OPEN Magazine 7 July 2014

DU CRISIS SMRITI

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IRANI’S BLUNDER

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ZIA HAIDER RAHMAN ON HIS nOVEL

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7 J U LY 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

JIHAD 2.0 Islamist warriors on a rampage in Iraq pose a new global threat

By JASON BURKE

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

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

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and East), Karl Mistry (West), Krishnanand Nair (South) Manager—Marketing Raghav Chandrasekhar

National Head—Distribution and Sales

Ajay Gupta regional heads—circulation D Charles

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

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

mj

This is in reference to your article ‘The Inheritance of Ruins’ (30 June 2014). About revenues: only 3 per cent of the population pays income tax in the country.

Until we are able to convince people—often rich businessmen, doctors, etcetera—that paying their right share of tax is good for the overall health of the country, we will not be able to solve our fiscal problems. The reluctance to pay tax arises out of the justified fear that it will be wasted by netas and babus who will use it to feather The reluctance to pay their own nests. Sadly, tax arises out of the this lack of trust in the justified fear that it will public has been building be wasted by netas and over the last 60 years. babus who will use it to Perhaps a dose of strong and honest governance feather their own nests

by India’s current administration will help address this problem in the days to come. While all successful, efficient countries have a solid tax base, India does not! So for [Indians] to grow prosperous, we must fight this and institute something like the Internal Revenue Service of the US that instils fear among tax-dodgers.  letter of the week

publisher

R Rajmohan

The War in Iraq

All rights reserved throughout the world.

Reproduction in any manner is prohibited.

Printed and published by R Rajmohan on behalf of the owner, Open Media Network Pvt Ltd. Printed at Thomson Press India Ltd., 18-35 Milestone, Delhi Mathura Road, Faridabad—121007, (Haryana).

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Volume 6 Issue 26 For the week 1—7 July 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover photo

HAIDAR HAMDANI/AFP

In reference to your article ‘The Face of Fear’ (30 June 2014), it is unfortunate that Iraq is in deep crisis due to the ongoing war-like situation between Sunnis and the government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. As the turbulence in the country has led to the abduction of Indian labourers in Mosul and the detention of nurses in Tikrit Hospital, [the Indian Government must] redouble its efforts to evacuate its citizens from different parts of Iraq at the earliest. American interventions in West Asia and Afghanistan have so far proved disastrous, and have only made citizens of every other country, including India, vulnerable to attacks.  KR SRINIVASAN

Saving Infosys

This refers to your article, ‘The Burden of Legacy’ (30 June 7 july 2014

2014). Now that Mr Narayana Murthy himself has decided to move out of the company— along with his son—and given responsibility to a non-founder member, things should start falling into place. With the kind of credentials Mr Vishal Sikka has, he should be able to move Infosys in the right direction and regain lost ground from its competitors.

The biggest advantage of having a non-core, non-founder member at the helm is that he will think out of the box and will not have any biases.

The next two quarters would probably give us a sense whether this move could help Infosys in regaining its top position.  BAL GOVIND

Ganga Clean-up

Having read your essay on the Ganga written by Professor Damodaran (‘The Sacred and the Profane’, 23 June 2014), I

completely agree with the author’s views and would like to reiterate the need for one supreme body instead of ten different directorates or authorities. It is because of these uncoordinated government bodies that there is no clear directive for controlling ETPs even when the best technology is available. If Singapore can recycle all its water into drinking water, why can’t we? Another grave concern that I would like to voice is that immediate steps are needed for integrated river basin management. In other words, we need planning from 30,000 feet but execution at 3 feet. We need more champions like Professor Damodaran who can speak openly about the Ganga’s condition.  ANIRUDDHA

With reference to your article

by Professor Damodaran (‘The Sacred and the Profane’, 23 June 2014), I wanted to say that the essay was very thoughtful on the current situation of the Ganga’s cleaning and restoration. The essay is perfectly timed, now that the Modi Government is pushing this as a key agenda point, and has a dedicated team to make sure it sees the light of day. I totally agree that a holistic approach is required to address all issues related to this subject, and I wholeheartedly endorse the views of the writer.

If implemented for policymaking purposes, the essay’s key notes can have multiple advantages—for the political and environmental welfare of the country.  MAYUR PATEL

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

Taming of the wild one Camp elephants help capture a wild tusker near Mysore

The Worried Man’s Guide to Nabbing Elephants Trigger-happy

How Karnataka’s forest department went about catching two dozen wild pachyderms

I t l o o k e d l i k e a clear shot when he crept up behind the elephant with his tranquiliser gun, but it turned all of a sudden, and charged at him.

“The earth shook. I fired the dart. It hit its ear, but the elephant was so close that there was nowhere to run. I smacked its eye with my gun, forcing it to turn away and run past me,’’ says veterinarian Dr BC Chittiappa. He was part of a Karnataka forest department operation to capture 24 wild elephants in two taluks of Hassan district.

7 july 2014

The animals had been on the rampage, mauling sundry villagers who got in their way.

After the Hemavathi dam project submerged a large area in the early 1990s, these wild elephants moved from Coorg to occupy huge tracts of abandoned coffee estates and forest patches.

A platoon of forest officials was drafted for the operation. The moment an animal or herd was spotted, the team would spring to action. Camp elephants would be brought in. A suit-

able terrain would be identified to drive the wild elephant to, and the vets would then shoot it with morphine darts.

A shooter is allowed only one shot because an overdose can kill. The fallen tusker would then be goaded onto a truck— with the aid of trained elephants. The entire process would often take up to two days.

Marappa Siddappa, a mahout who takes out his 45-year-old tame tusker for such operations, says, “While tame elephants love to charge

at cornered wild elephants, sometimes the sedated ones fight back.”

Most of the 24 wild pachyderms have been set free in forests in other parts of the state. A few aggressive loners have been sent to forest department camps to be tamed. The population of wild tuskers has risen.

“At least six more are roaming around these areas. We will resume captures as soon as the Centre gives the goahead,’’ says Dr Chittiappa. n Anil budur lulla

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ravishankar gs

small world

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contents 7

Empathy for the well-off

cover story

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Jihad 2.0 poses a new global threat

open essay

6

angle

12

Modi and the uses of dissent

sacha sauda

20

Kerala as a new market

politics

Smriti Irani under fire again

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locomotif

Some imperialism please

punjab

The junkie cops of Punjab

person of the week Luis Suárez

Cannibal at Play He does it again. The Uruguayan footballer faces expulsion for biting an Italian defender Lhendup G Bhutia

A

day before Luis Suárez, the Uruguayan forward who plays for Liverpool, was named the Football Supporters’ Federation Player of the Year for 2013, and his name was doing the rounds for the PFA Player of the Year, which he eventually won, the newspaper Toronto Star made a prediction. It wrote, ‘He will do something insane at this summer’s World Cup—mark it down...

Eventually, he’ll punch a baby.’

Well he didn’t quite punch a baby in the Fifa World Cup. But he did something equally bizarre. He bit a player. At the time of going to press, Suárez may miss the remainder of his country’s World Cup campaign. FIFA has started disciplinary proceedings against him for biting the Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini. Under its rules, he can be banned for up to two years or 24 games.

If it happens, it could prove disastrous for Uruguay’s campaign. In a group where hardly anyone gave it a chance, Suárez single-handedly changed its team’s fortunes.

After their defeat to Costa Rica, a game he missed, nobody expected Uruguay to withstand the English and Italian firepower. But Suárez engineered England’s collapse, sending the much-fancied side home with his two goals. But now that his team has qualified for the knock-out round, it is likely to miss its most valuable player.

Talented as he is, Suárez is a bewildering individual. He dives and cheats. He bites opponents—he’s done it for the third time on record. He racially abuses players. And even though he gets warnings and bans, he is back on the field unreformed. When he made his international debut against Colombia in 2007, he was sent off in the 85th minute of the game. In the 2010 World Cup, he denied Africa its first ever representative in a World Cup semi-final when he stopped a goal-bound header with his hand. It would have been Ghana’s winning goal in extra time, but they missed the resulting penalty and Uruguay eventually won a penalty shootout. Asked about his conduct in that game, Suarez had said, “Mine is the real ‘Hand Of God’. I made the save of the tournament.”

In high-pressure games, one expects a

few lapses. But it is either an incredibly stupid or short-tempered person who will behave in the manner Suárez did in the Uruguay-Italy match. Even if he escapes the referee’s eye, as he did, millions will catch it on TV, and so will FIFA officials.

And the inexplicable thing is that he has already been penalised in the past for biting opponents. In 2010, after he bit PSV Eindhoven’s Otman Bakkal, he served a seven-match ban, and in 2013, when he bit Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic, he got a 10-game ban.

Football is an intense physical sport, where acts of aggression, unpardonable as they are, do occur. Players head-butt opponents, they punch, they kick. But who bites? Last time someone saw a player bite in a high-profile game was back in 1997 when boxer Mike Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Suárez’s latest bite made Holyfield tweet, ‘I guess any part of the body is up for eating’.

Following Suárez’s bite of Ivanovic last year, BBC tried to fathom such behaviour. A sports psychologist, Dr Thomas Fawcett, told the channel that anger management therapy would have little effect on Suárez. “It’s in the man,” he said, “I would think that in five years’ time, if there was a certain nerve hit or chord rung with Suarez in a different situation, he would react in the same way.” Well, a year is all it took. n

Matthias Hangst/Getty Images

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Nine Yards of Nostalgia

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Banaras: A pictorial guide

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Ten questions for Zia Rahman

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f o r upholding death sentences

of 183 Muslim Brotherhood supporters and lengthy prison terms for journalists During the Arab Spring, Egypt was thought to be the flashpoint that would spark off liberal democracy in the region; but it is now swiftly going in the opposite direction. After upholding the death sentences of 183 members of the Muslim Brotherhood—including its

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NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

The precision duo

leader, Mohammed Badie—an Egyptian court has also sentenced three Al Jazeera journalists to prison, two of them for seven years and one for ten years. The three journalists—Australian Peter Greste, Canadian-Egyptian Mohamed Fahmy, and Egyptian Baher Mohamed— were arrested in December last year in Cairo. They were accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious-political group (now termed a terror organisation), and producing false reports to aid the group. Despite the international outcry and farcical manner in which the trial was carried out, neither has President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi intervened nor has the judiciary reversed the decision. As the country desperately seeks stability, what is required is effective leadership that establishes and respects democratic institutions. Instead, one witnesses a return to dictatorship and draconian crackdowns. n

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Saif’s recovery plan

Days after taking its first big political decision and claiming that it wouldn’t balk under pressure to reduce the steep railway fare hikes, the NDA Government did just that bA C K TRA C K

“It is a bit harsh to hike the fares, but... it will only benefit the people… I could have stalled the hike.

But then what is the point in continuing to postpone something that is inevitable?”

—Minister of Railways, DV Sadananda Gowda, 23 June

turn

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

arts

‘Decision has been taken to increase the cost of existing MST fare by only 14.2 per cent...

There is no change in fare for second class suburban travellers for a distance up to 80 km’ —Ministry of Railways notification, 24 June

around

The Desperate Game of Leaking IB Reports of an impropriety at the Law Ministry.

Intelligence reports are mandatory before hiring a Supreme Court judge, but leaking the contents of such a report sent to the Ministry is preposterous.

The Centre’s stand not to approve the elevation of senior advocate Gopal Subramanium as Supreme Court judge may be justified. So is the former solicitor general’s decision to withdraw his candidacy in the wake of the leak of an Intelligence Bureau (IB) report.

Manish Swarup/ap

I t w a s t h e f a ll o u t

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Righteous Indignation Gopal Subramanium

The NDA Government is said to have objected to his appointment as an apex court judge because of his alleged ‘links’ with corporate lobbyist Niira Radia; also, an IB report said he is known for his ‘odd’ behaviour. Subramanium, who was amicus curiae in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case, had been critical of the Modi-led Gujarat government in the past. In his letter to the Chief Justice of India, Subramaniam said: ‘I’m fully conscious that my independence as a lawyer is causing apprehensions.’ n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to The National Herald Case A Delhi court has asked Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi to appear before it over a case that is connected to The National Herald newspaper. This is the handiwork of an old foe, Dr Subramanian Swamy (of the BJP), who has accused them and other Congress leaders of fraud and misappropriation of funds.

Swamy alleges that the Gandhis floated a company called Young Indian that, through a series of questionable transactions, took over the parent company of The National Herald and thus got prime properties worth thousands of crore for virtually nothing.

The two Gandhis have a 76-per cent stake in Young Indian, and the rest of the equity is held The two Gandhis

by Congress leaders own 76 per cent of Motilal Vora and Oscar Young Indian, Fernandes. which Swamy accuses of high level fraud

Ajay Aggarwal/Ht/Getty Images

The newspaper itself shut down in 2008, but, according to Swamy, Associated Journals Private Ltd, the parent company of The National Herald, owns properties in Delhi, Mumbai and several other states. It got these properties at subsidised rates from the government because the purpose of the company was to publish newspapers. But, Swamy claims, the properties continue to be in the custody of

swamy’S targets Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi

Young Indian, which he alleges has made money off their rental and lease value.

Even though it was known as a Congress mouthpiece, The National Herald has an illustrious history. It was launched by Jawaharlal Nehru who was also once its editor.

Feroze Gandhi, husband of Indira Gandhi, was once managing director. But the paper lost its appeal after the Congress went into decline.

After the summons was issued, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a Congress spokesperson, was quoted as saying: “When we receive the papers and take full legal advice, a vigorous response will be filed in respect of this completely false and motivated complaint.” n

The Campa Cola Syndrome Empathy for illegal flat owners and disdain for illegal slumdwellers M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

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ife is tough —it becomes self evident sooner or later. There are all kinds of dangers waiting round the corner for perfectly good people. The State’s role is to ensure that such shocks are kept to a minimum, and when they do happen, you get justice. It has no business, however, compensating those who willingly endanger themselves.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the rest of the country has forgotten about Campa Cola, a soft drink of the 70s and 80s. In Mumbai, the brand name has been screaming itself from the front pages of newspapers over the past week, but it has nothing to do with cola. In 1962, the Municipal Corporation of the city leased out land to Pure Drinks, the company that owned Campa Cola. The land was specified for ‘commercial’ purposes.

In 1980, the company got the terms of land use altered so that it could construct and sell residential flats.

Permission was granted for six buildings, each of which could have a basement, ground floor and five upper floors. Later, this was extended to nine buildings. The company outsourced the construction to builders, and by the time they finished, the five-floor limit had gone for a toss. They did seek permission to breach that limit, but when it was denied, coolly went about adding floor after floor—until one building was 20 floors high, and another, 17.

The BMC, whose officials can reasonably be assessed to have been part of this racket, has been trying to get the illegal floors demolished. Last year, it almost began doing it, but the Supreme Court gave a last-minute reprieve to the buildings’ residents till the end of May 2014 for them to move out. The demolition squads are now out again, the SC has refused an extension, and the flat residents’ electricity, water and piped gas supplies have now been cut off.

The most striking aspect of all this is how middle-class observers have reacted to it—the extraordinary sympathy that abounds for about 80 to 90 families in a city where slums often get demolished, turning thousands onto the streets. In such minds, there are two strange categories: of rich victims in illegal homes who get cheated by the State, and of poor non-victims in illegal homes who cheat the State. Their inference, then, is that the former deserve protection only because their flats cost Rs 5 crore apiece.

The sole reason that the middleclass finds so much empathy for one and disdain for the other is the The educated idea that ‘it could happen well-off are to me’; so equipped to be slumdwellers more diligent, are seen to be but something encroaching obfuscates their on ‘my land’, judgment once while what the Campa Cola they end up as residents did victims was forced upon them by shoddy State regulation.

This convenient self-delusion is why every time one reads about someone duped in a chit fund, a stockmarket scam or a housing fraud, it would be a good thing to pause before sympathising. An educated well-off victim was, in a majority of cases, equipped to be more diligent before signing up for the venture. But something obfuscates judgment, and it is usually greed. It is said that Campa Cola flats went cheaper than the market price precisely because their papers were not in order. That should make for caution, not opportunity. What their residents are going through is tragic, but it doesn’t lessen their own responsibility for the tight spot they find themselves in. n 7 july 2014

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S PRASANNARAJAN

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Bring Back Some Imperialism Please

raq was America’s unfinished war, no matter that Barack Obama, even before stepping into the White House, called it a phoney war. He wanted to be the non-George Bush of America, for the Republican was caricatured

by Beltway liberals and sundry critics of Imperial Overreach as a cowboy president, a gun-slinging, Bible-thumping moralist. Set against George W’s America First was Obama’s America Least. Bush, driven by the Manichaean worldview of the neo-conservative, believed that the big bad world of the 21st century still needed American intervention. Obama, the reconciler, wanted to engage with a world alienated by America’s imperial impulses. For the 44th, American exceptionalism was an exaggeration incompatible with the ideas and attitudes of his times. And the two wars he inherited, he knew, did America immense harm, though, it must be said, he didn’t call the war in Afghanistan phoney. He wanted American troops out of the swamps of Mesopotamia and the scorched hills of Afghanistan. The wars were not worth the body bags. The last of the American troops left Iraq by the end of 2011; and by 2016, Afghanistan will be America-free.

