OPEN Magazine 8 September 2014

ESSAYS BY Shiv Visvanathan Tavleen Singh suhel seth Edward Luttwak

WHY EVERY ONE LOVES GANESHA

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

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

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

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

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 publisher

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Volume 6 Issue 35 For the week 2—8 September 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

8 september 2014

SN gupta

In reality nothing like ‘Love Jihad’ exists in India (‘Jihad: An Indian Love Story’, 1 September 2014). This term has been coined by some fanatic Hindus. I am sure that even most BJP leaders do not believe that something like ‘Love Jihad’ has been launched by Muslims to lure away Hindu girls. It is practically impossible to convert anyone in India using force. Just as a Hindu girl falls in love with a Hindu boy and gets married, there are I am sure that even instances of Muslim girls marrying Hindu boys. In most BJP leaders do not the recent Meerut case it believe that something was proven that the like ‘Love Jihad’ has Hindu girl was eager to been launched by marry her Muslim lover Muslims to lure away and for the sake of a Hindu girls Muslim marriage the girl made an effort to convert to Islam. Some years ago when a (Hindu) friend intended to marry a Muslim colleague, I went to the parents of the girl. The parents were angry or sad because their daughter was marrying into another religion. But they did not complain that the girl was being forcibly converted to Hinduism. In my personal circle I know at least four cases of Muslim girls marrying Hindus. In no case did we hear of a Muslim complaint that their daughters had been forced into Hinduism. All conversions were indeed voluntary.  letter of the week

It’s the Same Love Story

this refers to ‘Jihad: An Indian Love Story’ (1 September 2014).

There are scores of examples of Hindu boys married to Muslim girls around me. I have never heard something like Muslims charging that Hindu boys were in a conspiracy to lure away Muslim girls. Hindu girls fall in love with Muslim boys and get married, the same way Muslim girls fall in love with Hindu boys and get married. Compared to their Hindu counterparts, Muslim girls are more backward and reserved, and are less likely to have the moral gumption to go ahead and marry Hindu boys. This perhaps is why Hindu girls marrying into Muslim families outnumber cases of Muslim girls marrying into Hindu households.  Har oon

Not the Right Example

the article ‘The Rise of Ideological Jihadists’ (1 September 2014) is well written. But it’s a tragedy that the writer could find only Syed Ahmad Khan (founder of Aligarh Muslim University) as a ‘progressive’ role model for Indian Muslims. Syed Ahmad is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of the ‘Two Nation’ theory along with Allama Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and he once said, “I am now convinced that the Hindus and Muslims could never become one nation as their religion and way of life was quite distinct from one another.” So if this is the best example for Indian Muslims to

follow, there is no doubt in my mind that India is headed for a second partition. 

What Not to Highlight

it must be noted that the organisation the author works for, the Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington DC, was co-founded by two Israeli citizens.

Critics charge that it aims to portray the Arab and Muslim world in a negative light, through the production and dissemination of inaccurate translations and by selectively translating views of extremists while de-emphasising or ignoring mainstream [Muslim] opinions. 

can somebody please explain why report suicide at all? (‘Dreaming and Dying in Bangalore’, 1 September 2014).

Why not just report successful cases of rehabilitation? Why not approach the subject the way we do sex education?

Youth in cities with high suicide rates obviously have issues of mental fragility.

Too much information, about circumstances that lead to suicide and methods of killing oneself, feeds that fragility. It is better to [be dull if it stops] ‘copycat suicide’ than offer unintended encouragement to weak souls to go for it. 

Ghulam Faruki

Vidyasagar Ay yappan

Vikram

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A Problematic Passage to India Animal welfare activists are alarmed by Mumbai zoo’s plan to import six penguins from Thailand Come December, if everything goes according to plan, Jijamata Udyan, Mumbai’s zoo, will get India’s first batch of penguins. The municipal body, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), has just set aside Rs 21.40 crore for the purchase and upkeep of three pairs of male and female penguins from Thailand. Zoo authorities hope that these will breed more penguins.

Animal welfare organisations are, however, aghast at the news. They believe that

mumbai

8 september 2014

the logistics of caring for the penguins, from providing the right food to creating an appropriate environment, will be disastrous.

“How can birds from the cold south survive in Mumbai?” asks Sunish Subramanian Kunju, president of the Plant & Animals Welfare Society. Kunju is busy preparing a report on the dismal conditions of the zoo for the Central Zoo Authority, asking it to stop the acquisition of the penguins. “The mortality rate in

the zoo is extremely high. The enclosures are small. One hippopotamus currently has a long-festering wound that attracts crows. A crocodile and a sambar deer are kept in the same enclosure. There are so many issues that need rectification,” he says.

JC Khanna, secretary of the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, also thinks it is a faulty idea. “The country’s zoo policy states that zoos are to give priority to animals of their region. But the Mumbai

zoo... is undermining the very purpose of zoos.”

But the zoo is going ahead.

An official of Jijamata Udyan, who requests anonymity, claims they will build a large temperature-controlled glass enclosure. “We have done our homework. Humboldt penguins, with proper care, can survive the heat. Some officers from the zoo will go to Bangkok and Singapore zoos, where they will undergo training in feeding and taking care of penguins,” he says. n Lhendup G Bhutia

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dinodia photos

small world

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contents 6

8

angle

Cricket coach crisis

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42

26 40

Editor’s note

foreign affairs

One hundred days of rectitude

congress

The missing leader

Tailored, not tinkered

cover story

To honour a mandate

person of the week angel di maria

open essay

Silence of the civilised

ioo

kerala

Loss of sobriety

days of modi

The Red Devils’ Angel Why Manchester United has spent £59.7 million on acquiring El Fideo, ‘the noodle’, as this lean footballer is often called Lhendup G Bhutia

D

uring their World Cup

campaign, Argentina had what many termed ‘the fantastic four’.

Sergio Aguero and Gonzalo Higuaín ahead, Lionel Messi just a touch behind, and Angel Di Maria, who in sudden bursts, would emerge from the deep. But save for Messi, during the initial part of the tournament, they looked far from fantastic. Both Higuain and Aguero looked off colour, with the latter perhaps even unfit. And Di Maria alternated between unlucky and clumsy.

The situation did not look very different in their match against a plucky Switzerland side. Messi was closely guarded throughout the match, sometimes with as many as four players. The first 90 minutes was tight, without any goals, just like the Swiss would have wanted. For Argentina to win, someone else apart from Messi would have to stand up. Di Maria was having a miserable game. He had given the ball away 51 times and recorded a pass completion rate of only 63 per cent. The match went into extra time. Just two minutes away from a penalty shoot-out, Messi, in a fantastic display of skill and speed, snaked past defender after defender. By the time he neared the goalie, there were too many defenders to attempt a goal. So he sent the ball, gently and sublimely to his right.

And from nowhere Di Maria emerged, pointed ears, a face like Kafka, snaking towards the post, sprinting into space—a footballer as beautiful as his name. To Messi’s gentle touch, Angel Di Maria sent in a scorching left to the bottom left

4 open

corner of the post. The next shot was Di Maria’s face, his fingers formed into a heart. You could understand then what the big fuss was about this 26-year-old. In the quarter-final match against Belgium, he set up the winning goal. But he also tore a thigh muscle, which made him miss the rest of the tournament. The Germans didn’t have to cope with his pace in the finals.

Nicknamed El Fideo, or ‘the noodle’, for his long and thin physique, he was once sold by one club to another for 35 footballs. The Argentine club Rosario Central, when it first spotted him as a child playing for a local side, had to provide those balls as a transfer fee. Today, denis doyle/getty images

Di Maria’s is the most expensive English transfer of all time. He has signed a five-year deal with Manchester United for a staggering transfer fee of £59.7 million.

The last time someone shelled out such big bucks was when Chelsea paid £50 million to acquire Fernando Torres from Liverpool. Born to a coal seller in the city of Rosario, Di Maria is part of Manchester United new coach Louis Van Gaal’s plans to turn around the club’s fortunes. The English club has had a terrible season last year, failing to defend their Premier League title and to qualify for the UEFA Champions League. Van Gaal would be looking at Di Maria’s speed, his penetrating passes and knack for creating goal opportunities.

Di Maria has been excellent at Real Madrid. Last season, he provided a total 22 assists, more than anyone else in Spain.

He leaves Real with 36 goals and 72 assists in 190 games. But his departure from Real was being predicted about a year ago, when the club spent a fortune to acquire Gareth Bale. James Rodriguez’s acquisition created further buzz. A few weeks ago, when Atlético Madrid’s manager Diego Simeone was analysing his side’s 1-1 game against Real, he told reporters that the game’s turning point came when Real brought on their best player, Di Maria. Real’s manager Carlo Ancelotti’s reply was, “I think he has forgotten about the Ballon d’Or winner Cristiano Ronaldo and about Gareth Bale, who scored in the final in Lisbon (against Atlético).” It seemed certain then that plans were afoot. Di Maria was leaving soon. n 8 september 2014

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Evolution of a god

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International round-up

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cinema

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Roshan Seth on Richard Attenborough

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imran

khan

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f o r seeking to destabilise the

Pakistan government without much justification Pakistan is said to be a country hurtling towards chaos, and Imran Khan, leader of the Tehreek-e-Insaf party, is now contributing his bit towards that end. After making a bizarre call to citizens to abstain from paying electricity bills and

taxes, which met with much derision within the country that is ridden by tax defaults and power shortages, Khan has since 15 August been leading a large anti-government agitation right outside the Pakistani parliament.

This week he refused to call the agitation off, insisting on Nawaz Sharif resigning, if only temporarily. Imran says that the government was elected through large-scale rigging and is therefore not legitimate. It begs the question of why he is raising this issue of legitimacy now when the elections happened in May 2013. And even more telling is that his own party won in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK; formerly called North-West Frontier Province) but he conveniently refrains from talking about any rigging there. What Imran is indulging in is political opportunism. It might reap dividends for his party but Pakistan’s continued destabilisation does not bode well for the Subcontinent. n

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

63

Varun Dhawan grows up

After announcing that he would contest the state’s Assembly polls, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray has decided not to stag e f r i g h t

“I will be contesting the upcoming elections and if we get a majority then I will be leading from the front”

“The entire state of Maharashtra is my constituency and I do not want to limit myself to just one”

— Raj Thackeray at an MNS rally, 30 May 2014

— Raj Thackeray at a press meet, 24 August 2014

turn

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

In conversation with Jeremy Seabrook

around

Weeding out Meaningless Laws n e w d e l h i Certain laws in India are so old that they are as good as dead. The march of technology has rendered most British-era laws rudderless. Repealing such laws requires identifying them.

Various efforts to do so have not met with much success so far. Therefore, the latest initiative by the Modi Government—which has vowed to fast-track reforms—to set up a committee to weed them out will ensure smoother governance.

The new panel is expected to submit 8 september 2014

its report in three months and on the basis of its recommendations a bill will be introduced in Parliament in the Winter Session, a PMO statement said.

‘The newly constituted Committee will examine all Acts recommended to be repealed by the Committee on Review of Administrative Laws which had been appointed by AB Vajpayee government in 1998,’ it added. Modi had expressed concern that out of the 1382 Acts recommended for repeal by the committee, only 415 have been repealed so far. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to Bollywood’s gangster scare The police recently stepped up the security of actor Shah Rukh Khan, after the gangster Ravi Pujari tried to get in touch with the actor. Pujari, who has in the past tried to extort money from various Bollywood personalities, reportedly made the call on 25 August. The call was answered by someone at the actor’s office, since Khan was unavailable.

A few days prior to the call, the gangster’s henchmen reportedly targeted Khan’s friend and business partner, Karim Morani.

Morani is a film producer who recently produced Chennai Express and is also involved in the 2G scam case. As the CCTV cameras from the area revealed, late on Saturday night, three Pujari is also men astride a motorreported to have cycle, fired three rounds made threat calls of bullets at the Morani to Nusli Wadia, family’s four-storey Salman Khan and bungalow in Mumbai’s Farhan Akhtar Juhu suburb. No one was, however, injured.

Morani reportedly received an SMS from the gangster threatening dire consequences.

According to media reports, Pujari, who is believed to be based in Australia, has been threatening the Morani family for several months. The gangster has apparently been demanding the overseas rights of an upcoming

Ravi Pujari, said to be hiding in Australia

Shah Rukh Khan-starrer. This film appears to be the Farah Khan-directed Happy New Year.

The gangster reportedly spoke with Morani and personnel in his office on separate occasions, but they told Pujari that they did not have the film’s overseas rights.

The police suspect that the gangster was trying to reach Khan to threaten him. Policemen have now been deployed outside the actor’s house, just in case an attack is attempted.

Pujari is also reported to have made threat calls to Nusli Wadia, Salman Khan and Farhan Akhtar earlier this year. Boney Kapoor also received calls from him last year. n

Games BCCI Plays How come not even the Indian captain knows who the Indian coach is? M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

Q

uite remarkably, even for an institution that has been whimsical and bungling so often in the past, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) seems to have bested its record.

For the first time in Indian cricket, the coach is not the coach and the captain says the coach who is supposed to be the coach in place of the coach—who is not the coach—is not the coach.

As we know, the main cast of characters in this melodrama are four: the BCCI; Duncan Fletcher, the coach who is now demoted into no one knows what; Ravi Shastri, who has been made the man Fletcher will report to, technically making him the head coach; and captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who on Sunday said that Fletcher was “still the boss” and would remain so until the ODI World Cup in 2015, insinuating that Shastri wouldn’t have a say in coaching matters. The BCCI immediately clarified that this was not true—Shastri was the boss of everything to do with the team.

BCCI secretary Sanjay Patel said that Dhoni’s statement was a personal opinion, which is a little bizarre— the identity of the coach is a point of fact and there cannot be an opinion on it.

Fletcher’s sidekicks, two assistant coaches, have been “given a break”, a euphemism for being sacked. And Shastri has got in two Indian assistant coaches. So, no matter what Dhoni might desire or opine, Shastri is de facto the man running things in the dressing room too. But that doesn’t make Dhoni’s irritation with the sudden change in affairs any less valid.

After the 3-1 drubbing, he can’t do much about it, but that the BCCI has been arbitrary in its actions is evident.

The first question that needs to be asked is ‘Why Shastri?’ He really doesn’t have much of a record managing a team and commenting on

games is no shortcut to being in charge of one. If Fletcher had to be superseded then there are good former cricketers who have decent coaching experience like Sandeep Patil and Mohinder Amarnath. Also, because everyone, including Shastri, is saying there is no magic wand to deliver immediate results, he will also not have responsibility for any debacles to come in this tour. It is a dream job: power without responsibility.

The purpose of this sudden appointment might be to humiliate Fletcher into quitting but there is little reason to be sympathetic to him. His record is abysmal and he should probably have been removed long ago (assuming of course that If Fletcher coaches matter had to be in cricket, a debatable superseded point). But the then there are BCCI itself good former gave him an cricketers extension last with coaching year despite his experience like record. The middle of a tour Sandeep Patil is hardly the and Mohinder time to demote Amarnath him, especially when players have not been touched.

Not that the BCCI has not thought about how to make them perform.

The other cause of the defeat, it has identified, is the presence of wives and girlfriends (WAGs) of cricketers. The BCCI’s new policy, post the drubbing, is that wives will now have limited time with husbands on tour.

Girlfriends are barred completely, a move aimed at Virat Kohli who got the actress Anushka Sharma along to England. The revocation of privileges is to punish the players for being defeated. And while it would have been proper to sack underperformers, this was just a petty thing to do. n 8 september 2014

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INNOCEAN-001/12

One Hundred Days Modi’s ‘Broken India’ theme carries the first notation of Conservatism—and a moderniser’s

W

hen Narendra

Modi stormed Delhi, it was as if India was waiting for that moment with the famed Hindu rate of patience. It was an India that was made to feel betrayed in its every waking hour, and in retrospect, perhaps only the rulers alone refused to see it coming, for they lived in that gravity-free zone of simulated immortality, also S PRASANNARAJAN known as UPA. In that India before Prime Minister Modi, leadership was mostly about stillness, frozen conscience and suspended sensory faculties, and it was unable to comprehend the anger of a people abandoned. It was an India ready for a redeemer, and he was out there, turning the sighs and sorrows of a nation into bestselling lines on the stump. Modi’s struggle for India was one of the longest political campaigns in the world undertaken by an individual pitted against the heaviest odds, including his own party. Armed with an unmatched confidence in himself as an administrator and moderniser, and wearing his ambition on his custom-made kurta sleeve in a country that frowns upon anyone with a hunger for power, he as a campaigner was in a class of his own. It began the day he became the Chief Minister of Gujarat, and even as he fought and won three consecutive assembly elections, Delhi was on his mind; and in the end, he made himself inevitable to the nation and the party, which in those days had more dark horses than warhorses. It was one of those moments when one man’s struggle for power merged with a nation’s struggle for freedom.

The magnitude of his victory was a mark of his success in internalising the attitudes and aspirations of twenty-first century India; and the wreckage of his opposition the unkindest sight in political redundancy.

Everything about Prime Minister Narendra Modi was larger than the office he inherited. For the most ardent of his believers, he was Moses and Midas rolled into one. He was expected to take them to the Ruritania of the Indian Right, and turn hopelessness into dream. So expectations were exaggerated, and examinations of everything he did and said were severe; he had to be different from the mortal majority of politics as usual. The mass delirium of hope his campaign induced had to be replaced by an eruption of change under his rule. Who doesn’t want the spectacle of Candidate Modi to be carried forward as the wizardry of Prime Minister Modi? So his first hundred days were supposed to be about the dramatics of radicalism. The Prime Minister was only ready for the latter. The Union Budget was the

first of its indication: the minutiae of farsightedness that refused to play with poverty—the easiest of games for your average Indian politician—and an acknowledgment of the middle-class as an integral part of the growth agenda. The Right turn was quiet but definitive—and certainly not surprising.

