four years ago.

His love of the brand was rekindled en route to Bangalore Airport for work-related travel. “I passed by HMT Bhawan in Bangalore on one of my trips and remembered an HMT Janata watch gifted to me by my grandfather [when I was in] school. Wondering whatever happened to HMT, I started visiting showrooms and shops looking for the watches, and now I have a collection,” says Pandey, who runs a blog and a Facebook page for HMT aficionados. With 500 pieces, his collection could well be the largest in private hands. “There is no way to confirm it, as we are still connecting with HMT enthusiasts and there is no formal way of ascertaining it,” he says.

In a blogpost, Delhi-based art critic, writer and curator Johny ML, recounts his journey with artist and friend Shibu Natesan through the city of Thiruvannamalai looking for ‘mechanical HMT watches’. The post, which has been doing the rounds of social media ever since news broke of the brand’s end, begins with childhood stories of collecting packets of Scissors cigarettes to assemble the letters ‘H’, ‘M’ and ‘T’ as part of a promotional drive—whoever could manage to put the name together was promised an HMT watch by the cigarette company. Johny never won the contest, which turned out to be a hoax, but he too remembers his first watch that was gifted to him by his grandfather when he finished school.

“Most of us did get our first HMTs like that—as gifts for good marks or presents from grandparents,” says film cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi, credited

Wondering whatever happened to HMT, I started visiting showrooms and shops looking for the watches, and now I have a collection” Prashant Pandey collector

with potboilers like Ishaqzaade and Kurbaan. He is a collector of rare HMT watches and is particularly proud of the three pieces he owns of the rare Jawahar series, launched after the company’s tie-up with the Japanese company Citizen in 1960. His first, too, was gifted by his grandfather for completing school with good marks.

Chaturvedi often sports an HMTCitizen on his wrist, one of the first editions released after the tie-up. He got it from a rundown shop in Lucknow.

“Someone thought I was wearing a classic vintage Omega and I proudly told him that it was actually a Hindustan Machine Tools watch,” he says. Since HMT would always launch watches with Indian sub-brand names like Ajeet, Sona, Kajal, Vijay and Sudeep, he adds, he used to open www.openthemagazine.com 47

pick them up as gifts for friends with corresponding names. “There was Sudeep; a Vijay and Maurya for a friend called Vijay Maurya; and I managed a Hemant too.” His first buy was in 2006, a 1986 Janata from an old shop in Delhi’s Kalkaji after he realised that he had lost his grandfather’s gift. “I bought it for 300 bucks, that’s all.”

With news of the shutdown, HMT watches are now in demand on the internet as collectibles, with a Janata watch fetching close to Rs 8,000 on such sites as eBay. An original Janata, though, can still be bought from an authorised HMT shop for about Rs 1,200. Other prized watches are of the Pilot series, along with Jawan and Sainik, associated with the Army and designed in keeping with the patriotism associated with the be-Indian-buy-Indian era. “That’s the brilliance of these watches, which make them great collectibles,” says Chaturvedi, “They are easy on the pocket and are vintage.” He cautions collectors against buying them from unauthorised shops, though. “The prices have never been advertised, so no one knows the original prices,” he says.

The brand does not have takers only in India. According to Pandey, there are HMT aficionados in places as far away as 48 open

Somehow, the marketing division of HMT figured that quartz watches would not work in India and concentrated on manufacturing its mechanical range” Ramanujan Sridhar ad professional

Italy, France, Belgium and Australia.

“This is because HMT watches are fine machines and it’s the only brand that comes with a guarantee. Even their aftersales service is brilliant,” he says.

T

he downfall of HMT will remain

a classic case study for business schools. It is a textbook story of a public sector enterprise that failed to respond to competition once it was faced with free market forces. In the old days, with

imports barred under the protectionist policies of the Indian Government, it thrived. But its monopoly made it complacent. Since it always sold all it could make, it was in a ‘seller’s market’ with no incentive to upgrade technology; and so when Titan launched quartz watches, it was slow in sensing a threat.

“Somehow, the marketing division in HMT figured that quartz watches would not work in India and concentrated on manufacturing its mechanical range,” says Ramanujan Sridhar, who runs a communication consultancy in Bangalore and had worked with Mudra, an ad agency that ran its advertising in the 80s. “Indians who were going to the Gulf to get their watches suddenly found alternatives in Titan, with its elegant range, and HMT failed to see that,” he says. “People could walk in with cut-outs of Titan ads and find beautiful and elegant watches right off the counter.” In contrast, he says, when HMT launched its Roman collection that had roman numerals and was pitched as a ‘masculine’ watch for real men, its distribution system failed the advertising because the product was not even available at its showrooms.

According to Sridhar, Titan was selling watches to a new generation of selfindulgent consumers who did not care about the nation so much anymore. And so HMT’s tagline—which tried to evoke a patriotic spirit—failed to attract buyers. Also, after Titan’s launch, watches underwent an image shift. They were now seen as items of aesthetic value and no longer as sturdy machines that only needed to be dependable as tellers of accurate time. Agrees ad filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, who directed an iconic ad for HMT starring actor Dilip Tahil.

“HMT watches were never beautiful watches,” he says, “It was more a matter of pride to be associated with them.”

M

eanwhile, as Chaturvedi bran-

dishes the HMT collection that he has put together over eight years, he has started connecting with other HMT enthusiasts all over the internet.