As Iraq falls apart, and the tribal fault lines become more glaring than ever before, what we witness are the wages of an unfinished war. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), radical Islamism’s new avatar, was bound to happen. And such sanguineous manifestations of post-freedom are common in history. Towards the end of the last century, we saw the old ghosts of nationalism marching out of the trapdoors of history in the post-communist Balkans. Communism, like any totalitarian ideology in power, was, as a Milan Kundera character famously said, an idyll. Beneath the calm stirred ancient resentments. The empire of communism was built on suppressed identities, and when the artificial edifice fell, freedom was bound to be violent, even hateful.

Iraq is not different. Ba’athism, the ideology of Saddam Hussein, too began as a romance. It was Arab nationalism with a dash of poetry, and its founder Michel Aflaq, a Syrian, was, as Fouad Ajami wrote, ‘more an artist than a leader and a politician; he had the artist’s propensity for escape from reality to a world that exists only in his imagination’. Ba’athism was pulp nationalism written in the sands of Arabia. Iraq and Syria, the ideology’s founder states, were supposed to be leaders of an Arab renaissance. We know what happened. In power, Ba’athism

became terror in military uniform. The secular Ba’athist leader of Iraq—well, ‘secular’ only till American missiles began to rain on Baghdad—was more at home in the gilded bunkers on the Tigris. The so-called Republic of Fear, paranoid and brutal, allowed no dissent. If the calm of the graveyard is an achievement of totalitarianism, Saddamism was pure peace. The marginalised Shia majority suffered in silence.

Bush’s war, in retrospect, was a just war because it brought the dictatorship of Saddam to an end. The world is a better place without him. And the morality that powered the Bush war was born of the idealism institutionalised by America as the Land of Freedom. The war was just and necessary, but it went wrong in its management. It should not have ended with the fall of Saddam; America could have learned from the classic model of the British Empire, which left behind truly advanced colonies. America was defensive about nation building; it left the job to liberated sects, which resulted in tribal bloodlust. The empowered Shias began to copy the statecraft of their erstwhile tormentor. Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shia prime minister, for all practical purposes, is Saddam Lite without the medals. The country’s Sunnis, the post-Saddam victims, became the new enemies. The ISIS owes a great deal to the prime minister who, borrowing from the biographies of your average Arab ruler, has come to believe in his own indispensability. Like Saddam, he too refuses to be the leader of all Iraqis.

Iraq has already proved that it cannot be managed by Iraqis.

And an Iraq as the new battlefield of radical Islamism is a threat larger than the size of Arabia. It’s intervention time again, but we live in a world without such freedom fighters as Ronald Reagan, Lady Thatcher, and Karol Wojtyla. The Western victory in the Cold War was the triumph of democratic ideals over the de-humanising lies of ideology. In the Age of Obama, tentative pragmatism has replaced overarching Wilsonian idealism. Whenever freedom stirred in controlled societies, Obama was not there with a spontaneous endorsement. The non-Bush has become non-committal to freedom as well. Political Islam requires the same strategy of containment that the West deployed against the Soviet empire during the Cold War. There is none today; the Obama presidency’s global vision is all about retreat-and-reconcile.

No war is America’s anymore. Political Islam triumphs because freedom is an idea that no longer appeals to leaders of the so-called free world. n

It’s intervention time again. But in the Age of Obama, tentative pragmatism has replaced overarching Wilsonian idealism

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open essay

By Shiv Visvanathan

MODI AND THE USES OF DISSENT The danger ahead: The idea that this Prime Minister can do no wrong may create its own McCarthyism

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ecently, I rushed to this friend

of mine who sat eating vadas, enjoying each nuanced bite with a sense of joy. I told her that Narendra Modi was cleaning up the Ganga and talked enthusiastically about the proposed research institute for the Himalayas. A few bites later, my friend said, “Brahmanic, very Brahmanic.” I Shiv Visvanathan expressed regret over her sarcasm, and considers himself then she added, “You know, it reminds a social science me of the story I read in Diana Eck’s nomad book on Benares. A beautiful book, and like the Ganges, it is more than a story of the river. There is a moment in it where Eck observes that Indians have a habit of seeing the Ganges everywhere.” She tells a story of a professor, a famous Sanskrit scholar and philosopher who visits Harvard, and, looking at the River Charles running past the university, exclaims joyfully, “Ah, I see a bit of the Ganges here!” My friend then added it is not the Ganga alone that we must clean, but every drain, river and rivulet. An unclean river is an insult to civics.

My friend paused, chewing reflectively. “A river is also a metaphor for pollution,” she said. “What is polluted more than our rivers is our language; in fact most of our words urgently need an exorcism. Cleaning the language may be tougher than cleaning the river.” I realised that India’s recent election has created a graveyard of words. All the key words in Indian politics need to be psychoanalysed, reworked and reinvented. “Think of it,” my friend said, “Every beautiful word now looks tarnished or fragmented or even apologetic about its origins.”

Words, like any language, belong to the culture of commons; yet, people act as if they have patented them, disciplined each to one fragment or nuance of meaning. People want words to march in uniform, when words love to enact paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities. The tragedy of politics is often expressed in a tragedy of language.

My friend collected wounded words and considered herself the Red Cross for the injured. She produced a long list, moaning over them as if each word were alive and sighing in distress.

“Think of it. Think of the damage we have done to beautiful concepts like secularism, socialism, nationalism, development, civil society, security, and history. The angst of language is lost in the noise of politics.”

I challenged her, claiming that this alleged crisis was an everyday affair, that words often get injured like soldiers at war. She sighed, “It is a deeper malaise; wounded words are symptoms of a sickness. Wounded words reflect a fractured society.” It is not about one party or group. The malaise is structural. Think of it as a problem of thinking, of thinking without constraints.

My friend admitted that the Modi Government was democratically elected, but electoral democracies create their own problems. One can think of the Modi regime as a triangle, each side reflecting a variant of a problem. At its base, we have majoritarianism. Modi came to power elected by a majority. A majority in itself need not be problematic, but majoritarianism as a condition under which the majority senses its power and flexes its muscles can be threatening. Modi as PM might be a responsible leader, but the forces he has unleashed might be beyond his control. Modi himself might show restraint, but a Giriraj Kishore or someone similar could evoke nostalgia for an earlier Modi.

Majoritarianism could become a coercive force, intolerant of dissent, threatening anyone critical of Modi and his platform.

The idea that Modi can do no wrong could create its own McCarthyism. A repressed majoritarianism that breaks loose could create eddies of violence. The question then is: can the Modi regime contain the very forces it has unleashed?

Another symptom of majoritarianism is that it thinks that the majority speaks the truth of politics. Any dissent is then seen as an act of sedition. Security becomes a job of social policing, devoted largely to disciplining internal forces. One sees this kind of jingoism in the media nowadays, especially on TV, where anyone with a contrarian view is nudged aside roughly.

The jingoism of the majority does not allow for debate or conversation. The ‘threat’ becomes the basic unit of debate.

Naxalites, angry activists and young protestors are not seen as articulating the pain of people but performing acts of dissent.

For instance, Irom Sharmila, the Manipuri leader whose decade of protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act made her a legend, is now seen as a mere nuisance who should be

illustration Anirban Ghosh

quietly ignored. Between jingoism, accusations of sedition and physical coercion, the majority enacts a carnival of intolerance.

In such a situation, the minority lives under constant threat.

One has to examine language to read the symptoms of such a disease. The casualty word is ‘security’. This word, once applied with clarity to domestic life in the context of the integrity of national boundaries, is now applied to internal problems.

The conflation of internal and external security blurs the problems of human rights, and suddenly every ethnic or human rights activist appears like a trouble-maker bent on sedition.

Today, NGOs and civil society groups, which gave India many of its great moments of democracy under earlier regimes, are frowned upon. They are simply described as ‘corrupt’, ‘intrusive’ or ‘greedy’, and these narratives ignore the idealism that propelled these movements. There is a split in perspective.

NGOs that are political in nature are being attacked. Social work is still seen as permissible, but with the State under Modi re-staking its claim to competence, space for it may shrink.

Unfortunately, many of the issues raised by these groups about life on the margins may become dormant again. Confusion has arisen over the role of NGOs. Indeed, they must be transparent and submit to audit processes, but audits cannot be used as weapons to coerce them.

One has to realise that the word ‘governance’ extends beyond the idea of government by the State. The modern notion of governance includes institutions of civil society, and these need to be part of a pluralistic order of administration.

I

f majoritarianism devours democ-

Human Development indices should include the availability of space for diversity and differences. How a regime scores on such an index should be held as significant

racy, so do minority antics. The nature of electoral politics is such that minorities can often exploit alleged weaknesses to set up little regimes of censorship. Films, plays and books routinely face strictures not just from an angry majority but also from minority groups exploiting the politics of hurt—where ‘hurt’ is defined as any perceived attack on the sentiments and beliefs of a group that could lead to violence. The confusion is usually between law and order and the rule of law. Such groups threaten the former to challenge the latter. The politics of insult has launched many a political career, and it has undermined the robustness of democratic thinking.

On occasion, however, a burst of melodrama highlights the silence around marginal groups. One has to merely recollect the poignancy of Narmada dam victims lying in water to protest against the conspiracy of silence around ‘development’.

This is a word with a huge genocidal quotient, and yet our narratives today treat it like a boy-scout term, antiseptic and humanistic, waiting to improve the well-being of the masses.

When Narendra Modi raises the height of the dam, there is an inevitability to it. There is hardly any protest. Instead, there is a sense that such displacements of people are an inevitable part of development, that progress has no place for them.

This brings back the question of dissent and eccentricity in Indian life. The recent controversy around UR Ananthamurthy 10 open

illustrates the dangers of dissent in a consciously consensual society. The Kannada author, one of India’s leading public intellectuals, exclaimed impetuously that he could not dream of living in a “Modi ruled India”. The reactions were disturbing. Faced by threats, the author had to be provided police security. Yet, beyond the threats, it is the framework of attitudes that is disconcerting. Labelled ‘unpatriotic’, he was asked to climb onto a train to Pakistan. The illiteracy of this jingoism is worrying. Few ask what makes Ananthamurthy less patriotic than his opponents.

Here is an intellectual who has fought for diversity, for vernacular languages, and has yet remained deeply cosmopolitan. To insist that all dissenters against Modi move to Pakistan is tyrannical. Those proposing the move should read the classics of Manto and recall the chilling horror of Partition and its corpseladen trains to Lahore and Amritsar. In an odd way, we repeat history at the very moment we could liberate ourselves from it.

I am not saying Modi has encouraged such forms of fascism.

His current performance is correct and impressive. His career has been littered with controversies over jingoism and a bullyboy attitude to dissent. The danger is that his followers in their enthusiasm might enact the earlier incarnations of Modi.

The question is whether he has the maturity and will to stop them. His followers are like a collection of Modi masks acting in his name, and it is for him to disown them. To do less will not befit the Prime Minister.

The dangers of majoritarianism need to be addressed. Majoritarianism is not like Congress populism, which is deviously instrumental. It is more useful to think of majoritarianism as a dominant language. In its dominance it often creates a consensus, leans towards uniformity and prefers a society that thinks alike.

Dissent then has to be seen as a set of dialects invoking a different world and seeking to capture the diversities underlying that uniformity.

Unfortunately, the words of the dominant language frequently become surveillance machines patrolling the borders of thought. Majoritarianism, unless it is like an affable Hinduism open to syncretism or the creativity of Bhakti movements, becomes a disease of intolerance accompanied by symptoms of jingoism and vigilantism, and witch-hunts. The danger is that we have begun taking these habits of mind for granted, even treating vigilantism as a form of heroism. One has to only watch some TV channels to witness it.

India is too diverse for an official majoritarianism. The challenge before the regime is to pluralise itself, and for this, it needs a new language of plurality. We need to reinvent democracy to create ecologies for dissent and even some forms of disorder.

One would suggest that Human Development indices include the availability of space for diversity, eccentricity and for difference as a form of reasoning. How a regime scores on such an index should be held as significant. For, only responsible dissent can mediate between majoritarian democracy and majoritarian authoritarianism. n 7 july 2014

JIHAD 2.0

The success of rampaging Islamist warriors in Iraq poses a new global threat

By JASON BURKE

revenge of the victim Sunni gunmen take position in Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad

Reuters

I

n April of 2004 , a group of senior militants met in the

western Iraqi city of Fallujahh ‘to review the situation’ of their campaign and to discuss ‘recent accomplishments’.

Their conclusions were far from edifying, recorded Abu Anas Al-Shami, a Jordanian Palestinian cleric who was the group’s religious advisor and who was present at the meeting.

‘We realized that after a year of jihad we still had achieved nothing on the ground,’ Abu Anas wrote in a diary published on the internet a few months later. ‘None of us had even a palmsized lot of earth on which to reside, no place to find a refuge at home in peace amongst his own.’ The jihadi leaders assembled felt they had ‘failed resoundingly’ and that a new strategy was needed. Instead of relying on calls to arms relayed through propaganda to mobilise and radicalise the faithful, they needed territory, fortifications, bunkers; in short, a base that would be a home, a haven and of course a springboard for further expansion once the immediate defensive phase of fighting, which they compared to the early trials faced by Prophet Muhammad himself with his small band of followers, was over.

‘So we decided to make Fallujahh a safe and impregnable refuge for Muslims and an inviolable and dangerous territory for the Americans, which they would enter in fear and leave in shock, burdened by their dead and wounded,’ wrote Abu Anas, who died shortly afterwards.

A decade later, the direct inheritors of Abu Anas and his associates, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), now has that territory, and, as from this week, it includes not just Fallujahh, which the group has held for several months, but the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, only a few hours further north, the border town of Tal Afar, and Tikrit itself, the birthplace and

power base of Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Abu Anas would be pleased.

The irony, of course, is that before 2003 or 2004, there was no al’Qaeda or al’Qaeda-style activism in Iraq, despite the claims of the US administration of George Bush prior to the invasion of the country. Though Saddam Hussein had attempted to give his secular Ba’athist regime a veneer of religion in the 1990s in a cynical bid to exploit the broad trend towards conservatism across the Middle East, the Iraqi strongman dictator saw extremists like Osama bin Laden as threats, not potential allies, and had turned his brutal security services against them. And though both Sunni and Shia communities in Iraq had become more broadly sympathetic to more rigorous and politiKhaled al-Hariri/Reuters

An important cause of ISIS’s success is Nouri al’Maliki’s stubborn ability to alienate Iraq’s Sunni minority 14 open

cised versions of Islam during that period too—with Gulfsponsored preachers moving through the Sunnidominated west of Iraq and in the semi-urban hinterland of the capital Baghdad, for example, and increased religiosity among Shias—there was little support for the violent fringe. A small group of jihadi militants were holed up in the far north-east of Iraq, a region nominally under Kurdish control, in an enclave which was then eliminated by local troops during the invasion.

Subsequently, of course, much changed. The US invasion turned the country’s balance of power—a minority of Sunnis dominating a majority of Shias—upside down.

With Shias in the ascendant and the US in power, the now marginalised Sunnis needed all the help they could get.

Extremists were welcomed and men like Abu Musab al’Zarqawi, a brutal Jordanian street thug turned militant leader of al’Qaeda in Iraq (AQAI), set out to deliberately foment sectarian violence. Given the fertile ground, his success was a foregone conclusion. By 2006, accelerated but not created by the militants, a vicious civil war was killing tens of thousands while Iraqis of all confessions simultaneously fought the US. ISIS has its roots in this conflict. Abu Bakr al’Baghdadi, its head, was a minor commander of Sunni resistance groups who was imprisoned by US authorities in 2004.

Some say the 42-year-old graduate in Islamic Studies was radicalised in jail. Others maintain he was a firebrand preacher before being incarcerated. Little is known about his activities between 2004 and 2009, and it is possible al’Baghdadi remained behind bars. The situation evolved dramatically during this period. The increasing brutality of al’Qaeda in Iraq had led to Sunni tribes turning against the group. Many Sunnis also joined forces with reinforced US troops to gain protection against the now dominant Shias. It was a context that was perfect for an effective strategist to exploit.

By 2010, al’Baghdadi—a nom de guerre—had been announced as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, which had emerged from the wreckage of the late al’Zarqawi’s AQAI some years earlier.

But it is unlikely even al’Baghdadi anticipated the opportunity that came in 2011. These years saw both the Arab Spring plunge Syria, where a brutal and autocratic minority Shia regime held power over a Sunni majority, into chaos, and the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq after the failure to confirm their legal immunity under a strategic agreement between Baghdad and Washington.

The US left a country that was suffering significantly less violence than at any time since 2004 and with growing oil revenues but also deep sectarian tensions. It was also a country run by a paranoiac Shia former Islamist, Nouri al’Maliki.

The immediate causes of the recent success of ISIS are simple. First, there is the violent ferment of the ongoing conflict in Syria. This has not just spilled over in ideological and inspirational terms into neighbouring Iraq, but 7 july 2014

AP

Now ISIS will undoubtedly come up against the classic problem faced by extremist groups for decades: how to hold on to their gains without alienating locals has provided strategic depth to extremist groups there.

Much as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, drawn by a colonial era bureaucrat, means little, ISIS and others have reduced that between Syria and Iraq, also drawn by Western imperial administrators and politicians, to a mere line on the map that means nothing on the ground.

‘The Iraq-Syria border is.... increasingly immaterial,’ Charles Lister, a military analyst at the Brookings Doha Centre, wrote last week. ‘Conflict on both sides of the border has become inherently interconnected.’ ISIS, for example, seized lucrative oil fields and archaeological sites in Syria which helped fund its attack on Mosul. Cash and equipment seized in Mosul has now flowed back across the non-existent border.

