OPEN Magazine 30 September 2013

How the ghost of MONSANTO haunts GM food research in India

Saying no to ST STEPHEN’S

RS 35 30 September 2013

INSIDE Muzaffarnagar: Aftermath of the riots l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

e v e r y

w e e k

“These Indians are cowards”

— Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were willing to risk a superpower conflict, even a nuclear holocaust, in their bid to get China to attack India during the 1971 Bangladesh war. Extract from Gary J Bass’s The Blood Telegram

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Volume 5 Issue 38 For the week 24—30 September 2013 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers cover photo

Yogesh S/Getty Images

30 september 2013

dilip

To judge the truth or social value of competing sets of beliefs, or sundry prophets, or the acceptability of science, requires free dialogue. This can happen only when we respect life. Murder annihilates speech (‘My Vote for Pluralism’, 16 September 2013). Therefore, opening caveat notwithstanding, the essay does Narendra Dabholkar an injustice. He may have The central question said unfair or even is not the validity patronising things, but or otherwise of he never advocated rationalism, but of violence. He was the means whereby we engaged in reasonable engage one another. speech, which angered Murder is not one some vested interests to of them such an extent that they killed him. In one of their death threats they had also reminded him of Gandhi’s fate. A pacific and gentle man was killed because of his ideas. The central question is not the validity or otherwise of rationalism, but of the means whereby we engage one another in society. Murder is not one of them.  letter of the week Message in the Irony

there have been many critical reponses like this article, ‘No More Goddesses, Please. Bring in the Sluts’ (23 September 2013), floating around the internet of late, and I’m sorry to say they’re not going to make even 1 per cent of the impact the ad campaign itself did. The campaign is patriarchal and stunted in scope, but like many others, I took the imagery as irony and not a literal representation of women. Moreover, if the campaign has got people talking and critiquing, it has served its purpose. Given the short attention spans of the internet generation, it seems the best way to address the campaign’s limitations would be through the same media format. On a separate note, I disagree that education and morality aren’t connected. And I am referring to a holistic education which includes discus-

exploitative than those of witchcraft/black magic.

Ideally, no one set of ideas/ practices should become all powerful.  Gitanjali Singhal

Nudity Is a State of Mind

sions on history and human rights, not just maths and fancy degrees.  Tara

Can’t Justify Use of Force

there is as much diversity in the practice of rationalism as there is in the practice of religion, and individuals in both groups of people use force to enforce their ideas and power (‘My Vote for Pluralism’, 16 September 2013). The use of religion to impose certain views about how lower castes or women should conduct themselves is nauseating. One can distinguish between mainstream Hindutva Hinduism and the myriad forms of local religious practice that are more democratic in their practice and make no pretence of being rational. Use of State power to control/interpret religious belief is equally dangerous, as the practitioners of statecraft are no less unscrupulous and

some of the primitive tribes (be it in Amazon forests or Africa or even in the Andaman’s) have always led nude or minimally covered lifestyles (‘My Nude Vacation’, 16 September 2013). These people have for long lived happily in their communes in harmony with nature. It was the advent of modern religion and Victorian prudish moral values that led to their cultural extinction. Nudity or covering oneself is a state of mind and is largely determined by the way one is conditioned in his/her upbringing, and that to an extent affects one’s outlook to these experiences.  Vikrant

Comforting Memories

this is a really good read (‘City of Perpetual Wait’, 19 August 2013). I think what saved the day for me ( and I think it would hold true for a lot of us) was this dogged belief that I was preparing myself for something that I could not put a finger on but could only feel in my heart—a life that awaited me beyond the city.

And yet, when I have mostly managed to live the way I wanted, the memories of that slow-paced life is what I turn to for comfort. I am really glad ‘small-town’ India is finding its voice and expression in articles like yours.  Ankita Srivastava

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

openmagazine to 56070

vivek muthuramalingam

small world

A Menu Card in Braille empowering

A Bangalore restaurant introduces menu cards for the visually challenged

b a n g a l o r e In the city’s upmarket neighbourhood of Koramangala, restaurants have to reinvent themselves to keep people interested. There are always cheaper or cooler places to go to. But at Om, a vegetarian restaurant popular with office crowds for its thalis, it isn’t about hipness. It’s about being convenient even for the differently-abled. Om has menu cards in Braille for the visually challenged and in large fonts for those with low vision.

A chance conversation with EnAble India, an NGO that works with the different30 september 2013

ly-abled, set things in motion.

The EnAble India office is close to the shopping complex that houses Om restaurant and its employees and volunteers often eat lunch there. Among other things, the NGO has several programmes for the visually challenged. These groups too frequent the restaurant.

One afternoon, Bhavna Jain, the owner of Om, met Gangamma, a 21-year old visually-challenged Bharatanatyam dancer who had just returned after a performance in the US. When it was time to order, the girl asked a

waiter to read out the menu to her. “That’s when it struck me how unfair it was that someone who could travel the world had to depend on someone else for something as mundane as ordering her lunch,” says Jain.

Gayathri Iyer, Sharath HN and a team of a few others from EnAble India, all visually challenged themselves, volunteered to design the menu card in Braille. On Ugadi festival this April, the restaurant made it possible for the visually challenged to be a little more independent. “We complain about small things when we go out,

but we don’t realise what the visually challenged have to contend with. Abroad there are many facilities for them, not so in India,” says Jain.

Sharath says, “[the menu card] was one of our employability projects, which also include money pouches to identify currency notes, taking printouts, etcetera. Another restaurant also printed its menu card in Braille, but never used it.” Jain says that the patronage of the visually challenged has increased after the introduction of the Braille menu card. n Deepa Bhasthi

open www.openthemagazine.com 3

14

contents

36

cover story

40

The war Nixon nearly started against India

football

6

angle

A racist comedy of errors

Jubilant in Kabul

10 32

news reel

Modi’s propaganda force

photo essay

After the rage in Muzaffarnagar

Puff Fiction Electronic cigarettes have gradually found their way into the market as a healthier alternative to smoking. But anti-tobacco activist Jeffery S Wigand thinks they are “just another lie” peddled by the tobacco industry to suit its purpose by “initiating or maintaining nicotine addiction.” Wigand, whose life and mission were chronicled in the film The Insider (in which Wigand was played by Russell Crowe) was in Delhi last week at a talk organised by the web site Newslaundry. Health activist Chitra Subramaniam was also part of the panel. Wigand said that most e-cigarettes are made in China and have no quality control.

Moreover, he said that if we understand nicotine as a poison and as an addictive substance that results in acute myocardial infarction—heart attack—e-cigarettes deliver as much nicotine, if not more, as other forms of cigarettes. n aanchal bansal

smoke and mirrors

Freeloading Fashion Blogger ha u t e A popular fashion blogger was at her shameless best at the launch of Bobbi Brown cosmetics, a UK brand, at the Lodhi Hotel in Delhi last week. The hosts spared no effort in making the event a grand success. The lunch was lavish. Flowers had been flown in from abroad. The champagne flowed. There were free make-up sessions. Far from being gracious, the blogger in question insisted on bringing her husband and friend to the event. What’s more, she also wanted to keep the clothes she was to be styled in. The organisers complied. n chinki sinha 4 open

agriculture

The other face of genetic modification

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of gh ■ ■

AP sin

LAWYER

F o r blatant victim blaming

When his clients were sentenced to death in Delhi’s 16 December gangrape case, defence counsel AP Singh told the media:“If my daughter was having premarital sex and moving around at night with her boyfriend, I would have burnt her alive. All parents should adopt such an attitude.”

To call Singh unreasonable is a tame response to a deeply sinister declaration, the logic behind which is clear: why punish these poor boys when it was the girl who ought to have been punished? The central issue for AP Singh appears not to be the rapists’ crime, but the woman’s conduct. Burning women alive is his proposed moral solution for the problem of sexually active and publicly visible women. So essentially, both the lawyer and rapists have the same response to the same ‘problem’. And the same sentiment: ‘How dare she? She must be taught a lesson.’ n 30 September 2013

46

42

p

p

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

63

Emraan: out of luck?

comedy

Johny Lever’s daughter

photography

52

An island in time

b books

50

true life

Inscrutable Coetzee

Saying ‘No’ to St Stephen’s

‘B’ for Baba

Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar warmed to the Food Security Bill once he spared a thought for the 74 per cent of Indian children who suffer malnutrition

p h o n y - ti c s Baba Ramdev will soon embark on a ten-day trip to the UK and US where, among other things, he will attend a Chicago celebration for the 150th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s birth. He is upbeat about this trip, his second to the US. Insiders say he is brushing up his English.

“Knowledge of the local language is key to connect,” says a key aide of Ramdev’s who asked not to be named.

“After all English is a global language and Baba is a global leader.” n mihir srivastava

c ha n g e o f h e a r t

“There is a need to ensure that farmers’ tendency to work hard shouldn’t be destroyed by the proposed bill”

“If we can provide wheat and rice to the population at nominal rates, they will be left with enough money to buy other nourishing food that they now can’t afford”

—Sharad Pawar, as quoted in the Hindustan Times

—Sharad Pawar, as quoted in The Indian Express

turn

around

12 August 2013

AAP Ki Kasam B ROOM V ROOM Autorickshaw drivers have emerged as unlikely stakeholders in the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections. Their support for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is a reaction against Delhi’s skewed transport policy, which allows the harassment of rickshaw drivers by police and transport officials. Black marketing of rickshaws, too, is

rampant. This has tightened the grip of Delhi’s transport mafia, which has political connections and affiliations with both the Congress and BJP. So the next time you see Arvind Kejriwal’s face and the AAP election symbol—a broom—on a rickshaw, consider it his promise to clean up the mess in Delhi’s transport department. n mihir srivastava

17 September 2013

angle

On the Contrary

A Racist Comedy of Errors If the slurs against Miss America were because Americans thought she was an Arab, why are Indians getting upset? M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

6 open

michael loccasano/getty images

W

hile you, as an Indian,

may be shocked at the latest winner of the Miss America crown, Nina Davuluri, becoming the target of nasty racial slurs on social networking sites by ignorant White Americans, ponder awhile the peculiarity of the emotion that it has aroused. True, she is of Indian descent, but she is also a person born in America and proclaims herself an American. She has become a target of racism under the mistaken belief that she is an Arab. Taking into account the above, back home—ours not hers—we feel affronted because of…what exactly?

The slurs weren’t against Indians. Large parts of America don’t even know where we are on the map. Being slightly geographically dumb, after 9/11 they associate any brown skin with the Middle East. Shouldn’t it be someone from those countries getting angry? Shouldn’t it be their newspapers running two-deck banner headlines on the front page?

If the reason for such angst is that Indians are paragons of empathy and can’t tolerate racism against anyone anywhere, then you might as well take a walk.

Between Americans and Indians, it’s a no-brainer who is more racist. A recent study by two Swedish economists to find the correlation between racism and economic freedom used data from a World Values Survey that had asked people from different countries who they would not like to see as neighbours. India emerged as the second most racist country in the world. ‘In only two of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 per cent of respondents said they would not want a neighbour of a different race. This included 43.5 per cent of Indians and 51.4 per cent of Jordanians,’ wrote The Washington Post in a report on the study.

When we were making nuclear energy thousands of years ago in forests using twigs and vocal chords, we also invented racism. It is just our luck that today, racism is defined by colour. Bring caste into the equation and we are still the emperors of discrimination anytime anywhere in history. Hitler might have turned Jews into slaves, but, in the flow of

hypocrisy If the tweets were aimed at someone not as glamorous as Davuluri, no one would have bothered

time, that is a blink. We have been at it since civilisation took a foothold. And in the beginning, it was the pure racism of colour without technical loopholes like caste. The Rig Veda records the victory of Aryans over the local dark-skinned Dasyus. The enslavement began then and continues today after at least 3,000 years.

One theory says that is why Dalits and Scheduled Tribes are dark complexioned.

Even if historical hypotheses are debatable, all you have to do is look around you for evidence of our racist character. In Mumbai, perfectly normal people in committees of housing societies refuse to let Muslims buy flats there. Every Miss India is unilaterally fair complexioned.

How many Bollywood actresses with dark complexions can you think of besides

It is just our luck that today, racism is defined by colour.

Bring caste into the equation and we are still the emperors of discrimination anytime anywhere in history

Bipasha Basu? Matrimonial columns make it a point to ask for fair-skinned brides. And for decades, newspapers have been writing about the open racism that Africans and Northeast Indians face in Mumbai and Delhi. To feel this sense of shock at a comedy of error which happened in the US is funny.

There is also the question of why anyone got bothered in the first place.

There is a difference between an Indian student being stabbed in Australia because of the colour of his skin and stray comments on the internet. This was so far removed from Davuluri that she wouldn’t even have been aware of it had the media not picked it up. Who doesn’t know about the ugliness of Twitter and who makes a general case out of a few tweets? It became an issue for the simple reason that there was glamour involved. If the same things had been said on Twitter of some middle-aged man doing a mathematics PhD in a US university, no one would have bothered. All that this episode shows us is the hypocrisy of our nature and shallowness—worship of beauty and success—when it comes to values that we hold important. n 30 september 2013

india

A Hurried Man’s Guide to The Onion Price Spiral

Onion prices across the country have been on an upward spiral since July. Wholesale prices in Delhi have shot from Rs 3,889 on 6 September to Rs 4,650 per quintal 10 days later. In Mumbai, during this same period, prices increased from Rs 6,350 to Rs 5,400. In Maharashtra’s Lasalgaon market, the largest for the bulb in India, prices went from Rs 4,410 to Rs 5,300 per quintal in the same time frame.

According to media reports, about 90 per cent of last year’s onions that were stored are already exhausted. There is now about 350,000 tonnes left for consumption.

What the crop is currently going through is a seasonal shortage. Because of this, prices usually peak between September and November and fall between January and March. But the current spike is believed to have The current been manipulated by spike is believed traders and speculators. to have been Government officials claim manipulated by that traders are hoarding traders and and releasing stocks at a speculators slow pace.

biswaranjan rout/ap

In a bid to reduce exports, the Government is mulling the option of raising the minimum export price of onions from $650 a tonne to $1,000. There is also talk of importing onions

crying shame The BJP has made it an electoral issue

from Pakistan and China. The Government claims prices will soften by early next month when kharif crops from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu hit the market.

The vegetable’s price spikes have always held electoral ramifications. In 1998, the BJP lost power in several state elections in part because of the price rise. It is said that this was most evident in Delhi, where the BJP went from the leading party in the state legislature with 67 seats to the opposition with only 15 seats.

The current hike has already become a rallying point for the BJP, which has set up stalls across Delhi to sell onions at discounted prices and call for the fall of the Congress government. n

It Happens

Handheld Ganapati Darshan How Mumbai’s largest Ganapati mandal created an Android app for online darshans L h e n d u p G B h u t i a ritesh uttamchandani

real

not riding the mouse any longer Almost 2,500 people have downloaded the Android app

L

albaugcha Raja in

Parel is the most popular Ganapati in Mumbai. Every year during the Ganesh festival, thousands of devotees throng this venue, often waiting in queues for up to 10 hours to get a glimpse of the idol. Last year, according to the police, millions of people visited the mandal during the 10 days of the festival. This year, however, a new method of darshans was introduced, one that did not involve waiting in lengthy queues. Devotees could get online darshans through a cellphone app.

Bharat Bhujbal, the brain behind the app and a member of the trust that organises the mandal, the Lalbaugcha Raja Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav Mandal, claims he came up with the idea after being moved by the devotion of people last year. “There were elderly people and young children in the crowd waiting for hours to get a darshan. I realised that there must be so many other elderly, young and infirm who want to get a darshan but can’t. That’s when I thought, ‘How about a mobile phone app that live-streams visuals of the idol?’” he says. Bhujbal proposed the idea to Ashok Pawar, president of the mandal, who agreed.

“We also realised that this would even benefit devotees abroad and

those who live in Mumbai but can’t make it to the mandal because of work constraints. Now, it’s all there, right in your hand. Click a few buttons and you get your darshan,” Pawar says.

Apart from live-streaming visuals from the darshan, the app provides photographs, videos of aartis and of celebrities visiting the mandal. So far, almost 2,500 people have downloaded “This would the app. benefit devotees Bhujbal abroad and those expects more can’t make it downloads next year. to the mandal because of work” Currently, it is only available on the Android platform, but an iPhone version will be made available next year.

The Lalbaugcha Raja mandal was established in 1934. Devotees also call it the Navsacha Ganapati (wish-fulfiller). Apart from the app, the mandal also has a Facebook page and website. Bhujbal says, “The idea of online darshans seems odd, I agree. But we need to keep in step with the times. And as long as people really mean it, online or offline, He will bless you and fulfill your wishes.” n 30 september 2013

business

Tribute and Tribulation

Another Dollar Outflow

punit paranjpe/afp

In 2011-12, 300 companies listed in India—mostly subsidiaries of multinational corporations— paid aggregate royalties of an estimated $6 billion. As the list of the five biggest payers shows, payouts have shot up, of late.

Indian shareholders, of course, are disturbed by this trend

r oya lt ie s

The assembly-line

burger chain McDonald’s has left Vikram Bakshi with a bitter aftertaste, at the core of which may be an issue sandwiched in obscurity: royalty payments to foreign principals. For almost two decades, Bakshi has led Connaught Plaza Restaurants, a 50:50 joint venture with McDonald’s Corp of the US that operates its fast-food outlets in north and east India. In July, accusing him of financial misdeeds, the US firm tried to oust him from his job. In his defence, Bakshi claims innocence and alleges the company is trying to bully him out of his stake in the JV so that it gains full control.

“Ending the JV is a rational business decision [for McDonald’s] to maximise revenues,” says Sriram Subramanian, founder of InGovern, a corporate governance consultancy, but adds that “things would have looked better settled amicably.”

Globally, McDonald’s Corp operates via franchise deals with sundry local businessmen who run outlets as little businesses of their own, paying the principal a royalty for the privilege of using its brand and systems. In India, oddly, it had two half-owned JVs instead. Connaught is one. The other was Hardcastle (for its west and south outlets), in which McDonald’s Corp sold its stake two years ago to the local partner and enrolled it as a franchisee that would raise its royalty payment from 3 to 8 per cent of net sales over a few years. Observers suspect the US 30 September 2013

firm would like to extract the same cash of Connaught Plaza.

That would be in line with a trend seen across multinationals operating in India—which is now big enough as a market for them to count on for money. Ever since 2009, when India’s Government lifted its cap on royalty payments to foreign principals, MNCs, under pressure because of the global slowdown, have sharply been raising the sums of money they demand of their Indian subsidiaries for the use of their brands, knowhow and suchlike.

According to Institutional Investors Advisory Services, the quantum of such payments—including technical and licence fees— Ever since India has more than lifted its cap on doubled since royalty outgos, 2008, with the top MNCs have been 25 firms listed on squeezing local stockmarkets here subsidiaries having paid the equivalent of a quarter of their profits as royalties in 2011-12. Since this payout is counted as a cost (like any other expense), minority shareholders in India feel cheated: had royalties been less, local profits and dividends would be higher.

According to Lalit Kumar, partner with Jyoti Sagar Associates, a law firm, instead of a fixed percentage of sales, it may be fairer for subsidiaries to pay on the basis of a gradation scale that “links royalty to different levels of sales that such knowledge transfers help achieve”. n SHAILENDRA TYAGI

TOP ROYALTY PAYERS 2007-08

2011-12

493.1

1,803.1

146.9

374.9

144.4

316.7

77.2

300.9

28.6

129.1

ALL FIGURES ARE IN Rs crore

ronald mcroyalty Battle of control between equal-equity partners? Or a case of market extraction?

Source: institutional investor advisory services compiled by shailendra tyagi

news

reel

propaganda

Modi’s Gujarat Army Seven hundred BJP workers from the state have been drafted to fan out across India to tom-tom his ‘model of development’ dhirendra k jha

central leadership was still squabbling over its prime ministerial candidate and Narendra Modi’s name was yet to be declared, the Gujarat Chief Minister’s lieutenants were busy selecting party workers in the state who would be pressed into service in other parts of the country to convince voters that their leader is not just an icon of

While the BJP’s

ashish sharma

Hindutva but also of ‘development’. By the time the white smoke arose from the BJP headquarters in Delhi, Modi’s men in Gujarat had already drafted around 700 canvassers.

These carefully selected workers of the BJP are all from Gujarat and will be working directly under Modi, according to a state BJP leader considered close to the

party’s PM-in-waiting. They are expected to carry out the necessary spadework in other parts of India before Modi goes in for his final burst of campaigning for the Lok Sabha polls due early next year, he adds. cheerleaders “All of us have been asked to promote Narendrabhai’s image as a man of development”

Sources in the state BJP unit say pamphlets, booklets and CDs are being put together to highlight “Gujarat as the [best] role model for development”, which would then be handed over to these party workers before they set out in different directions.

“The process of identifying party workers desirous of working outside the state began about a month back,” says Khursheed Suma, a Modi loyalist based in Rajkot. “Recently, I was told that my name was confirmed, and so were the names of nearly 30 other party workers from Rajkot. All of us have been asked to work solely on the promotion of Narendrabhai’s image as a man of development.” Besides Rajkot, other districts of Gujarat have also contributed their own groups of BJP workers to this select band “ready to do anything” for Modi.

Khursheed is the all-India convenor of the Narendra Modi Fans Club, an informal body formed in 2005 that has gained popularity in the past three years after it got the patronage of BJP Vicepresident Purushottam Rupala, a close aide of Modi. The club was particularly active during the last Assembly elections in Gujarat, drumming up support for Modi in districts like Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Junagarh, Jamnagar, Surat and Vadodara.

