India must draw lessons from Israel's response
By Swapan Dasgupta
All over the world, but notably in the Islamic countries and Europe, the ongoing conflict in Lebanon has become the occasion for another outburst of visceral anti-Americanism. The Bush Administration, controversial at the best of times, has been squarely blamed for its failure to force Israel into accepting an immediate, unconditional cease-fire. Televised images of civilian casualties, particularly the death of 19 children in Qana, and the endless lines of refugees have aroused a wave of moral indignation and turned the conflict into a public relations disaster for Israel.
Predictably, India has not been unaffected by the prevailing mood. Both Houses of Parliament, which had failed to agree on a common strategy to counter terrorist outrages like the July 11 Mumbai blasts, shed their differences and passed unanimous resolutions demanding an immediate cease-fire and condemning the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets. With a “sense of the house” parliamentary resolution critical of the Indo-US nuclear cooperation programme proving contentious, the Lebanon resolution became the cloak for the expression of the all-pervasive anti-Americanism.
In such a charged environment, a clinical assessment of the lessons the Lebanon conflict holds for India may seem heartless. Yet, having climbed on the bandwagon of liberal outrage, it may still be pertinent for India to consider why the peremptory condemnation of Israel and the US is a trifle rushed.
The immediate provocation for Israel’s bombing and attack on southern Lebanon was the July 11 raid by the Lebanese Hizbollah on a military post in northern Israel. Eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two were abducted and taken to hideouts in Lebanon. The Hizbollah was clear it wanted to use the hostages to secure the release of jailed terrorists, including Samir Qantar, a man responsible for the brutal murder of a 28 year-old Jew and his four-year-old daughter in 1979. Qantar, according to eyewitnesses, shot the father and then smashed the little girl’s skull against a rock with a rifle butt.
The July 11 attack was followed two days later by the Hizbollah launching rocket attacks from southern Lebanon on Haifa.
It has been suggested that Israel’s response to the Hizbollah provocation was disproportionate. In the Indian context, where every terrorist outrage is invariably followed by appeals for tolerance and cross-border amity, this is apparently so. Yet, the undeniable fact is that Israel was pursuing a robust, zero tolerance approach to a problem that is plaguing many countries in the world—the menace of non-state militias.
The Hizbollah is not some rag-tag cluster of wild fanatics operating from tents and dingy basements. It is a formidable non-official army, committed to the destruction of Israel, which was created by elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran. Having hijacked the control of southern Lebanon from an effete Lebanese army, the Shia-dominated militia has fast become the leading anti-Israeli force in the region, outpacing both the PLO and Hamas. Now backed by both Syria (which opposed it initially) and Iran, it has demonstrated its fighting capability over the past fortnight by doggedly resisting the Israeli army and firing a daily shower of between 130 and 160 rockets into Israel. Any unconditional cease-fire will be seen as a victory of Hizbollah and establish its claim to be only force of standing up to Israel.
The de-facto Hizbollah takeover of Lebanon is a pointer to the dangers arising from non-state militias going out of hand. The Hamid Karzai Government in Afghanistan faces such a threat from the regrouped Taliban operating from Waziristan and, in time to come, India could well be confronted by a similar danger from either the Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan or another jihadi outfit.
Although the authority of the state in Pakistan hasn’t degenerated to the level of Lebanon, there are visible similarities between the LeT and Hizbollah. Both derive military sustenance from organised state power; both are motivated by variants of Islamism; both have elaborate tentacles in civil society; and both have a political presence in the democratic system.
By tacitly endorsing the depredations of the Hizbollah, India has implicitly questioned the right of sovereign states to take military action against cross-border terrorism. This short-sighted and populist posturing is almost tantamount to negating an important defensive option.
However, it is important to acknowledge that Israel could not have exercised its right to defend itself aggressively without the blessings of the only power that really counts. Without Washington’s protective umbrella, Teheran’s threat to wipe Israel from the face of the earth would have acquired even more menacing connotations. Yet, Israel hasn’t acquired its place in the American imagination by guilt-tripping invocations of the Holocaust. In offsetting the natural American inclination to put its oil interests above all else, Israel has had to work diligently over decades. Of course, the Jewish-American lobby has played an important role but far more significant has been Israel’s successful projection of its commonality of values with the US. Considering the historical schism between Judaism and Christianity, the achievement is seminal.
At the same time, Israel is not a client state of the US. Israeli leaders over the years have never hesitated to say No to America when it has been in its national interest. A special relationship has evolved by Israel juxtaposing uncompromising nationalism with strategic commonality.
As India battles against a terrorist assault on its nationhood, it is worthwhile drawing the right lessons from the Lebanon conflict. Mushy sentimentalism is no substitute for hard-nosed diplomacy.
(Published in Times of India, August 8, 2006)
Monday, August 07, 2006
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Mountain over the Mole hill (August 6, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
The media, all of us know, can be a damned nuisance at times. But what really took the biscuit was the sight of TV cameras literally following Jaswant Singh to the toilet at the launch of his controversial A Call To Honour—as if the privacy of the Maurya Sheraton’s Men’s toilet would be the right setting to divulge the name of the elusive mole.
I don’t think this column will be deemed habitually offensive for suggesting that India’s first great mole hunt, conducted in Parliament and through the media, has been anything but a monumental farce. After a fortnight’s frenetic search and oodles of whispered calumny heaped on the reputations of distinguished public servants, we are nowhere close to discovering whether or not the Americans had secured privileged access to India’s nuclear plans in 1995. Alternatively, we are yet to dispel the possibility that some dirty tricks department somewhere had successfully planted on the senior BJP leader a document whose authenticity is unverifiable.
Politically too the jury is still out over the consequences of the mole hunt. For the moment, the Congress appears to have got the upper hand after it emerged that there was a discrepancy between what Jaswant claimed in his book and what he told Parliament. There was jubilation in the Treasury benches that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a very effective intervention. Equally, there was concern in the BJP that a furtive mole hunt had diverted attention from economic mismanagement and terrorism—issues which are awkward for the UPA Government.