Announcing successes in recent weeks, ISIS has used Twitter with a hashtag, #SykesPicotOver, that’s a reference to the secret 1916 agreement between Britain and France which divided much of the Middle East.

Another important cause of ISIS’s recent success is the stubborn ability of Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, to alienate his nation’s Sunni minority. Maliki has gutted the senior ranks of the army, filled the intelligence services with loyalists and marginalised all opposition. Any attempt by the Sunni community to redress grievances through political channels has been blocked. This has led Sunnis to turn against the Iraqi authorities and government, even the idea of the nation, and has naturally provided a degree of acceptance if not active support for ISIS, which has been key in its well-planned campaign to establish an Islamic state of ill-defined borders across the entire ‘al’Sham’ region from western Iraq to central Syria.

7 july 2014

T

his is not just about Iraq, however, but about the fu-

ture of extremist Islamism globally. And it indicates the future of a phenomenon that we have learned to live with, but which still poses a significant threat.

That global threat has been underlined in recent weeks.

There has been a ‘lone wolf’ attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium, an assault on the main airport in Karachi, continuing violence in Syria (of course), operations against consulates and presidential candidates in Afghanistan, scares in Egypt, fighting in Libya and the ongoing mayhem associated with the Boko Haram in Nigeria.

In its breadth and intensity, the violence recalls some of the darkest days of the last decade—around the time when Abu Anas was writing his diary in Fallujahh— when danger seemed clear and present across four continents or more.

There are three major differences with that previous time. These offer reason, however, for both optimism and alarm.

The first is that the al’Qaeda ‘hardcore’ has ceased to exist. Ayman al’Zawahiri, the veteran Egyptian-born jihadi who has led al’Qaeda since Osama bin Laden was killed, is still alive but has less and less traction on the global movement of Islamic extremism than ever before.

Western intelligence officials boast, with some reason, that his organisation has been ‘hollowed out’ by repeated drone strikes. It has also lost much credibility, unable to claim credit for any major headline attack since 2005.

Propaganda efforts, such as a recent video aimed at Kashmiris, are unlikely to get much traction. In its communication strategy, worldview and global message, open www.openthemagazine.com 15

Rob Howard/CORBIS

Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images

Ayman al’Zawahiri, who has led al’Qaeda ever since Osama bin Laden was killed, is still alive but has less and less traction on Islamic extremism globally

which ignores local differences in favour of a single vision supposed to unite all Muslims against their millennia-old enemies, al’Qaeda’s hardcore is looking increasingly like an ageing rock group living on the increasingly dubious credentials of a handful of hit songs a decade or so ago.

Al’Baghdadi definitively split with al’Qaeda last year, after al’Zawahiri ordered him to withdraw from Syria.

The second major change is that, unlike in 2003 or 2004, mass public opinion in the Islamic world has turned against radicalism. It is easy to forget the covert and overt sympathy from Morocco to Malaysia for Osama bin Laden and his followers in the years following the US in16 open

vasion of Iraq. This was a period where up to 80 per cent of people in some countries expressed their approbation of Osama bin Laden’s project and methodology. This has not returned after declining sharply in the face of local violence in successive Muslim-majority countries in the period from 2005 to 2007. That period saw popular support for militancy collapse wherever violence made its sudden, bloody appearance. The exception was Pakistan, where levels of support for al’Qaeda remained high until later in the decade, though they dropped there too as violence began to rise locally and are now among the lowest in the Islamic world. It is significant that so many Pakistanis blame bombings and shootings in their own country on Indian security services. To blame Delhi’s agents is psychologically easier than blaming fellow Muslim Pakistanis for acts that are seen as unjustifiable.

Last September, a survey by the respected Pew Centre found that across 11 Muslim publics, a median of 67 per cent said they are somewhat or very concerned about Islamic extremism. In five countries—Pakistan, Jordan, Tunisia, Turkey and Indonesia—Muslim worries about extremism have increased in the past year. Al’Qaeda still appears widely reviled, with a median of 57 per cent saying they have an unfavourable opinion of the terror organisation.

The third change from the scenario ten years ago is that while insurgency was then seen as a problem that needed to be fought to destroy the supposed real menace of international terrorism, the main foe now is insurgents who practice terrorism as a tactic against local communities—such as ISIS—but whose interest in international acts of spectacular violence is secondary. This is the opposite of the approach of Osama bin Laden, who deployed spectacular terrorism internationally, while backing local insurgents. In fact, ISIS is fighting a classic non-conventional campaign that involves the seizure of cities and key resources, the undermining of the credibility of authorities, the co-opting of local allies such as nationalist ex-Ba’athists and the leveraging of international support, in this case networks of Islamic conservatives in the Gulf.

No one was fighting like that a decade ago, except the 7 july 2014

ISIS has its roots in Iraq’s post-invasion civil war. Its head Abu Bakr al’Baghdadi was a minor commander of Sunni resistance groups who was imprisoned by US authorities in 2004

AP

rump of the Taliban, and even they were yet to launch their major comeback offensives.

T

here are also three major similarities with that ear-

lier period of widespread violence in 2005 and 2006.

First, though the core al’Qaeda group may have largely gone, an intricate web of networks still exists. These connections are chaotic, but are capable of ‘swarming’ together to concentrate resources. And though the ideology of al’Qaedaism has been discredited in much of the Islamic world, it remains sufficiently attractive to sufficient numbers to guarantee a significant level of activism for many years to come.

Second, a new generation of militants is emerging, as did a generation in the late 1990s. This is true for European nations as much as for Egypt, Libya, Iraq or Pakistan, though the fact that one of the three British young men in a video released by ISIS last week called himself ‘Abu Bara al-Hindi’ should cause some concern in Delhi.

The key causes of radicalisation are now well-known: the significance of family links, the attraction of adventure, the possibility of social advancement or access to financial resources, the need of perceived support from close or wider communities, the limited but important role of internet propaganda, and above all, the role of mistreatment by police or security forces, especially in prison.

Third, as in the earlier period, there is the continuing success of radical ideology in plugging into local conditions when these are propitious. This can be seen in the Sahel, and again in Europe too, where ‘lone wolves’ living on the cultural and social margins of mainstream society are likely to keep troubling security services. It can also be seen in India, where, despite recent successes in eliminating senior leaders, authorities have struggled to stem a small but steady stream of Muslims attracted to jihadi activities.

Perhaps most significant is the impact the success of ISIS will have on the global jihadi movement in the coming months and years. Extremist ideology has always 7 july 2014

seen an internal debate between proponents of a strategy of territorial acquisition—a ‘war of position’, in one sense—and those who favour a campaign of radicalisation aimed at bringing about a globalised ‘leaderless jihad’, something that could also be termed a ‘war of manoeuvre’. At the moment, it appears the former are winning the argument.

The ISIS campaign is thus likely to provide a template for other groups from the Sahel to the FATA—near the Afghan-Pakistan border—and beyond. It is not simple opportunism, as earlier thought, that has brought the group success, but a clear, phased strategy. First, its senior leadership was freed in a series of prison raids; then an intensifying campaign of suicide bombings was launched to destabilise target cities such as Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul; next came a push to secure ‘strategic depth’ in Syria with added reserves of manpower, cash and arms, while back in Iraq local networks of Ba’athists and sympathetic tribal leaders were welded into a coalition. Only then was the offensive launched.

Al’Baghdadi and ISIS will undoubtedly now come up against the classic problem faced by extremist groups for decades: how to hold on to their gains without alienating locals. This is the very problem which led to the downfall of Abu Anas al’Shami, the diarist who wished for a ‘palmsized lot of earth’ back in 2004, and other members of al’Qaeda in Iraq a decade ago. Historically, Islamist militants have swiftly clashed with populations who tire rapidly of the toxic mix of brutal violence, puritanical strictures and poor governance which they offer. There is certainly much evidence that these Islamists are now far more conscious of the danger of losing local support and will try not to repeat earlier errors. If they succeed in keeping the population on their side, or at least acquiescent, ISIS may yet consolidate the world’s newest non-state: the Islamic Emirate of al’Sham. The stakes are high. n Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent of The Guardian and the author of The 9/11 Wars open www.openthemagazine.com 17

sta n d - o f f

Educating Ms Smriti Irani Has the education minister put the Prime Minister’s modernisation agenda in jeopardy?

Ullekh NP

Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

I

Qamar Sibtain/India Today Group/Getty Images

t is no secret that Smriti Irani is one of

Narendra Modi’s favourite ministers, but she has often come under sharp attack for capitulating on values that are at the heart of the Prime Minister’s good-governance agenda. As one of the most photographed ministers in the recently-formed NDA Cabinet, the 38-yearold former model and actress who holds the HRD portfolio is accused of having a penchant for playing to the gallery. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has scrapped Delhi University’s fouryear undergraduate programme (FYUP) under apparent pressure from the NDA Government. The storm over it even has a few RSS-leaning members of the faculty point fingers at her for stooping to new lows in scoring political brownie points. “The FYUP is a programme cleared by the UPA Government. One year on, a new government that comes to power can’t reverse its policy just to please a few party leaders and student unions. One has to think from an academic point of view,” asserts Professor Tulika Prasad, who teaches English at Delhi University.

Prasad argues that while the talk of refurbishing and refining the FYUP—now pursued by at least 60,000 students— must be encouraged, it smacks of political expediency to take sides with “vested interests” among teachers and students.

“This is called embracing cheap publicity,” she notes. The Left-affiliated Democratic Teacher’s Front (DTF), which heads the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA), has been dead against the FYUP from the beginning and has managed to secure popular support against the changes effected by Vicechancellor Dinesh Singh, a well-reputed academic, with the blessings of former HRD Minister Kapil Sibal. The BJPaffiliated teachers’ organisation, National Democratic Teachers’ Front (NDTF), which has been eclipsed by the Left’s union, is worried about the rising popularity of Left-wing politics among teachers on DU campuses.

“It is to battle the Left on DU campuses that the majority of the NDTF is opposed

The defiant Vice-chancellor of DU, Dinesh Singh, has come under tremendous pressure from the Government to step down to the FYUP. They plan to steal the Left’s thunder now, perhaps in vain. There is no other reason I can see for their support for the old course,” says an NDTF member who is of the view that creating uncertainties a year after the programme came into effect is a highly “subversive” act on the part of the UGC. He regrets that Irani is yielding to pressures from the Delhi unit of the BJP, which has been hellbent on “making desperate efforts to outdo the Left in order to win back a lost foothold among DU teachers”.

Many other members of the DU faculty that Open spoke to feel that HRD Minister Irani—whose educational qualifications generated enough controversy last month after it emerged that she had made contradictory declarations in her affidavits for the Lok Sabha polls in 2004 and 2014—is incurring the wrath of Modi’s fan base of upwardly mobile students.

Alienating Supporters

in the eye of the storm Smriti Irani, 38, India’s Human Resource Development Minister, arrives for a Cabinet meeting on 29 May 2014 7 July 2014

Recall that Modi began appealing to students across India with an address at a conclave organised by students of Shri

Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) in Delhi last February. As he began reaching out to the country’s youth beyond Gujarat in the run-up to the General Election, an internal poll by SRCC students chose Modi as the key speaker at the conclave. With his popularity soaring through the roof, Modi pipped former Tata Group Chairman Rata Tata, who came a close second out of a pool of prospective invitees, including five UPA cabinet ministers and Congress Vicepresident Rahul Gandhi.

“Thanks to Irani, Modi now risks alienating such students who crave reforms in the education sector so as to be much more employable,” says a professor close to Dinesh Singh.

Apparently under pressure, the UGC, which is typically an advisory body, has scrapped the university’s FYUP. The row has now reached the Delhi High Court, which, while ruling out an immediate hearing, said the issue demanded an effective hearing which cannot be done by a vacation bench, and asked the aggrieved parties to approach it in July after the holidays. On its part, the UGC warned open www.openthemagazine.com 21

DU of ‘consequences’ if it went ahead with FYUP admissions this year, forcing colleges to stall their enrolment of students.

Irani’s Woes Galore

“The UGC has shown no sense of transferability. Yes, we all know that UGC often responds to political pressures” Shiv Visvanathan, sociologist

“The VC’s intentions are good. The FYUP is for a good cause.

He wanted us to move away from lecture mode to an interactive mode of teaching” Dr Tulika Prasad, English professor at DU

“Proper consultations with various stakeholders would have made the four-year degree a better initiative.

There was nothing of the sort” N Sukumar, professor, faculty of political sciences, DU 22 open

Over her reported support for DUTA and scrapping of the FYUP, Irani has attracted rebuke from journalist Madhu Kishwar, who said, “Left lobbies are most happy with BJP’s HRD minister fulfilling their agenda in bringing the DU VC down who tried much-needed reforms in the education system. CPM’s [DUTA president] Nandita Narain and [CPM general secretary Prakash] Karat seem to have taken over HRD minister’s office….” Kishwar had earlier triggered a row with a tweet saying that Irani wasn’t qualified enough to be India’s HRD Minister. Irani responded to the controversy in a carefully worded statement: “In public life one should be open to scrutiny and criticism.

So am I.” Clearly, the Modi Government has ended up in a soup over the FYUP logjam thanks to Irani’s ambiguous stance, which has resulted in a prolonged wait for nearly 300,000 students who begin college in the national capital this year.

The Centre now faces tough questions over its commitment to educational reforms so as to fulfil Modi’s dreams of surpassing China as an economy by investing in the country’s large young population. “The DU tangle only shows that the Modi Government is as good at lip service as the previous one on the need to push ahead with reforms,” says another pro-BJP member of the DU faculty. According to this person, there’s a “witch hunt” against Vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh at the behest of both the Delhi BJP unit and the Left. “Most of these teachers who have political allegiances are those from the arts faculty. They are upset that the new curriculum has forced them to go to classes and spend a lot of time of learning anew,” he adds, “This is frustrating for teachers used to just vomiting verbatim what they had learnt a long time ago.” Open could not independently verify whether the schism between the arts and science departments has been widening over the FYUP. Dr Prasad agrees with this viewpoint, and adds, “Dinesh Singh’s intentions are good. The FYUP is for a good cause. It

wanted us to move away from lecture mode to an interactive mode of teaching; the VC wanted to introduce hands-on learning.” The so-called foundation courses in the four-year degree are meant to offer mathematics students language skills and language students knowledge of others academic disciplines, she avers.

What, according to her, is key to reforms in the higher education sector is an open mind to change. “Which is not much there now,” she rues, adding that allegations of Singh running the administration assisted by a coterie are mere excuses. “It’s not good to have a coterie around you, but that is nothing new. The 7 July 2014

Parveen Negi/India Today Group/Getty Images

days of uncertainty Students about to attend an orientation programme at St Stephen’s College in New Delhi

issue here is resistance to change.”

Like many others Open spoke to, including some pro-Left teachers, Prasad agrees that she would “promptly concede” that all is well with the way foundation courses have been planned. “The curriculum can be refined. Besides, there are those who say the FYUP makes things difficult for some students (it, according to some professors, forces students from poor families to spend four years for a degree while they are in a hurry to start earning for their families). They are wide off the mark because if you spend two years you get a diploma,” she declares.

Of course, the FYUP has some causes of 7 July 2014

concern, says another pro-BJP academic at DU: “But that doesn’t mean you throw the baby out with the bath water.” He is anxious that the FYUP row has brought to the fore what ails India’s higher education system overall. “Forget the autonomy part. Think of duplicity on the part of UGC which allowed FYUP’s introduction.

Why this volte-face? Top UGC officials want to warm up to those in power like Irani and the Delhi unit of the BJP. I don’t see any other explanation,” he states.

Gaps to Fill

All isn’t well with the FYUP, though, students and teachers contend. Dr Shailaja

Menon, who has done extensive research on Dr Ambedkar’s vision of India, says she has no qualms about admitting that the FYUP experiment was innovative, but regrets the lack of attention given to details such as consultations with faculty members. “Such consultations were done in a hurry. Besides, some student organisations were stopped by various colleges from doing a plebiscite on FYUP before it was launched. It is counterproductive when you push through things without planning well,” she contends. Dr N Sukumar of the faculty of Political Sciences at DU, too, says that “widespread consultations with various open www.openthemagazine.com 23

Sushil Kumar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

Protest art Students look at banners put up at Delhi University’s North Campus by the All India Students Association against the four-year undergraduate programme

stakeholders” would have made the programme a better initiative. “There was nothing of the sort. The only positive is the freedom to pursue inter-disciplinary studies,” he feels.

Meanwhile, Naila Grewal, a student of journalism at Lady Shri Ram College who is pursuing a four-year degree, complains that now that she and her classmates will have to revert to the old three-year course, she would end up losing a year, literally, besides missing out on the FYUP’s advantages—interactive learning among them. She says that unlike in regular journalism degree courses, the first year at FYUP was spent on learning “nonjournalistic” subjects, including math.

She is upset that now she just has two years left to catch up on subjects that are highly relevant to the practice of journalism. “Foundation courses of the first year,” she feels, “were a waste of time.”

Meanwhile, senior professors close to Vice-chancellor Singh say that the UGC’s decision is reminiscent of the Licence Raj and doesn’t reflect the Modi Government’s promise to formulate a new education policy by fostering autonomy among institutes of higher learning.

24 open

“Instead, what we are seeing is more political patronage and indifference from the HRD minister,” alleges one of them.

Irani’s office was not immediately available for comment. Texts left on her phone didn’t elicit any response.

Singh, whom sociologist Shiv Visvanathan calls an “intelligent, bright chap”—and was described as behaving like a ‘terrorist’ by DUTA president Nandita Narain—has come under tremendous pressure to step down following violent protests.