For his new assignment, Khursheed and other selected party workers have been given a list of do’s and don’ts while they go about generating a nationwide ‘wave’ in favour of Modi. These workers, for example, are advised not to travel in cars and always use public transport instead. They have also been asked to avoid hotels and stay as far as possible at the houses of party workers wherever they go. Though most of these workers are likely to be sent to rural parts of other states, Khursheed has been asked to prepare himself for a visit to Lucknow and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. “Most of us would be working in villages,” he says.

‘Only a few of us, including me, would be staying in urban areas.”

According to sources in Gandhinangar, the list of workers has been sent to the BJP’s central office on Ashoka Road in New Delhi and their command for action would be issued “as soon as the [headquarters’] response comes and the pamphlets and CDs are ready”.

W

hat is glaring in the entire exer-

cise is Modi’s excessive reliance on the reputation and party apparatus of Gujarat, a sign of his reluctance to directly involve the BJP’s network in the rest of 30 september 2013

the country for what is sure to be a personality-centric campaign. The fact that all 700 workers belong to the state is yet another indication that he remains rather uncomfortable with—and perhaps even suspicious of—not just a section of party leaders outside Gujarat, but also of non-Gujarati cadres.

Although the BJP has declared him as its face for the upcoming General Election in spite of internal dissent over such a move, Modi himself hardly appears to have grown beyond his state as a commander of the party’s own signed-up loyalists. His behavioural pattern in that sense shows that Modi still sees himself more of the Gujarat BJP’s prime ministerial candidate than of the all-India party. This is typical of Modi.

Those who know the man believe that the same mindset explains the recent appointment of Amit Shah, his close confidant and fellow Gujarati, as the BJP’s leader in charge of Uttar Pradesh, the most crucial state in Modi’s scheme of electoral victory.

In UP, observers have seen a surge in communal tension ever since Amit Shah, Modi’s man Friday, took charge of BJP politics there. What they haven’t seen is what may be in store for the rest of India with 700 of Modi’s men—all from Gujarat—on the prowl That decision on Shah, taken by the central party in May this year, had surprised many both within and beyond the BJP because the electoral profiles of Gujarat and UP are not too similar.

However, the Gujarat CM was keen on him to the point of insistence. For Modi, who is known to accord others only grudging trust if any at all, Shah is the perfect foil. Having played Modi’s nuts-and-bolts man in Gujarat earlier, he now has the same role in UP, and since he has no apparent ambition or appeal of his own, he poses his boss no political threat.

He is simply Modi’s Man Friday.

Even for his October rally at Patna, Modi could not find anyone other than Shah to rely on to set the stage. Shah is likely to visit Patna on 21 September, purportedly to participate in a function being organised by the BJP Scheduled Caste Morcha but actually to do the groundwork and stir up interest in the

proposed Modi rally to be held there.

It is not surprising that Gandhinagar, and not Delhi, is fast emerging as the operational headquarters for the BJP’s newly-anointed candidate for the country’s top post. Whether it is the control of propaganda outside Gujarat or plans for constituencies electorally significant for Modi’s ascent to power, or the technical task of whipping up an e-wave on social media, scarcely has the Gujarat CM ever shown an inclination to trust BJP functionaries in Delhi.

I

f Amit Shah’s appointment as the BJP’s man in charge of delivering UP to the party’s tally was significant, so is the new band of BJP workers now set for Mission Modi. According to BJP sources in Gandhinagar, though many of these party workers will visit key battle constituencies in states like Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir, a large number of them will concentrate primarily on various pockets of Uttar Pradesh.

Khursheed Suma, for example, has been asked to carry out Modi’s propaganda work in Lucknow and Varanasi. “I have been advised to work primarily among Muslims in Uttar Pradesh,” says Khursheed. “I have to tell them that Muslims in Gujarat are happy under Modi and that they have been progressing as never before.”

It is no secret that the Sangh Parivar sees UP—which sends the Lok Sabha 80 of its 543 members—as a communal cauldron that could be stirred to the BJP’s electoral benefit. A series of HinduMuslim riots in the state has already created an atmosphere needed to polarise votes by religious belief. The BJP’s state unit expects that its latest exercise of selling the so-called ‘Gujarat model of development’ could also help the party gain a sizeable chunk of middle-class votes in UP and other areas of the country.

These calculations are especially significant for UP, where the BJP has for almost a decade been in complete disarray. In the 2004 and 2009 General Elections, the party won ten seats apiece, only an eighth of the state’s total. Modi’s emphasis on UP shows that he is sharply aware of the crucial role this state must play for him to have a chance of reaching Delhi, his grand aim.

In UP, observers have seen a surge in communal tension ever since Amit Shah took charge of BJP politics there. What they haven’t seen is what may be in store for the rest of India with 700 of Modi’s men on the prowl. n open www.openthemagazine.com 11

news

reel

Defence

Flight Delay HAL’s production of helicopters and aircraft cannot keep up with even half of the requirements of India’s Air Force and Navy adnan abidi/reuters

suman sharma

scarcity The ALH Dhruv during a joint Indo-US training exercise in Babina, Uttar Pradesh, in 2009

when the country is facing a crisis over paying for oil in dollars, a bid by Venezuela to buy Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) Dhruvs from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) in exchange for oil has surprisingly run into trouble.

On the face of it, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), refused to consider anything other than hard cash, but this is only the pretext for the real reason.

Reflecting the sorry state of affairs within HAL, India has been unable to produce enough Dhruvs to meet its own demands, let alone those from other countries. Both the Indian Army and Indian Air Force (IAF) need these helicopters, but there is a shortage of about 100 in both services. A highly-placed source tells Open that “HAL was told long back by MoD to increase its production, so that the ALH could be exported.”

According to HAL’s own rule book, around 35-36 ALH Dhruvs are supposed to be manufactured each year, but only about 17-18 are rolled out, sometimes even less. Last year, 28 were to be manufactured but only 14 were delivered. “Earlier,” the source says, “extensions of about three months have also been given, but in the past year this was stopped and a 12-month

At a time

12 open

deadline was decided upon. However eventually, a 13-month time-limit was given. But in the audits the dates can’t be tampered with; it will show up.”

The Indian Army presently has three squadrons of the ALH, in Manasbal, Nasik and Bangalore, and there are plans for an additional operational squadron in high altitude areas comprising the weaponised Dhruv. The French missile-making company MBDA has successfully tested Dhruv’s weaponisation by testing its Mistral twin-tube missile in Leh. Four such packs would be mounted on the chopper. The DRDO too has developed the Helina missile for the helicopter, for which launchers have been cleared.

The ALH Dhruv was supposed to replace the Cheetah and Chetaks, presently in use in the Army Aviation Corps. The project

Last year 28 Dhruv helicopters were to be manufactured

by HAL but only 14 could be delivered. It was also meant to make 15 Sukhoi-30MKI fighters for the Indian Air Force but it produced only three

was approved in 1984 but, after more than two decades, the technical requirements specified in 1979 by the Army and IAF have not been fully met.

Defence Minister AK Antony has confirmed in Parliament that HAL’s track record on deliveries has been poor. The annual output per employee tabled in Parliament was Rs 43.49 lakh; it should have stood at Rs 1 crore. Moreover, the overall loss in terms of failing to meet its production target stands at Rs 4,000 crore, a figure that combines the cost of production and the penalty levied on HAL for failing to deliver manufactured aircraft on time to customers. If HAL does not deliver on time, it has to pay liquidatory damages. In the year 2011-12, HAL paid around Rs 100 crore in liquidatory damages for failing to meet its deadline.

HAL Chairman RK Tyagi was contacted by this correspondent, but his office has not responded.

The problem is not restricted to Dhruv.

Last year HAL was to manufacture 15 Sukhoi-30MKI fighters for the Indian Air Force, but it could produce only three.

And this is an organisation that may soon be tasked with producing the Intermediate Jet Trainer (IJT) and the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas (both for the IAF and the Navy).

The biggest foreign customer of the ALH Dhruv is Ecuador, which has been negotiating a price for further orders with India. An order of seven aircraft for $50 million was placed in 2008. India had already supplied five helicopters to Ecuador when an ALH sold to the Ecuadorian Air Force crashed during an aerial display at an air force base near Quito in October 2009. Inquiries showed that the crash was due to a pilot’s error, after which the Bangalore-based Helicopter Academy to Train by Simulation of Flying (HATSOFF) decided to train Ecuadorian Air Force pilots to prepare them for emergencies.

The price of the helicopter has since gone up from $8 million to $12 million because of upgrades, and price negotiations are underway. The Ecuadorian defence attaché in Delhi has been in talks with the MoD and Indian defence attaché in Chile, who also looks after Ecuador. The earlier Ecuadorian requirement of seven choppers has not yet been fulfilled, and there is now an order for more choppers, says a MEA source. Also, last year a defence delegation from Ecuador visited India to discuss the matter.

An MEA official tells Open, “The backlog of the Indian Armed Forces’ requirements is already huge; where is the question of exports?” n 30 september 2013

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H I STO RY

Playing at War How two madmen brought the world to the brink of a third great war ap/Indian Defence Ministry/HO

gary j bass

endgame Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora (left) looks on as Lt Gen AAK Niazi signs the declaration of surrender in Dhaka on 16 December 1971

O

n December 7, Lieutenant General AAK Niazi,

the commander of Pakistan’s Eastern Command, was haggard and exhausted. According to another general, he wept loudly in a meeting. After only a few days of combat, the Pakistan army was being routed in Bangladesh. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger became sincerely convinced that ripping Pakistan in half would not be enough for India. India could next redeploy its eastern forces for a crushing assault against West Pakistan.

What was India fighting for: the liberation of Bangladesh or something more? “The destruction of Pakistan, which seemed to be the ultimate war aim at the time,” answers Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide, without hesitation. “Indeed, she was ready to do it. We had pretty good information that this was under serious consideration in the war cabinet.” Once Bangladesh was secured, the White House staffer says, “Her intention was to move troops across northern India and attack in the west, to finish off this problem.” He says, “I know that it 14 open

was being discussed actively with her generals and her top people.” This was intolerable for the White House.

“This would be a mighty strategic defeat for the US,” says Hoskinson. “She had taken on an ally and destroyed it.

Nixon and Kissinger were always aware of national prestige. . . . This would be a total victory for the Soviets.”

Although the most sensitive wartime records are still secret, it is not clear that India was seriously trying to break apart West Pakistan. As Kissinger briefed Nixon, “the Indians still seem to be essentially on the defensive” in the west. Even if India could smartly finish up its eastern campaign, it would take more time to redeploy its troops westward than the Soviet Union, stalling a ceasefire at the United Nations, could accept: the CIA reckoned that it would take five or six days for India’s airborne division to move to the western front, and much longer for their infantry and armor fighting in the east. US intelligence analysts argued that in order to hack apart West Pakistan, India would have to not just defeat the Pakistan 30 September 2013

army, but completely wipe it out— something probably beyond India’s capacities, even if it wanted to do so.

Hoskinson’s verdict, echoing that of Nixon and Kissinger, depended heavily on raw intelligence from a CIA mole with access to Indira Gandhi’s cabinet. Based on this one source, the CIA reported that Gandhi meant to keep fighting until Bangladesh was liberated, India had seized a contested area of Kashmir currently controlled

by Pakistan, and Pakistan’s armor and air force were “destroyed so that Pakistan will never again be in a position to plan another invasion of India.”

It is still not certain who the mole was, nor how reliable he was. Many intelligence analysts doubted the report.

For a start, the real debates and decisions happened in the prime minister’s secretariat, sometimes widening to include a small political affairs committee of key ministers, but certainly not the whole unwieldy cabinet of blabbermouths. It is true that Indian diplomats were evasive when asked about that contested area of Kashmir, and Indian officials later admitted wanting to gain some other small, strategic bits of territory in Kashmir— but they emphasized that Gandhi had overruled her hawks and insisted on waging a basically defensive war in the west.

Whether the informant was worth much, the US government relied overwhelmingly on this information.

Kissinger, whose emotions were already running high, was jolted. He did not question the intelligence, which confirmed his preconceived view of India. He did not ask how India would manage such a major campaign against West Pakistan, nor about how it could extricate itself afterward. Instead, he decided that the United States needed to get much tougher on India. On December 8, he told Nixon, “the Indian plan is now clear. They’re going to move their forces from East Pakistan to the west.” They would then “smash” Pakistan’s army and air force and annex some of Kashmir. This, he argued— going beyond the CIA intelligence— could well mean “the complete dismemberment” of West Pakistan, with secessionism in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. “All of this would have been achieved by Soviet support, Soviet arms, and Indian military force.” So Soviet client states in the Middle East and elsewhere would feel free to attack with impunity, while China would think the Americans were “just too weak.” The crisis was, he told Nixon, “a big watershed.”

Nixon was hit hard too. Like Kissinger, he swiftly accepted the intelligence, without wondering whether this was bluster or if India would really be so reckless, or asking skeptical questions about India’s military difficulties besieging West Pakistan. Both Nixon and Kissinger might have seen this one source as revealing hostile but standard Indian war aims in the west: some gains in Kashmir, substantial damage to Pakistan’s war machine, all of it limited by West Pakistan’s own formidable resistance.

Instead, they foresaw the imminent annihilation of West Pakistan. Extrapolating beyond the CIA mole’s informa30 September 2013

tion, Nixon spoke of a US intelligence “report on Mrs. Gandhi’s Cabinet meeting where she said that, she said deliberately that they were going to try to conquer West Pakistan, they were going to move their forces from the East to the West.”

KISSINGER’S SECRET ONSLAUGHT

Yahya’s only hope was outside help from China and the United States. Pakistan’s General Niazi says that he was told to hold out for help from “Yellows from the North and Whites from the South”—the Chinese and the Americans. Kissinger urged Nixon to “scare them”— the Indians— “off an attack on West Pakistan as much as we possibly can. And therefore we’ve got to get another tough warning to the Russians.”

Kissinger now proposed three dangerous initiatives.

The United States would illegally allow Iran and Jordan to send squadrons of US aircraft to Pakistan, secretly ask China to mass its troops on the Indian border, and deploy a US aircraft carrier group to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India. He urged Nixon to stun India with all three moves simultaneously.

Kissinger knew that the American public would be shocked by this gunboat diplomacy. “I’m sure all hell will break loose here,” he said. Still, Nixon quickly agreed to all three steps: “let’s do the carrier thing. Let’s get assurances to the Jordanians. Let’s send a message to the Chinese. Let’s send a message to the Russians. And I would tell the people in the State Department not a goddamn thing they don’t need to know.”

Nixon and Kissinger’s most perilous covert gambit was the overture to Mao’s China— already on poisonous terms with India. Kissinger believed that Zhou Enlai was somewhat unhinged when it came to India, and the deployment of Chinese soldiers could easily have sparked border clashes. Such a movement of Chinese troops would have made an effective threat precisely because of the danger of escalation out of control. At worst, this could have ignited a wider war.

That, in turn, risked expanding into a nuclear superpower confrontation. If China was moving troops to help Pakistan, India would surely want the Soviet Union to do likewise. According to the CIA’s mole in Delhi, Indira Gandhi claimed that the Soviet Union had promised to counterbalance any Chinese military actions against India. Just two years before, China had set off hydrogen bombs in its western desert to threaten the Soviet Union.

Would the Soviets dare to confront the Chinese? And if the Soviets got dragged in, how could the Americans stay out?

Back on November 23, Kissinger had enticingly suggested to a Chinese delegation in New York that India’s northern border might be vulnerable. Now, on December 6, Nixon told Kissinger that he “strongly” wanted to tell China that some troop movements toward India’s border could be very important. “[D]amnit, I am convinced that open www.openthemagazine.com 15

if the Chinese start moving the Indians will be petrified,” the president said. “They will be petrified.” He shrugged off the obvious problem of winter snows in the Himalayas, admiringly recalling China’s bravery in the Korean War: “The Chinese, you know, when they came across the Yalu, we thought they were a bunch of goddamn fools in the heart of the winter, but they did it.”

Kissinger had personally and repeatedly promised Indian leaders at the highest levels— including Haksar and Gandhi herself— that the United States would stand with India against threats of Chinese aggression. Now the Nixon administration was secretly doing the opposite.

Kissinger was heartened at US intelligence reports of truckloads of military supplies flowing from China into West Pakistan. But the CIA insisted that China was “keeping its head down,” neither prepared for nor capable of a full-scale war against India. In harsh mountainous terrain, it would be tremendously hard to move forces fast enough to matter. The CIA argued that it would take at least two months for China to get ready for a moderate amount of combat with India. Still, the CIA noted, with India’s “traumatic” memory of the last war with China, Chinese saber rattling and harassing attacks could cause real trouble for India, even without a war. India would have to divert large numbers of troops to guard its northern flank. As Kissinger wrote to Nixon, the CIA did think that China could launch smaller but still substantial military efforts, from “overt troop movements” to a “limited diversionary attack.”

Kissinger linked the China gambit to the United States secretly providing aircraft from Iran and Jordan to Pakistan. On December 8, in the private office that Nixon kept in the ornate Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, Kissinger told the president that “we could give a note to the Chinese and say, ‘If you are ever going to move this is the time.’ ” Nixon immediately agreed. Kissinger did not think it would be so simple to scare off the Soviet Union. He admitted that if the administration’s bluff was called, they would lose, but added that if they did not act now, they would definitely lose.

Nixon was resolute, saying they had to “calmly and coldbloodedly make the decision.”

The president argued that “we can’t do this without the Chinese helping us. As I look at this thing, the Chinese have got to move to that damn border. The Indians have got to get a little scared.” Kissinger agreed, proposing that they notify the Chinese about what Nixon was secretly doing, and tell them of the advantages of China moving some of its soldiers to India’s frontier. Nixon bluntly instructed Kissinger to go to New York, to the Chinese mission at the United Nations, with a message directly from him to Zhou Enlai. Kissinger, who wanted to impress the Chinese leadership by showing the administration’s toughness, guessed that China might start a small diversion— enough to prevent India from moving too many of its troops west.

16 open

Nixon was tantalized by the prospect that the Chinese would move if they thought that the White House would act too. Although Kissinger cautioned that China had “just had a semi-revolt in the military” and had “a million Russians on their border,” the president said, “Boy, I tell you, a movement of even some Chinese toward that border could scare those goddamn Indians to death.”

“IS IT REALLY SO MUCH AGAINST OUR LAW?”

Kissinger told Nixon, “We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.” That understates it.

In fact, to help Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger knowingly broke US law— and did so with the full awareness of George H W Bush, H R Haldeman, Alexander Haig, and others.

Yahya desperately needed US military supplies, particularly aircraft. On the second day of the war, he begged for US help, adding, “for God’s sake don’t hinder or impede the delivery of equipment from friendly third countries.”

That day, Kissinger told Nixon that they had received a desperate appeal from Yahya, saying that his military supplies had been cut off, leaving him acutely vulnerable.

Could the Americans help him through Iran, one of Pakistan’s most reliable friends? Nixon and Kissinger swiftly agreed to this, without considering any legal issues. Kissinger was concerned only that the United States would have to replace whatever Iranian weaponry was lost in the fighting. Nixon agreed: “If it is leaking we can have it denied. Have it done one step away.” Kissinger told the president, “If war does continue, give aid via Iran.”

Nixon was relieved: “Good, at least Pakistan will be kept from being paral[y]zed.”

They determinedly kept their actions in the shadows, circumventing normal State Department communications by using a back channel between Nixon and the shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Nixon, reassured that the US ambassador in Tehran was oblivious, was delighted: “Good, well we’ll have some fun with this yet.

God, you know what would really be poetic justice here is if some way the Paks could really give the Indians a bloody nose for a couple of days.” The next day, the shah agreed to a US request to send Iranian military equipment to Pakistan, with the United States replacing whatever Iran sent.

Jordan also got a request from Yahya, for eight to ten sophisticated US-made F-104 Starfighter fighter-interceptors. King Hussein seemed keen to move his squadrons, but, fearing congressional wrath, did not want to act without express approval. When he nervously asked the US embassy in Amman for advice, the diplomats balked.

Kissinger noted with exasperation that these US officials were lecturing the king of Jordan that it would be immoral to get involved in a faraway war; these diplomats had not conceived of the last-ditch possibility of using Iran and Jordan to provide US weapons to the tottering 30 September 2013

Pakistani military.

This was illegal. That fact was driven home to Kissinger by lawyers at the State Department and Pentagon, as well as by the White House staff.

On December 6, in the war’s early days, Kissinger for the first time proposed the operation in a Situation Room meeting— not mentioning that the president had already made up his mind, and that the Iranians were already acting. But a State Department official immediately warned Kissinger that transferring Jordanian weapons to Pakistan “is prohibited on the basis of present legal authority.” Kissinger countered, “My instinct is that the President will want to do it”— his way of saying that Nixon had already decided. “He is not inclined to let the Paks be defeated if he can help it.”

After this Situation Room meeting, Kissinger walked upstairs to the Oval Office, where Nixon was waiting for the press. Before the cameras arrived, Kissinger told the president that “this military aid to Iran that Iran might be giving to West Pakistan. The only way we can really do it— it’s not legal, strictly speaking, the only way we can do it is to tell the shah to go ahead through a back channel, to go ahead.” Nixon did not flinch at breaking the law.

Kissinger continued, “He’d sent you a message saying that he’s eager to do it as long as we don’t— the damn press doesn’t know about it and we keep our mouths shut.”