There are four broad conclusions to be drawn from the inconclusive mole controversy. First, that Jaswant erred by attaching inordinate significance to what is at best a clumsily drafted, non-official intelligence input. These days such inputs can be purchased by subscription over the internet or even extracted from blogsites. Jaswant compounded that folly by not being able to anticipate the political fallout of the media’s speculation game.
Secondly, the BJP did not succeed in its efforts to link the mole controversy to the ongoing furore over the nuclear deal with the US. There may be reasons to be concerned about India’s status as an independent nuclear power if the US legislature imposes extraneous conditionalities. However, this is not an inescapable conclusion from a purported letter from one think tank functionary to a former US Ambassador to India.
Thirdly, there was no seriousness on the part of the Government to use Jaswant’s revelations to review its in-house security. Beginning from its astonishing dismissal of the Mitrokhin Archive—which pointed to the KGB’s deep penetration into the political class—and extending to its nonchalance over the leaks from the National Security Council computers, the Government’s commitment to counter-espionage has been dangerously casual. It has been content scoring high-school debating points over the Opposition. To this date, for example, no legal charges have been pressed against a senior intelligence official who defected from two years ago.
The amateur mole hunt has shown that India is too casual about Intelligence. Successive governments have failed to evolve a system that combines functional autonomy with accountability. It’s a shame that the present controversy didn’t become the occasion to foster a more meaningful debate on the scope of gathering and protecting intelligence.
Finally, the mole hunt has inflicted collateral damage on the writing of contemporary history. Indian politicians are not accustomed to penning their political reminiscences. The number of revealing books on Indian politics by its practitioners does not run into double figures. Jaswant tried to initiate a welcome trend. In the process he broke the one cardinal rule governing political memoirs—they are written after retirement. This facilitates honesty, detachment and prevents the past from intruding into the present.
By trying to straddle his political responsibilities with his obligations as a chronicler, Jaswant, tragically, has fallen between two stools. Since Indian politicians don’t retire, his experience may well prove a deterrent to members of the political class sharing their past experiences so freely.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, August 6, 2006)
The media, all of us know, can be a damned nuisance at times. But what really took the biscuit was the sight of TV cameras literally following Jaswant Singh to the toilet at the launch of his controversial A Call To Honour—as if the privacy of the Maurya Sheraton’s Men’s toilet would be the right setting to divulge the name of the elusive mole.
I don’t think this column will be deemed habitually offensive for suggesting that India’s first great mole hunt, conducted in Parliament and through the media, has been anything but a monumental farce. After a fortnight’s frenetic search and oodles of whispered calumny heaped on the reputations of distinguished public servants, we are nowhere close to discovering whether or not the Americans had secured privileged access to India’s nuclear plans in 1995. Alternatively, we are yet to dispel the possibility that some dirty tricks department somewhere had successfully planted on the senior BJP leader a document whose authenticity is unverifiable.
Politically too the jury is still out over the consequences of the mole hunt. For the moment, the Congress appears to have got the upper hand after it emerged that there was a discrepancy between what Jaswant claimed in his book and what he told Parliament. There was jubilation in the Treasury benches that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a very effective intervention. Equally, there was concern in the BJP that a furtive mole hunt had diverted attention from economic mismanagement and terrorism—issues which are awkward for the UPA Government.
There are four broad conclusions to be drawn from the inconclusive mole controversy. First, that Jaswant erred by attaching inordinate significance to what is at best a clumsily drafted, non-official intelligence input. These days such inputs can be purchased by subscription over the internet or even extracted from blogsites. Jaswant compounded that folly by not being able to anticipate the political fallout of the media’s speculation game.
Secondly, the BJP did not succeed in its efforts to link the mole controversy to the ongoing furore over the nuclear deal with the US. There may be reasons to be concerned about India’s status as an independent nuclear power if the US legislature imposes extraneous conditionalities. However, this is not an inescapable conclusion from a purported letter from one think tank functionary to a former US Ambassador to India.
Thirdly, there was no seriousness on the part of the Government to use Jaswant’s revelations to review its in-house security. Beginning from its astonishing dismissal of the Mitrokhin Archive—which pointed to the KGB’s deep penetration into the political class—and extending to its nonchalance over the leaks from the National Security Council computers, the Government’s commitment to counter-espionage has been dangerously casual. It has been content scoring high-school debating points over the Opposition. To this date, for example, no legal charges have been pressed against a senior intelligence official who defected from two years ago.
The amateur mole hunt has shown that India is too casual about Intelligence. Successive governments have failed to evolve a system that combines functional autonomy with accountability. It’s a shame that the present controversy didn’t become the occasion to foster a more meaningful debate on the scope of gathering and protecting intelligence.
Finally, the mole hunt has inflicted collateral damage on the writing of contemporary history. Indian politicians are not accustomed to penning their political reminiscences. The number of revealing books on Indian politics by its practitioners does not run into double figures. Jaswant tried to initiate a welcome trend. In the process he broke the one cardinal rule governing political memoirs—they are written after retirement. This facilitates honesty, detachment and prevents the past from intruding into the present.
By trying to straddle his political responsibilities with his obligations as a chronicler, Jaswant, tragically, has fallen between two stools. Since Indian politicians don’t retire, his experience may well prove a deterrent to members of the political class sharing their past experiences so freely.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, August 6, 2006)
Pakistan is not an estranged brother (August 12, 2006)
The Partition has defined Pakistan's identity. It exists separately because there is India. This fundamental contradiction can't be wished away
By Swapan Dasgupta
When it comes to Pakistan, a very large number of Indians nurture a peculiar complex. Jaswant Singh, whose bestseller, A Call To Honour, represents the candid confessions of an Indian Tory—as distinguished from a Right-winger—is no exception. His second second chapter is entitled “Born of the same womb-Pakistan”. It’s a formulation calculated to put him on par with those sentimental souls who travel to the Wagah border to light candles each year on August 14.