Till date, there is no confirmation of the Vice-chancellor’s ‘resignation’ announced by joint dean Malay Neerav, who’d said that Singh quit after the UGC diktat that forced colleges to stall admission to FYUP courses. “The UGC has shown no sense of transferability. Yes, we all know that UGC often responds to political pressure,” laughs Visvanathan.

The UGC now contends that the fouryear format of DU’s undergraduate programme is a violation of the nationwide policy of a three-year undergraduate degree. Those in the FYUP’s favour say that it is one of the first initiatives at saving education from government clutches.

“The tragedy is just because you don’t like the vice-chancellor’s face or because you think he is vain, you can scrap a course and hold students and the whole university to ransom. All this goes against what we thought the Modi Government would stand for,” says a professor at Lady Shri Ram College who asked not to be named.

There are others in Delhi’s academic circles who echo such views.

Irani is keeping silent for the time being, but she has so far displayed no resolve to revive India’s education sector that remains plagued by lack of deregulation, among other ills that need the Centre’s attention. She has done nothing to help educational institutions and colleges experiment and compete either.

Instead, she has brought disrepute to a Modi dispensation committed to freeing education from micro-management by HRD mandarins, and from a straitjacket crafted by a handful of Delhi bureaucrats obsessed with preserving the status quo by overly centralising India’s education system.

With proteges like Irani, does Modi need enemies? n 7 July 2014

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INNOCEAN-001/12

dope

Sloth, Stupor and Shame in Punjab Police forces in the state are caught in a vortex of drugs and politics. Is there a way out?

Mihir Srivastava reports photographs by ashish sharma

A

mandeep Singh, who has been a

constable with the Punjab Police for three years, thanks Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal for his job. “I was appointed under the Director General of Police’s quota on a priority basis,” says the 33-year-old, offering his swanky Android phone to show a blackand-white picture of a young Badal with his grandfather. It’s an old family connection. The constable is a burly man— a one-time kabbadi player—with high cheekbones that almost eclipse his small eyes. He sits with his legs folded on the bed of a private ward at Adesh Hospital’s drug de-addiction centre in Sri Muktsar Sahib district of Punjab. This happens to be the home district of the Badals: Prakash Singh, the state’s CM, and his son Sukhbir Singh, deputy CM. Amandeep is one of 10 cops being treat26 open

ed here for a habit he was unable to break.

It’s going well. He hasn’t had any bhang for the past six days now. At one time, he would consume Rs 1,000 worth of it every day, mixing it with milk and drinking it like a beverage. “I had to pay a big price for it,” he says, “My family and professional life suffered. Nobody took me seriously.”

He holds his grandfather in awe, who, among other remarkable things, had a vast appetite for various forms of cannabis. “He led a quality life, would have bhang daily and never felt the need to visit a hospital,” he says with undisguised admiration. In contrast, his ‘addiction’ has been a “curse”. Every day spent in rehab seems longer than a year, he sighs. “I am on a solitary voyage to a distant island of hope.”

Money was never a factor; Amandeep

earns much more from his ancestral farms than any job with the police would ever pay him. Nonetheless, for 10 years he was a slave to this habit, and he blames his social milieu for it. “Nearly 90 per cent of lower ranking cops consume drugs in some form or another, even if not everyone is an addict,” he says in Punjabi, “It’s rampant [in the Punjab Police].”

The scene is rather different in the general ward, a hall with a dozen beds in two rows. In here, it is hot and damp, with the sun bearing in through large windows.

Most patients are lying still, seemingly in various stages of unconsciousness, and the room is filled with an eerie silence.

Balwant Singh Bhullar, the hospital’s security chief, refuses to identify which of the patients are policemen; however, it is not difficult to figure this out. At least three are wearing the blue track pants 7 JULY 2014

GRIM REALITY Policemen in track pants are easy to spot in this general ward of Adesh Hospital’s de-addiction centre in Punjab’s Sri Muktsar Sahib district

that cops wear for sports. The past 10 days in rehab might have been their toughest, guesses Bhullar, explaining that the first few nights are critical. Some lose control and run amok, pleading for a ‘fix’, while others turn violent in desperation.

“Often,” says Bhullar, “an addict has to be tied to the bed”—as was the case of a nephew of a deputy Superintendent of Police lodged in a room near Amandeep’s.

This 23-year-old struggles to keep his eyes open. He is being treated for heroin addiction. “It destroyed the man in him,” says an elderly gentleman in a white turban, a relative who is attending to him, “but he is fighting back.” This is his sixth day in rehab, and his craving for smack remains a nightmare. Stirred to speak, the patient expresses hope. “A few days more, and I will be free as a bird,” he says, slurring. “I am not like this because of the drugs; this 7 JULY 2014

dizziness is because of drugs to keep me away from drugs,” he claims, forcing a smile. Seconds later, tears well up in his eyes: “See what smack has made me?”

And then, an instant later, he is livid, his body stiffening as he rubs his feet repeatedly on the mattress. “I know the name of the supplier,” he says, “a cloth merchant in Jalandhar. The whole city knows him.

It’s an open secret that he’s a drug peddler.

The police know him. In fact, I was introduced to him by a local constable. But no one will catch or arrest him.”

Another addict is a 35-year-old head constable; he paces up and down the corridor. He doesn’t want to be named in fear of being killed by the local drug mafia. His face is bloated but seems both assertive and curious, and he talks in a monotone, as if lecturing a class. “It’s white gold,” he says, referring to smack, which he took

up because “drugs are in fashion”. It’s easy for cops to indulge in drugs, he says.

“When we seize drugs, say 10 kg of smack or heroin or even poppy husk, only a part of it, about 70 per cent, is shown officially as confiscated. The rest stays with us.

What [cops] do with it is anyone’s guess. I used to sell it a cheaper rate,” he says with an air of generosity. “But if you play with fire, your hands will get burned.”

Drugs, according to Amandeep Singh, are easily available in Punjab’s prisons too. At Modern Jail at Faridkot, he claims, smack sells for Rs 4,000 per gram, more than three times the open price outside.

Singh says he learnt of this from the undertrials lodged there that he would escort to court. Many jail inmates are addicts—and it makes him suspicious.

“This cannot happen without the connivance of jail authorities, no?” open www.openthemagazine.com 27

GOODFELLAS Spot checks being conducted for drugs at Kot Ise Khan village in Moga district on 18 June (above); One of the policemen under de-addiction therapy (right)

M

uktsar’s Senior Superintendent

of Police Kuldeep Chachal refuses to discuss the alarming rate of drug addiction among the men in khaki. The unofficial reason, often cited off-the-record, is that policemen are vulnerable to temptation since they oversee the maalkhana, the storehouse for psychotropic substances seized by the police. The bulk of it is heroin, the common man’s poison, while synthetic ‘party drugs’ used by the wealthy are not uncommon either.

In Chachal’s view, instead of taking punitive action against errant cops—suspension or dismissal from service—it makes more sense to “identify black sheep and reform them”. To this end, he has initiated a special programme. The first step involves getting addicted cops to overcome their fear of dealing with the problem. Many have admitted their addiction and sought help. For several others, wives and other family members have stepped forth.

Muktsar is only a few hundred kilometres from the Indo-Pakistan border, which is assumed to be highly porous for narcotics destined inward. Poppy farming, however, is rampant within India, says SSP Chachal, particularly within a belt in Rajasthan and Haryana that serves as a source of opium and heroin (a refined form of the opium extract) for the global narcotics trade.

The government’s claim is that Punjab 28 open

is a victim of suppliers. “Punjab is an international transit route for the flow of drugs from Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir,” Deputy CM Sukhbir Singh Badal has stated, “Most of the drug inflow in Punjab is from Pakistan.”

Yet, last November, a 1,000-kg haul of drugs seized was found to have been processed in various cities across Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Whispers of an alleged police-politician nexus running a drug cartel in Punjab have gained such traction that tackling it was among the electoral planks that saw the debutant Aam Aadmi Party win four Lok Sabha seats here. The deputy CM, who is also president of the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal—which did rather badly in the recent polls—had loudly denied any patronage extended to the drug trade by politicians in Punjab. But drugs remained a hot-button issue for the opposition. “All parts of Punjab were in the octopus-like grip of different kinds of alcohol and drug abuse,” says Nobeljit Singh, head of the Sikh Youth of Punjab, which is the youth wing of the Dal Khalsa.

Earlier this year, a wrestler-turned-drug supplier, Jagdish Singh Bhola, claimed that he had funded the electoral campaigns of many politicians. He alleged that Bikram Singh Majithia, the state governement’s revenue minister and brother-in-law of the deputy CM, was a key figure in the drug cartel—a charge that

Majithia denied as baseless. The opposition, however, is demanding a CBI probe that the Badal government in Chandigarh may be unable to ignore. Also, three months ago, former Director General of Police of Prisons of Punjab Shashi Kant named some politicians that he alleged were involved in the illicit drug trade; he also claimed that senior police officers were aware of these operations.

Under pressure to act, the Punjab government has declared a ‘war against drugs’, setting up a Punjab State Narcotics Control Bureau—headed by Inspector General of Police Ishwar Singh—that is supposed to be ‘independent’ of the Punjab Police. It has asked the High Court of Punjab and Haryana to set up fast-track courts for drug-related trials, and has promised tough action on other fronts as well. Over the past month, Punjab’s Director General of Police Sumedh Singh Sain—who rejoined duty after a brief replacement by TN Mohan mandated by the Election Commission for the election period—has launched a special drive to rid the state of the menace of drugs. Some 3,353 arrests were made and 3,000 cases registered in just 15 days. The government also dismissed 25 SHOs for suspected links with drug racketeers, although their names have not been made public. In the first three days of the drive, the police confiscated 2.5 kg of heroin, 3.75 kg of opium and 377 kg of poppy husk.

7 JULY 2014

“If [the police] aren’t involved, how come they were able to seize so much in a matter of a few days?” asks a DGP with a twist of irony. Meanwhile, others remain sceptical of how earnest the ‘war’ is.

“The state government has arrested hundreds of addicts, mostly youth. While they arrest consumers, none of the big suppliers or producers has been arrested so far,” says Captain Amarinder Singh, former CM and now the Congress’ only Lok Sabha member from Punjab.

A

t a distance from the Muktsar rehabilitation centre is an extraordinary village called Kot Ise Khan, in Punjab’s Moga district. Almost every family in this village of some 1,200 voters has at least one member who is either a drug peddler or an addict. Men, women and minors included.

The road to Kot Ise Khan has a police barricade, and every vehicle that passes by is put to a spot search; the recovery of poppy husk packets is routine. The village itself is a maze of lanes and bylanes with houses of bare baked kiln bricks all around. At its centre, where three roads converge at a chaupal space canopied by a banyan tree, about a dozen men are seen leisurely going about their tasks. A team of policemen, one of the three stationed in the village to curb drugs, is busy frisking all those who turn up on motorcycles.

7 JULY 2014

The locals dare not protest. Everyone is under suspicion.

There are a few multi-storey mansions that stand out amidst the modest houses.

“You won’t find such houses in Delhi,” says Ravi Sher Singh, the area’s SHO. The locals do have stories to tell— though always in past tense—of their brush with narcotics. Sixty-year-old Furan Nukara admits to have made a fortune selling drugs. He has no qualms about it. “[My wife] was the kingpin,” he says with a casual grin, “She used to receive consignments from across the border. It all ended with her death two years ago.” Since then, he has led the life of a law-abiding citizen, he claims—as onlookers break into laughter.

Nukara was an addict himself and has spent weeks in state-run de-addiction centres. If he gets back to peddling drugs, SHO Sher Singh cautions, the consequences would be far harsher. “Stay warned,” he tells Nukara in thet Punjabi.

At least Nukara is not absconding, as nearly half of the villagefolk have been since the police begun their post-poll crackdown. Given its reputation as a drug hub, this village has become the prime focus of attention.

At the far end of the village is a fourstorey house plastered with cement, a rarity in a rural setting like this. Its outer gate of stainless steel is firmly locked.

This house belongs to Minadar Kaur, the wife of one Bagh Singh. The local lore is that she departed in a big hurry, with-

“Nearly 90 per cent of lower ranking cops consume drugs in some form or another, even if everyone is not an addict,” says Amandeep Singh, “It is rampant in the Punjab Police”

out even packing her clothes. “Achcha kaam thha,” (“It was good work,”) says her 60-year-old brother-in-law, Virsa Singh; and by ‘good work’, he means ‘lucrative’. “She used to sell heroin,” he adds, driving the point home. On a good day, she could earn Rs 1 lakh, but then she apparently had to pay off government officials to stay in business. “All she took with her was a big stash of drugs in a bag.

No one knows where she has gone,” says the brother-in-law.

The village’s former sarpanch Veer Kaur, a 50-year-old woman, complains that many innocents have been nabbed by the police while most of the real culprits are missing. The place bears a deserted look and farms are going unattended.

Farming is still the official occupation of most residents of Kot Ise Khan. Almost to emphasise as much, one farmer—also accused of drug peddling—has had a lifesized statue of bulls pulling a plough erected on the third floor terrace of his house, overlooking the rest of the village.

According to Virsa Singh and Veer Kaur, the local custom is for families to marry within the village, which keeps relationships tightly bound and well knit into a network of mutual support and secrecy. This makes it difficult for the police to break in.

But that still doesn’t explain what makes this particular village such a peculiar hub of narcotics. Why Kot Ise Khan?

No one has an answer. Veer Kaur feels it’s just media propaganda. On the way back, a head constable at a roadside police station offers a frank explanation. The network is intricate, he says. The drug cartel cannot operate without the connivance of politicians and the police. While a few cops have been dismissed for their drug links, of late, few expect the nexus to come apart. “We maintain our own fourwheelers, pay for our fuel from our pockets [since only the SHO is entitled to free fuel: 250 litres a month], and employ our personal vehicles for official work. How can we sustain our jobs? Obviously, someone pays for it. Drug money is easy money,” says this constable, raising his voice above the noise of his car’s air-conditioner. He then jams his foot on the accelerator, saying, “Jab tak yeh Pakistan se aana bandh nahin hota, hum kya karenge?”

(Until drugs don’t stop coming in from Pakistan, what can we do?) n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

PHOTOS ANGEL M BABY

c u lt

Godman’s Own Country

The controversial chief of Dera Sacha Sauda finds a new spiritual market in Kerala Shahina KK

FAITH HEALING Dera followers at a medical camp organised at Vagamon on 15 June

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he community hall of Greenline Holidays, a tourist resort located in the lush verdant hills of Vagamon, Kerala, is crowded with workers of tea estates, a sizeable number being women. They live in nearby villages, but don’t have to go to work today because it’s a Sunday. They were brought in buses to the venue by 9 am, and since then have been patiently waiting without a clue about when the programme will begin.

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, who heads

7 July 2014

Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS), makes a dramatic entry to the hall at 10.30 am. Singh is the third chief of DSS, a religious sect founded in 1948 and based in Haryana.

He is accompanied by a large group of followers who have also come all the way from Sirsa, the headquarters of DSS in Haryana. A woman devotee addressing the crowd in a mixture of Malayalam and Hindi desperately tries to make them shout the slogan, ‘Dhan dhan Satguru, tera hi aasra’ (‘Glory of the Satguru, you are

our shelter.’) Except for a few children, no one responds to her exhortations.

Outside the hall, a team of percussion artistes perform the traditional Keralite orchestra, Pancharimelam. The armed Haryana policemen who are part of the security detail of Ram Rahim Singh bow their heads as he climbs the stage. He is dressed in a bright white kurta-pyjama and waving his hands at the crowd. It is a session of prayer and meditation, to be followed by a free medical camp. Unlike the cultism that Rahim Singh evokes in Punjab and Haryana, here, most men and women seem more curious than swayed.

Pennamma, a tea estate worker seated next to me, catches hold of my hand and tells me she is scared to see all the armed policemen around. It is the first time in her life she has been so close to a gun. I can see a team of the Kerala Police standing behind the hall, exchanging contemptuous glances with each other. They are all here to protect Singh, who has Z level security cover, and are the only people who know that I am a journalist and not a devotee.

This is the Dera chief’s tenth visit to Kerala and the second one to Vagamon.

According to the police, since 2012, he has visited Kerala five times. Each time, he stayed between 20 days and a month, travelling extensively in all the hilly districts and visiting lagoons in Ernakulam and Alappuzha. “His activities are under surveillance. We have some clue that he has business interests in Kerala,” says a high-level state intelligence officer, adding that they keep an eye on Rahim Singh because of the controversies that trail this godman.

Back home, Rahim Singh has been facing allegations of numerous criminal offences, including rape, murder and illegal stockpiling of arms. The first controversy around him was triggered in 2002 when a sadhvi follower sent an anonymous letter to the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee alleging rape by Singh. The letter spoke of largescale sexual exploitation of women devotees in the Dera. The High Court of Punjab and Haryana took cognisance and ordered an enquiry, but the case is still pending. Recently, Singh made a submission in court denying the charges of rape, claiming himself incapable, physically and mentally, of sexual intercourse. open www.openthemagazine.com 31

Other criminal cases that Singh has figured in include the murder of a journalist who had consistently written about alleged malpractices at the Dera.

Ram Chander Chathrapati, editor of Poora Sach, was shot dead by two bike riders who claimed to be DSS followers. A Dera follower, Hans Raj Chauhan, has, in a 2012 complaint filed at the High Court of Punjab and Haryana, also accused Singh of forcibly castrating him and 400 others. Most of these charges remain under investigation and Singh has never personally appeared in any court till date, successfully getting exemptions. On 4 June this year, a Bathinda court exempted him from appearing in court for a case of hurting religious sentiments, which he is alleged to have done by dressing up like Guru Gobind Singh.

