OPEN Magazine 2 June 2014 by Open Media Network

Reign of the New Power Trinity

RS 40 2 j u n e 2 0 14

inside Moment of Truth for the Dynasty

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AN INDIAN REVOLUTIONARY What is it about the Modi mandate that provokes such fear of fundamental change? By Swapan Dasgupta

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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,

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Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Aastha Atray Banan, Mihir Srivastava, Chinki Sinha, Sunaina Kumar, Rajni George Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra senior copy editor Aditya Wig copy editor Sneha Bhura Assistant Art Directors Tarun Sehgal, Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNER Anup Banerjee assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani photo Researcher Abhinav Saha Editorial Researcher Shailendra Tyagi Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Rajeev Marwaha (North

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Volume 6 Issue 21 For the week 27 May—2 June 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover photo Ashish Sharma

2 june 2014

Goutham

I love this article, ‘The Light of Benares’ (19 May 2014). It pains me when so-called intellectuals fail to notice that people care about real issues. India is bursting with energy and wants to break free. A great decade has been wasted. With policy paralysis, people will be rendered jobless, with the result that some politicians play up frustration to create more trouble. I am well placed to take care of my life, but I see how people have been subdued by a lack of opportunities. My previous generations were all submissive, while in my generation I have people more India is too big a confident. I know the country and too diverse only thing different with undercurrents between my generation too strong to be calm and the one before is that we have opportunities, without people that’s all. I know many having hope of a better smart people just 10 tomorrow years older than me who are resigned to their fate. This is sad. I support Modi because he is talking about all the things that seem right to me. He talks about development and jobs. India is too big a country and too diverse with undercurrents too strong to be calm and peaceful without people having hope of a better tomorrow.  letter of the week Saving Nehruvianism

while modi may appear to be a threat to many things good, holding him responsible for the demise of Nehruvianism is quite a stretch, simply because Nehruvianism was never a structured school of thought (‘Aggression of the Ascetic’, 26 May 2014). With the passing of the UPA, Nehruvianism is being used as a catch-all concept to indicate all that Modi-RSS threatens, but in reality this whole ‘ism’ is an afterthought. If there is a need for a credible alternative to Modi, the answer doesn’t lie in another ‘ism’. Modi’s opponents will do well to learn from him in this regard. He has not adopted Hindutva officially; that ‘tva’ remains just below the surface of his discourse, like an insider reference for fellow travellers.

The surface message has to be generic, energetic, and—there is no other way of putting it— dictatorial so that enough people consider you their own ‘personal saviour’. That’s why Priyanka Gandhi with her faux imperiousness commands more attention than a consensual Rahul. Aiming for the instincts of individual benefit and spectacle would help Nehruvianism more than its genteel and idealistic do-gooder approach. Modi has won because he is a personal messiah. Kejriwal came into prominence because he was the wrathful censor of the people.  Kalo’smi

Miles to Go

the article misses the hard truth that the BJP tries to cash in on the negativism that

abounds in the Congress party (‘Modi Could be the One’, 19 May 2014). The BJP has not fully endeared itself to voters who are still wary of its religious stance. The much trumpeted Gujarat growth model suffers from lack of veracity. One wishes Modi identifies himself with all Indians without reservation, donning the attire of amenability and acceptability. However, his utterances in West Bengal that left a note of warning to Bengali Muslims belie the theory of his transformation [as a leader worthy of] national stature.  Chandrasekaran

Proud to be Indian Again

this refers to ‘The Modi Nation’ (26 May 2014). The strong mandate that the BJP got under the leadership of Narendra Modi is a pleasant surprise. And it emphasises the fact that voters wanted a positive change, which they found in the BJP. The last election where a single party got a clear majority was in 1984, but that was a pure emotional event, while this BJP victory is on the promise of good and stable governance, growth and development. As far as the Congress is concerned, we don’t need to look beyond Delhi, where all its candidates ended a poor third, which sums up the mood against it in the country. Last but not least: Narendra Modi’s humility is evident in his talk about inclusiveness. Hopefully, he will usher us into a new era where we will all feel proud to be Indians again.  Bal Govind

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‘I Want to Continue Being Modi’ role seeker

Vikas Mahante, the Modi double, wants the BJP to hire him as a permanent lookalike

T h e s h e l f l i f e of a politician’s lookalike, suddenly discovered on the campaign trail, lasts only till the length of the election season. After which he must return to his earlier life. But Vikas Mahante, whose striking resemblance to Narendra Modi earned him sudden fame, has no intention of doing that. Mahante, who runs a packaging business in the distant Mumbai suburb Vasai, and has two sons, campaigned for various leaders of the Shiv Sena and BJP as a Modi look2 june 2014

alike. Most of these rallies took place in Mumbai, but he was also called upon to campaign for the BJP in Gujarat and Amritsar, where he was the star attraction at a public meeting addressed by Arun Jaitley. He says that he has found a new calling by impersonating Modi. “I don’t want to go back and become obsolete again. I want to continue being Modi.” The 52-year-old businessman claims he will ask the BJP to hire him as a party worker. “I have realised that party

workers and supporters become reinvigorated when they see me. Even the voters, they feel they are having an audience with Modi. BJP can use these qualities,” he says. Mahante arrived at his Modi impersonation by accident, he says. Around two years ago, he started growing a beard to try out a new look. When people started pointing out his similarity with the leader, he started wearing a pair of rimless glasses and got a shorter haircut to look more like him. During a Holi party

organised by a Maharashtrian filmmaker he is acquainted with, some Shiv Sena leaders saw him and asked him to campaign for them. Last year, on learning of the resemblance, Modi asked Mahante to visit him in Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat. “He stared at me for a while and asked how I would do prachaar (preach, or, in the Sangh lexicon, spread the message),” says Mahante, “He seemed to be very impressed by what he heard.” n Lhendup G Bhutia

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ritesh uttamchandani

small world

contents

26 congress

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Give up or gear up

cover story An Indian revolutionary

locomotif

business

person of the Week Anandiben Patel

open essay

Lessons from Venice

18 TRIAD

No harm, cry a little more

Will AirAsia shake aviation up?

The new power trinity

A Suitable Lady Will the new Chief Minister of Gujarat make her own policy choices or follow in the footsteps of her predecessor? ullekh np

ujarat chief minister

Anandiben Patel knows only too well that it will not be easy to fill her predecessor’s shoes. But she must be glad that she has the PM-elect’s best wishes. Anointing her CM was easy only after Narendra Modi made his choice clear, but until then there was complete silence. The state’s legislators—all 123 of them—were waiting for word from their master. Perhaps there was more to that silence: Patel and Amit Shah weren’t the best of friends. But then it didn’t matter any longer. For Shah, she had stopped being a rival long ago. With his gaining popularity and power, the old rivalry was only for memoirs. With the opposition in disarray and the party under the control of the former Chief Minister, Patel, 73, is expected to find the going smooth. As the first female Chief Minister of Gujarat, she has credited Modi for her rise, while Modi, on his part, sees her as a disciplinarian who could carry forward his legacy—something that has come under extreme scrutiny. His 12-year-tenure has been both commended and ruthlessly criticised. While economists as famed as Jagdish Bhagwati lauded his governance and promoted his growth model as something to emulate, he came under sharp attack from political rivals, especially over Gujarat’s 2002 riots. However, it was this

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said that the BJP deserves her thanks for training women in politics and giving them lessons in competent governance. Patel, who belongs to a community that has been a strong support base for the BJP, says she will follow in the footsteps of Modi, whom she called a “leader of the 21st century”; a man who converts adversities into opportunities. Patel had headed a group of ministers and was in charge of running the day-to-day affairs of the state during the poll campaign as well. She has held important india news network portfolios—education, urban development, revenue and disaster management. She has also successfully handled projects aimed at enhancing female literacy. A former school teacher, Patel was thrust into mainstream politics after she earned much respect and fame by saving two school girls from drowning during an excursion, winning the Governor’s gallantry award for this heroic act. In 1987, Patel joined the BJP and went on to become the Gujarat Pradesh Mahila Morcha President. She was also the only female leader from Gujarat to take part in the BJP-led Ekta Yatra. Patel, who was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1994, had played a pivotal role in setting up irrigation projects as well. Now the question being asked is: will she remain in Modi’s shadow or will she act on her own volition? n

mix of extreme reactions that catapulted him to become the country’s most famous politician, revered and feared. While critics say Patel will be remotecontrolled from 1,100 km away—from Delhi, in a manner reminiscent of how the Manmohan Singh Government was run—it is not easy to dismiss her long experience in handling government departments and altering the complex nature of the revenue office in Gujarat. The senior-most minister in Gujarat has

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b books

Activist fiction

The elephant whisperer

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

acker

■

f o r striking a discordant

anti-Pak note that would embarrass India’s new Government Even before the National Democratic Alliance Government has had a chance to take charge at the Centre, Uddhav Thackeray, chief of the alliance’s second biggest party, the Shiv Sena, has begun stirring controversy by speaking out of turn. He did no one any favours by cranking up his party’s usual antiPakistan rhetoric. He said that

drink

Champagne’s sparkle

cricket matches with India’s neighbour should be called off in order to teach ‘them’ a lesson. The Sena has a long history of sabotaging and protesting cricket matches, once even digging up a cricket pitch in Mumbai. Uddhav had also twice earlier made such a demand, once following reports of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif threatening to go to war if the Kashmir issue was not resolved soon (this was later denied by Pakistan), and the second time after two soldiers were killed along the LoC. Such pointless fist-waving needs to change now that the Sena will be part of the Union Government. It especially embarrasses the PMdesignate Narendra Modi, who recently sent a missive to Nawaz Sharif, inviting him to attend his swearing-in ceremony. Since foreign policy and diplomacy are not the Sena’s strengths, perhaps it would be best if they were tostay off this territory and leave it to Modi’s Cabinet. n

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

son RISE

“[MK Stalin] has offered to resign from the post accepting moral responsibility for the defeat”

“Stalin offered to resign. Our leader, Karunanidhi, said it was not needed. The party needs Stalin. He has to take care of the party’s future. After we persuaded him, he has agreed not to resign”

—A senior DMK leader on condition of anonymity to the press on the morning of 18 May

—Durai Murugan, deputy general secretary, DMK, later on 18 May

around

Digvijaya’s Pipe Dream General Secretary Digvijaya Singh has a knack for bluster. The latest is his appeal to Mamata Banerjee of the AITMC and Sharad Pawar of the NCP to return to the party fold. After inviting flak for comparing Rahul Gandhi’s failure to energise his party workers with the electoral reverses suffered by the onetime US president Abraham Lincoln, the former Madhya Pradesh CM has now called for a larger alliance of all Congress-minded parties. In an

C o n g r e ss

2 june 2014

ashish sharma

Guess who’s back!

After the DMK’s rout, MK Stalin, who was in charge of its Lok Sabha campaign, resigned all party positions only to be persuaded by his father M Karunanidhi to stay on

turn

The forecourt of history

av Th Uddh

true life

archival

interview with The Economic Times, he said, “I strongly appeal to all leaders and workers who have left Congress in the past, be it Sharad Pawarji or Mamata Banerjee, to come back.” Singh, the ultimate dynasty loyalist, knows well that these powerful leaders had quit the Congress expressing deep displeasure over the way power was centralised by the Family. Isn’t it blasphemous, then, to dole out such invitations, Mr Singh? Is Rahul Gandhi listening? n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the latest match-fixing scandal Excerpts of confidential statements from the New Zealand (NZ) cricket captain Brendon McCullum and former batsman Lou Vincent to ICC’s Anti-Corruption Security Unit (ACSU) were recently leaked to the media. The excerpts revealed a number of match-fixing details and a certain former player—referred to as ‘Player X’ and rumoured to be former allrounder Chris Cairns—who approached them. According to McCullum, Player X had offered him up to $180,000 per match to underperform in cricket matches. The player first approached him in Kolkata in 2008 before the start of the inaugural Indian Premier League (IPL) and later again in England during New Zealand’s tour there. Player X told him all the “big boys” were involved and he had Even though a group of players working cleared by the for him in the now-defunct ICC, McCullum Indian Cricket League and can be charged for not reporting wanted McCullum to do the same for him in the IPL. the matter earlier

rajanish kakade/ap

McCullum told ACSU that he does not remember the names of players who X said were involved, although he recollects thinking most of them were Asian cricketers. McCullum is believed to have turned Player X down, although he can be charged for failing to report the matter ear-

lier. In December 2013, media reports stated that Vincent, Cairns and NZ bowler Daryl Tuffey were under investigation for fixing matches. The latest leaks state that Vincent has identified a number of others who were involved, including Player X, and some of the matches that were fixed. These apparently include a number of county and domestic Twenty20 tournaments. Since the leak, ICC has clarified thatMcCullum is not under investigation, while Cairns claims reports alleging that he is Player X are false. In 2010, Cairns won a defamation suit he filed against Lalit Modi, who had claimed he was involved in fixing matches. n

Prisoner of Politics Kejriwal and the joy of going to jail M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

uess who said this (clue: he is no friend of Arvind Kejriwal)—“Criminal defamation means the accused could go to jail for expressing his views. This is unacceptable and against freedom of expression as laid down in the Constitution. It also violates international protocol on civil and political rights …The USA, England and other countries have removed criminal defamation. We need to do it in India as well.” These words are of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy at an interaction with journalists in Bhubaneswar last year. However, another BJP leader Nitin Gadkari has used precisely this law against Arvind Kejriwal after the latter accused him of corruption in public. This is a law that the media at least has for long wanted scrapped because even truth is not a defence. When it comes to politicians, there is even less reason to use this because it is in the nature of the profession to accuse each other. It will be hard to find a politician in India who has not said something that could be termed ‘defamatory’ about an opponent. But whereas criminal defamation scares the media because most people don’t like jail, to politicians it is actually not such a bad thing because imprisonment—a short stint preferably—is a shot of energy to their career. That includes politicians of all colours and periods. As far back as 1913, Mahatma Gandhi went to jail after refusing to pay a fine in South Africa. Almost all those who were jailed during the Emergency by Indira Gandhi emerged as national leaders. Imprisonment, and the spin he put on it, is one element of why Lalu Prasad Yadav actually made a comeback of sorts in Bihar after his recent stint behind bars. To Kejriwal, battered after the General Election and with Delhi having slipped away

on account of a misreading, it was an easy choice to make when asked to furnish a bail bond. It is hard not to notice Kejriwal’s evolution despite his many blunders. It was just a year or so ago when there was consensus that he is a ‘media creation’ who conducts his politics through press conferences. And now, when he is actually going by the regular rules of the game by creating a public fuss, he is being called someone who has no respect for institutions. When he took on the Delhi chief ministership with Congress support, he was accused of compromising his principles. When he quit, he was accused of being irresponsible. But with every Now when political Kejriwal is statement that going by the he makes (like contesting in regular rules Varanasi), there of the game, seems to be an he is being undercurrent dismissed as a building which rabble-rouser no one, not even him, is very clear about. His party keeps throwing unexpected surprises. Otherwise, how does one explain the success of AAP in Punjab? In Delhi, it is the second largest party in every single constituency. It is hardly an experiment that failed. It will be interesting to see how his jail innings will end. Possibly he might furnish the requisite bond after having made his point, and again there will be jokes on Twitter about him. He will return to singing songs on stage and giving speeches that reek of unabashedly cheesy Hindi film dialogues. It won’t help in the Delhi polls, which are probably lost no matter how many times he goes to jail. But we can count on the man being there in our drawing rooms for some time to come. n 2 june 2014

business

av i at io n ‘Whatever IndiGo tries to do to stop us it just makes us stronger and smarter,’ AirAsia’s founder Tony Fernandes reportedly tweeted on 20 May, addressing Mittu Chandilya, CEO of the airline’s Indian operations, ‘Well done’. The tweet was just the most recent in a string of conflicts between domestic carriers and new entrants to India’s aviation market. In granting an Air Operator’s Permit to AirAsia India last month, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) increased the number of domestic airlines to seven; and an eighth is on its way as well, a joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines. However, it’s not all-clear for takeoff yet. Prabhat Kumar, director general of the DGCA, has confirmed that AirAsia’s permit—opposed by the Federation of Indian Airlines and by IndiGo most prominently—is yet to be ratified. The challenge to its market entry comes in the form of a Public Interest Litigation filed at the Delhi High Court by the BJP’s Subramanian Swamy. The PIL alleges that the tripartite agreement between Tata Sons, AirAsia Berhad and Telestra Tradeplace aimed at launching this new airline violates India’s FDI norms. The matter rests on a policy that allows 49 per cent FDI in domestic airlines (the draft of which reportedly has a controversial comma a la Lynn Truss’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves). Swamy contends that this policy

the hindu archive

The Case for Open Skies and Low Fares

on a wing and a comma Tony Fernandes (right) with Mittu Chandilya in Mumbai

was put in place for cash-strapped existing airlines—such as Kingfisher—to source foreign funds. The DGCA, which has already ruled on this matter in AirAsia India’s favour, disagrees, but the matter is set for an HC hearing on 11 July. AirAsia, though, has taken delivery of aircraft and is reportedly ready to launch its services in a few weeks. The airline is known for its aggressive pricing, and has suggested that airfares could fall by a third; domestic carriers are unconvinced of the merits of this idea. SpiceJet executives have been asking how such a low cost

structure is possible; and IndiGo, it seems, is unwilling to find out. While other carriers chose to issue a joint letter of opposition, market leader IndiGo’s protest has been the loudest. It isn’t about policy as much as business interests, though. In the words of D Suhdakara Reddy, president of the Air Passenger Association of India, “[It] shows a lack of confidence in business. Any competition in the segment should be welcomed, particularly if it helps passengers and brings down fares.” As in any other arena, cartelisation would do the market no good. n ADITYA WIG

time to fasten seatbelts IndiGo, India’s undisputed market leader, has been steadily gaining passenger share. Will AirAsia’s entry shake things up in the skies?