Of course, it is not as simple as that. The Wagah candle brigade harbours a Amar-Akbar-Anthony vision of South Asian fraternity, whereas Jaswant’s perception of Indian identity is rooted in the culture and folklore of Rajputana. Where the twain do meet is in the heartfelt conviction that the Partition of India in 1947 was a monumental tragedy which ought to be negated sometime in the future.
People differ as to who and what was responsible for a large chunk of Indian Muslims going their own way. Jaswant, taking his cue from historian Ayesha Jalal, is comfortable heaping all the opprobrium on the Congress and Jawaharlal Nehru. The “progressives” who also include a large body of Left-leaning Muslims, blame the messy separation on the Muslim League’s willingness to dance to a divisive imperial tune.
What linked these two versions of history is the conviction that Partition was a consequence of “high” politics which scarcely touched the “people”. By this logic, Partition was akin to two brothers moving into separate wings of the ancestral property and being separated by a line drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe. Separate living arrangements, it was implied, didn’t entail the end of kinship.
My belief in the sameness of India and Pakistan collapsed one evening in a London bar some 30 years ago. I was sitting with some friends enjoying the mandatory Friday night drink when a South Asian gentleman sat down in the adjoining table. During a lull in our conversation he butted in abruptly and asked me: “Where are you from?”
I was in no mood for polite conversation that evening and, with a bored expression, answered: “India”.
“I’m from Pakistan”, he replied sombrely.
“It’s the same thing,” I retorted, anxious not to prolong this exchange.
“Same thing?” he asked incredulously. “Oh no, it’s not the same thing. It’s not the same thing at all.”
For close to six decades, well-intentioned Indians have been trying to keep alive the fiction that the divide between India and Pakistan is politically contrived. The drawing rooms of the metros are replete with anecdotes of that Pakistani taxi driver who gave a discounted fare to a visiting Indian. The Sunday supplements abound with mushy articles by apprentice journalists describing their journey to the house in Lahore where grandmother grew up. Grandma’s family, needless to add, “Owned half of Lahore.”
The Lahore disease has proved infectious. Last year, it claimed its most celebrated victim in the form of L.K. Advani.
What prompted Advani to go beyond the demands of protocol at Jinnah’s mausoleum? How did the man Pakistan believed was the “invisible hand” that scuttled the Agra summit abruptly become so weak-kneed about Pakistan?
Advani’s motives were entirely noble. He proceeded on the belief that the biggest obstacle in the path of an enduring Hindu-Muslim understanding in India was the memory and consequences of Partition. If the rulers of India and Pakistan agreed to bury the hatchet and agreed to stop terrorism and respect each other’s borders, the ensuing peace dividend would transform Hindu-Muslim relations radically. In the summer of 2004, many ‘eminent’ Muslims privately advised Advani that if the BJP persevered with the peace process it would win the confidence and votes of Muslims.
I was personally witness to one Muslim intellectual telling Advani that for Muslims the 2004 general election would be as important a turning point as 1952. In 1952, the Muslims broke with their earlier infatuation with the Muslim League—and, for that matter, the slogan of Pakistan—and voted overwhelmingly for the Congress. Now, in 2004, they were on the verge of effecting another tectonic shift—this time to the BJP!
In hindsight, this sounds absolutely cuckoo. However, in the heady atmosphere of early-2004, when almost everything seemed to be going right, there was a market for such fanciful ideas within the BJP.
Of course, the 2004 general election didn’t turn out the way many expected. The Muslim vote for the BJP remained in the realms of fantasy. However, the idea of making the BJP acceptable to Muslims persisted. One of its misplaced manifestations was Advani’s intervention at the Jinnah mausoleum in Karachi.
To a large extent the problem is generational. There is little doubt that till the late-Sixties a section of Muslims, particularly the underclass, had a macabre fascination for Pakistan. In Uttar Pradesh, where the Pakistan movement originated, many middle-class Muslims imagined emigration was the escape route from the loss of a way of life. The aggressive Hindi nationalism and the corresponding decline of Urdu also convinced many Muslims with emotional ties to a disappearing feudal order that India was not the place to be.
Such comforting thoughts of a Promised Land across the international border disappeared with the creation of Bangladesh. Coupled with the beginnings of the Mohajir problem in Karachi, the 1971 war convinced the Muslim community that it was not worth reposing faith in Pakistan. Moreover, the ignominious surrender in Dhaka persuaded the more obtuse sections that the legend of one Muslim soldier being equal to 10 Hindus was a statistical miscalculation.
What these anecdotal titbits go to suggest is that for one generation of Hindus, Muslims and Pakistan are virtually synonymous. Clobbering Pakistan on the head also implied showing the local Muslim his place too. In Gujarat 2002, the local population were quite clear in their mind who Narendra Modi was actually referring to when he flayed Mian Musharraf.
Why single out Modi for opprobrium? Immediately after the Mumbai blasts of July 11, the Prime Minister, his National Security Adviser and Foreign Office mandarins have been vocal in accusing Pakistan. So far, there is nothing concrete to link Pakistan to the blasts but there is mounting evidence to indicate that radical Islam, another euphemism for terrorism, has struck roots in India. It is, however, politically unacceptable to speak openly of the reality of a Fifth Column in our cities. The Samajwadi Party and other bleeding hearts are already protesting against religious profiling by the police. Consequently, with this government too, General Musharraf has become the euphemism for rabid mullahs and their murderous followers. What Modi said angrily in Gujarati after Godhra is being said in understated English by the senior functionaries of the UPA today.
The difference ends here. Whereas many in Gujarat believed that popular retribution is the only way to fight terrorism, the UPA Government has thrown up its hands in despair. It cannot go after all the terrorist cells because the political cost of such an exercise is likely to be enormous. At the same time, its diplomatic offensive against Pakistan lacks teeth and credibility. Consequently, it has fallen on the “Mumbai spirit”—the contemporary term for old-fashioned Hindu fatalism.