It was exactly what the Right was expected to do; and Modi could not afford to lose the economic argument. And no right winger worth his anti-socialism—be it Reagan or Lady Thatcher—ever lost that argument. The Planning Commission was a socialist anomaly in twenty-first century India, a monumental—literally—legacy of Nehru’s Soviet-style nation building. It became redundant in Modi’s India, where the state has to be less Leviathan. If the Independence Day speech was his first post-election Cicero moment in political theatre, the public execution of that Nehruvian sacred cow was its highlight. He was conspicuously tactful in avoiding the cultural argument, before and after the election, and it was an argument the Right tends to lose in most democracies. (The RSS is always there for sporadic tutorials on pulp nationalism if any of us misses it.)

Modi’s most expressive moment of the Nation First was when he told Pakistan that he means business but he does not accept its version of diplomacy.

That said, for me, Modi at his Conservative best was when he made society the overwhelming motif of his Independence Day speech. It was society that powered his semantics, and it was an idea seldom used in India—I mean used as a political argument.

Modi could have easily won the day by his slaying of Nehruvian socialism; instead, he, like a true Conservative, chose a theme that was absent even in his stump speeches: Broken India, though he did not use those exact words, an echo of David Cameron’s now-famous Broken Britain. By putting individual responsibility and freedom above the state, he asked everyone listening to mime the morality of his own life story. (Still, it must be said that it is also a narrative technique used by the smartest in political evangelism: the outsider’s exceptional biography as a variation of national destiny. Barack Obama’s first campaign for the presidency set the gold standard in this.) Modi’s rags-to-Raisina Hill self-portrait could have been titled ‘One tenacious man and the Indian dream’. The Indian dream will remain unrealised as long as we remain irresponsible as individuals in an India where social cruelties such as the imbalance in the sex ratio and the violence against women mock the pretence of modernity. If India is still a land without justice, it is because many Indians continue to be denied the dignities and decencies of life. It was the first notation of a modernisation agenda sustained by political Conservatism when Modi turned what could have been another rhetorical cliché into a social urgency—and a national emergency.

Some revolutions begin from what you may think are the banalities of life. n

illustration anirban ghosh

of Rectitude social vision

saurabh das/ap

ioo days of modi

right and radical The understated revolution of Prime Minister Narendra Modi

BY PR RAMESH

W

hen Barack Obama completed his first 100 days in office as President of the United States of America, historian Robert Dallek reportedly said, “I don’t think you can point to anything at the end of 100 days that will give you a clear indication of how we’re going to see the President’s performance at the end of four years.” Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi’s critics maintain that no signals of ‘big-ticket’ reforms, political epiphanies or landmark decisions have emerged so far from his government as it completes 100 days in office, so how can it be effectively judged?

However, in his deliberately understated, macro objective-driven governance style—this is a contrast from his highly vocal electoral quest for high office—lies the clues to Modi’s personal vision for the nation’s future over the next five years. Calculatedly toning down the 24X7 media vuvuzelas that worked to his advantage at the hustings, Modi has chosen a different style of functioning as Prime Minister. This involves precision rather than broad-sweep communication as a key tool of governance.

Says Suresh Prabhu, who was a minister in the earlier NDA Government and has now drawn up a power sector roadmap for the Modi regime to work on: “This is a government led by a leader who has extraordinary oratorical power, something that made him Prime Minister. But having become one, he believes in the adage ‘Speak less, work more’. And he leads on this from the front, working 17 hours straight every day. He has kept all [elements of the] government machinery, ministers and bureaucrats on their toes since the day he took office. He takes daily meetings not just with his ministers but also with secretaries in all key departments.” Prabhu, a seasoned Modi watcher adds, “Now, he is preparing for the next extensive performance review of his men and women in the ministerial council: the first 100 days of governance have been earmarked for planning. The next 300 are for execution of planned projects. The following four years will be for new initiatives and action and course correction, where there is need. This

will be especially so in core sectors and areas, including sanitation, water, energy, jobs and the economy— and about how to optimise delivery in all these through effective governance.”

Opting for a low-key approach, among the first things Modi did as Prime Minister was set a tone of modesty for his government to follow. The bill for refurbishing the three-house complex at 7 Race Course Road was, at a mere Rs 70 lakh, less than half the sum his predecessor Manmohan Singh spent on his new residence at Motilal Marg. That he was earnest about putting an end to ostentation and clearing the capital’s power corridors of cobwebs and deadwood in order to implement his new work style and philosophy was patently clear when, one hot afternoon, close to 42 trucks of rotting files, furniture and rusting gadgetry were moved out of the Ministry of External Affairs alone.

That real winds of change had swept that key arm of the Union Government so closely connected to the PMO was apparent when bureaucrats—used to living it up—were inculcated with a new work ethos, one of shramdaan, of work as a measure of goodwill for the people. Apart from punctuality, this meant a toning down of fancy foreign terminology and greater use of regular Hindi for broad communication and a finger on the pulse of all issues related to domestic governance and foreign policy. Notes a party insider: “It was the Prime Minister’s decision to build strong new bonds with the BRICS nations and strike out boldly in new directions, and it was his decision to not indulge in a media cirque while it was being negotiated.

It was also a deliberate decision to use the official media to communicate achievements. The decision to proactively communicate each step of the Government in the evacuation of Indian nurses from Iraq through the minister and ministry, minimising the prevalent and pronounced occidental jargon and attitude and mindset, was part of the same rubric.”

According to a senior official of the Ministry of External imtiyaz khan/india news network

All the PM’s Men National Security Adviser

A highly decorated police officer, Doval had earlier served as director of the Intelligence Bureau. He has worked in Pakistan for a long time and is familiar with the dynamics of power in that country. Besides, nobody in the government seems to have a better understanding of the Kashmir issue than him.

Ajit Doval

Principal Secretary

He is in charge of implementation of projects and policy. The 1967 batch Uttar Pradesh cadre officer, who had worked with state chief ministers such as Kalyan Singh Mulayam Singh, is a hands-on officer. In fact, he worked with the Prime Minister for 10 days before he was named the Principal Secretary.

Nripendra Misra

Additional Principal Secretary

He is in charge of the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC). ACC proposals are sent to the Home Minister only for his approval. All the selections are done only at the PMO level.

Mishra, a 1972 batch Gujarat cadre IAS officer, has closely worked with the PM for many years.

PK Mishra

Modi prostrates himself on the steps of Parliament before taking office

Joint Secretary

Joint Secretary

Officer on Special Duty

BVR Subrahmanyam

AK Sharma

Sanjay R Bhavsar

As private secretary to PM Manmohan Singh during UPA-I, Subrahmanyam, the 1987 batch IAS made quite an impression.

Singh went out of his way to get him back in his core team despite his being wanted in his home state. He has managed to stay on as an important player in the PMO.

The 1988 batch IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre who had deftly managed Narendra Modi’s showpiece Vibrant Gujarat summits in the past is now in charge of coordination between various departments within the Central government.

He is a point person in the PMO for India Inc.

Bhavsar is the one who handles Narendra Modi’s tours. When the Prime Minister was Gujarat Chief Minister, he was in charge of deciding Modi’s public meetings, speeches and public relations. He was also in-charge of Modi’s war room in Gandhinagar during the last general election.

pib

Modi on his first day in office as Prime Minister

Affairs, “The decision to call off the talks [with Pakistan] despite everything was taken by the PM himself.”

Explains the official, “If an accredited diplomat is asked by the host country to desist from a particular action, he should pay heed. Hurriyat leaders may have been meeting the Pakistan High Commissioner on the eve of IndoPak talks for more than a decade, but that is a practice that won’t be allowed any longer. Naturally, the Government sent out a strong signal to Pak: ‘either meet us or talk to marginalised separatists’.”

P

olitically, Modi’s signals have been just as strong.

He made it amply clear to the Congress that it cannot afford the vanity of a big player after having won a mere 44 seats in the Lok Sabha. The Government first signalled that the erstwhile ruling party would have to beg for the post of Leader of the Opposition, since it had no constitutional claim, and then pushed it to seek legal refuge.

Critics have called this stance churlish, pointing to the importance of a vibrant opposition in a democracy to take the Government on over its policies and programmes. But armed with the rulebook and more concerned about revi14 open

talising the economy, this is a trade-off that Modi and his men appear to have accepted.

The message to the bureaucracy from the new political head of government was straightforward and hard hitting: ‘Shape up, or else!’ There would be no more leisurely golfing during work hours, no prolonged lunches at the Gymkhana Club, and strictly no cosying up with power for plum postings. Further, making it obvious to bureaucrats across the board that they would be empowered to take informed decisions on key issues—consulting the PM directly if need be on complex matters—Modi swiftly dismantled the 62 EGoMs and GoMs set up by the UPA II. Effectively, that put a full stop to the governance machinery’s attempts to use ‘policy paralysis’, institutionalised by the Singh regime, as an excuse to delay decisions.

More importantly, say observers, the move to rid the system of these groups of ministers boosted the flagging morale of bureaucrats, since their inputs would be actively sought once again for crucial decisions. In turn, this has rejuvenated multiple mechanisms of governance down the line.

Points out a Union minister, “In fact, the PM has empowered bureaucrats amply. They have also been asked 8 september 2014

‘‘Modi leads from the front, working 17 hours every day keeping all elements of the government machinery on their toes” Suresh Prabhu to use their negotiating skills and knowledge base to the optimum, so that issues in different sectors are resolved outside the red tape and only crucial problems are entered as notations on files.” In short, he says, Modi has told bureaucrats that a red carpet welcome instead of red tape barriers should define the theme in key sectors. Backed by informed bureaucrats in a crackling new regime with well-identified objectives, ministers have been empowered to take decisions in new ways as well. Modi has directed that only projects over Rs 1,000 crore should be decided upon by the Union Cabinet. Otherwise, the concerned sector’s ministry may take the call on approvals and suchlike.

L

revolution—rather than the optics.

The dismantling of EGoMs—once seen to assure decision making a measure of sancitity—has speeded up decisions and put vested interests and sneaky lobbyists in trouble. Among the big issues muddled by the previous government was the pricing of gas; with an EGoM involved, the decision had dragged on inordinately. To resolve it expeditiously, Modi set up a Committee of Secretaries (CoS) comprising stakeholders and relevant ministry representatives (including of the Power and Fertiliser ministries). Again, on sugarcane pricing, the old virendra singh gusain/hT/getty images

ike Obama, Modi was a commander-in-chief in the

making who was raring to go and driven by the challenge of fixing a government rocked by myriad corruption scandals, a weak leadership and an economy dangerously teetering at the edge of a precipice. Once in power with an overwhelming mandate, his style and optics changed in response to perceived needs of the time. As with Obama, his assumption of power was an extraordinary moment “full of peril and full of possibilities”.

Running a tight ship as a captain firmly in command and with a clear navigation map for the nation was not one among many options; it was the only way ahead.

Obama in his first term was described by one author as the ‘explainer-in-chief, advocate-in-chief and initiator-inchief’ for his diverse political and economic agenda.

When he took over, he told his council of ministers that each one’s100-day agenda was to begin from day one.

Prime Minister Modi, although an ‘outsider’ to New Delhi’s political corridors, was a highly successful threetime Chief Minister of Gujarat.

“Modi exudes an energy and urgency to get things done that leaves his ministers inspired and fuelled. It is something he has carried through to the PMO from Gandhi Nagar. He believes in hitting the ground running where work is concerned and works long hours every day, all year round. That is leading by example,” says a Cabinet minister.

Even before Modi took oath, he was obsessed with fixing the Government. “Barely hours after taking office, he asked his ministers to prepare a 100-day agenda with work cut out for bureaucrats,” the minister says.

That is borne out by a blog on his personal website, Narendramodi.in, which asserts that the focus for the agenda was on governance and delivery systems—the fourth

8 september 2014

Modi with Rajnath Singh

Modi’s

1Scrapping of

10

the Planning Commission

big

EGoM has been dispensed with and the Cabinet and Principal secretaries are now authorised to iron out problems should they arise after the Agriculture Ministry took its decision. For the resolution of complex problems in key interlinked sectors such as infrastructure, energy and power, all relevant factors are to be monitored by the National Litigation Data Grid, which is expected to speedily resolve legal hassles.

On the food inflation front, the short-term price rise of essentials is being tackled by measures spelt out in the Union Budget, while for longer term solutions to the problem, the Government has given shape to a National Food Grid to rein in agri-commodity market speculators even while pursuing a hard line at the WTO on the right to stockpile foodgrains (which buys the Centre time to switch to cash transfers as a mechanism to provide food subsidies to the eligible). The latter was done, says one bureaucrat involved with earlier WTO negotiations, “only after shunting out Congress retainers from the forum”.

Plans to amend the Land Acquisition Bill are afoot in order to give a fillip to the economy through the revival of the real-estate sector. Together with swifter industrial clearances, the easing of access to large tracts of land for big projects is expected to set off a new cycle of large investments.

That Modi is determined to revitalise the manufacturing sector in order to exponentially boost jobs and strengthen the country’s economic core has been apparent in both word and action over the past 100 days. From his ‘making India’ sound bite to his urging World Bank President Jim Yong Kim not just help the country in mass production but in production by the masses, generating jobs galore, Modi’s government has, since taking charge in May, let few opportunities go to strengthen the manufacturing sector. Within just 45 days of its taking over, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman wrote to states to switch either to a third-party system of inspection or self assessment of industry, except in the case of those involved with hazardous stuff.

Under Modi’s baton, the Government has also set itself a specific goal of easing the regulatory environment for the corporate sector in order to improve the country’s rank (it is at No 134 right now on a list of 189 nations) on a 16 open

3Hike in FDI participation in insurance, defence and railways

2Launch of Jandhan

scheme, which envisages bank account for every citizen and 1 lakh in insurance cover

4Course

correction in India’s stand at the WTO

globally recognised survey of ‘Ease of Doing Business’. The areas covered, in particular, will be the Tax Department (labour, central excise, VAT), where Small and Medium Enterprises complain of being at the receiving end of the ‘hostile attitude’ of various government agencies.

“He’s a man who puts his money where his mouth is,” says a senior BJP leader, citing the instance of the manufacturing sector. Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL), which gets shale gas from the US, did not have sufficient ships to ferry it home—till his intervention ensured that new vessels were put at GAIL’s disposal.

As an intrinsic part of his governance style, PM Modi has made sure that most key decisions with long- and medium-term implications in core sectors are being taken steadily and firmly, if quietly. Recently, he cleared an infrastructure project pegged at Rs 250 crore in 2006 that had ballooned to Rs 1,400 crore this year. However, he appended a note that authorised an immediate probe of how the estimate had expanded so much.

H

ow effectively Modi has managed to plug all media

and government leaks on key long-term decisions, a sharp departure from the UPA’s norms, was patently clear on the disbanding of the Planning Commission.

Announced by the Prime Minister in his Independence Day address, the bold decision to move away from the era of Central Planning as an economic model, by eliminating its last vestige, came as a surprise to most. It was a response to the current economic reality of India. It also signals a federalist spirit that would mean India’s states do not have to play second fiddle to the Centre on core issues. Modi’s breakthrough on this has been welcomed by everyone barring unreconstructed Nehruvian socialists.

According to Arvind Panagariya, economics professor at Columbia University, “There is need to rethink the need for institutions such as the Planning Commission … I think planning has become our habit. We should break that habit. We are in a market economy. It has to be planned but not by the Planning Commission but by the ministries.

Even in China, the National Planning Commission is now called National Reforms Commission.” That body is now to take shape.

8 september 2014

5Single-window

clearance for all infrastucture projects

7Abolition of GoMs and EGoMs and streamlining of the functioning of the Cabinet

6Self-attestation of documents in place of attestation by gazetted officers

The decision was taken at a Cabinet meeting before 15 August. Insiders say that the Prime Minister sent out a categorical signal at that meeting that prematurely giving out information on the Government’s decisions to the media or anyone else would not be brooked. At that same meeting, Modi is believed to have shot a direct look at the corner of the conference table while stressing—without taking names—that he saw no need to rush to the media each time a biofuel came up at a Cabinet meeting.

Meanwhile, the rumour industry within the party and outside has painted him as an iron-fist dictator, pushing

Modi greets his colleagues as he arrives at the Central Hall of Parliament

8End of

environmental fundamentalism

9A panel to decide on scrapping of obsolete laws

10 More engagement

with neighbours but on India’s terms

his colleagues to their limits. One such was that he called up Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar to change into traditional attire after seeing him on TV wearing a T-shirt and jeans at the Indira Gandhi International Airport just as he was about to take an overseas flight.

Javadekar has denied travelling abroad recently.

According to another, the Prime Minister ticked off a Union minister for being seen with a corporate chief at a five-star hotel. One particularly controversial rumour has been about an alleged case of misconduct by Pankaj Singh, son of Home Minister Rajnath Singh; the nation-

pib/india news network

Modi inspects the guard of honour at the Red Fort on Independence Day ahmad masood/reuters

‘‘Even with modest governance, we have grown at 8 to 9 per cent.

With better governance, we have the capacity to achieve much higher growth” Arun Jaitley al capital was rife with gossip that Pankaj was admonished by Modi over a financial misdemeanour.