Source: livemint.com compiled by Aditya wig infographics by tarun sehgal

2 June 2014

IndiGo 31.6%

Jet Airways 21.8%

SpiceJet 17.9%

GoAir 9.5%

Air India 18.3% AirCosta .8%

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lo co m ot i f

No Harm, Cry a Little More S PRASANNARAJAN

t was unlikely that Narendra Modi was rereading Daniel Goleman between his stump performances. Even if he was turning the pages, it was more likely to be Vivekananda than the former journalist who added to the motivational literature on leadership with his book on emotional intelligence. Great leaders, from business or politics, went the bestselling argument, were masters of their emotions, which are as important as your intelligence in measuring the success of your relationship with people at the workplace or in the arena. Candidate Modi, in spite of the consistency of his message, was a performance. In one moment, he was the debunker, smashing the iconography of one of the world’s long lasting political dynasties. In another, he was the lampoonist, the effete princeling of Delhi being the butt of his jokes. Then he was the dreamer, dreaming the dreams of a billion, building on the wreckage of the present a perfect tomorrow, his raw material drawn from technology, economy and governance. Before you could recover from that, he was the memoirist, selectively distributing chapters from a life lived in dispossession—a rags-to-Raisina-Hill story for those who love fairytales. The ease with which he shifted from one role to the other at the drop of a soundbite was a sign of the man’s ingenuity as a public speaker. Still, Gujarat’s Cicero was not your Vajpayee. Or your Indira. He was more admired than loved. He was kept in awe, but he was not the leader India indulged, and spoiled by unconditional affection. He was the leader from whom India kept a distance—a distance that could only be reduced by the so-called ‘emotional connect’. His mistakes were never forgotten even as his achievements were celebrated. India wanted him to be its leader. Just that. He was far from being the Leader Beloved. Indira Gandhi was the first one to form an unbreakable emotional covenant with India. She was not the perfect leader; nor was she the noble one. She was powerful and paranoid in equal measure; she could not resist her totalitarian temptations even as she cried, in the tradition of socialist kitsch, for the shirtless legion of the ghettos. She was Mother India sentimental as well as savage. India admired her, adored her, lover her, loathed her. The relationship between India and Indira was built on raw emotion. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Dubcek 8 open

of the Indian Right, is the other leader most indulged by India. The original orator, poetical and philosophical, and even mischievous with a stunning metaphor after a pause—the first right-wing Prime Minister of India still rules the nation’s heart. Modi’s popularity lacked that emotional quotient. Shall we say, till Tuesday, the 20th of May? In Delhi after the victory, he stood before Parliament House. He knew this was his moment, his alone, and it was for this moment he has been campaigning for more than a decade. He bowed and his forehead touched, in the tradition of submission and devotion, the grandest steps of Indian democracy. Once inside Central Hall, the Prime Minister elect faced his party colleagues and began his acceptance speech. If biography is destiny, this one is getting too overwhelming for someone as controlled—and emotionally opaque—as Modi. His eyes welled. He was on the verge of breaking down. He spoke about the son in service of the motherland. Again, it was all about him—the chosen son, the dutiful son—and he always knew that his story would be better told by himself. And suddenly, the story became rich in its emotional content. On the podium was not the leader in ramrod posture, surveying rows of the awestruck; there was only a man humbled by the wonderment of his own story, holding back tears of gratitude. This televised sentimentalism of the Central Hall event was culturally different from the melodrama circa 2004 in the same venue, featuring the Madonna of renunciation and the wailing legion of Congressmen pleading for a ‘yes’ from her. This time it was all about the humanisation of the Yes. It is cool to be a leader with a dash of emotionalism. There are occasions when shedding tears—or holding them back— in front of television cameras is the right thing to do, as long as it is not stagecraft. The empathetic leader is not a weak leader; the distant leader, in the manner of Barack Obama, is not the ideal leader either. As the leader of the world’s largest—and the most unforgiving—democracy, Modi’s conversation with India now requires a different vocabulary. He may have to discard the one perfected by Candidate Modi. Prime Minister Modi could be the next moderniser from Asia. A language compatible with the spirit of the times—conservative, compassionate and reconciliatory—would make his story greater. Next time, and let it be soon, don’t hold back your tears. n 2 june 2014

illustration by anirban ghosh

AN INDIAN REVOLUTIONARY What is it about the Modi mandate that provokes such fear of fundamental change?

By Swapan Dasgupta

he excruciatingly long election campaign was bonanza time for speculators, brokers and the media. By contrast, counting day on 16 May, which had promised to be the grand finale for the merchants of uncertainty, turned out to be a roaring anti-climax. Exactly 63 minutes after the first Electronic Voting Machine poured out its data to the tellers, TV channels were in competition to declare that Narendra Modi would be the next Prime Minister of India with a clear majority for the National Democratic Alliance. It took just another hour or so for the even more dramatic announcement: that for the first time since the 1984 electoral verdict, the Indian voter had given a single party a clear majority of seats. The arithmetic of the 2014 poll proved unexpectedly easy

sonu mehta/hindustan times/getty images

mark of respect Narendra Modi prostrates himself at the steps of Parliament House on 20 May

to compute. What the assembled ranks of the punditry found more daunting was to figure out the meaning of the historic mandate. What does Modi’s emphatic victory mean? That the process of making sense of the mandate has proved to be a long-drawn work-in-progress isn’t entirely surprising. Comprehending the scale and magnitude of Modi’s victory first involved the arduous job of clearing the landscape of its intellectual debris. For the past three years or so, ever since the possibility of projecting the Gujarat Chief Minister as the BJP’s national face first began to be seriously discussed, the presiding deities of academia and media were near-unanimous on one count: the idea of Prime Minister Modi was a laughable absurdity. Nor did Modi’s conclusive victory in the Gujarat 12 open

Assembly elections in December 2012 prompt a measure of intellectual contrition. On the contrary, the India hands of the West, the social scientists at home and the English-language editorialists feverishly fed each other’s visceral hatred of the Modi Project. Beginning from the non-negotiable contention that centrist politics is imperative for any all-India appeal to the more recondite dissections of Modi’s incompatibility with the ‘idea of India’, the artillery assault on the perceived icon of the ‘Hindu Right’ was relentless. First, it was presumed that Modi would find no takers outside Gujarat. Second, it was believed that an alliance of the Nagpur Brahmins and LK Advani would ensure that the BJP kept Modi away from Delhi. Third, it was broadcast that Modi wouldn’t secure RSS backing to be projected as BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. Fourth, it was felt that the presence of Modi at the helm would repel existing allies and deter future allies. Fifth, the conviction that the newly-formed Aam Aadmi Party would emerge as a roadblock to both the Congress and BJP became conventional wisdom among editorialists and academics. Finally, the estimated number of MPs it would take Modi to form a half-viable coalition kept climbing upwards—from a BJP tally of 180 (‘Surely he can’t better Vajpayee’s record’) to 240 (a target thought impossible). There were self-serving reports of a ‘160 Club’ in the BJP with a clear anyone-but-Modi agenda. What is particularly remarkable is that the more Modi cleared each successive hurdle, the more the Modi-haters went into denial. In the final stages of the campaign, when it became apparent that neither a disoriented Congress nor an over-stretched AAP was capable of halting a Modi who had occupied the centrestage of popular discourse, the punditry fell back on the Muslim and caste vote. A dissection of the ground analysis in the final stages of the campaign will reveal that the entire focus was on the creation of a Muslim human shield against Modi. Rather than asking how voters would behave, the thrust was on Muslim tactical voting. The staggering crowds Modi was drawing to his public meetings across India were dismissed as ‘manufactured hype’, the creation of corporate money and a slick publicity machine. The telltale signs of a spectacular Modi surge were all there. Yet, the punditry chose to look elsewhere. The 2014 election was a resounding defeat for the Congress, AAP and the caste-based regional parties. Equally, the outcome amounted to a clear rebuff of those who had assumed for themselves the intellectual monopoly of interpreting India. On 16 May, garbage collectors accumulated a rich haul of tattered reputations and stereotypes of political India.

ust as a ‘wave’ is invariably discovered in hindsight,

the future course of events will determine whether the 2014 election was a landmark event when old assump2 June 2014

Modi’s win was a clear rebuff of those who had assumed for themselves the intellectual monopoly of interpreting India. On 16 May, garbage collectors got a rich haul of tattered reputations tions are discarded and new orthodoxies established. Rather than concede they misread India, Modi’s liberal and Left critics appear to be still in denial. The BJP victory is being attributed to a low 32 per cent popular vote and the vagaries of the country’s first-past-the-post system that exaggerates majorities. The overwhelming majority of India—an expedient combination of those who didn’t vote for the BJP/NDA and those who didn’t vote at all—it is being pompously asserted by some, haven’t endorsed Modi at all. This attempt to deflate the euphoria surrounding Modi’s victory stems mainly from the churlish outrage at having been proved wrong. However, there is a deeper meaning. The fraternity of the vanquished are essentially suggesting that there is no mandate for change and that India would prefer to remain undisturbed by an individual who is desperate to carve out an alternative. The statistical jugglery is essentially a plea for the status quo to prevail. Modi, they have in effect implied, should settle down to a routine term at 7 Race Course Road, pop star Modi energises his supporters after having cast his own vote in Ahemdabad on 30 April

attend the annual UNGA meetings, inaugurate a few good works and then retire to Ahmedabad at the end of five years—in good time for the country’s natural rulers to resume where they left off. The ripples from a Modi victory, the grandees have pronounced, must leave the depths unmoved. What is it about the mandate that provokes such fear of fundamental change? The first is the style of Modi. Unlike the top leaders of the past, his approach is blunt and in-your-face. He may choose the august surroundings of the Central Hall of Parliament to deliver a speech that leaves lumps in the throats of party activists who have persevered since the Jan Sangh days when losing deposits was the norm. But when it comes to the hustings, and when the fire from opposition guns is directed at him, Modi is a pugilist who gives as good as he gets, and more often with compound interest. Throughout the six month-long campaign he undertook from 15 September 2013 to the final rally in Ballia on

ajit solanki/ap

anand singh

celebration at the ghats Narendra Modi, flanked by BJP President Rajnath Singh (right) and UP campaign chief Amit Shah (left) in Varanasi on 17 May

10 May 2014, Modi sought to devastate the opposition. Having restored the importance of the mass rally, Modi sought to inspire the hundreds of thousands who turned up to cheer him, a message that was both inspirational and fiercely combative. To him, parliamentary niceties were best kept for Parliament. Was the ‘crudeness’ of Modi, therefore, the issue? Was the fear he generated among the la-di-da crowd in the metros and among the intelligentsia that flocked to sign petitions warning against his rise, purely a matter of aesthetics? Alternatively, was there a subliminal class bias to the fears he aroused? Mani Shankar Aiyar may have overstated the case and scored an avoidable self-goal when he invited Modi to be content with selling tea at the AICC premises. But The Doon School, St Stephen’s and Cambridge alumnus was mirroring a prejudice of the metropolitan elite towards a man who spoke English with a pronounced Gujarati accent. A durbar that had been nurtured on the Anglicised pronunciation of ‘Jawaharlal’ and the old-style RP (Received Pronunciation) of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and now Rahul baba, couldn’t countenance the idea of India being governed by a man with an unmistakably desi accent. In their mind, he was, as a fiercely anti-Modi columnist put it uninhibitedly, going to be India’s first ‘uneducated’ Prime Minister. 14 open

To Modi’s credit, he took this show of snobbery head on. The aesthetes may well have exercised control over intellectual capital, but this was a battle that was going to be settled by the numbers game. And in this, Modi’s vernacular populism proved unbeatable. In speech after speech, the BJP leader taunted the repugnance of the durbar towards a chaiwala, the son of a man whose father was not even the head of a panchayat and who, to top it all, came from a ‘backward caste’. The effect of Modi turning class disadvantage on its head was absolutely electrifying. At one stroke, he got ‘backward caste’ voters, Dalit voters and those who resented the sense of entitlement of the Gandhi parivar to pay him heed. He broke the back of the three caste-based parties of the Hindi heartland and got people to transcend identity politics, even if only for one national election. They were presented with a moral choice: to vote or reject one of their very own. Modi brought to the political table the moral authority of the self-made individual. It will now be very difficult for his detractors to counter him with snobbery and social disdain. What compounds the problem for Modi’s elitist detractors is their belated realisation that the sharpness, aggression and phenomenal energy of the Modi campaign had a definite social sanction. Part of it stemmed, quite naturally, from the sheer scale of anger directed at 2 June 2014

the UPA Government for its relative non-performance and mismanagement of the economy. But anti-incumbency cannot explain the scale of the positive vote for Modi. Throughout the campaign, Congress stalwarts recoiled in horror at the sheer intensity of Modi’s attacks on the UPA Government. They mistakenly concluded that a traditionally placid country like India would be averse to ‘lowering’ the tone and tenor of an election campaign to that of a T20 encounter. They failed to take into account that the principal appeal of Modi was to the 100-125 million first-time voters and the 35 per cent or so share of the electorate that was below the age of 35. In his post-election speeches, Modi repeatedly emphasised the fact that for the first time India would have a Prime Minister who was born after Independence. What he could have added is that his victory owed primarily to those who were born after the Emergency, voters for whom Jawaharlal Nehru is a distant historical figure.

the economy from sloth and socialist incompetence. What united these divergent strands was the belief that his victory would usher in the proverbial happy days. Those who needlessly internalised the great conspiracy theory of a corporate-communalist alliance to capture India were taken aback when Modi told the BJP Parliamentary Party meeting on 20 May that his would be a government for the poor. They assumed that commitment to serving the poor was at odds with the professed commitment to deregulation and entrepreneurship. In the election campaign, Modi proceeded from a different understanding. To him, what motivated youth voters cutting across classes, castes and region were education (particularly skills), opportunity and the removal of glass ceilings. Add to this his complete and unequivocal endorsement of technology. In these respects, Modi differed significantly from traditional RSS thinking, which tends to be neo-Gandhian. Indeed, comparisons with Margaret Thatcher are ap-