The Mumbai spirit is to political mobilisation what the Upanishads are to Hinduism—a mass of abstractions which establishes intellectual superiority in a climate of political servitude. It is manifestation of both fear and defeatism, and it is likely to be interpreted as such by the Islamists. There is a feeling in the Muslim community, quite openly articulated in Pakistan, that Hindus lack the mental wherewithal to wield power. “We were rulers here for 800 years. Inshaallah, we shall return to power here once again”, threatened the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid to his congregation on July 17, after accusing the authorities of targeting every “bearded man” in the country.
The Shahi Imam is a loose cannon who defies the expedient stereotype of the pious maulvi. What then will they say of the belief, again widespread in Pakistan, that the problem with Hindus is their deep sense of inferiority vis-a-vis Muslims? This, of course, is a peculiarly North Indian phenomenon but it continues to shape Indo-Pakistan diplomacy. The good UP small-town Hindu genuflects before the so-called “refined Urdu” of the Muslim feudals while his Punjabi counterpart drools over the greasy food served in the by-lanes of Lahore. Together they add up to the foreign policy conclusion—common to all governments—that the rogue state be given another chance to affirm its allegiance to a composite culture.
It is a colossal blunder that stems from the ‘estranged brother’ act. Pakistan, it is important to realise once and for all, is just a troublesome neighbour who has little in common left with us. We can’t change our neighbour but we are not obliged to love him either.
(Published in Tehelka, August 12, 2006)
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Why bristle about identity? (July 31, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
Last week, London’s Labour-voting smart set, popularly known as the ‘luvvies’, were aghast when a mob of boisterous Bangladeshis forcibly prevented a film crew from entering Brick Lane—the epicentre of the Bangla town in Tower Hamlets. The spat was over the outdoor filming of Monica Ali’s bestselling novel Brick Lane. Indignant Bangladeshi traders—you must not make the mistake of calling them Bengalis—told the media that Ali, of mixed Bangladeshi-English parentage and living in gentrified Dulwich, “is not one of us, she has not lived with us, she knows nothing about us, but she has insulted us.”
The idea of fictional misrepresentation may seem an oxymoron to evolved societies but as the peremptory bans on The Da Vinci Code in Congress-ruled states suggest, the idea of literary license is not conventional wisdom in the Orient. Experience shows that it requires a determined offensive by any organised group to make a mockery of the Constitutional commitment to free speech. It’s all the better if the protestors happen to be classified a “minority”. To date, for example, you cannot purchase a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in a bookshop in India.
It is intriguing that Hindus combine a phenomenally high threshold of tolerance—witness the muted reaction to the July 11 massacre in Mumbai—with astonishing prickliness. One possible explanation of this apparent paradox is our hyper-sensitivity to the views of any ‘outsider’. Germaine Greer, who needlessly intervened in the Brick Lane fracas, has suggested that it was “outlandish” for a person who is more English than Bangladeshi to create her own imagined version of a vulnerable immigrant community. Greer’s central objection, it seems to me, is not that a novelist shouldn’t be entitled to imagine, but that the imagination should be from the perspective of an insider. Ali’s crime, therefore, was two-fold: she was imposing an outsider’s “defining caricature” and she was too English to have such a right.
Greer’s formulation is laced with astonishing condescension—the hallmark of Sixties’ radicalism. She proceeds on the belief that in an unequal world, there are different standards for the coloniser and colonised. It is thus all right for Americans to impose ridiculous caricatures of Englishness on their own Rednecks because it is an engagement of metropolitan equals. However, if Bangladeshis and, presumably, the other wretched of the earth, take offence to an English depiction, the latter will cease to have democratic rights.
What constitutes an “outsider” is, of course, a matter of expediency. A few years ago, Iqbal Wahhab, then editor of a London-based food magazine, was hounded out of journalism for daring to suggest that ‘tandoori’ restaurants in Britain were marred by rude Bangladeshi waiters. Wahabb was of Bangladeshi origin and not an outsider but what he wrote offended a community living off its contrived exotica. He too had to be silenced.
For too long this type of post-colonial claptrap has been conferred respectability for too long by our own establishment. A few months ago, the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, a Government-funded body, organised a literary variant of a Non-Aligned Movement summit. The presumption was that Third World writers should exchange notes about the size of the chips on their shoulders. Remember the time when a raffish one-novel wonder had the gumption to misbehave when V.S. Naipaul asked incredulously why colonialism should matter after six decades of Independence?
For a long time, Indians were encouraged to believe that the West was engaged in a monumental conspiracy to deprive us of our identity, culture and self-respect. This may certainly have been the case with Victorian evangelists of another century, but today’s westerner is at best guilty of glib superficiality—a habitual offence in journalism. Otherwise, all the irritating attributes of self-effacement and post-colonial guilt are handsomely present. There are many South Asians—particularly Bangladeshis in Britain—who have perfected the art of preying on this gullibility. Guilt tripping has become a lucrative business for Third World entrepreneurs.
Can India afford to bask in this nonsense for much longer? Today, we claim to be a hub of a global knowledge economy. Our diplomats demand the right to be seated permanently on the High Table of nuclear weapons states and the Security Council. The presumption is that we have earned the right to be treated as equals by the erstwhile colonisers. In that case, we have forfeited the right to be prickly about imagination of the outsider. An independent Indian perception can be as rigorously conveyed with a measure of civility.
(Published in DNA, July 31, 2006)
Last week, London’s Labour-voting smart set, popularly known as the ‘luvvies’, were aghast when a mob of boisterous Bangladeshis forcibly prevented a film crew from entering Brick Lane—the epicentre of the Bangla town in Tower Hamlets. The spat was over the outdoor filming of Monica Ali’s bestselling novel Brick Lane. Indignant Bangladeshi traders—you must not make the mistake of calling them Bengalis—told the media that Ali, of mixed Bangladeshi-English parentage and living in gentrified Dulwich, “is not one of us, she has not lived with us, she knows nothing about us, but she has insulted us.”