“It is a beautiful discovery, and given the popularity of the brand, maybe its factories won’t shut now,” he says, hoping against hope. n 29 september 2014

a rt

mindspace Beauty with purpose

63

o p e n s pa c e

Abhishek Bachchan Saif Ali Khan

62

n p lu

Finding Fanny The Prince

61

cinema review

Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Breitling Transocean 38 Steel Ma Creative Sound Blaster E3

60

tech & Style

Bhang’s non-narcotic high Fats and academic success When a wife is happy

52

science

‘If I Die Here, Who Will Remember Me? ’ India and the First World War

by Vedica Kant Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ letters, 1914-18

by David Omissi The testimonies of Indian soldiers and the two World Wars: Between self and sepoy by Gajendra Singh The winged wonders of the Rashtrapati Bhavan

by Dr Thomas Mathew

books

Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen

50 64

The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

THE IMMORTAL SEPOY the Indian soldier in the First World War 52 Amitav Ghosh • Sunanda K Datta-Ray • Vedica Kant

ART

Dreamer’s Realism Exploring war, nationhood and the Left movement, Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen has emerged as the chronicler of a merciless history SHREYA RAY

M

idway through Afsan’s Long Day (40 minutes) by New York and Dhaka-based Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen, there’s a dream-like sequence through night skies, and finally an ad billboard with simply an image of a silhouetted figure holding out an umbrella, and glowing just above the head, the words ‘Endless Opportunity’. Therein ends the dream, and the narrative jumps back to the reality: that of missed ‘endless opportunity’—or rather, endless episodes of missed opportunities.

Afsan’s Long Day,which premiered at the MoMA(Museum of Modern Art) this spring, explores Bangladeshi Left politics of the 1970s through the diary of Bangladeshi leftist journalist Afsan Chowdhury, whilst deftly weaving it

50 open

with the radical Left movements worldwide. Everywhere, it seems, the story is the same, of buoyant dreams, which eventually collapse and crumble.

The film—along with allied multimedia works—forms a part of Mohaiemen’s second solo show, The Young Man Was (cont.), which opened at Experimenter, Kolkata, last month, picking up from his 2011 show at the gallery, The Young Man Was (a few chapters), an ongoing investigation of Bangladesh’s Left history via art.

Combining archival research with personal and pop-culture anecdotes, Mohaiemen employs video, photography, text and objects, to fill in the blanks of official history. Or, to just explore multiple, messy versions of it.

It has taken a while, however, to

arrive at this idiom. Mohaiemen recalls his initial brush with brushed-underthe-carpet history in 1993 while he was working on a project called The Shobak Tapes. While on a Watson Fellowship to explore the ‘good war’ of 1971 that created Bangladesh, Mohaiemen fell into a black hole of history in his pursuit of alternative research: the voices of the radical Left. Hitherto ignored by official narratives, this round of interviews presented complete contradictions to his thesis. As a young student of History, the need to arrive at a conclusion was paramount, and the lack of it, crippling. But in the course of time, Mohaiemen, now a PhD student of Historical Anthropology at Columbia University, is far better equipped to handle such contradictory, 29 september 2014

Naeem Mohaiemen (far left); the Shokol Choritro Kalponik show

Rashomonian realities.

For one, he moved from typical academic mediums to the visual arts.

Contemporary visual arts—with the endless room it offers for dual, fractured and schizophrenic realities to coexist—seemed paradoxically like the neatest space for this chaos. Mohaiemen’s form, often one that forces the audience to work hard, derives from his attempt at “investigating a minimalist aesthetic”. The idea is to challenge the idea of art as a rarefied space; “everyone is an artist”, including the audience, whose interpretation of the work makes them an active participant in the process of art-creation.

The work preceding Afsan’s Long Day, is United Red Army: The Young Man Was, Part 1, a 70-minute video. Acquired by the Tate Modern in 2012, it is about the hijacking of Japan Airlines’ Flight 472 en route from Paris and Tokyo to Dhaka by a unit of the Japanese Red Army in September 1977, and Mohaiemen’s memories of being glued to the television set and watching those events live, waiting for his favourite TV 29 september 2014

show The Zoo Gang to come back on air.

The negotiations take place in pitch dark, with only the conversation between the Bangladeshi military and Japanese hijackers appearing as subtitles. This is counterpointed with a parallel narrative, which is Mohaiemen’s calm voiceover, measuring the events of the past, including his own reactions to the events as a child, in retrospect.

Something about the narrative is unputdownable, in video terms. A whodunnit. There are also layered dynamics of language: for instance, the negotiations take place in English, of which neither of the two is a native speaker. The comfort with which the British-English-schooled Bengali officer speaks is pitched against the nervous stutter of the Japanese speaker.

Ironically, this also dislodges the hijacker from his position of command, but this, right here, is an example of messy multiple realities.

Language is a key tool in the work of Mohaiemen, not simply because he uses a lot of text in his installations, but because he plucks out texts from official mainstream sources, which he then uses for ironical or critical effect, and also as running themes through his work. For instance, if there’s one phrase which has served as a backbone to his work, it’s shothik itihaash, which means correct/precise (‘shothik’) history (‘itihaash’), words thrown at Mohaiemen by an elderly gentlemen at a conference in Dhaka. The thought was repeated by a professor at Michigan who noted that the present generation was insufficiently “respectful” of foundational history. “Each time I shivered and wondered who was going to decide for us, once again, what was or was not ‘correct history’.”

In the Experimenter show, too, there are a couple of such phrases. For instance, there’s a site-specific installation featuring tiny name labels in Bengali neatly in grid-formation pasted on a wall. Called We The Living, We The Dead, it looks at the targeting of Hindu intellectuals during the 1971 war. The

project draws from Humayun Azad, one of several post-1971 anti-establishment writers whose works Mohaiemen repeatedly draws on. Azad’s angry cry, “Amra Ki Ey Bangladesh Cheyechilam?”

(Is this the Bangladesh we wanted?), is an anchor for many of Mohaiemen’s political sentiments.