Modi brought to the political table the moral authority of the self-made individual. It will now be very difficult for his detractors to counter him with snobbery and social disdain

he complete breakdown of the Nehruvian consen-

sus in the 2014 election is something the pundits never anticipated. The Congress believed that dollops of Statesponsored welfare schemes and a direct cash transfer arrangement would be the magic wand that would transform political disadvantage into triumph. In reposing their entire faith in monetised paternalism, the Gandhis and their National Advisory Council advisors completely misread the mood. In repeating that “Gujarat isn’t India” to the point of exasperation, the Congress presumed that the neo-middle-class impulses that motivated Gujaratis to support Modi for three consecutive Assembly elections would somehow deter the rest of India, particularly the so-called BIMARU states. Whether Modi’s faith in the politics of aspiration stemmed from political instinct or was a consequence of focus group surveys is best left to the chroniclers. What is important is that he never wavered from his belief that the key to electoral success lay in selling a dream of a better future. There were different perceptions of Modi among different social and political groups. For some he was a modernday Chhatrapati Shivaji who would finally make Hindus come into their own; to others he was the poor boy next door who had made it big in the ugly and cruel world of Delhi, and to still yet others he was the great liberator of

2 June 2014

propriate. Thatcher too sought to effect a social revolution through the creation of an opportunity society. And Thatcher too broke new political ground by securing the endorsement of a large section of those who were earlier associated with the gradualist socialism of the Labour Party. Tony Blair, in fact, had to reinvent the Labour Party completely and embrace the newly-forged Thatcherite consensus to regain support for Labour. In time to come, it is entirely possible that India’s 2014 General Election will be regarded as a political watershed. If Modi is able to complement his electoral success with a government that unleashes India’s full potential, he will have forged a new Modi consensus that is more in tune with the 21st century. The BJP has not reached saturation point: there are large geographical tracts left to conquer. However, this conquest will only be possible if the BJP is itself reinvented to fit the goals of what may well be described by future historians as the Modi Revolution. For India, the next decade may turn out to be momentous. And all because one leader dared to challenge orthodoxy, conventional wisdom and social assumptions. n Swapan Dasgupta , a Delhi-based political commentator, is a self-confessed conservative open www.openthemagazine.com 15

P OW E R

New Delhi’s Holy Trinity Only two other men matter in the Republic of Modi: Arun Jaitley and Amit Shah PR RAMESH

n that hot mid May morning, as Narendra Damodardas Modi crossed the threshold of the historic Central Hall of Parliament for the first time, two men stood out of the throng of leaders waiting to felicitate the politician set to be India’s first post-Independence-born Prime Minister. Arun Jaitley and Amit Shah were more than a bulwark for him in the several months running up to the massive mandate on 16 May. They were the two who worked the hardest in the backrooms and battlefields to make that moment possible. The indispensable two would now join Modi to form the power trinity of Delhi reborn. It was India’s Obama moment. “Yes, we can!” Modi had thundered in his

18 open

2 june 2014

NARENDRA Modi

He is the sovereign lord, presiding over the dominion, unchallenged. Omniscient and omnipotent, he is more instinctive than impulsive. Those who know Modi will never harbour the remotest thought of challenging his Authority. In the new House of Saffron, there is only one master

AMIT Shah

His master’s unwavering mind, Shah’s relationship with Modi defies definition. He will be bigger than any designation accorded to him. As Modi plays the moderniser, Shah will control the party for the boss. He will be Modi’s most trusted aide, and Shah has no ambition bigger than to be the one forever

ARUN Jaitley

He has choreographed the ascent of Candidate Modi. He stood by Modi through his best and worst of times, and worked the hardest in the back rooms for his prime ministerial candidacy.He is the ultimate Delhi insider. Modi, a newcomer to Delhi, needs this suavest of lawyers who has mastered the art of navigating the muddied waters of Lutyens’ Delhi

illustration anirban ghosh

Bhaskar Paul/India Today Group/Getty Images

speeches days prior to his maiden Central Hall sojourn. The blueprint for that transformative journey leading up to the day had been drawn up by the JaitleyShah duo. In the jostling throng of ebullient BJP leaders and allies, the two, as different as chalk and cheese except for their common abiding faith, Modi, merged into the backdrop. But the signals were clear: the would-be Prime Minister, for long known to play his cards close to his chest, had already chosen his closest aides. In the top echelon of power in the Modi Republic, there are only three members. They were with Modi long before he was anointed the party’s prime ministerial candidate, and each of the would-be Prime Minister’s men had had their task cut out for them, backing him to the hilt through inner-party conspiracies and steering him meticulously through leadership rivalries and subterranean at20 open

Jaitley has been summoning a steady stream of bureaucrats, old and new, transforming his two-storey bungalow in South Delhi into a hyperactive power centre tacks. The reality of Candidate Modi owed a great deal to them. Jaitley had recognised the shine in Modi way long before the Goa conclave of May 2013 that anointed Modi as the BJP’s campaign chief. It was then that he had observed to senior leaders that there was a growing interest in Gujarat’s Chief Minister as a prime ministerial candidate because of a groundswell of support in his favour. “When there was a media blitzkrieg against him, he had the guts to survive by addressing audiences over the heads of the media. There are few Indian

politicians who have the courage to do that,” he had said. These remarks came ahead of the BJP’s national council at Goa where party leaders such as LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Sushma Swaraj were determined to counter those pushing for an early endorsement of Modi as its prime ministerial candidate. In July, the BJP leadership decided to ignore pressure from the sulking leaders—Advani even skipped the Goa meeting—and appointed Modi as chairman of the party’s national election committee. That decision 2 june 2014

IN SYNCHRONY Narendra Modi with Arun Jaitley (facing page), and with Amit Shah

Having elevated Anandiben to the Chief Minister’s post in Gandhinagar, Modi needed his right hand man in a key slot that would add immense value to the BJP took the party beyond the still-lingering shadow of Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. Narendra Modi alone embodied the alternative. By then, the party leadership was working in coordination with the top echelons of the RSS. Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, had reservations in the beginning. He had refused to rehabilitate RSS favourite Sanjay Joshi in the party. Bhagwat now veered round to the view that the Gujarat strongman was best suited to lead the party. Suresh Soni, the 2 june 2014

RSS man overseeing the affairs of the BJP, had virtually choreographed the Modi ascension. However, strong vestigial opposition to Modi continued within the party. Senior leader Sushma Swaraj, who chose to disguise her sullenness at Goa, revived her campaign against Modi when it became clear that the BJP leadership and RSS were determined to have Modi lead the party and assume the country’s top political post in the event of a victory at the 2014 hustings. After the Goa meeting, BJP leaders con-

tinued with their efforts to work out a consensus within the party. Advani and Swaraj, though, proved to be tough customers. They said any announcement of a PM candidacy should wait till the four state assembly elections were over. Jaitley busied himself in several months of lobbying, countering some and checkmating others to navigate Modi past these hurdles and promote his candidacy. Swaraj, in fact, resorted to proxy war. By attacking Amit Shah, she was attacking Modi. At a meeting of the party’s parliamentary board following the arrest of Shah, Swaraj had said that backing Shah could land the party in trouble. “How long can we support Amit Shah,” she asked. Jaitley and Modi countered her swiftly. Modi told the meeting that Shah had an impeccable track record and the party should resist all attempts to frame him. Jaitley told the meeting that the foropen www.openthemagazine.com 21

Ashish sharma

THE OLD GUARD Sushma Swaraj with LK Advani on 7 April at an event to mark the publication of the BJP’s election manifesto

mer CBI chief AP Singh was the one behind the framing of a false case against Shah. Jaitley even visited Shah in jail. His efforts paid off when Modi was finally crowned the BJP’s PM nominee.

he fulcrum of New Delhi’s threemember power club is arguably India’s most consummate politician, the first 24X7 leader since Indira Gandhi. He is one leader who has no life other than politics, no mission other than good governance. As the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi was completely in control without being a control freak. He is known to deal 22 open

firmly and briskly with bureaucrats, allowing and encouraging an environment in which only the best performers find a niche around him. To them, he delegates responsibility and expects noticeable results as a matter of right. The Chief Minister of a BJP ruled state, knowing something of Modi’s nature, is believed to have told his principal secretary that his officials should now be better prepared with facts and figures when they visit the Prime Minister. “It won’t be like when we visited Dr Manmohan Singh. He never asked us about specifics of the implementation of various projects. The new man will.”

Arun Shourie, tipped for an important role in the new regime, maintains that Modi has a straightforward approach to decision-making: while he is open to ideas and suggestions, the final call is always his own. The no-nonsense attitude was in full display when nervous hopefuls of ministerial berths were left with little option but to wind their way to BJP President Rajnath Singh’s house after they were bluntly told at Gujarat Bhawan that Narendra Modi does not appreciate favour seekers. An indefatigable workaholic, Modi addressed close to 450 rallies during the Lok Sabha campaign. “Most days, during 2 june 2014

include even the smallest of allies and friends in his thanksgiving, even appreciating previous governments for their efforts to move the nation forward. Showing grace in strength, Modi, who can clearly form a government at the Centre on his own, made it a point to endear himself to BJP allies. Among those who spoke at the NDA meeting to felicitate India’s Prime Minister designate was Neiphiu Rio, Chief Minister of Nagaland and first time Lok Sabha member. Modi personally thanked DMDK chief Vijayakanth, even asking after the welfare of the actor-turned-politician’s wife. A key pre-poll ally from Bihar, the LJP’s Ram Vilas Paswan was seated next to the BJP’s top brass. Paswan, not often known to pull his punches while demanding heavy portfolios, has for the first time left the decision completely to Modi. In reciprocation, the BJP has indicated that one portfolio each would be reserved for allies. Often criticised for his lack of a worldview, Modi, who played pugilist with Pakistan during the poll campaign, has since pushed a proposal that all of India’s

bers rolled in on 16 May. That Jaitley was among the BJP candidates who lost didn’t matter and had no bearing on his equation with the PM-elect. Jaitley was given the urgent task of getting the financials right for Seemandhra and Telangana, the latter of which will officially be carved out of what was Andhra Pradesh on 2 June this year. Among Modi’s first tasks would be to deliver on the expectations of both these states. The Prime Minister’s most able men would be working overtime for that. Jaitley has been summoning a steady stream of bureaucrats, old and new, transforming his two-storey bungalow in South Delhi into a hyperactive power centre in the new New Delhi. As leader of the Modi brain trust, Jaitley, with easy access to the grandees of industry, corporate, legal and political circles, is expected to help Modi, a newcomer to the labyrinthine Capital, navigate the Centre’s power maze. Among the most feted in the 2014 poll narrative has been Amit Shah, the 49-year-old political whizkid who delivered more than 70 of Uttar Pradesh’s

At a meeting of the party’s parliamentary board following the arrest of Amit Shah, Sushma Swaraj had said that backing him could land the party in trouble campaigning, he would return home to Gandhinagar well after midnight, sometimes after campaigns in two different states, six or seven meetings daily. But he was never tired. He would sit up with his officials until the early hours, clearing files,” according to a campaign worker. Modi was keen on appointing a set of advisors when he started off on his campaign, but gave up on the idea soon enough once he realised that it could be seen as a shadow cabinet, causing heartburn within the party. The strong man image notwithstanding, Modi projected a more statesmanlike image in his maiden speech at Parliament’s Central Hall, taking care to 2 june 2014

neighbours be invited for his swearingin ceremony scheduled on 26 May. Orchestrated by Arun Jaitley, that plan bore instant dividends when all these countries accepted the invitation, helping Modi come off as a statesman. It also placed the BJP in contrast with a churlish Congress, which was posing doubts on the new Prime Minister’s Pakistan policy.

he buzz of activity at A-44 Kailash

Colony, the residential address of Arun Jaitley, only shows that the trio is already at work. Jaitley was among the first who Modi called after the num-

80 Lok Sabha seats to his master. His contribution turned the fortunes of both his leader and the BJP irrevocably. If Modi was the Man of the Series, Shah was Man of the Match—so went the media refrain. In less than a year, Shah, a stranger to UP, went through the state with precision planning and perspective, not to speak of a highly effective marketing strategy that outlined the Modi message to maximise the BJP’s appeal, even designing a post-poll plan involving a blueprint for local elections (the moribund state unit had not contested these for over 12 years) as an incentive for high performers and loyal voters alike. open www.openthemagazine.com 23

India News Network

POWER TO THE PEOPLE Narendra Modi addresses a public meeting in Ahmedabad on 16 May

The BJP’s state chief Laxmikant Bajpai describes Shah as a master strategist and a “modern day leader who can connect the dotted lines on the political landscape” and use fuzzy logic effectively in every sub-region to optimise offtake. The outcome of that super successful strategy has only added to Shah’s already established reputation as a political strategist and logistics man par excellence.

And having elevated rival Anandiben to the Chief Minister’s post in Gandhinagar after his exit, Modi needed his right hand man in a key slot that would add immense value to both the BJP and newly formed Modi Government. After moving party president Rajnath Singh to the Union Cabinet, he is expected to hand over the party’s reins to someone else. Who might that be?

The fulcrum of New Delhi’s three-member power club is arguably India’s most consummate politician, the first 24x7 leader since Indira Gandhi. He has no life other than politics 24 open

On current indications, while someone like JP Nadda may formally be designated party chief, it would be Shah who actually manages the BJP under the new dispensation. “Amit Shah will control party affairs,” acknowledges a party leader. Having already demolished the Congress in several states, Shah is expected to do a UP elsewhere in the country and take the Modi message to regions that have been averse to the BJP. Modi’s right-hand-man is also expected to rejuvenate the party by taking young leaders aboard. With two lieutenants as dedicated and focused as Jaitley and Shah, Modi is unlikely to vacate 7 Race Course Road after his first five-year term. The trio is in for the long haul. n 2 june 2014

ashish sharma

w r ec k ag e

GIVE UP OR GEAR UP Faced with an unforgiving India and a redundant leadership, does Rahul Gandhi have any other choice? ullekh np

ll through the poll campaign,

Rahul Gandhi was casual and hirsute. This was deliberate posturing because managers of Brand Rahul were convinced that being unshaven— a four-day-old beard—gave the not-soyoung scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family the look of a leader forthright, blunt and mature. For a man who simply rolled up his sleeves and cultivated a casual demeanour about him, the new look, however, couldn’t ward off heckles by people angry over the pathetic state of his family’s pocket-borough, Amethi, a backwater of a constituency where you don’t find a good meal or decent place to stay overnight. Far from being a model Lok Sabha constituency, it is a forlorn outpost as good as hell on earth on a scorching summer day. People do have choices: either get used to hardship and vote by force of habit, or get angry and heckle. Once the results were out, the 43-yearold vice-president of the 129-year-old party found no reason to keep up appearances. On Judgment Day—when the Congress took a battering that a senior Congress leader confessed “was far more humiliating than we had seen in our nightmares”—Rahul appeared alongside his mother, Congress President Sonia Gandhi, clean-shaven enough to be on an advertisement for the new five-blade Gillette razor, smiling boyishly, rolling up his sleeves as usual. He spoke in an easygoing manner, owning up responsibility for the drubbing, the enormity of which looked totally lost on him. Mama’s boy wanted to field questions from reporters, but Sonia wouldn’t hear of it. She said ‘no’. And he was gone, vanishing closely behind her.

he poll loss was largely expected and efforts were in full swing to guard the Family from criticism. But with the size of a poll setback beating all projections of a worst-case scenario— with a tally of 44, the Congress won 27 seats fewer across India than what the BJP won in Uttar Pradesh alone—the party’s grandees knew it was time to huddle around the Family and pitch the blame on the Manmohan Singh-led UPA Government. The Congress Working Committee (CWC) acted as if on auto-pilot: it turned down the Sonia-Rahul duo’s 28 open

india news network

Taking stock Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and AK Antony at the Congress Working

offer to resign over the poll debacle. “The logic circulated within the party is that now is the time to place ultimate faith in the Family,” says another Congress leader with a chuckle, emphasising that for the time being it looks as if the UPA is solidly behind the family. Not quite. Milind Deora, the young Congress leader who lost in Mumbai South, has, in an interview, attacked Rahul’s advisors for getting everything wrong. He was piqued that whoever got a free hand at running the campaign—a team of lateral entrants to the party handpicked by Rahul much to the anguish of the old guard—is not taking any responsibility for the biggest reverse in Congress history.That the old guard, which includes senior leaders such as Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad and political lightweights such as Jairam Ramesh and Salman Khurshid, is upset with sweeping powers enjoyed by the “new team of loyalists”, as a party leader explains, is no secret. To add to their woes, this new set of advisors who sidelined several party leaders had no electoral experience whatso-

ever. “And see, they were the ones to handle the biggest challenge ever for the Congress party, and from an opponent as formidable as Modi,” says a Mumbaibased Congress functionary. He adds that Rahul and his team didn’t listen to “sane pieces of advice from some weather-beaten Congress leaders who have handled tougher elections”. These so-called advisors included Madhusudan Mistry, a Gujarat-based leader; Mohan Gopal, director, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies; Sachin Rao, a Michigan Business school graduate who handles internal research; Deepender Singh Hooda, Bhupinder Hooda’s son; KB Byju, a former SPG officer; Kanishka Singh, his Wharton-educated close aide; Jitendra Singh and Meenakshi Natarajan; Haryana Congress chief Ashok Tanwar, and so on. Another close Rahul advisor Sam Pitroda, who spends most of his time in Chicago only to fly down at state expense briefly every month to ‘advise’ the ‘core team’, has come under sharp attack from Congressmen over causing such ‘wasteful expenditure’ to the party. While Rahul recruited them in the name of decentralisation and internal democ2 June 2014