The PMO has rubbished such news reports and rumours. A statement issued by it said: ‘This has reference to reports appearing in a section of the media over the past several weeks, mentioning the Prime Minister, and referring to the conduct of some Union Ministers, and alleged misconduct of the Home Minister’s son. The reports are plain lies, motivated and constitute a malicious attempt at character assassination and tarnishing the image of the Government. Those indulging in such rumour-mongering are damaging the interest of the nation. These reports are strongly denied.’

Rajnath Singh, former party president, had been accused of pitching for his son’s candidacy from Noida for the 13 September bypoll in Uttar Pradesh. Instead, the BJP named Batham, an industrialist, as its candidate, triggering rumours that Singh’s clout within the BJP is on the wane.

This has been among the only signs of unease within the party. The Home Minister has chosen to go public with a complaint to the Prime Minister and BJP President Amit Shah on a Central Hall-generated rumour. “I had 18 open

brought it to the notice of the Prime Minister and the BJP president,” Rajnath Singh told the media, and added that he was willing to quit politics if there were any allegations against him or any member of his family.

The “I believe in clean politics” assertion of the Home Minister comes in the backdrop of the PMO assuming a larger role in steering national security issues and firming up of the bureaucracy. Unlike in the past, top bureaucrats are now handpicked by the PMO and sent to the Home Ministry only for endorsement.

Singh’s outburst comes close on the heels of a generational change in the BJP. Earlier this week, Shah revamped the BJP’s Parliamentary Board after removing LK Advani and MM Joshi from the panel. “The Advani camp, which is virtually defunct now, may find a new recruit,” says a party insider.

The truth is that the proverbial camp politics is dead, and what is in its place is a new imperium of the Right presided over by India’s most popular administrator and managed by his most trusted aide. The first hundred days of Prime Minister Modi show how Right and radical it could be. n 8 september 2014

ioo days of modi

silvia izquierdo/ap

Tailored, Not Tinkered

Modi and Vladimir Putin at the BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil

Narendra Modi didn’t bother to tweak policies to please any bloc. Regional stability and local economic growth topped his agenda BY ULLEKH np

I

n the final years of UPA II, American diplomats and

corporations had begun to use the expression, ‘India fatigue’, to refer to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ambivalence on investment policies and AK Antony’s lacklustre stint as Defence Minister that saw modernisation of the armed forces take a backseat, much to the anguish of US defence contractors who were hoping to hit pay dirt supplying weapon systems to the world’s largest arms importer. Which was why when Narendra Modi, who had earned a reputation as a ‘doer’ while Chief Minister of Gujarat, took over as Prime Minister on 26 May this year, mandarins in Washington DC cheered; they also issued assurances that he would be given a US visa, earlier denied over the Gujarat riots of 2002. But expecting Modi to roll out a red carpet for US businesses was a mistake, at least three diplomats admit.

“The worst was the assumption that he would jump at the idea of being offered a visa,” says a US diplomat, adding that it is time to rethink ways to engage India, especially after India blocked a World Trade Organization (WTO) deal that has taken 12 years to negotiate. This July-end, New Delhi rejected a trade facilitation agreement (TFA) signed last December at Bali—envisaged to cut red tape and relax customs rules, it would have been the largest multilateral trade agreement since the GATT Uruguay Round accord in 1994. Shocked at India’s stance, US officials, globalisation buffs and the Western media vilified Modi for his adamant stance, with some of them describing it as India’s ‘WTO antics’ driven by domestic political calculations. Lisa Curtis and William T Wilson of The Heritage Foundation question Modi’s business-friendly image, asking why he, a leader ‘who was elected in an electoral landslide on a platform promising economic reform’ had to pull the plug.

The question is: was Modi wrong in insisting that the WTO alter its rules to allow countries such as India to expand food subsidies for the poor? If India had signed the TFA, it would have violated WTO obligations that demand that the value of subsidies India gives its farmers on agricultural products must be limited to 10 per cent of the total value of output of a product at market price. Columbia University Professor Arvind Panagariya argues in a column that appeared in The Times of India that Modi’s problem against it was that the WTOmandated methodology is so flawed, India’s subsidy bill ends up violating the trade body’s guidelines. Besides, agriculture is India’s mainstay and employs more than half of the country’s workforce.

Nailing the Issue

Why is the West upset then? Washington DC-based lawyer and India expert Robert Metzger believes that though Modi is committed to economic diplomacy, his paramount objective remains regional stability, and that “he has adroitly navigated the shifting landscape through an independent path that has not committed to any particular bloc at the expense of another”. Which, interestingly, is in direct contrast with UPA I’s strategy of being US-centric. Modi’s first foreign visit was to Bhutan. He also travelled to Brazil for the BRICS meet (which Modi being greeted by children during his visit to Bhutan 20 open

saw the creation of a BRICS development bank, seen as a counterweight to the World Bank), and later to Nepal; he became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit the Himalayan country in 17 years.

Adds Metzger: “I believe PM Modi has made a good start in foreign policy—though foreign policy has not been a cornerstone of his objectives or those of the BJP.” He points out that Modi’s initial emphasis was to improve relations with countries on India’s periphery. “This is quite important given the diverse security challenges that are arrayed around India. He also has shown special interest in India’s naval capabilities, which makes sense because of the importance of maritime security, both to protect against seaborne terrorism and to guard all-important shipping lanes for oil as well as other supplies.”

Michael Kugelman can’t agree with him more. The Senior Program Associate for South and Southeast Asia at the

‘‘Inviting SAARC leaders to his inauguration was a bold idea and a big achievement” Michael Kugelman Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars foreign trips both regionally (to Bhutan and Nepal) and further afield meant to promote commercial cooperation (to Brazil).

His decision to invite the leaders of all SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) states to his inauguration was a bold idea—and a big achievement. On the latter, Modi sent a strong message to Pakistan by cancelling a highlevel bilateral meeting after Pakistan’s envoy to Delhi met with Kashmiri separatists.”

Harsh V Pant, professor of International Relations at King’s College London, succinctly captures Modi’s 100 days in pow-

pib/india news network

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars terms Modi’s 100 days a success on the foreign policy front because he remained true to his initial intentions: to re-engage with India’s neighbours in a way that highlights the country’s desire for economic partnerships and more all-around diplomacy, while also emphasising its desire to portray itself as a strong State internationally. Modi’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has visited Bangladesh in what has been widely described as a goodwill gesture’.

Continues Kugelman: “On the former, Modi made a series of

navesh chitrakar/reuters

Modi waves to supporters waiting to greet him at Pashupatinath Temple, Kathmandu

er that he began with a diplomatic coup of sorts, getting all SAARC heads of state, including Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to attend his swearing-in ceremony: “In his first 100 days, Modi has defied many expectations and confounded his detractors and supporters alike.”

Pant argues that while on the economic front, the Government’s position has disappointed many economists and most Western nations, on the security front, there is a new purposeful response against China with a focus on border management and defence acquisitions.

He agrees with Metzger and Kugelman in the view that Modi has succeeded in ensuring a “a refreshing focus on immediate neighbours”. He is glad that the manner in which the evacuation of Indian nurses from strife-torn Iraq was handled showed a government that is operationally well-prepared. “So the larger picture that is emerging in the first 100 days is of a government that is not as risk-averse as previous governments and will be willing to take risks should the need arise,” notes Pant.

22 open

The Big Risk

The Prime Minister has incurred the displeasure of so-called peaceniks and left liberals for ‘derailing’ India-Pakistan talks.

New Delhi suspended a proposed round of foreign secretarylevel talks—which would have been the first of their kind in 18 months—after the Pakistani High Commissioner in Delhi invited a Kashmiri separatist leader to tea in mid-August.

Kugelman thinks that Modi was actually reacting to domestic developments in Pakistan. “Anti-government protests in Islamabad had weakened the civilian government and consequently given the Pakistani military an opportunity to seize the foreign policy portfolio from Nawaz Sharif. The military does not share the civilians’ enthusiasm for rapprochement with New Delhi. This suggests to me that Modi felt there was no reason to have the high-level meeting with Pakistan because Pakistan’s government would be in no position to have substantive discussions with India, given that the Pakistani military is now likely in control of India policy once again,” he avers.

8 september 2014

‘‘India needs a long-term policy that focuses on managing security risks emanating from Pakistan” Harsh V Pant King’s College, London He adds that when the situation stabilises in Pakistan, the military may well relax its grip on foreign policy and give the government more leeway—and this could in turn make Modi more willing for high-level talks. “I definitely do not think that Modi’s decision to cancel talks this month suggests that they can’t be started again soon,” he says.

Pant calls it a calculated risk. He feels that the Modi Government decided to take a gamble by resetting the terms of engagement with Pakistan. “It is a move that was probably long overdue, but it is not clear what India’s options are should this gamble fail. Given Pakistan’s internal turmoil, this perhaps doesn’t matter in the short-term, but India needs a longterm policy that focuses on primarily managing the national security risks emanating from Pakistan.” He, however, expresses hope that New Delhi will focus on this issue now. “It would do great damage to Modi if his government is forced to talk to Pakistan once again, as in the past, under global pressure in case of an Indo-Pak crisis,” Pant explains.

For his part, strategy analyst and writer Brahma Chellaney says that while challenges abound for Modi, the Prime Minister is pursuing a dynamic and assertive foreign policy with a two-fold focus: regain India’s clout in its strategic backyard by reaching out to smaller neighbours that have traditionally been in India’s sphere of influence; and push for closer engagement with the world’s big powers. “By standing up to US and Western pressure at the WTO talks in Geneva, he demonstrated an unflinching resolve to uphold national interest,” he declares.

Hurdles Galore

Metzger says that India faces new strategic choices, given that the world has seen tremendous changes and alliance shifts in the 100 days since Modi assumed office. “We have seen many changes that have altered alliances and displaced assumptions about relationships among countries. India may have difficulty trying to grow trade with China while also bolstering defence capabilities in order to respond to China’s growing military might. It will find it difficult to remain so closely aligned with Russia during a period where there is worldwide aversion to Russia’s aggressive moves in Ukraine.

India may wish to build a security relationship with Japan, but must do so without provoking a regional arms race,” he suggests.

True, Modi faces different challenges in countries like the US, Pakistan, China, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Says Kugelman: “These challenges are all of a different nature. With Pakistan, China, and even the US, issues of mistrust and latent hostility often constrain the pursuit of coolheaded diplomacy. In Afghanistan, by contrast, Modi finds a receptive ally that may want more from India than India can give: Kabul may seek a security blanket (in the form of greater 8 september 2014

bilateral security cooperation) that Modi, concerned about provoking Pakistan, is not willing, at least not yet, to provide.”

His sense is that the rays of hope are numerous now, but they may not extend beyond the short term. “With China and Pakistan,” he adds, “Modi is keen to get things right with these rivals right away, and he will likely come bearing ample carrots—in the form of deeper economic ties. I fear, though, that in the months ahead, he could be tested—through Chinese provocations into contested territory and through terror attacks in India traced back to Pakistani soil.”

If and when these incidents occur, Kugelman notes, Modi will not be nearly as restrained as his predecessor, suggesting that the carrots may be withdrawn and replaced by an array of sticks. “Tensions could well rise.”

Pant says that among all these countries, there are certainly signs that there is a new dynamism in bilateral ties. According to him, India’s neighbours, barring Pakistan, are certainly looking at New Delhi with a new sense of expectation. “Delhi now has to operationalise those aspirations that have been articulated. It is the implementation phase that has always been a problem. India should focus on completing the projects in its neighbourhood that are in the pipeline,” urges the King’s College professor.

He notes that Afghanistan will be a critical challenge for Modi as Western forces start departing later this year. “India will have to articulate its own role more cogently. It has immense goodwill that it can leverage. But that would mean stepping up its security role. Can the Modi Government go beyond what the previous Government has done on the security front?

This will be critical as the Modi Government has made the immediate neighbourhood its priority,” he says.

Most experts, including Pant, agree that with regard to China, the challenge for Modi is to enhance economic and trade ties while building deterrent military might. “The Xi [Jinping] regime is turning out to be more militaristic than previously assumed. The Modi Government will have to hold firm on critical issues and the first test will be [Chinese president] Xi’s visit to India next month,” he argues.

Pant concedes that “some urgent ameliorative measures” are required to put India’s ties with the US on track. He expects Modi’s visit to the US in September to set the tone for this.

For this to happen, says Metzger, the US should work towards earning India’s trust. “Apart from the appointment of a new ambassador—long overdue—the Obama administration needs to take positive measures to demonstrate to India that the US is a reliable partner in defence and other forms of trade,” he points out. Most importantly, he adds, the US needs to articulate a vision for the India-US relationship that is more than “transactional” or opportunistic.

Which means neither Modi nor Obama should let ‘WTO antics’ overshadow their talks in September. n open www.openthemagazine.com 23

ioo Arvind Yadav/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

days of modi

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi

The Leader Is Elsewhere, Still Lowest ever numbers coupled with clueless leadership, Congress lacks direction as an opposition both within and outside Parliament By Kumar Anshuman

O

n 6 August, Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi

was at his fiery best when he stormed the Well of the House along with other Congress members. He shouted slogans against the Government, and his anger was evident when he spoke to the media outside Parliament. “There is a mood in Parliament that only one man’s voice counts for everything in this country. There is a mentality in the Government that discussion is not acceptable,” he said. It was the same Rahul Gandhi who was caught on TV dozing off in the House barely a month earlier.

Rahul Gandhi’s aggression enlivened Congress leaders and came as a shot of adrenaline for the down-and-out party cadre; their hero, they saw, was back in form. But the euphoria evap-

26 open

orated quickly, when Rahul Gandhi chose not to speak in the House discussion on communal violence that followed, something that he himself had demanded. What began as a high point for the Congress in the Budget session turned out to be another damp squib. Except his occasional outbursts, Rahul Gandhi largely remains aloof. In the past 100 days, ever since his party lost power so humiliatingly, there have been many moments for him to show his followers what a Congress in opposition can do. However, his idea of the concept of opposition remains a mystery for his own party.

“More was expected of him. He seemed to take the lead role after [the recent incidents of] communal violence. But he didn’t take up,” says Mridula Mukherjee, a professor of Modern 8 september 2014

The Congress has been unable to find a central theme to mobilise the party cadre, especially in poll-bound states History at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Senior Congress leaders, though, are quick in jumping to his defence. “He went into the Well of the House as a duty-bound Congress Member of Parliament,” says Mallikarjun Kharge, the leader of Congress in the Lok Sabha. “He will speak on several issues in the future in Parliament and is very active outside the House. Other leaders, including me, have spoken.”

It is a sign that little has changed in the Congress after the General Elections. Consider the informal panel formed by party President Sonia Gandhi to examine the reasons for its defeat.

The committee, headed by former Union minister AK Antony, held several meetings with state leaders and finally submitted its report on 14 August. Instead of putting the party and its leadership to any form of serious self-scrutiny, the report pinned almost all blame on the media and a grand campaign by the BJP’s Narendra Modi.

Expectations of structural changes to address the party’s glaring deficiencies have sunk further since then. Few believe anything will happen of much significance. “It will be just a shuffling of cards, if at all it happens. This party never learns from its mistakes,” says a General Secretary of the party. The few changes that are underway are likely to be announced only after the upcoming Assembly polls. “The current Congress is not only a defeated one but a demoralised one,” says Sanjay Kumar, an academic at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. “The problem is that they expect a lot from their leadership, which has a poor record.”

The not-so-bad performance of the party in recent assembly bypolls would have been a reason to rejoice and re-energise party workers for a fight, but dejected Congress leaders see little hope of any major revival in the near term. “It is difficult to say that we are gaining much after 100 days of the Modi Government. There are several factors which come to play in bypolls,” says a senior Congress leader.

Learning what noises to make in Parliament is an important part of opposition politics. The Congress of today looks like the BJP of 2004, trying to make everything an issue. It all started with the Congress raising its voice for the Leader of Opposition post, something the party does not have the required Lok Sabha seats for (at least one-tenth the House total). The party tried everything, from bargaining jointly as the leader of an alliance to quoting constitutional necessities, but to no avail.

“It’s the discretion of the Speaker to appoint a Leader of Opposition, but this government doesn’t want to follow the democratic process,” contends Kharge.

The Congress’ uproar on foreign policy, inflation and governance is more theatre than social concern. “The removal of governors was a big issue in the Congress kitty, but the party approached it with reluctance,” says Sanjay Kumar. There were several bills which were to be introduced by the UPA. When the current NDA Government brought in those bills, the par8 september 2014

ty opposed them in the Rajya Sabha, where its voice still counts since it has larger numbers. “We were not opposed to the bills but the current Government introduced them with some amendments and that’s why we asked them to refer them to a standing committee,” says Kharge. “Don’t forget that we have also helped the Government in passing the National Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2014.” Others in the party also claim that they are playing the role of opposition successfully.

“We have been raising different issues, be it Chinese incursions... or talks with Pakistan, or India’s position at the WTO; we have cornered the Government on each of these,” argues Congress General Secretary Shakeel Ahmad.

Y

et, in its three months out of power at the Centre, the Congress has not been able to find a central theme to mobilise party workers, especially in poll-bound states such as Maharashtra, Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir, where it has seen an exodus of local leaders. “No one cares in the Congress for a loyal worker. The top leadership is briefed and guided by some senior leaders who have their own vested interests,” says former MP Choudhary Lal Singh, who joined the BJP on 25 August. Dithering by the Congress top leadership has led to desperation among workers, even as allies look out for better prospects. Just before the Assembly election in J&K, for example, it has lost a partner in the form of the National Conference.