T

would come, collect their addresses and do the needful. A widow with no relatives asks for either free medical aid or money because she has cancer. Singh advises her to gather inner strength, which he says would enable her to fight all diseases.

Most cry while talking about their lives, stricken as they are either by poverty or ailments. In return, they are showered with prayers and advice.

The language barrier between the people and the organisers helps me. They

itual corporation is keen on opening a branch in Kerala. What is peculiar is its belief that it will find takers in a state at the tip of southern India that speaks only Malayalam, given how closely the DSS has been associated with Punjab and Haryana.

Visits to resorts occupied by Singh and his disciples offer glimpses of the wealth that attends the Dera. Three Range Rovers and five BMWs are seen parked at Woodcastle, one of the resorts occupied

identify me as a devotee who can handle both English and Malayalam, and ask to assist them in collecting names and addresses of all participants. I talk to a huge number of women gathered in the hall and can find no one who has turned up here out of devotion—just about everyone present expects some monetary benefit and free medical aid from the Dera.

The few days that I spend in Vagamon as a tourist—and devotee of Ram Rahim Singh—make it clear to me that this spir-

by Singh. This is in addition to a specially designed bulletproof car that Singh enjoys driving himself.

All the hotel rooms and cottages in Vagamon have been booked by the DSS for 15 days. “They have booked around 30 cottages here. Around 800 people have come with him. All the staff-managers, helpers and chefs were asked to move out. They have taken complete control.

They have employed their own chefs in kitchens,” says the manager of one of the resorts. He was even asked by Singh’s

HE SPEECH he delivers this day in

Vagamon is old rhetoric on the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ within oneself, and the quest for self knowledge. It is followed by Singh crooning a devotional rock number from his album Love Charger. It is a mellow performance accompanied by slow head and body movements; but on YouTube Singh can be seen performing the same song in an entirely different avatar. In this internet video, he is on a stage at a large ground, performing like a rock star—in sleeveless glitzy multicoloured attire—while a hysterical crowd cheers him on. The video went viral recently; but in Kerala, a guru with a tinge of rock stardom is an alien idea. Many in the hall look bewildered.

After the speech, song and prayer, the floor is open for questions. The woman who had been trying to teach the crowd the Guru Mantra, translates the questions and answers. The microphone is given to a middle-aged woman in shabby clothes. She introduces herself as a tea estate worker from a nearby village and asks for Rs 3 lakh to take her husband, a cancer patient, to hospital. She is timid and nervous, her voice low, as if she wants only the Dera chief to listen to her sad story. Another woman, a homeless widow, says she wants a house of her own. There are few spiritual queries; most only have requests for houses, land, money and medical aid. Everyone is given the same assurance by their guru: that someone 32 open

7 July 2014

men not to eat non-vegetarian food until their guru leaves.

“They are imposing vegetarianism,” says a local police officer on duty. “We were asked by the Haryana Police not to eat non-vegetarian food while on duty.

We ignored him. Why should we listen to them?” Another police officer claims that Haryana cops also asked them to bow their heads before the guru. “I don’t understand why all these cops are so docile [before] this man! Isn’t he an accused

tea estate workers in this area is deplorable,” he says. Real estate agents in the locality as well as top members of the state intelligence confirm that there is something afoot. For instance, DSS is buying the Indo-US International School located in Theekkoyi Panchayat along with 26 acres of land. “The deal is done. Only the paperwork remains,” says an employee of the revenue department that deals with land registration. A few real estate agents Open spoke to say that Singh’s men have

QUESTION OF BELIEF Participants at a question-and-answer session organised by the Dera at Vagamon

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh tells the crowd he needs police protection from the drug mafia after having rid thousands of young men of their addiction in criminal cases?” the local cop asks. The camera crew hired from Kochi to record the Dera chief’s Vagamon days have also been asked to stay strictly vegetarian.

“They instructed the hotel staffers not to give us non-vegetarian, but we managed to get chicken and fish,” says a young adfilmmaker working as part of the team.

KR Rajeev, a social activist in the area, says he has no doubt that the Dera has big plans for Vagamon. “They have some real estate interests. They are exploiting the vulnerability of the poor here. The life of 7 July 2014

asked them to look for a hundred acres of land. “This is in addition to the school. We don’t know what they want to do here, but for us this is a very good deal,” says a realtor who does not want to be named.

“This exhibition of the free medical camp and meditation is an eyewash,” says PA Umesh, a CPI activist. “[Vagamon] is abundantly green and known for its scenic beauty and biodiversity. We have already been facing the threat of hills being bulldozed for construction and sandmining. Vagamon cannot afford being

home to such a big spiritual industry.”

In his Greenline speech, Singh tells the crowd why he has armed police escorts: because he has freed thousands of young men of drug addiction through prayer and meditation and has thus become a target of the drug mafia, which he claims has tried to kill him. He is being liberal with the truth; among the few credible threats he faces is one from pro-Khalistan militants. But it holds no martyrdom.

None of the villagers participating in this camp has heard of the controversial aspect of Singh’s life. Apart from charges of rape and murder, he is said to have stirred up sectarian trouble as well: his alleged sartorial impersonation of Sikh Guru Gobind Singh had resulted in communal clashes.

Singh also claims not to take donations. “You may wonder how we manage these activities without donations. We have 700 acres of land in Sirsa where we cultivate 13 food crops,” he says.

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh has never given an interview to the media, but we decide to try our luck anyway. The communication manager of DSS says that a personal interview would be impossible, but he would answer an email questionnaire. So we send a set of questions, asking him about the purpose of his visits and plans in Kerala; we also ask him about the cases against him, his views on homosexuality, who he supported in the recent General Election (because of the Dera’s rumoured electoral sway in Punjab), etcetera.

A few hours later, we are informed that such an online interview would also not be possible. The communication manager offers us no reason for this about-turn, except to say that her duty is merely to convey to us whatever the Dera leader asks her to. That is no surprise. There are plenty of godmen and godwomen who operate under a veil of secrecy in Kerala.

This merely adds another to that number.

What some find worrying, however, is that the geographical locations targetted

by DSS—Wayanad, Munnar and Vagamon—lie on the Western Ghats where mining and further construction are strongly discouraged. Vagamon is among the hotspots identified by the Gadgil Committee that need protection from human intervention—and that would include godmen. n open www.openthemagazine.com 33

l aw a n d o r d e r

The Brigand Who Wanted to Be Veerappan The rise and capture of the poacher who was threatening to step into the late bandit’s shoes.

Anil Budur Lulla reports from Palar village, near the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border

I

n the late 1990s and early 2000s,

the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu looked helpless before Veerappan as he kidnapped, extorted, smuggled sandalwood and ivory, poached elephants in huge numbers and attacked and killed policemen and forest department officials. What set Veerappan apart was his total disregard of the law. If policemen were sent after him, he would go after them.

In 1991, Veerappan was yet to attain mythical status, when Indian Forest Service officer P Srinivas tried to get him to surrender. Srinivas was asked to meet Veerappan alone; and venturing out on foot, Srinivas was abducted, tortured and beheaded. Today, in every forest office in southern Karnataka there is a framed photograph of him. It would take another 13 years for Veerappan to be killed, years in which his infamy spread all over India.

Saravanan Padayachi Gounder comes from the same community as Veerappan.

He doesn’t have a handlebar moustache; but Saravanan is said to love alcohol, guns and women in equal measure, making it unsurprising that the local media began to call him ‘Veerappan 2.0’.

That stray note of amusement aside, Saravanan’s name also evokes fear among Forest Department employees 34 open

and locals living on the forest fringes.

They perceive him as similar to what Veerappan was in the beginning. Though Saravanan operates in a smaller area, with his exploits nowhere near the scale of the late forest brigand’s, once in a while, he offers a hint of what he can do.

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n 28 May this year, Saravanan entered the Male Mahadeshwara Hills Wildlife Sanctuary from the Tamil Nadu side. He was accompanied by 20-odd armed men and a dozen trained hunting dogs. A source tipped off Karnataka Forest Department officials, and they moved to capture the poachers.

Vasudeva Murthy, assistant conservator of Forests, was in the forest party that night, and remembers the event clearly.

They saw the gang, weaving up a hill, their flashlights jumping up and down.

Suddenly, they changed direction and walked directly towards the foresters, surprising them. Later, it came to be known that the gang had run into an elephant herd and had decided to move away. “We warned them to surrender but they started shooting at us. I shot at them at quite a close range and saw one or two men fall down. But we were outnumbered and had to retreat,” says Murthy.

FOREST BANDIT Saravanan, who is now in custody of the Karnataka State Forest Department

This was the kind of boldness that Veerappan used to exhibit. The same night, Saravanan decided to attack a check-post on the state border deep inside the Palar range. The staff manning it ran away on seeing the gang, which then set the check-post on fire. For over two hours, the guards who were hiding could hear Saravanan loudly shouting for them to arrest him if they were “real men”.

This incident was enough for the Karnataka Forest Department to start taking emergency measures. “We formed a special team to nab him and his gang members. A massive combing operation was started,” says Javed Mumtaz, deputy conservator of Forests of MM Hills Wildlife Sanctuary. When they heard that Saravanan was trying to sell a pair of tusks, they sent decoys; but it turned out Saravanan had sent only one tusk and was trying to negotiate a better price for the pair. “Eventually, we managed to arrest two gang members. Clues given by them also led to the arrest of another poacher, Ganesh. Saravanan himself was nearly caught on three occasions,” says Mumtaz.

Murthy says they knew there was no point to catching gang members—they were clear that they wanted Saravanan himself. “This would deter others from venturing into the forest,” says Murthy.

Last week, Saravanan surrendered to the Tamil Nadu Police, claiming that Karnataka Forest Department officials were planning to kill him in a staged encounter. Even in this, he is employing Veerappan’s strategy of playing the police of two states against each other. The Karnataka foresters have been given his custody, but cannot harm him now.

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aravanan grew up in Oonjikarai,

a small village at the border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, a few hundred metres off the Mettur-MM Hills highway at Govindapadi. It is a hilly area with breath-taking views of valleys in between—a tiger spot and a migratory route for elephants as well.

Saravanan, who is said to be between 35 and 38 years old, knows every detail of the topography. It is said he was brought up on stories of Veerappan, seen as a Robin Hood of sorts in this region. Forest officials say in demeanour, swagger and even facial expressions, Saravanan apes him. open www.openthemagazine.com 35

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS A view of Govindapadi village in Tamil Nadu, the hometown of Saravanan

Both belong to the Padayachi Gounder community. They are both expert huntsmen and trackers by profession.

Saravanan dropped out of school early, acquiring his first gun while still young.

Later, he graduated to hunting wild boar and deer, but was never involved with Veerappan, probably because of the presence of the large number of policemen in the region at the time.

After Veerappan’s death, the joint Special Task Force was disbanded and there again was a spurt in poaching and wood smuggling cases with several new gangs beginning operations. This was when Saravanan started supplying arms and ammunition to them.

Stories about him begin from this time; among them, that he would stock guns in several houses, including of a woman— Shivamma—whom he visited near MM Hills. When her husband became suspicious of the affair, he took the gun away; and when Saravanan visited next and found his gun missing, he is said to have chopped her hand off.

Even politicians allegedly courted him to settle scores. Police say that once, when a local leader offered Rs 1 lakh to have a rival’s girlfriend killed, Saravanan offered to do the job for Rs 20,000. The story goes that he was arrested after shooting her down; but a local police official says there was no such case against him in Tamil Nadu. In a videotaped confession made to Karnataka forest officials, however, the bandit allegedly confessed to the murder.

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aravanan’s mother, Madhamma,

is a tall, angular woman who claims her son is innocent when we speak with her in his village of Oonjikarai. “He has never been arrested by police or forest officials before. We do not know why he has been arrested now. Please talk to my husband,” she says. She adds that her son has never killed any elephants either, saying, “Why should we? We live close to the forest and protect it. My elder son has been employed as a forest watcher in Tamil Nadu. Why should we be doing something that hurts our own interests?”

36 open

“Why should we [kill elephants]? We live close to the forest and protect it.

Why should we be doing something that hurts our own interests?”

Vasudeva Murthy says it is natural for people to protect him. “All lower staff who work in police and Forest departments are involved... Otherwise, how come there is never any real time information?”

Some months ago, Saravanan killed an elephant for its tusks. When he returned, Tribals from Talawadi village approached him in a group, saying that forest officials would arrest them for what he did. “He threatened all of us to keep quiet or face the same fate as the elephant,” says Chikapi, a cattle grazing tribal.

Based on his interrogation, the Forest Department is now trying to arrest his gang, while searching for three pairs of tusks. “We know [they are] for sale in the wildlife market. Once [they are] found, our case against Saravanan will strengthen,” says G Hanumanthaiah, a range forest officer in charge of the team. But, it is going to be difficult to convict him.

Saravanan claims that it was a namesake who set the check-post on fire.

During a recess at the Kollegal court

complex where Saravanan, dressed in a lungi and shirt, was produced, we try to speak to him. “Yenna Saravanan, yuvango sollrudu ella unmaya?” (“Tell us, Saravanan, is it true, what you are accused of?”) we shout as he is being taken away. The wiry man turns with a beatific smile on hearing a Tamil phrase in a largely Kannada-speaking compound.

He looks skywards, both palms also pointing upwards.

Officials later claim that Saravanan had given valuable leads during questioning. “It will keep him busy in jail well into his fifties,” says Mumtaz. “For elephant poaching alone, he will get five years, maximum... It will be a strong deterrent for other gangs and poachers.”

But the bandits of this area have an ability to spring surprises. The first time Veerappan was jailed was in 1972.

Nonetheless, till his killing in 2004, he was almost king of the forests here. How the legend of Veerappan 2.0 will play out is anybody’s guess. n 7 July 2014

fa s h i o n

Nine Yards of

Nostalgia Designers strike a stunning balance between tradition and modernity as the sari becomes the newest style statement, writes Chinki Sinha photographs by raul irani

Sari Made of pre-stitched tussar silk woven in Odisha. The blouse is of treated leather, frayed at the edges.

The idea behind the silhouette is ‘progression versus regression’.

Designer Arjun Saluja of Rishta Model Geetanjali Thapa, a national award-winning actress

“The sari Mother wears everyday is sometimes a train, sometimes a river, or a swing, or a hiding place . . .”

—My Mother’s Sari by Sandhya Rao

O

nce, on the ramp, not so long ago, it had every-

day motifs such as cycle-rickshaws on it. The handloom sari was mundane, yet beautiful on the ramps of Delhi. That was in 2006, when David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore presented their version of the eternal nine yards. It was also the first sari of theirs to be acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Nostalgia has its role. There are mothers and grandmothers, chiffons and georgettes, handloom and Banarasis, and Kancheepurams that are part of the heritage, and memory.

Today, the sari is an art that challenges designers with its versatility and potential. Not that it was ever out of the scene.

It’s been part of the fashion industry’s repertoire as a ‘trousseau’ garment. Textiles are a way of establishing an identity in an ever-changing world. Even when chiffon was around, it was in a way showcasing its ‘stubbornness’, saying that the sari would somehow adapt but not lose its hold on India.

Abraham says he cut it. To him it was a design concept. He wanted the modern woman to be able to wear it as an edgy

Sari A black and white, linen and silk chequered sari. Its blouse is cut in the fashion of a jacket from the front.

The inspiration for this piece comes from the material, colour and the possibilities of weaves Designer and Model Neeru Kumar

outfit. One metre was gone. There was a belt, and a printed tunic to go with the jamdani sari, and it was their opening outfit. Years ago, when he was in design school, his teacher wore a black and white and red Sambalpuri sari, and he was fascinated with the geometry and austerity of the concept. Abraham thinks the sari poses an ‘identity question’ that makes him want to do things with it.

At the 2014 Wills India Fashion Week, A&T (Abraham & Thakore) showcased a range of saris that still catered to Western notions of minimalism, but in their characteristic way, they fused it with traditional Indian textiles, using laser-cut triangles on the pallu to hint at precision and craft and modernity and industrial design. The silk was woven in Assam.

Mostly, everything was in beige and black.

Tussar and crepe. Other young designers also had a version of the sari in their collections

then. Like Rimzim Dadu, who showcased a few pieces in her collection for the first time.

Even beyond the ramp, designers like Mrinalini Gupta and Rina Singh of Ekà were also taking it up.

Abraham, who sells under the label A&T, says that through the resurgence of the sari, the Indian fashion industry is coming into its own. Nostalgia has a larger role in fashion than many would like to admit. The sari has always been part of the visual scene. Abraham’s mother was Chinese, he grew up in cantonments, and had no direct relation with the sari in childhood. Yet, the garment was all around him. “I am not interested in paying homage to crafts. I just want to acknowledge the vast resources that we have,” he says. “All Indian silhouettes are challenging. The question is: how does one keep it relevant?”

S

anjay Garg of Raw Mango, who started

doing Chanderi saris, doesn’t call himself a designer. But like a graphic artist who pretends he is looking at a frame to understand design and implement it, he says the sari intrigued him. It could be minimal. There existed something like Indian minimalism.