Perhaps because the viewer is allowed a distance from it, it isn’t hard to see traces of humour in such a grim situation. One of his projects Shokol Choritro Kalponik (‘All Characters are Imaginary’), a fictitious newspaper (the newspaper itself was titled Dainik Kalponik, meaning ‘Imagined Daily’) formed on the lines of a vernacular daily, does trigger off little giggle-athons whilst addressing subjects as serious as nationhood and Subcontinental politics. The project—which featured at the Dhaka Art Summit this year— was simply a newspaper anyone could walk away with (and clearly many did).

Mohaiemen also sneaks in a (not so unreal) news item about the Bangla language dying in West Bengal, its youth increasingly abandoning Bangla classics of Tagore and Co for the racy school of Indian-English pulp fiction. There are also laugh-out-loud news items such as one where an egg entrepreneur from Bangladesh gets on the Forbes list of high-flyers. The ridiculous is juxtaposed with the serious: such as ‘Karachi to repay historical debt’ or ‘New Delhi pays homage to border crossers by building a memorial to Felani’ (Felani Khatun was a Bangladeshi girl shot on the border by the Indian BSF) outside Indian Parliament.

The combination of producing a work that is ridiculous, as grim as it is sarcastic, has a curious effect on the audience. For one, it forces one to examine the roots of the funny as also that of the unfunny. Which is also when you begin to think: why is it so unbelievable? Why is it so unbelievable, for example, that New Delhi will build a memorial to Felani?. And of the answers you come up with. They are likely to be uncomfortable, if somewhat messy. Well, that was the idea. n The Young Man Was (cont.) is on at Experimenter, Kolkata, until 27 September open www.openthemagazine.com 51

Books

World War Special

The Way of the Sepoy Why the Indian soldier’s experience of the First World War doesn’t merge seamlessly with the triumphal narrative of the winners Amitav Ghosh

O

f the many poignant images

in this book, none captures better the plight of the colonial soldier than the photograph in which a sepoy in a prisoner-of-war camp is seen to be washing his foot while a German soldier looks on, bemused, from the other side of a barbed-wire fence. Whether in captivity or not, the sepoy had always to contend with the Amitav Ghosh gaze of those he served: on the is the author of other side of the battlelines too he several novels, would have known himself to be including the first under constant watch, hemmed in two volumes of the by fences that related not only to his Ibis trilogy: Sea of physical being but most significantPoppies and River ly to the question of his loyalty, this of Smoke last being a matter of such profound uncertainty that no one perhaps was more unsure of it than he himself. It is this ambivalence above all, that defines the predicament of the sepoy, not just in the First World War, but in many other conflicts before and after.

The sepoy’s way of soldiering dated back to a time when mercenary armies were the norm rather than the exception—that is to say, the mid-18th century, which was when the East India Company raised its first ‘Native Infantry’ regiments in the newly-founded Presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal. The First World War sepoy is thus the embodiment of a paradox: a soldier schooled in modern weaponry and tactics but recruited, remunerated and officered by methods that belonged to another era. The sepoy was in other words a warrior of a completely different ilk from the citizen-soldiers who were the main protagonists of the First World War: this is one reason why his role in that conflict is so often overlooked, at home and in the West.

Since the creation of the East India Company’s standing armies, the sepoy had fought in innumerable British campaigns in Asia and Africa through the Mysore Wars, the Maratha Wars, the Opium Wars, and so on. Yet, across those centuries of service one thing that remained constant was the sepoy’s ambivalent relationship to his job. His loyalty could never be taken for granted; mutiny, which always simmered beneath the surface, regularly came to the boil, most spectacularly in 1857. Nor did his ambivalence end with the start of First World War: sepoys mutinied at Singapore in 1915 even as their compatriots were 52 open

A second line of gurkhas under shell fire at the front

fighting side-by-side with English regiments at the Somme; a generation later the story would repeat itself on a much larger scale, in the same theatre, during the Second World War. This split in the sepoy’s loyalties is perfectly captured in Vedica Kant’s account of two Afridi Pathan brothers, one of whom, Mir Dast, won the Victoria Cross at Ypres, while the other, Mir Mast, deserted to the German side at Neuve Chapelle, along with 24 other sepoys.

This is why the Indian soldier’s experience of the First World War resists appropriation by those who would like to merge it seamlessly into the triumphal narrative of the winning side. The sepoy’s ambivalence, as much as the anomalous circumstances of the army to which he belonged, made sure that his story could not be fitted into the usual frames of ‘victor’ and ‘vanquished’. This is another reason why the sepoy’s role in the war is so often overlooked.

In a sense, the sepoy was himself complicit in this neglect—for not the least aspect of his ambivalence was his witholding of his own story. Through the history of his existence, silence was one of the sepoy’s most enduring traits; it goes so far back and is so consistent that it is hard not to see it as an act 29 september 2014

of resistance in itself. Consider that in the century and a half that preceded the First World War hundreds of thousands of Indians, many of them literate, served as sepoys. Yet over that entire period there exists only one first person narrative of a sepoy’s experiences, and this too is possibly an apocryphal text: Sitaram Subedar.

Nor did the First World War, which was to result in an enormous outpouring of prose and poetry in English, French and German, have a similar effect on the Indian subcontinent.

While Europe produced tens of thousands of books about the war, in India only a tiny number of first person accounts were to find their way into print: to date they can still be counted on the fingers of one hand—and not one of them was written by a sepoy.

In fact two of these accounts were written by men who were not even eligible to serve as sepoys by reason of their ethnicity; they were Bengalis and thus excluded from military recruitment because of the British Indian army’s racial policies. One of these men, Kalyan Mukherjee, was a doctor in the army’s medical corps, the other, Sisir Sarbadhikari, was a medical auxiliary. Although neither of them bore arms, their writings are to my mind, among the most remarkable accounts of the violence of the First World War. This is of course a tall claim to make of a conflict that was so fecund in literary production: since neither of the two books has been translated, I am afraid the only substantiation I can provide, for those who do not read Bengali, is the evidence of the excerpts that I have translated for my own blog (several passages of which are included in this book).