In Haryana, the party has lost stalwarts such as Chaudhary Birender Singh to the BJP and Avtar Singh Bhadana to the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD). “There is no respect for senior leaders like us. Hooda created a situation where it was difficult for me to stay. I told Soniaji a number of times, but she did not take any action against him,” says Bhadana. There are problems in states such as Maharashtra and Assam too, where party morale is scraping new lows.

The only opportunity on which the Congress has capitalised well is the recent snubs given to its chief ministers by BJP workers in the Prime Minister’s presence. The Congress scored a PR victory and got other non-NDA parties to voice their outrage as well. The PMO called Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda—who was among the victims — and invited him for tea on 22 August. The party is planning to make it a poll issue. “We are going to tell the people of this country how the Modi Government is not able to live up to its pre-election promises,” says Kharge. “There is no dearth of issues. The 100 days of the Modi Government has given us enough ammunition to fire [with],” he adds.

Congress needs to behave like a cohesive unit, unlike the divided house it has become. It needs street visibility, with leaders in command. The party is faced with its toughest battle: survival. n open www.openthemagazine.com 27

ioo days of modi

From Brand Modi to Modism An amazing transition from Candidate to Prime Minister, from Seeker to Giver

by suhel seth

B

rands make very strange journeys. From commodity to brands and then almost becoming generic for the category. While this is true of consumption brands, there are very few human beings as brands who make this Suhel Seth journey and that too within their lifetime. is Managing Gandhi stood as the brand of seeking freePartner of dom through non-violence and then went Counselage on to become a generic name for peace India and can be and freedom. Today, more than just the reached at generic virtue, Gandhi is easily an suhel@ ‘ism’ as well; it is another matter that counselage.com people only pay lip-service to that. If you were to look at the category of consumer brands, it would be true in yesteryears for Dalda and Colgate as much as it is today for Google and Apple.

Narendra Modi is different from any politician that India has ever experienced. Only some dolts in the media would have expected him to blabber about every achievement or step he was taking after becoming Prime Minister. You only have to see his track record in Gujarat to understand that this man controls everything: from the message to the medium to the intended stakeholders. In that sense, he is the perfect brand because ultimately brands are about benefits. You don’t buy Surf; your intent is to buy the whitest wash. And like powerful brands, he is about symbolism as much as he is about delivery.

Coca-Cola has never moved away from its core promise.

Neither has Modi. He has harped constantly about Maximum Governance and Minimum Government and delivered slowly but surely on that. For many, his speech on Independence Day suggested his unhappiness with the Planning Commission, but if you read between the lines, he was only fulfilling his MGMG theme to greater effect.

28 open

The first thing any sensible marketer gets right is the product. Which is what Modi has done in these 100 days. The product is government sans middle-men and fixers. It is about a government that delivers on what it promises and doesn’t care about being unpopular. It is also about a government that goes about its tasks unabashedly without bothering about what TV pundits will have to say. It is also about courage and the courage of one’s conviction. The removal of state Governors may be wrong for a few, but Modi is not the kind to change his mind once he’s made it up. Hence the first message that he has sent out in these 100 days is: ‘I am my own man. There is Narendra Modi and then there’s the rest. I have a job to do which I will do without opposition or hindrance.’

Take his stand on Pakistan and begin by examining his stance on inviting the SAARC leaders to his swearing-in: both suggest the fact that Modi believes he has to first get the respect of the region before he begins to spread his wings. But then again, he doesn’t forget friends and always remains loyal—take the case of both China and Japan. Or for that matter the manner in which Sushma Swaraj is spanning the region articulating the new Indian diplomacy push. The core takeaway from this grandstanding is that he is not about to sacrifice national esteem at the altar of being seen to be liberal. Which says yet another thing about Modi. Years of post-Godhra bashing have made him treat the media with disdain. He uses it to great advantage rather than succumbing to its errant ways. It is no surprise that migrating editors who hated him once are now singing his paeans. Brands don’t alter strategy every time they face some media headwind. They build a connect with the consumer: in this case, yet again, everything Modi has done is about engaging people directly. From being their ‘Pradhan Sevak’ to the use of social media to the clothes he sports.

Like all good brands, there are three distinctive attributes of Modi: packaging (from sartorial taste to media usage), 8 september 2014

illustration anirban ghosh

promotion (the causes he believes in: be it a Digital India or the Ganga or National Security) or positioning. Here he has positioned himself as the strong man. More Patel, less Nehru.

More man, less wimp. More about being decisive rather than worshipping consensus.

But then this is a piece about the transition of Modi from Candidate to Prime Minister. From the seeker to the giver, as it were, and this is remarkable study about morphing into another role with such alacrity and focus.

As candidate he was voluble. Today he is measured. He doesn’t need to be on TV every day. He will appear on screens in any case, now that he is Prime Minister. As candidate, he was articulating his vision himself. Today able gents like Arun Jaitley are doing it with aplomb and that too only through their work. Earlier he was talking about transparency and honesty: and parties like AAP took pot-shots at him for his industry connections. Today, he is far removed from any of them. In a manner, Candidate Modi was actually listening to people while saying all that he was because his actions have proven how he has responded to criticisms which could have cast a cloud over his intent or deeds. Take his cabinet, for instance: one glance and you will know that he has no place at the top table for people who are either old (so no one above 75) or who were habitual dissenters to him. This helps the brand attain a greater enigma.

His key cabinet minister Arun Jaitley is known both for his intellect and integrity, which again establishes the fact that Modi was not pandering to any industrialist pressure to appoint someone other than Jaitley for both the Finance and Defence portfolios. Modi respects track records, which is why Rajnath Singh is where he is. So in many ways the transition from Candidate to Prime Minister has been one of demonstrable resolve.

Demonstrating intent with action. Which is what he would like his birthmark to be.

Finally, while as a candidate he had to rely on a much larger 8 september 2014

firmament of believers, Modi as Prime Minister has identified a core group of specialists who he believes will be honest and deliver. If you take his choice of Nripendra Misra and Ajit Doval as indicators of his intent, you have demonstrable proof of that.

Modi as Prime Minister also benefits from the ugliness of history that the past ten years of Manmohan Singh as PM left us. Never had a Prime Minister been the subject of such ridicule as Manmohan was (perhaps unfairly at times). Modi wants to change that, and he has. He has brought back the supremacy of the PMO: and like all strong brands, has established control where there was none.

In many ways, Modi has continued to be the master of what he has always been: surprise, but also predictability. We all know that Coca-Cola anywhere in the world tastes the same.

But at times, the communication it wraps itself in is so distinctive and appealing that you feel as if you are experiencing something new.

Modi has done what challenger brands would do: l Re-drawn the engagement between consumer and brand: Modi has done it admirably as a candidate, and now as Prime Minister is only extending his reach, and that too, directly rather than via media; l He has established an overarching respect and fear for himself: something that challenger as well as lead brands do; l He has taken calculated risks in order to expand his universe of believers; l And today he exudes fear, admiration and respect.

But I guess the biggest service Narendra Modi has done himself is that he has brought back the confidence of more than a billion Indians. Before you ‘Make in India’ you need to ‘Believe in India’. In an ironic twist of fate and history, with respect to Dev Kant Barooah, Modi is India, and India is Modi. This will only increase his workload as he goes about expanding his influence and carving out a Narendra Modi legacy. n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

ioo days of modi

RAUL IRANI

The old regime

From Chaos to Con

by Shiv Visvanathan

R

ichard SennetT, the sociolo-

gist and musician, in his Uses of Disorder, talks about the need for dissent, debate, resistance and noise; it is these, he observes, that grant a disorderly city a higher form of order, one Shiv Visvanathan replete with diversity, surprise and pluconsiders himself a rality. Disorder opens the possibility of social science change while order freezes options. One nomad is reminded of the Modi regime as one re-reads Sennett, who also hints that not all order is a form of solidarity; for solidarity presupposes difference, not unanimity. Sennet is a wonderful perspective from which to read the rituals of India’s new regime. It provides an understanding of its silences and dangers.

One has to begin with beginnings. Modi’s inauguration had an air of closure and decisiveness. It is captured best in Raghu Rai’s brilliant photographs of Manmohan Singh, where the agony and alienation of the face captures the poignancy and 30 open

emptiness of the Congress era. Clock time freezes as the former PM suffers the agony of an ignominious exit. Then, watching a distant Rahul Gandhi, one realises that one faces an empty Congress, a party which refuses to rethink. Simultaneously one realises the emptiness of the Congress cannot be an argument for the BJP. One has to read it as a new construct, a new set of possibilities.

Modi’s inaugural speech—indeed, the whole ritual— indicated a faith in the institution of parliament, a trust in institutions. His Ganga promise was seen as a form of cleansing, even a kind of liberation, by the majoritarian mind; it conveyed a sense of the religious, that something Hindu had returned after idiot repetitions of the secular.

The certainty of majoritarianism, however, creates an umbra of silence. Once the good news of Modi has been announced and the regime settles down to an everydayness, a different ecology appears, an ambience of fear, threat, doubt and uncertainty facing a majority shedding its old repressions, its sense of victimhood created by a secular elite which looked 8 september 2014

AJAY AGGARWAL/hindustan times/getty images

... and the new

trol

From UPA rule to NDA, the transition has been dramatic. But Modi needs to understand the inherent value of dissent

down upon the religious and wanted a scientific temper privileged by the constitution. Fear and uncertainty create an eddy of emotions. They demand a palette of colours to portray the concrete anxieties they create.

Oddly, at the very moment of victory, a party that was eloquent in its campaign and powerful in its rhetoric becomes silent. The transition from protest to power does not explain this behavioural change. The silence around appointments signals not party discipline but a deeper ecology of change, the signs of which are difficult to interpret.

To understand the Modi regime, one has to accept that Modi was therapeutic for a generation that felt that elite modernisation was a hypocritical affair conducted by groups which used words like ‘secular’ to dismiss the thought processes of a middle-class more rooted in religion and folklore. As a wag put, “For years Bollywood and the middle-class were frowned upon.

Only Bollywood continued undaunted while the middle-class played apologetic, becoming tentative before an English speaking cronyism.” The majority felt it could not assert its 8 september 2014

Hindu identity, that it had to be apologetic about its culture.

Modi gave this new class confidence by showing that the Nehruvian legacy and the Sonia Congress were shallow entities, that Rahul Gandhi betrayed an incompetence which was revealing. This new middle-class, echoed by the Diaspora, wanted to feel at home in its home-cooked religiosity and its extension, nationalism. By articulating such anxieties, Modi soothed their wounded subconscious. And this ‘wounded class’, tired of pseudo secularism, elite cronyism and majoritarian hypocrisy, voted him to power.

When a long-ignored opposition and silent majority comes to power, it begins flexing intellectual muscles, gerrymandering categories. It wants to assert its presence, make a few points of deviation, state a few outrageous things just to semaphore its power. All these new rituals of assertion look different from a minority or dissenting perspective. The majoritarian epidemic appears threatening and a new set of anxieties ripen.

This is exaggerated by a split-level spectacle. At one level, we have a regime that tries to convey a familiarity with the table open www.openthemagazine.com 31

manners of power, and at another we have an electorate that is jingoistic and tomtoms Hindutva as a favoured prospect for India. So while the regime plays out a technocratic script, its support base echoes primordial sentiments of culture and religion from an earlier time. Thus while Modi’s ratings go up in surveys, signalling an upward spiral of approval, the ecology of majoritarianism creates its own whorls of anxiety and suspicion. Suddenly dissent or pluralism becomes seditious, minorities feel threatened and liberals out of place. One has to realise that exorcising the old demons only puts new ones in place. Modi’s handling of this situation is ambivalent. He has projected many selves, including a wounded self; he has played the outsider, a communalist, a majoritarian and a statesman.

His multiple selves are beginning to haunt him. One has to ask whether he can disown some of his past selves.

A

nother factor starts emerging in the midst of all this.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is no longer a cultural group in the background. It has combined an elector-

al strategy with a cultural—even agricultural—strategy. One wonders if it is setting the agenda for some parts of the regime.

Its mobility and power are pronounced. One has to contrast this with the regime’s attitude to NGOs, many of which are portrayed as anti-development fanatics powered by foreign money. The recent attempt to embargo BT brinjal was the result of RSS support for the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh’s protest against it. Union Agriculture Minister Prakash Javedekar was indecisive. The question is not about the decision, which many might favour, but the nature of public debate and discussion. If the RSS is out in public, then civil society must engage it in debate.

Reinventing democracy also means reinventing the contours of debate; I want to emphasise this because democracy is not just about emerging discourses. There is bitter clarity about this. Worse, there is fear and anxiety over a lack of openness.

There is yet another factor. This is a government which wants to speak the language of civic virtues. It talks of cleanliness, punctuality, service, about civics of bureaucratic and public places, but has to ponder the contamination of public spaces. Ideas may not be sanitised but they need sanity, the

Modi’s inaugural speech, indeed the whole ritual, indicated a faith in parliament, a trust in institutions SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP

Dinanath Batra believes history must be rewritten to include ‘Hindu’ nationalism 32 open

hospitality of difference. The current regime has an odd approach to this. At the policy level, it chooses silence, deterring debate; it prefers the noise around the UPA’s failures.

When it comes to ideas floated in public about security, patriotism, Hindutva and majoritarianism, it chooses either indifference or silence, pretending that nothing has happened or been heard. But there is a critical problem of responsibility, one of ownership of ideas in this space. As the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena construct a map for the country, the BJP and Modi will have to say whether they agree with it. To emphasise freedom of speech is fine, but disowning the content of some kinds of speech will not be so easy. In earlier years, one has seen acts of moral policing, with two-bit politicians launching their careers, against Valentine’s Day. What we are witnessing now is cultural policing. A majority may want this, but what gives them a right to impose it on minorities?

Silence, uncertainty and anxiety are hardly a way to inaugurate a new regime. There is an epidemic of threats and insults that has begun to afflict society. Each instance may be seen as a fragment, an isolated case. But these fragments add to a structure that has tacitly unfolded all across the country. It began with Giriraj Kishore’s threat to send anyone opposing Modi on a train to Pakistan. One thought of it as a provocation uttered in the heat of an electoral battle, but then the threats began to multiply. Pakistan is a favourite for the exile of dissidents, especially those whom mere abuse fails to silence, and this new train offers ironic possibilities for debate. Such statements become more threatening as they are banalised.

The Chief Minister of Goa recently stated that India was a 8 september 2014

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP

When UR Ananthamurthy died, rightist outfits in Karnataka burst crackers

Hindu nation. Not to be left behind, RSS Sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat claimed Hindutva as the religion of Hindus.

A syncretic society that always contrasted an open Hinduism with a closed Hindutva suddenly finds a majority thinking differently. Worse, a religion which never thought of one church or doctrine as supreme gradually seems to be semitising itself.

An innocuous looking Dinanath Batra talking of a new history now seems more powerful than the University Grants Commission or National Council of Educational Research and Training. Batra feels that history must be rectified to include more Hindu nationalism, and he goes about it with confidence, as if all the forces of Hindutva have been marshalled to push his text books. The new majority wants to capture history and politics and rewrite culture to align it with its subconscious.

The tyranny of an exploding subconscious, where the majority literally launders its repressions, creates clouds of uncertainty. There is fear, doubt and suspicion, but no one gives it the imprimatur of a simple ‘This is it’.

The regime stays silent as little obscenities are enacted. When UR Ananthamurthy dies, rightist groups in Karnataka burst crackers in celebration. When the Gaza Strip goes up in flames under Israeli bombing, Indians once known for supporting Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian liberation cause suddenly start backing Israel, which becomes a comrade in confronting terror. It is at this time that a strange ritual is enacted. The Right lashes out at the Left and at Muslims for supporting Palestine. It plays out 8 september 2014

the politics of absence by asking where the Left was when Kashmiri Pandits were being displaced. True, the Left was silent, but the issue here is more skewed. Each side patents a particular group’s suffering with the claim that some suffering is more equal than others. Suffering becomes a tool for political battles.

This see-saw creates an arbitrary society where suffering is the privilege of a few. As a result, our sense of justice suffers.

T

his essay has so far mapped a set of caveats and doubts

about the incumbent regime. Much of the scenario is still emerging in bits and cameos—a rumour here, a confirmation there. Yet, compelled to sum it up, most say that the new majoritarian impulse is to articulate its discourse in a holier-thanthou ambience. Its sense of past ‘wounds’ appears to vindicate a range of petty behaviours. Yet, instead of adding to the sense of debate, this freezes order and creates a regime which plays technocratic at one level and fundamentalist at another. This spells trouble ahead because technocratic-fundamentalism justifies itself both as being modernist and as culturally rooted. Claiming to be at home with both, it imposes a sense of loss on minorities, dissenters and marginal groups. It can create a chain of threats and pretend they are inconsequential. Dissent, then, is difficult because there is no space for it. An observer watching this spectacle realises that wounded majorities can create tainted democracies. Modi needs to understand this. n open www.openthemagazine.com 33

AJAY AGGARWAL/HINDUSTAN TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the nation on Independence Day at the Red Fort

ioo days of modi

Tomorrow Is Another Big Day Modi’s first hundred days may not have been bedazzling but his Independence Day speech reveals his passion for change

by Tavleen Singh

F

irst, a confession. After Narendra

Modi became Prime Minister I have had many moments of serious doubt. As someone who wants him to succeed in bringing ‘parivartan’ and ‘vikas’, I have been worried by statements Tavleen Singh his ministers make. And, by the ease is a columnist with which they have accepted every bad and author law made by the last government.