Committee meeting held in Delhi on 19 May 2014

racy, he ended up centralising power instead, rues a senior Congress leader. While Congressmen have more or less confined their criticism of ‘Rahul’s wayward ways’ to private chats, some constituents of the UPA—which the Congress heads—have been bolder and more unsparing. The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) has launched a diatribe against Rahul, saying that he failed to touch the ‘soul of India’. The IUML mouthpiece, Chandrika, lashed out at the Congress vice-president for restricting the war-room of the party’s campaign committee to his 12 Tughlak Lane residence and for disallowing access to senior party leaders, who had to seek appointments with the leader through e-mail. The Chandrika editorial also castigated Rahul for not learning lessons from the defeat in state assembly polls held late last year in which the Congress

lost all four states. It also regretted that the erstwhile ruling party failed to campaign effectively. This is a view shared by political pundits as well. In an interview with Open, Professor John Echeverri-Gent of Virginia University, who has closely studied how India’s first family has maintained its hold over the party, had earlier said, “However well-meaning, Rahul has failed to show the mettle of great political leadership.” He was of the view that at a time when Sonia Gandhi has lost energy on account of ill-health and age and Rahul’s political leadership has not managed to meet the challenge posed by Modi, the Congress appears headed towards a decisive political defeat and serious political crisis. Several other political analysts had forewarned that banking merely on pro-poor schemes would cost Rahul dearly in the General Election. After all, the ‘young and impatient’ whom he had vowed to woo aren’t happy with lollies doled out by the Government. Instead they are looking at policies that promote entrepreneurship. MGNREGA, the flagship programme of the UPA, which has certainly saved lives in many villages, had come under attack from various sections for destroying the country’s rural work culture as it encouraged ‘lazy labour behaviour’. Analysts had also pointed out that not having pitched himself as a prime ministerial candidate against Modi was seen as Rahul’s sign of unpreparedness and lack of initiative.

former Union minister says that Rahul, whom he jokingly de-

scribes as the “longest political apprentice” in Indian history, has disappointed Congressmen with his dismissive attitude towards Congress workers. “He was supposed to re-energise the cadre after the Jaipur summit, in which he was chosen vice-president of the party, and lead it in the polls. Instead, he became distrustful

Several senior Congress leaders concede that they were never consulted by Rahul; they had to send e-mails to request meetings 2 June 2014

of Congress leaders, even those of repute, and relied more on inexperienced hands,” he says, adding that having “loose-talking people such as Digvijaya Singh by his side” didn’t help either. The likes of Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyar had also made politically incorrect and preposterous remarks about Modi. Aiyar went to the extent of inviting Modi to serve tea at a Congress meet, Modi being a tea-seller’s son. That sarcasm didn’t go down well at all, and the Congress had to immediately distance itself from his condescending remark. Modi, however, used it throughout his campaign to highlight his fight against what he called the leadership of the Delhi elite. Former Congress leader Natwar Singh felt that party leaders such as Singh played into the hands of Modi. “He campaigned tirelessly and cleverly,” in Singh’s words, “The Congress campaign was no match for his.” The Congress has done very badly even in states it ruled and in those it was expected to do well thanks to alliances. In Maharashtra, where an NCP-Congress government is in power, the NCPCongress combine won only six of the state’s 48 Lok Sabha seats. The results from Mumbai city and Thane, often considered safe bets for the ruling alliance, were a shock for the coalition as highprofile sitting MPs such as Sanjay Nirupam, Priya Dutt and Deora bit the dust. Political pundits expect ties between the Sharad Pawar-led NCP and the Congress to get even more strained in the months ahead. In Jharkhand, known for its diverse and fragmented electorate where the Congress fought in coalition with the JMM and RJD, the party was wiped out with JMM winning a mere two seats and the BJP the rest 12. The party was hoping to do a 2004 this time around: in 2004, the Congress had won six seats, the JMM four, and the RJD two. Similarly, in Assam, the Congress was reduced to a tally of three while the BJP surged ahead with seven. There were disasters galore across other states too. The Congress’ Telangana gamble proved a disaster. The humiliating show has already resulted in internal bickering and party general secretary Digvijaya Singh has come under criticism for not constituting a separate PCC immediately after the 30 July announceopen www.openthemagazine.com 29

Rajasthan Rajasthan Rajasthan

INC INC INC INC

(+10) 22 (+10) (+10) 12 (+10) 22 22 22 12 12 12

23 (-18) 23 23 5 (-18) 23 (-18) (-18) 55 5

(-21) 21 21 0 21 (-21) 21 (-21) (-21) 00 0

(-19) 21 2 21 (-19) 21 21 (-19) (-19) 22 2

BSP BSP BSP BSP

BJP BJP BJP BJP

SP SP SP SP

general election results BJP and allies

Karnataka Karnataka Karnataka Karnataka (+3) (+3) 9 6 (+3) (+3) 99 6 9 66

19 19 19 19

P PP P

(+6) (+6) 6 0 (+6) (+6) 66 00 6 0

LJP LJP (NDA Ally) LJP LJP (NDA Ally) (NDA (NDA Ally) Ally)

2009 2014

JD(S) JD(S) JD(S) JD(S)

JD(U) JD(U) JD(U) JD(U)

Sweep States

Others

(-1) (-1) 0 (-1) (-1) 00 0

8 88 8

BJP BJP BJP BJP

INC INC INC INC

JMM JMM JMM JMM

282 (+166) (+11) 27

Assam Assam Assam Assam 4

(-3) 6 9

NCP

16 206

Source: Bureau, (+2) India (+3)Press Information (-4)

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The Congress has suffered on account of its organisational weakness

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Parveen Negi/India Today Group/Getty Images

intimations of devastation Rahul Gandhi on 5 April 2012 after attending a review meeting on the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls that the Congress lost badly

ment of Andhra Pradesh’s bifurcation. Now, at least three senior Congress leaders have told Open that the party, which has not won more than 10 seats in any state, is expected to see multiple odds going against it: allies turning hostile, regional parties trying to go one-up on the Congress in their regions, and the BJP working with other parties to consolidate its power. Battered by the BJP in UP, the SP and BSP, two parties that rewrote the politics of the state that has historically determined the country’s regime at the Centre, will now work hard to win over vote bases it had lost to the BJP and in the process hurt the Congress. A Congress leader is opines that as the SP and BSP battle it out among themselves, the Congress might end up being the biggest loser. The SP, which won only five of the state’s 80 Parliament seats this time, had not fielded candidates in the Gandhi family’s pocketburoughs. “Such camaraderie will not exist any lon2 June 2014

ger. The SP and the Congress will fight tooth and nail for votes,” says an SP leader. The SP had extended such courtesies to the Family in exchange for going soft on graft cases against the Mulayam Singh clan. The BSP, too, is expected to be hostile to the Congress as it hopes to win back the Dalit-Brahmin vote bank it lost to the BJP. The BJP had managed to strike the right caste balance in this election; it gave onethird of its election tickets to numerically preponderant OBCs, and announced that power would not remain in the hands of an ‘upper caste’ leadership. ‘Backward’ voters, one may recall, had deserted the BJP after Kalyan Singh, an OBC

Lodhi Rajput, left the party in the 1990s. Similar trends are expected in Bihar, too, where the RJD, a Congress ally, trailed much below expectations as the new social coalition that Modi forged— ‘upper castes’, OBCs, MBCs and a sizeable section of Dalits—gave the BJP a lethal support base to take on opponents in electoral combat. “The Congress under Rahul went for an ostrich-like approach,” according to an RJD leader, visibly upset at the party’s poor showing at the polls. As the avian world story goes, ostriches bury their heads in the sand whenever they confront an enemy or turn fearful of reality. “Yes, that is exactly what Rahul did,

Young leaders such as Milind Deora openly hit out at Rahul’s advisors for not taking the blame for the Congress’ poll debacle open www.openthemagazine.com 31

sonu mehta/hindustan times/getty images

whether he realised it or not,” he adds. Meanwhile, Congress leaders such as Shobha Ojha and some other senior leaders, voicing themselves on condition of anonymity, say that they were unaware of such criticism from allies. By the assessment of a Congress leader based in Bangalore, the party is likely to see a “balkanisation of sorts” in some states like Gujarat, which is Modi’s home state. “See, it is not easy to keep fighting when your leader doesn’t trust you. You end up distrusting him as well,” he says, referring to Rahul. Incidentally, Gujarat Congress leader and former Chief Minister Shankersinh Vaghela has praised Modi and requested the PM-elect to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya within the constitutional framework, now that the BJP has got a parliamentary majority. Vaghela, once a co-traveller of Modi in the BJP and RSS, now favours the BJP demand of a Uniform Civil Code and the rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir. He quit the BJP in 1996 and later became Chief Minister after joining the Congress. “These are signs of trouble for the Congress in states,” adds the Congress leader from Bangalore. Congress leaders aver that many things have changed in the party after Rahul’s errors became apparent—such as his distrust of his party’s own government and public shredding of an ordinance meant to overrule the Supreme Court order on disqualifying convicted MPs and MLAs. He called the ordinance ‘nonsense’. While Rahul was trying to endear himself to the ‘young and impatient’ India, he dealt a devastating blow to the image of the UPA Government and the senior Congress leadership. “The party became disjointed,” rues the first Congress leader.

ure, Rahul’s poor show has evoked

extreme responses. While Princeton University Professor Atul Kohli hopes that the setback for the Congress could

largely unconsulted Jairam Ramesh with Salman Khurshid (left) outside Parliament in April 2013

push the ‘dynasty’ aside and open India’s oldest political party to a new and better leadership, several other Congress leaders, who are unhappy with the way things are, contend that the TINA factor—short for ‘There Is No Alternative’— still favours Rahul within the party. Natwar Singh notes that Rahul lacks fire-in-the-belly, and the Congress, a party full of Family sycophants, will pay a huge price for it. “Even if there is rebellion in the party, we expect Rahul’s sister Priyanka to step in as a buffer,” says a Congress functionary known to be close to the Family. He does not elaborate. Rahul may have flown to Amethi along with his sister to monitor relief work after a major fire broke out at Mauja Baraulia, leaving 65 houses gutted, but such symbolic gestures are fast losing appeal. “All this will not help. He is an MP in absentia and has failed to protect the people of his so-called pet constituency,” says BJP leader Dharmendra Pradhan.

Rahul can reinvent himself only by trusting the party, say insiders. So far, he has distrusted everyone except his core team, they add 32 open

A member of the CWC says that pinning blame for the party’s rout on Rahul will not help it—“though there is much to blame him for,” he adds with a tentative laugh, his facial expression betraying a fear of impending trouble. After all, none of Rahul’s initiatives have helped. He even introduced US-style electoral ‘primaries’ this time in 15 constituencies to select candidates. The plan was to end nepotism and place merit over ticket distribution based on caste and community lines. Unfortunately, none of these candidates won. Prominent among them were Meenakshi Natarajan (Mandsaur in MP) and Ajay Maken (New Delhi). Besides, several highly vocal ministers such as Kapil Sibal lost. Only a few ministers—just 13 of them—such as M Veerappa Moily, Kamal Nath and Mallikarjun Kharge managed to claim victory, and 10 of the 44 Congress candidates elected are from political dynasties. Dousing the flames of criticism across the country in the aftermath of the polls isn’t that easy. Rahul can’t afford to just keep smiling away and rolling up his sleeves. He must reinvent himself as a leader. “That task, at the moment, looks Herculean,” sums up the former Union minister. Rahul’s choice is stark: give up or give his all. n 2 June 2014

open essay

By SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

A VENETIAN LESSON FOR THE LION OF HINDUSTAN

What the world’s longest lasting republic can teach the leader of the world’s largest democracy

34 open

2 June 2014

reminds visitors Every Venetian, Pope Pius II wrote snobbishly in the fifteenth that prosperity knows no re- century when Venice was at the height of imperial glory, was a ligion. Neither does good slave to ‘the sordid occupations of trade’. One sees overwhelmgovernance. Other impulses ing evidence of this triumph in room after painted room of the shaped the Byzantine, Ottoman, Doge’s Palace. In their ermine robes and bejewelled velvet caps, Napoleonic and British empires the Doges comported themselves like monarchs. But they whose tides also washed over the knew they were kings in a truer sense. They were millionaire eastern Mediterranean, but Venice businessmen elected to the highest office in the modern world’s claimed no imperial mission. It ex- first republic. Being sturdy democrats, Venetians wanted no hereditary oliported no ideology. It did not even Sunanda K Datta-Ray crave territory. Only the urge to be- garchy. They took care to elect only old men so that their reigns is a journalist and come rich created La Serenissima, were necessarily short, thereby eliminating the need for cumauthor of several books The Most Serene Republic of Venice. bersome ombudsmen and impeachment procedures. A Doge The young Bangladeshi men scat- who was so infirm as to fall out of his throne was preferable to tering fragments of coloured light the young sprig of an entrenched dynasty. The fifty-fifth Doge from Chinese-made torches that they sell in Venice’s Piazza who did try to perpetuate his rule was beheaded in the Piazza San Marco are the latest to testify to that spirit of commercial San Marco. Today, a black shroud painted over his portrait in the Palace’s Sala del Maggior Consiglio (Hall of the Great enterprise. Napoleon allegedly called the piazza the ‘finest drawing- Council) warns populist rulers everywhere of the peril of room in Europe’. Venetians see it as the centre of Getty Images the world. Unerringly hitting on the truth in their untutored innocence, the Bangladeshi boys know that a paved vastness surrounded by arcades of glittering shops can only be a marketplace. “You have a new government in India?” one of them, a lad from Kishorganj, asked me. He hadn’t heard of that famous son of Kishorganj, Nirad C Chaudhuri. Narendra Modi’s name meant nothing to him either. But a garbled rumour had reached his ears that India’s new political leader “doesn’t like us Bangladeshis”. This new leader, he believed, had vowed to send back even Hindus who had migrated to India from Bangladesh. Another Bangladeshi presented a more sophisticated assessment. “Your election results have been accepted. Ours haven’t. That means more instability,” he bemoaned, referring to the battle of the begums 6,000 miles away. A European family stopped just then to ask about the kaleidoscopic lights and I retreated. Even a Bengali adda must yield precedence to the market in Venice. Neither Bangladeshi had any inkling of the appositeness of the conversation in the shadow of the pink façade of the Doge’s Palace above the Grand Canal. The world’s longest lasting republic—1,100 years from 697 to 1797—has much to teach the world’s largest democracy. True, the Venetian Republic reserved high office for only noblemen, but that didn’t mean an archaic order of hereditary privilege. Venice’s nobility was a vibrant commercial elite. Whenever La Serenissima ran short of funds, it updated theprecious Golden Book of the nobility so that munificent donors could be added to the existing lords and counts. Jeff Overs/BBC News & Current Affairs/Getty Images With the canny sense of all traders, Venice sold titles long before Lloyd George in England. Today’s HEART OF THE MATTER The Grand Canal in Venice (top), as shot from the Academy bridge looking toward the Santa Maria della Salute church; Parliament building in New Delhi bania could be tomorrow’s Baron. 2 June 2014

enice

open www.openthemagazine.com 35

trying to bend the rules to serve their authoritarianism. Other huge murals of Ottoman pashas in onion-shaped turbans (Mahmud II replaced the turban in 1825 with the fez as a symbol of modernity, but it, too, was banned in turn in 1925 by Kemal Ataturk) are a reminder of interaction across religious lines. Pragmatism is never a prisoner of bigotry. Even while fighting the Turks, Venice kept open her trading posts in Ottoman-ruled Syria and Egypt. She also allowed Turkish merchants to set up their own business centre on the Grand Canal.