As for the sepoys themselves, true to their tradition, they left behind very little: inasmuch as their voice can be heard at all it is through their censored letters, and through the various materials that were collected by scholars in German prisonerof-war camps. These sources have only recently seen the light of day and this book is one of the first to incorporate them into a panoramic overview of the Indian subcontinent’s involvement in the First World War. It is a welcome and long-necessary endeavour but it should be noted that on certain subjects there remains a yawning gap in information: for example the role of lascars, who probably contributed more, proportionally, to the seaborne war effort than sepoys did on land. Despite the gaps in the record, Vedica Kant has succeeded, to a quite remarkable degree, in conveying a sense of the texture of the sepoy’s experience and of the conflicted, ambivalent cadences of his voice. It is a voice that cries out to be heard, precisely because its story does not conform to the mirrored Western narratives of victory and defeat: what it offers is the possibility of an alternative reading of that history—as a story both of defeat-in-victory and victory-in-defeat. To my mind this is closer to the truth of what happened on the battlefields of Europe and Asia during the First World War than many more familiar interpretations of those tragic events.

(Foreword from ‘ If I Die Here, Who Will Remember Me?’ India and the First World War, by Vedica Kant, Roli Books, 256 pages, Rs 1,975) 29 september 2014

E X C E R P T Indian soldiers out for a ride in Bournemouth

The War-Scarred

by Vedica Kant

P

erhaps among the most momentous outcomes

of the war for several Indian soldiers was the opportunity to see and experience England firsthand. Never before had so many Indians made a collective journey to Europe. Never again would these soldiers come so close to seeing England, the imperial ruler for whom they had risked their lives. During the course of the war the imperial centre was to become the base where wounded Indian soldiers underwent treatment and recuperated. By early 1915 six hospitals had been established (usually by converting existing buildings) for Indian soldiers in England. Sir Walter Lawrence, who was appointed the Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Indian Soldiers in France and England in late 1914, was given the task of managing the hospital system to achieve two main aims. One was to return sepoys to the front as soon as possible. The second was to protect British ‘prestige’, which was usually seen to be a combination of proving to the Indian masses that British rule was just and fair and that the British ruling classes own personal behaviour was somehow beyond reproach.

These aims give us a sense of the importance of the hospital sites in the Indian experience of the war. For the British authorities, they became important sites of communication and propaganda to showcase to the soldiers and a wider audience in India the care and concern that was going into the recuperation of wounded Indian open www.openthemagazine.com 53

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton serves as Dome Hospital, one of several seaside palaces converted into infirmaries for Indian troops during the war

soldiers. Some of the most memorable images of Indian soldiers from the war illustrate their recuperation under the ostentatious dome and chandeliers of the Brighton Pavilion, the orientalist kitsch palace built in 1823, that had become a hospital for Indian soldiers during the war. Others show Indian soldiers meeting with British dignitaries including the King himself in the vast hospital lawns. At the same time, the hospitals also became sites of contention, reinforcing the racial and sexual hierarchies of the Empire, against which Indian soldiers often chafed and even rebelled...

From the very beginning of the war, the British were concerned that the treatment of Indian soldiers should leave no room for complaint. Lawrence, keenly aware of the politics of treating Indian patients in England, wrote to Lord Kitchener: ‘I will never lose an opportunity of impressing upon all those who are working in these hospitals that great political issues are involved in making the stay of the Indians in England as agreeable as possible.’ This was not just for fear of a revolt amongst the soldiers, but also to preclude the possibility of the treatment of soldiers abroad becoming a rallying point for nationalists in India.

Luckily for Lawrence, the Indian soldiers were welcomed just as warmly in England as they had been in France. The first large contingent of Indian soldiers arrived at Brighton in December 1914 on a dreary, cold and rainy day. Despite the weather, crowds gathered to cheer the soldiers arriving from the front. The Brighton Gazette wrote: ‘... They arrived under rather mournful conditions. A drab day, rainstorms, and a fierce sea running in the Channel, mud-laden streets, and a vista of dripping umbrellas and mackintoshes. That was the first impression the warriors got of Brighton, and it was rather chilling.

But crowds assembled to voice public welcome, and the reception 54 open

undoubtedly cheered the brave fellows. The hundred stretcher cases in the first train that reached the terminus on Monday afternoon constituted perhaps the most distressing of the many pathetic sights seen on similar occasions during the past four months...’

Regardless of where they were admitted, Indian troops enjoyed good medical facilities and treatment. Lawrence noted: ‘Every effort was made to keep them cheerful and provide the simple comforts, which means so much to the Indians.’ It was not an effort that went in vain. One wounded Indian soldier wrote home to Peshawar simply saying, ‘Do not worry about me, for I am in paradise.’ Another recuperating soldier, Gulab Singh, wrote to a friend: ‘The arrangements for our food are excellent… The Gora Log (British) are most attentive to our wants.’

The purpose of the hospitals was not just to heal, but also to make the soldiers fit for war again. The hospitals provided the patients space for exercise and drills, and amenities to make the sepoys’ convalescence quick and pleasant. Soldiers were able to walk outside the hospital grounds as well (although this was usually only under supervision, reflecting the concerns the British authorities had about granting too much freedom to recuperating Indian soldiers). In the Kitchener Hospital, a large recreation room was used to project scenes of Punjab life to ‘a delighted audience of soldiers from the north of India.’ In Brighton, patients were allowed weekly trips to the cinema and those at the Pavilion were treated to a weekly organ recital. Gramophones regularly played the ‘native airs of India’ at convalescent homes and soldiers were also provided books and puzzles. n From the chapter ‘Face-to-face with Blighty’ in ‘If I Die Here, Who Will Remember Me?’ India and the First World War 29 september 2014

books

World War Special

We Go Singing as We March The joys and sorrows of the Indian soldier in the world theatre of war Sunanda K Datta-Ray The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy

Edited by David Omissi

Gajendra Singh

Penguin/Viking | 424 pages | Rs 599

Bloomsbury | 312 pages | Rs 599

he mythic gladiator’s salute from imperial Rome,

“Morituri te salutant… Those who are about to die salute you”, echoes poignantly through both these volumes, but especially in David Omissi’s collection of letters. What intensifies emotion is the chasm of race, religion and language separating saluter and saluted.