The idea of fictional misrepresentation may seem an oxymoron to evolved societies but as the peremptory bans on The Da Vinci Code in Congress-ruled states suggest, the idea of literary license is not conventional wisdom in the Orient. Experience shows that it requires a determined offensive by any organised group to make a mockery of the Constitutional commitment to free speech. It’s all the better if the protestors happen to be classified a “minority”. To date, for example, you cannot purchase a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in a bookshop in India.
It is intriguing that Hindus combine a phenomenally high threshold of tolerance—witness the muted reaction to the July 11 massacre in Mumbai—with astonishing prickliness. One possible explanation of this apparent paradox is our hyper-sensitivity to the views of any ‘outsider’. Germaine Greer, who needlessly intervened in the Brick Lane fracas, has suggested that it was “outlandish” for a person who is more English than Bangladeshi to create her own imagined version of a vulnerable immigrant community. Greer’s central objection, it seems to me, is not that a novelist shouldn’t be entitled to imagine, but that the imagination should be from the perspective of an insider. Ali’s crime, therefore, was two-fold: she was imposing an outsider’s “defining caricature” and she was too English to have such a right.
Greer’s formulation is laced with astonishing condescension—the hallmark of Sixties’ radicalism. She proceeds on the belief that in an unequal world, there are different standards for the coloniser and colonised. It is thus all right for Americans to impose ridiculous caricatures of Englishness on their own Rednecks because it is an engagement of metropolitan equals. However, if Bangladeshis and, presumably, the other wretched of the earth, take offence to an English depiction, the latter will cease to have democratic rights.
What constitutes an “outsider” is, of course, a matter of expediency. A few years ago, Iqbal Wahhab, then editor of a London-based food magazine, was hounded out of journalism for daring to suggest that ‘tandoori’ restaurants in Britain were marred by rude Bangladeshi waiters. Wahabb was of Bangladeshi origin and not an outsider but what he wrote offended a community living off its contrived exotica. He too had to be silenced.
For too long this type of post-colonial claptrap has been conferred respectability for too long by our own establishment. A few months ago, the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, a Government-funded body, organised a literary variant of a Non-Aligned Movement summit. The presumption was that Third World writers should exchange notes about the size of the chips on their shoulders. Remember the time when a raffish one-novel wonder had the gumption to misbehave when V.S. Naipaul asked incredulously why colonialism should matter after six decades of Independence?
For a long time, Indians were encouraged to believe that the West was engaged in a monumental conspiracy to deprive us of our identity, culture and self-respect. This may certainly have been the case with Victorian evangelists of another century, but today’s westerner is at best guilty of glib superficiality—a habitual offence in journalism. Otherwise, all the irritating attributes of self-effacement and post-colonial guilt are handsomely present. There are many South Asians—particularly Bangladeshis in Britain—who have perfected the art of preying on this gullibility. Guilt tripping has become a lucrative business for Third World entrepreneurs.
Can India afford to bask in this nonsense for much longer? Today, we claim to be a hub of a global knowledge economy. Our diplomats demand the right to be seated permanently on the High Table of nuclear weapons states and the Security Council. The presumption is that we have earned the right to be treated as equals by the erstwhile colonisers. In that case, we have forfeited the right to be prickly about imagination of the outsider. An independent Indian perception can be as rigorously conveyed with a measure of civility.
(Published in DNA, July 31, 2006)
BJP must not flirt with foes (July 30, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
If public memory is woefully short, the recollections of politicians tend to be conveniently expedient. Those of us who remember the heady days of May 1998 when India exploded its nuclear devices in Pokhran will recall that the national celebratory mood did not always cut across party lines. The two Communist parties—which had in earlier decades celebrated the “worker’s bomb” of the Soviet Union and China—were incensed. Equally agitated was the “progressive” wing of the Congress whose world view was aggressively articulated by K. Natwar Singh, then a member of the Lok Sabha. Eight years after Pokhran-II, it would be instructive to re-visit some of the pronouncements of the Comrades and the Nehruvians—if only to confer profundity to the saying that consistency is the virtue of little minds.
None of this history is unfamiliar to Yashwant Sinha, the BJP Rajya Sabha member who has taken it upon himself the onerous task of delivering his party to grateful clutches of Amar Singh and Sitaram Yechuri—the moving spirits behind the proposed parliamentary resolution on the Indo-US nuclear understanding. Sinha is sufficiently appreciative of the political instincts of the cause he represents to realise that being seen on TV addressing the media with the Samajwadi Party’s public face by his side (as he did last Thursday) does not bring instant comfort to those who swear by Indian nationalism. Making common cause with the public defenders of SIMI doesn’t exactly convince the average Indian that national security is uppermost in the minds of the BJP.
Nor were matters helped by Sinha’s boast that even Natwar Singh was on his side. The man who was instrumental in pushing the NDA Government into acquiescing to the “unanimous” pro-Saddam Hussein resolution of Parliament in 2003 may hate the Americans for what they did to his great Iraqi friend. But didn’t the BJP, only a year ago, wave the UN-sponsored Volcker Report to argue that the recipients of oil vouchers had sold the country’s foreign policy for 30 pieces of silver?
The attempts by what can best be called the Hizbollah faction of the BJP to win brownie points with the Samajwadi Party may yet come to nought because some of the Comrades are loath to abandon political untouchability. That, however, would be an unforeseen face saver. The larger question is: what is the BJP doing in the company of those who hate America because of its unrelenting fight against terrorism?
This is not to suggest that everything is hunky-dory with the Indo-US relationship. There are some aspects of the ongoing legislative ratification of the July 18, 2004 agreement which warrant concern. These are concerns shared by the White House too. The BJP would be justified in expressing these concerns forcefully and with clarity. But nit-picking over a clause or two cannot be allowed to divert attention from the fact that the nuclear understanding is symbolic of a larger strategic partnership.