was told of an occasion in 1464 when the fiercely Christian

Knights of St John seized some Muslim passengers from a Venetian ship at Rhodes. Hearing of the outrage, Venice at once sent a fleet to rescue them. The Knights had no option but to hand over the Muslims who were then safely returned to the Turkish authorities in Alexandria. La Serenissima understood that even religious adversaries must be protected not only in the interests of mercantile prosperity and good governance but for the sake of the administration’s own reputation. Venice projected herself to the West as Christendom’s fervent champion in the eastern Mediterranean. But she knew that within her own sphere of influence—and that extended beyond the Adriatic to Greece, Asia Minor and North Africa—she needed Islam for trade and survival. Venice was similarly hospitable to gypsies—distant children of India, better known today as Roma—because of their skill at horse-breeding, and to Jews because of their scholarship and financial acumen. Jan Morris writes in The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage, ‘Nobody mourned the fall of Venice more than the Jews of Corfu, and with reason, for never again, under any successor government, did they achieve such power and prosperity; and in the end the worst of all the empires, arriving similarly out of the north, took them away and killed them. To the end their vernacular remained the Venetian dialect of Italian.’ Despite being hereditary Caliphs of Islam and the Shadow of God on Earth, the Ottoman Sultans could display similar secular enlightenment for the public good. When Catholic Spain expelled Jews after the Moorish kingdom of Granada surrendered in 1492, it was the Sultan who sent a fleet of ships to rescue them so that they could settle down in his empire. That was a full 150 years before Britain, which had expelled Jews in 1290, allowed them back again. If religion didn’t make for eternal enmity, neither did it make for permanent friendship. Venice had no scruples about participating in the Crusades that attacked Christian Byzantium and gobbling up what she could of the fallen empire. The Doge even adopted the grandiloquent title ‘Lord of a Quarter and a Half-

Quarter of the Roman Empire.’ So, my Bangladeshi acquaintance in Venice may not have been so far-fetched after all in believing that Modi would evict Hindu refugees! But a gem-studded Mughal throne in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace—an oriental masnad, very unlike the stiff emerald-encrusted chair I was once shown in Teheran’s treasury as Shah Jehan’s Peacock Throne—provided the most evocative instance of the failure of religion to create political unity. Nadir Shah, who looted India, probably presented the throne in the Topkapi Palace to the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud I. His ill-gotten wealth allowed Nadir Shah to exempt his Persian subjects from taxes for three years. History records that thousands of elephants, horses and camels were laden with his plunder, which included the Peacock Throne and the Koh-iNoor and Darya-ye Noor diamonds that are now among the British and Iranian Crown jewels. No wonder Muhammad Shah, the defeated, disgraced and blinded twelfth Mughal emperor who had been forced to cede territory west of the Indus to Persia, befriended the Ottoman ambassador, Haji Yusuf; and then readily promised help when Mahmud I declared war on Persia. Two Muslim potentates, the Mughal and Ottoman emperors, united against a third, the Shah of Persia. Not that relations between Mughals and Ottomans had always been cordial. Naimur Rahman Farooqi’s excellent Mughal-Ottoman relations: a study of political and diplomatic relations between Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, 1556-1748 describes the fracas when Akbar’s womenfolk went on Haj. ‘Akbar’s religious attitude seems to have scandalised the whole world of Islam,’ Farooqi wrote. So did the ultramodern Mughal ladies. Incensed at their expulsion, Akbar stopped sending funds, stopped Hajj caravans to the Hijaz, broke relations with the Sharif of Mecca, considered a Portuguese alliance against the Ottomans, and even had an Ottoman governor put in chains. ‘The reason for this is said to have been his resentment at the arrogance of the ambassadors themselves and the king who sent them’ wrote the observer, Father Monserrate. Akbar also refused an Uzbek proposal for a triple alliance with the Ottomans against Persia. His ecumenism may have influenced Akbar’s attitude towards the Ottomans and Persians to some extent, but a more likely explanation lies in his mature grasp of statecraft. The ummah mattered, but like the ancient Venetians, Akbar knew that the economic well-being and political happiness of his subjects demanded an inclusive policy. His great-grandson’s inability to appreciate this and take a holistic view of his responsibilities sounded the death knell for the empire of the Mughals. India could once again suffer fractious strife if the man who has been hailed as Hindustan ka sher fails like Aurangzeb to understand that secularism is not an abstraction. It is an active instrument of governance to nourish the diversity that makes India great. n

With the canny sense of all traders, Venice sold titles long before Lloyd George in England. Today’s bania could be tomorrow’s Baron

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2 June 2014

sexism

What women want from Narendra modi Let there be an end to the politics of the second sex Chitra Subramaniam

omparisons are a giveaway.

They tell you more about the comparer than they do about the compared. Exclusions tell tales too. They tell you more about the excluder than the excluded. Neither the compared nor the excluded have the luxury of choice in the short run. India’s women got compared and excluded in the General Election—among themselves and then from the rest. In this election, like in previous ones, Indian women let Indian women down. As Prime Minister-designate Narendra Modi prepares to take oath on 26 May, men have compared men with men and men have proposed men who will lead the country. Since 16 May, when the results were declared, not a day has passed without people assuming and asserting that the key portfolios of Finance, Home, Defence and Commerce will be assigned to men. Delhi-based intellectuals and economists, opinion makers and thought leaders have turned blue in the face telling anybody who cares to listen why the Governor of the Reserve Bank is a good man, implying some special quality unknown to others, why Arun Shourie can be trusted but Rajnath Singh can’t, and why efforts have to be made to pacify Jaswant Singh because he is so dignified and LK Advani because he is a patriarch. What is frustratingly familiar is that it is a small and petrified group of people in New Delhi—men and women—who stand exposed. How long will this game of dumb-charades, this performance of Kabuki, continue? Marxists-Leninists will say one thing, capitalists another, but together they have failed to see that they are far too old fashioned to even be relevant, let alone recognise their patronising and blatant sexism. In the run-up to the polls, there were campaigns about ‘49 per cent’ counting to change the face of India. That’s the proportion of women in a country that counts 1.2 billion but forgets to count what counts for the country’s women when power has to be shared. And finally when it does trickle down, it assumes the form of a dole, a charity, a quarter given to humour women, many of whom accept it without 38 open

wisdom or foresight. The new Lok Sabha has 66 women out of a total of 543. That’s about one woman for every year that India has been independent. So what is it? Rosy the Riveter who ran the arms and ammunition factories in the United States during the wars and was sent back to the kitchen after the war ended? Or Kupamma patty, a young widow in south India who held a gun to a British collector’s head at the turn of the 19th century because he ganged up with men in the village to divert water from her paddy fields and whose story is untold? Is it Rosa Luxembourg of Poland who didn’t get the Nobel prize or Nirbhaya of New Delhi who got a fund? Nothing should ever be handed over to anyone, not least political power. It must be earned every day, especially the right to lead. Institutionalised concessions are crutches. They break under the weight of genuine ambition. Covering Indian elections as a reporter after a gap, I was struck by how soon it can all regress, how fragile any success is, especially for women. I was reminded of a conversation at Stanford with the late anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo. She had argued in a book she co-edited in 1973 that an emphasis on a woman’s maternal role played to a universal opposition between ‘domestic’ and ‘public’ roles that are necessarily asymmetrical. Women confined to the domestic sphere, she said, do not have access to the prestige and cultural values that are the prerogative of men. The exercise of power by women is often seen as illegitimate and the avenues by which women gain prestige and a sense of value are shaped by their association with the domestic world. If the frame is skewed, so will the form and the enquiry. Having lived and worked in two continents and been educated in a third, I see a striking uniformity and repetitiveness of issues related to women. Rare is the country where the full scope and implications of a labour market that accepts women not just as co-workers but also as child-bearers is truly integral to its democratic comprehension. The Scandinavian countries remain a model, but adopting that model or comparing what happens there to India would be an exercise as grotesque as the reverse. Simply stated, the labour market has not recognised that a woman’s output includes children. 2 June 2014

High expectations Modi at the 29th Annual Session of the FICCI Ladies Organisation held in New Delhi on 8 April 2013

Election 2014 has pushed India to stand up and be counted. Wasting this opportunity would be tantamount to failure ashish sharma

The power-brokers in this election were men and a Jayalalithaa or a Mamata or a Mayawati were often portrayed as whimsical and unpredictable primarily because their method of work and terms of reference was not the accepted comparer-excluder model but one they had developed on their own, complete with inconsistencies and sometimes even incoherence. Their rise to power is seen more as a phenomenon, something out of the ordinary, which it is, but not necessarily one that challenges the core principles of their sustained success and assimilation. They are viewed as dictators, their powers illegitimate in a society which lives in three centuries claiming a stake in the fourth. All that is only partially relevant because even in political parties led by women in India, women are not nurtured and mentored to attain positions of leadership. A woman is given an electoral ticket as a token, as a celebration, as a cost. When women raise questions that in the past have been taken for granted or ignored, it is placed in a bracket labelled ‘reservation’, to which caste calculations are systematically added without questioning. Vague theories are foisted. Sadly, the question of women and their role in political and social life is informed exclusively by one section of Indian society that considers itself ‘progressive and open-minded’—which, translated, means looking elsewhere, especially towards the West for wisdom and guidance. In such a scenario, every unorthodox win or surge is derided as a flash. A challenge is defined as extreme good or extreme evil because the excluders know that extremes will, by definition, disappear. The election campaign has exposed India’s wounds. Leaving an understanding of that opportunity to self-seekers who have done nothing much this past week other than complain and 2 June 2014

quarrel would be an enormous waste of an opportunity that has come our way. People have rushed in to say how women should be empowered and educated. For them, nothing, not even the language, must be allowed to change. Many of the proposers and comparers may wither away if they encounter the disruptive part of truth and genuine dialogue that may hold the germ of an idea for women in India. Expose, engage and ensure. Expose the problem for what it is, so roadblocks are seen for what they are. Engage all, especially the blockers, to find solutions. Ensure that adequate funds and resources are channelled to where it matters most. In a country where over 600 million people are hungry and disease is rampant, the challenge seems evident. Whatever you do, don’t tell women what to do. Engage with sincerity and humility, not an agenda or a voters’ list. That kind of engagement will enable change in ways nobody could have imagined. Meaningfully engaged women are a society, a culture and a political path. Women are survivors—enable them as people, not as cooperative societies. They will give you the roadmap that will heal and construct, combine and grow. If you go to the same people all the time, you will get the same answers, often negative ones and even more often new problems disguised as questions. Election 2014 has pushed India to stand up and be counted. Wasting this opportunity—any opportunity—would be tantamount to failure. National failure. n Chitra Subramaniam is an award-winning journalist best known for her Bofors investigations. She is currently editor-in-chief of the current affairs portal, Thenewsminute.com, and divides her time between Geneva and Bangalore open www.openthemagazine.com 39

tRADITION

In the Forecourt of History When Modi skips the Throne Room on Inauguration day, it will be a sign of the people’s Prime Minister Sunil Raman

hen Narendra Modi drives in

to take his oath of office as Prime Minister of India, he would be the country’s third prime minister to have his swearing-in conducted in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan. The first was Chandra Shekhar. Months of anti-reservation agitations against the recommendations of the Mandal Commission led to the internal collapse of the Janata Dal in the winter of 1990, leading to VP Singh’s exit and the emergence of the shortlived prime ministership of his rival, Chandra Shekhar, supported by a Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress. Chandra Shekhar was keen that the ceremony be shifted from the spiffy and ostentatious Ashok Hall to the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan. Chandra Shekhar was eager to show that he was ‘one of the ordinary Indians’ and wanted the participation of as many people as possible in his swearing-in ceremony. The Durbar Hall was originally the Throne Room of the Viceroy’s House conceptualised by Edwin Lutyens, the architect of the stately building. In this high-domed hall—the ceiling covered with paintings of hunting expeditions — the Viceroys held State functions. On the night of 15 August 1947, this was the very venue for the swearing-in of Independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Every Prime Minister since then, following a tradition set by the British, preferred to be sworn-in inside the renamed Durbar Hall, which has a limited seating of 500 people. After Chandra Shekhar, it was in 1999 that Atal Behari Vajpayee, as the 44 open

National Archives of India

The complete statesman Jawaharlal Nehru was the first to propose ideas for a formal dress to be worn during official functions by top-office bearers of the country. He finally decided on a black achkan and white churidar 2 June 2014

FIRST AND FOREMOST Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru takes his oath of office as the first Prime Minster of India on 26 January 1950

brief innings Chandra Shekhar (extreme right) being administered the oath of office on 10 November 1990 Photos Times content

2 June 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 45

STATE pageantry Red uniformed men on horseback in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan

Dorling Kindersley/getty images

head of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) Government, opted for the forecourt over the Hall. The Grand Vision: In the late 1920s, when Lutyens sat finalising the building plan of the Viceroyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s House atop Raisina Hill, he planned the forecourt as an annexure to the structure. Apart from adding to the grandeur of the building, the forecourt enhances its ceremonial nature. The vast open court with its grand steps leading to the state entrance of Rashtrapati Bhavan overwhelms any visitor. It is in this forecourt that every ceremonial procession has been meticulously planned and implemented with precision over the last eight decades. The red sand (bajri) that is spread over the grounds of the forecourt adds dramatic colour and augments the majestic aura of the Bhavan. But the dust raised by presidential horses during ceremonies forced a relook at the available options. Finally, archival material provided a solution to those who did not want to change what had been prevalent for de46 open

Little has changed in the ceremonies that attended the swearing-in of a president or prime minister. Only the thrones used in colonial times by the Viceroy and Vicerine have been removed cades. Red bajri had been used ever since the building came up, it was argued, and the issue was settled. The only new instruction was that the sand should be made finer and water sprinkled regularly to keep the dust down. Ceremonies and Rituals: Independent India inherited all the rituals attached to official ceremonies and processions. Since the time of Nehru, little has changed in the ceremonies attached with the swearing-in of a president or prime minister, except for the thrones once used by the Viceroy and Vicerine, which were sent off to a storehouse. It was the Prime Minister who took the

lead in formalising many of the ceremonies of high offices. Nehru was keen to do away with ostentatious rituals that were part of a colonial system where the monarch and his representatives were treated as superior to those they governed. But he did not want to discard all the ceremonies only because they were started by Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colonial masters. It is for this reason that little has changed in the ceremonies attached with the swearing-in of a president or prime minister, except for the thrones of course, which are currently displayed in the Rashtrapati Bhavan museum. The niceties of protocol remain much the same. A look at the protocol arrangements for the 2 June 2014

Once bitten, twice brave Atal Behari Vajpayee being sworn-in as the 10th Prime Minister on 19 March 1998 John McConnico/AP

1950, he mentioned various options that could be considered. He did not seem to like the idea of a kind of ‘university gown’ suggested by C Rajagopalachari as the official attire for the GovernorGeneral, President and Prime Minister. He finally suggested a black achkan and white churidar as the official dress, pending discussions later. It, however, gained acceptance over a period of time and was made an official dress for the President. Prime Ministers, however, in recent decades have preferred a bandhgala with trousers as their official dress when travelling abroad.

the highest levels of security ever. The buzz is that around 500 Special Protection Group personnel will be deployed for the Prime Minister’s security henceforth. It would be interesting to recall a note from Jawaharlal Nehru, dictated to his principal personal secretary on 9 July 1949. The Nehru Papers reveal that he was always uncomfortable with security men milling around him. After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru was asked to move out of his bungalow at York Place to Teen Murti House—the former residence of British India’s Commander-in-Chief. The note, which can be found in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, reads: ‘...to line up policemen or troops from Palam to my house or where I travel... During these visits I have found far too many policemen in cars and trucks accompanying me, as if I was leading a reconnaisance force against some enemy.’ n

Security: Finally, Modi assumes the prime ministerial post with perhaps

Sunil Raman is the founder of the website, Monumentaldelhiwalks.com

Narendra Modi will assume his post with the highest levels of security. Five hundred SPG security personnel will be deployed for his protection henceforth swearing-in of Lord Louis Mountbatten as India’s first Governor-General will establish as much. Even the Presidential Body Guard traces its history to Governor-General Warren Hastings, who raised the mounted cavalry in 1773. Official Garb: A look at archival material reveals that the achkan and churidar, commonly seen as traditional wear in India, entailed serious discussions and deliberations among India’s top leaders. Again, Nehru took the lead in starting a conversation on what should be the formal dress for top office-bearers of the country. In a letter to President Rajendra Prasad, three days before the Constitution of India was adopted in 2 June 2014

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thick and thin A photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s endeavour to reform the handling of captive elephants 50

What Colour Are You?