Of course, the creation of new identities and loyalties Gajendra Singh discusses in his cerebral analysis of the British Indian state’s human element may have softened the dilemma. A middle-aged middle class Englishwoman, the daughter of a Second World War hero and herself steeped in military lore, who read my essay on the First World War in Open (‘Where the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row’, 11 August 2014), faulted my description of Indian recruits as mercenaries who ‘saved the sum of things for pay’.

“They fought for the honour of the regiment,” she asserted stoutly. Some of the letters Omissi reprints certainly bear her out. ‘For many, soldiering had been the family profession and they were staunchly loyal to their family regiment,’ Sir Mark Tully writes in a Foreword that reminds us that more than a million Indian soldiers served in the First World War, 60,000 died and 9,200 were decorated for valour. “The reputation of the regiment mattered deeply to them.” This is, of course, the colonialist’s interpretation of the colonised. Yet, one could elaborate on it on the basis of some very moving epistles these men composed in Urdu, Hindi and Gurmukhi. The regiment was family. It became the focus of the devotion that would otherwise have been lavished on kith, kin and caste.

At a time when the idea of India was still amorphous, the Central Government, the sirkar that today’s British writers romanticise as the Raj, was also the fount of all legitimate authority. It commanded the absolute loyalty of these simple folk. As a sipahi wrote to his brother, ‘We shall never get another chance to exalt the name of race, country… and to prove our loyalty to the government.’ Ghulam Abbas Ali Khan, a Punjabi Muslim, could in all sincerity see George V as superior to the Kaiser and Tsar in a letter from France to Risaldar Muhammad Sarwar Khan in Peshawar, concluding, ‘We are ever praying that the victory may be granted to our King, the King of peace.’ They had no reason to suspect Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi of wily bargaining when

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he proclaimed India’s moral obligation to the Allies. “We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire,” Gandhi urged piously, expecting political return. “Fighting as the British are… in a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation… our duty is clear: to do our best to support the British.”

Clearly, my comment about mercenaries must be modified.

But it need not be abandoned. Singh’s exhaustively researched volume to some extent counters the starry-eyed Omissi-Tully vision by quoting official literature to show how the authorities fostered the Government’s ma-baap image. Like Britain’s ‘Kitchener needs you’ or ‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ posters, Indian military propaganda depicted an old Muslim saying, ‘I have always heard that all Faujdar officers are kind, more like brothers and fathers to the sepoys.’ Omissi’s 650 letters are taken from ‘a collection of many thousand.’ Singh says Captain Evelyn Berkeley Howell, the first censor, found it impossible to examine even a small portion of the masses of letters that flowed through his office, leave alone track down those entrusted to civilian post offices. While Omissi has undoubtedly tried to be representative, most of the letters are in Urdu, suggesting the writers were Muslim or from the An Indian Lewis gun team engages an enemy aircraft in Mesopotamia, 1918

Ariel Varges/ IWM/ Getty Images

T

Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-18

‘martial races’ or both. Many were warlike Pathans itching for a fight. The younger sons of peasants who signed up for the sipahi’s monthly salary of Rs 11 would write less effusively if they wrote at all. Omissi concedes that some of these ‘illiterate peasants… had been driven from the land, but most were willing labour migrants looking to make the most of the economic opportunities created by the colonial encounter.’

The social quirks that encounter produced didn’t leave the armed forces untouched. Jibes about the ‘British Indian Army’ came back to me recently on reading a foreign diplomat’s recollection that visiting the mess at Kolkata’s Fort William in the sixties he had ‘the extraordinary sensation that if you closed your eyes, accents and conversational topics would make you think you had been transposed to an equivalent British group of senior officers.’ Legend has it that addressing his troops on 15 August 1947, Field Marshal KM (Kipper) Cariappa, OBE, India’s first Indian Commanderin-Chief, blithely announced, “Aaj hum lok sab mufti ho gya!”

Cariappa, who affected an exaggerated Sandhurst manner (he was educated entirely in India), meant ‘muft’ (free) and not ‘mufti’ (civilian). Evan Charlton, last British editor of The Statesman, who repeated the joke to me, joined up with two colleagues, Philip Crosland and Lindsay Emerson, when the Second World War broke out. All three suffered cruelly as Japanese prisoners. An account of the heroism of such men might throw another light on the ‘mètissage’ (variously translated as ‘threat to White prestige’ and ‘European degeneracy and moral decay’) Singh mentions, citing a British report on sex, race, European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Asia.

His book breaks new ground in many ways, demonstrating why despite the kindness of European hosts and the graciousness of the King and Queen, ordinary sipahis may not always have felt they were treated fairly. Crossing the kala pani and fighting Islam’s supreme head could be called occupational hazards. But there were pay disparities.

Flogging was reintroduced for sipahis just as it was being phased out in the British Army. Restrictions on movement and socialising prompted comparison with French generosi-

Indians were not included when soldiers who were executed during the First World War were pardoned in 2006 although the defence secretary did mention executions under the 1911 Indian Army Act

ty towards Algerians. Indians were not included when soldiers who were executed during the First World War were pardoned in 2006 although the defence secretary did mention executions under the 1911 Indian Army Act. Some letters suggest greater risks were taken with Indian lives. When George V asked Subedar Mir Dast, VC, to make a request, the man replied: a wounded soldier should not be sent back to the trenches. Omissi says this was the ‘most important grievance.’ It crops up again and again with additional charges. An anonymous letter to the king written in Urdu from Milfordon-Sea says: ‘No sick man gets well fed. The Indians have given their lives for eleven rupees. Any man who comes here wounded is returned thrice and four times to the trenches.’