India today needs business partners, markets and a loose security umbrella to further its remarkable success story. The US is a “natural ally” in the quest for technological excellence and the fight against jihadi terror. In a world which is lurching towards a civilisational conflict, India and the US will inevitably be on the same side of the divide, unless India is overwhelmed by dhimmitude. For all his shortcomings, the Prime Minister has grasped this, although vote bank politics rule out any formal acknowledgement of national threat. It is astonishing that the BJP believes it can do business with forces whose primary commitment isn’t (and never was) to India.
Where it needs to oppose uncompromisingly—as on the Office of Profit Bill and the lax national security—the BJP either effects backdoor compromises or spouts inanities. Where it needs to be supportive it goes ballistic and ends up unwittingly embracing Communists and jihadis. Is there a leadership left in the party? Or, can any hustler hijack the agenda?
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 30, 2006)
If public memory is woefully short, the recollections of politicians tend to be conveniently expedient. Those of us who remember the heady days of May 1998 when India exploded its nuclear devices in Pokhran will recall that the national celebratory mood did not always cut across party lines. The two Communist parties—which had in earlier decades celebrated the “worker’s bomb” of the Soviet Union and China—were incensed. Equally agitated was the “progressive” wing of the Congress whose world view was aggressively articulated by K. Natwar Singh, then a member of the Lok Sabha. Eight years after Pokhran-II, it would be instructive to re-visit some of the pronouncements of the Comrades and the Nehruvians—if only to confer profundity to the saying that consistency is the virtue of little minds.
None of this history is unfamiliar to Yashwant Sinha, the BJP Rajya Sabha member who has taken it upon himself the onerous task of delivering his party to grateful clutches of Amar Singh and Sitaram Yechuri—the moving spirits behind the proposed parliamentary resolution on the Indo-US nuclear understanding. Sinha is sufficiently appreciative of the political instincts of the cause he represents to realise that being seen on TV addressing the media with the Samajwadi Party’s public face by his side (as he did last Thursday) does not bring instant comfort to those who swear by Indian nationalism. Making common cause with the public defenders of SIMI doesn’t exactly convince the average Indian that national security is uppermost in the minds of the BJP.
Nor were matters helped by Sinha’s boast that even Natwar Singh was on his side. The man who was instrumental in pushing the NDA Government into acquiescing to the “unanimous” pro-Saddam Hussein resolution of Parliament in 2003 may hate the Americans for what they did to his great Iraqi friend. But didn’t the BJP, only a year ago, wave the UN-sponsored Volcker Report to argue that the recipients of oil vouchers had sold the country’s foreign policy for 30 pieces of silver?
The attempts by what can best be called the Hizbollah faction of the BJP to win brownie points with the Samajwadi Party may yet come to nought because some of the Comrades are loath to abandon political untouchability. That, however, would be an unforeseen face saver. The larger question is: what is the BJP doing in the company of those who hate America because of its unrelenting fight against terrorism?
This is not to suggest that everything is hunky-dory with the Indo-US relationship. There are some aspects of the ongoing legislative ratification of the July 18, 2004 agreement which warrant concern. These are concerns shared by the White House too. The BJP would be justified in expressing these concerns forcefully and with clarity. But nit-picking over a clause or two cannot be allowed to divert attention from the fact that the nuclear understanding is symbolic of a larger strategic partnership.
India today needs business partners, markets and a loose security umbrella to further its remarkable success story. The US is a “natural ally” in the quest for technological excellence and the fight against jihadi terror. In a world which is lurching towards a civilisational conflict, India and the US will inevitably be on the same side of the divide, unless India is overwhelmed by dhimmitude. For all his shortcomings, the Prime Minister has grasped this, although vote bank politics rule out any formal acknowledgement of national threat. It is astonishing that the BJP believes it can do business with forces whose primary commitment isn’t (and never was) to India.
Where it needs to oppose uncompromisingly—as on the Office of Profit Bill and the lax national security—the BJP either effects backdoor compromises or spouts inanities. Where it needs to be supportive it goes ballistic and ends up unwittingly embracing Communists and jihadis. Is there a leadership left in the party? Or, can any hustler hijack the agenda?
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 30, 2006)
Saturday, July 29, 2006
The dynamics of deadlock (July 29, 2006)
Mumbai is in fatal denial. That has made a wimp of a once spirited city
By Swapan Dasgupta
Let me make yet another horrible confession of political incorrectness. I happen to be among the minuscule die-hards who are instinctively at ease with Bombay, rather than Mumbai. Perish the thought that this has anything to do with any aesthetic repugnance for the Shiv Sena-BJP government that effected the change in the mid-1990s. It is simply a question of habit and a dogged refusal to change with the times. I can’t speak for Marathi and Hindi speakers but to one of Macaulay’s orphans, Bombay sounds more natural than Mumbai. In secular India, however, it is de rigueur to say Mumbaikar rather than Bombayite.
I am, of course, neither a Mumbaikar nor a Bombayite. My closest connection with the fabled “Mumbai spirit” about which the English TV channels and a particular breed of bleeding hearts go on and on, is the striking, light-blue bottle of Bombay Sapphire. I have always been a casual visitor to the city—one who takes taxis rather than the commuter trains to travel from Colaba to Borivili—and naturally prefer the verandah of the Bombay Gymkhana to the conviviality of the Ganesh Lunch Home. My Bombay is hazy and centred on people rather than places.
Yet, even from a distance, the slow transition from Bombay to Mumbai was more than apparent. In my mind, there were always two Bombays. The first, gleamed from countless Hindi films of the Sixties, centred on the juxtaposition of the bright lights of Malabar Hill with the rain-soaked slums where the other half lived. Bombay, it was apparent, was a city of extremes—where fat cats and dynamic entrepreneurs prospered and working people, like Raj Kapoor in Shree 420, struggled. It was also a metropolis marked by the archaic charm of the Parsis, the dash of the Gujaratis and the civilised decency of the Marathi middle classes.