O p e n s pa c e

Aishwarya Rai Kangana Ranaut Abhishek Bachchan

n p lu

The Xpose Fading Gigolo

61 Cinema reviews

Devialet 240 Manero MoonPhase Limited Edition HP Pavilion x360

Tech & style

Long and Short of Life Arguing to Death New Nickle-eating Plant Found

Science

The Gift of Dionysus

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The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy

books

Remember Mastram?

roug h cu t

The Elephant Whisperer

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anand shinde

true life

The Elephant Whisperer What started as a photography assignment to capture a festival of pachyderms soon turned into a passion project for Anand Shinde, says Mitali Parekh

aja the elephant calf does not approach photographer Anand Shinde as you would expect a long-lost friend to. In fact, he walks past him hurriedly as the herd comes up from their daily bath at the Kottur Elephant Rehabilitation Centre near Thiruvananthapuram. Rana, the rowdy one, starts flapping his ears the minute he spots Anand from far away. Then he stops by him, while Anand says hello. ‘Animal Whisperer’ is a term that’s loosely thrown about for anyone who is able to communicate with another species. It implies magic, mystery and a bit of secrecy. When in reality, like all communication with someone of a different language, it is rooted instead in empathy, mimicry, patience and observation. That’s what Anand will tell you if you ask him how he learnt to ‘speak’ to elephants. Anand’s journey started as a news photographer, posted to a land where he didn’t speak the language. In Kerala, the elephant is omnipresent; and one of the first assignments Anand had to cover was an elephant festival in Thrissur Pooram. There he saw majestic, dressed-up elephants prodded by mahouts with sharp sticks, their ankles blistered and bleeding from the thick chains that weighed them down. Sometimes, an el50 open

ephant snaps. That’s put down to ‘its unpredictable animal nature’, not to the fact that it may be in unbearable pain. The chaos of drums and musical instruments, too, might be too much to bear for an animal that can hear sounds as far as seven kilometres away; or the fact that male elephants are not used to and cannot be too close to each other in large numbers. Elephants have a matriarchal society, and if you gather more than three adult males together, their natural instinct is to feel threatened and assert dominance. Once you put all these factors together, it’s a wonder that there aren’t more stampedes.

he Malayalee relationship with el-

ephants is ancient, symbolic and superficial. There are books with biographies of famous temple elephants. The ones with a particular shape of forehead (you must be able to make out the face of a cow), a trunk long enough to reach the ground and curl up, and a Manipuri dancer-like gait are sifted and enlisted for temple ‘service’. If you are wealthy, you own one and parade it at these festivals, much like a socialite carries a Chihuahua in a monogrammed purse. A child on a mama’s knee will insist on an elephant ride, not a horsey-ride. Elephant hair is even cast

into a gold ring and worn for courage and strength. But the relationship is one of aggression, violence and fear. “When an elephant is brought in,” explains a senior Kerala journalist who has covered this beat for years, “he is kept chained in a dark room. The senior mahout will stand in front of him and shout loudly. Four or five others will stand in the shadow around the elephant and rain blows with polished teak wooden clubs and chains. This continues until the elephant associates pain with the voice of the mahout and is conditioned to be submissive.” It was this landscape that Shinde joined in April 2012, a photographer with no special empathy or love for animals. “I began spending time at the Kottur and Kodanand Elephant Training Centre to take pictures of the elephants there,” says the 35-yearold Mumbaikar. This resulted in the series Dialogue with Elephants, which won an honourable mention in the Best Photo Story category at the Media Foundation of India’s National Photography Contest in 2013. Shinde’s unobtrusive, quiet observation reassured the elephants. They saw him as an unthreatening presence and he formed a close bond with Krishna and Ganga, two calves at the Kodanand Centre near Kochi. Calves separated 2 june 2014

from their herd have a lower chance of survival; without the security, nourishment, warmth and reassurance of the matriarchal herd, they do not learn to cope with the world. Krishna developed a leg injury when he toppled while running down a slope to the river. Eventually, the leg grew weaker and couldn’t take his weight. Ganga, placed in a pen next to him, would urge him to get up if he lay down for too long on one side, understanding intuitively the strain it put on his organs. Anand observed their behaviour and began mimicking their calls. They slowly began to understand each other. Krishna would playfully push Anand if he turned his back to him and wind his trunk around Anand’s arm when he started to leave. If the sky thundered, Krishna would grip his arm and 2 june 2014

not let go. “I began understanding how important it is for a calf to have an elder around it,” he says.

his deep attachment is what makes

a mahout’s life isolated and lonely. Being a mahout is a hereditary profession and few changes have been made in its violent methods over time. Of course, there are some empathetic mahouts who truly love their charges, but there are more who are stuck in this profession because they have no other alternative. Once a calf bonds with a mahout, he follows him 24/7. They cannot be separated, which means a mahout can have no social life. They live in forest reserves or rehabilitation centres far from cities, and there is no promotion ‘up the ladder’. They are not part of the decision making, training

or bureaucracy that surrounds the elephant industry, which creates a great socio-economic divide that is often filled with resentment. Alcohol is a popular refuge. Every once in a while, an expert is called in from abroad to deliver a talk on elephant conservation in English. Sometimes, certificates are distributed. Much is lost in translation and the event becomes an inside joke among mahouts. Anand’s endeavour is to reform the handling of elephants by influencing their mahouts. He began sharing his observations on Radha, Krishna and other adult elephants with Jacob Alexander of Trivandrum Zoo. Alexander is a dedicated veterinarian who takes periodic pictures of Maheswari’s tail, Maheshwari being the resident elephant at the zoo. “It’s to threaten the handlers,” open www.openthemagazine.com 51

explains Alexander, “if I see the tail get less bushy, they will be in trouble.” He’s talking about hair depletion on account of the local tradition of wearing elephant hair as jewellery; since an elephant cannot twitch its back muscles, it needs a busy tail to fan or sweep away irritating insects. Shinde would take his questions and observations to Alexander and the two would research elephant behaviour and try to implement changes. “Anand has found a positive way to communicate with the elephant by building a bond with it. If we can understand its behaviour and follow it better, we don’t need force to make it obey. We can have a peaceful co-existence and give it a better life,” says Alexander. These changes would have been difficult to implement through the bureaucracy of the forest department were it not for the support of the then Chief Wildlife Warden V Gopinath, who now heads the Forest Force. Gopinath is genuinely interested in reforming these centres, which are a big tourist draw. He gave Shinde full access, and even encouraged him to address the Kerala Forestry Department on elephant behaviour last year.

t is under Gopinath’s sanction that a large enclosure is being built for calves Rana and Raja at the Kottur Centre. Krishna and Radha passed away last year while Shinde was visiting his family in Mumbai; it is a loss he is still coming to terms with. Raja and Rana are slowly helping him heal. Rana is an attention-seeking bully, while Raja is shy. They were kept fenced in by bamboo sticks in a small, enclosed area; now a large space with varied terrain and a water body is being created for them. “The variation in terrain helps develop their leg muscles as they climb over small bumps,” explains Shinde. “They take dust baths and are very playful. Rana’s company might help Raja assert himself and gain confidence. A large water body is [also] important so that they learn to spray themselves with water using their

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trunk. This is how they start gaining control of their trunk muscles.” Shinde’s observations come across as common sense once he speaks; they are uncommon when you realise no one else has thought of something so elementary. For example, elephants love their daily scrub-down in the river; but Shinde would often see mahouts prodding them urgently to get into the water. “They were not reluctant; they were just adjusting their body to acclimatise themselves to the water temperature. Like we

“The relationship is one of

AGGRESSION, VIOLENCE AND fear... He is kept chained in a dark room. The senior mahout will stand in front of him and

SHOUT LOUDLY WHILE four or five others will stand in the shadow around the elephant and rain blows with polished

TEAK CLUBS AND CHAINS” would while getting into a bath one foot at a time,” Shinde explains. This may not seem to be a big thing, but small irritations corrode a relationship and can push an ill or irritable elephant to snap. Another endeavour is to enlist senior female elephants such as Minna or Jayashree for the the task of raising abandoned calves. Authorities are unsure of how an adult female elephant would react to a calf, but by advancing slowly, Shinde is sure this experiment will be a success. “If we could start by

placing their pens together, bathing them together, we can judge whether there is antagonism or camaraderie,” he says. It shouldn’t be hard to do since elephants start exhibiting maternal instincts when they are as young as five. If centres are able to recreate the secure and caring matriarchal herd structure, calves will have a higher chance of survival and adults will lead happier and more fulfilling lives in captivity. Shinde’s aim is to get mahouts, who already have traditional wisdom in this area, to treat their wards with due sensitivity. “We could also start an exchange programme where deserving mahouts visit conservation centres in Africa or Thailand and exchange knowledge. This would improve their self-worth, integrate them valuably with the existing bureaucracy, and in turn make them more excited about their work. It could also add value to the profession, and young mahouts would then have a reason to join [other than] compulsion,” Shinde says. As one watches Shinde at the Kodanand Centre, it seems evident that elephants speak with him. Sunita starts flapping her ears when she sees him after a gap of eight or 10 months. He keeps his distance, mindful of tourists who might start taking liberties, but she keeps looking at him and is fidgety until he goes and talks to her. At Kottur, Shinde is about the only human Raja is comfortable around. His earlier reluctance was on account of my presence—he has never seen a human female before. Now Raja is comfortable enough to wind his tongue around Shinde’s hand and take it into his mouth to chew. “He is teething,” explains Shinde, “and needs something to cut his teeth on.” Rana, jealous like any toddler, is trying to push Raja away so he can get his share of affection. But he is an elephant, albeit a small one, and risks mangling Shinde’s arm as he wedges himself between Shinde and Raja. Shinde’s relationship with elephants may have started with a photography project, but now he’s in too deep. The trunk wrapped around his arm will not let him leave. n 2 june 2014

rough cut

Remember Mastram? A film on an old smut paperback series that nobody wants to watch except nostalgics like me Mayank Shekhar

he sight of men wrapping blankets over their heads academic chore. For instruction and delight, we read like monkey caps wasn’t uncommon in the early 90s; ‘Prescription’, the sex advice column in Femina. Most of us except it seemed the few men around us at the box-ofwatched porn only on printed pages, inevitably starting fice counter of Connaught Place’s Rivoli cinema were also with the depressing Debonair, a magazine that Atal Behari trying to hide their faces. We had bunked school—in our Vajpayee kept under his pillow, according to its former early teens—to catch a ‘morning show’ (a euphemism for editor Vinod Mehta. I lost my only copy in the rains, having soft porn). The film playing was Gupt Shastra. Its poster outhidden it under the bushes near my house. side, of a voluptuous female upper torso—as usual smeared During our time at college, crumpled issues of Playboy or with black ink—bore tremendous promise. A few minutes Hustler would get shared among rooms like a community into the screening, however, we realised Gupt Shastra was a grant. Mumbai’s finest cartoonist Hemant Morporia once complete KLPD. It was a sex-education documentary with a told me how he knew nobody read Playboy for the articles: doctor attending to a series of married couples with conjuthose pages were stuck anyway! Still, Playboy and Hustler gal issues, besides informing the audience of the side-effects did more to push the boundaries of free speech than most of of wearing tight underwear. American journalism put together. In Delhi, we would hear And yet, every time a pictorial diagram of the female anatabout editors of desi girlie-mags like Chastity and Fantasy omy or a shot of a woman breastfeeding being arrested by cops on charges of obwould show up, we would hear the menscenity. This is probably why no one knew The word ‘sex’ in-blankets let out loud guffaws from the who the author Mastram really was, or if it front rows. Such was the famine of imagwas a shared pseudonym. appears in various es of the female form in Delhi back then. In Jaiswal’s film, the writer, who lives in forms as puns on Forget pictures, even language was devoid of a Himachal town, shields his identity out kaama: kaameria sexual expression. It’s no surprise that writof shame. He holds high literary ambitions. (love-disease), er Mastram’s novellas—a series of cheaply I can imagine. While in my early twenties, kaamnaon ki priced pornographic paperbacks—sold like when a proprietor—Mr Jain—offered me hot samosas at railway bookstalls. the chance to edit Debonair, the first thing baarish (rush Akhilesh Jaiswal’s film Mastram is a ficI thought of was what my parents would of love) or tional biopic of the eponymous author. In tell their friends. Besides, of course, Jain kaamohit (lust) the film, Mastram’s writings contain the wouldn’t pay more than my salary as a usual Indian sexual themes—‘Jijaji’ (brothreporter, which I loved very much. I don’t er-in-law), ‘bania’ (shop-owner) and the best friend’s wife know how many people read Mastram, but even in small (‘bhabi’) offering love on the sly. His sentences are sexual towns, DVDs, satellite TV and the internet should have remetaphors. The word ‘sex’ itself appears in various forms as lieved the worst excesses of sexual repression by now. puns on ‘kaama’: ‘kaameria’ (love-disease), ‘kaamnaon ki baarNobody wanted to watch Mastram. I was the only one at ish’ (rush of love) or ‘kaamohit’ (lust). They sound ancient. the theatre for the Sunday 11 pm show, picking a fight The most popular Hindi word for sex is sex (even ‘yaun’ is because they wouldn’t let me in. They had cancelled all othtoo Doordarshan). Digging deeper, the Hindi word for semen er shows that day because no one had bought a ticket. After that a friend had come up with in college was ‘brasphootan’; intense discussions with the manager, the box-office clerk he had apparently deduced this from a book on fish farmfinally let me book a ticket for the next morning. ing. Slang and abuse make up for absence of vocabulary; and Word on movies usually gets out early on social media. Mastram’s books, I’ve heard, were written imagining how a Perhaps people already knew the film wasn’t as exciting as north Indian truck driver would describe his sexual its posters made it out to be. Or maybe nobody wants to fantasies. They did well for the sheer audacity of the revel in nostalgia of a time when men wrapped in blankets written word. got off on female body diagrams and had Mastram to read I never read Mastram. English medium education had for erotica. Maybe. n rendered my Hindi reading comprehension so slow that Mayank Shekhar runs the pop-culture website TheW14.com browsing a book in my own language seemed like an

2 june 2014

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books Family Matters Neel Mukherjee’s second novel gives us the Calcutta family in all its crumbling glory, foregrounded by the Naxal movement, but offers Calcuttans little that’s new ARUNAVA SINHA