Nixon’s only concern was that the shah did not inform the US ambassador in Tehran: “I don’t want that son of a bitch to know.” “Oh no, no, no, no,” Kissinger assured him.

Nixon and Kissinger then plotted to conceal what they were doing. “We’ll have to say we didn’t know about it,” Kissinger said, “but we’ll cover it as soon as we can.” “Shit, how do we cover it?” Nixon asked. Kissinger explained, “By giving him”— the shah— “some extra aid next year.”

“Do it,” said Nixon. He gave his official line: “I don’t know anything about it.” Then he laid out how they could publicly justify increasing military aid to compensate Iran, without mentioning the real reason. “Let’s put it this way: if I go to the Mideast, I think we need a stronger anchor in that area, and I determine, at this moment, that aid to Iran should substantially be increased next year.” Kissinger agreed.

The State Department, sensing the impending scandal, quickly drew up a legal memorandum to stop Kissinger.

Pakistan was still formally under a US arms embargo. So, the State Department’s lawyers explained, the president could only consent to the transfer of US weapons to Pakistan from another country if the United States declared it would be willing to directly provide the stuff itself. Nixon and Kissinger knew that that kind of presidential declaration was politically impossible— an overt step that would never be tolerated by the infuriated Congress.

Such a White House action would also, as the State Department noted, be in conflict with the ban on military assistance and arms sales to Pakistan in pending foreign aid legislation that had been approved by both the Senate 30 September 2013

Yahya desperately needed US military supplies, particularly aircraft. On the second day of the war, he begged for US help, adding, “for God’s sake don’t hinder or impede the delivery of equipment from friendly third countries.”

and the House of Representatives. After quoting from the relevant public law, the State Department emphatically warned, “Under the present US policy of suspending all arms transfers to Pakistan, the U[nited] S[tates] G[overnment] could not consent to such a transfer.”

The Pentagon’s lawyers agreed. They repeated all of the State Department’s legal analysis, chapter and verse, and helpfully sent along copies of each of the laws to the White House. As the Pentagon’s legal experts pointed out, the law “prohibits ‘third-country transfers’ to eligible recipients where simple direct transfers would not be permitted for policy reasons.” Leery of White House skullduggery, they warned that “if simple subterfuge is the only reason for preferring a ‘third-country transfer,’ then that is the type of ‘abuse’ which the Congress intended to prohibit.”

Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s staffer at the White House, echoed these legal alarms. He had actually floated the idea of looking away while Iran and Jordan snuck weapons into Pakistan, but soon after prominently highlighted the legal “serious problem” for Kissinger— leaving his adventurous boss in no doubt that any US weapons that found their way from Iran or Jordan to Pakistan would stand as a stark violation of US law.

Understanding clearly that what they were doing was illegal, Nixon and Kissinger did it anyway.

In the Oval Office, Nixon explained to Haldeman that they had told “the Iranians we’re going to provide arms through third countries and so forth and so on.” He casually added, “We’re trying to do something where it’s a violation of law and all that.” The White House chief of staff did not object— or even comment— when the president said that he and Kissinger were planning to break US law.

On December 8, in a Situation Room meeting, Kissinger laced into State Department officials for trying to stop him. “I have reviewed the cables to Jordan which enthusiastically tell Hussein he can’t furnish planes to the Paks,” he said. “We shouldn’t decide this on such doctrinaire grounds”— that is, obeying US law. “The question open www.openthemagazine.com 17

is, when an American ally is being raped, whether or not the US should participate in enforcing a blockade of our ally, when the other side is getting Soviet aid.” After a Pentagon official reminded him about the law, Kissinger blew up at the group: “We have a country, supported and equipped by the Soviet Union, turning one half of another country into a satellite state and the other half into an impotent vassal. Leaving aside any American interest in the subcontinent, what conclusions will other countries draw from this in their dealings with the Soviets?”

Kissinger urged the president, “I would encourage the Jordanians to move their squadrons into West Pakistan and the Iranians to move their squadrons.” When Nixon asked what effect these squadrons would have, Kissinger replied, “Enough. Militarily in Pakistan we have only one hope now. To convince the Indians that the thing is going to escalate. And to convince the Russians that they’re going to pay an enormous price.” Nixon wanted to “immediately” tell the Jordanians to act. Kissinger said, “I’d let the Jordanians move another squadron to Pakistan simply to show them some exclamation and let the Iranians move their two squadrons to Jordan if they want to.”

Nixon agreed. Kissinger pressed him: “right now we’re in the position where we are telling allies not to assist another ally that is in mortal danger.”

Nixon and Kissinger worried about getting caught. The president warned that if Kissinger raised these weapons transfers in a Situation Room meeting, “the whole damn thing will get out in the papers.” When Kissinger doubted that the Jordanians could move squadrons of planes without reporters finding out, Nixon said they would pretend that the Jordanians had acted on their own. Kissinger told Pakistan’s ambassador to “stop all cable traffic with respect to help on ammunition and so forth. We are doing what we can and we will send a coded message. It’s getting too dangerous for you to send it.” Kissinger cautioned him that “we are working very actively on getting military equipment to you— but for God’s sake don’t say anything to anybody!”

Even Kissinger’s own White House staffers, who suspected something was up, were kept in the dark. Samuel Hoskinson denies knowing about the operation. “This would have been in a channel outside of us,” he says.

“Covert action was in a separate vein.” Later, Kissinger grew sufficiently nervous about this illegality that he had Alexander Haig, his deputy, gather evidence fixing the blame on Nixon. Haig wrote to Kissinger, “Here are three telcons [telephone conversations] all of which confirm the President’s knowledge of, approval for and, if you will, directive to provide aircraft to Iran and Jordan.”

Nixon and Kissinger made no appeal to theories of executive power, and drew up no legal briefs supporting their actions; they simply acted. For their crucial meeting on the Iranian and Jordanian arms transfers, on December 8, they were joined in the president’s hideaway office in the Executive Office Building by John Mitchell, the attor18 open

ney general, who proved as unconcerned about violating the law as they were. (The crucial parts of this meeting are bleeped out on the White House tapes, but the State Department has released a declassified transcript.)

Kissinger candidly said, “it’s illegal for them to move them.” A little later, Nixon said, “You say it’s illegal for us to do, also for the Jordanians.” Kissinger explained that “the way we can make it legal is to resume arms sales through— if we, if you announce that Pakistan is now eligible for the purchase of arms.” That would be a massive policy shift, and Nixon balked: “That would be tough, Henry, to go that way.” Kissinger concurred: “you would do more if it were not for this goddamn Senate.”

Instead, Kissinger, unfazed by the presence of the attorney general, said, “the way you get the Jordanian planes in there is to tell the King we cannot give you legal permission. On the other hand, we’d have to figure out a message, which says, ‘We’ll just close our eyes. Get the god-damned planes in there.’ ” Similarly, Kissinger said, the shah of Iran did not dare to act without a “formal commitment from us.” To safeguard their secret, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to covertly send a “special emissary”— probably either the CIA director or an Israeli— bearing that message to King Hussein. “We’d have to do it that way,” said Kissinger. “We cannot authorize it.”

None of this elicited protest from the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Mitchell waited patiently through the meeting, occasionally jumping into the conversation to disparage “the goddamn Indians” and to slam Ted Kennedy as “stupid.” When Nixon wanted to keep the State Department in the dark, Mitchell immediately concurred. When Kissinger pointed out that the State Department had to know about the movement of the Jordanian planes, Mitchell proposed a cover-up: “Well, you’ve got to give them the party line on that or all a sudden the Secretary of State will say that’s illegal.”

Kissinger insisted that the Jordanians had to be told that they would not be punished “if they move them against our law.” Nixon agreed.

The president said, “All right, that’s an order. You’re goddamn right.” In front of the attorney general, Nixon asked, “Is it really so much against our law?” Kissinger admitted that it was. Referring to the Iranians and the Jordanians, he explained again, “What’s against our law is not what they do, but our giving them permission.”

Nixon said, “Henry, we give the permission privately.”

“That’s right,” agreed Kissinger.

“Hell,” said the president, “we’ve done worse.”

“WE GO BALLS OUT”

This was a radical set of steps. They could ignite a border war between China and India, set up a confrontation with the Soviet Union, cause a domestic firestorm, and get the administration dragged through US courts. If Nixon stood his ground, the crisis could escalate out of control; if he did not, then the United States would lose credibil30 September 2013

ity— always a big concern for Nixon’s team. Nixon momentarily got cold feet. “The partition of Pakistan is a fact,” he told Kissinger, who conceded as much. Nixon said, “You see those people welcoming the Indian troops when they come in. Now the point is, why is then, Henry, are we going through all this agony?” Kissinger stiffened the president’s resolve. “We’re going through this agony to prevent the West Pakistan army from being destroyed,” he crisply replied, after a pause to consider the question.

“Secondly, to maintain our Chinese arm. Thirdly, to prevent a complete collapse of the world’s psychological balance of power, which will be produced if a combination of the Soviet Union and the Soviet armed client state can tackle a not so insignificant country without anybody doing anything.”

Kissinger then went apocalyptic. “I would keep open the possibility that we’ll pour in arms into Pakistan,” he said angrily. “I don’t understand the psychology by which the Russians can pour arms into India but we cannot give arms to Pakistan. I don’t understand the theory of non-involvement. I don’t see where we will be as a country. I have to tell you honestly, I consider this our Rhineland.”

Kissinger direly warned that “the rape” of Pakistan, an ally of the United States, would have terrible consequences in Iran, Indonesia, and the Middle East. When this did not sway Nixon, he added that if the Soviet Union grew too confident after an Indian victory, there could be a Middle East war in the spring. Nixon nervously said, “We have to know what we’re jeopardizing and know that once we go balls out we never look back.” Kissinger agreed that the president was gambling his relationship with the Soviets, but hoped that the very willingness to bet such big stakes would scare them.

This doomsday argument persuaded Nixon. He went forward on all the interlocking parts of Kissinger’s plan: moving a US aircraft carrier and asking China to deploy its troops toward India’s border. And the president again approved the illegal movement of Jordanian warplanes.

Kissinger said, “I’d let the Jordanians move some of their planes in,” and added, “And then we would tell State to shut up.” Nixon agreed to that. Kissinger continued, “we would have to tell him”— King Hussein— “it’s illegal, but if he does it we’ll keep things under control.” Once again, neither Nixon nor Kissinger flinched at breaking the law.

Nixon said, “with regard to the Jordanians, no sweat.”

Soon after, he ordered, “Get the planes over.”

Nixon and Kissinger laid their relationship with the Soviet Union on the line, deliberately risking the cancellation of an upcoming summit of the two superpowers.

That afternoon, Nixon hauled the visiting Soviet agriculture minister into the Oval Office for a beating. The startled minister was said to be a close personal friend of Brezhnev, but he was beyond his brief and out of his depth. Nixon— sending a message to Brezhnev— warned that the war could “poison” his relationship with the Soviet Union and cause “a confrontation.”

30 September 2013

Afterward, Nixon said, “I really stuck it to him.” “Well, but you did it so beautifully,” Kissinger replied. He predicted that the war would end now, with the United States coming out damaged but not as badly as it could have been, and with India thwarted from launching an onslaught against West Pakistan.

Kissinger told a Soviet diplomat that the United States was moving some of its military forces: as he explained to Nixon, “in effect it was giving him sort of a veiled ultimatum.” Nixon sternly wrote to Brezhnev, urging him to use his influence to restrain India, and telling him that he shared responsibility for India’s actions.

Soon after, Kissinger told the Soviets that they had until noon on December 12, or “we will proceed unilaterally.” With vague menace, he said that “we may take certain other steps.” Nixon privately said that the Soviet Union was abetting Indian aggression. Kissinger, who called the situation “heartbreaking,” agreed: “now that East Pakistan has practically fallen there can no longer be any doubt that we are dealing with naked aggression supported by Soviet power.”

Meanwhile, the illegal transfers of US weaponry to Pakistan went ahead. As Kissinger frankly told Nixon, “Four Jordanian planes have already moved to Pakistan, 22 more are coming. We’re talking to the Saudis, the Turks we’ve now found are willing to give five. So we’re going to keep that moving until there’s a settlement.”

Kissinger pressed a Situation Room meeting: “What if Jordan should send planes to Pakistan? Why would this be such a horrible event?” A senior State Department official again explained the legal problem. Kissinger’s insistence sparked suspicions. Harold Saunders, the White House staffer, warily wrote that Jordan might have already delivered F-104s.

The CIA spotted the covert operation, reporting that a squadron of Jordanian F-104s had gone to Pakistan, totaling twelve warplanes. En route the planes stopped in Saudi Arabia, with some of them flown by Jordanian pilots and others allegedly guarded by Pakistanis. The State Department, too, observed eleven of these Jordanian F-104s in Saudi Arabia, and surmised they were bound for Pakistan. While the US embassy in Amman was never notified, its staffers did notice a conspicuous absence of Jordanian fighter pilots at their favorite bars.38 Haig secretly told a Chinese delegation that Jordan had sent six fighter aircraft to Pakistan and would send eight more soon; Iran was replacing Jordan’s lost airplanes; and Turkey might be sending as many as twenty-two planes.

Kissinger assured the Chinese, “Jordan has now sent fourteen aircraft to Pakistan and is considering sending three more.” Nixon later asked, “Did the Jordan[ian]s send planes[?]” Kissinger replied, “17.”

Now Kissinger could ask China to move its troops toward India’s border. Nixon, keen for the People’s Liberation Army to deploy its soldiers, was convinced India would back down: “these Indians are cowards.” open www.openthemagazine.com 19

About the Chinese, he said, “All they’ve got to do is move something. Move their, move a division. You know, move some trucks. Fly some planes. You know, some symbolic act. We’re not doing a god-damn thing, Henry, you know that.”

So Kissinger raced up to New York on December 10, bringing with him Haig and Winston Lord, his special assistant and China aide. George H W Bush got a call from the White House, telling him to come to an Upper East Side address, which was a CIA safe house. Bush arrived first, then Kissinger and Haig, followed by China’s tough ambassador to the United Nations, Huang Hua. It was an extraordinarily secret gathering. Kissinger assured the Chinese, “George Bush is the only person outside the White House who knows I come here.” Although Kissinger cringed at the apartment’s mirrored walls and tacky paintings, the place was chosen because it had no doorman and few occupants, so that gossipy New Yorkers would not see Chinese officials in Mao suits entering a building, soon followed by someone looking a lot like Henry Kissinger.

With candor verging on gusto, Kissinger told the Chinese that the Americans were breaking US law: “We are barred by law from giving equipment to Pakistan in this situation. And we also are barred by law from permitting friendly countries which have American equipment to give their equipment to Pakistan.” Making a show of being untroubled by the illegality, he explained that they had told Jordan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia— and would tell Turkey too— that if they shipped US arms to Pakistan, the Americans would understand. The administration would only feign mild protest, and would make up the Jordanian and Iranian losses in the next year’s budget.

This operation, he said, was under way: “On this basis, four planes are leaving Jordan today and 22 over the weekend. Ammunition and other equipment is going from Iran.” And there would be “six planes from Turkey in the near future.” Kissinger reminded the Chinese how sensitive this information was.

While Kissinger spoke, Lord, Haig, and Bush— a future assistant secretary of state, a future secretary of state, and a future president of the United States— all kept quiet.

George Bush was well aware of the illegal acts: after the meeting, he wrote, “Kissinger talked about the fact that we would be moving some ships into the area, talked about military supplies being sent from Jordan, Turkey and Iran”— prudently leaving out Kissinger’s admissions of lawbreaking. Winston Lord, who took the official notes, says, “How they were handling it, whether they were stretching or breaking limits, I don’t remember precisely. Clearly it was to help Pakistan and to impress the Chinese. In terms of the legality or morality of it, I can’t untangle that in my own memory.”

Next, as Bush noted, “Henry unfolded our whole policy on India-Pakistan, saying that we were very parallel with the Chinese.” Kissinger said that the Americans had 20 open

cut off aid to India, including military supplies, pointedly mentioning that they had canceled all radar equipment for India’s northern defense— an invitation for China to strike one day. And he said that they were moving an aircraft carrier and several destroyers toward the Indian Ocean, in an armada that far outmatched the Soviet fleet there.

Kissinger then turned to his main goal: getting the Chinese to move troops against India. He said, “the President wants you to know” that “if the People’s Republic were to consider the situation on the Indian subcontinent a threat to its security, and if it took measures to protect its security, the US would oppose efforts of others to interfere with the People’s Republic.” In case all that diplomatic verbiage was unclear, he later bluntly said, “When I asked for this meeting, I did so to suggest Chinese military help, to be quite honest. That’s what I had in mind.”

Kissinger laid out all of the administration’s innermost secrets to the Chinese. One of the documents he showed them was, a Chinese translator pointed out, classified as “exclusively eyes only.” Kissinger joked, “There’s a better one that says ‘burn before reading.’ ” Turning to Bush, he said, “Don’t you discuss diplomacy this way.”

Huang denounced Indian aggression and the dismemberment of a sovereign Pakistan, harshly comparing India to Imperial Japan. Kissinger, trying to match the Chinese venom at India, said, “I may look weak to you, Mr Ambassador, but my colleagues in Washington think I’m a raving maniac.”

Returning to Washington, Kissinger hopefully noted that China was calling up reserve troops for its mountain divisions. He told Nixon that he was pretty sure that the Chinese would do something. Nixon was optimistically inclined to believe that if China moved troops, it would not “stiffen the Russians” to back up India. Kissinger was confident that China would move.

Bush— whom Kissinger mostly used for comic relief— was frightened by Kissinger’s behavior and startled by how much information he unveiled to the Chinese. After the meeting, Bush privately wrote that he was uncomfortable to be “in close cahoots with China,” and would have preferred to “keep a fairly low profile, let Red China do what they had do to counteract the Russian threat.” He distrusted Huang, who was “a one-way street. We are supplying him with a great deal of information, he is doing nothing.” About Kissinger, Bush noted, “I think he goes too far in some of these things,” especially when Kissinger said he would support any Chinese resolution at the United Nations: “That is going very far indeed, it’s going too far.” But Bush, a team player on his way up, kept his misgivings to himself.

“ARMAGEDDON TERMS”

With the Indian army closing in on Dacca, the crisis built to a crescendo. Nixon privately wrote off East Pakistan, 30 September 2013

and concentrated on safeguarding West Pakistan.

Kissinger warned the president on December 10 that “the east is down the drain. The major problem now has to be to protect the west. . . . Their army is ground down. And 2 more weeks of war and they’re finished in the west as much as they are in the east.”

Nixon’s and Kissinger’s efforts to back Pakistan seemingly wound up encouraging its military rulers to fight on in the east. Although a quick surrender would have saved soldiers’ lives, the Pakistani junta still hoped for rescue by the great powers. Even though Yahya seemed to realize that he could not hold East Pakistan, he vowed that his troops there would fight “to the last Muslim” for Pakistan and Islam. On December 10, a senior Pakistani general desperately offered an eastern cease-fire through the United Nations— but Yahya quickly withdrew the proposals. These cease-fire terms were also scorned by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, appointed by Yahya as deputy prime minister and foreign minister in a new wartime civilian Pakistani government. In Delhi, Haksar was shocked at the military junta’s willingness to allow continued wasteful bloodshed.

On December 11, the Pakistan army’s chief of staff exaggeratedly wrote to General Niazi, the commander of Pakistan’s Eastern Command, that the United States’ Seventh Fleet would soon be in position and that China had activated a front. With India under strong Soviet and US pressure, the chief of staff instructed Niazi to hold out, following Yahya’s wishes.

With Niazi’s troops still battling on, Indian officials needed more time to win in the east. So a frenetic Haksar insisted that a cease-fire must address “the basic causes of the conflict”— an effective way of stalling. Indira Gandhi, despite the staggering rebuke from the United Nations General Assembly, told foreign governments that a ceasefire without firm commitments to get the Bengali refugees home would merely “cover up the annihilation of an entire nation.”

Still, Haksar briefed Indian officials that they had no territorial claims in either Bangladesh or West Pakistan.

He urged them to avoid saying or doing anything that would help those who were trying to label India the aggressor. India was, he wrote, “fighting a purely defensive battle” against West Pakistan.

Trying to mollify the Nixon administration even as Indian soldiers fought on, Haksar instructed the embassy in Washington to explain that India wanted no West Pakistani soil, and that India’s recognition of Bangladesh was a “self-imposed restraint” proving it had absolutely no territorial ambitions there. By way of contrast, he reminded the US government that Pakistan was attacking in Kashmir and elsewhere on the western front. The Indians were clumsy about explaining their goals in one particular area of Kashmir, called Azad Kashmir, under Pakistan’s control but claimed by India; but even there, Haksar said that India would not wrest that land from 30 September 2013

Pakistani rule by force. Swaran Singh, India’s foreign minister, told George Bush that India had “no major ambitions” there, leaving open the possibility of what Bush called “minor rectifications.” The Indians assured Bush they did not want to prolong the war. Haksar soothingly wrote that “we have no desire to aggravate the situation and shall exercise self-restraint consistent with the needs of self-defence.”

The State Department’s analysts confirmed that— at least for the moment— India’s troops matched Haksar’s words. Kissinger told Nixon that Indian troops were still in a holding posture on the western front, despite Indian airstrikes at military sites across West Pakistan. At the same time, Pakistan was on the offensive in Punjab and especially in Kashmir; as the CIA reported, Pakistan’s troops had driven the Indians out of Chhamb and were still advancing. India and Pakistan were, the CIA reckoned, roughly equally matched in Kashmir and the northwest. But the CIA had some signals intelligence to suggest that India might be preparing to shift some troops from the eastern front to the western.