And, I have been worried by the Prime Minister’s seeming inability to change the decadent political culture of Lutyens’ Delhi. This will change only when we stop the practice of reserving the most expensive real estate in India for our elected representatives.

It is a practice we copied from Soviet Moscow and Maoist Beijing where leaders of the communist party lived in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City while the people made do with squalid dormitories. No democratic country uses taxpayers’ money to pay for elected representatives and high officials to live like princes. As 15 August approached, I feared that Modi would disappoint further by reading out a speech written by some clerk.

He did not. He made the best speech I have heard from the ramparts of the Red Fort and I have heard many. And, he used the occasion to sound the death knell of Nehruvian socialism.

Not just by abolishing its most obvious symbol, the Planning Commission, but by urging Indians to contribute to the process of nation building. He made it clear that he needed the people’s participation in cleaning up our filthy cities and villages. And, for removing social evils like rape and open defecation. In asking Indians to do their bit for India, he showed that he has understood the need to reverse the mindset of Nehruvian socialism. This mindset caused Indians, especially poor and illiterate Indians, to believe that the Government would do everything for them. It led them to 8 september 2014

believe they had no personal contribution to make. So it was reassuring to see him use his most important speech as Prime Minister to urge change. By the end, I dared hope once more that the dream of ‘parivartan’ and ‘vikas’ may become reality.

But, the road ahead is long and hard and aspirations are higher than they have ever been. In Thailand, some days before 15 August, I met an Indian yoga teacher at a health resort who asked if I believed Modi could make a difference. He discovered as we chatted between asanas that I wrote about politics. And so, he told me how he had watched the election campaign carefully. He said he had never been interested in elections before but sensed that this one was special because of Modi. “Does he know how many millions of people have invested all their hopes in him?” he asked. “Does he know how much despair there will be if he fails them?” I said there was reason to hope and reminded him of what Modi said in his first speech in the Lok Sabha. “Matdaan sey pehley hum ummeedwar thhey. Ab hum ummeedon key rakhwaaley hain. ” (Now we are the guardians of the hopes of those who voted for us.) The yoga teacher, Sandeep, said he had listened to that speech and that he listens carefully to every speech the Prime Minister makes, but he still dares not believe that India will ever change. Sandeep is in his early thirties and comes from Dehradun. He studied yoga at a yoga university in Hardwar and then tried to find a job in India that would earn him enough for him to give his wife and small son a life of dignity. He failed. He tried working in health resorts and five-star hotels but found that the salary offered him was no more than ‘exploitation’. “In India they just know how to exploit people,” he said with a sad laugh. So four years ago, he moved to Thailand, where he earns three times what he earned in India and where his small family can afford a decent home and a decent life.

Sandeep’s story is the story of millions of young Indians who have learned a skill or a profession and found that it does not even earn them enough to rent a small apartment in Delhi or open www.openthemagazine.com 35

Mumbai. It is the votes of young Indians, many of them voting for the first time, which helped Modi become Prime Minister.

They believe that he can walk on water. Make miracles happen. I remember well the words of a young man I met in Benares on the day Modi came to file his nomination papers on that day of intense heat and intense hope. The young man was standing behind me as the massive, jubilant procession went by with Modi standing in an open truck. He got down from the truck just in front of where we stood to garland a statue of Vivekananda, and the young man yelled, “Modi, Modi, Modi!”

So I asked what he liked about Modi, and he said he believed that he could bring development to India. When I pointed out in devil’s advocate tones that Modi was a politician, not a magician, the young man said, “When it comes to ‘vikas’, I believe he is a magician.”

So as we approach the hundredth day of his government, are there those signs of ‘parivartan’, without which there can be no miracles? Are there signs of a new kind of governance? Are there signs of a new approach to political power? Are there signs that the new ministers know what needs to change for India to drag itself out of the quagmire of bad laws and policies that have, in the name of the poor, kept India mired in poverty for decades? These are questions people have asked a lot since that hot May evening in Delhi, when, amidst a glittering array of prime ministers, presidents and princes, Modi was sworn in as India’s first non-Nehruvian socialist Prime Minister.

There is no question in anyone’s mind that the Prime Minister understands very well that he has not been given a mandate to continue with Nehruvian socialist policies. Every

mistakes that the Sonia-Manmohan Government made.

Among the more glaring ones is the rural employment guarantee law. Why can it not be just an optional welfare scheme as Vasundhara Raje has correctly asked? Why does it have to be a law? MNREGA has done nothing to reduce unemployment in rural India. It has served mostly as dole for people who would otherwise have worked usefully in agriculture. Even if Arun Jaitley was persuaded in the name of continuity to keep MNREGA, he should have ensured that it created real jobs and real assets. This has not happened. The Food Security law is another gigantic waste of public money, but the Modi Government has chosen to hang on to it. This, despite little evidence that it will reduce malnutrition levels in the villages.

With a broken public distribution system and horrible corruption at every level, it is madness to waste money on distributing cheap food grain when the money could be so much better spent. Organisations like Akshaypatra have shown how malnutrition can be significantly brought down just by feeding schoolchildren one nutritious meal a day. The Prime Minister could have chosen to abandon the Food Security law and spend the money saved on a massive school meals programme. So much like a Sonia-Manmohan budget was the one that Arun Jaitley presented that his predecessor, P Chidambaram, publicly gloated that the new Finance Minister had made no changes to the Budget he would have given us had the election results been different. And, further humiliation was added by Sonia Gandhi herself when she said that her ideas were being copied by the new Government.

One of the first ministers I met in the new Government was

The Prime Minister could have abandoned the Food Security law and spent the money on a school meals programme time he speaks and with every gesture he has made since he took office, he has shown that he understands. In my opinion, he has not put a foot wrong other than making the small mistake of speaking in English when he went to Brazil for the BRICS conference. And, this was probably the fault of Lutyens’ bureaucrats. The mighty mandarins who inhabit the hallowed corridors of North and South Block are usually unable to speak or write in Indian languages, so they must have convinced Modi to read an English speech. They would have done this despite knowing that the leaders of Brazil, China and Russia would speak in their own languages.

As someone all too familiar with the ways and wiles of high officials in the Government of India, I blame them as well for the less than dazzling performance we have so far seen from Modi’s ministers. The new ministers seem trapped by the mantra of continuity. So much so that the Finance Minister did not dare rid us of the ludicrous retroactive tax. He put it in his Budget knowing that this tax was the single biggest reason why foreign investors started fleeing our shores when Pranab Mukherjee introduced it to try and extort more money out of Vodafone. Arun Jaitley had the chance to rid us of other 36 open

the Minister of Human Resource Development. I met Smriti Irani in the middle of her senseless spat with the Vice Chancellor of Delhi University and tried to convince her that instead of trying to control the Vice Chancellor she should try to control the University Grants Commission (UGC). I actually suggested that it be disbanded if she was keen to make a real difference. If we want to improve the quality of higher education, I explained, then it must be released from the licence raj that has strangled it for decades. Her response was to say, “But, then what if vice chancellors go rogue?” I pointed out that this should not concern the HRD Ministry at all, because if colleges offered bad courses or poor quality teaching standards, students would simply go elsewhere. I mentioned that the need for more universities was so great that Kapil Sibal, when he first became HRD Minister in 2009, had told me in an interview that India needs 1,500 new universities. I soon realised I was having a pointless conversation because the Minister was too steeped in the old ethos to understand what I was saying.

But, at least she was good enough to meet me. My efforts to meet the Environment Minister have so far failed. My reason for wanting to meet him was to see if he was planning to put in 8 september 2014

RAUL IRANI

SONU MEHTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN Former Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (left); current Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani place objective and measureable norms for the construction of major infrastructure projects. One of the worst things that the Sonia-Manmohan Government did was to use the Environment Ministry as a new licence raj. Jairam Ramesh, with the unconcealed glee of a natural hatchet man, went about closing major projects on ‘environmental grounds’ after thousands of crores had already been invested.

When asked why he did this, he admitted privately that he had ‘orders from the top’. Since Rahul Gandhi was present when he ordered Vedanta to close its operations in the Niyamgiri hills, this was easy to believe. The project was closed after more than Rs 11,000 crore had been invested in an aluminium refinery that could have saved transportation costs enough to halve the international price of this very environmentally friendly material. Had it not been stopped, it is possible that Odisha would today have been the centre of aluminium production in the world. Jairam Ramesh would not have been able to turn the Environment Ministry into a licence raj had there been clear norms in place. So with a new government you would expect that in the first hundred days a decision could have been taken to come up with clear 8 september 2014

norms. This has not happened and instead the new Minister has chosen to given clearances faster as a signal to investors that the Environment Ministry is now business-friendly. As long as every project is cleared individually, the problems will remain.

The list of necessary changes for ‘parivartan’ and ‘vikas’ to happen is a long one. Labour laws need to be changed. The last Government’s land acquisition bill needs to be scrapped or altered drastically. The justice system needs to be made to function at a more modern speed and in more modern ways.

The infrastructure ministries need to work together instead of at odds with each other. Some obsolete ministries such as Information & Broadcasting need to go the way of the Planning Commission.

So it has not been a bedazzling first hundred days but the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech renews the hope that he is committed to ‘parivartan’. And, that he is committed to using his high office to really make India a better country.

May he remember every morning that outside the salubrious environs of Lutyens’ Delhi lies an increasingly impatient and angry country. n open www.openthemagazine.com 37

open essay

By Edward Luttwak

silence of the civilised The beheading of James Foley and the sinister truth about ISIS

T

deafening silence of Islamic leaders and preachers worldwide about the killings, including the brutal beheading of James Foley, of forced conversions, enslavements and desecrations of Abu Bakr alBaghdadi’s Islamic State or ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyyah, the former al-Dawla alIslamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham, that is, the Edward Luttwak Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is an American proclaims an important truth: as far military as good Sunni Muslims are concerned, historian and killing Yazidi or any other pagans who political scientist. refuse to convert, removing ‘arrogant’ crosses from churches or turning them His latest book is into mosques, beheading apostates The Rise of China such as Syria’s ruling Alawites and vs the Logic of such, may not be very nice or very poStrategy lite but it is all perfectly legal and proper under Islamic law.

Apostasy is a crime in 23 Muslim states and people have been beheaded for it in recent years in both Iran and Saudi Arabia. In Turkey, apostasy from Islam is still legal (if too dangerous to disclose) but only because of the old constitution that its current leaders are dismantling—it is revealing that the neo-President Erdogan and Prime Minister designate Ahmet Davoutoglu always describe President Assad’s community as ‘Nusayri’— Sunni pejorative for ‘Alawite’. In other words, Abu Bakr’s Islamic State may be extreme for us, but it is much less so for its only relevant audience of believing Sunni Muslims everywhere—the ones who enthusiastically voted for Erdoganprecisely because of his Islamist slogans.

Nobody should therefore be surprised by the ability of the Islamic State to attract Muslim volunteers even from affluent Western Europe, for it is merely practising the Islam they learn in schools and mosques. That other Islam, ‘the religion of peace’ that is invoked in public speeches all over the West from US President Obama down, does really exist here and there. But it is a minority view lacking in popular legitimacy, and its preachers are despised as weaklings or government agents (moderate ‘official’ Imams have recently been assassinated in both the Russian Federation and China’s Xinjiang province).

Another significant aspect emerges from the precedent cited by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in announcing his new ‘caliphate’ from Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and a multi-religious metropolis—until its conquest on 10 June 2014. He did not recall the famous caliphates of history, from the Umayyad to the longer-lasting Abbasid extinguished by the Mongols in 1258, the Egypt-based and tolerant Fatimid inbetween, or the Ottoman one that lingered till 1924, let alone the extant Ahmadiyya caliphate that he would condemn as heretical.

Instead, like mainstream Sunni Muslims including professors in Western universities, ISIS’s caliphate celebrates the rule of Muhammad’s first four ‘rightly guided’ suche

cessors, the al-Khulafa’ ur-Rashidun—who followed one another after his death in 632. Unable to assume Muhammad’s prophetic role, his leading followers Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, Umar [or Omar] ibn al-Khattab, and Uthman ibn ‘Affan, took control of his movement in that sequence as his ‘successors’, Khulafaa’, from which their rule became known as the ‘succession’ or Khilafat (caliphate).

When modern Muslims afflicted by the sad condition of today’s Muslim world speak in praise of the Rashidun, the reason is rarely the serenity of their rule. The first Caliph, Abu Bakr asSiddiq (632-634) had to fight tribal rebels throughout his two-year reign, and also the supporters of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, who wanted the leadership for her husband Ali ibn Abi Talib— which marked the start of the Sunni-Shia split (the latter being the ‘party of Ali’). Abu Bakr died of illness, but of the other three Rashidun, Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-644), also known as ‘Omar the conqueror of Jerusalem’, was assassinated by a Persian captive; Uthman ibn ‘Affan (644-656) was lynched by victorious rebels in his own house in Medina; and Ali ibn Abi Talib (656-661), revered by the Shia, was assassinated.

But all this is disregarded because what modern Muslims celebrate are the great conquests of the Rashidun: within a year of Mohammad’s death in 632, Muslim warriors launched raids on Byzantine Syria and Sasanian Mesopotamia. The two empires had been fighting for almost 30 years, destroying each other’s power. A few years of peace would have restored them, but Arabs waving the banner of Islam arrived first. By 636, both empires had been defeated decisively , and these utterly unexpected victories opened the way for conquests that soon reached across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic, and as far east as the Indus valley. For adherents of the new faith, those victories vindicated Muhammad’s central promise that Islam would assure them victory. But that same promise is now the cause of explosive inner tensions, because in recent centuries Muslims have been defeated again and again by Christians, Hindus and Jews. These defeats generate terrible inner doubts about Islam itself, which are vented in extreme outbursts of violence and wild fantasies of renewed conquest. The black flags of the Islamic State, lately also seen in Berlin, Paris and London as well as in Iraq and Syria, often feature maps of a Muslim world that include Spain (‘Al Andalus’) and much of India, as well as Israel of course. That too derives sanctity from an Islamic law which prescribes that any land once ruled by Muslims is under ‘wakf’, a sacred trust, that nobody can give away to non-Muslims (this is the law cited by Hamas to reject any peace accord that involves recognition of the state of Israel).

Muslims are currently waging jihad from Mindanao in the Philippines to northern Nigeria and beyond in Mali, across Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya as well as the Gaza Strip. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State differs because it displays its beheadings and desecrations on YouTube, calculating that the spectacle will attract more recruits.

These are hard truths, but no successful strategy can be built on self-deception. n

Black flags of the Islamic State often feature maps of a Muslim world that include Spain and much of India, as well as Israel

8 september 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 41

loss of sobriety Kerala’s decision to ban liquor bars outside of five-star hotels could dampen the state’s economic spirits and spawn new vices, says Manu Remakant

S

omething is brewing down here in Kerala. Something so

phenomenal and yet comical, so surrealistic and yet drab, so magical and yet true, that if you don’t watch, you may regret having missed the greatest piece of drama since Shakespeare. We Malayalees who happen to be the characters in the plot don’t understand what is happening in our lives, even though we do realise we are being taken for a ride.

It all began when the state government revoked the licences of 418 bars across Kerala just before the General Election. Such theatrics are common in a state where a large chunk of votes come from women and various religious groups—no fans of the liquor industry.

But the mood turned sombre when, after the polls, the state’s new Congress chief, VM Sudheeran broke the fourth wall and declared to the audience that it was not mere drama; the decision was no joke, and the bars, all 418 of them, were gone forever. It was a bombshell. The fallout was mass hysteria, with the church, NGOs and women’s organisations rallying behind the new moralists.

Most political parties, however confused they were about the potential outcome and feasibility of the order, had to choose between emotionality and sanity. Cornered, they were asked to declare to an elated audience, led by Sudheeran, their stance.

The atmosphere was so electric that none of the drama’s other characters could afford to stay silent.

Politically, it was perhaps the shrewdest move by a leader since Marthanda Varma’s Thrippadidaanam, when the king laid his sword down before Sree Padmanabha and declared he was only a servant to the real lord up there. Anyone who dared raise an arm against Marthanda Varma would have the Almighty as his enemy. Likewise, anyone who’d oppose Sudheeran would become a friend to the liquor mafia, and would have the good people of Kerala as his enemy.

The audience watched with wonder how leaders who voiced apprehensions in the morning had to swallow their words by the evening. Kerala’s Revenue Minister KM Mani, who knew the extent to which the closing down of bars could hurt the state exchequer, did a volte face within a few hours and became one of 42 open

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the strongest voices of prohibition. The church smiled.

Sudheeran chose to ride the wave he himself had created, but when it rose to a crest he realised he was no match on the surf for the real hero waiting in the wings. Pressure mounted, and suspicious eyes turned to Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who’d dropped hints that he had a more pragmatic view on the matter, and the closed bars, if proven good, would soon be back.

So, few anticipated a twist in the plot when he made his government’s final stance on the matter clear. The Chief Minister nonchalantly declared that not only would the 418 bars stay closed, but even those that had remained open would have to pull down shutters. Thus, with a flick of the magic wand, he laid out a plan for total prohibition in the state. And that was how the Chief Minister stole the thunder from Sudheeran as Kerala’s new messiah of morality.

In a state which tops the country’s record of alcohol use, that was quite a dramatic turn of events.