He grew up in Rajasthan, and the monotony of the dusty parts was broken beautifully by the rani, the sharbati, the lime-greens, the reds and the yellows. He began with a white Chanderis with gold borders. But he figured weavers had a lot more to offer. What was needed was design intervention. “I wanted to write a story that nobody wrote,” he says. “I have a problem with the way we were aesthetically representing the sari. We weren’t changing with time. Everything was getting modified everywhere. The sari needed to go through a churn,”Garg earnestly believes.

His saris are poetry. A bird in flight, flowers in bloom, and everything that is beautiful, woven with colours that are essentially Indian.

“My romance is with history. It is with pehchaan,” he says, referring to ‘identity’. “I wanted answers. If we didn’t do bootis on saris, the weavers would be betraying their craft, and would fade away.”

In just a matter of a few years, he has acquired a clientele that includes writers, politicians and actors. He has moved beyond Chanderis. There’s Banarasi, and there is cotton. White on white, gold on rani pink. That’s his answer to Western minimalism, and it’s with a vengeance. “Why would you drape the sari as a saafa for a fashion shoot?” he says. “Let it be what it is, and make it desirable.” It has to

40 open

7 July 2014

Sari: A pre-stitched sari with a laser-cut pallu and a mulberry silk skirt, teamed with a tussar tee Designer: David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore (A&T) Model: Painter and artist Mithu Sen (centre)

Sari A double-weft cotton and silk piece, with chains woven into it that have tiny skulls at their end. The blouse is a silk full-sleeve piece in black.

The inspiration is Goth Designer Rajesh Pratap Singh Model Shreyasi Gopinath

42 open

be released from elitism and weird fashion perceptions, he adds.

The sari, once written off as an occasional wear by many fashionistas, is now a commercially viable option for designers. Kallol Datta, a Kolkata-based designer, says, “I think it automatically found a place [in my label’s product mix] by virtue of its being an unstitched piece of fabric. The possibilities are limitless.” He adds, “The sari has helped with storytelling.

When you have six metres of fabric and print all over it, not only does it belong to the collection but becomes a manifesto of sorts for that particular fashion season. The influence of the sari on the international fashion circuit cannot be denied. Any garment with a shoulder or shoulder-to-waist drape is called sari-esque.”

He explains why the sari hasn’t found space in wardrobes worldwide.“The reasons are the same as to why the kimono or the lederhosen or the burkha haven’t found takers beyond a certain ethnic or religious group. Native clothing, when taken beyond the concept of race or geography, is perhaps looked upon as costumelike,” says Datta.

In his Fall Winter 2014 line, Datta calls his sari ‘Paranoia Pronoia’. The entire look has 20 metres of fabric. He has done away with the conventional blouse, and a traditional Japanese kimono is incorporated into the look.

A

rjun Saluja, who owns the label Rishta,

says the sari is like a chameleon. It can 7 July 2014

Sari A hand-woven linen sari with Bark Selvedge.

The blouse is of natural linen with khatwa work done on it Designer and Model Anavila Sindhu Misra ritesh uttamchandani

change, mutate and transform, yet hold its soul in place. His first ever sari attempt was inspired by a chapter in Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis.

The particular chapter spoke about Zeenat’s first tryst with the burkha, and how she, a eunuch, loved the way it felt against her body sans the salwar or kameez. She also never gave up on the sari. That’s his story. The story of not giving up.

He fused the two. The opening garment then was the burkha-sari, zipped up (a pre-stitched version), and the model walked the ramp in a cloud of smoke—a memorable image from 2012 in black.

This time, Saluja tried yet another version.

Stitched, as the previous one, but hand-woven in Odisha, it was inspired by Lahore and its ex7 July 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 43

Sari A 100-per cent khadi linen sari in gradation.

Its pallu is a coordinated polka print. And its fabric is hand-woven in West Bengal Designer and Model Rina Singh of Ekà

cesses. Paired with a treated leather blouse, frayed at the edges to hint at the city’s violence, churn, state of mind and also at the work of several artists he met on trips across the border, his sari crossed over in many ways. Yet again.

After the burkha-sari, Saluja’s next was a white stitched Hakama pant-style sari with a shirt blouse. It had darts, and a gathered, pleated pallu, a signature style. “It is very naked. It exposes, and yet it hides,” he says. “The sari is contradictory. It has no occasion. It is the ‘staple diet’ of women in India, the kind of women you interact with. That’s how I understand the sari, and approach it.

T

hen, there are other approaches to the

sari. Not as complex, but more simplistic.

A way of living. Rina Singh of Ekà says the sari to her is “far from the boundaries of Indian or Western silhouettes”. It’s for women who

approach fashion likewise, without being caught up in trend cycles and such notions.

“Earlier, though not consciously but somewhere in my mind, I felt a beautiful sari was the ultimate sexy statement for a woman. My notions were Indian; my references for a sari were also the same,” she says. “Why make it modern and fashionable? When it’s already a wonder. It’s a full circle in Indian Fashion. The 70s rocked the sari with elegance.”

In fashion, the sari has always found itself in the crossfire of the stitched and unstitched.

Rina Singh says she doesn’t fathom stitched saris. “Maybe for ease of wearing... But as a purist, I’d rather think it takes the charm away from the specialty of a sari,” she says.

Among other purists is Neeru Kumar, a senior designer who owns Tulsi, and has a loyal clientele that includes Priyanka Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi (for her handloom saris). “The format of the sari by definition is body-borderand-pallu. Every element plays an important role, and they come together to make a strong statement. The sari commands a certain respect for the wearer and viewer,” she says. “It all started with Indira Gandhi, who always wore handwoven saris. It meant something, it suggested that it was important for us Indians to wear.” Neeru Kumar started weaving saris back in 2000.

Mrinalini Gupta’s favourite fashion phrase is ‘swinging it’. She herself went through plenty before she found her own response to the sari (she had under-rated nostalgia as part of the creative process). She is yet to showcase it on the ramp. As a designer, she merely took it for granted. After all, it was everywhere.

“Weren’t your sketches supposed to be different, springing from nowhere?” But then, she says, she grew up. The encounter was with a “stunning gold weave and I knew that I wanted to wear it in the simplest way possible. No clutter... just classic and cold.”

“My grandmother had a knack of really swinging the sari at that time and at her age. In the 50s and 60s, she was independent, pragmatic, a thinker, humorous and fashionable.

I remember her stepping out crisply dressed for her various sojourns. A complete shopper.

My mother belongs to a more classic school of thought—read chiffon and pearl drops—and the sari on her came across as a more elegant affair. I was an unfortunate counter to this trend as my interest in the sari has kindled as recently as two years ago. But I am happy to say it’s a quintessentially Indian concept, steeped in our history with a million stories woven into it. In a nutshell, [others] just don’t get it.”

7 July 2014

L

ike Sanjay Garg, Anavila Sindhu Misra only does saris. In linen. That’s how she started. Her collection of linen saris was well received at the Lakme Fashion Week this year.

It was her first-ever fashion week. Misra’s moment came in a rural belt in Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh, where she was handling a cluster that was part of a Textiles Ministry project.“I was from the corporate sector. I was called in to instill discipline. The project was a turning point. This was 2004. Here, I was dealing with human hands… I had a socialistic point of view then, but all that changed during those three years. You have to make it a viable business. For how many days will you say ‘ These people are poor and you must save them’?”

She realised the beauty of the sari in daily chores. She started wearing saris herself then.

She invested her money, and the first sari took months to weave and develop. Misra draped the sari in 30 different ways for her last show.

“Apart from being feminine, the sari gives you a lot of strength. I don’t feel docile. I feel so much in control of myself, like my mother.

7 July 2014

Like all the other women in these rural areas,” she says. “There is the strength of simplicity. It is very sentimental.”

F

or Deepika Govind, a designer who

works with textiles, the sari is a garment of freedom. “It’s interesting for it defines our Indian identity. All the variations from every state: from the tribal woman, from the fields, women sitting in a palatial haveli, every one of them wore and accessorised it differently. Not only that, the men too wore the dhoti, panche and angavastram, which is similar to saris in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.”

And then there are those who are weaving copper and steel into saris. Like Gaurav Jai Gupta of Akaaro.

There’s a lot going on in the sari narrative, aiding its comeback. Handloom or otherwise, approaches could be sentimental or unsentimental. But what makes it appealing is a basic human condition: nostalgia.

We return to belong, to stay. n

Sari Of Eri, the ‘peace silk’. It has a muted two-tone colour with an exotic blue border, while its pallu has a simple asymmetric top in cotton tussar for a blouse Designer and Model Deepika Govind

open www.openthemagazine.com 45

BOOKS

mindspace Pasture Problems

63

O PEN S PACE

Ranbir Kapoor Armaan Jain Saif Ali Khan

62

n p lu

Humshakals Chef

61 Cinema reviews

Audeze LCD-X Alacria Royal Rose Asus Essence STX II 7.1

60

T e c h & st y l e

Does free will exist?

An island on Saturn’s moon Starving for longevity

56

Science

A Profile of Aparna Rao and Soren Pors

53

A RT

Social impact videos: Do they help?

so c i a l m e d i a

10 Questions for Zia Haider Rahman Banaras: Walks Through India’s Sacred City by Nandini Majumdar

48 64

ashish sharma

CLICKACTIVISM Internet vigilantes come up with a new weapon of mass awareness 53

books 10 questions for zia haider rahman

‘I have an ill-defined yearning to belong to some stretch of this earth’ Zia Haider Rahman’s first novel, In the Light of What We Know, is already the literary event of the year (reviewed in Open, ‘A Groundbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, 23 June 2014). Born in Bangladesh and educated at Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, Rahman has worked as an investment banker and human rights lawyer. The novelist in conversation with S PRASANNARAJAN

As a writer, you hold the world in your palm and play with it. Are you drawn to the novel as a form because of the freedom that it alone gives you?

There are few venues that offer the scope to explore the phenomena of experience and consciousness afforded by the art of the novel. I believe that the novel remains the pre-eminent form for a certain kind of enquiry.

Ideas, from philosophy to politics to mathematics, replace action in this novel, seldom seen in novels from the East. Am I right?

I wouldn’t presume to comment on what is (or isn’t) seldom seen in novels from the East. But to take your substantive point, I understand what you’re getting at though I would have to reframe it slightly. There’s a lot of action in this novel, ranging from walks in the leafy squares of Bloomsbury in London and boat rides off Manhattan island to train crashes in Sylhet and bomb explosions in Kabul. But what you’re noting is that there’s also a lot that is discussed, in the way that two men—both approaching middle-age, both of a certain education, both at pivotal moments in their lives— might discuss things if freed from quotidian claims. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, of soundbites and the frenetically simplifying accounts of an ever more complex social environment, these two men have been granted a space in which to slow down.

Consider an American president’s decision to take his country to war. What the media will slant us towards is the action of the battlefield, which is where the images are. But think of the drama that took place in the lead-up to the decision. The state department at loggerheads with the defense department; junior analysts at the CIA resigning noisily over the willful blindness of their superiors. All action is predicated on a drama, sometimes a struggle in itself, played out in thoughts and ideas, in the things we think we know.

Many of the novels that have left an enduring mark on me have not shied away from exploring the life of the mind, directly or indirectly. Sebald’s novels are an obvious example, but there are many other works too, not so readily detectable in similarities of style but whose influence has been, I think, on my perception of what fiction is capable of doing.

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus combines ‘action,’ as you put it, with ideas, or the actions of the mind. Our beliefs are what 7 july 2014

animate us and without them we would be lifeless.

It is more than obvious that you love Sebald. Being an eternal outsider? Or…

When I moved to Cambridge for graduate studies, for the first time I met a lot of Indians from India—many Bengali, as it happens. I remember being struck by how very different they were from me. I had a couple of British Asian friends and we observed to ourselves how comfortable in their skin the Indians seemed to be, how unencumbered they were by the anxieties of dislocation or outsiderness that we seemed to carry around with us all the time. They inhabited Cambridge as if they were insiders, in fact, rather than outsiders. In some part, no doubt this was due to the fact that Cambridge, even more so than Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, had a long-standing and deep relationship with India. But I think it was also the case that, even without that historic association, they were insiders because they had none of the anxieties of the outsider.

The outsider, in the sense in which you use the term, is really a creature of within, something that Sebald identified and explored, defined by the schisms within himself. The outsider is the man placed before the door who stands there not knowing if it will open or if it can open or if he can open it. For the Indian students, there was no door and therefore none of the anxieties of a door.

I don’t think I have given you an answer so much as the beginning of a conversation. But perhaps that’s true of anything anyone ever says.

You love Kurt Godel too. You make mathematics poetic.

If someone says it is a 9/11 novel, is it a simplification?

Yes. And it is as much a simplification (if that is all she says), as a one-word reply is a simplification of my reaction to the question.

Is there a bit—or more—of the novelist in Zafar?

Certainly. My stock answer has been to recall that Philip Roth didn’t write a novel about a South African writer living in Sydney; Coetzee didn’t write a novel about a Trinidadian settling in England; and Naipaul didn’t write about Jews in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1950s.

But nothing that any character says is to be attributed to the author. The failure to recognise this basic distinction between fiction and non-fiction is precisely that: a failure.

And it’s an error that leads to mayhem, artistic and political.

Are you another writer from what Naipaul would have called a half-made society?

Could your questions be any more mischievous? Which is the allegedly halfmade society you’re referring to here?

Is it a geographic society? Bangladesh, where I was born? Or even the England that I grew up in? Or the US, where I wrote most of the novel? Or is the halfmade society not one of Naipaul’s geographic societies of the former colonies but of another kind, cutting across geographies?

I have an ill-defined yearning to belong to some stretch of this earth, a place to call home, and to know what it means—what it feels like—to call a place home. There are moments when I turn a corner and catch a fleeting glimpse of this thing, but just as quickly it vanishes. I sometimes console myself with the thought that the worms, that will one day have us, know full well that we belong to them.

“Mathematics is inherently poetic. It was where I found the greatest beauty, and at times the only beauty in life.

It’s humanity’s most creative endeavour”

I’m gratified you think so but mathematics is inherently poetic. It was certainly my obsession from childhood and through to youth. In fact, it was more than that. It was where I found the greatest beauty, and at times the only beauty in life. Though I’m no longer invested in mathematics, I retain the view that it is humanity’s most creative endeavour and its fruits her greatest achievements.

More than Sebald, the epigraphs are pretty active in this novel.

How much of your reading shaped your imagination?

‘Active’ is an apt description of the epigraphs; as the novel unwinds, one quickly discovers that the epigraphs are in fact put there by the narrator (unlike most novels where the epigraphs are evidence of authorial intrusion). Moreover, towards the end of the novel, the epigraphs themselves make a disclosure in the story.

It is very hard to know how one’s imagination has been shaped; in so many ways we remain strangers to ourselves, 7 july 2014

which is itself an idea that the novel explores. It is certainly the case that I read extensively.

Is it a novel by an exile?

Yes, though I suspect all novels of a certain kind are. Writing is a lonely business except for those for whom its solitude is the condition for the pleasures of discovery.

If I say In the Light of What We Know is the big, breakthrough novel after Midnight’s Children written by a novelist of subcontinental origin, how will you respond?

I think I would be dumbstruck. Such things are for others to judge. I have enough to be getting on with. n open www.openthemagazine.com 49

books

Sacred Treasure A limited edition pictorial guide to Varanasi returns a rare British Library map to India after more than a century RAJNI GEORGE

A

s the nation focuses on recovery plans for Varanasi,

we call up the chronicles of its spiritual capital.

Visitors to Harmony Bookshop, that beloved Assi Ghat fixture, find 60 plus titles on the past and present of the home of Tulsidas’ epic poem Ramcharitmanas, across genres, including Diana Eck’s lyrical 1982 modern classic Banaras, City of Light; Vasanthi Raman’s The Warp and the Weft, which uses the sari to tell the city’s communal history; Geoff Dyer’s whimsical Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, told between Venice and Varanasi. Then, there are the sumptuous coffee table books, the handbooks; even an audio guide by Robert E Svoboda featuring music by DJ Cheb I Sabbah.

Adding to the fine body of guidebook literature around the sacred city, Roli Books has just released Nandini Majumdar’s stylish, educative new guide to the city, Banaras: Walks through India’s Sacred City (Roli Books, 184 pages, Rs 599/ 15,000). “You don’t think Varanasi is conducive to walking around as it is dirty, but its lanes require residents to walk around and get to know the city,” says Majumdar, a young local who began working on the book five years ago and

marks its completion from Oxford, England, where she has just completed graduate studies in World Literature. “It’s depressing when you live in Varanasi and see what is happening. But we want people to be aware of this and there is a lot that can be done.”

The book comes in two versions. A limited edition of 200 features a digitally printed, 2.9 metre-long map, reproduced for the first time in India in lovely, watery pinks, greens and yellows, on imported white canvas. Enclosed in a box set with a hardback guide, the package is priced at Rs 15,000 (the mass market version is a paperback with generous foldout flaps, more affordable, if not as gorgeous). ‘‘I don’t think there is another illustration, another panorama of the ghats as they were 150 years ago. We have replicated the scroll in its exact size, to be faithful to the original, which is at the British Library in London,” says Roli Books publisher Pramod Kapoor of the map, drawn and lithographed by artist Durga Pershad and originally printed in 1901 by an old Allahabad press. ‘‘We have good museums in India and have improved our methods vastly, but unfortunately our archiving is not good. The map might not have survived in this pristine condition here; we have lost what we have lost. We don’t have something like this in India.”