Fearing the worst from China, India shored up its Soviet support. Gandhi’s government sent DP Dhar racing back to Moscow on December 11, carrying a personal message for the Soviet premier. The Soviet leadership stood by India, but cautiously; they were not willing to recognize Bangladesh yet. Still, the Soviet ambassador in Delhi secretly pledged that if China intervened against India, the Soviet Union would open its own border diversionary action against China. Indira Gandhi warned a long list of world leaders that the intervention of outside powers would “lead to a wider conflagration with incalculable consequences”— a reminder of Soviet backing for India.

On the morning of December 12, in the Oval Office, Nixon and Kissinger reached a peak of Cold War brinksmanship. They had warned the Soviet Union to restrain India by noon that day, or face unilateral US retaliatory measures. Believing that China was about to move its troops toward the Indian border, they braced themselves to stand behind China in deadly confrontations against both India and the Soviet Union— with the terrible potential of superpower conflict and, at worst, even nuclear war. Kissinger seemed ready to order bombing in support of China. As he later put it, he and Nixon made their “first decision to risk war in the triangular SovietChinese- American relationship.”

Despite the reassuring signals coming from Indian diplomats, Kissinger wanted China to move some troops.

Until the Chinese had acted, he did not want to hear any more of their bombast against India. The opening to China rested on US toughness now, he argued: “If the Chinese feel we are nice people, well-meaning, but totally irrelevant to their part of the world, they lose whatever slight, whatever incentives they have for that opening to us.”

Nixon wanted to “hit in there hard and tough,” publicopen www.openthemagazine.com 21

ly accusing India of Soviet-supported “naked aggression.”

Calling Gandhi “that bitch,” Kissinger said they needed “to impress the Russians, to scare the Indians, to take a position with the Chinese.” The president resolved to press the Soviet Union. “It’s a typical Nixon plan,” Kissinger told him. “I mean it’s bold. You’re putting your chips into the pot again.” Without acting, he said, they faced certain disaster; with brinksmanship, they confronted a high possibility of disaster, “but at least we’re coming off like men. And that helps us with the Chinese.”

Urging the president on, Kissinger blasted critics who said they were alienating the Indians: “We are to blame for driving 500 million people. Why are we to blame?

Because we’re not letting 500 million people rape 100 million people.” Nixon compared India to Nazi Germany: “Everybody worried about Danzig and Czechoslovakia and all those other places.”

Then Alexander Haig strode into the Oval Office with a message from China. “The Chinese want to meet on an urgent basis,” Kissinger said. “That’s totally unprecedented,” he said. “They’re going to move. No question, they’re going to move.” Nixon asked if the Chinese were really going to send their troops. “No question,” replied Kissinger.

Kissinger now fully expected a standoff between Chinese and Indian soldiers, with obvious potential for skirmishing or worse. Although Kissinger often bragged around Washington that he was the only thing standing between a madman president and atomic annihilation (“If the President had his way, we’d have a nuclear war every week”), here he played the instigator. In this nerveracking session, he repeatedly pressed the president to escalate the crisis to maximum danger. Now that the United States had seemingly unleashed China against India, India would have to beg the Soviet Union for help. If that caused a confrontation between the Soviet Union and China, Kissinger insisted that Nixon had to back China: “If the Soviets move against them, and then we don’t do anything, we’ll be finished.”

Nixon balked. “So what do we do if the Soviets move against them?” he grilled Kissinger. “Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?” But Kissinger, rather than backing off at that dire prospect, held fast: “Well, if the Soviets move against them in these conditions and succeed, that will be the final showdown. We have to— and if they succeed, we’ll be finished. We’ll be through.”

Nixon was not swayed. “Then we better call them off,” said Kissinger, about the Chinese. Then he realized, “I think we can’t call them off, frankly.” Haig said that the Chinese could only be dissuaded now at a terrible price.

Kissinger said that “if we call them off, I think our China initiative is pretty well down the drain.” Nixon saw the logic there: “our China initiative is down the drain. And also our stroke with the Russians is very, very seriously jeopardized.”

22 open

Kissinger goaded Nixon to confront the Soviet Union, despite the peril: “If the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese, and if the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis, what we are now having is the final, we may be looking right down the gun barrel.” Bucking Nixon up, he said, “I think the Soviets will back off if we face them.” But he did not give any suggestions about what to do if they did not.

Nixon yielded to Kissinger’s pressure, hoping that the Soviet Union would be satisfied with its gains from India’s battlefield victories and in no mood for further confrontation. Kissinger said that “we’ve got to trigger this quickly.”

The president rounded on Kissinger: “The way you put it, Henry, the way you put it is very different as I understand. You said, look, we’re doing all these things, why don’t you threaten them. Remember I said, threaten, move a couple of people. . . . Look, we have to scare these bastards.” In a frightening analogy, Kissinger compared this moment to China’s entry into the Korean War: “They are acting for the same reason they jumped us when we approached the Chinese border in Korea.”

Kissinger demanded that Nixon stand firm. He ratcheted up the geopolitical stakes: “if the outcome of this is that Pakistan is swallowed by India, China is destroyed, defeated, humiliated by the Soviet Union, it will be a change in the world balance of power of such magnitude” that the United States’ security would be damaged for decades and maybe forever.

This induced in Nixon a doomsday vision of a solitary United States isolated against a Soviet-dominated world.

“Now, we can really get into the numbers game,” he said darkly. “You’ve got the Soviet Union with 800 million Chinese, 600 million Indians, the balance of Southeast Asia terrorized, the Japanese immobile, the Europeans, of course, will suck after them, and the United States the only one, we have maybe parts of Latin America and who knows.” Kissinger replied, “This is why, Mr President, you’ll be alone.” “That’s fine,” said Nixon, standing tough against his own phantasm. “We’ve been alone before.”

After that, Nixon tried to take a step back from the brink: “I’d put [it] in more Armageddon terms than reserves when I say that the Chinese move and the Soviets threaten and then we start lobbing nuclear weapons. That isn’t what happens. That isn’t what happens.”

Instead, he said, they would use the hotline to the Soviets and talk to them.

“We don’t have to lob nuclear weapons,” agreed Kissinger. “We have to go on alert.” But now he wanted to get the United States to join the war. “We have to put forces in,” he said bluntly. “We may have to give them bombing assistance.”

Nixon added, “we clean up Vietnam at about that point.” Kissinger agreed: “at that point, we give an ultimatum to Hanoi. Blockade Haiphong.” (He would make good on this in May 1972 with the mining of 30 September 2013

Haiphong harbor.)

Trying again to cool off, the president said, “we’re talking about a lot of ifs. Russia and China aren’t going to go to war.” But Kissinger disagreed: “I wouldn’t bet on that, Mr. President.” The Soviets “are not rational on China,” he said, and if they could “wipe out China,” then Nixon’s upcoming visit there would be pointless. Despite believing that a war— possibly a nuclear war— was possible between the Soviet Union and China, Kissinger still insisted on backing China in a spiraling crisis.

Haig— who would become Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state— concurred, suggesting that the United States might tacitly support a Chinese invasion of India: “they feel they know that if the United States moves on the Soviets that will provide the cover they need to invade India. And we’ve got to neutralize the Soviet Union.” The president asked, “suppose the Chinese move and the Soviets threaten, then what do we do?” They planned to tell the Soviet Union that war would be “unacceptable” once China began moving troops.

They all agreed. The White House was ready to escalate.

Nixon and Kissinger, having set infernal machinery in motion, were rewarded by the more fearful judgments of the Soviet Union and China. A few minutes after that supercharged Oval Office session, the Soviets, having checked with Indira Gandhi, soothingly reassured Kissinger that India’s government “has no intention to take any military actions against West Pakistan.”

Kissinger rushed into the Oval Office to tell Nixon that the Soviets, making the noon deadline he had set, had extracted an assurance from Gandhi that she would not attack West Pakistan. That was what they had been looking for. Kissinger did not disguise his relief: “goddamn it, we made it and we didn’t deserve it.” But he was proud of their brinksmanship earlier that day: “What you did this morning, Mr President, was a heroic act.” “I had to do it,” said Nixon. “Yes,” Kissinger replied. “But I know no other man in the country, no other man who would have done what you did.”

Nixon reveled in his victory. Taking a historical turn, he said that in World War II and the Korean War, the right path was toughness. Kissinger concurred, saying that the Soviets had backed down because they “knew they were looking down the gun barrel.”

The two men congratulated themselves. “Mr. President, your behavior in the last 2 weeks has been heroic in this,” Kissinger said. “You were shooting— your whole goddamn political future for next year. . . . Against your bureaucracy. . . . [A]gainst the Congress, against public opinion. All alone, like everything else. Without flinching, and I must say, I may yell and scream but this hour this morning is worth 4 years here.” Nixon gamely accepted the praise: “It wasn’t easy. . . . [T]he reason the hour this morning was that I had a chance to reflect a little and to see where it was going. The world is just going down the goddamn drain.”

30 September 2013

Kissinger did not disguise his relief: “Goddamn it, we made it and we didn’t deserve it.” But he was proud of their brinksmanship earlier that day: “What you did this morning, Mr President, was a heroic act.” “I had to do it,” said Nixon.

“Yes,” Kissinger replied.

China was not actually going to move its troops. The Chinese leadership knew that picking a fight with the Soviet Union’s friend meant exposing themselves to a million Soviet soldiers on their border. After that dramatic Oval Office meeting, Alexander Haig and Winston Lord bolted up to New York for another secret session with the Chinese delegation. But Huang Hua said nothing to them about deploying Chinese troops to confront India.

General Sam Manekshaw would later say that despite noticeable Chinese military activity along India’s northern border, China avoided any significant provocations.

Although China hurled mephitic revolutionary propaganda against India, the Indian embassy noticed that the People’s Daily refrained from promising any direct action. Indian spies in the R&AW did think that China was stirring up insurgencies among India’s restless Nagas and Mizos, and cracked down in response— but this was harassment, not the start of a border clash. India was confident enough that China would stand by that it moved most of its Himalayan mountain divisions from the Chinese frontier to face Pakistan instead.

In the end, China would only act immediately after the news that Dacca had fallen. It would not be until December 16, as India was securing a cease-fire, that China issued a protest note accusing seven Indian troops of violating China’s border at Sikkim, a small Indian state nestled in the Himalayas— a place where the winter weather would not be such an impediment to Chinese intervention. India would flatly deny the charges. Although Kissinger hopefully told Nixon that this “could be the prelude to limited Chinese military actions along the border with India,” it would all come too late to matter. The note was, the Indian embassy in Beijing concluded, “a grudging acceptance of the fait accompli in the East accompanied by fears that the existence of West Pakistan could be in jeopardy.” When Zhou Enlai delivered a furious banquet speech against India, India’s diplomats in Beijing smugly dismissed it as “impotent rage.” open www.openthemagazine.com 23

Years later, at a summit in Beijing, Kissinger would tell Deng Xiaoping, “President Nixon and I had made the decision— for your information— that if you had moved and the Soviet Union had brought pressure on you, we would have given military support” to China. He added, “We understand why you didn’t, but you should know our position, our seriousness of purpose.”

IN ENTERPRISE OF MARTIAL KIND

On December 12, after that agitated session in the Oval Office, a top Soviet diplomat in Washington assured Kissinger that they would soon get results from the Indians, and that there was no need for “a fist fight in the Security Council because we are in agreement now.”

Kissinger soothingly said that the United States would be cooperative. Although a US aircraft carrier group was on its way, he downplayed that, saying that the Americans had to stand by their allies, but had now gone through that exercise.

There was a fistfight anyway. The same day, in New York, the United Nations Security Council reconvened.

After the last debacle, Haksar had sent Swaran Singh, India’s foreign minister, to confront George Bush and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was now leading the Pakistani delegation. Haksar told Gandhi that “the art of diplomacy lies not merely in advocating one’s cause, but in reducing one’s opponents.” That Singh did skillfully. “Is Mr. Bhutto still harbouring dreams of conquering India and coming to Delhi as a visitor?” he caustically asked.

When Bush, on Nixon’s and Kissinger’s instructions, inquired about India’s ultimate intentions in the war, Singh asked about US intentions in Vietnam. He denounced Pakistan: “It is not India which has set a record in political persecution, the genocide of a people and the suppression of human rights that inevitably led to the present conflagration.”

For the third and last time, the Soviet Union shielded India with its veto, knocking down another Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal. Kissinger, not checking with Nixon, threatened to scrap the upcoming Soviet summit.

All the while the diplomats traded insults, Nixon and Kissinger had the USS Enterprise carrier group sailing fast toward the Bay of Bengal. To use the wholly implausible pretext of evacuating Americans, Kissinger told the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Send it where there are Americans— say, Karachi.” Kissinger informed Bhutto that US warships would soon cross the chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca, heading for the Bay of Bengal, and be spotted by the Indians. Nixon insisted that it continue toward India unless there was a settlement.

The Enterprise, a nuclear aircraft carrier from the US Seventh Fleet, was accompanied by the rest of its formidable task force: the helicopter carrier USS Tripoli, seven destroyers, and an oiler. (They were under the Honolulubased command of Admiral John McCain Jr., the father of 24 open

John McCain III, the Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential candidate.) With alarming symbolism, the carrier group set sail not merely from the Vietnam war zone, but, as the Indian government unhappily claimed, from the Gulf of Tonkin.

Nixon and Kissinger had a schoolboy enthusiasm for moving military units without meaning too much by it.

Still, compared with India’s ragtag fleet, this was an awfully intimidating force. An Indian official called it “a nuclear-studded armada including the most powerful ship in the world.” The Enterprise had helped blockade Cuba during the missile crisis there. It was a modern, mammoth warship, almost five times larger than India’s own rickety aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. Even one of the Enterprise’s escorts, the Tripoli, was bigger than the Vikrant. The Enterprise, powered by atomic reactors, could sail around the world without refueling; the Vikrant was lucky if its boiler worked. This US carrier group was, the vice admiral of India’s eastern fleet recalled, “a fantastic threat.”

Indian troops were simultaneously closing in on Dacca from the north, south, and east. While the news of the Seventh Fleet’s deployment broke in the Indian press, Gandhi rallied a gigantic crowd in Delhi, speaking in simple, blunt Hindi. Indian warplanes circled overhead. As one of her top advisers nervously noted, this huge gathering could have made a tempting bombing target.

The wartime prime minister complained that the United States’ alliance with Pakistan was supposed to be against communism, not democracy. Although not naming the United States or China, she warned that India would stand firm against “severe threats” of “some other attack.” And, in words so inflammatory that her press office cut them from the printed version of her speech, she irately declared that the world was against India because of the color of its people’s skin. She led the masses in roaring “Jai Hind!”— victory to India.

That victory was almost in hand. Triumphant in Bangladesh and under pressure from both superpowers to leave it at that, India lost whatever appetite it might have had for a wider war. India by now held some pockets of Pakistani territory in the west, and two Soviet diplomats tried to ascertain the country’s intentions from Haksar and then from Gandhi herself— hoping to restrain them from reckless steps that might drag the United States into the war. The CIA noted that the Soviet Union had advised India to be satisfied with liberating Bangladesh and not to seize any West Pakistani territory, including that contested area in Kashmir known as Azad Kashmir. As Haksar anxiously wrote to Gandhi, the Soviets believed that the United States was firmly committed to defend West Pakistan’s territorial integrity.

Thus Indian provocations against West Pakistan could drive the Americans to “enlarge the conflict.”

Haksar urged the prime minister to impress upon General Manekshaw that his troops must use “extreme 30 September 2013

care” on the western front. The United States, Haksar nervously wrote, would react to any military moves that gave the impression that India was trying to grab land in West Pakistan, including Azad Kashmir, or that India was planning to transfer forces from the eastern theater to charge deep into West Pakistan.

With Indian troops racing against the UN’s clock, Haksar was grateful for every deferral and adjournment of the byzantine Security Council. While Haksar eagerly awaited the end of military operations in Bangladesh, he came up with a quibbling series of stalling tactics for the United Nations, meant to be “sufficiently elastic to generate discussion and give time.” But the Soviet Union, having endured more than its fill of embarrassments on India’s behalf, was, as Haksar told Gandhi, anxious for India to allow it to say something in the Security Council that was not completely negative.

The same CIA intelligence that had so alarmed Nixon and Kissinger now reported that India was almost ready to end its war. According to the CIA’s mole in Delhi, India would accept a cease-fire once an Awami League government was set up in Dacca. Although hawkish military leaders and Jagjivan Ram, the defense minister, reportedly wanted to fight on in southern Azad Kashmir and to smash Pakistan’s war machine, Gandhi had had enough.

She wanted to avoid more trouble with the United States and China. Under Soviet pressure to accept a cease-fire as soon as Bangladesh was a fact, India, according to the CIA, was set to “assure the Soviet Union that India has no plans to annex any West Pakistani territory.” Once the war ended, according to this CIA mole, Gandhi was confident that Yahya’s military regime would fall and there would be new pressure for autonomy in Baluchistan, the NorthWest Frontier Province, and other restive areas in West Pakistan. India would dominate South Asia.

General Jacob remembers, “by thirteenth December we depleted strength on the outskirts on Dacca.” He and the other generals were closely watching the United Nations, as the Soviet Union kept on vetoing cease-fire resolutions.

Then, he recalls, “The Russians say, no more veto. Panic— sorry, ‘concern’— in Delhi.” That night he prayed. He says that God evidently answered, as he received information that General Niazi, commander of Pakistan’s Eastern Command, would be going to a meeting at Government House in Dacca. He bombed the gathering. This terrified the remainder of the local Pakistani government. That evening, Jacob says, Niazi went to Herbert Spivack, the US consul general, with a cease-fire proposal.

General Manekshaw, the Indian chief of army staff, sent a third note asking Pakistan to surrender. Once again, he offered protection under the Geneva Conventions to all surrendering soldiers and para-militaries, and promised to protect ethnic minorities—meaning the Urduspeaking Biharis, who were terrified of the Mukti Bahini’s vengeance. With the Bangladeshi forces under his command, he promised that Bangladesh’s government had 30 September 2013

also ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions.

“For the sake of your own men I hope you will not compel me to reduce your garrison with the use of force.”

General Niazi urged the United States to help get a cease-fire to spare his troops and avoid street fighting in the city. Yahya accused India of inflicting bloodshed on his military and civilian forces of “holocaust” proportions.

In Delhi, Haksar warned India’s defense ministry that the dominant interest of the United States and China was preserving West Pakistan. He thus cautioned against any statements or military actions that indicated that India had serious intent to sever parts of West Pakistan or seize Azad Kashmir. To Haksar’s annoyance, India’s information ministry had been hard at work generating exactly that kind of impression, by preparing propaganda trying to whip up Sindhi irredentism in West Pakistan. He ordered a stop to that, and demanded the withdrawal of all propaganda “fanning Sindhi, Baluchi or Pathan irredentism.”

Even with the war lost, the CIA reported that pro-Pakistan forces killed “a large number of Bangla Desh intellectuals” soon before the fall of Dacca. According to the State Department, as many as two hundred people were killed.

Later, after an Indian general visited the massacre site, he could not eat. Arundhati Ghose, the Indian diplomat, remembers telling him that he was a soldier, accustomed to seeing dead bodies. Yes, the general replied, but he had found the hand of a woman, with her nails painted. He said, “I can’t get that out of my head.”

Yahya begged Nixon to send the seventh fleet to Pakistan’s shores to defend Karachi. But Nixon, despite often sounding like he was on the verge of war with India, had no intentions of any naval combat. The USS Enterprise carrier group was an atomic-powered bluff, meant to spook the Indians and increase Soviet pressure on India for a cease-fire, but nothing more. Kissinger privately said that “we don’t want to get militarily involved and there isn’t a chance. Can you imagine the President even listening to that for three seconds.” Kissinger worried that the American public would not be able to stomach the mere sight of a US aircraft carrier threatening India— let alone actually opening fire. As for Nixon, he left no doubt: “we’re not going to intervene.”

Samuel Hoskinson, the White House staffer, who remains convinced that India meant to destroy Pakistan, applauds the deployment of the carrier group. “To my way of thinking, it was a brilliant strategic move,” he says.

“I know Nixon and Kissinger have been faulted for that.

I think more than anything else it stopped Madame Gandhi in her tracks.”

But India’s military commanders seem to have doubted the Americans would fight them. “I didn’t think the Americans were so foolhardy,” recalls General Jacob. “We had land-based aircraft.” Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, the director of naval intelligence, says he briefed Indira Gandhi open www.openthemagazine.com 25

about the composition of the task force, and explained it was possible that it could strike India. But with Vietnam going on, he told the prime minister, he did not believe the Americans would attack. He also noted that the Seventh Fleet could try to break India’s blockade of Pakistan by coming between India’s navy and the land; Vice Admiral N. Krishnan, leading India’s eastern fleet, feared that the Enterprise task force would do this at Chittagong. Krishnan even considered having an Indian submarine torpedo the US fleet to slow it down. But he told his underlings in the Maritime Operations Room that any direct US attack could cause “the end of the world,” or embroil the Americans in “a Vietnam to end all Vietnams.” In defiance of the Enterprise, India intensified its naval assault on Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar. India’s political leaders claim to have been equally skeptical that the Enterprise would actually fight them. Thanks to Soviet surveillance, they knew that Dacca was going to fall before the Seventh Fleet could do anything about it.