A

s the dust raised by the tug-of-war between the Chief Minister and the Congress chief settled, it is time to take account of the war spoils and the impact of the struggle.

Other than a political move to outsmart an opponent, how serious and prepared could the government be in implementing such a decision? Can a government afford a gut 8 september 2014

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, with his plan for total prohibition, has stolen the thunder from his rival VM Sudheeran as the new messiah of morality reaction or an emotional response to a political challenges? Can it allow itself to be used as a platform for moral vindication?

What are the consequences of state decisions being made to settle individual rivalries? Can a state whose economy depends a lot on spirits cut off ties with alcohol quiet so easily? There are other questions too. What happened when prohibition was implemented in certain pockets of the state in the past? What were the lessons of those massive failures? What is happening in the states where prohibition is still in practice? What about the illicit liquor trade and bootlegging there? Why did the US after a period of 13 years lift its ban on alcohol?

Oh, I forgot! You can ask questions only as a participant in a discussion, but not while you watch a play, especially one that is still going on. Moreover, anyone who opposes such a decision, by default and the moral standards of the state, becomes an agent of the liquor mafia, an enemy to the people and God—political wisdom that our kings have taught us.

8 september 2014

We tout Kerala as ‘God’s Own Country’. Every year, as the season begins, we greet the first flock of tourists with much pomp and flair. What would be the impact on the tourism industry if we close all the bars in the state? Has anyone given a serious thought to this? A tourism secretary I once spoke to told me that, despite all this hype, Kerala fails to draw high-end tourists. So the moment you pull the shutters down on the bars in three- and four-star hotels, you risk the loss of a large chunk of tourists as well as foreign money. There are far better places in the world for tourists to visit and spend their money—places where the authorities are not as myopic as those in Kerala. We want information technology, tourism, airports and harbours of international standards, as also foreign money and all the trappings of the 21st century, but we remain closed, cold and apathetic to the outside world.

Is Kerala’s state economy healthy enough to withstand the loss of revenue from spirits? Being a consumerist society, one leg of the state stands firmly on earnings from the alcohol industry. Can we knock it off on a whim? What would be the social impact of such a move?

Various parts of Kerala, including Thiruvananthapuram, have seen the evil effects of prohibition in the past. Ageing men still share nostalgic stories of how they used to travel all the way to the neighbouring district of Kollam to get a high. Bootlegging was rampant in those days. In the absence of legally available drinks, people looked out for spurious liquor to get sozzled.

Anyone with a little knowledge on dubious alchemy started concocting spirits to sell in secrecy. You do not need to get your product verified and certified for quality if your product is illegal, right? By turning the production and sale of alcohol illegal, the government lost control over the market. Liquor rackets and nefarious agents mushroomed. Ayurvedic dispensaries converted themselves overnight into shops selling dubious concoctions like viplavarishtam. Many drinkers suffered the blindness caused by methyl-alcohol poisoning, a glaring risk of badly-made booze; many died of it. And that’s what it took for the government to open its eyes to reality and lift the ban. The government realised that it was the only way it could muscle back into the place of action, and reclaim the right to verify liquor samples before anyone had a chance to consume it.

But a decade ago, when AK Antony banned arrack, the same story was repeated. The popular arrack beat a retreat from the limelight; and soon toddy, the poor man’s beer, hogged a lot of unwanted attention. Pumped with more and more chemicals every day, the character of the meek drink changed, until one day it lost all connection with the coconut tree from which it must be tapped. Today, pure toddy is a grandma’s story.

The scenario in a tribal village in Palakkad, Attappadi, is a telling example from the present times. Liquor was prohibited years ago in the village to check the growing menace. What happened? Sure enough, the village was flooded with spurious liquor. What can the state expect from the excise department when it has proven useless in enforcing a ban even in a tiny hamlet of Kerala? What should we look forward to when the minister in charge of this department admits that the system is too ill-equipped for it?

Elsewhere, we have examples like the US, which had to lift its ban at the start of the last century because by then it had seen open www.openthemagazine.com 43

Serpentine queues outside liquor vends are a common sight in Kerala

enough of bootlegging, with the booze mafia an even bigger menace than bathtub gin. Prohibition in other states of India has also proven to be farce.

T

here is another danger too. The moment we try to flush

out all these ‘evil spirits’ from our midst, there would be another monster to be reckoned with: hard drugs. College campuses are already full of narcotics. Some schools too. Drugs can be hidden in all shapes and sizes, even as harmless-looking stamps and pens. You only have to chomp an end of a loaded pen to get a high for a few hours, says a newspaper report.

The US saw a huge increase of drug use during its dark days of prohibition. Kerala may also be headed for a calamity on this count. Close all bars in the state, and tiny hideouts and holes will sprout across the landscape, unmonitored places where it would be far easier to experiment with strange chemicals that could cause grave harm.

It so happens that some people need an outlet—an escape, a release from their usual state of mind. They also need to bond with friends over social solvents such a liquor. Within safe limits, it is a matter of choice: of free will. To drink or not to drink is a question best left to the individual rather than the law.

India’s ancient texts also take a benign view of this in the interests of a healthy society. The Shastras, for example, offer an idea of the political and domestic codes vis-a-vis spirits of 44 open

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olden times. A monitoring authority like our present-day excise department existed back in those days to keep excesses in check. Wine shops were restricted to certain areas in the state and inspectors were appointed to oversee their functioning.

‘Liquor shops shall not be taken out of villages, nor liquor shops be closed to each other,’ one rule went. And more: ‘These shops shall contain many rooms, provided with beds and seats apart.

The drinking rooms shall contain scents, garlands of flowers, water and other comfortable things, suitable to varying seasons.’ How modern they were, back in those days, and how ancient we seem in contrast!

Still, despite all the evidence, ‘Death to spirits’ remains a slogan for all in Kerala to join the chorus of. And more and more seem to be adding their voices to it.

Who has the nerve to stand apart from this swelling crowd and scream that the king is naked at the risk of getting branded an agent of the liquor mafia?

Let the show go on, for we are but mute spectators, after all, condemned by the age of populist politics to watch political rivalries snowball into state crises and easy-to-foresee tragedies.

We may have read the story many times, and know how ironies pan out at the end. But let us, like good democratic citizens, suffer still in silence. n The writer is an associate professor of English who runs the website, Rumroadravings.com 8 september 2014

G o d

OF BIG THINGS

The evolution of Ganesha from a city deity to one of the most popular gods in the Indian pantheon Madhavankutty Pillai

kunal patil/hindustan times/getty images

THE

I

n a city dotted with count-

less pandals during the tenday Ganesh Chaturthi festival, Lalbaugcha Raja would be the most popular in Mumbai. Two years ago, the man who wanted to be first to worship the idol came four days beforehand, and behind him, as the festival neared, the queue gradually became longer and longer. There are actually two queues there—one is for people who want to have a look at the deity and pray; the other is for those who have something to request of him. The latter is called the navas line and one has to sometimes stand for more than a day before the turn comes. And what they finally get to see is an idol made by Kambli Arts, run by a family that has been sculpting Lalbaugcha Raja for eight decades.

The workshop of Kambli Arts is in a little lane off the main road in Lalbaug, not very far from where the pandal is. Two weeks before the festival is to begin, idols of Ganesha, big and small, are arrayed inside in different stages of completion.

They supply other pandals, but only Lalbaugcha Raja is 14 feet tall, the rest are 9 feet or below. Ratnakar Kambli is the head of the family now. His father, a

sculptor of idols, would have roaming exhibitions at festivals across Maharashtra.

In 1935, a year after the festival began to be celebrated there, friends recommended his name to the organisers of Lalbaugcha Raja. He passed away in 1952 and his eldest son Venkatesh took over, and after his death, Ratnakar Kambli started designing the idol. The face and body actually changes little but Ganesha’s accouterments—the pose, the throne, the colours, the weapon he holds in his hands—are where the innovations of Kambli Arts come in. Ratnakar’s son, Santosh, who is now the third generation doing this, says that last year they decided to take a risk. Thrones are usually gold, silver or bronze in colour, but they decided to go with purple, the hue of peacock feathers, and in keeping with this motif, instead of lions they had peacocks adorning the base of the seat.

Kambli Arts makes the parts of the Lalbaugcha Raja idol at its workshop and these are then taken to the pandal, assembled and painted. Finally, Ratnakar, who is 73 years old, will go and draw the eyes.

He says that the eyes are very important to devotees because that is where they will look and what they should see is

RITESH UTTAMCHANDANI

Ratnakar says that the eyes are very important, since devotees should see Ganesha looking back at them with love

Ratnakar (right) and Santosh Kambli 48 open

Ganesha looking back at them with love.

He attributes the phenomenal popularity of Lalbaugcha Raja to how his father conceived this god. He points to a photo of the idol on the wall, and says, “You can see, unlike other images, he is slim and not potbellied. Our Ganapati is a human like figure.” What Kambli’s father did of endowing a god with human likeness is called anthropomorphism, and it holds a clue to the evolution of Ganesha from when he makes his first appearance in history on the back of coins of IndoGreek rulers.

A

mong archaeologists and stu-

dents of ancient Indian culture, Dr MK Dhavalikar is something of a legend. A former archaeology professor who went on to become the director of Pune’s Deccan College Post-Graduate Research Institute, he has authored numerous books on ancient Indian culture, and got a Padma Shri three years ago.

Dhavalikar has written a number of papers on Ganesha. He is 84 years old now and it was almost 50 years ago that he first got interested in studying the deity.

In 1962, he was working with the Archeological Survey of India and had been sent to Greece to take part in an excavation for three months. There he encountered figures which combined animals and men (like centaurs) and he wondered whether Ganesha’s form was also in any way connected. Later, while teaching numismatics in India, one of the earliest coins he came across showed Alexander wearing a helmet in the form of an elephant’s head.

He started reading up and in Alexander’s biography found references of a sojourn in Taxila in present day Afghanistan, where, in a shrine at the heart of the city, a sacred elephant was kept and worshipped. Dhavalikar thought that it was possible that the coin represented that elephant. “His governors, the Indo-Greeks, who ruled in the northwestern parts of the Subcontinent, also copied the style,” he says. Dhavalikar also found that when Hiuen Tsang came to India in the 7th century, he came to a city called Kapisa in present day Afghanistan. The city’s presiding deity was in the form of an elephant whose name was Pilusara. (This could be why in 8 september 2014

SEAN DRAKES/LATIN CONTENT/GETTY IMAGES

Devotees at the Ganesh Utsav festival at Chagville Beach, Trinidad

Tamil, Ganesha is known as Pilaiyar, because Sanskrit’s ‘sa’ becomes ‘ya’ in the language.) A coin by an Indo-Greek king Eukratides, who ruled that region from 170-150 BCE, shows a coin with an elephant, and, linking it to Hieun Tsang’s account, scholars thought it might represent Pilusara. The elephant deity was associated with a tribe called Hastikas who were predominant there and had the animal as their totem. But it was still not Ganesha as we know him. Rather, at the most, it was a prototype.

D

r Arvind Jamkhedkar, a renowned

authority in archaeology, Buddhist studies and art history, says that there are stages in the development of Ganesha as a god and the first phase is the elephant 8 september 2014

Idols of Ganesha drinking milk is a phenomenon reported from many foreign shores home to large numbers of people of Indian descent deity of the Subcontinent’s northwest.

He says that Ganesha probably started off as a yaksha, one of the semi-divine beings worshipped in primitive Indian societies who often evolve into major gods as they get assimilated into Hinduism. As an indication of Ganesha’s yaksha orgins, he points to the practice of its idols often worshipped with vermillion paste.

Originally, yakshas were typically besmeared with blood during worship and the hypothesis is that vermillion came to represent blood later. There is an entire category of such gods who are oblated with vermillion, including Hanuman and Durga, all of whom possibly have yaksha origins.

According to scholars, yakshas have the property of being ambivalent; they are both good and bad. Initially, Ganesha is

also like that. In ancient Indian literature, he comes first as Vinayaka, but in the beginning there are more than one entity by that term, with characteristics of yakshas. In an essay Ganesa: The Idea and the Icon, the late AK Narain, a reputed archaeologist and numismatist who did considerable research on Ganesha, says, ‘The name Vinayaka occurs for the first time in the Manava Grihyasutra; it is used there in the plural number to refer to a group of four spirits or lesser gods, namely Salakatankata, Kusmandarajaputra, Usmita and Devayajana, and not for Ganesa.’ In later literature the four (and sometimes five) Vinayakas coalesce into one.

Jamkhedkar says that in keeping with the character of a yaksha, the deity was originally an obstacle creator in such litopen www.openthemagazine.com 49

B

ut by then, Ganesha was no long-

er just a Hindu god, even being incorporated into Buddhism and Jainism.

In a book Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God, there is an essay by the Jainism scholars Maruti Nandan Tiwari and Kamal Giri titled ‘Images of Ganesa in Jainism’.

They write, ‘During the early medieval times ([around the] ninth century AD), the Jainas and the Buddhists also incorporated Ganesa into their pantheon and held him in esteem. This assimilation took place only after the development of a separate Ganpati cult in the early Gupta 50 open

MATHEW POLAK/SYGMA/CORBIS

erature. Farmers affected by drought, girls who didn’t find suitable matches or unsuccessful men, would believe that they were suffering from Vinayaka’s curse and the solution was to appease him by making offerings. “The belief was that when these offerings are made, the curse goes away and [the appeaser] becomes successful,” he says. When Ganesha evolves in his individual form, he is first a lord of obstacles—he was worshipped to remove the problems that he himself had created. It is in his final form that he becomes a remover of all obstacles, metamorphosing into a benign lovable god.

Along the way, as his popularity increased, so did myths and legends around him. He is now known as the son of Shiva, but that was not always so.

Jamkhedkar cites the example of cave number 21 in Ellora which is dated to 550 CE. “It is a Pashupatha cave and the wedding of Shiva is depicted there. At the head of the procession are Karthikeya and Ganesha,” he says, “What does it mean?” The answer is that the two were not seen as children of Shiva and Parvati, otherwise they couldn’t have been part of the procession. It shows that Ganesha had been brought into the fold of Shiva and Parvati, but it is only later, as his importance grew, that other myths turned him to their son.

During the Tantra period in Indian religious history, when urbanisation grew rapidly and a lot of the autochthonous population came within the fold of Hinduism and their beliefs were assimilated, Ganesha even becomes the supreme deity with the rest of the gods turning subordinate.

Devotees attempt to ‘feed’ idols of Lord Ganesha milk in London as part of the September 1995 frenzy

period ([around the] fifth century AD).’

Tiwari and Giri surveyed the Jain images of Ganesha from that period and concluded that in Jainism, he got a favoured position ‘mainly as a god bestowing success (siddhi). In the beginning he was conceived both as a two-armed and as four-armed, but by the tenth or eleventh century AD he was a prominent Jaina deity and was consequently visualized with six, eight, and even more arms.’

Ganesha also ventures out of India to become a god in southeast Asia. “From the Gupta period, Indians also went to southeast Asia in large numbers,” says

Dhavalikar, “They took with them small plaques of Ganesha because he was the obstacle remover. In Indonesia you have such huge images of Ganesha that you don’t have even in India.” Oddly, there are independent temples of Ganesha in southeast Asia, while in India he is mostly a gatekeeper for other divinities, usually kept at the door or entablature.

He was taken to Tibet, China, Japan and Korea along with the spread of Buddhism to those countries. In Japan, he is worshipped even today. “They have their own Japanese names [for Ganesha] but their iconography remains the same.

8 september 2014

8 september 2014

DE AGOSTINI/L. ROMANO/GETTY IMAGES

All over Buddhism, Ganesha has gone,” says Jamkhedkar.

What is it that let Ganesha make the leap from his local semi-divine not-so-benevolent origin to a supreme being with the ability to span nations and religions?

It has something to do with his fundamental ability of removing obstacles.

“That type of god is welcome anywhere,” says Jamkhedkar.

It is also this inherent appeal that made Lokmanya Tilak use the Ganesh Chaturthi festival for political and social mobilisation during the Raj by turning it into a public spectacle. He wanted to make it an instrument of agitation against British rule. Tilak knew that the authorities would have cracked down on political gatherings but wouldn’t touch a religious festival, so it therefore served as a good camouflage.

In the Girgaum area of south Mumbai, the Keshavji Naik Chawl is a long courtyard with residences lined on both sides.

Because it housed a number of his associates, this was the first locality to respond to Tilak’s call in Mumbai and hold a public festival in 1893. While the festival’s celebration would go on to change the cultural landscape of Mumbai with phenomenal amounts of money, pomp and power involved, at Keshavji Naik Chawl it continues in the same low-key manner.

Instead of racy takes on Bollywood songs as heard at the other pandals, here they stick to traditional Maharashtrian music. “Our children themselves play the drums. It is conducted in a very quiet manner,” says Vinod Satpute, trustee of the mandal. The idol is made of clay and is only 2.25 feet high. And they make it a point to not let politicians take over.

This is not true for the rest of Mumbai, where the festival’s politicisation is complete—every politician worth his salt patronises it. And it is not just in Maharashtra, such public celebrations have been adopted in other states too.

Kerala for example never had a tradition of Ganesha immersion, but in 1990, it suddenly began there. The man who initiated it was MS Bhuvanachandran, head of the state’s Shiv Sena unit. “The first few years, it didn’t get much of a following. But now it is a big festival in Thiruvananthapuram,” he says.