Perhaps Western historians might reconsider why so many prisoners of war joined the Indian National Army.

However, whether or not because of Omissi’s selection, the general tone of the correspondence is not carping. Most writers are brave and defiant; some even joyous. Signaller Kartar Singh’s letter in Gurmukhi to a Muslim friend in Punjab—‘We go singing as we march and care nothing that we are going to die’—recalled the sang-froid of a sipahi Jules Verne mentions in his novel, The End of Nana Sahib. Noting that the mutineers whom the British blew from the mouth of canons ‘nearly all died with that heroic indifference which Indians know so well how to preserve even in the very face of death’, Verne writes: ‘“No need to bind me, captain,” said a fine young sepoy, twenty years of age, to one of the officers present at the execution; and as he spoke he carelessly stroked the instrument of death. “No need to bind me; I have no wish to run away.” Such was the first and horrible execution, which was to be followed by so many others.’

As for Singh’s case that sipahis were too lowly even to be classified as subalterns, I would respectfully recall Thomas Wolfe’s haunting lines ‘Naked and alone we came into exile.

In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?’ Social scientists rediscover what literature proclaimed long ago!

From the sublime to the banal—one can’t forget the sipahi of popular lore who had been at the front without leave for nearly two years rejoicing at the birth of a son to the wife who hadn’t stirred out of the village during that time.

How was this possible? “I wrote home regularly!” the delighted sipahi replied. The story may be apocryphal but the innocence it portrays shines through both books. No subaltern straitjacket can turn yesterday’s sipahi into a sophisticated modern. But, then, neither were senior Indian officers then driven by monetary greed or political ambition.

Both merit further study. Amen then to Tully’s hope that ‘more historians will turn their eyes away from the British army and focus on the neglected Indian story’. n Sunanda K Datta-Ray is a journalist and author of several books open www.openthemagazine.com 57

books Presidential Wings A camera-wielding bureaucrat’s tribute to the birds of the Rashtrapati Bhavan Estate GUNJEET SRA The Winged Wonders of the Rashtrapati Bhavan

Text and photographs by Dr Thomas Mathew Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India | 339 pages | Rs 2,850

S

Black-rumped flameback (above); Dr Mathew with his lens and team of helpers 58 open

tarting last May, Dr Thomas Mathew, Additional Secretary to the President, took over a year to capture on camera and document 113 species of birds inhabiting or visiting the Rashtrapati Bhavan Estate. The Winged Wonders of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, part of a three-part series to commemorate the President’s two years in office, adds to the existing literature on the subject, particularly with regard to the President’s Estate.

For each of the species recorded, the book provides the location, date and time of sightings. It also carries forward an earlier study (2002–03) on 91 species of birds at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, carried out by the Bombay Natural History Society.

The Rashtrapati Bhavan contains excellent open spaces, forest cover and thousands of fruit-bearing plants and trees that attract many exotic bird species.

This showcase of the feathered denizens of the president’s official home, among which are many migratory species, idenitifies birds spotted on the expansive lawns of the Mughal Garden, Herbal Garden, Cactus Garden, nursery and duck pond.

Dr Mathew says the idea for the book came from the President, who is a nature lover and took over a year to complete it. A keen photographer in his free time, he says he was assisted by the many gardeners on the presidential estate. He asked them to bird-watch for him, and they colluded on the project.

Among some of the specimens that have been spotted on these premises are the black-rumped flameback, the Oriental white-eye, some exotic ducks and the purple sunbird. While a number of species spotted are resident breeders, many documented in the book are species that have travelled from as far as Europe, Central Asia and Siberia; like the elusive Asian paradise flycatcher, which usually spends its winters in tropical Asia.

The photographs are gorgeously rendered! The book is a must-have for any bird lover. n 29 september 2014

science

fat choice Thanks to two heavily government-subsidised crops—corn and soybeans— the average US diet is heavy in the bad omega-6 fatty acids and far too light on the good omega-3s

Bhang’s Non-Narcotic High An Indian research team finds that essential oils in cannabis can be used for industry

Fats and Academic Success

B

hang has been used in India for millennia, but, though it has social sanction for consumption during festivals, it is firmly identified as a narcotic. A team of Indian researchers has, however, found that there is more to marijuana than the high it offers. Its oils have antibacterial properties and can even be used for making cosmetics.

Cannabis sativa, as the plant is known in the English lexicon, is one of the most widely studied plants in the world and almost always controversial. A new research paper in the journal Current Science outlines its industrial benefits. The paper, which is a result of one year of research at the Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants, Research Centre, Pantnagar, was aimed at dispelling the negative image that the plant has had in the country. “Not one person in India has studied the chemical components of the plant to analyse its properties beyond the hallucinogenic for commercial purposes, and since it grows abundantly in the foothills and is generally known to have some vital properties, we decided to explore them,” says the lead author 60 open

of the report RS Verma, who is in the department of natural product chemistry. “The present study was to investigate the essential oil composition and anti-microbial activity of the plant. We hydrodistilled an essential oil of the plant and studied it through capillary gas chromatography and GC mass spectrometry and evaluated that against nine pathogenic bacterial strains,” says Verma.