They were well aware how impossible it would be for Nixon, mired in Vietnam, to send US troops into a new Asian war against India. Gandhi later said, “Naturally, if the Americans had fired a shot, if the Seventh Fleet had done something more than sit there in the Bay of Bengal . . . yes, the Third World War would have exploded. But, in all honesty, not even that fear occurred to me.”

Still, the Indian government asked the Soviet Union to warn against the dire consequences of this threatening movement of the US Navy. At the same time, Haksar ordered D. P. Dhar, the Indian envoy sent to Moscow, to personally reassure Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin that India had no territorial ambitions in either Bangladesh or West Pakistan, and that India’s western position was entirely defensive. The Soviet ambassador assured India that a Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean would not allow the United States to intervene.

On December 15, India’s R&AW spy agency warned that US warships were moving past Thailand, heading toward India. That day, the Enterprise carrier group entered the Bay of Bengal.

This caused some panic among Indian officials, according to General Manekshaw, although Gandhi and Haksar publicly affected nonchalance. Manekshaw claimed that in a cabinet meeting Swaran Singh and other ministers urged an immediate cease-fire to avoid facing US troops or even nuclear weapons. There were some overheated rumors of a shooting war between Americans and Indians. India was tipped off, seemingly by an American source, that the Seventh Fleet might move into action, maybe even landing troops. One senior Indian official in Washington claimed that the task force was ready to establish a beachhead, with three Marine battalions at the ready, and that bombers on the Enterprise had been authorized by Nixon to bomb Indian army communications if necessary. When India’s ambassador in Washington asked a senior State Department official about the pros26 open

pect of US troops establishing a beachhead, he got a less than categorical denial, although the official said he had not heard of the possibility. The Indian ambassador fed the story to the press, lashing out against the Nixon administration on American television. Nixon and Kissinger enjoyed frightening India. Kissinger said that India’s ambassador “says he has unmistakable proof that we are planning a landing on the Bay of Bengal. Well, that’s okay with me.” “Yeah,” said Nixon, “that scares them.” Kissinger added with satisfaction, “That carrier move is good.”

Still, the Pentagon said that the task force never got far into the Bay of Bengal, staying over a thousand miles away from Chittagong. Although admitting there were four or five Soviet ships in the same area, the Pentagon said that the Americans never saw any of them, nor any Indian or Pakistani ships. The Indian ambassador assured the State Department that the Soviet warships were not going to get close to the fighting. In the end, the Enterprise carrier group did rather little militarily.

Even before the Enterprise task force entered the Bay of Bengal, anti-Americanism in India had reached worrisome heights. After Pakistani jets bombed an Indian village in Punjab, the survivors found bombs with US markings. With pieces of dead buffaloes strewn about and the smell of burned human flesh lingering, a college student who had just lost his sister screamed out that he blamed Nixon.

Now the threat from the Enterprise drove Indians to a whole new level of wrath. Jaswant Singh, who would later become foreign minister, remembers the hollering of India’s newspapers as the carrier group steamed into the Bay of Bengal, becoming a lasting symbol of American hostility. Even he— as worldly as any person could be— seethes at the memory: “It served no purpose. What possible military purpose did it serve? Was it going to launch an attack on Calcutta?”

That possibility was uppermost in the minds of anxious people in Calcutta. Arundhati Ghose, the Indian diplomat there, who is a Bengali Indian, remembers, “When it entered the Bay of Bengal, there’s a particular kind of fish called hilsa, which Bengalis love. And we said, ‘Don’t let them touch our hilsa.’ And a lot of people said, ‘They’ll bomb Calcutta,’ and we said, ‘Great, so we can rebuild it properly this time.’ ” There were “rubbish” rumors in Calcutta that the Americans “were making a nuclear threat on us, basically to stop our progress in West Pakistan, because they didn’t care about the Bangladeshis in any case.” Then, dropping her jocular tone, she intones, “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that the Americans were threatening us. I just couldn’t believe it.” She says, “We didn’t think the Americans would threaten us. We thought the Chinese might. But the Chinese didn’t. It was the Enterprise which threatened us.”

The Parliament went predictably berserk. Atal Bihari Vajpayee from the Jana Sangh joined a West Bengali leg30 September 2013

islator from the Communist Party (Marxist) in demanding that Gandhi’s government denounce the United States. Beyond Parliament, the perennial critic Jayaprakash Narayan was incandescent with rage at this attempt to “frighten India to submit to Nixon’s will.” If the Americans actually tried to establish a beachhead, he threatened “the most destructive war that history has yet witnessed.”

Kissinger did not care about such Indian emotions.

When a reporter asked if the deployment of the carrier group was meant to influence the outcome of the war, Kissinger said, “What the Indians are mad at is irrelevant.”

But many Americans were appalled too. Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s senior aide for South Asia, says the Indians were right to be furious. In Delhi, Kenneth Keating, the US ambassador who had confronted Nixon and Kissinger in the Oval Office, had spent the war marinating in Indian grievances. At the start of the fighting, he had decried the hasty US accusations that India was the aggressor, blaming Pakistan’s airstrikes. After Kissinger gave a press briefing, Keating cabled that much of it was misleading or outright false.

Amid roiling rumors of possible US direct intervention to help Pakistan, Keating cabled that if people in Washington were seriously considering doing so, or directly providing US weapons to Pakistan, he wanted to evacuate American families and nonessential American personnel from India. When the Enterprise entered the Bay of Bengal, Keating— fearing that Yahya would be encouraged to fight on— objected that he could no longer defend US policy.

Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times reporter, was in Calcutta when he heard the news about the Enterprise. “I had a sinking feeling,” he says bitterly.

“I’m an American, I’m standing in Calcutta, and my country is sailing up, and now I’m the enemy of my country? Because I’m living in India and thinking they’re on the right side? It was the worst feeling, to this day, one of the worst feelings in my life. You don’t want to hate your government. Somehow someone’s tipped the world upside down.”

The Enterprise task force could have reached East Pakistan by the early hours of December 16. But the day before, Pakistan’s General Niazi sent a message to General Manekshaw saying he wanted a cease-fire, passed along through the US embassy in Delhi. In reply, Manekshaw repeated his promises to safeguard the surrendering Pakistanis and the minority Biharis. As a goodwill gesture, Manekshaw ordered a pause in air action over Dacca.

Despite Bhutto’s theatrics at the United Nations, where he ripped up papers and stormed out of the chamber vowing to fight on, the war was all but over.

Niazi’s cease-fire letter was delivered to Haksar by Galen Stone, a US diplomat in the Delhi embassy who was possibly even more pro-Indian than Keating. Haksar 30 September 2013

asked him, “Galen, where are we heading?” Stone, according to Haksar, replied with high emotion, saying that the US relationship with India was being destroyed and wondering if he should resign. Stone said that he— and many people in the State Department— simply did not understand Nixon’s policies. According to Stone, Haksar, in tears, asked what kind of relationships Indian and American children would have.

Haksar pounced on this show of pro-Indian sentiment.

He drew up a tough letter for the prime minister to send to Nixon, aiming directly at American hearts and minds, as a way of publicly refuting the accusations made against India by George H. W. Bush and other US officials. Haksar took the United States’ own Declaration of Independence and repurposed it for Bangladesh. Thus Gandhi wrote to Nixon, “That Declaration stated whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of man’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, it was the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” This gave her a way to write off Pakistan’s sovereignty, like British rule of America: “while Pakistan’s integrity was certainly sacrosanct, human rights, liberty were no less so.” Professing grief at the downward spiral in relations with the United States, she bitterly blamed Nixon for not using US influence over Yahya. But she did assure him, “We do not want any territory of what was East Pakistan and now constitutes Bangla Desh. We do not want any territory of West Pakistan.”

Kissinger dismissed the letter as “defensive and plaintive,” but he told Nixon that a cease-fire was imminent: “we are home, now it’s done.” The Soviet Union had promised that India would not annex any West Pakistani territory. “It’s an absolute miracle, Mr. President,” Kissinger said, praising him for having “put it right on the line.”

Although the cease-fire was a foregone conclusion, Nixon said, “I’d like to do it in a certain way that pisses on the Indians.”

In private, Kissinger, still relying on the CIA mole in Delhi, remained convinced that India had meant “to knock over West Pakistan.” Nixon said, “Most people were ready to stand by and let her do it, bombing [Karachi] and all.” Kissinger agreed, “They really are bastards.”

“Look, these people are savages,” said Nixon. Kissinger usually spoke of India raping Pakistan, but Nixon now had a better verb in mind. He wanted to put out the spin that “we cannot have a stable world if we allow one member of the United Nations to cannibalize another.

Cannibalize, that’s the word. I should have thought of it earlier. You see, that really puts it to the Indians. It has, the connotation is savages. To cannibalize . . . that’s what the sons of bitches are up to.”

SURRENDER

An exhausted group of Mukti Bahini fighters were ecstatic— and relieved— to hear that Pakistan was about to yield. They found abandoned buses and loaded them up open www.openthemagazine.com 27

with jubilant rebels bound for Dacca. People packed the streets and rooftops, chanting, “Joi Bangla!” Coming into the city, hearing the crowds, a rebel later wrote, “We felt liberated at last.” With the first column of Indian troops about to enter Dacca, the chumminess of elite South Asian officers was not to be disturbed by the minor matter of a war. An Indian commander sent a note to General Niazi, whom he knew personally: “My dear Abdullah, I am here. The game is up. I suggest you give yourself up to me, and I will look after you.”

On December 16, Niazi, emphasizing the “paramount considerations of saving human lives,” offered his surrender on the eastern front. Manekshaw dispatched General Jacob, the chief of staff of the Eastern Command, by helicopter to Dacca, to negotiate a swift capitulation.

Jacob remembers that India actually had only three thousand troops outside of Dacca, while Pakistan still had over twenty-six thousand in the city. “Just go and get a surrender,” Manekshaw told Jacob. He rushed onto a helicopter, joined by the wife of his superior, Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the general officer commanding-inchief of the Eastern Command, who said that her place was with her husband. When they landed in Dacca, Jacob remembers, there was still fighting going on between the Mukti Bahini and Pakistani troops. As insurgents shot at his car, he jumped up to show them his olive green Indian army uniform, which stopped their firing. Once he got to Pakistani headquarters, Jacob remembers, General Niazi said, “Who said I’m surrendering? I only came here for a cease-fire.” Alone and acutely aware of how outnumbered the Indians really were at the moment, he took Niazi aside. Jacob recalls, “I said, ‘You surrender, we take care of you, your families, and ethnic minorities. If you don’t, what can I do? I wash my hands.’ He said I blackmailed him, to have him bayoneted. I said, ‘I’ll give you thirty minutes, and if you don’t agree, I’ll order the resumption of hostilities and the bombing of Dacca.’ ” As Jacob walked out, “I thought, my God, I have nothing in my hand.” But Niazi, surely knowing how many more Indian troops were following the tip of the spear outside Dacca, yielded.

With battalions of the Indian army and Mukti Bahini guerrillas crowding into the city, the short eastern war came to an abrupt end. On the afternoon of December 16, General Niazi tearfully surrendered to General Aurora at the Dacca Race Course, surrounded by Hindu neighborhoods that had been destroyed by some of the Pakistan army back in the spring. Preserving the Pakistanis’ dignity, Jacob says, they set up solemn ceremonies at the Race Course. Niazi handed a pistol to Aurora. When Sydney Schanberg, covering it for The New York Times, told Jacob that the surrender of a Pakistani general to a Jewish Indian general made one hell of a story, Jacob indignantly told him not to write it. General Aurora, beaming, was hoisted aloft by crowds of leaping, cheering Bengalis.

While street skirmishes continued, crowds thronged into 28 open

the streets shouting “Joi Bangla!” and shooting bullets into the skies.

General Manekshaw telephoned Indira Gandhi with the welcome tidings. She ran into the Lok Sabha, exuberant. She informed the Parliament of the unconditional surrender of Pakistan’s forces in the east. “Dacca is now the free capital of a free country,” she declared with satisfaction. “We hail the people of Bangla Desh in their hour of triumph.”

Gandhi got big cheers when she praised India’s military and the Mukti Bahini, and when she said that Indian forces were under orders to treat Pakistani prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions, and that the Bangladesh government would do the same. “Our objectives were limited— to assist the gallant people of Bangla Desh and their Mukti Bahini to liberate their country from a reign of terror and to resist aggression on our own land.” There was exuberant jubilation throughout the chamber, with lawmakers giving her thunderous standing ovations and throwing papers and hats into the air.

Yet there was also an uglier side to the surrender.

General Aurora was bound by India’s promise of protection for West Pakistanis and ethnic minorities. “If we don’t protect the Pakistanis and their collaborators,” an Indian officer told Schanberg, “the Mukti Bahini will butcher them nicely and properly.” Indian soldiers kept surrendering Pakistanis off the roads lest they be attacked. Aurora even allowed thousands of Pakistani troops who had surrendered to keep their weapons for protection against vengeful Bengalis.

But the Indian army could not stop an awful wave of revenge killings. Gandhi admitted that her generals— although officially in command of the Bangladeshi forces— could not meaningfully promise that there would be no reprisals against loyalists. In Dacca, a Los Angeles Times reporter saw five civilians lying dead in the street, executed as collaborators. The CIA noted “bloodchilling reports of atrocities being perpetrated by revenge-seeking Bengalis in Dacca.” Still, India worked to disarm guerrillas roaming Dacca, and detained one Mukti Bahini leader who whipped up a crowd to torture and murder four men at a public rally. After a few horrific days of bloodshed, the CIA reported that the situation had calmed down.

Meanwhile in the west, there were still tank battles going on. This was the moment of truth for India’s war goals.

India could declare victory in Bangladesh and go home, or launch a new and more aggressive phase, trying to capture land and cities in West Pakistan.

The hawks were in full cry. Pakistan was in chaos and vulnerable, and there were some indications that Indian troops were gaining the upper hand in the west. But Manekshaw, as he later claimed, told the prime minister that a unilateral cease-fire in the west was “the right thing to do.” Haksar agreed. “I must order a cease-fire on the western front also,” Gandhi told an aide, wary of the coun30 September 2013

try’s euphoric mood. “If I don’t do it today, I shall not be able to do it tomorrow.” According to her closest friend, Gandhi heard discussions from the army’s chief and her top advisers about the feasibility of seizing one of Pakistan’s cities. The military said that such a battle against Pakistan’s well-trained soldiers would cost roughly thirty thousand casualties. She sat silently for a while.

She knew that the United States and China would have to react. She decided it was time to end the war.

The same day that Pakistan surrendered in the east, Gandhi declared, “India has no territorial ambitions. Now that the Pakistani Armed Forces have surrendered in Bangla Desh and Bangla Desh is free, it is pointless in our view to continue the present conflict.” She unilaterally ordered India’s armed forces to cease fire all along the western front as of 8 pm on December 17.

The guns fell silent. India said that 2,307 of its warfighters had been killed, 6,163 wounded, and 2,163 were missing. The death toll was slightly higher in the west, where 1,206 Indians had been killed, against 1,021 in the east.

And Pakistan’s losses were presumably worse.

These were terrible human losses. Even so, vastly more Bangladeshi civilians died than Indian and Pakistani soldiers combined. A senior Indian official put the Bengali death toll at three hundred thousand, while Sydney Schanberg, who had excellent sources, noted in the New York Times that diplomats in Dacca thought that hundreds of thousands of Bengalis— maybe even a million or more— had been killed since the crackdown started on March 25. Even the lowest credible Pakistani estimates are in the tens of thousands, while India sought vindication with bigger numbers: Swaran Singh quickly claimed that a million people had been killed in Bangladesh. A few days before the end of the war, Gita Mehta, an Indian journalist working for NBC, showed Indira Gandhi a film on the Bengali refugees. The prime minister, watching with her son Rajiv Gandhi, wept as she saw the images of young and old refugees.

General Jacob, when asked about violating Pakistan’s sovereignty, explodes in anger. “If you knew what was happening there,” he thunders. “You know the rape and massacres that were taking place there? When we get ten million refugees, what do we do with them?” In Bangladesh, he had picked up a diary and read about Bengalis being bayoneted. He is convinced it was an “awful genocide,” although “I didn’t think it was like what the Nazis did.” His fury unabated, Jacob continues hotly, “They had raped, they had killed, several hundred thousand. I was listening to Dacca University on the twentyfifth– twenty-sixth March night. They slaughtered the students. So we should keep quiet? So I have no problem.”

Finally cooling down, he finishes, “I have no second thoughts on it. I’m proud of it.”

Soon after the surrender, Schanberg took a trip across the traumatized new country of Bangladesh. Everywhere The New York Times reporter went, people showed him “all 30 September 2013

the killing grounds” where people were lined up and shot.

“You could see the bones in the river, because it was a killing place.” In Dacca, he went to a hillside burial place.

“There were shrubs and bushes, and there was a little boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, he was on his hands and knees, scratching the earth, looking for things. He looked disturbed. He was looking for his father, who he said was buried there. If you scratched enough there— it was shallow graves— you’d find a skull or bones. There were cemeteries everywhere. There was no doubt in my mind, evil was done.”

Kissinger, HR Haldeman noted, was “practically ecstatic” at the imminent cease-fire. Nixon was not. “Dacca has surrendered,” the president told Kissinger glumly.

Sharing none of Kissinger’s ebullience, Nixon was sunk in bitterness at Pakistan’s defeat. He was, he said, “outraged” at India’s media advocacy, and “really teed off” that Kissinger had not adequately publicized their accusations of an Indian plan to destroy Pakistan. With Kissinger’s assent, he wanted to move toward a conflict with India: “If the Indians continue the course they are on we have even got to break diplomatic relations with them.”

The president took some comfort in the fact, relayed by Kissinger, that Jordan had illegally sent warplanes to help Pakistan. But Nixon complained that “when the chips are down India has shown that it is a Russian satellite.” He fumed, “I know the bigger game is the Russian game, but the Indians also have played us for squares here. They have done this once and when this is over they will come to us ask us to forgive and forget. This we must not do.”

Soon after, Kissinger telephoned the president to report the cease-fire in the west. Kissinger saw this as an enduring achievement for himself. Jolly once again, he tried to cheer Nixon up: “Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved W[est] Pakistan.” Nixon brooded, not wanting Indira Gandhi to gloat in victory. “She shouldn’t get credit for starting the fire and then calling in the fire department,” he said. “It’s back to Hitler.”

Kissinger savored a victory lap. He separately told Haldeman and George Shultz, “We have turned disaster into defeat,” and thanked John Connally, the anti-Indian Treasury secretary, for giving him “the moral courage to do it.” He spent the rest of the day calling reporters to claim credit and working the phones to try to cobble together a feeble United Nations Security Council resolution. About the Indians, he told the British ambassador, “I don’t know how you tolerated them for those years.”

Kissinger joked to Bush, “don’t screw it up the way you usually do.”

“I want a transfer when this is over,” replied George Bush. “I want a nice quiet place like Rwanda.” n —Extracted from The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J Bass, with permission from Random House India open www.openthemagazine.com 29

s u rv i va l

after the rage In the aftermath of communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, displaced Muslims fill relief camps; and politicians visit, seeking votes photographs by raul irani

32 open

30 September 2013

nowhere people (Clockwise from left) Children wait to be attended to at a medical relief camp in Kairana village, Shamli district; a young girl dresses another in donated clothes at a relief camp in Kandla village, also in Shamli; locals listen to UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s address to riot victims at Kandla; two women and their children at Kairana

sheroon, 25 housewife

Sheroon, from Kudba village, has taken refuge in madrassa Ishaa-atul-Islam after losing 12 members of her family in the violence

Mohammed Sabir, 16 brick factory worker Mohammed Sabir of Lisad village is still waiting to get access to the bodies of his parents so he can give them a proper burial. Both were burned alive in the riots

Shabnam, 10

Madrassa student Shabnam misses her friends, and has been pressing her mother to tell her when they can return to their home in Tugna village

Shaukat Ali, 30

dryclean shop owner Shaukat Ali from Tajpur Simalgah says his four-yearold son Aris now sleeps with a nailfile, having witnessed his grandfather’s death at the hands of a mob that attacked the village, stabbing him through the stomach with a sword as he tried to shield another grandchild.

Shaukat Ali claims this happened in the presence of the police. As he fled to another village with his family, he says, they were pelted with stones

30 September 2013

open www.openthemagazine.com 35

p e r s p ec t i v e

Collateral Damage GM crops can be developed responsibly, as India’s public sector shows, but are anti-Monsanto activists listening?

PRIYANKA PULLA

I

n 2002, a team at the Hyderabad-

based International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a nongovernmental organisation working to boost agriculture in the globe’s dry regions, began genetically modifying the groundnut crop.

They chose groundnut because it is an important subsistence crop in both India and Sub-Saharan Africa—many of the farmers who grow this legume also eat it. A crop failure not only affects these farmers’ incomes, but also, directly, their health.

There were several reasons the groundnut was a great target for genetic modification. This crop is grown in the droughtprone districts of interior Andhra,

Karnataka and Rajasthan, and it is not adapted to such dry conditions. When it does not receive enough rain, yields tend to get hit hard. The conventional way to get around this problem would be to hybridise a drought resistant variety of groundnut with one that is not. The problem, though, is that there aren’t any drought resistant varieties of groundnut in nature. Hybridisation techniques had hit a roadblock. But the droughts kept coming.

So ICRISAT’s researchers turned to a little flowering plant called Arabidopsis for help. This relative of the cabbage— the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced—has a gene that can fight dehydration. When faced with drought, a

plant with this gene would conserve water much better than a plant without.

The team took this handy gene from the Arabidopsis and inserted it into the groundnut crop. Sure enough, they got a plant that would fare much better in Andhra’s hot summers. After about eight painstaking years of work, during which it was tested in greenhouses, the crop was finally ready for field trials.