Bombay was always an old city. The Indo-Saracenic architecture of its public buildings and the lovely art-deco style of the 1940s apartment buildings, gave Bombay a style of its own. Of the three cities created by the Raj, Bombay, in fact, was always the least British. Unlike Calcutta where Marwaris serviced the dominant Scot-dominated boxwallahs, the economy of Bombay was always firmly in the hands of the “natives”.
The implication of this on the collective mindset of Bombay was profound. The nationalist movement was very generously funded by the Bombay elite because they wanted a state that would accord preferential treatment to Indians. At the same time, the more visceral dimensions of anti-colonialism which were so marked among the Bengali babus in Calcutta and the impoverished Muslim gentry of the United Provinces was missing from the city. Bombay bowed to three deities—Ganpati and Goddess Lakshmi, the icons of good living and wealth, and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the symbol of Hindu assertion.
The importance of Shivaji to Bombay can hardly be overstated. He was, of course, the audacious folk hero who had made a daring escape from Agra fort and clawed one of Aurangzeb’s general’s to death. At the same time, he was the founder of the only, self-avowedly Hindu kingdom in modern times. The Hindus, it is said, were always a nation who lacked the vision of a state. In Hindu pad-padshahi, Shivaji and his Peshwa successors conferred on the Hindus a sense of governance.
The British realised the importance of this phenomenon far more presciently than future Indian historians. A few years ago, I read the autobiography of the Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the man who was assassinated by Madanlal Dhingra in London—an act of retribution for O’Dwyer’s complicity in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar. A passage from the book, published in 1925, is worth recounting. The Maratha Brahmins, wrote O’Dwyer, “have by actual experience learned what it is to rule; the others have, for at least nine centuries, been under successive conquerors; and with all their forensic ability show so far no indications of any capacity for organising a government of their own.”
The profound sense of civic pride and local activism that was the hallmark of Bombay was a legacy of this historical ability to wield power. Bombay was always a well-governed city because the politicians of all hues—Congressmen, Socialists, Communists and Hindu nationalists—imbibed the Peshwa tradition of sophisticated statecraft. All the major political and social movements, from the Dalit self-respect movement to the Hindu assertiveness over Ram Janmabhoomi, found reflection in Bombay.
It was a happy city too. So much so that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a stalwart of the Bombay Bar, always dreamt of spending his last years in the house on Malabar Hill rather than some god-forsaken palace in Karachi.
The deluge began with a series of parallel developments—the growth of a lumpen Shiv Sena, the rise of a powerful Muslim underworld and, finally, the coming of age of a deracinated cosmopolitan elite. Many of these developments had their origins between the mid-Sixties and early-Eighties but they flowered and took shape around the time that Bombay was unceremoniously dumped for Mumbai.
The 1992-93 riots were, in many ways, a turning point. The more lumpen elements of the Shiv Sena emerged as saviours of the Hindus and soon turned their skills from protection to extortion. The more rabid of the Bhendi Bazar lot acquired disproportionate clout within the Muslim community, overshadowed pragmatic elements like the Bohras, and, after linking up with the underworld, formed the nucleus of the terrorist cells which organised the first devastating bombings in March 1993. And, finally, the riots and the subsequent serial blasts became the occasion for a clutch of cosmopolitan activists—with generous help from the media—to hijack the agenda of activism. Working in the Times of India during those turbulent days, I recall the editorial savagery which greeted the suggestion that the ISI and Dawood Ibrahim had anything to do with the blasts. Rajdeep Sardesai even wrote an edit page article regretting that Dawood’s patriotism was being questioned by nasty saffronites.
Given this backdrop, the public life of today’s Mumbai has only a passing resemblance with the vibrant activism of Bombay. For all its obsession with money, Bombay always nurtured a fierce sense of right and wrong. Even Bal Thackeray’s movement was born of a legitimate sense of marginalisation felt by Marathi-speaking citizens. And, with leaders like S.A. Dange and George Fernandes at the helm, the Communists and Socialists did address the issue of working class rights quite effectively.
After Mumbai, the priorities have got horribly skewed.
It’s the depoliticisation of civic culture that is at the root of the problem. It is pertinent to ask whether this was a pattern triggered by the media or an emerging trend that merely found reflection in the growing importance of mindless supplements and Page Three. Whatever the reason, it witnessed the emergence of a wave of hedonism and a socially-sanctioned disregard for larger community interests. There is something profoundly wrong when advertising agencies start setting the social agenda—and this is precisely what has been happening in Mumbai for more than a decade.
Mumbai has unleashed the powerful entrepreneurial instincts of a people and, at the same time, been unable to give them a sense of belonging. I have little or no doubt that if Mumbai’s civic crisis persists, these very dynamic forces will vote with their feet and relocate nationally or globally. There is nothing but the fear of more bombings to tie them to Mumbai.
Seen from a distance, it is Mumbai’s disinterest with itself that was at the heart of the “Mumbai spirit” which was so lavishly celebrated after the July 11 bombings. A carnage of this magnitude would, in any healthy democracy, have provoked a bout of both anger and soul-searching.
It did neither.
Mumbaikars, if media reports are any indication, tut-tutted their way home from the destruction on the tracks, exchanged horror stories and then decided that it was best to pretend nothing unusual has happened. This was no stiff upper-lip and forbearance at work; it was a remarkable display of ostrich-like behaviour—pretending that nothing has happened.
It was this growing disinclination to engage with the city that gave a licence to the jihadis in the first place. A sense of commitment to the city would have led to the red alert being sounded at least three years ago—after the Gateway of India and the Ghatkopar blasts. Those who observed the Azad maidan rally of Muslim organisations during the visit of President Bush earlier this year should have alerted people to a new radical menace.
Instead, everyone chose to look the other way. They salvaged their conscience by not rioting after 200 people died.