Originally from Varanasi, Kapoor remembers running in and out of its lanes growing up, as he spreads the scroll out on a long work table in his wood-panelled office, pointing to the particular ghat he calls home. It has changed tremendously, and he looks forward to the new Government’s focus on cleaning up. “The river has needed attention for a long, long time. In our time—I left in 1975—I remember learning how to swim and it was as clean as any private

ashish sharma

had mapped this part of Varanasi since the 1920s, which is when the municipal maps were made. Since then, not too much has changed, but the landmarks have changed. We thought, why not make this a practical resource, a guide.

When you stop at a shop or temple, you know exactly where you are with this book.” Every ghat is mentioned here, she shows us; even the road to Sarnath is marked.

Each copy of the limited edition is accompanied by a numbered certificate.

‘People in fact nominate their number, a lucky number, or number 1, and you keep a register tracking who each goes to.

This is new to India, and this is our third limited edition,’ says Pramod, who began the publishing house, well-known for its handsomely produced illustrated titles, in 1978 and also published Delhi 360. This similar limited edition, of which he estimates only 10 copies remain, is now Rs 20,000, up from an earlier Rs 15,000.

“In the West, these special editions can go for four to five times its original price at auctions.” The Kapoors often deal excessively with permissions, they say, more difficult in India than in the West; thinking there prioritises dissemination, they feel. For curatorial projects, Pramod has travelled along Europe’s Western front from home to home through Ypres and beyond in search of war memorials for Roli’s forthcoming World War I book, among upcoming archival projects.

Father and daughter speak fondly of the peaceful nature of cultural confluMASTER CURATORS Roli Books publisher Pramod Kapoor with his daughter, editorial director Priya Kapoor ence and thereby of Hindu-Muslim relations in Varanasi, tracing far back. “My father had a lot of customers who were swimming pool can be. There used to be an area where wom- traders, weavers, who would come and get boxes made for en swam, with barricades for privacy. It was a ritual—even their products,” recalls Pramod. “They would bring their now it is a ritual, perhaps with fewer people—for locals to own water, what they call jham jham, and give it to my grandhave daily baths in it. Today, you can’t put a finger in it, it has mother and she would happily drink it, though the food they gotten so bad.” ate was separate. There are more Shia-Sunni riots in Varanasi The map—which Pramod remarks is very folk, just as it than Hindu-Muslim.” looks contemporary—came together with the author’s re“I hope this newfound focus actually changes Varanasi for search through serendipity, and only the publisher and his the better, and not worse,’ adds Priya, who has sent the book wife Kiran have seen the original. Even his daughter Priya, out to language rights publishers, hoping for a Hindi edition the company’s editorialdirector, hasn’t seen it. ‘My parto reach out to that audience too. “I hope whoever develops ents were looking for something else and found this paintthe city uses the book because it’s a great record. It tells us ing,’ explains Priya, who was born in Varanasi and often rethe original purpose of old buildings, for example, which turned for visits from New Delhi, where the family settled. is useful now.”

‘The manuscript Nandini Majumdar sent us three years In the book’s six walks, Majumdar reaches for more intiago, a big block of research she had done at the time. No one mate stories; for example, the fishing community in one of 7 july 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 51

BACK TO THE ARCHIVES A section of the valuable British Library map Roli Books has printed, showing the full stretch of Varanasi’s ghats for its inheritors

the ghats has so many young people hanging around it because of the unusual amount of people deprived of an education, in this area. The commentary is socio-economic here: ‘One result of social reform movements was that energies were channelled into ritualised religious activities rather than those that would improve the immediate environment of young people.’

The ghats’ various akharas—the juna akhara of the Naga sadhus for example—and the listings of musical concerts are other features highlighted in this accessible, photograph-filled guide. It tells us: ‘What Banarasis value is a khula dil (an open heart) a khula mijaz (an open nature), and khuli bat karna (speaking openly). They equally treasure the little bit of open space, the khuli jagah, in the heart of their neighbourhood. For them, happiness is the easy movement through the layers of the self and the world.’

“I’d keep walking around in the same place and doodling till I was able to draw where it was,” says Majumdar, who 52 open

found 20 detailed contemporary maps in the development authority’s resources, traced and used throughout the book as a practical supplement. Repeated perambulations threw up surprises even for the 27-year-old local, author of five children’s books. She spent 16 formative years here, a decade of it associated with NIRMAN, a non-profit organisation working for children’s education in Varanasi; along with her mother Nita Kumar, author of The Artisans of Banaras, which speaks of 80s Varanasi. (Royalties from paperback sales will be donated to NIRMAN.) Majumdar kept happening upon one place after another, and was fascinated

by Siddha Kshetra, a maze of alleys containing some major shrines, said to be the birthplace of Agni. “There’s something humble and cosy about the city, but also magical and fantastic,” she says.

This view is shared across generations.

Pramod Kapoor laughs, remembering the common myth of the Til Bandeshwar statue; locals say it increases by a til a day.

“People are quite different in Varanasi.

They live in their own world, they don’t know where their bed finishes and history begins.” n

“I don’t think there is another panorama of the ghats as they were 150 years ago” says Roli publisher Pramod Kapoor, who replicated the scroll, found at the British Library, exactly

7 july 2014

social media Age of the Clickactivist Internet vigilantes come out with a new weapon of mass awareness: social experiment videos AANCHAL BANSAL

E

arlier this month, amid the

hysterical outrage in the press and social media over images of two teenaged girls hanging by a mango tree in a nondescript village in Badaun in Uttar Pradesh, a three-minute video on YouTube quietly surfaced on social media platforms that sent a chill down the spines of those who watched it.

Reminiscent of the 16 Decemeber Delhi gangrape and other cases reported from various other cities in India of hapless women assaulated sexually in moving vehicles and then offloaded on streetsides, the video features a white van with tinted glasses parked in a dim and secluded spot at night. Barely a few seconds into the video, a scream emanates from the van. One hears a woman begging a man to let her go while the man threatens to shoot her.

Passersby (who are not actors), in the meanwhile, simply walk by. One of them peers through the tinted windows, but still opts to leave, while a cycle-rickshaw stops for a little longer only to pedal away. Finally, a man tries to open the door by force and later tries to break the tinted glass with a brick, only to be stopped by another man who informs him that this was a ‘social experiment’ being shot and the voices heard from within the car were mere recordings. In another instance, a 78-year-old security guard shows up armed with an iron rod and tries to smash the windows—but is stopped again.

“I was just too tired of statements on social media about rape and violence. I wanted to see if people really meant it and how many people would actually come forward to help a girl in trouble,” says 17-year-old Sahil Bedi, who parked the van in Delhi’s Naraina Industrial

7 july 2014

spine chiller Screen grabs of the experimental video Public Experiment on Women Abuse in India

“I was just too tired of statements on social media about rape and violence,” says Sahil Bedi, “I wanted to see if people would actually help”

Area at around 8.30 pm on a weekday and shot the video with his friend Prabal Narang. Titled Public Experiment on Women Abuse in India, this video may sound like a banal and somewhat forced school project, but is not.

Uploaded on 6 June, the video went viral on various social media platforms and has been viewed over 2.1 million times so far, making it one of YouTube’s most-viewed videos. “It at least shows the true picture of how things are, and with the comments and number of ‘likes’ it has collected, I know that my video is making an impact on people,” says Bedi, who runs a YouTube channel called YesNoMaybe and essentially uploads prank videos as content for online media.

A little like prank videos, at least in their staging, such social experiments aim to see how people would respond if faced with a person in real trouble.

Broadly, an act is staged in the middle of the street with a camera recording reactions of ‘real’ people to the situation portrayed by the act. The video is then uploaded online on YouTube and if it goes viral, YouTube ‘monetises’ the video—sharing revenue generated via the video based on the number of ‘views’ and ‘likes’ it gathers.

The video of a girl from the Northeast being subjected to racial abuse while passersby stay stubbornly apathetic, is considered to be one of the first such social experiments to have gone viral online. It appeared in February this year. Another clip that gained popularity recently is Kill the Poor, shot by a Delhi-based online content maker, YTV. The video draws people’s responses to a hypothetical scenario in which extermination of the poor is presented as a problem solver, simply to open www.openthemagazine.com 53

ashish sharma

best friends on a social mission Prince Thareja and Rahul Sharma (left) cite ABC’s TV show What Would You Do? as inspiration for their experimental videos

gauge attitudes to poverty and levels of sympathy for India’s have-nots. It was featured on the websites of international publications like The Daily Mail.

A Nirbhaya video shot by actor Varun Pruthi recreates the Delhi gangrape scene by having in in make-up that makes him look severely injured and bleeding. Through the seven minutes of the clip’s running time, Pruthi tries to stop vehicles in broad daylight, asking for help, but none pulls up.

Videos with somewhat ‘lighter’ social messages, like Free Hugs shot by Bedi and one about littering in public places by a channel called Awkward Unlimited, have been doing well. The months of May and June alone have seen at least half a dozen ‘social experiment’ videos 54 open

being uploaded on the net.

Another offbeat experiment, put up recently and made by YTV, tackles the issue of homosexuality and public responses to it through the video of a girl who discloses to her mother that she is a lesbian. The message of the video, explains YTV founder Naman Sharma, is to get the nature of the problem across to viewers. “The biggest problem that young people face is lack of communication with parents.

The video aims to tackle that,” says the 26-year-old, who founded his company only two years ago after completing a Phd in business and finance and a teaching stint in Melbourne, Australia.

The video has already garnered as many as 3.6 million views.

B

est buddies since school, Prince Thareja and Rahul Sharma (both 23, and the duo behind India’s first social experiment video) would casually bumble around the streets of Karala, a middle-class neighbourhood in north-west Delhi, playing video games on the net and laughing over the various prank videos available online, till they thought of making prank videos of their own and uploading them.

This was nearly two years back, when Sharma was studying to be a chartered accountant while Thareja was looking at starting his own dance academy in Karol Bagh. While they formed a channel called Troubleseekers and began uploading prank videos online in partnership with YouTube, using a Sony 7 july 2014

digicam, they made their first ‘social experiment’ video in January this year that tackled the issue of poverty. The video involved hitting a poor person in public and seeing if people would react and try to stop them. While the apathy and lack of interest displayed was shocking, the video failed to make an impact online. The next month, following reports of racial abuse faced by people from the Northeast in Delhi, the duo decided to record a social experiment on it. “A friend from the Northeast [who also features in the video] suggested it,” says Rahul Sharma.

The clip, shot in daylight in Hauz Khas, sees Sharma calling the girl names and harassing her. No one really helps out. The video went viral and received press coverage within days of its being uploaded. It has got about 2.3 million views and is still going strong.

“Social experiments have been pretty popular in the West,” says Rahul Sharma. Online reruns of ABC’ s primetime series What Would You Do? is the inspiration behind most such social experiments. “I have been an avid user of the internet, and if we can make prank videos and earn good money, why not make social experiment videos which can go viral and also make an impact?” argues Sharma, who has quit his CA training classes and has decided to devote all his time to Troubleseekers.

Thareja, who works with Rahul Sharma, runs his own dance academy.

While he is reluctant to disclose how much money he makes on his videos (on account of a contract signed with YouTube), Sharma says he had worked out the math long ago. “If I had continued with my training and taken up a job, I would have had a package of about Rs 80,000 a month at the most. I can make far more than this with my videos,” he says. While he spends about Rs 1,500-2,000 on each clip, he uses his home bedroom as his office and his desktop PC as his workstation.

H

ooked to the idea of making more

such videos, Rahul Sharma says that he is dabbling with ideas like tacking child labour. “But they have to be

7 july 2014

made in an interesting manner,” he adds, ‘interesting’ here being something that will pull as many ‘likes’ as possible—something that cannot really be ignored in dealing with what works online and what doesn’t. Naman Sharma of YTV admits that some videos are aimed at generating viewership and revenue. The catch is in the numbers of ‘likes’ and ‘views’ one manages. While YouTube monetises videos on the number of ‘likes’ per thousand (unofficial estimates say between $50 and $400), the money lies in one’s video going viral and getting hits in the hundreds of thousands.

“If we can make prank videos and earn good money, why not make social experiment videos which can go viral and also make an impact?” argues Rahul Sharma of Troubleseekers “If you are in the business of media, you will be concerned with the aspect of popularity because you want people to click on the thumbnail of your video and watch it. But in the end, if the message is positive and well-intentioned, I am willing to let that go,” Naman Sharma says. Capitalising on the popularity and impact of ‘social experiment’ videos, TV entertainment channel Bindass too has launched a ‘social experiment’ that dealt with public harassment of girls in cities like Delhi.

The video was part of a three-phase campaign rolled out by the channel, which positions itself as ‘the voice of the youth’. While most shows, including the voyeuristic Emotional Atyachar, are geared towards increasing awareness and understanding relationships,

Prashant Madaan, executive director of creative services at the channel, says that the video was launched in May to make a point. “We wanted to veer out of the zone of armchair activism and tell real stories of real people,” he says.

Admitting that some videos online might be carefully edited and hence manipulated, as “no-reaction” to a situation will always attract viewership, he cites the example of a video he recently updated with a bit of clickbaiting.

While the video is called What guys should do to drunk girls and is about ‘doing the right thing’, both the thumbnail and title act as teasers to lure as much traffic as possible. “The idea is to get people hooked to the video, which is why the girl in the thumbnail is wearing itsy-bitsy clothes. The message, however, is positive and the twist in the story is amazing,” he says.

The video has got over 3.7 million hits since it was uploaded in May this year.

Interestingly, while the Kill the Poor video essentially capitalises on shockvalue, it has only managed about 66,000 ‘likes’ since May.

I

n times of ‘clickactivism’, where voicing an opinion or endorsing a cause can be conveniently done by clicking the ‘like’ button online, social media has gained unbound popularity over the last couple of years. It now plays an important role in the way people organise public protests or rally for a cause, be it for the 16 December gangrape or the popular movement against corruption.

According to Ankita Gaba, a social media expert and co-founder of Socialsamosa.com, a social media content portal, such social experiments are popular because social media has thrown open opportunities for young people to express their ideas and thoughts in new ways.

“Earlier, such projects would be relegated to class projects carried out by media students and remain in the realm of discussion,” she says. “Social media has thrown the floor open to young people to publish their ideas and thoughts—and reach out to a large number of people.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 55

arts

Pursuit of Precision Bangalore-based artists Aparna Rao and Soren Pors use technology to explore the mysteries of modern life Deepa Bhasthi

W

hen one walks into the studio of Bangalore-based artist collaborative Pors & Rao in Benson Town, it is easy to mistake the place for an office of an electronics-related firm, with bespectacled engineertypes peering at large computer monitors, technical manuals lying about, sorrounded by whiteboards with equations on them.

Outside is a stark contrast: next to yellow and orange benches, bright saffron fish dart in a small tank under lotus leaves; there are plants collected from everywhere. These living, breathing organisms juxtapose with the artworks that are being realised inside, where Indian artist Aparna Rao, 36, and Danish artist Soren Pors, 40, work.

They have two shows coming up by the end of this year, a biennale to participate in, though they can’t offer details yet. They have signed on recently with GallerySke to represent them. “A show there might happen next year,” says Rao, the vagueness of time and details courtesy of the very lengthy production time their works require. Sunitha Kumar Emmart, gallerist at GallerySke says, “The process of Pors & Rao’s works

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involves huge collaboration, apart from involving basic human emotions.

For me, their works deal with what we as humans deal with. Their’s is a unique practice in the country and we are excited to represent them.”

In a society that is increasingly slavish to technology and in a city that pays ode to it, their main interest lies in behaviour. Their works try to capture the innocent, ephemeral, organic expressions of behaviour and how these can vary. It is an interesting contradiction. Technology that permeates modern lives, technology that can be perceived as cold and distant, is used to help express emotions and behavioural patterns in the creatures they

create. The manner in which they use something so inescapable to talk about issues deeply personal is what makes the work of these contemporary artists relevant and exciting in the Indian artscape. Both live and work in Bangalore; in the manner of the silicon city, their works are wholly global, with almost no localism in evidence at all. Their works have been showncased at museums and galleries around the world.

Reimagining the ordinary as something creative, clever and hi-tech is how the work of Pors & Rao is often described. Their multidisciplinary art practice has been called ‘humorous’, ‘edgy’, ‘interactive’, ‘quirky’—words 7 July 2014

vivek satpathy

when art met technology Soren Pors and Aparna Rao at their studio in Bangalore; Sun Shadow (right), one of their art installations from 2009–11

they vehemently disagree with, especially the ‘interactive’ part. But before getting to what their works are not, let’s begin at the beginning.

Rao goes back to how she always wanted to be an artist as a child but felt that she was not good enough. “I wanted to find my own language, my own voice,” she recollects. By the time she was going through college (National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad), the Internet had exploded. A two-year long research scholarship in Italy that sought to look at technology in a different way culminated in Rao finding Pors, an artist from Denmark, to collaborate with. “It happened organically. I have always loved animals, dabbled in 7 July 2014

martial arts, some sports, so the idea of physical presence was very important.

I started to have an aversion towards how rapidly all our previously varied, physical actions were being replaced by virtual ones where keys are pressed for tasks like writing letters, do grocery shopping, pay bills. The art as almost an instant reaction to that was the need to re-physicalise, and work with movement, performance and physical forms,” she says. Their collaboration began in 2004.