By then, however, countrywide protests against Monsanto, a major global producer of genetically modified (GM) crop technologies, had reached a crescendo.

In response, the Government introduced a moratorium on genetically modified food crops and made it tougher to win permissions to conduct GM field tri-

mahesh kumar a./ap

scare and crow Greenpeace activists paint ‘biohazard’ at a Bayer CropScience field outside Hyderabad in protest of genetically modified rice

als. As a result, some ten of ICRISAT’s programmes in genetically modified foods, including the groundnut, are now in a state of limbo.

GM beyond Monsanto

There are few similarities between public sector and private sector GM research. The allegations that anti-GM activists level against Monsanto and the private sector do not apply to ICRISAT and public sector institutions such as the National Agri Biotech Institute (NABI), National Botanical Research Institute, Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR) and University of Delhi’s Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants (CGMCP), all of which have GM programmes.

“Their ire is against Monsanto,” says Deepak Pental, who developed a genetically modified mustard crop at CGMCP, “but they are killing everybody.” Late last year, the Rajasthan government withdrew its go-ahead for field trials of Pental’s GM mustard, and burnt down one of the three fields where the crop was being tested.

The list of Monsanto’s alleged offences is long: activists say Monsanto carried out inadequate biosafety tests for its genetically modified Brinjal and then concealed the safety data, under the pretext of protecting its commercial interests. Further, it forced farmers to buy expensive seeds from it year after year, by selling seeds that can be used only once.

But more incriminatingly, the Bt Cotton sold by private sector firms such as Monsanto and Metahelix hasn’t fulfilled the promises it made. Yields have plateaued, and pesticide use has begun to rise again, contrary to what these firms originally promised.

Even if these allegations are correct (they are strongly contested), public sector research shows that genetic modification is possible without these fatal flaws.

First, when institutes such as ICRISAT and NABI develop GM crops, the safety data on them can be accessed by anybody.

“As far as I am concerned, I wouldn’t mind anyone analysing my data. If we are convinced our technology is not good, we would be the first ones to point it out.

Tomorrow, if ICRISAT’s groundnut is commercialised, we won’t make a single 30 September 2013

rupee out of it, and the farmer will benefit because he won’t pay a single rupee extra in getting the GM material,” says Kiran K Sharma, who headed the GM groundnut programme at ICRISAT. Further, the seeds developed by ICRISAT are reusable by farmers, so that farmers do not have to go back every year and repurchase them.

In fact, the public sector works on several important crops that are neglected by the private sector. ICRISAT, whose core funders are the governments of various countries and the World Bank, focuses on chickpea, pigeon pea, sorghum, pearl millet and groundnut. All of these crops are difficult to hybridise and have small markets. And yet, they are crucial to farmers because they are subsistence crops.

But firms such as Monsanto prefer hybrid varieties of genetically modified crops because it helps safeguard their in-

“Monopolies will develop further if you don’t allow a public system to be created. Thanks to this, our public research is poor,” says Deepak Pental tellectual property. When a crop is a hybrid, the farmer can use its seed only for one season. In order to produce the seed for the next season, he would need access to both parent crops, which he doesn’t have. This forces farmers to buy new seeds each year.

Such practices create a crucial market gap for straight varieties of GM crops, which only the public sector can fulfil.

But anti-GM activism makes no distinction between the two.

ICRISAT and NABI are also developing nutrient enhanced crops to tackle the widespread dietary deficiencies that ail poor people. For example, nearly 70 per cent of pregnant women in rural India are iron-deficient—a large number of them die during childbirth as a result.

This problem also afflicts children, especially vegetarians in low income families, who subsist on cereals, because vegetables are expensive. Supplementing diets with iron tablets often doesn’t work,

because patients don’t stick to their regimens. To address this, NABI is now working on a genetically modified wheat crop with higher levels of iron. Simultaneously, it is also developing a banana variety with higher levels of vitamin A. The cotton conundrum

Ironically, Bt Cotton, the stronghold of Monsanto, is another technology that would benefit greatly from public sector research. While anti-GM activists hold this technology responsible for the recent plateauing of cotton yields and high pesticide usage in India, the real picture is more nuanced.

According to KR Kranthi, director of Indian’s Central Institute of Cotton Research, Bt Cotton did in its initial years meet the promises of increasing cotton yields and reducing pesticide usage against the bollworm, the primary pest targeted by this genetic modification.

The problem began because of the GM industry’s preference for hybrids. These hybrids are susceptible to sucking pests, against which they weren’t tested adequately. Further, hybrids tend to need more insecticide, water and fertiliser due to their heavy foliage, and cannot be planted as densely as straight varieties.

As a result, in the last five years, cotton yields have begun to plateau and insecticide use for sucking pests has grown.

China and Pakistan have been smarter than India in this respect. In his ebook, Bt Cotton Q&A, Kranthi writes, ‘China and Pakistan experimented with Bt-cotton hybrids, but appear to have decided in favour of straight varieties. The area under Bt-hybrids is negligible in these countries now. Thus, India happens to be the only country all across to cultivate hybrid cotton and that too, in more than 95% of its cotton area.’

It was the public sector in China and Pakistan that developed the straight varieties of Bt Cotton. But in India, CICR’s effort to develop a straight variety of Bt Cotton has ground to halt in the last two years. This variety, developed entirely by Kranthi’s team, uses a different Bt gene than Monsanto’s. But the government of Maharashtra has denied permission for field trials, even though there is no policy against testing Bt Cotton.

“Our whole team is very upset, “says open www.openthemagazine.com 37

aijaz rahi/ap

pyaaz-tamasha Greenpeace activists dressed as vegetables protest a government decision to approve field trials for GM food crops

Kranthi, “They have been working hard for years, late into the night. They ask, ‘What use is all this if you don’t even let us test it?’ We don’t even know if it works.”

In the din of protests against Monsanto’s monopolistic practices, the value of GM research by the public sector has been completely ignored. “I went to one of the debates being hosted by Jairam Ramesh,” says ICRISAT’s Sharma, speaking of the public discourse at the height of the GM controversy in 2010, “90 per cent of the arguments were against multinationals; nobody was discussing real issues such as biosafety.”

Pental believes such an attitude will hurt public sector research, leaving the way open for the private sector to dominate the GM industry. “Monopolies will develop further if you don’t allow a public system to be created,” he says. “Thanks to this, our public research is poor; our biosafety regime is not sorted out. That’s what [multinationals] want.”

Let’s talk about biosafety

Scientists have cautioned time and again that genetic modification is not a monolithic technology. It is a set of wide ranging technologies, each of which varies in impact. Statements such as ‘All GMOs are unsafe’ have no meaning because each GMO differs from the other. As the editors of the scientific journal Nature noted in a 2012 editorial, ‘Even if one GM crop 38 open

were to be shown to have serious adverse health effects, that would say little about others: the safety of any genetic modification depends on the crop and on the particular changes introduced.’

This is most telling in ICRISAT’s case.

A big concern of anti-GM activists is that the introduction of GM foods will threaten biodiversity. They worry that if artificially introduced genes spread to wild relatives of GM crops through pollination, the wild crops may gain a survival advantage and proliferate uncontrollably. The GM crop itself may also replace other cultivated varieties of the same crop, reducing diversity in the fields.

Even if these fears were well-founded (though scientists have argued they are not), ICRISAT’s groundnut is a prime example of a GM crop that carries very low risk of contamination. The groundnut plant is self-pollinating, which means that it mates with itself. Unlike plants such as wheat, its pollen does not travel to other nearby plants. In fact, during the trials so far, the ICRISAT team observed that pollen wouldn’t even travel a few centimetres away from the plant. “We got lucky,” says Sharma.

Further, there are several instances that show the public sector has been a responsible GM researcher. ICRISAT decided not to pursue genetic modification of the pearl millet because chances of it contaminating wild varieties were high.

“Even though there were a lot of oppor-

tunities to work with pearl millet, we decided to stop until the regulatory framework was clearer,” says Sharma.

Meanwhile, NABI has branched off into a new line of research, aimed at removing the possibility of GM pollen flow altogether. One way to develop seedless fruits through this approach, for example, would be through grafting. While the rootstock, or lower half of the plant, would be modified genetically, the upper half grafted onto it, or the scion, would be unmodified. The root would then send the chemical signal of seedlessness to the scion, even though the scion would have no genetic modification. “You normally don’t eat the rootstock and it doesn’t make seeds and fruit. So this will control safety issues substantially,” says Rakesh Tuli, director of NABI. To clump these diverse and well-intended genetic modifications under a homogenous category called ‘GM’ and then to label them ‘unsafe’ would be foolhardy.

Each crop needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Pental says India is capable of carrying out such stringent biosafety evaluations. “The message is: develop good biosafety protocols and implement these properly. If doubts still persist, carry out post-release monitoring.”

To claim that we cannot introduce GM foods because we do not have the ability to test their biosafety in advance, according to Pental, is “a shameful situation for a country of 1.2 billion people.” n 30 September 2013

SHAH MARAI/AFP

unity

An Afghan Moment

A minor football victory over India for news tickers, a major cause of jubilation for Afghans Nazes Afroz

‘W

e’ve finally stopped partying,’ reported a tired-yethappy friend from Kabul four days after Afghanistan defeated India in the final of the South Asia Football Federation tournament that took place in Kathmandu.

When India and Afghanistan reached the tournament’s final, most commentators concluded that India were going to be champions. But most Afghans were upbeat, so much so that a planeload of ministers, MPs and celebrities flew to Kathmandu to cheer the team. The tall 40 open

Afghans, described by breathless Indian sports reporters as ‘six-foot-giants’, drove one goal in either half of the match to register an emphatic 2-0 victory.

As the match progressed, I was getting updates through social media and personal messages from friends in Kabul.

‘The city is empty,’ they said, ‘Everyone is watching the match on TV or listening to the radio commentary.’ The country’s Moby Group had arranged to broadcast the match live at short notice.

Once the final whistle of the match blew, the euphoria across Afghanistan

was unimaginable. I was told that Kabul reverberated with sounds of celebratory gunfire or shaadeeyana as they call it. ‘But it was not fighting, it was gunfire of joy,’ said another friend. That celebratory gunfire went on all through the night.

One non-Afghan UN official currently posted in Kabul said, ‘For the four years I’m living here, I haven’t seen anything like this!’

The homecoming of the team was another manic moment. President Karzai and his entire cabinet turned up at the airport to receive the team. A big public 30 September 2013

over the top All to catch a glimpse of Afghanistan’s football heroes back in Kabul after their 2-0 surprise victory over India

felicitation event was organised at Kabul Stadium, which swarmed with thousands of people. Some were lucky to enter; others used every possible high vantage point around the stadium to get a glimpse of their football heroes. One image is particularly noteworthy: a few dozen men hanging off a mobile phone mast at least 30 feet above the ground at the risk of their lives.

During my regular visits to the country, only once have I seen such scenes of jubilation in the last 11 years. The other event was the country’s first open democratic election to pick a president in 2004.

We witnessed people coming out in huge numbers, dressed their best. People danced on the streets, as though they were out to celebrate a wedding. It was understandable; it was their first shot at nation-building in which they felt they had a stake. But what explains such a euphoric response to Afghan triumph in a minor tournament like the SAFF Cup?

W

erected, it was being painted, and, most significantly, there were kids kicking a football around the field. Since then, we have seen how sports gradually became an important part of Afghan society, even though not much was reported of it or talked about.

In the ‘grand nation building project’ led by the West, we had not seen any strategy paper on making sports an integral aspect of the task. Sports gained ground because people wanted it. They wanted to make a mark in life through it.

Since Afghanistan’s ‘nation-builders’ did not have much on offer, they took the initiative themselves.

Anyone who drives around or walks the streets of Kabul will come across signboards of several schools for martial arts and bodybuilding gyms. Kids and young men play football and cricket in public parks all day long.

In the Beijing Olympics of 2008, a

In the ‘grand nation building project’ led by the West, sports was not an integral aspect of the task.

Sports gained ground because people wanted it

hen I set foot in the same Kabul sta-

dium for the first time in 2002, I had an eerie feeling. Walking on the grounds, I was trying hard not to visualise the public executions that took place there regularly till recently. The Taliban, in power between 1996 and 2001, had banned all sports activities and used the country’s only stadium as a killing field. They would routinely execute people who ‘strayed’ from their interpretation of Islam; they would put men and women to death for alleged adultery; they would punish their political adversaries with public executions.

Walking in that arena, I cringed at the thought that I was possibly stepping on a spot that might once have been soaked with the blood of innocent victims of the most violently repressive regime of modern Afghanistan. The concrete seating stands were half broken and the main building was so derelict it felt like a haunted house.

Within a year-and-a-half, during one of my visits, I saw that the stadium was getting a facelift. New walls were being

30 September 2013

young Afghan called Rohullah Nikpai did his countrymen proud by winning a bronze medal in taekwondo—the country’s first ever such medal. Rohullah’s success inspired many young Afghans to take up the sport.

Compared to Rohullah’s accomplishment, winning the SAFF Cup could be seen as a minor feat. The event does not have much stature in the arena of world football, yet Afghans are equally if not even more proud of it. Football is a team game, after all, so it is something of a collective achievement, and that too, over a far larger country.

I

n recent times, there have been many doomsday predictions for the country as NATO’s troop withdrawal deadline of end-2014 approaches. These scare scenarios range from a return to anarchy to a Taliban takeover. Without

getting into a debate over whether these predictions have any merit, one has to admit that Afghans are worried and their worries concern their leaders more than anything else.

If one looks at Afghan history, one cannot but agree that Afghans are their own worst enemy. In their bid for ethnic, tribal or clan dominance, Afghans have a centuries-long record of war and conflict, often ending up defeated by enemies weaker than them.

The Taliban’s assumption of power is one such example. When the last Communist president Dr Najibullah handed over power to factions of the Mujahideen in 1992, the three factions in their true tradition started a four-year long civil war that killed tens of thousands of civilians. They also wasted all the resources and energy at their disposal. As a result, a relatively new militant group with little influence came to defeat them comprehensively.

Infighting along ethnic and tribal lines has always been the Achilles heel threatening Afghanistan’s stability. Since the 2002 overthrow of the Taliban, however, the only strife seen in the country has been on account of the NATO-led fight against that group. Yet, there is no denying the fissures that run underneath the present set up. This explains the search for celebratory moments that have the country come together as one, and this football victory offered exactly one such.

The ongoing celebrations, thus, are best seen as a demonstration of the country’s popular mood: of unity. The entire country, irrespective of ethnic or tribal identity, was glued to TV and radio sets and erupted in jubilation as soon as the final whistle blew.

The homecoming event in Kabul also carries a poignant significance for an oldtime watcher of Afghanistan like me.

The public frenzy to welcome the football team at the stadium can be interpreted as a loud statement against the insurgents who used the place as an execution ground only 11 years ago. The country and its people have converted this killing field into a football factory. These footballers have now done Afghanistan proud. They have brought Afghans together and given them the self-esteem and sense of national identity this country so badly needs. n open www.openthemagazine.com 41

i n h e r i ta n c e

mohini chaudhuri

ritesh uttamchandani

The Heir Is On Air

Comedian Johny Lever tried to keep his daughter Jamie J away from the glare of showbiz, but she was too talented to ignore

I

f veteran comic Johny Lever had his way, he would have kept both his children, daughter Jamie Janumala, 25, and son Jesse Janumala, 23, at arm’s length from the vagaries of the entertainment industry. He almost succeeded with Jamie. Till August 2012 she was a marketing executive at the London-based market research agency Visiongain with a passion for music, theatre, dance and, not surprisingly, stand-up comedy.

Jamie’s predisposition to the arts was no secret to her father. In the 10th standard she failed seven subjects and topped 42 open

every talent contest at Mumbai’s Jamnabai Narsee School. But abandoning her education was not an option Johny Lever allowed her. She completed her Bachelor’s of Mass Media from Jai Hind College, and then did a Master’s in marketing at the UK’s University of Westminster.

In early 2012, when Johny Lever was touring London, he tested Jamie’s mettle by granting her a 10 minute-spot in one of his stand-up shows at Watford Colosseum. He advised her to prepare an act different from his. She spoke about

look out Jamie has been watching her father’s films to mimic his voice and signature eye-pop

her experience in London, her observations of the locals as well as Indians settled there. The local flavour to her act resonated with the thousands of desis in the audience.

“I had to struggle a lot and I didn’t want my daughter to go down the same path,” Johny Lever says over the phone from Bangkok, where he is shooting a film.

“She kept sending hints through her 30 September 2013

mother [Sujata Janumala] about wanting to perform, but I insisted she study because I never had that option. Par main majboor ho gaya uske talent se (‘but I was compelled by her talent’).”

In July, Jamie, who now goes by the name Jamie J, made her television debut on one of Sony’s longest-running shows, Comedy Circus Ke Mahabali. At the audition, the judges were impressed by her impression of Asha Bhosle singing the 70s chartbuster One Two Cha Cha Cha, an act she says she never gets wrong. A student of classical music since the age of 10, Jamie says her training helps her imitate singers.

She has already been asked by the show’s makers to mimic her father in close to four episodes. As preparation, she has been watching videos of his shows to learn how he pops his eyes out, his gestures and his way of using his voice. “I’ve never copied my dad before. They just assumed I could do it and kept incorporating it in the script. I guess it works because I look just like him,” says Jamie.

Even off the show, her abilities are constantly put to test. Every now and then people stare at her expectantly till she says something that cracks them up.

“When people meet me, they want me to be funny like my dad. And I get scared because what if I’m not? I’m sure a lot of people think ‘This girl is Johny Lever’s daughter and she’s not even funny’. I guess I’m still not that spontaneous. I need some time to prepare,” Jamie says.

A

s children, Jamie and Jesse (an

assistant director on Dharma Productions’ Gori Tere Pyaar Mein starring Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor) saw little of their father. He was like the elusive Santa Claus who crept into the house late at night with gifts from travels abroad and then vanished the next morning. They saw more of him in the movies.

Jamie’s favourite is Baazigar where Johny Lever plays the absent-minded servant Babulal. “I can’t stop laughing at him in that movie. I have many videos from the film on my iPad and watch them from time to time. I think people can never forget dialogues like ‘Anarkali ka phone tha; ice-cream khaana zaroori hai (princess Anarkali called; it is mandato-

30 September 2013

ry to eat ice-cream)’.”

As you enter the Lever household in Mumbai’s Lokhandwala area, a series of life-size cut-outs of Charlie Chaplin jump at you in the corridor. They are the only contribution Lever made to the home when his wife renovated it a few years ago.

Jamie remembers watching her father writing scripts and rehearsing with his orchestra at home. He’d often run his fresh batch of jokes by her to test them.

“He always tells me that while doing comedy you have to think a little tedha (twisted). They say comedians always have to be a little kamina (mean). The key to being a good performer is observing people around you. He says everybody has something funny about them.”

Like most comics, Jamie feeds off people with peculiarities—it could be a unique accent, the way their voice breaks when they speak, or a distinct manner-

“[My father] always tells me that while doing comedy you have to think a little tedha. He says everybody has something funny about them” ism. She’s yet to find a favourite haunt for scouting subjects but the two places that have never disappointed her are Elixir Gym near her house and the New Life Fellowship Church in Oshiwara. “Every Sunday I meet at least 10 people at the Church that I can imitate. It’s a great place to pick up accents. I learnt the Malayalee accent from an old aunty I keep meeting there. Even gym trainers are usually very funny. I just got a new one and I keep observing him. It is clear that he doesn’t know much English but he speaks it anyway to impress customers,” says Jamie.

C

ompared to Johny Lever’s early

years, Jamie has had a relatively painfree start to her career. During her threeyear stint in London, she performed in two musicals—Exodus and Rehab— and after her return, had a successful two-month run at The Comedy Store in

Mumbai. Along with shoots for Comedy Circus, she makes time to act in plays, the most recent being Raell Padamesse’s stage adaptation of Grease.

“Aaj kal log ek second mein famous ho jaate hain (these days it takes a second for people to become famous). I had to do almost 1,000 shows before people started noticing me,” says Johny Lever, whose original name is John Rao Janumala.

Before his film debut in 1981, he juggled a variety of odd jobs to make ends meet. From working as a small-time labourer at Hindustan Lever (from where he adopted the name Lever) to selling pens on city streets in different actor voices, to participating in local dramas, he grabbed every available option to make an extra buck.

“In the 1980s the entire nation was talking about my audio cassettes. That helped me get film offers. I was nervous because I only knew how to mimic people and not acting. People took me seriously only after Tezaab released, but no one realises that by then I had already spent many years in the industry. Even now I feel there’s so much more to learn. I’ll always be a student,” says the 56-year-old.

The scars of his battles are still fresh in Lever’s mind and he likes to keep it that way. He narrates stories of his days of poverty to Jamie. “I may be a comic but I’m a strict and serious person. Jamie’s been born with a silver spoon. I keep telling her about my past so that she remains balanced,” says Lever with a tone of finality.

Jamie says her father loves being able to provide for his family. “It’s amazing to see where he has come from. He’s used to having a hand-to-mouth existence. Being the eldest in the family, he always had to support the rest. Even now, though I’m earning, he likes to pay for everything.

He feels I should save everything I get,” says Jamie. She can’t reveal her pay but says she gets compensated on a per-episode basis. Besides, she has income from multiple sources.