And given that everyone likes a god on their side to help them out, another ele-

“In Indonesia you have such huge images of Lord Ganesha that you don’t have even in India” Dr MK Dhavalikar

‘By the 1980s there are said to have been fortyfive mandals financed by elements of the underworld’ Raminder Kaur

ment also came into the picture—criminals. In her sociological treatise on the festival, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism: Public Uses of Religion in Western India, Raminder Kaur, a professor of Anthropology & Cultural Studies at Sussex University, writes: ‘By the 1980s, there are said to have been fortyfive mandal[s] financed by elements of the underworld…Two areas are especially renowned in Mumbai for gangsters collecting donations for the Ganapati utsava—Matunga in central Mumbai, formerly lead by the South Indian smuggler Varadarajan Mudaliar or ‘Vardhabhai’ and Tilaknagar in Chembur in the eastern suburbs led by the don Rajendra Nikhalje alias ‘Chhota Raja’ or Chhotta Rajan.’ YC Pawar, a retired joint commissioner of police, had run-ins with both of them over Ganesh Chaturthi.

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n June 1982, when Pawar was first posted as a Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone 4, Varadarajan Mudaliar’s area of operation, he didn’t know much open www.openthemagazine.com 51

52 open

A worker climbs onto an idol of Lord Ganesh in Thiruvananthapuram

RAVEENDRAN/AFP

about the man because he had spent most of his police career outside Mumbai. A few days before Ganesh Chaturthi, he went on a family outing. At a road outside Matunga East, he was stopped by a traffic policeman who said the festival organisers had taken over the area and no vehicles could ply there. Pawar, who did not reveal his identity, asked why there was no public notification about the road being blocked. He was told that it was Varadarajan’s orders. Pawar shouted at the policeman and went ahead. “By that evening a traffic notification was published and the road closed for 10 days for Ganapati. That was the clout of Varadarajan,” he says. “His Ganapati was known to be the best in Mumbai— the most decorated, most expensive and most popular.”

Pawar soon went to war with Varadarajan and over the next few years decimated his empire. In 1986, a strategy he hit upon to ‘cut him down to size’ saw to it that the Ganapati festival Varadarajan organised became rather ordinary. One of the few police inspectors he trusted in the department gave him the idea. “One day he came to me and said ‘Sir, I dont know how far you will agree.

[Varadarjan’s] reputation is that he is a godfather and holds this big Ganapati, why not reduce the size of his Ganapati?’

I said, ‘Excellent idea.’” There was a small police chowki outside Matunga railway station. Pawar ordered that it be shifted to the exact place where Varadarajan’s Ganapati would get installed.

He then saw to it that when the application for police permission came, they would not be allowed the use of the entire ground, just a 35 by 35 feet pandal.

“We also specified where the pandal should be erected and shifted it to the extreme left southwest corner of that ground,” says Pawar. When the courts were approached against this, the police relented to allow a slightly bigger 45 by 55 feet pandal, but they had hit Varadarajan where it hurt.

In the late 90s, Pawar did the same to the Ganapati that Chhotta Rajan was said to be hosting. Again, an entire ground used to occupied, and Pawar shifted it to a nearby temple. Pawar says there is a reason and process by which criminals come to patronise the festival. “Money is required for celebrations. Where will it

Kerala’s tradition of Ganesha immersion began in 1990 with MS Bhuvanachandran, head of the state’s Shiv Sena unit come from? Small donations will only bring in a little even if many people give.

So extortion becomes a good way to gather funds. That is how goondas join the picture. But unless they are office bearers, why would they collect for a particular Ganapati? They get respectability by associating with the festival. They get money that is extorted. They might get political patronage or become politicians.”

C

onsider this headline: ‘Ganesh murtis ‘drink’ milk’. And the words below: ‘Murtis of Sri Ganesh “drank” or accepted milk, offered as part of a religious ritual by Hindus yesterday… A steady stream of devotees stood in line yesterday to make offerings to the elephant-headed god, remover of obstacles in the Hindu faith...’

If you took it for a news report of 21 September 1995 when—in what rationalists consider a breakout of religious mass hysteria—idols across India were reported to have started drinking milk, then you were mistaken. It was a 2010

news item that appeared in Trinidad Express, a newspaper in the Caribbean country. Idols of Ganesha drinking milk is a phenomenon which has been reported from many foreign shores that have a large number of people of Indian descent.

Inanimate idols, as science is clear, cannot drink milk—it is just not possible.

What is real is that people believe they do and this irrational belief spreads wherever devotees go. We can analyse myths that have come down to us and look for kernels of history in it, but occasionally we also get an insight into how new myths are born. There are many epithets for Ganesha. He is, for example, the God of Beginnings, the Patron of Arts with whose invocation Carnatic music performances begin, he is the Gatekeeper of the Gods, the Endower of Intellect. And since that day in 1995, someone somewhere is also thinking of him as the God that Drinks Milk directly from the devotee’s hands, and his idols are now being fed in faraway Trinidad. A new ritual has been created, another attribute added to his personality, and so the evolution continues. n 8 september 2014

cinema

mindspace

Roshan Seth on Richard Attenborough 54

A macabre twist

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o p e n s pa c e

Varun Dhawan Sidharth Malhotra Arjun Kapoor

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n p lu

Mardaani The Expendables 3

61 cinema reviews

Miele RX1 Scout Breitling Colt Automatic Asus Chromebox

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tech & style

When Neanderthals lived with humans Splitting water the cheap way Digital media dulls social skills

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science

The international list The Song of the Shirt

by Jeremy Seabrook

books

Roshan Seth recalls Richard Attenborough

54 64

CINEMA

terry o’neill/getty images

“Gandhi as a film will outlive us all” Roshan Seth on Richard Attenborough (1923–2014), the man behind one of the greatest biopics ever made

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andhi remains the definitive

work of Richard Attenborough, what he always will be remembered by. There is no question in my mind of that. It’s a film that speaks for itself. It has survived for 30 years.

People are very proud of it. All Indians Roshan Seth are proud of it. My experience of workplayed Nehru in ing on it is in a sense immaterial, as Gandhi. He also acted in several films the film will outlive us all. It changed the course of my life. It gave me a including Indiana chance to be an actor again. I will Jones and the always be remembered for my Temple of Doom portrayal of Nehru. I am still known as ‘Nehru’ today wherever I go, and I am more than honoured by it. The film came at a crossroads in my life. I had returned to India after living in England for 54 open

15 years. I considered 15 years long enough for things to have fallen in place in my attempt to be an actor. However, that didn’t happen, and I gave up acting, and came back home in complete and utter defeat. I took up a job at India International Centre as a sub-editor for its journal. And that’s when I went to meet Richard Attenborough.

Pandit Nehru was the last major character required to be cast, all the other actors had been selected. Attenborough told me that Nehru was the second most important character in the film. Nehru came into his own after Gandhi died.

Up until Gandhi’s death, Gandhi was the premier figure in the Congress party. Nehru was important as he was the great lieutenant of Gandhi. They were looking at portraying a father-son relationship in the film. I wasn’t the obvious choice. There were many problems before I was offered the role, and there were many people competing for it. I did a screen test for the role, for which I went down to England, 8 september 2014

along with Rohini Hattangadi. Rohini did her screen test in four days and returned. They were unsure about casting me. I didn’t look like Nehru, and the costumes were wrong.

Finally, after seeing everybody and my screen test, I suppose they saw some potential in me and offered me the role.

I was asked to play the character 10 days before the shooting was to begin. And at the beginning I almost didn’t do it because I thought there were problems with the contract.

I rang up my brother, who was the Consular General at Hamburg at the time and told him about the offer and the problem. My brother convinced me: “Don’t be a fool, do it.

He is the first major political character to be portrayed on the screen. You have a chance to play him. You don’t need the money. Put your pride to one side and do it.”

The start of the film for me was very shaky. I had come for the shooting after the end of a nine-year relationship with a woman. I was unsure of myself in the beginning and did the entire movie with a broken heart. But by the end of 16 weeks, I had gotten into it and played two or three scenes of which I am still very proud.

Attenborough is a wonderful example of a director as field marshal. He knew how to employ talented people. India is a difficult country to get along with. There were the usual kind of differences—differences which were felt during the shooting. It was felt that Indians were treated in one way, the English in another. But he kept pushing on. He was after all on a time schedule and had a difficult film Roshan Seth (left) as Nehru in Gandhi on his hands.

What I really admire is that he cast an epic project with completely unknown actors and that takes a lot of courage. He had sprinkled the film with big names like Candice Bergen, Martin Sheen, and knights of the British acting stables in it, but I suppose that was to attract an audience. All the major parts, the Indians and Gandhi himself, were played by unknown people. He himself was an actor before he was a director, and he could appreciate the process of acting. There are very few directors who know how to nudge a nuanced performance out of an actor and he was one of them.

As we went along, Attenborough realised a couple of things: that my background was similar to Nehru’s; that I had met Nehru as a child and knew about the character I was portraying. I also knew the family. They helped me in getting the wardrobe right. The first scene I did was a bit of a disaster.

It was with British actor John Mill, who played the Viceroy.

I had no dialogue. I had to just sit in a powder-blue achkan. It did not come out well. Jawaharlal Nehru would never have 8 september 2014

worn a powder-blue achkan. We had to rework the wardrobe, and it was done after Indira Gandhi’s intervention. The costumes for Nehru were 100 per cent accurate towards the end. As the film got along, and as I got into the character, Attenborough started relying on me. He knew that I knew my history, my dates, and knew what I was talking about.

Attenborough’s interpretation of Gandhi was based on Louis Fischer’s biography on Gandhi. Fischer had used as a template for his book what Gandhi told him—that “my life is my message”. What Attenborough, therefore, took were the major events from his life and put those in the film. It wasn’t subjective. He was merely showing what happened.

There has been criticism of his interpretation of Gandhi, as there is bound to be. We argue about everything. Morarji Desai was one of the many critics. The point is that any work of art that outlives its critics and its criticism speaks for itself.

We became friends later. In my profession, the word ‘friend’ needs to be used cautiously. He came to see me when I was acting on stage in England after the movie. Every year,

What I really admire is that Attenborough cast an epic project with completely unknown actors playing all the major parts, and that takes a lot of courage

up until a few years ago, he used to send me a Christmas card. He also knew the Englishwoman I was married to. I never got a chance to work with him again. We kept in touch but from a distance. The main thing is that he respected me and my work.

He was a charmer, a people’s person, a wonderful networker. He dealt with everybody with great love and respect. He knew how to get work out of people, how and when to flatter them, when to scold them. I remember the small things, like how he used to love Toblerone chocolates.

I have seen a lot of his other work. I loved his performance in 10 Rillington Place, where he played the role of serial killer John Christie. He was among the British greats—directors like David Lean and John Schlesinger. In the end, I think his achievement—in making Gandhi—will outlive his memory by hundreds of years. n As told to Shruti Vyas open www.openthemagazine.com 55

Books The International List

Japanese introverts, aircraft carriers, celebrity interviews, new dope on a legendary double agent, contemporary feminism 101, showgirls in 30s San Francisco, Spain after Franco and the Resistance rajni george

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The legendary Haruki murakami , always trippy, is back with his weird yet affecting CoLOURLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE

(Harvill Secker, 300 pages). The Atlantic recently published a piece (‘The Mystery of Murakami’) about his continued appeal despite ‘awful’ sentences and ‘formulaic plots’. Never truer than in his thirteenth novel. The story is typically simple yet poignant, told in Murakami’s taut, hermetic style: Tsukuru Tazaki, a lost thirty-something must find out why the four other members of his high school unit of five abandoned him, if he is to find love with Sara, who asks all the right questions of this reclusive railway worker. He always thought it was because he wasn’t colourful or interesting enough (his friends all have colours in their very names, and are bright and compelling). But there may be a darker reason lurking beneath it all, connected to his vivid subconscious and the desires their group had to resist to stay together.

There are beautiful descriptions of consciousness, of the will to stay alive, of the sexy texture of life itself: ‘The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train’, as it were. Who can’t relate to the sudden, unreasonable punctuation of friendship, occasioned by so many of us when young, for which we still bear the scars? But the puzzle, this time, leaves us cold.

A Curious Career

2

So, has Geoff Dyer gone soft? In his thirteenth book, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George HW Bush

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2 3

4 5 6

7 56 open

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3

Sparkling British journalist Lynn Barber is wise and wonderful in

(Pantheon, 208 pages), about his residency aboard an aircraft carrier, the master comic English whiner mutes his cynicism and even tears up at a speech.

The hyper-real atmosphere of flight decks and 14-hour work days examines the American ability to ‘dwell in the realm of the improvable superlative’, but stalls in places.

Yet, he is hilarious as ever; his farts appear to summon a trusted guide and he compares the Foreign Object Debris safety walk to rituals at Burning Man. At 53, Dyer is ‘sucking it up’; his parents die, he is finally old(er), he prays, and he may have lost some sexual feeling. We still love him.

(Bloomsbury, 224 pages), her memoir about interviewing celebrities. Full of wicked insight and guarded love for her subjects, she essentially interviews herself—and no one could be better suited. From finding a used condom on artist Tracy Emin’s sofa to a lush evening with The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, which ends in a promise to rob a bank with him after her husband’s passing, Barber has done plenty. She tells you how to elicit information—concerted attention and sudden pounces—and how to avoid questions you don’t want to answer.

Speaking to interviewers’ vulnerabilities, she recalls the experience of hearing your voice on a recording: dreadful.

Sly at the right moments and throwing herself wide open to possibility throughout, Barber offers a master class in journalism. Like Stet before her, hers is a luminous and painfully honest look at a life of letters.

8 september 2014

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5

In this bold and vital comment on gender politics, LAURIE PENNY

4

Has there been a greater con artist than Soviet mole Kim Philby? Using newly released MI5 files and family papers,

BEN McIntyre

explores the tragedy of early AngloAmerican espionage in his stylish A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: KIM PHILBY AND THE GREAT BETRAYAL

(Bloomsbury, 368 pages). Brilliantly vivifying infamous incidents like the botched Crabb operation, the betrayal of Konstantin Volkov and an ill-fated Albanian mission, the action flies fast and loose. For, the decadent and ‘bibulous’— often used to convey the extent to which Philby and Nicholas Elliott, his great friend and fellow veteran, enjoyed their trade— world of espionage also sent many to their death. And it is Philby the dogmatist who sank this failed friendship of the Old Boy network, we learn.

8 september 2014

roars as she speaks up for the underclass— standing right by their side, and usually at a protest. UNSPEAKABLE THINGS (Bloomsbury, 288 pages) is no academic treatise; it is full of passages that seem to strain at the confines of their section breaks, as The New Statesman contributing editor examines what ‘is not a fairytale’; for, ‘sex and money and power police our dreams’.

Harnessing all the power of a rant but transcending shoutiness, Penny analyses slut shaming, poverty and prejudice in the same vein as Caitlin Moran and Hadley Freeman, only younger (27) and angrier. A formidable anomaly, she has documented her time as a burlesque dancer, her rape by an older man, fighting anorexia; yet, she also won a George Orwell award for a blog post. At times the writing is uneven and difficult to handle; and the pain in these discourses is never easy reading.

But ‘nobody is really a perfect girl’, as Penny says, aptly.

6

Showgirls in 1930s San Francisco form the backdrop of LISA SEE ’s new novel, CHINA DOLLS (Bloomsbury, 383 pages). Three young Oriental women from different backgrounds come together as dancers at the popular Forbidden City nightclub: Grace comes from Plain City, Iowa, and is fleeing a violent father; Helen is dealing with an excessively traditional family; Ruby, born in Los Angeles to Japanese parents, must pass as Chinese to find a job. The girls look ‘delicate and breakable’, but they are anything but dolls, we learn, after Pearl Harbor: ‘I had made it this far without revealing my deepest secrets... I forgot that to believe in dreams is to spend half your life asleep.’

A narrative spanning 50 years, the latest from this bestselling author will haunt you.

JAVIER CERCAS’

seventh novel begins as Spain transitions from dictatorship to democracy, following General Franco’s death in 1975 and tracing three main characters over three decades. OUTLAWS An old-fash(Bloomsbury, 384 ioned tale, All pages), set in the the Light We Catalan city of Cannot See (Fourth Girona, introducEstate, 544 pages us to the protagoes) tells of the blind nist Ignacio as a middaughter of a lockdle-class teenager smith at the Museum who is frightened by of Natural History, the gang he has fallMarie-Laure, whose en in with. He wants purity guides her gorgeous blonde through the ravagTere, though she is es of World War II; with the gang’s boss and Werner Pfennig, Zarco, and the trouwhose skill with the ble starts here. Told radio brings music through a set of inclose but snuffs out terviews with a third countless lives. The party, the narrative two find each other takes us to his in Saint Malo, current life as a sucby the sea, in cessful criminal deAnthony Doerr ’s fence lawyer. When first ‘big’ book (The Tere appears and Shell Collector is his asks him to represent first and foremost Zarco, Igacio must gem). Always a pretaccept, in a sequence ty writer (‘A child is worthy of Tarantino. born, and the world ‘But worst of all was sets upon it with viothat, as soon as I saw lence and milk and Zarco and Maria belanguage’), here side each other, I he ups his game. felt with no room Gorgeous descripfor doubt that such tions of wartime a couple could not transmissions lift a function’, the nartale that is sentimenrator tells us. Full of tal but compelling. gritty dialogue but not for everyone, A monthly roundup of the best here is great fun for of international publishing crime novel readers.