Hydrodistilling a plant basically means extracting its essential oils. So Verma and his team took this oil and tested it against various bacteria. The study revealed strong activity against most of the bacteria it was tested against. It was also found that the oil extract contained several components inherent in other commonly used essential oils. Verma says that this could mean that the plant may be of high utility, especially for industrial purposes. “It has potential to be explored for flavour, fragrance and even cosmetic purposes,” he says, adding, “although similar conclusions of its anti-bacterial tendencies have been explored by scientists, nobody has really thought of [extracting] it and using it for nonnarcotic commercial purposes.” n

According to a study published in Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids, the amount of omega-3 docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) in a mother’s milk is the strongest predictor of the child’s cognitive performance. It outweighs national income and the number of dollars spent per pupil in schools. Researchers compared the fatty acid profiles of breast milk from women in over two dozen countries with how well children from those countries performed on academic tests.

DHA alone accounted for about 20 per cent of the differences in test scores among countries.

On the other hand, high amounts of omega-6 fat in breast milk—fats from vegetable oils— predict lower test scores. n

When a Wife Is Happy

A new Rutgers University study finds that the more content the wife is with the marriage, the happier the husband is with his life, no matter how he feels about their nuptials. “I think it comes down to the fact that when a wife is satisfied with the marriage, she tends to do a lot more for her husband, which has a positive effect on his life,” says Professor Deborah Carr.

“Men tend to be less vocal about their relationships, and their level of marital unhappiness might not be translated to their wives.” Researchers analysed data of 394 couples who were part of a national study of income, health and disability. At least one of the spouses was 60 or older, and on average, couples were married for 39 years. n

29 september 2014

hdr photo At the most basic level, a High Dynamic Range photo is a set of photos of the same subject taken at different exposure levels, which are then blended into a single image comprising the most focused, well-lit and colourful parts of the scene, with the help of advanced post-processing software

tech&style

Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Yes, they are bigger, lighter and faster. And worth upgrading to gagandeep Singh Sapra

Breitling w Transocean 38

Price on request

Prices awaited

T

he i Phone 6 features a 4.7-inch screen, while the 6 Plus has a 5.5inch display. Both of them are Retina HD displays and are packed with innovative technologies that ensure that the colours that you see on the screen are vivid and bright, and the text is easy to read. The handsets also feature a precision unibody enclosure of anodised aluminium, which seamlessly joins the shaped glass display screen, assuring you a smooth surface from end to end.

On the inside, Apple’s phones have upgraded to A8 processors, which now run on 64-bit architecture, very similar to what your desktop would have. This gives the new iPhones added power efficiency and extends their battery time. It also means faster processing and enhanced control of applications. Plus, the new processor 29 september 2014

lets Apple offer consolequality games on these handy devices.

The cameras are also better, ensuring sharper pictures than ever; iPhones now boast of an 8 megapixel sensor, a True Two Tone Flash integrated into a single lens, an f/2.2 aperture, and 1.5 micron pixels. For optical image stabilisation, Apple has added a mechanism for both horizontal and vertical adjustment of the lens. As for video use, iPhones can now capture up to 240 frames per second, letting you create some amazing slow-motion clips.

The front camera also has a brand new sensor, a larger f/2.2 sensor that increases light absorption by 80 per cent, and a ‘burst mode’ that enables you to get that perfect selfie. The sensor also lets you take HDR photos and HDR selfie videos.

Both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will come with iOS 8 preloaded, and with huge improvements. The fingerprint sensor that was added in the iPhone 5 now acts as your credit card payment gateway. Though this feature may not be available to us in India, it will surely relieve you of worrying about credit cards if you travel abroad. That’s not all. The new iPhones also have a barometer to let you monitor your workouts and put all that fitness data on the screen for easy viewing. n

The Transocean 38 is water-resistant to 100 m. Its steel case is 38 mm in diameter with a slim beveled bezel, and it houses a selfwinding movement certified by the Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute. The watch comes with a black or silver dial. It is fitted with a steel mesh bracelet (in tribute to the original models), a perforated bracelet or a leather strap. n

Creative Sound Blaster E3

Rs 12,999

If you want to get better sound out of your PC or Mac, connect the E3 to a USB port and download the sound blaster E series control panel software, which gives you a full suite of SBX Pro Studio audio enhancement technologies, and enjoy a fully customisable listening experience. The E3 also connects over Bluetooth to a tablet or smartphone and acts as a portable headphone amplifier with a battery that lasts up to 8 hours. The E3 can also convert uncompressed RAW audio output to analog, which lets you enjoy studio quality sound while on the move. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

from bobby to bobba Veteran actor Dimple Kapadia was first seen in Bobby (1973) in which she played Bobby Braganza, a Goan Christian, and became a national sex symbol at the age of 16. In Finding Fanny, she sports a 20-kg prosthetic bottom to portray a Goan yet again

Finding Fanny With its truthful depiction of individual foibles and local Goan charm, this film is a winner ajit duara

o n scr een

current

The Prince Director Brian A Miller cast Jason Patric, Bruce Willis,

John Cusack

Score ★★★★★

padukone, in shah, Deepika Cast naseerudd ur kap pankaj dimple kapadia, nia Director homi adaja

I

f you live in a place long enough doing virtually nothing—‘sosegado’ as they call it in Goa—it doesn’t mean you are calm and stress free. The mind wanders, the imagination plays tricks and there is plenty of time to regret, turn bitter or eccentric. Finding Fanny is about five characters like this in a small village in Goa called Pocolim.

Only one, Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapur), stakes claim to professional success. He is an internationally known painter, or so we are told, but from the only work we see of his—a portrait that he does of his magnificent obsession, Rosalina Eucharistica (Dimple Kapadia)—he is no FN Souza. His palette, painting and persona recall someone from a ‘Retrogressive Artist’s Group’.

The story is about Ferdie (Naseeruddin Shah) looking for his long lost love, Fanny. He is accompanied by Pedro, Rosalina and two young people with memories and regrets of their own—Angie (Deepika Padukone) and Savio (Arjun Kapoor). The five of them

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drive around Goa in a beat-up old car, and nothing significant or unexpected happens right through the movie.