As of now, Johny Lever has no plans of performing with Jamie. He says he might consider it in the future, depending on how she shapes her career. Even on her recent performances on Comedy Circus, Lever offers measured praise. He lauds Jamie’s comic timing but then quickly adds, “She’s got a long way to go.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 43

between the sheets

wandering thoughts On going places and moving on sonali khan

F

or the past few weeks, I’ve been in a city I can’t believe I’ve waited so long to visit. I’ve had more than half a dozen boyfriends from here. It belongs to the country some of my favourite writers call home. There was a time everyone believed it would eventually become home. And now, I’m finally here.

It started as a dream vacation. As soon as I landed, I was whisked away to the fanciest hotel in the poshest area of the city, courtesy two very generous friends. There were ridiculously decorated welcome drinks, warm towels for my flushed-from-the-cold cheeks, and leggy blondes (who I mistrusted instantly because they looked too happy to be working at such an ungodly hour of the morning) bidding me Namaste. My room had enough chocolates to feed a small African country and the bar was stocked with the most delightfully unpronounceable wines and champagnes.

I had a hair stylist, masseuse and trainer on-call for 18 of the 24 hours of the day.

A girl could get used to living like that.

Three days later, I checked out of the hotel, bored out of my skull, dying to explore the city the way my ruffian friends described it. When news of my departure reached home, exactly 3.9 seconds after I checked out, frantic phone calls ensued. My father is convinced his spawn has been added to the growing number of illegal immigrants here.

Aunty M’s eyebrows, forever surprised thanks to incessant botox, were spotted hovering in the sky when I declined her benevolent offer to use her luxury apartment and phallic limo for the remainder of my stay here.

Another friend, who happened to be travelling too, begged my way into the hostel he was living in. A mixed dormitory. Eight men and two women sharing a room that could easily fit inside my own back home. Twice over.

It was the kind of thing college porn and my mother’s nightmares are made of. For the first time in my life I was (technically) sleeping under a guy with no intention of getting to know him in a Biblical sense.

There were several other firsts that night. For starters, my first night at the hostel was proof that the man I used to refer to as The Dude in this column was well and truly out of my system. My body physically rejects his memory now. There was a time when I was so used to his snor-

ing, it had become part of my sleep routine, like the soothing tick-tock of a grandfather clock that’s been in the family forever. As I lay in bed that first night, mutinously conjuring mental images of the Chinese torture techniques I wanted to employ on the friend sleeping on the bed above mine, blissfully unaware that his snores were scaring the kids down the hallway, I realised that snores no longer had a soporific effect on me. I was free from the phantom limb of that amputated relationship.

Since misery loves company, I was selfishly glad to learn that my friend’s nasal thunder was doing its bit to bring nations closer. Two of the guys, a German and a Chinese, who had obviously been staying at the hostel for a while, produced a bottle of wine and headed into the hallway to enjoy it in (relative) peace. In the bed diagonally opposite mine, a middle-aged man of indeterminate nationality put on his earphones and engrossed himself in solving his Rubik’s Cube. But I have to give it to the French for the most innovative use of unexpected free time and the creation of opportunity where none was to be found. A few minutes after the makeshift German-Chinese bar had been set up near the stairs and the Rubik’s Cube lover had turned his back on us, the gangly French boy with too little facial and chest hair clambered down from his own bed and slipped into his girlfriend’s, barely a foot away from mine. What followed next created shadows that reminded me of Begum Jaan and the elephant quaking in her quilt.

(Lihaaf, Ismat Chughtai) I messaged the boy back home, hoping he’d be up early.

He was. Some wild phone sex ensued. Later, I was disturbed by how much I already missed him. In the two weeks since my first night in this crazy new city, I’ve made friends from countries I can’t find on the map, met a regular reader of this column, watched money being stolen from my bag and not said a word to the friend who did it and thought about cheating on the boy. All that and more in the upcoming issues. n

The Dude is well and truly out of my system. My body physically rejects his memory now

44 open

Sonali Khan was holding on to her virtue, and then she fell in love...with several men.

She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan 30 September 2013

true Life

mindspace The Story Museum

63

O p e n s pa c e

Pulkit Samrat Salman Khan Emraan Hashmi Karan Johar

62

n p lu

John Day Grand Masti

61 Cinema reviews

Sony RX 100 II Speedmaster ’57 Omega Co-Axial Lava 402 3G Smartphone

60

Tech & style

The Great Diaspora Genes Linked to Handedness Mechanical Gears in Nature

58

Science

Ladakh Film Festival

52

cinema

Looking at Shahpur Jat

50

photography

Understanding JM Coetzee

books

Saying No to St Stephen’s

46 64

ishan tankha

island in time Two photo exhibitions that focus on Delhi’s Shahpur Jat 52

Philosophy at Brooklyn College.

He blogs at samirchopra.com and The Cordon at ESPN-Cricinfo

hindustan times/getty images

true life

samir chopra is Professor of

Saying No to St Stephen’s Why rejecting one of the country’s premier educational institutes has had a long-lasting effect on me Samir Chopra

I

n April 1984, at the age of 17, I

finished my requisite 12 years of schooling by passing my ‘board exams’. Shortly thereafter, I began the familiar grind of applying for admission to Delhi University: I caught buses to the main North Campus, visited one college after another, picked up application forms from each, and after filling them out, handed them in with the application fee. I then waited for the ‘cut-off lists’ to be announced; they would tell me where I would be spending my next three years.

Among the colleges I had applied to 30 september 2013

a class apart Students at St Stephen’s College

was St Stephen’s—my father’s alma mater—for its science programmes, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. I dreamt of a post-graduate career as a researcher of some sort; perhaps I would study planetary science, perhaps astrophysics, or some other esoteric science.

A week or so later, when the lists were announced, I had been selected for an interview for an honours programme in Chemistry. Yet, despite having applied, I declined the interview call. Instead, a few days later, I joined an honours programme at Hindu College in Mathematical Statistics— 30 september 2013

a subject of study that ranked a distant third behind Physics and Chemistry in my hierarchy of preferences. I had decided I did not want to attend St Stephen’s; indeed, I did not even want to be interviewed.

In between the time I had applied to St Stephen’s and been called for the interview, a low-level dislike of St Stephen’s had blossomed and flared.

I had heard the usual chatter about St Stephen’s snobbery for a while; most of it—the catty tales of how it had been the home of brown sahibs and still was—had rolled off my back. But the details of its admissions process had begun to grate on me. Every other college at Delhi University admitted you on the basis of your marks in highschool examinations: make the cut-off point, you were in. There was something seemingly egalitarian and democratic about this arrangement. But St Stephen’s, for some inexplicable reason, wanted to see you in the flesh. Its requirement should have been merely an irritant, the kind of hurdle an Indian schoolboy would have been expected to clear in that maddening rush for an all-elusive ‘seat’. I should have dealt with it; I should have been ready for it given my all-too-frequent encounters with Indian bureaucracy. Surely, this was just another manifestation of that?

But I did not see it that way.

Instead, I saw it as a malevolent symbol of an elitism I despised. Over the course of a few days, as a sometimes easily-infuriated 17-year-old, I rapidly developed a theory of why St Stephen’s included the interview in its admission process. It sought to weed out the ‘Central School-Kendriya VidyalayaTrans-Yamuna’ types; it sought out Delhi’s upper and middle-class, the Anglophilic and Anglophone children of its bourgeoisie; it wanted boys and girls who wore blue jeans and whitecollared shirts, who talked animatedly of their plans for graduate school in the US; it did not want ‘Biharis’ or ‘bhaiyyas’; it did not want rough types, those who might wear chappals to college and ride DTC buses from destinations other than South Delhi. The exam marksheets would not provide this infor-

mation, but an in-person interview would. The college’s interviewers would be able to examine candidates’ clothes, accent and style; they would be able to determine whether the putative Stephanian spoke English with the right intonations and comported himself in the appropriate manner.

Bizarrely enough, I might have met their desired demographic profile: my father was a Modernite and a Stephanian; I had gone to boarding schools, and yes, Modern School as well; I spoke English fluently, and wouldn’t you know, I wore blue jeans, lived in South Delhi and spoke glibly of my tastes in rock music.

But somehow, this knowledge failed to comfort me. I felt estranged from those that I thought were the targets of St Stephen’s interview committees.

I was the son of an Air Force pilot, a member of India’s urbanite middleclass, and I might have attended a ‘public school’, but I still felt like the child of a government servant. I did not identify, and indeed never had, with the considerably more wealthy schoolchildren I had often seen, met and interacted with in New Delhi. The idea that an interview committee would evaluate me as being worthy enough to join the ranks of those snobs struck me as deeply offensive. I found the dismissal of the implied egalitarianism of the marksheet system problematic. Just what did St Stephen’s think it was? Why was the system that was good enough for the rest of the university not good enough for this college? So I said ‘no’ and walked away. In my opinion, by refusing to attend the interview, I was not participating in the system, I was not perpetuating it.

As political tactics go, this was not a particularly well thought-out move. I did not write a letter to St Stephen’s explaining my action; I did not write a letter titled ‘Why I will not be attending an interview at St Stephen’s’ to the editor of a local newspaper and call for a boycott. Perhaps I dimly sensed no one would join me. I simply refused to show up. My gesture was lost, and someone else took my place.

I went on to finish my BA at Hindu open www.openthemagazine.com 47

College; I cheered as our sports teams comprehensively thrashed St Stephen’s whenever they played; I joined in the ‘ragging’ of St Stephen’s students on the University Special buses with just a little extra gusto. When my three years of college ended, I left for the US to study Computer Science, and then eventually, Philosophy.

I often wondered about my decision. By not going to St Stephen’s I had missed out on a chance to be part of a cohort of ambitious, intelligent, hardworking college students; they would have aimed high, I was sure, and I would have too with them. My classmates at Hindu College possessed all the qualities I attributed to their Stephanian counterparts, but my insecurities turned me into a second-guesser. I might have gone on to a top graduate school in the US. Perhaps I would have studied my dream disciplines; and best of all, I would have, to use modern parlance, had great ‘networking’ opportunities. Of course, the fact that I did not attend a top graduate programme in the US had everything to do with my lack of application and motivation in my undergraduate years and nothing to do with my cohort, but in my most acute moments of other-directed angst, I failed to see it that way.

I often met and read about St Stephen’s graduates in the US. Their academic careers seemed to exist in the fast lane in a way that mine seemed not. I thought I recognised two Indian fast-tracks to academic success: the IIT one and the St Stephen’s one. Members of the latter appeared to secure the INLAKS, Nehru and Rhodes scholarships that took them to Oxbridge; the former went to Stanford and Berkeley and MIT. I felt myself floundering in academic backwaters; I appeared to have no powerful academic community to network with. Nice work, champ; all that idiotic posturing in the dark, all for naught.

In my darkest hours, staring at an editor’s curt rejection note, a publisher’s polite refusal to entertain a book proposal, fuming yet again about how the Matthew Principle—those that have, get more—played itself out in aca48 open

demia, I would curse myself, including among all the other stupid mistakes I had made in my academic career, the intemperate, ill-directed response that had made me reject that interview call.

Why didn’t I go for the interview, get admitted and then make up my mind?

Admission to St Stephen’s in my time represented for many students in New Delhi and elsewhere who were not going to IITs or medical schools—as per-

I found the dismissal of the implied egalitarianism of the marksheet system

problematic.

Why was the system that was good enough for the rest of the university

not good enough for St Stephen’s?

So I said ‘no’ and

walked away.

By refusing to attend the interview, I was not participating in the system,

I was not perpetuating it haps it does even now—a singular achievement. At one stage I had aspired to it as much as anyone else. But somehow, another emotion had taken over: a curious febrile mix of resentment and anger at the snobbery I had sometimes been exposed to in Delhi, and which I took St Stephen’s to be representative of. I didn’t want to be judged by a panel of ‘theirs’. Somehow this had congealed into a political stance against St

Stephen’s elitism.

Now, considerably older and hopefully wiser, I do not regret my decision in the slightest. It was indicative of a passion that I could have calibrated, but if you are not going to be irrational and intemperate when young, then when else? Perhaps that same untempered impulse formed the basis for the ambition that drove me in later years to change careers—away from computer science and back to the humanities. The humanities subjects were what I had loved studying in school; I had only changed my mind and selected the sciences in high school and later, in college, because studying English Literature or History felt like a self-indulgent choice when career options seemed available only in the usual suspects: engineering, medicine et al. If I had gone to St Stephen’s I might have gone on to become a runof-the-mill weekday scientist, just getting by, floundering in graduate school without any real talent. I might have been found out at the wrong time. By choosing a mediocre programme in Computer Science, and securing a boring job as reward, perhaps I had ensured I would exit that field and seek my fortunes elsewhere.

In January 2011, I travelled back to Delhi, and, thanks to arrangements made by a departmental colleague and friend—a St Stephen’s graduate—gave a talk to St Stephen’s Philosophy department. My host was the impossibly erudite KP Shankaran; my conversations with him were one of the highlights of my trip. I spoke with first-year, second-year and third-year students in their classes. They were well-read, friendly, inquisitive and intelligent; my question-and-answer sessions with them were simultaneously exhausting and invigorating. With a wry smile on my face, I told them I was a Hindu College graduate; some of them got the joke and grinned back at me.

I console myself by counting my blessings: I live in an interesting city; I have tenure and a full professorship in a great department; I like the work I do. To use a saying I dislike profoundly: things have turned out pretty well. n 30 september 2013

Books No Questions Please Unsuccessful attempts at the Berlin International Book Festival to understand how the reclusive JM Coetzee’s mind works anuradha ananth

I

n JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, a central character, Simon, responds to a piece of well-meant advice by asking, ‘Is that the end of the sermon?’ A question that you, the reader, will also want to pose to Coetzee after reading his latest novel. Add to that another question: What in sweet Jesus’ name is this meandering drivel?

I thought that listening to Coetzee read from the book, at the Berlin International Book Festival on 9 September, would help me make sense of this dense allegorical tale. I thought that by noting his choice of chapters to be read (since he would by no means answer questions), I would have a moment of epiphany. Sadly, that was not to be. My frustration on reading the book was intensified on it being read out in German by Frank Arnold (albeit an expressive rendition) and Coetzee himself doing the English version in a beautifully measured manner. Coetzee and Arnold alternated between four chapters, two in English and two in German. One almost heard the first autumn leaf of the year sail softly down outside, such was the enraptured silence of the audience in the main hall of the Berliner Festspiele where the 11-day-long festival was taking place.

Were there others out there too trying to figure out the complex tale of The Childhood of Jesus, I wondered. If you thought the plot had anything to do with Jesus, you’re so wrong. The only Biblical allusion is the mention of grain and bread in the early chapters.

The story revolves around middle-aged Simon, who arrives by boat with fiveyear-old David at the socialist Spanish city of Novilla. They met on the boat and Simon assumes guardianship of the lost boy. Simon then embarks on a 50 open

quest to reunite David with his mother. The rest of the maddeningly cryptic story, interspersed with homilies and philosophical disputations, traces their life in this vaguely utopian setting. The book ends as abruptly as it begins and if it is meant to be provocative, it only provokes disbelief that the great Coetzee could have produced something so disappointing.

I

have never understood the point of authors merely reading from their books sans a discussion. A die-hard devotee of Coetzee, though one feeling particularly angry at being short-changed

For someone who has always wondered why Coetzee will not talk but only read from his books, I am placated by this: ‘Interrogation is not a medium I do well in. I am too brief in my responses...’ at the end of the 277-page-long, nearly ¤14-priced The Childhood of Jesus, I nevertheless decided to listen to him read again the next day. This time, the readings were from Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011, Paul Auster and JM Coetzee.

Auster himself was not present for the epistolary banter. It would have been a treat to hear the rustling of letters being pulled out of their envelopes, the two literary giants making eye contact, possibly exchanging knowing looks and smiles as they read what they had written to each other over three years.

Instead you had Coetzee reading the missives in English and readings in

German by Samuel Finzi and Burghart Klaußner. What an unalloyed treat this evening was!

‘I realise I often respond to your remarks with stories about myself,’ writes Auster in a letter to Coetzee dated 2 February 2009. These delightful stories liven up the exchange between the two friends. Auster’s anecdotes work as chatty foils for Coetzee’s sombre ruminations on diverse themes, ranging from friendship, incest, cinema, sport and Israel-Palestine to language and, of course, writing.

The selection that the three gentlemen read was eclectic. Coetzee started with friendship: ‘Considering how important friendships are in social life, and how much they mean to us, particularly during childhood, it is surprising how little has been written on the subject.’ This was followed by Finzi reading from Auster’s brilliant observations on sport: ‘There is no question that games have a strong narrative component. We follow the twists and turns of the combat in order to learn the final outcome.’ Klaußner responded with Coetzee’s reply: ‘I continue to look out for moments of heroism, moments of nobility. In other words, the basis of my interest is ethical rather than aesthetic… Absurdly because modern professional sport has no interest in the ethical: it responds to our craving of the heroic only with the spectacle of the heroic.’

There are several humorous pieces of correspondence, but mostly from Auster. For instance, his regret at not having punched a critic who reviewed his work unfavourably: ‘I myself am too well-mannered to punch or spit, much as I have sometimes wanted to.’ As well as addressing Coetzee as 30 september 2013

micheline pelletier

inaccessible The more you read Coetzee, the more you realise how little you know of him

‘Gramps’ in his reply to the former’s meditations on growing old.

F

or someone who has always won-

dered why Coetzee will not talk but only read from his books, I am placated by this: ‘Interrogation is not a medium I do well in. I am too brief in my responses, where brevity (clippedness) is all too often misread as a sign of irritation or anger.’

The book of letters soothes the nerves after the jangling caused by The Childhood of Jesus. It’s a privilege

30 september 2013

to feel that one has been able to get into Coetzee’s mind, even though you know these letters were meant for publication and therefore Coetzee, the recluse, will not have revealed too much.

Ironically, he says in a letter to Auster’s wife Siri Hustvedt: ‘I have been engaged to write a review of a new edition of Samuel Beckett’s letters of the years 1929-1940… the edition in question appears to be based on a sharp distinction between literary correspondence and his personal correspondence. None of the latter is included. The editors also seem determined not to say anything

about Beckett’s private life. One consequence is that the reader of the letters has little idea of why Beckett keeps shuttling between Dublin and Paris and Hamburg and London (mostly,one suspects, eros is the spur).’

Touche! That’s what you feel when you read Coetzee’s letters. While Auster emerges as more three-dimensional, Coetzee remains inaccessible.

Despite having read his majestic and deeply moving fictionalised memoir in three parts (Boyhood, Youth and Summertime) I find myself still craving to know more. n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

photography An Island in Time Two upcoming photo exhibitions capture contrasting moods in Delhi’s Shahpur Jat devika bakshi

inbetweeners by Ishan Tankha

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30 September 2013

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open www.openthemagazine.com 53

a summer in shahpur jat by Philippe Calia

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C

oncurrent to the forthcoming

Delhi Photo Festival will be several satellite shows, included in the festival’s programme as ‘partner gallery exhibitions’. Among these are two bodies of work shot in and around Shahpur Jat, where Open’s office happens to be located. Well, almost.

Starkly dissimilar in concept, aesthetic and approach—one rooted, a portrait of a community with a generous sense of place; the other distinctly unplaced, resisting location in pursuit of a mood, a state of being—both works tap into something essential about this dense historic village in its contemporary state. Philippe Calia burrows inward to find fullness, community, an immensely reassuring vitality, while Ishan Tankha wanders outward, toward the periphery, finding pauses in the bustle, a gentle desolation also encountered elsewhere at the other end of the continent.

P

hilippe Calia’s work, A Summer

in Shahpur Jat, was commissioned

by Kaushik Ramaswamy and Akshay Mahajan of Printer’s Devil when they found themselves in possession of a large-format film camera, which they were keen be used to create a body of work based in Shahpur Jat— perhaps along the lines of the series Small Trades by Irving Penn, or August Sander’s People of the 20th Century. They identified Calia as someone who’d be able to use the camera, and who might bring a grounded outsider’s eye to the place. What began as a portraiture project turned into what Calia calls “a social experiment”. By announcing his presence in a flyer, opening himself up to questions and photographs on-demand, Calia made himself a fixture in the village—a familiar face rather than a lingering intruder. The resulting intimacy defines the work, transforming what could have been an ethnographic survey into an extended family album.

The subjects of these portraits— referred to with affectionate nick-

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names like ‘Mr India’ by Calia and Ramaswamy—are not alien or exotic or objects of condescension as subjects of similar studies so often become.

Though frontal in their composition, with subjects looking at the camera in carefully constructed frames, the photos are not faked. They are a panorama, not a pageant. The subjects are not being asked to perform anything, nor to surrender themselves and their contexts to some arbitrary visual category dreamt up before the fact. The longer you look, the more effortlessly cheerful they seem, gifting you a sense of upbeatness, perhaps of in-touchness.

They evade the voyeurism, the forced pathos, the drive-by alienation that ethnography, documentary and street photography often lapse into. The portraits have a dignity and openness and, despite being very diverse, a sense of being part of a continuum. Impossibly, all these people, pictures in their little niches, seem to make sense as a collective in a way they might not otherwise.

In addition to the portraits, a view of the monument unfolds across a beautiful triptych, an open parenthesis for an ongoing portrait of a place. The portraits are also punctuated by a diptych: the same galli twice, in the daytime and the night, in which Calia has employed a selective focus to terrific effect. In the day shot, the photo converges where the street does, and in the second, breathtakingly, the eye hurtles into a narrow sliver of space between buildings. The work is, unmistakeably, a portrait of a place.