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open www.openthemagazine.com 57

books

Harvester of Strife Jeremy Seabrook, a lyrical narrator of socioeconomic conflict, takes us to the factories of Bangladesh and England rajni george

R

espected BRITISH journalist and writer Jeremy

Seabrook is the author of 40 books, mostly dealing with socioeconomic development and the interplay between the economy and ecology. People Without History: India’s Muslim Ghettoes (with Imran Ahmed Siddiqui), his most recent one, is evidence of his keen, thoughtful global eye, seen in essays tackling the idea of a ‘culture of poverty’. In pieces like ‘Twins’, Seabrook’s lovely essay in Granta, he speaks powerfully of personal trauma, too; showing how both threads are often irretrievably connected, and how regret can outlive us.

In The Song of the Shirt: Cheap Clothes across Continents and Centuries (Navayana, 287 pages, Rs 495), Seabrook takes on the big issue of labour in Bangladesh and the cost of its abundance. Men, women and children toil in flammable buildings to bring in 70 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange, supplying companies like Primark, Walmart, Benetton and Gap, and it is this world of sacrifice Seabrook looks into.

Using both Bengal and Lancashire to look into impoverishment and affluence, he looks at the larger picture as it is not often viewed. Open spoke to Seabrook, who lives in England, about this deceptively quiet book on the ‘global imperium’.

What drew you to the subject, at first?

Originally I talked about Blackburn, in Lancashire, 17th century weavers. They had made garments that went to Bangladesh; the great migration of the industrial areas in England connected. I felt a sense of kinship in India, and I went to Nagpur, where the Empress Mills were still in production. They were built, modelled on, mills in Lancashire.

Then, on to Dhaka. In 1990, I first went to Bangladesh, long after I first went to India. The actual sense of physical overcrowding, the great tangle of metal. I found it beautiful, terribly complicated, and filled with stoicism and a syncretic tolerance. East and West Bengal share an identity.

The book is ‘a reflection on the mutability of progress’?

It is a circular dance. Money circulates around the world. People are barred from movement, but garments aren’t. They’re sort of blown with the wind, there is a repetitive quality to it: the dance of capital. Like a washing line. In Europe, the ghost of Manchester might be suffocated and there is irony and melancholy around this. We 58 open

never chose industrialism; we never chose to become industrialised either. It just happened, as it were, in the absence of any real self-determinism. China, Morocco, Turkey, there are many places like this; Bangladesh just has lots of people. This fate is certainly not chosen by young women toiling in factories, but for many it is an enlargement of the life that would have been circumscribed by being at home.

There are consolations and small joys. In spite of the insecurity and mistreatment they suffer, there is the idea of sisterhood and sharing. In Dhaka, the slight surplus has enhanced the cosmetics and chocolate industries. It is all difficult to measure; having their wages unpaid for months, living in terrible, overcrowded, heated, metal cabins. But the consolation is being together and sharing assurances, helping to save their families.

What future do these workers have, what kinds of choices ?

On other people’s perspectives, I wouldn’t want to be too adamant about what’s good or what’s bad. There is a great choicelessness, but the choices you make within that choicelessness are not negligible. In the end, nobody knows. We’ve got to train the people for the jobs of tomorrow. But no one has a clue about what to train them for. No one knows what the jobs of tomorrow are. It’s like a midwife birthing a child into a culture it doesn’t know.

You speak of fire as the biggest hazard for workers in the garment industry, full of flammable material—what is being done about this?

The greatest industrial accidents were getting caught in the machinery—long hair, unguarded machinery. Yes, there were also stories of fire, by owners who were going bankrupt. They would rather collect the insurance. There is no proper collective outlet for negotiating, trade unions are so anomalous. NGOs are not really trade unions.

What are you working on now?

I have just written a book about my mother’s life; it’s about how my mother survived her husband, developed syphilis, and it is published on Kindle. What a relief to be free of publishers! On the other hand, I’ve no way of publicising it. The best thing I wrote couldn’t find a publisher. n 8 september 2014

not so clean Toyota and Honda will begin selling cars that run on hydrogen in the US by 2015.

But generating hydrogen fuel is an energy-intensive process that releases carbon dioxide as a byproduct

Neanderthals Walked Among Us This ancient human species co-existed with modern humans for nearly 5,400 years

Splitting Water the Cheap Way

tom mchugh/getty images

Mark Shwartz

science

O

ne of the greatest mysteries of evolution is the extinction of Neanderthals. Scientists have for a long time wondered how and when this ancient human species disappeared. Were they still a thriving species when modern humans, Homo sapiens, appeared? And did the two strands of humanity compete with each other? According to one theory, Neanderthals got into an intense competition with Homo sapiens when the latter first appeared. This competition for resources, often violent in nature, eventually resulted in the rapid extinction of the Neanderthals.

However, a new study, considered one of the most extensive studies into the Neanderthal species, finds that these people lived along with Homo sapiens for around 2,600 to 5,400 years. And the two species met and mixed with each other.

According to the study, Neanderthals finally disappeared around 40,000 years ago, probably in current Western Europe.

A team of researchers, led by Professor Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford, published the results of their six-year-long study in the journal Nature. They ana60 open

lysed around 200 samples found at 40 Neanderthal sites from Spain to Russia with the latest carbon dating techniques and mathematical models and concluded that pockets of Neanderthal culture survived until between 41,030 and 39,260 years ago. According to the study, Neanderthals, though they kept to themselves, also interbred with modern humans and picked up tool-making pointers from them. Samples taken from some Neanderthal sites include artefacts that look like those introduced to Europe by humans migrating from Africa.

The researchers write in the journal: ‘The timing of Neanderthal disappearance and the extent to which they overlapped with the earliest incoming anatomically modern humans (AMHs) in Eurasia are key questions in palaeoanthropology…

Our data indicate that the disappearance of Neanderthals occurred at different times in different regions… A mosaic of populations in Europe during the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition suggests that there was ample time for the transmission of cultural and symbolic behaviours, as well as possible genetic exchanges, between the two groups.’ n

Scientists at Stanford University have developed a low-cost, emissions-free device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to produce hydrogen by water electrolysis. Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts, the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel and iron.

In addition to producing hydrogen, the novel water splitter could be used to make chlorine gas and sodium hydroxide. The nickel/nickeloxide catalyst significantly lowers the voltage required to split water, which could eventually save hydrogen producers billions of dollars in electricity costs. Details of the new device were published in Nature Communications. n

Digital Media Dulls Social Skills

According to a psychology study, children’s social skills may be declining as they have less time for face-to-face interaction due to their increased use of digital media. UCLA scientists found that sixth-graders who went five days without even glancing at a smartphone, television or other digital screen did substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic devices. “You can’t learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way you can learn it from face-to-face communication,” says lead author Yalda Uhls, “If you’re not practising face-to-face communication, you could be losing important social skills.” n 8 september 2014

tech&style

Miele RX1 Scout Cleaning robots are not new, but this new model from Miele is a winner gagandeep Singh Sapra

electrolux trilobite It’s a robotic vacuum cleaner manufactured by the Swedish company Electrolux. It takes its name from the extinct arthropod that scoured the ocean’s floor. It was the world’s first commercially available autonomous vacuum cleaner, introduced as a product in 2001

Breitling Colt w Automatic

Price on request

$999

The Colt Automatic perfectly reflects its original idea: that of a watch intended for the armed forces. The satin-brushed bezel features four rider tabs, ensuring good handling and optimal protection for the sapphire crystal, glareproofed on both sides. The steel case—water-resistant to 200 metres—houses a chronometer certified self-winding movement. n

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he Miele RX1 Scout is designed

to vacuum clean a 1,600 square foot area on a single charge, and then automatically return to its base to recharge before it begins to clean another section or repeat a cleaning cycle.

The RX1 uses a triple cleaning system of rotating side brushes that target difficult-to-reach areas along the walls of rooms and furniture, sweeping the dust to the centre of the unit where a removable beater bar picks up coarse particles; and then in a final step, a fan sucks dust into its dust compartment like a vacuum cleaner. Its 0.6 litre dust bag can be released at the touch of a button to empty it once full.

This robot uses a proprietary navigation system of parallel tracks to cover an entire area, instead of the random crisscross patterns other robotic vacuum cleaners follow, ensuring a better clean up job and an optimised battery usage.

The RX1 also features a high quality digital camera on top of the unit, which scans the ceiling of the room 8 september 2014

several times a minute to keep itself on course. There are three sensors at the bottom of the unit that stop it from tipping over the edge of stairs. It can also easily negotiate rugs up to 2 cm thick and keep cleaning. Seven infra red sensors around the unit make sure it does not bump into anything. And if you want to keep it out of a specific room, just install a magnetic strip at the doorstep and it will not cross this line.

You can command the RX1 by pressing one of the buttons on the top panel, or via its remote control unit. You can also programme it to start and finish at pre-defined times—while you sleep or are away at work.

The RX1 offers four modes of cleaning: ‘Spot’ mode for cleaning a defined area of 6 square foot, ‘Corner’ mode for cleaning the full room, ‘Turbo’ for 50 per cent faster pace but with wider spacing between its cleaning lines, and an ‘Auto’ default mode.

A source tells me that this unit will soon be available in India. n

Asus Chromebox

Rs 58,000

If you want to make your TV smarter, you can now add a Chromebox from Asus to your TV set. This 12 cm x 12 cm sized compact computer running Chrome OS with the latest Haswell processor offers 4K ultra high definition video too. Play, communicate or work on your TV set by opening up websites that you like or editing a spreadsheet on Google docs.

The Chromebox boots up in seconds, giving you quick access to the information that you need even while watching your favourite movie. Designed for ultrafast multitasking performance, Chromebox can also act like a full-fledged computer when hooked up to a monitor. The Chromebox can easily be linked up to your TV set over HDMI. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

a new anti-hero in b-town Tahir Raj Bhasin, who essays the role of a sextrafficker in Mardaani, has grabbed attention for his unconventional portrayal of a villain. A former journalist and model, Bhasin was previously seen in the Abhay Deol-starrer One By Two

Mardaani This police film’s predictable plot line is rather low on thrills ajit duara

o n scr een

current

The Expendables 3 Director Patrick Hughes cast Sylvester Stallone, Jason

Stathom, Jet Li Score ★★★★★

, TAHIR Cast rani mukerji TANEJA RAJ BHASIN. SANJAY sarkar eep ad pr r to ec Dir

S

earching for a missing person

is a great role for a woman with a straight-talking personality and good marksmanship—ergo, Vidya Balan in Kahaani. That movie had holes, but it held you.

Here, in Mardaani, Rani Mukerji is cast in a similar role of a down-to-earth investigating officer and she does her damnedest to make it work, but the sheer obviousness of the plot and the complete absence of even the slightest suspense in what is, essentially, a police thriller, lets her down horribly. To add to that, the movie burdens itself with a faux social conscience and parades as a film that condemns the sexual exploitation of women.

It does this by lining up teenage girls about to be trafficked in the sex trade.

The scene looks like a school PT drill.

The sex trafficker, an English speaking Hindu College dropout called Walt (Tahir Raj Bhasin), is the drill master, ordering the girls to drop their towels,

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pronto. After checking out their bods, he grades them suitably, then dresses them up in badly cut mini skirts for auctions at the sex slave market. The whole thing looks like a C-grade Miss Paharganj contest.

Director Pradeep Sarkar should have had better sense than to accept a script like this, and then to shoot it without modification. The thing is that once Crime Branch Inspector Shivani Shivaji Roy (Mukerji) of the Mumbai Police goes to Delhi to investigate the case of the kidnapped girls, the movie is an open-and-shut case. Roy has been talking all this while to ‘Breaking Bad’ Walt on her cellphone (he wants to buy her out), but we already know, from her professional and domestic life, that she is not for sale and she is going to hound him to his den. It’s all a matter of time.

So where is the thriller?

Without a single twist in the plot, we watch predictable action unfold.

Mardaani is a disappointment. n

It was great while it lasted, but now The Expendables series seems to be getting a tad long in the tooth. Handsome men do tend to look better as they get older, but when it all started it was 2010, and Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mickey Rourke, Chuck Norris and Bruce Willis were still in their early sixties, or thereabouts.

Four years later, The Expendables 3 has added Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson to the ensemble, and now the franchise has really started looking wobbly in the knees. Nobody is going to believe that the 72-year-old Harrison Ford is a CIA Field Operations Officer, in charge of handling this group of mercenary soldiers, especially when he strips off his CIA badge and joins the action himself, piloting a helicopter counter-attack.

However, Barney Ross (Stallone) and his boys do retain some of their old world humour. They start off in Somalia and end up in Romania, where the outcast from the original Expendables, now a powerful arms dealer called Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), is hiding out.

A bit of the laconic attitude of this postwar generation remains, but quite evidently it is fast turning into sepia.

The next sequel will have to be shot in a geriatric ward. n AD

8 september 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Student Ready for Higher Studies

Versatility and range may not be the qualities one immediately thinks of when discussing Varun Dhawan, but the actor appears determined to change that perception. He followed up his debut in Karan Johar’s Student of the Year with his father David Dhawan’s Main Tera Hero, and single-handedly turned that film into a bonafide box-office hit, revealing a natural flair for slapstick comedy that many likened to Govinda’s in his heyday. Close on the heels of that came Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania with his SOTY co-star Alia Bhatt, another breezy romantic comedy that also made all the right noises at the box-office.

But he follows up those films with a pivotal role in Ek Hasina Thi and Johnny Gaddar director Sriram Raghavan’s next, Badlapur. The film, a thriller featuring an ensemble that includes Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Huma Qureshi and Vicky Donor’s Yami Gautam, wrapped production last week, but is likely to hit the screens early 2015.

The 27-year-old star told me he committed to the film the minute Sriram offered it to him, “but I had second thoughts right away because I really wasn’t sure I could pull it off”.

Didn’t help that the director had lined up solid actors like Nawaz and Huma to work with Varun. “I literally had nervous pangs the first few days of filming.

I’d seen Gangs of Wasseypur and I knew what I was up against,” he admitted. He eased into the character and the film gradually “because Sriram was very patient with me”. Varun says he found his feet roughly a week into the shoot “and from that point on, I didn’t have a moment’s doubt that I’d made the right decision”.

No one associated with the film will say much about its themes or its plot, but this is the same film Sriram originally hoped to cast Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in, opposite Varun. The actress turned it down, allegedly because she didn’t want to play a “grey” character, and because she wasn’t particularly keen on making her comeback in an ensemble project.

And the Parts Go to?

The moment Karan Johar and Rohit Shetty announced that they were collaborating on a remake of Ram Lakhan, fans began 8 september 2014

suggesting casting ideas on social media platforms. Since Rohit had revealed he was keen to work with a young cast, SOTY stars Sidharth Malhotra and Varun Dhawan’s names have cropped up most frequently, and insiders at Karan’s Dharma Productions reveal it could well be the two up-andcomers who’ll take the roles Jackie Shroff and Anil Kapoor played in Subhash Ghai’s 1989 original.

But it’s hardly any secret that Gunday star and fellow upand-comer Arjun Kapoor counts Ram Lakhan as one of his favourite films, and that he even does a perfect impression of his chacha Anil from that movie. Apparently Arjun has already reached out to Karan offering himself up for the Lakhan role.

The other pivotal part that must be cast is the one Raakhee played in that superhit melodrama. Tabu has shot down rumours that she will take the role, or that she was even offered the part. The buzz is that Karan will likely approach his Jhalak Dikhla Jaa co-judge Madhuri Dixit to play mum, and Juhi Chawla’s name has also cropped up. But don’t be surprised if Kirron Kher, or even Amrita Singh (hot off the raves she received for her 2 States performance), is eventually cast. Good luck trying to convince Madhuri or Juhi to play mother to the likes of Sidharth, Varun or Arjun!

Studio Spendthrift

According to the grapevine, a prominent studio head is peeved with a director whose next film his studio will release. Turns out the filmmaker has been deflecting attention from the fact that his latest film has gone over budget by giving examples of other as-yet-unreleased films whose budgets also bloated considerably during production. One among these, an example the filmmaker has cited frequently, is the remake of a Hollywood film starring two heartthrob stars. That film, incidentally, will also be released by the same studio, and the honcho is not pleased that the director repeatedly brings it up.

Both movies are important projects for the studio in question, and the big-shot exec would rather that the industry discuss something other than the money riding on these two. But how to get others to lay off his expensive mistakes when one of his own directors won’t give up the habit first? n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

A Macabre Twist

by r i t e s h u t ta m c h a n da n i

Between Sarchu and Pang in Jammu & Kashmir is a stretch of road commonly known as ‘21 scissors’ or ‘gatta loops’—for the 21 hairpin bends one has to negotiate. At one such bend stands a temple where travellers offer cigarettes, alcohol and water bottles as offerings. The story goes like this: In the late 90s, an oil tanker was stuck at the very same bend. The driver asked his young assistant to place a rock behind the rear tyres as he tried revving the vehicle uphill. Instead, the vehicle slid and crushed the boy’s hands. The boy was bleeding profusely and the only medical centre was 18 hours away, in Leh. The driver sought the help of a truck driver but he too didn’t have a first-aid box. By now the boy was losing consciousness and the two drivers decided it’s best to put the boy out of his misery. The driver drove the tanker over his assistant, crushing him to death. A few days later, another driver got stuck at the same bend. He claimed to have been slapped by the boy’s ghost.

For years, vehicles would get stalled at this bend and drivers would claim that the kid slapped them and asked for water, alcohol or a smoke. A priest was roped in and a temple has been set up to placate the ghost. The conductor of our bus offered prayers too, but we all noticed a stalled oil tanker not too far from the temple

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8 september 2014