As in RK Narayan’s fictional town of ‘Malgudi’, individual quirks in the characters’ speech and behaviour reflect the larger tradition and culture outside their immediate world. Writer Kersi Khambatta and director Homi Adajania have skillfully imbued the local syntax in words and pictures. So whether the conversations are in English, Konkani or Hindi, the pattern of speech and intonation remains unique to Goa. The art direction and photography present the micro-picture of a society, ignoring the touristy Goa in favour of the interior of heritage homes, dirt roads in villages and the faces of interesting people.

Cinematographer Anil Mehta’s closeups are extraordinary portraits of humans in doubt, despair or happiness.

All the actors in this movie will treasure forever this portfolio of themselves at a particular time and place.

Do not miss Finding Fanny. n

Mindless Hollywood ‘bang bang’ films can be excruciating to watch. The saving grace of The Prince is the first half hour when a man, apparently a garage mechanic, is looking for his teenage daughter who seems to have mysteriously dropped out of her college classes and simply vanished, like an aircraft gone off the radar.

Of course he’s not really a garage mechanic. Paul (Jason Patric) is a gangster who has prematurely retired from the underworld of New Orleans because he is worried about the consequences of the extensive damage he has done to other gangsters like Omar (Bruce Willis).

He now fears that his precious daughter may be at risk from revenge seekers.

Sam (John Cusack), who gives Paul a safe house while he looks for his daughter, explains the meaning of the title of this film. He tells how, at the height of the Roman Empire, Emperor Hadrian built the now famous heritage site, ’Hadrian’s Wall’, in Scotland, to keep out a particularly vicious Scottish tribe. That tribe was led by someone called ‘The Prince’.

Did ‘The Prince’ really exist? Well, we shall find out when the Scots vote for their Independence (or not) on 18 September. Meanwhile, this film can be given a miss. Even the final shoot-out is not worth the ticket. n AD

29 september 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Dr Smart Aleck Fails to Impress

Abhishek Bachchan has reportedly earned the title ‘Dr Bachchan’ from his Happy New Year cast mates for the never-ending supply of gyaan that he dispenses at any and every occasion. When his colleagues began noticing that the actor had an opinion on pretty much everything—not to mention how he could contribute to just about any conversation with a personal anecdote—they bestowed this honour upon the know-it-all.

During a press interview session recently, the film’s five male principals and director Farah Khan smirked among themselves when Abhishek delivered long all-too-serious responses to questions that were meant to be taken lightly.

During one interview they joked that Boman Irani had managed to slip into a nap while AB Jr droned on for 15 minutes to a television reporter who was evidently tired of holding out the mike for him.

One eyewitness reveals that while the actors were hanging out together after lunch on the sets one afternoon, Farah accidentally eavesdropped on a conversation between Sonu Sood and Abhishek Bachchan that made her burst into peals of laughter. Apparently Abhishek was busy recommending protein supplements to Sonu Sood.

The director declared: “Now I’ve seen everything,” before cracking up and heading to her own make-up van.

On another note, according to sources in the film trade, Abhishek was paid close to Rs 10 crore for Happy New Year, because the makers were desperate to have him on the project. Story goes, they badly needed a second lead for the film and were hoping to cast a prominent star in the part since they’d already filled out the other roles with Sonu Sood, Boman Irani and Vivaan Shah, who aren’t exactly above-the-marquee names.

They famously approached John Abraham first, who declined. When they went to AB Jr, his Dhoom co-star John reportedly advised Abhishek to demand a sizeable salary because the part, after all, was merely “padding” in a Shah Rukh Khan vehicle.

Of Misses and Regrets

In a new update on the many misadventures of Saif Ali Khan, the Humshakals star called up a respected Bollywood trade analyst on 29 september 2014

the Monday after Finding Fanny’s weekend release to enquire about the “real collections” of the film, not the “inflated numbers that were being circulated by the studio”.

When the analyst revealed that the collections were modest at best, and barely enough to cover the film’s not-so-reasonable budget, Saif pointedly scoffed, “What’s the point then?”, suggesting that he thought the film was a bad idea on his former producing partner Dinesh Vijan’s part.

More recently, Humshakals director Sajid Khan’s sister, filmmaker Farah Khan remarked in the press—without naming Saif—that it was “unethical” and “shameful” on the part of an actor to distance himself from a film after he’d “taken money for doing it”. Farah, of course, has had a similar experience of her own. Akshay Kumar famously disassociated himself from Joker a few years ago, the turkey that Farah produced with her husband Shirish Kunder, who directed the film.

Not Really a Family Man

Turns out there’s a lot brewing between an up-and-coming male actor (not Indian, but one who frequently works in Bollywood) and his pretty female manager (also not Indian). No big deal in the matter, you’d say. Except that the gentleman in question is married and a father too. The lady manages not only this chocolate-boy hero’s career, but also that of another out-of-towner actress who made her Bollywood debut recently in a dud film.

Apparently when he saw photos of his girlfriend partying with the new friends she’d made in Mumbai splashed across Twitter and Instagram recently, he called her up one evening while she was out living it up and chided her for not focusing on her work.

She, in turn, deduced that he’d become insecure of the fact that she was mingling with people he might know closely.

The actor, who has made a few successful Hindi films, has earned himself a heartthrob image, yet always projects himself as a happily married and committed husband. Yet his close friends insist he’s got a roving eye and tends to travel without his family a lot—which suggests he’s got a wider range of interests than he lets on. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Beauty with Purpose

by r au l i r a n i

Twenty-four-year-old Simmi stands in front of her salon in Faridabad, Haryana, which is probably the first beauty treatment centre run exclusively for transgenders in the National Capital Region.

Pahal Foundation, an NGO which works with gay men as part of a community initiative to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS in Faridabad, funded the enterprise

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29 september 2014