Even as Pors & Rao took to technology, both became “slaves to the idea of making something physical” using technology, which Rao calls “expensive and very, very difficult.” The prohibi-

tive costs and dearth of technology experts who would take them seriously initially made them work day jobs, taking five to six years to finish their first work. “A lot of support and mentoring came from senior scientists pro bono at that stage. That was invaluable, both in realising the works and getting a grip over the medium. These 12-13 years have been a long journey for... from an artistic, existential point of view. It is much better now, but still very tough,” says Rao. ‘Very tough’ because works like Pygmies, where 509 black silhouettes of tiny creatures peep from behind white panels and react to sound by hiding, each moving differently to open www.openthemagazine.com 57

fatal fall to glory Heavy Hat (2008-11) is a replica of an upside-down man about to fall over

create a lifelike reaction akin to, say, curious squirrels or mice, requires complex electro-mechanical integration.

If Pygmies reacts to sound, several of their other works are activated by human presence.

Technical specifications are something they have to fight for. Precision is crucial for every work, like Heavy Hat, where an upside-down man, his head full of heavy thoughts, moves around in a constrained circle. When a viewer walks in, the figure moves slowly and almost seems to fall, provoking the viewer to want to go over and help the man. Almost painfully drawn out mechanics were beaten out into shape over several years, for it was necessary that the upside-down man not fall and damage the sculpture itself, yet there needed to be enough of a fall to instill a sense of fatalism. Technical challenges run as a common thread in all the works of Pors & Rao. “It can take between two and eight years to finish a work,” Rao tells me, adding, “We don’t stop until we are completely satisfied with the quality and expression of the form and movement.”

Rao finds it hard to rationalise how the process of a new work begins. “A lot of my adult life I have spent with Soren, but we are not a couple. Over the years we have developed our own private world. An idea might spring from a conversation, a dream, a drawing, anywhere, and we pick the one that presents the greatest sense of urgency,” she says. This sometimes takes years and is always organic, mostly unpre58 open

While the idea behind each work is deeply personal and rooted in behavioural patterns, the polished consumer aesthetic serves to depersonalise dictable. A lot of conceptual work follows, models are made with cardboard and clay, sketches are drawn and software is used to simulate the way they want the objects to behave. After about six to eight months of this, collaborators are brought in, often from around the world. “Earlier on, it was hard to find engineers who understood what we wanted and were able to deliver, against professional agreements,” they say. But things are better now, with a robotics scientist, a kinematics professor and a systems engineer as mentors on board.

Their works engage in slapstick, lifelike movements. Not stiff like robots, but not entirely like humans either. This, more often than not, lends to their works an element of humour.

“Working with humour is not intentional at all,” says Rao, insisting that she was always the serious, shy introvert. Nor are the works ‘interactive’; neither likes the word. “Interactive to me is where you give an input and

get an output. We don’t ask anything of the viewer, no ‘press this button’, ‘pull that lever’, etcetera. Some of the works are responsive and react to the natural movements and behaviours of viewers,” says Pors. The duo also contend that there is nothing cutting-edge about the technology they employ in their work, but what they do with it is new. “The technology is 50 years old. It is just that not many people have tried to build anything like this before.”

One of their most well-known works, Teddy Universe, with thousands of fibre optic lights embedded in faux fur in the shape of a teddy bear, is under bubble wrap. It has come to the studio for some maintenance. This work apart, all the others, like Split Knife, especially Decoy, have a very factory finished look. How thin is the line between design and art for them?

“Everything is in the service of art, be it the use of technology or design,” says Rao. While the idea behind each work is deeply personal and rooted in behavioural patterns, the polished consumer aesthetic depersonalises and creates an interesting distance between the two experiences. They currently have some eight or nine projects in the pipeline, at various stages of production.

There is Imperial Monochromes, where panels remain in languid disarray until a viewer walks in and they snap to attention. Clappers, where 996 small figures arranged in an amphitheatre are enabled to clap whenever they want, and Framerunners, where figures run within the frame, only to hide when a human presence is detected. For all the technology they use, Pors & Rao, surely, must be techno geeks themselves? “We don’t love technology, we are allergic to it,” says Rao, insisting they perceive it only as a necessary evil, like having to go to college.

They pose for the last set of photos with cardboard and clay models of ongoing and scrapped works. A prototype for Space Filler, a work in progress, lies nearby. Aguirre,their pet Doberman, is tearing about the studio. The engineertypes are saving simulation videos on Basecamp, measuring something, or making notes. It is work as usual in the studio. n 7 July 2014

vilayanur s ramachandran is a world-renowned neuroscientist, currently teaching at the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego

Do We Have Free Will? What we do may not really be our own doing

The ‘Magic island’

Massimo Brega/The Lighthouse/Corbis

science

I

t is a commonly held belief that

humans have the ability to take decisions and act on their own volition. For long, neuroscientists such as Vilayanur S Ramachandran have argued against the validity of this notion of ‘free will’; and now, a new study in America suggests that the consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, striking only after a person has acted.

The study, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience by researchers of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, reports that the decisions or choices an individual makes can actually be predicted by observing patterns of brain activity even before a choice is made. What is popularly taken as ‘free will’, the researchers contend, could well be the outcome of ‘background noise’ or electrical activity in the brain.

For the study, the researchers sat 19 volunteers in front of a screen and asked them to focus their attention at its centre. The participants— wired to an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine to record the electrical activity of their brains—were then asked to decide whether to look left or right when a cue symbol ap-

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peared on the screen. This symbol appeared randomly, and since the participants had no knowledge of when or where on the screen the cue would appear, they were unable to consciously or unconsciously prepare for it. The researchers found that the pattern of activity in the second or so before the cue symbol appeared, which was even before they knew they were going to make a choice, could accurately predict the outcome of the decision.

The result of the study raises profound questions about what constitutes human volition and how much of a decision is predetermined.

The authors write in the journal, ‘This finding provides evidence for a mechanistic account of decisionmaking by demonstrating that ongoing neural activity biases voluntary decisions about where to attend within a given moment.’

The lead researcher, Dr Jesse Bengson, told the website IFLScience, “A broader implication of this finding is that the appearance of free will, as manifested through seemingly arbitrary cognitive decisions, may be a consequence of the role that inherent variability in brain activity plays in biasing momentary behaviour.” n

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has registered the appearance of a bright, mysterious object in its second largest sea Ligeia Mare.

The object, scientifically referred to as a ‘transient feature’, has been lightheartedly dubbed the ‘magic island’. The Nasa-commissioned Cassini space probe had captured the presence of the object which disappeared in later images. The report was published in Nature Geoscience. “This discovery tells us that the liquids in Titan’s northern hemisphere are not simply stagnant and unchanging, but rather that changes do occur,” said Planetary scientist Jason Hofgartner. n

Eat Less, Live Longer

Worms ‘stop ageing’ when deprived of food and are capable of doubling their lifespan once they are given access to food again, according to a new study conducted by scientists from Duke University, North Carolina. The study was published in the journal PLOS Genetics. The researchers selected the tiny Nermatode worms that are commonly seen underground, in order to determine how tissues respond to circumstances of starvation. Researchers discovered that these worms enter a condition of arrested development when their sources of food are removed. Even though they continue to move about and rummage for food, their cells and organs achieve a sort of unchanging, motionless stupor in the absence of food. n

7 july 2014

xlr connector Invented by James H Cannon, this is a type of electrical connector that is most commonly seen in audio and video gadgets, apart from stage lighting equipment. These connectors are primarily circular in shape and can contain three to seven pins

tech&style

Alacria Royal Rose w

Audeze LCD-X The pursuit of high end audio ends with these handcrafted headphones gagandeep Singh Sapra $1,699

T

he problem with most of our

portable devices, whether it be the latest iPod or iPhone, is that they can’t supply enough power to headphones for the desired output. And you will never really carry a pre-amplifier with you. This is where the Audeze LCD-X reference-level planar magnetic headphones come in.

Designed to extract the maximum power out of low-powered amplifiers and portable devices, the LCD-X is an extremely efficient headset. It is no wonder they are a favourite among recording engineers and musicians.

The LCD-X produces a fast, dynamic and accurate sound while keeping its focus on clarity.

The LCD-X comes with two cables, each 8.2 feet (yes you are reading it right) long. One is terminated on a 4-pin XLR to a dual 4-pin mini-XLR cable and the other (1/4in) to a dual 4-pin mini-XLR cable. There is even a 6.35mm (1/4in) to 3.5mm (1/8in) stereo adapter to allow you to plug it into your iPod, apart from a rugged travel case. The headphones are

7 july 2014

capable of delivering 15 watts of music (remember that your typical headphones reach a tiny fraction of a watt).

But all this comes not only at a price but with a heavy weight too.

The LCD-X weighs about 600 gm, more than double the weight of your typical headphones. However, they are not uncomfortable to wear. As a matter of fact, their real lambskin leather-padded ear cushions feel great on the ear, and their large 50 mm drivers surround you with a relatively natural presentation. You can also go for a microsuede (leatherfree) version.

The LCD-X is what one would call a top-of-the-line headset, with full-bodied vocals and a vivid bass. It projects a power that ensures you enjoy every beat of the music you are listening to. And just in case this is not enough, go get yourself an amazing headphone amplifier, sit back, grab a glass of Henri Jayer Richebourg Grand Cru, and let Coltrane take you for a heavenly musical ride. n

Price on request

Inspired by the majestic splendour and symbolic power of the rose, Carl F Bucherer has created a timepiece that radiates a special power: the Alacria Royal Rose. Framed in the typical casing of the Alacria range, the dial shimmers forth from a mass of entwined flowers. The exquisite case, set with 137 shimmering sapphires and 137 diamonds, is made of 18-carat white gold. The Swiss CFB 1850 precision movement is at the heart of the watch.

The model is beautifully complemented with a decorative strap made of exquisite calfskin.A piece of jewellery fit for a queen. n

Asus Essence STX II 7.1

Rs 20,000

If you still own a Desktop computer, or are a gamer who loves his desktop machine but wants to derive better sound output from it, then Asus Essence STX II 7.1, a Hi-Fi grade sound card, is designed to delight audiophiles. With its 124dB signal-tonoise-ratio (SNR) clarity and a 600ohm headphone amplifier, STX II 7.1 is the first consumer sound card to deliver these numbers. Its precision clock is controlled by a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) clock source. Its power delivery is optimised with assured low-dropout (LDO) regulators, while WIMAÂŽ capacitors deliver a balanced sound. With its Dolby Certification, you can now enjoy great 7.1 sound on your desktop computer. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

the southern connection Tamannaah Bhatia, born in Mumbai and of Sindhi descent, is a leading actress in south India.

She has established her stature with several commercially successful hits in the Tamil and Telugu cinema industries of the south

Humshakals This film packs in thrice the crudity and vulgarity found in Sajid Khan’s cinema ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Chef Director Jon Favreau cast Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr,

Scarlett Johansson Score ★★★★★

h i khan, Riteis Cast Saif al su ba a sh pa deshmukh, bi jid khan Director sa

T

his is actually a structured Sajid

Khan film—a rarity for this filmmaker, whose general directorial style is complete disorder. Also, Humshakals is not half as racist and misogynist as his earlier Housefull—part one and two—films. The homo-erotic subtext continues unabated, of course, but the film sticks to a straightforward narrative, and though half-an-hour too long, motors along at an even pace.

Crudity and vulgarity is Khan’s signature tune, and, God knows, he has a huge audience waiting to lap it up.

But what is very surprising in this film is the level of enthusiasm that he generates from his central actors, all professionals to the core—Messrs Saif Ali Khan, Riteish Deshmukh and Ram Kapoor. They happily prance around this ridiculous story, each doing a triple role, and, incredibly, seem to be having the time of their lives. You don’t need profound acting skills for this film, so what they contribute instead is a high energy quotient.

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It is infectious to see someone like Saif drop his suave persona, and clown around in a self deprecatory manner for almost three hours. He seems to consciously mimic the old British comedy routine—‘Benny Hill’ and ‘Mr Bean’ kind —and play the village idiot.

The film is about Ashok Singhania (Saif), heir to a family fortune but a stand-up comic at heart. He, his friend Kumar (Riteish) and their respective romantic connections (Tamannaah Bhatia and Bipasha Basu) live the fun life in London, until one day the evil ‘Mamaji’ of the Singhania family (Ram Kapoor) slips in a drug that turns Ashok and Kumar into dogs—metaphorically speaking, of course. Their subsequent doggie behaviour gets them locked up in a lunatic asylum.

By the time they get out of the loony bin, you are ready to get into one. The movie is exhaustingly long, but if this kind of inane humour is something you enjoy, you might just get your money’s worth. n

This is a ‘foodie’ road movie about a passionate chef in Los Angeles who is sacked from his job for being too thin-skinned about a restaurant review. So he goes to Miami, cooks delicious ‘Cubanos’ and gets on the road with a food truck after teaming up with his ex-wife (Sofia Vargera), his son and a friend. He turns into a sensation while selling them in different cities, all the way back to Los Angeles.

Jon Favreau, who writes, directs and acts as the Chef, gives you a very wholesome movie. He makes food erotic and you salivate right through. There is a way he does this and it is by showing us how the love for good food is so closely connected to our social connections, our cultural preferences and our primordial instinct of looking at a meal as essential community activity.

So when a famous Los Angeles food critic (Oliver Platt) comes to eat and finds that the Chef he respects hasn’t developed his menu too much, he responds to social signals rather than the food, and gives him 2 out of 5. The review trends on ‘Twitter’ and the Chef loses his shirt and his job.

The movie shows you connections between social media and restaurants; how pictures of food and their write-ups displayed alluringly on your cell phone can make or break a chef. In all, a very entertaining film. n AD

7 july 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Newest Kid on the Block

Ranbir Kapoor’s cousin Armaan Jain, who’ll make his debut in Lekar Hum Deewana Dil shortly, says he wasn’t initially inclined towards a career in the movies. The young kid says he always intended to follow in his dad’s footsteps—a banker and graduate of the London School of Economics —but discovered eventually that the family’s relationship with Bollywood was a link too hard to resist.

First he assisted Karan Johar on My Name is Khan, hoping to get some set experience. Then, having watched how effortlessly his bhaiyya Ranbir transitioned into a matinee idol, he decided he’d like to take a shot at it too. “Watching him in Saawariya was so exciting, because that was my brother up there,” he says of Ranbir’s debut. “It’s only much later when I’d decided to be an actor, that I began watching him as an actor, and of course he’s very good—he’s a bawaal actor!”

Armaan, whose mother is Raj Kapoor’s daughter Rima Jain, was born much after his illustrious grandpa’s passing, but says he’s constructed an image of him from the memories his uncles and cousins share with him. “And then there are all the movies he acted in, which make me feel so much closer to him,” he says of the original showman.

Where pressure is concerned, Armaan insists he didn’t feel any until recently when journalists began putting the question to him during media rounds: “My family never makes me feel like I had something to prove, and I’m grateful for that.”

But he realises the film needs to do well if he wants to continue to have a job. “Yeah, I’m not going back to Economics,” he says sheepishly.

Saif’s Recovery Plan

Saif Ali Khan, who has received the worst reviews of his career for Sajid Khan’s Humshakals, is reportedly telling friends he was always sceptical of the film, but decided to put his faith in Sajid, who was confident the film would turn Saif into a “mass hero” like Salman, Shah Rukh and Akshay. Critics have singled out Saif’s performance in the movie, describing it as his worst yet, and insisting that the Omkara star never should’ve attached himself to such drivel in the first place. Evidently Saif failed to carry off the 7 july 2014

film’s low-brow slapstick humour, overshadowed by Riteish Deshmukh and even Ram Kapoor who fared slightly better by all accounts.

But the actor and his producing partner Dinesh Vijan are apparently in damage control mode already, quickly rushing his next film to the finishing line to wipe away the audience’s memories of Humshakals at the earliest. That film is Happy Endings, directed by Go Goa Gone helmers Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK. It’s a romantic comedy opposite Barfi’s Ileana D’Cruz, and the star and his team understandably appear more confident about that one, given Saif’s consistent success in the genre. He also has Kabir Khan’s action thriller Phantom with Katrina Kaif, before he embarks on two new projects— a Mohit Suri film, and a “relationship drama” that Vijan himself will direct with Parineeti Chopra opposite him.

As for reuniting with Sajid professionally—Saif had committed to doing another film with the director midway through Humshakals, even without a script in place—the chances appear slim now.

Unless career suicide is on his mind.

All for a Good Cause

A senior actress, celebrated as much for her enduring looks as for her versatile talent, has sportingly put vanity aside to tackle a challenging supporting role in an upcoming English film.

The lady in question, well into her fifties, allowed the film’s stylist to…umm…pad her rear in a way that has been a source of amusement and amazement for other characters in the film. Yes, to put it straight, she’s sporting a giant bottom in the movie.

It’s a surprising breakthrough on the filmmaker’s part, given that the actress is not exactly a fan of ageing or looking anything less than a million bucks on the screen. But turns out she has a soft spot for the film’s director, in whose debut movie she had starred, taking up an unconventional, grungy part in that one as well. She has admitted openly that she isn’t driven by any desire to work after all these years, and is seduced by fat pay cheques and not necessarily great roles. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

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The Case For Pasture-isation

by AS H I S H sha r m a

Thirty five-year-old Sant Gopal Das has been sitting in protest at Jantar Mantar with his supporters since 24 February 2014. Having already protested at more than seven locations—including a hunger strike at one—Das is demanding the implementation of a Supreme Court directive that 5 per cent of village land be reserved as cattle pastures. Illegal encroachment by land mafias has meant that this reservation is not being honoured. Das also says that India has been known as a country rich in dairy products, but now, given the lack of pastureland and ill-treatment of animals, he fears this will become a thing of the past. Among other demands, Das also wants a ban on the slaughter of cows

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7 july 2014