The Lives of Others

By Neel Mukherjee Random house india | 528 pages | Rs 399

lmost by definition, the great Calcutta novel of the 20th Century—and there are plenty—must include the following: the Naxalite movement, the bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese, Durga Puja, Mohun Bagan’s victory in 1911, the rise of new money, the decline of local gentility, the lives of servants and maids, the daughter who cannot be married off, incest (real or hinted at), a family home with the balcony running around its central courtyard, Sonagachhi (the red light area), one brilliant student, lots of Bengali food and wedding ceremonies. For a novelist harbouring the ambition of writing such a novel, it would be easy to fall into the trap of checklist fiction—and award-winning writer Neel Mukherjee’s second novel, The Lives of Others, gets dangerously close. Chronicling the dwindling fortunes of the Ghosh family for much of the 20th century, it covers all of this common ground and ends with the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But Mukherjee also adds more nuanced elements and plays with the formula a little. So, we have the mathematical genius, forbidden love between brother and sister, the long-standing servant who is betrayed, all in a new mould. If The Lives of Others goes a longer distance it is because, as the title suggests, the novel never settles into a comfortable narration of intrafamily drama from the point of view of the ubiquitous observer. Instead, it constantly examines each of the people through shifting perspectives, sometimes stepping into their minds, at other times withdrawing to a distance. The joint family is a superb invention, if only for the purpose of literature. No one in the Ghosh family—its patriarch and his wife, their four sons, one spinster daughter and numerous grandchildren—quite understands the other. Prafullanath has built a small business empire in the paper industry from scratch, and is too caught up in battling for its expansion and, later, survival, to spare a glance for any of his children. His daughter Chhaya, passed over for marriage, wreaks emotional and physical havoc. Adinath, the eldest, and his wife Sandhya are almost faceless creatures, while his brother Priyonath is too caught up in his personal 54 open

anguish and business responsibilities to empathise with any of them. The others, too, follow their private roads to their personal hells. Despite the visible as well as beneaththe-radar family bonds between them, each individual here is an island, and can only look upon the other members of the family from a distance. This inability to understand the lives of these familiar others, despite the fact that they hail from the same familial, architectural, linguistic and cultural space, leads to the conflicts that power the story. The Ghoshes live on money made from business enterprises built through a combination of fortuitousness and unethical means, money that is being eroded under the continued onslaught of the World War and, later, industrial unrest. Their hereditary entitlements, overflowing plates and excessive jewellery are shown up as obscene not only by starvation deaths in Calcutta and in the countryside, but by the challenges thrown in its face by one of its grandsons, Supratik, the urban revolutionary whose journals form a counterpoint to the story of his family. In its devastating detail—lavished on everything from clothes and ornaments to food and mathematical formulae—this novel leads us to that all-Indian clash between lives of material excess and lives of abject deprivation and poverty. But while there is a complex arc in the dramatic, even melodramatic, incidents and accidents that assault three generations of the Ghosh family, the heart of this work lies in what Supratik is told by the ancient family retainer Madan: “Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?” There you have it: the dilemma of choice, between betterment of the world and protecting those who love you. Supratik, of course, rejects the possibility that familial protection can be more important than the revolution, but circumstances lead him to betray the cause of the oppressed twice over. Is this a dilemma powerful enough to inform every leaf of this 500-page work? Much of the richness of incidents in the novel does not, ultimately, add up. Mukherjee’s first novel, Past Continuous—which juxtaposed a young man’s journey away from home and his confrontation with his own sexual identity with the tale of Miss Gilby, Bimala’s English music teacher in Tagore’s The Home and the World—was a searing journey through the protagonists’s life. But the events here do not lead to a destination grand enough to justify the wandering. 2 June 2014

nick tucker

chronicler of a cause and its fallout In his second book, Neel Mukherjee presents a Calcutta that is familiar to the city’s residents and delightful to bibliotourists

Still, Mukherjee brings Calcutta and the Bengali life alive in two remarkable ways in this book. The first is through his use of dialogue, where he translates Bengali idioms and phrases quite literally: ‘Rush me like this, it will go up to my head’, or, ‘You spend so much time with the boy, eating the worms in his ears’. While only those who know the language will realise this, the obvious deviations will alert all readers; they are really hearing a different language in their heads. The second achievement in this regard is the use of food. What is cooked and served in the Ghosh family is a more telling commentary on the relationships and hierarchies within the family than any verbal description. Food is also a potent medium for conveying deprivation. In one telling sequence, the spoilt child Somnath plays cruel tricks with the gruel that the kindly servant has just ladled out to starving paupers desperate for some food. In another, the breaking of a basic culinary tenet—of never mixing stale food with fresh—becomes a potent symbol for a daughterin-law’s minor rebellion. And, of course, there are the halfcooked, coarse vegetables that Supratik has to eat in the jungles and villages as a party worker and, later, as a fugitive. With its foregrounding of the Naxalite movement, The Lives of Others is bound to elicit comparison with Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowlands, which also built its narrative around the life, death and impact of one of two brothers taking up arms for the Naxal cause. But the similarity ends there; while Lahiri’s novel soars beyond the movement to the individual lives of lonely people, Mukherjee uses it 2 June 2014

as an end in itself and a climax of sorts. Mukherjee paints his scenes vividly, from rooftop flirtation to kinky sex gone bad to police torture, even: ‘Their ranks are swelled to six now, but, it is obvious from the moment they enter, that this Superintendent ... will not be participating; he sets himself slightly apart … The remaining man, kind-looking, almost fatherly, with chubby cheeks and a luxuriant ink-black moustache, turns to the SP and makes a querying motion with his head; the SP nods, once, calmly, then moves to stand behind Supratik’s head, from where he cannot see him. Chubby Cheeks takes out a short length of what looks a nylon rope and a pair of pliers from the pocket of his voluminous khaki trousers and advances towards Supratik.’ For all his skills, though, Mukherjee draws up characters who embody one or two particular traits too strongly for them to feel completely real: Madan, the family retainer, has a heart of gold; Suranjan, Supratik’s brother, is the classic wastrel. Even with the authenticity of their experiences, one cannot help feeling that these individuals are not the wonderful bundles of contradictions people are in real life. The Lives of Others is a novel for the outsider. This work will not tell the insider who is familiar with the history and the city something he doesn’t know. Perhaps that is just as well: Calcuttans have lived too much through the success and failure of their city to have to read about it again. The bibliotourist, however, will delight in this recreation of the city’s past and its inhabitants; particularly in their doomed attempts at bringing about change. n open www.openthemagazine.com 55

books india today images

A Dogmatic Goddess A fiery, fearless fictionalisation of the massacre of Dalit labourers in 1960s’ Tamil Nadu, this book is engaging, despite its excessive running commentary Rajni george

The Gypsy Goddess

By Meena Kandasamy HarperCollins India | 300 pages | Rs 499

‘R

emember, dear reader, I write from a land where people wrap up newborn babies in clumsy rags and deck the dead in incredible finery.’ Such is the tenor of 30-year-old poet, writer and activist Meena Kandasamy’s self-proclaimed ‘might thunderclap of a novel’. It tells the true story of the infamous massacre of 44 landless Dalit labourers in 1968 in the village of Kilvenmani, Tamil Nadu; when they asked for more rice, they were locked in a hut and burnt alive. The tale is so medievally brutal as to feel dated; yet stories like this continue to play out amongst beleaguered farming communities. This is the traditional prov56 open

ince of non-fiction, but it is easy to see why the novel might better dramatise its conflicts and enliven its bleak context. ‘‘Kilvenmani was a story I first encountered in detail in 2003 and just the horror of what had happened was too much to take,” says Kandasamy from London, where she lives at the moment. “It was something that was desperate and defeating on all sides, and at the same time, it was one of the most inspirational stories.” Kandasamy is not one to avoid difficult subjects. She has written about violence in her marriage and her support of a beef biryani festival at Osmania University (fighting ‘food 2 June 2014

fascism’ on the part of conservative elements disallowing its consumption) is among the many controversies she readily fuels. Her books of poetry, Touch and Ms Militancy, are stylish cult classics dealing with caste and feminism, if they are a bit green. Most striking are her descriptions of passion and reform, which display the influence of legendary poet Kamala Das, who provided a foreword to her first book of verse. You try suicide to sleep off such horror. Coma gifts you a lover, carrying him over on a crow’s wing. You give yourself to this man, like you are giving yourself to rain. Love lights up like lightning and you scream in sleep. —from ‘Sleeping Beauty on Celluloid’ The verse and journalism has earned her almost 25,000 Twitter followers and lots of heated virtual engagement. Social media, which makes frequent appearances in this book, has often been Kandasamy’s battleground, and it is the same feisty tone she engages in her novel, enlisting us as ‘comrades’. The trolls here are village landlords, the language ‘Taminglish’. The novel is broken up into four parts: background, breeding ground, battle ground and burial ground, and they combine to tell the tale of an uprising and its consequences. Communism, we are told, first arrived in Tanjore because it has the most tea stalls in the province; conducive both to talk of big things and the idle chatter that filters through the narrative describing the history of this place. The first protest calling for higher wages takes place in 1943, and the prospect of rebellion hangs hot and heavy over the miserable plight of the peasantry. It must be quelled: party organisers are killed off and food supply to the marketplace is cut off. Gopalakrishna Naidu, the self-styled leader of the landlords of Nagapattinam, is loud in his encouragement to rascals like Kerosene Govinda, telling them to ‘make [the labourers] mend their ways’. Everyone else, he proclaims, should wear bangles – such is the idiom of macho Tamil movie talk, which Kandasamy captures perfectly and satirises with her confident and amused mimic’s eye. Velaikaar (white people) are laughingly referred to, colonial histories are playfully recounted. You can almost hear the ‘dey, mind it’. It’s all good fun, as it is bad politics. But the rhyming political verse, redolent of Brixton, doesn’t work quite as well. Lines like ‘Carrying the tales of their cunts and their cuntrees and their cuntenants, women cross all hurdles’ seem a bit forced, as much as they are in keeping with the political agenda. “A poet is an anti-social on the loose, and then, you are becoming a novelist, which means you are an anti-social in solitary confinement,” says 2 June 2014

Kandasamy. The struggle shows. Her prose truly achieves meaning in the breathless chapters 9 and 10. Here, we see mature Meena, being serious and doing it well, without all the self-consciousness explanations her backdrop seems to entail. ‘The streets are alight and the marauding mob of landlords is at arm’s length and those who have stayed behind in Kilvenmani apprehend its onward approach through shrill synchronized whistles piercing the cold night air and rapid gunshots being aimed at moving targets and the crackling noice of their homes bursting into flames and the screams of their women caught in the clutches of these attackers and so they seek shelter in Paappa and Ramayya’s hut because there is nowhere safer to go and because they believe in the strength and safety of their numbers and in staying together and so united they stand as they squeeze themselves inside and lock the door and the mob soon arrives on its rampaging feet and tries to forcibly gain entrance and fails and in a fury sets the hut ablaze’ The first part, though funny at times, might have been better relegated to interviews, though the information it contains is of course necessary. Kandasamy herself acknowledges that a soundbyte would have given it to us; ‘Some headlines say the whole story: Madras is Reaping a Bitter Harvest of Rural Terrorism: Rice Growers’ Feud With Field Workers Has Fiery Climax As Labor Seeks Bigger Share of Gain from Crop Innovations’.While the regional nature of this world calls for explanation, the reader shrinks from the overabundance of metafictional commentary that results, detracting from the genuine feel of the story. What all the talk does is to sustain the sense of a silenced oral history that is finally being passed on. The collective nature of this exercise is wonderfully invoked. But this novel, choppy and staccato, never really feels like a novel; it is an extended oral history, a play, a dialogue. This belated conversation between history and the present follows the trial of the perpetrators through to its farcical end; yet no resolution. Sri Lankan writer Shobasakthi, whose playful novella Gorilla contained a similarly fractured narrative around that country’s terrors, put this quality down to the violence that formed its subject. “I still suspect that somehow India in the West has been reduced to a few tropes—and those who step across that line are not really noticed,” says Kandasamy. It is heartening, however, that publishers, blessed and cursed with an abundance of texts, are willing to back dissidents. One can only hope they do not succumb to the trappings of the attention that ensues. The political writer has always been a popular entity, and Kandasamy is lucky to have both talent and a message, stories she has engaged with to tell us. She is vulnerable to the packaging that publishing, particularly Western publishing, entails. But who can begrudge her turn in the spotlight? n open www.openthemagazine.com 57

DRINK

The Gift of Dionysus The story of Champagne is rife with irony, accidentally produced by the winegrowers of north-east France who did all they could to kill the sparkle Manu Remakant

n a June evening 31 years ago,

as we rioted through the streets, frenziedly waving our national flag at crowded balconies, an image was shimmering in our minds. The image of Kapil Dev spraying a foamy liquid from a balcony far away; the balcony of Lord’s cricket stadium, England. For most Indians, that was the moment we made our first appointment with Champagne, the most famous, the most expensive, and the most coveted sparkling wine in the world. When it began, Champagne was dry, still wine. Named after a region in north-east France, it lacked glitz and lustre—for it didn’t have those beaded bubbles that wink on the brim of a glass. It had nothing in it that could suggest a stellar future; and worse, there was a wealthy cousin in its neighbourhood—the Burgundy wine. The wine growers of Champagne did everything they could to wean ardent fans off Burgundy. But they couldn’t. For many years, they wondered what

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went wrong with their wine even after doing things by the book. They pressed the grapes, extracted the juice, threw in yeasts, and fermented their wine after the Burgundy fashion; and when the bubbling stopped, they moved the finished wine into bottles and put them in cellars to age. Barrels were even sent across the ocean as a market was steadily developing in England. The drama began only when people thought, many months later, of collecting the matured wine. In the cellars, bottles flew in every direction as the wine aged, smashing themselves against walls, on the floor, or if given a chance, on humans eager to fetch them from the cellar. Eyes were gouged by shards of glass. Faces were scarred. Dozens of people were injured every season. It was absolute mayhem; people had to wear iron helmets to reclaim what remained. Sometimes 90 per cent of the bottles were lost—but the winemakers nonetheless groaned at what remained, seeing millions of

hideous bubbles spoiling the visual appeal of the wine. The character of wine is planted firmly on its terroir—the soil, climate, sun, slope of the land, even the grape breeds of a particular region. Even an individual row of grape vines in a vineyard can be said to have its own terroir. And in Champagne, the chalky soil, the slope of the land, the grapes and the amount of sun are all perfect for the ideal brew. Soon, the area’s winemakers took note of the one ingredient that could be affecting their wine—the climate of Champagne. To make sure, the winemakers thought backward through the process of their winemaking. They found that the beginning of winter—which happens early in Champagne—timed perfectly with the last of the bubbling in their wine. No more bubbles, no more fermentation—that is what they thought as they transferred the drink from barrels to bottles, sealing them with wooden plugs before stashing 2 June 2014

them away in cellars to mature. But they were wrong.

hat they didn’t know was the fact that yeast doesn’t work in all weathers. Come winter, the bubbling stops as the yeast slips to a dormant state; and it was in such slumber that the half-fermented wine, thought to be finished, was transferred from barrels to bottles. As the warm season returned, the yeast cells stirred back to jittery wakefulness, and with fresh hunger attacked the residual sugar in the wine. Fermentation—and bubbling—started once again, this time, alas, in the cramped space inside a bottle, away from the monitoring eyes of winemakers. Pressure built up with all that carbon dioxide—the by-product when yeast sups on sugar—making time bombs out of every bottle. In 1668, Don Pierre Perignon, a Benedictine monk, took charge as cellar master of the Abbey of Hautvillers. His qualification: the monk could identify the vineyard where the grapes had ripened by tasting the wine. His assignment: kill the sparkle in the bottle and get back the old non-bubbly still wine of Champagne. To the monk, winemaking was a second religion. He began his assiduous work of perfecting Champagne by first inventing the gentler wine-press as he thought that a machine should only cajole the juice out by pressing the grapes as tenderly as possible. Any greater pressure and the dark tannin from grapes would leech into the white juice, spoiling the wine. He had already taken the press right to the vineyard to catch the grapes young and fresh. After perfecting the ingredients that went into Champagne, he braced himself for the real face-off. Dom now wanted to know how the English were dealing with the barrels of Champagne sent to them. How did they fare with the bubbles? Did English eyes also get gouged across the ocean? Indeed, the English too were hit and wounded by exploding bottles in their cellars. But a few bruises didn’t bother them; their love for sparkling wine had now become so deep that they invent-

2 June 2014

ed stronger bottles and corks to withstand the pressure. Don Perignon took a leaf out of the English book, deciding to work with the bubbles rather than against them. Stronger bottles and corks were imported from England. With the zeal of a fresh convert, he added more yeast to the half-fermented wine before bottling. With a childish delight he worked up more fizz, sparkle and fireworks in his new wine. “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!” he reportedly cried out after tasting the sparkling wine. When Dom Perignon threw yeast into the wine and bottled it, a new problem arose—dead yeast cells, called ‘lees’, began to float inside the bottle at the end of fermentation. Lees in Champagne not only created a haze but it also gave headaches to those who drank it. The makers found it extremely difficult to strain the deposits out without letting the fizz escape the bottle. What to do? Enter the widow Clicquot. With her husband’s death, Nicole Barbe Clicquot had a lot of Champagne to experiment with. She ordered her men to tip the bottles slowly until they were upside down. The lees that gravitated down to the neck gushed out the moment the cork was clicked open. As soon as the deposits poured away, the bottle was immediately topped up and re-corked. The procedure was named ‘riddling’. Had it not been for the devotion and passion of the Benedictine monk Dom Perignon and widow Clicquot, that particular still wine from Champagne would not have evolved into the timeless drink that set the standard of elite consumption in the following centuries. The sparkling wine caught on like wild fire in royal circles, being so close to Paris. No coronation or royal banquets were complete without it. No ships were launched without a bottle of Champagne smashed on its bow.