It is clear Calia has spent a summer hanging out, taking the pictures people ask him to take, getting to know them, inhabiting their space, becoming enfolded. The result is ease, visual fluency, unperformative work.

I

shan Tankha’s Inbetweeners is in fact two series, connected by a similar sensibility. One was shot in Tokyo in 2006 over the course of a week, the other in Delhi, in Shahpur Jat, over the

course of several months. As a visitor in Tokyo, Tankha sought parts of the city that were a little slower than the rest, islands of respite from its general pace. “Everything rushes past you in a new city,” he says; he looked for places to linger, inaccessible spaces into which you cannot be invited but must thrust yourself. A day spent in this way with a group of Harajuku girls resulted in several close portraits which, taken together, convey a collective remove, a public inwardness. Other portraits show people daydreaming, idling, waiting. Then there are other photographs that seem to lie between frames: fish waiting on a sidewalk, a reflection, an advertisement, nonevents—what Tankha describes as “the opposite of a decisive moment”. Such moments are the subject and pursuit of Inbetweeners—moments between other moments, moments of pause interrupting the bustle of a city, “moments of rupture”, but gentle ones.

Turning his attention toward the ragged, often sinister periphery of Shahpur Jat where he spent so much time, Tankha “didn’t think [I] could find something gentle”. But that is precisely what he found. Pools of shadow, corners of neglect, but also calm. People not going anywhere in particular, taking a break or a nap, time spent between tasks. The photos answer in the affirmative Tankha’s question, posed in a statement of inquiry: ‘Is it possible for photography to disrupt the image of the city’s relentless march, to offer a chance to reflect without despair?’

It is, indeed, and Tankha’s photographs show these disruptions can have the texture of a puddle on the pavement rather than a fist through a window. Frozen moments only possible in photographs: still, yet breathing, somnolent, simmering. When they go up at the Japan Foundation later this week, the two series will face each other; two cities in a rare, soft mood, reimagined through fragments, taking a moment out of their bustle to breathe. n 30 September 2013

CINEMA High Altitude Screen Shots Gulzar watching his first movie once again and other glimpses from a film festival in Ladakh Madhavankutty Pillai

T

he venue is an auditorium locat-

ed on top of a hill and surrounded by tall bare mountain ranges on which shadows and colours dance according to the hour of the day. For those there, says filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj while presenting the opening show of the Ladakh International Film Festival, it is a rare opportunity to watch the first film of a legend with him. The movie is Mere Apne, made by Gulzar in 1971. Gulzar looks his usual dour, pensive self and says he is nervous about seeing his first film. “Kehte hain hamare karam isi zindagi hamare saamne aate hain, aur yahi hone waala hai,” he says.

(It is said that our karma comes face to face with us in this very life and that is what is going to happen.)

In the movie, Meena Kumari plays the role of her life (except for perhaps Pakeezah) as an old woman picked up from a village and brought to a town by a distant relative to look after his child.

She then quarrels with his wife and leaves their home. Instead of returning to her village, she feels sorry for two orphans and starts living in the neighbourhood ruins with them. She also becomes a mother figure for two warring street gangs led by Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha. In the end, in a fight between them as they campaign for different politicians in an election, she is killed by a stray bullet fired by the very men in whom she had found family.

Gulzar is asked a number of questions. The first one is on the graffiti on the walls in the movie. He says that he wanted to reflect the times, especially the genocide that had just happened in East Pakistan. He also got the idea from the walls of West Bengal where such slogans were commonplace; he remembers one of them being ‘I can forget my father’s name but not Vietnam’. There are also posters of the movie Anand and that is because he was its writer and 58 open

one of the songs, Koi hota, in Mere Apne, is in fact taken from the background score of Anand.

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, the director of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, is sitting in the audience. He asks Gulzar about the impact of the movie at the time.

Gulzar replies that there was no special impact, it was just billed as another action film. His peer group, however, saw the nuances and that satisfied him.

He is asked many questions and is generous with ideas and memories. He answers only one question in one line and that is mine. I am curious about Meena Kumari playing an old woman and ask

At the other venues, filmmakers are despondent.

One filmmaker finds only the projectionist watching his movie. A National Awardwinning actress goes to watch her film and finds a handful there how she responded when he asked her to do the role. “I went to her and she agreed to do it,” he says and shrugs.

L

adakh is an unpredictable place.

The weather is chillingly nasty for half of the year, but even in summer when snow does not cut it off from the rest of the world, nothing is guaranteed. Phone lines and internet connections are whimsical. Public transport is non-existent. To organise a film festival here is a logistical nightmare. The second edition of the Ladakh International Film Festival had a bit more to contend with. It was to be held in July but then the Uttarakhand floods happened in June. Since it would

be in bad taste to host a festival under the shadow of such a tragedy, the dates were shifted to September. But by then, the tourism season was almost over. And in between there was one more unexpected obstacle—Arnab Goswami. And the rest of the media ratcheting up hysteria over Chinese incursions in the region.

Soldiers I spoke to said that there was nothing exceptional about the incursions. “We do it, they do it, it happens all the time,” says an officer. But it led to a 30 per cent drop in tourism and for a region that survives on it, that is heartbreak. At one session, the district magistrate of Ladakh speaks about how he noticed that one specific year the number of domestic tourists had shot up by a lakh, but foreign tourist numbers remained the same. When he asked around, he found the reason—3 Idiots had released the previous winter and it had extensive shots of Ladakh.

The chain of adverse circumstances this year shows in the film festival.

There are three venues. The main venue gets a decent audience for main shows, otherwise there are only a sprinkling.

At the other venues, filmmakers who are exhibiting films are despondent.

One filmmaker finds only the projectionist watching his movie. A National Award-winning actress finds a handful watching hers. Over dinner, I tell a Malayalam filmmaker that there were three people for the movie. He corrects me and says there were two—he was one of them. But he liked the movie.

R

akeysh omprakash Mehra has

been requested by Vishal Bhardwaj to become the festival’s patron from next year onwards. He is a Ladakh regular. He had come here for his honeymoon 22 years ago. Some scenes of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag were shot here. He 30 september 2013

leh and behold (From left) Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Vishal Bhardwaj and Gulzar at the Ladakh International Film Festival

wrote Rang De Basanti in Leh. His next movie is Mirza and he calls it a true-blue musical. Someone asks him how he differentiates a musical in Bollywood, where every movie has songs. It’s a good question and Mehra gives a cryptic one-liner that he doesn’t know what Bollywood is. He then speaks of how most songs in his movies are not sung by its characters. “Except for songs which [are required] to be sung,” he says. In Rang De Basanti, no one sang, in Dilli-6 there was only one song, Genda phool, and that was based on him remembering his aunties singing together while they made papad. In Bhaag Milkha, there is a song sung by soldiers in their dorm and that too is based on how he saw students singing in his hostel.

Later, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag is shown and it’s a full house. His inspirations might come from real life, but it’s plainly masalafied. In a scene shot in Ladakh, Milkha runs tied to a tyre and coughs up blood. His coach eggs him on and he starts running again. That is definitely not real. Any coach who does that wants to get the athlete killed.

T

he second evening’s main screen-

ing is The Frontier Gandhi, a documentary on freedom fighter Khan

30 september 2013

Abdul Ghaffar Khan by American filmmaker Teri McLuhan. She had once been given a book on Khan by a Classics professor in Berkeley. She took it back to New York and after several weeks opened it one night at 2 or 3 am, when she usually did her reading.

And then, “within 15-20 minutes something happened and I thought all the electrons in the room had re-arranged themselves”. A few months later, she was in India for the first time as a guest of the Government representing the motion picture industry of the US. During the course of showing her work, she was asked what she would be doing next and she surprised herself by saying that she would be making this film. That was 22 years ago.

It took her so long because she had many hurdles along the way, such as no financier. But the movie is now being shown for the first time in India. It is a striking overview of Khan’s life. He lived to be almost 100 and one-thirds of that time he was imprisoned, first by the British and then by Pakistan, until his eventual exile to Afghanistan.

But the film seems to mark no new territory and is more a recounting rather than an interpretation. Plus, it shows Khan’s character in monotonous greatness without even remote flaws.

After the screening, a Kashimiri

Pandit filmmaker says that the film gives him hope that he will one day get his homeland back, and the atmosphere turns political because a minister from the state government is also there. He asks McLuhan why people like Khan always lose in the end. She says that towards the end of his life, a journalist asked Khan whether he did not think that his whole life had been a waste of time. His reply was that he did get to plant a seed. “And the filmmaker came along and watered that seed, someone else will come and fertilise it. We all stand on the shoulders of one another,” says McLuhan.

And then she switches to her own life. “After all these years, I still don’t have the distribution that I dreamt of having. But I will. I understand the reasons for the roadblocks and one of them is that we are dealing with powerful stereotypes. One of them shows Islam as unyielding and violent. This story of this man turns this stereotype 180 degrees on its head and that makes people uncomfortable.

That’s one big reason I am encountering resistance, but if you think I am going to give up, that is not going to happen,” she says. n The writer’s stay and travel was hosted

by Ladakh International Film Festival open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

left or right Humans are the only species to show such a strong bias in handedness, with around 90 per cent of people being right-handed. The cause of this bias remains largely a mystery

The Great Diaspora A new study finds that humans might have taken different migration routes from Africa

Genes Linked to Handedness

I

t has so far been believed that early modern humans migrated from Africa to Europe via the Middle East, travelling along the Mediterranean rim or along the River Danube. These early modern humans are supposed to have reached Europe about 45,000 years ago. However, a new study shows that this might not be entirely true. A study published in the journal Plos One claims that modern humans arrived in the Middle East and Europe at roughly the same time. Providing an intriguing twist to the story of how early modern humans migrated from Africe, the researchers suggest that they probably travelled along different routes.

Researchers from Oxford University radiocarbon dated 20 marine shells found at the top 15 metres of an archaeological site in Lebanon called Ksar Akil. The shells were perforated, suggesting they were used for decoration either on clothing or the body, which was a trend unique to modern humans. Upon radiocarbon dating, the researchers found that the shell beads are between 42,400 and 41,700 years old, roughly the same period modern humans are supposed to have reached Europe.

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Explaining the objectives of their research, the authors write in the journal: ‘The Levant represents a land bridge connecting Africa, Asia and Europe and has often been viewed as a region of high palaeoanthropological significance... Important examples of human fossils in such contexts were recovered 75 years ago at Ksar Akil in Lebanon. The site and the fossils, however, lacked a secure absolute chronology, which is the focus of the present paper. We believe these data may help further our understanding of the timing and geographic context of the dispersal of AMH (anatomically modern humans) into Europe.’

According to the lead author of the study, Dr Katerina Douka, instead of the Middle East being the single point of origin for modern humans heading for Europe, they may also have used other routes. She told the Daily Mail, “A maritime route across the Mediterranean has been proposed although evidence is scarce. A wealth of archaeological data now pinpoints the plains of Central Asia as a particularly important but relatively unknown region which requires further investigation.” n

According to a genetic study published in PLOS Genetics, researchers have identified a biological process that influences whether we are right handed or left handed. They found correlations between handedness and a network of genes involved in establishing leftright asymmetry in developing embryos. The most strongly associated, statistically significant variant with handedness is located in the gene PCSK6, which is involved in the early establishment of left and right in the growing embryo. The researchers suggest that the genes may also help establish left-right differences in the brain, which in turn influence handedness. They, however, cautioned that these results do not completely explain the variation in handedness among humans. n

‘Mechanical Gears’ in Nature Burrows/Sutton

A functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect. The juvenile Issus—a plant-hopping insect found across Europe—has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the insect’s legs when it launches into a jump. According to a study in Science, the gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box. The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement. The gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile—or ‘nymph’—stages. It’s not yet known why the Issus loses its hindleg gears on reaching adulthood. n 30 september 2013

sony multi-interface hot shoe

tech&style

This new ISO-based 21+3 pin quick-lock hot shoe is mechanically and electrically compatible with a standard 2-pin ISO-518 hot shoe, but electrically compatible with the previous Auto-lock Accessory Shoe with extensions

Sony RX 100 II ...offers quite a few worthwhile upgrades over the original RX100 gagandeep Singh Sapra

Speedmaster ’57 w Omega Co-Axial

Price on request

Rs 42,990

Inspired by the design of the first Omega Speedmaster from 1957, the Speedmaster ’57 has straight lugs extending from the watch case. Its 41.5 mm case blends 18K red gold with stainless steel.

Powered by the Omega Co-Axial calibre 9300 that has a chronograph function, the Speedmaster ’57 combines a vintage look and a revolutionary movement. n

Lava 402 3G Smartphone

P

oint-and-shoot cameras are a

dying category, but last year Sony launched the RX100 and changed all that; I even went ahead and called it the best point-and-shoot camera that one could buy. So, when Sony announced the RX100 II, the second avatar of the RX100, I spent a couple of weeks using it to figure out why it was priced higher even though its specifications looked pretty similar to the RX100’s.

Both the RX100 and RX100 II have a 20.2 megapixel sensor. Though Sony does say they have improved the sensor, you do not see a jump in the sensor size or its capture capacity. Both cameras come with the Carl Zeiss 3.6x optical zoom lens with a minimum aperture of f/1.8, but here is what has changed: the version II has a tilt LCD screen, so if you have faced those awkward moments where you wanted to put the camera high up on a tripod, or put it on the ground to get that great shot, you can now do all 30 september 2013

that so easily. Sony has also got Wi-Fi and NFC on board, and there is a new multi-interface hot shoe for connecting an electronic viewfinder, a flash or even a stereo microphone.

Both the RX100 and RX100 II are great for low light shooting, and Sony has improved this capability quite a bit in the latter. The pictures are sharp and clear in both low light and bright light situations. The Wi-Fi on board allows you to connect the camera wirelessly to your smartphone and share images.

The phone still manages to be right up there when it comes to pointand-shoot cameras. It can shoot full high-definition videos, but you can’t change the settings while shooting them. The tilt screen has also added a slight bulk to the camera. Overall, it is a great camera and gives you some amazing results, but with the Sony RX 100 still available for Rs 34,990, the few changes in the RX100 II do not justify the price difference. n

Rs 5,499

Featuring a 4-inch capacitive touch screen, a high resolution WVGA display (480 x 800 pixels) with a capability to output 16 million colours, the 402 runs on the latest version of Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean). The phone has a 3 megapixel rear camera with a 1.2 GHz dual core processor powering it. Though the internal storage is limited to 256 MB, you can expand it by using a 32 GB microSD card. Other features include GPS capabilities, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

You have a choice of three colours—white, grey and red.

The Lava 402 is a good option in case you are looking for a budget handset. n

Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

actor s against pl agiarism?

Mere weeks before the release of John Day, it was reported that stars Naseeruddin Shah and Randeep Hooda had refused to promote the film after discovering that its plot had been lifted from the Spanish film La Caja 507 (‘The Box’ 507). The actors apparently found out when another filmmaker mentioned it to Hooda. Shah, however, denied reports of a boycott

John Day The charismatic Naseeruddin Shah and Randeep Hooda keep you hooked to this thriller ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Grand Masti Director Indra Kumar cast Ritesh Deshmukh, Vivek Oberoi,

Aftab Shivdasani Score ★★★★★

in shah, randeep Cast naseerudd ma ar sh in vip a, od ho solomon Director ahishor

J

ohn Day is a bloody thriller fre-

quently overlaid with the words of Jesus. Contextually, this is of course a paradox, but that the passages quoted in the film’s voiceover are all connected with this Prophet’s consistently anti-material stance appears interesting. The film is about a series of murders committed to grab property worth hundreds of crores, and when the film ends, with the entire cast dead and John Day still standing, we hear the words: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul.”

‘Casablanca’ is the property in the name of which everyone goes berserk in John Day. The movie starts off with a young girl and boy hiking in a bone dry forest near Lonavala and encroaching on this land. This sequence ends abruptly, and the next scene is John Day (Naseeruddin Shah) burying his daughter. We learn later that the forest was deliberately set on fire that very day the kids were hiking, and in a bi62 open

zarre and convoluted series of events, Mr Day, a bank manager, gets involved in a murder mystery.

Meanwhile, a cop gone bad (Randeep Hooda), strides across the screen. He is psychologically disturbed, both by his past and his present. He was molested as a boy and has never been able to come to terms with his childhood trauma. Now he has money and a very pretty girlfriend (Elena Kazan), but she is an alcoholic and he just can’t handle her addiction.

With a few additions and some alterations, John Day rips off Box 507, Enrique Urbizu’s 2002 film in Spanish.

With all his enthusiasm for Biblical messages, director Ahishor Solomon could have paid some attention to one of the Ten Commandments—‘Thou shalt not steal’—but unfortunately, he just skipped the ‘Decalogue’.

Damnation done, you have to say that the charisma of the two central actors holds you to your seat till the end. n

This movie follows in the footsteps of the original Masti and reprises adultery and blackmail, but as far as sex is concerned, there is a difference. The double entendre is now the single entendre, and so this movie names various parts of the human anatomy directly. At the very beginning, when the three musketeers visit their alma mater, they recite the ABC of college life—Ass, Breast and you know what.

Even though the sex comedy is now an established genre in Hindi cinema, this one is shockingly vulgar. There is no nudity in the film, true, but the language and attitude towards women is jaw dropping. Even more amazing is the complete lack of inhibitions of the actresses in the film and their comfort level at being given names like Rose, Mary and Marlow (phonetically in Hindi, ‘bang me every day’ ).

Grand Masti is about a college principal, newly appointed, who is a terror and particularly strict about boys meeting girls. Our three heroes (Ritesh Deshmukh, Vivek Oberoi and Aftab Shivdasani) try to avoid him, but are bored with their wives and are ripe for extra-marital frolic.

Unfortunately, they choose the wife, sister and daughter of the principal for their trysts. A completely indecent film that is not for family viewing. n ad

30 september 2013

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

In Salman They Trust

One Fukrey star, Ali Fazal, landed a role in the seventh Fast & Furious film, while another, Pulkit Samrat, was reportedly dropped from Sudhir Mishra’s Pehle Aap Janab (earlier titled Mehrunissa) because he quoted Rs 3 crore as his acting fee to play the role of a younger Rishi Kapoor.

Pulkit, the latest in the long roster of young actors who’ve been taken under Salman Khan’s wings, will play the Ek Tha Tiger star’s younger brother in one film and is apparently being ‘handled’ by Salman’s people. According to sources in the film trade, he’s been asked to run all offers by Salman’s manager so he can be advised appropriately.

Perhaps Pulkit ought to look at the careers of other hopefuls—singer Kamal Khan, Lucky debutant Sneha Ullal, Katrina Kaif-lookalike and Veer leading lady Zarine Khan— whom Salman promised to mentor but subsequently tired of, before submitting himself to the beefed-up star’s coterie of managers and handlers.

Waiting for Release

Kurbaan director Rensil D’Silva’s new film, Ungli, is reportedly besieged with problems. Shooting for this Emraan Hashmi-starrer has been over for some months now, but post- production is taking longer than expected. First, producer Karan Johar got into a bind with composer duo Salim and Suleiman Merchant when they apparently demanded the intellectual property rights of the tunes they’d composed in the film. This is fast becoming the practice in the movie biz, with AR Rahman leading the way. Karan decided not to part with the rights and allegedly replaced the composers overnight. So new songs are being created for the movie.

There’s also some buzz doing the rounds that the makers weren’t exactly thrilled with Shirish Kunder’s edit of the film, and have quietly brought in Karan’s trusted editor Deepa Bhatia (she famously lopped off many indulgences from My Name Is Khan and whittled it down to a reasonable length) to do a clean-up job.

But it’s possibly Emraan Hashmi’s poor luck at the box-office lately that 30 september 2013

is hurting Ungli the most. Signed up for the film two years ago when his star was on the rise, Emraan has had a string of duds, starting with Shanghai last year; the others include Raaz 3, Ek Thi Daayan and Ghanchakkar. In plainspeak, this means studios aren’t exactly throwing big money to buy the film off Karan’s hands.

Finally, with Rensil committed to direct the last five episodes of the first season of Anil Kapoor’s mega television thriller 24 (Abhinay Deo is series director, Rensil is the writer), Ungli has more or less missed a 2013 release window.

But word coming out of the Dharma Productions offices is that Karan believes the project still has potential and intends to push it down audience throats once they lock a release date.

Bewitched beyond Belief

A prominent director continues to remain infatuated with his muse, so much so that he didn’t blink an eyelid when he lost a committed producer attached to his project who had managed to rope in not one but two more bankable leading ladies for the director to choose from.

Determined to cast only his favourite actress in this triangular love story, for which he has already cast two thespian male stars, the director rejected both an A-list heroine who was willing to work for scale, and an award-winning actress with a spate of hits behind her who showed eagerness over being paired opposite the two male stalwarts. The director was very clear it was going to be his dusky discovery and no one else.

It was the director’s stubbornness and insistence to cast only this beautiful but frankly raw actress that ultimately cost him his original producer, who decided to opt out of the film despite his affection for the director, whom he’d trained under years ago. The film has found a new producer and is expected to go on the floors shortly with the director’s choice of leading lady very much intact. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

The Story Museum

dayanita singh

by s i d d h a rt h d h a n va n t s h a n gv i

When Toni Morrison was asked, “Why did you write The Bluest Eye?” her response was, “Because I wanted to read it.” Likewise, Dayanita Singh is asking frontier questions about photography simply to answer them from the frontline herself. In October, London’s Hayward gives her her biggest museum show, enlisting decades of work into what I call ‘photo sculptures’, wooden viewing rooms in which images invent and reinvent narrative as John Berger may have approved: Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one

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30 september 2013