parkling wine is now produced in many parts of the world, but the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC) stipulates that

for a wine to be called Champagne, it must be made of three grape varieties—Pinot noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay. The fruits must also come from predetermined areas in Marne, Aisne and Aube. About 90 per cent of Champagne made today is non-vintage, but every Champagne house rolls out a top end model (called Prestige Cuvee) to show off their best. Moët & Chandon’s Dom Pérignon—a tribute to the monk who tasted stars in his wine—and Louis Roederer’s Cristal are the most famous Prestige Cuvees in the world. Be warned; these great models from the world of Champagne are guaranteed to singe your wallet. Champagne can either be bone dry or sweet. Check the label: if it is Extra Brut, you have got a dry sugarless variety. The English love it Brut, while the Russians love it sweet. Demisec and Dous are sweeter versions of Champagne. And they come in bottles of all sizes, even though the standard 750 ml and the magnum 1.5 litres are the ones you meet more often on the road. For supreme taste and fizz, Champagne has to be kept at 7-8° Celsius. Experts advise you not to keep bottles in the fridge for more than two hours before use, since even the tiny tremors from the motor in a refrigerator can upset the delicate formation inside a bottle. An extra large ice bucket is perhaps the best compromise. Now watch the bubbles; how big are they? The smaller the bubble, the greater the champagne is. Tiny bubbles that stream upward continuously in the glass are a feature of top end wines. If there are ‘toad eyes’ (large bubbles) in the glass instead, take it in one gulp and forget it. Still, for the true epicure, like whisky which is nipped as tenderly as you smell a rose, you can also enjoy a glass of Champagne petal by petal of its rich terroir, with your eyes, nose and palate. Only if you’re keen on subtlety. And the stars. n The writer is an associate professor of English who runs the website, rumroadravings.com open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

friends indeed The midlife well-being of both men and women seems to depend on having a wide circle of friends they see regularly, says a study in Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health

Long and Short of Life Why short men outlive their taller compatriots

Arguing to Death

John Lund/Sam Diephuis/Blend Images/Corbis

ccording to a new study published in the science journal Plos One, there is a direct link between men’s height and their lifespan. The shorter a man is, the longer his life in comparison with taller compatriots. Researchers at the Kuakini Medical Center, UH John A Burns School of Medicine and US Veterans Affairs who worked on the study found that shorter men tend to have a protective form of the gene FOXO3. This form of the gene results in a relatively small body size during early development, but also an extended lifespan. Shorter men, the researchers found, also tend to have lower blood insulin levels and less cases of cancer. The findings have been thrown up by a long research project designed to study American men of Japanese ancestry. In the course of their work, researchers analysed over 8,000 such males born between the years 1900 and 1919. The men were separated into two groups. Those who were 5-ft 2-in or shorter were put into one group and those who were 5-ft 4-in or taller were put into another group. All through the years, the researchers closely followed and studied the lifestyles and health conditions 60 open

of the men. The researchers found that those who were 5-ft 2-in tall or shorter lived the longest. The taller the men got, the shorter they lived. About 1,200 men who were part of the study lived into their nineties and hundreds, and some 250 of them are still alive today. According to the researchers, a similar connection between the gene and mortality has been found in different animals and insects like mice, roundworms and flies. However, such a connection had never been established in humans before. The researchers write in the journal: ‘Given that smaller body size is a phenotype that is strongly associated with increased lifespan in model organisms of aging… we hypothesized that shorter height in humans would be associated with increased longevity and genotype of FOXO3, a key regulatory gene associated with human longevity and reduced insulin signaling.’ The researchers, however, make it a point to emphasise that other factors count too. No matter how tall a man is, the effects of the FOXO3 gene can still be offset by leading a healthy lifestyle. n

Frequent arguments with partners, relatives or neighbours may raise the risk of death— regardless of proximate cause—among middle-agers, suggests a study published in Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. Researchers quizzed almost 10,000 men and women aged 36 to 52 on their everyday social relationships, and their health was tracked from 2000 till the end of 2011. The analysis indicated that frequent worries or demands generated by partners and/or children were linked to a 50-100 per cent increased risk of death from all causes. And men seemed to be particularly vulnerable to worries and demands generated by their female partners. n

New Nickle-eating Plant Found According to a study published in the journal PhytoKeys, scientists of University of the Philippines, Los Baños, have discovered a new plant species called Rinorea niccolifera, which eats nickel for survival—accumulating up to 18,000 ppm of the metal in its leaves without getting poisoned. Such an amount is a hundred to a thousand times higher than in most other plants. Hyperacccumulator plants could aid the development of green technologies, say scientists, and bodes well for ‘phytoremediation’ and ‘phytomining’: the first refers to the use of hyperacccumulator plants to remove heavy metals from contaminated soil, while the latter refers to the use of such plants to recover commercially valuable metals present in plant shoots from mineral-rich sites. n 2 june 2014

rf advantage A long-range Radio Frequency remote-control handset is convenient because it allows the user to manipulate a device without having to aim at it—and, if the frequency range is long enough, even without needing to be in the same room

tech&style

Devialet 240 A gorgeous high-end audio system with revolutionary amplification technology gagandeep Singh Sapra

Manero MoonPhase w Limited Edition

Price on request

$17,495

hey say music is devotion in itself, and when you listen to it over an audio system, you want to experience it as if the artiste were in a live performance right there. You want to feel each beat, hear each note, every high and every low, and want those instruments crisp and clear. The team at Devialet has been known to create some of the world’s best sound experience technologies, using superb digital audio convertors to eliminate both harmonic and thermal distortions. Now, the Devialet 240 amplifier takes audio amplification to the next level. The first thing you notice is the 240’s aesthetic appeal. Its exclusive chrome-plated aluminium chassis, entirely hand-polished, is designed to go with any kind of ambience. Each of its components is machined out of a single block of aluminium and has an unusually slim design; you can easily place the unit on a shelf or mount it on a wall. With only one button on it, a colour screen and snug remote, the 240 is designed to make you crave its ownership. In stereo mode, the Devialet 240 pumps out 240 watts per channel, and if you want more of it, you can pair it with another 240 in a dual2 june 2014

monoblock configuration to generate 500 watts of pure powerful music. And if even that does not quite satisfy you, you can daisy-chain up to eight of these beautiful units for active multi-amplification. The 240 has several input options: network input for Wifi or Ethernet for digital audio streaming, four digital coaxial inputs, a synchronous USB input to connect to a Mac or PC, two analog inputs (line level or advanced phono MM / MC), a digital AES/EBU input and two optical inputs. In short, this device can amplify just about anything you’d have yourself or your neighbourhood listen to. The 240’s remote control uses long range radio frequency, and hence you don’t need to be in its line of sight. The unit is also controllable by smartphone apps (iOS and Android) that can be obtained from Devialet. Available at high-end audio stores across the globe, Devialet 240 comes with a five-year global warranty. Pair this revolutionary audio system with those beautiful Sonus Faber speakers, put on that lovely recording of Pavarotti, and enjoy pure audio bliss. Undoubtedly a cut above top-end amplifiers, this one is for discerning audiophiles. n

For its 125-year jubilee, Carl F Bucherer presents the Manero MoonPhase Limited Edition. Apart from the date, day and month, its beautiful calendar also displays the current phase of the moon. It boasts of an automatic CFB 1966 caliber, stainless steel case—of 38 mm diameter and 10.85 mm thickness—and an 18 K rose gold bezel. This watch is water-resistant up to 30 metres. n

HP Pavilion x360

Rs 41,115

A Windows 8 convertible with a 11.6-inch LED antiglare widescreen, the x360 runs on a Pentium Quad Core Bay-Trail processor. It has 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard disk drive. The machine can be used either as a regular laptop or a touchscreen tablet. Its audio output, with its Beats Audio technology, is great. The device features a wired Ethernet port in addition to its wireless connectivity options, and has a 1 megapixel webcam for video calls over Skype. In tablet mode, its keyboard faces down, so it’s advisable to use a mat to save it from dust and scratches. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

tHE WILD ONE Yo Yo Honey Singh, a well-known Indian rapper, made his Bollywood debut with The Xpose after appearing in Punjabi movies like Mirza (2012), playing the role of a crazy hoodlum, and Tu Mera 22 Main Tera 22 (2013) where he essayed a spoilt brat

The Xpose A lousy script, poor direction and pretentious settings render this movie a letdown ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Fading Gigolo Director John Turturro cast John Turturro, Woody Allen,

Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara Score ★★★★★

SINGH YO YO HONEY reshammiya , N Cast Himesh VA MAHADE ANT NARAYAN Director AN

he high point of The Xpose is an actress falling off the top of a building. The shot is repeated half a dozen times through the movie. Ostensibly, it is used as a rewind device, but by the end of the film it looks kinky, as though a girl falling off a building could be erotic. The girl, Zara Peter Fernandes (Sonali Raut), is a fashionably-dressed actress of the 1960s. Just before she fell off, she was at a film party where she got into a fight with her rival, an actress called Chandni Raza (Zoya Afroz). We are unreliably informed that this scene represents a heated public scrap in a city hotel between yesteryear stars Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi. Be that as it may, the 1960s ambience is inauthentic and the movie is one of the most pretentious ones in recent months. The designers have created Los Angeles, not Bombay, and the period setting is shockingly inconsistent—it varies from scene to scene, 62 open

alternating between retro and contemporary, eventually covering five decades, ending in the present time. So one moment you are in an ornate film star mansion of the mid-20th century, and in the next you are in a song sequence with Ukrainian blondes dancing in the background. The plot thickens. Did Zara Peter Fernandes fall or was she pushed? A whole gamut of possibilities appear and we run through the usual suspects. Because of his dodgy demeanour, a music composer called Kenny Damania (Yo Yo Honey Singh) becomes the popular choice as killer. Unfortunately, it turns out that he didn’t do it. A movie star called Ravi Kumar (Himesh Reshammiya) is next in line, but just as you start rooting for him, his wooden acting lets him down. In short, this is an almost unwatchable mishmash of a movie, and the only thing ‘Xposed’ is its lousy script and poor direction. n

As a duet with two actors on different instruments, Fading Gigolo is amusing. It is about a poetry spouting florist called Fioravante (John Turturro) and an ageing bookseller called Murray (Woody Allen) who get together to start a new business. The florist is the gigolo and the bookstore owner is the pimp. Up to a point, the film is funny, but the plot is contrived and the women who use their expert services for recreation and therapy are predictable Manhattan set pieces—an attractive married dermatologist (Sharon Stone), her friend (Sofia Vergara) and the lonely widow of a rabbi (Venessa Paradis). Naturally, Woody Allen is at his apocryphal best when it comes to the Hasidic widow, once even mishearing Hasidic as ‘acidic’. The Yiddish humour and neurotic mannerisms of Allen have always had a large fan club, but he is getting rather repetitive in his roles and the film could be more appropriately called ‘Fading Comedian’. On the other end, Turturro, as the dead serious no-nonsense gigolo, is good to watch. The best parts of this film are the lovely Spanish songs that accompany his gentler seduction moves. Unfortunately, once the premise of the movie is in place, it doesn’t evolve. There’s no memorable unravelling. The artifice is always visible. n AD

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Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Royal Who Priced Herself Out

Kangana Ranaut, still basking in the success of Queen (like her we’ll just pretend Revolver Rani didn’t happen), is reportedly in Switzerland at the moment, working on her own script. In June, she’s expected to take off to New York for a filmmaking course. Catty industrywallas are saying it’s good she has a Plan B to fall back on as they insist that the actress has allowed all the recent adulation to go to her head. The grapevine has it that Kangana has jacked up her fee to an inflexible Rs 5 crore per film and may have priced herself out of exciting new films because of this ‘unreasonable demand’. “When you quote Rs 5 crore as a fee, you ought to ask yourself if you can bring a Rs 5 crore opening to a film. In Kangana’s case—looking at the dismal box-office performance of Revolver Rani—she clearly cannot,” says a source, “Unlike a Vidya Balan or a Deepika Padukone, the audience won’t go watch any film that Kangana is in.” The actress herself is not unaware that she’s ruffled feathers with her demand, but denies accusations that she’s unwilling to negotiate her fee. For the right film and the right role, she has said she’s open to a pay cut.

Look Who’s Back!

So Aishwarya Rai has finally picked her comeback films! The Devdas star, who took a break from the movies to have a baby, will return to the screen in Mani Ratnam’s next, and has also signed an action movie titled Jazbaa with Kaante director Sanjay Gupta. Ash will soon begin filming Mani’s project (currently in preproduction stages), while Jazbaa is likely to go on the floors later. Her husband Abhishek Bachchan also has a movie in the pipeline with Gupta, Mumbai Saga, third in the filmmaker’s gangster trilogy after Shootout at Lokhandwala (which he produced) and Shootout at Wadala . It is no secret that Ash was being hotly pursued by her Jodhaa-Akbar director Ashutosh Gowariker to star in his next film, a love story tentatively titled Mohenjodaro , set during the 2 june 2014

Indus Valley Civilisation. But a source close to Gowariker reveals that she didn’t feel comfortable committing to the project till the director had a male lead cast and locked into the project. Gowariker has reportedly been in talks with Hrithik Roshan and Shah Rukh Khan for the film, and at one stage word got out that Hrithik had in fact said ‘yes’ to the movie. But it appears that news may have been premature.

Savouring Her Pound of Flesh

I’d already reported in this space some months ago the case of an actress who’s been feeling cheated by her director. Roped in to appear in his film in exchange for a fat fee, the red-hot star discovered that the director had only intended to use her as a prop, having given chunkier roles to two starlets whom he’d also cast in the movie. Now it turns out that the actress may be getting her revenge on the arrogant filmmaker. Turns out he’s been badgering her to promote the movie. Reportedly, his leading man is too busy shooting other projects and the media has little interest in the two starlets. So it’s left to the actress to salvage the film’s publicity. But she won’t give in so easily, she’s told her friends. She wants him to grovel. Among other things, the actress was horrified that she barely features in the film’s trailer, although she’s a bigger marquee draw than the two starlets. She’s also complained that she isn’t looking her best in the movie because the director banned her hair and make-up staff from checking the video monitors routinely so they could give her touch-ups whenever needed. In fact, she has alleged that none of the cast except for one of the two starlets—a South Indian import who the filmmaker is apparently seeing—was allowed access to the video monitors. This favouritism led to many a misgiving and often resulted in heated arguments. Of course, the actress does intend to relent eventually, but that is only because she needs the visibility herself. Right now, though, she’s just enjoying the filmmaker’s desperation. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

What Colour Are You?

by a m a n nat h

hen the political campaigns were gathering momentum in November, being an old hand

in advertising, I thought it was time to break away from the same old symbols and promises. I wanted to evoke Patel, Tilak, Tagore and Dayanand, take one of their best-known sayings and make them relevant. I began with Tilak, and re-used Vasundhara Raje’s apt slogan of ‘Su-raaj’, but then I got busy with other matters. The Congress Government was harassing us over the Tijara PPP project in Rajasthan that we had re-named the Private Party’s Problem! We appealed to everyone we knew in the state and Centre: the Planning Commission, various ministries, the PMO; but they were all busy with their Aadhaar bribes and NREGA seductions, announcing plans instead of results, and harping on the dynasty. That is what led me to create this poster. It’s born of a citizen’s anger and disbelief. And now, the usual pseudo-secular intelligentsia are going on about how we have all become ‘saffron’! What is wrong with that? India has been ruled by two monotheisms for 1,000 years: for about 700 by the ‘green’ lot and for 300 by red-and-blue-flag-flying colonialists, both of whom had terrible records on tolerance. Why should anyone feel insecure under a democratic regime of the most passive and tolerant religion the world has known—unless they have such a guilty racial memory that they feel Hindus will give back what they received in those days? Collectively, Hindus are far too evolved for that. n

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2 june 2014