Killing innocent Muslims in an insane act of retribution was, of course, never the answer but the least that was expected of Mumbaikars was a focussed show of anger. What we have seen instead—rather, the TV channels have shown—are gestures of collective wimpishness. Mumbai needs to show it cares for itself and the country.
(Published in Tehelka, July 29, 2006)
Friday, July 28, 2006
The biggest threat (28/07/2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
In the dominant political culture of India, citizens are encouraged to treat terrorism as an unavoidable feature of modern existence and undertake no independent initiatives to counter it. When seven bombs on commuter trains left 200 people dead in Mumbai on July 11, the gratuitous advice from ‘responsible’ quarters was for angry citizens to observe a minute’s silence, emulate activist celebrities in wearing white on a specified date and then go back to work pretending nothing has happened. When deadly explosives packed in pressure cookers killed some 25 devotees at Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan temple, the suggested palliative was a dignified bout of Indian classical music.
When occasionally, very occasionally, citizens choose to break the shackles of liberal squeamishness and fight back, the full weight of ‘enlightened’ opprobrium is hurled against them. The human rights industry, famous for its remarkable sense of selective indignation, the editorial classes and the eminence grise of the NGO sector rise as one to discredit anything that smacks of either retribution or self-defence.
Even before the late-night massacre of 32 adivasis by Maoists in the Errabore relief camp in the Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh on July 17, a fierce propaganda offensive had been unleashed to paint the Salwa Judum movement in the darkest of colours. In December 2005, a group of ‘human rights’ activists released a report denouncing the Salwa Judum movement as an assault on the dignity of the tribal population. While silent on the atrocities committed by Maoists, the report accused “forces from other states” of “behaving like an occupation army.” The demand was made for a judicial inquiry into all atrocities committed by Salwa Judum activists and the police. In a feeble attempt to be even-handed, the report also called on the Maoists to provide details of all those killed by them.
Since this report was too tendentious to be digested by even the normally gullible media, another group, this time comprising well-connected senior journalists, retired bureaucrats and academics, with the grandiose title of Independent Citizens Initiative, ventured into Dantewada and other parts of the old Bastar district in May this year. Although there were some critical references to the Maoists, this report—which received very wide coverage—accused the BJP-led Chhattisgarh Government of using Salwa Judum to divide tribal society and use hapless adivasis as cannon fodder against the Left extremists. The handful—150 out of 5,000 to be exact—of Special Police Officers (SPO) appointed by the local administration who were issued primitive .303 rifles were also accused of unleashing a wave of terror. In these columns, Ramchandra Guha, a member of the ‘independent’ study, described the Congress’ Leader of Opposition Mahendra Karma—the man credited with kick-starting Salwa Judum—as a “dangerous populist” and compared him to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
The call for the Government to disband all relief camps and put an end to the Salwa Judum movement was subsequently echoed by the CPI(M) Politburo and the former Chhattisgrah chief minister Ajit Jogi. A meeting of the UPA-Left Coordination Committee held earlier this month, ostensibly to discuss inflation and price rise, ended up with the Communists badgering the Congress to pressure its state unit into withdrawing support to Salwa Judum.
The magnitude of the opposition to Salwa Judum may seem surprising considering its scope is so far limited to Dantewada district—a Congress, not BJP stronghold. Yet the CPI(Maoist) has thrown its entire resources—both political and military—behind an attempt to snuff out a popular movement against its armed terror. Almost the entire top Maoist leadership, mainly drawn from Andhra Pradesh, has moved into the Dandakaranya region, particularly the 3,924 sq km of the thickly forested Abujhmad region. It has shifted both men and material from adjoining Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Gadhchiroli district of Maharashtra into Abujhmad to ensure that Salwa Judum does not spread beyond the 645 villages of Dantewada. Equally, the Maoists are determined to intimidate the 50,000 or so tribals who have taken sanctuary in 32 government-run relief camps.
Salwa Judum poses an enormous long-term threat to the Maoists. Contrary to what its overground publicists claim, the so-called socio-economic underpinnings of Maoism are feeble. To craft the Pashupati-Tirupati revolutionary corridor, the gun-totting guerrillas depend on terror and inaccessibility. The presence of just a handful of AK-47-wielding, trigger happy guerrillas in a remote village—where it takes hours for any police party to reach—is enough to transform a clump of forest land into a ‘liberated’ zone. Since the state, in most cases, doesn’t have the ability to offer 24x7 protection, many villages have succumbed to the Maoists without a fight. Today, Maoists are said to be in a commanding position over some 20 per cent of India’s forests. What a senior police officer in Raipur called the “tyranny of distance” has facilitated the Maoist advance.
The Maoist takeover of a village is also accompanied by a ruthless policy of divide-and-rule which leads to one section—particularly unemployed youth—becoming collaborators. This is followed by the imposition of draconian controls over the economic and social life of the community—restrictions on tendu leaf collection, ban on toddy and cock fights and supervision of marriages. In ‘difficult’ villages, occupation is preceded by the systematic destruction of all hand pumps and the demolition of school buildings—because these can be used as makeshift police camps. Congress leader Karma was not exaggerating in describing Maoism as “an assault on our tribal identity.”
The genesis of Salwa Judum lies in the refusal of a large section of tribal society to endure this nonsense any longer. What began in May 2005 in Kutru village in Dantewada and quickly spread to neighbouring areas was essentially a non-cooperation movement against an occupying Red Army. Maoists and their sympathisers were chased out of villages and their supply chain was crippled. When large 8,000-strong gatherings of local people voted in unison to fight the Maoist menace, if necessary with bows and arrows, Chhattisgarh saw the beginnings of a popular upsurge.
The local administration had neither the force nor resources to provide adequate protection to the Salwa Judum. The Maoists responded to the challenge with characteristic savagery. On February 28 this year, 26 people died in a landmine explosion at the venue of a Salwa Judum rally. On April 28, 13 people were abducted from Mankota village and killed in a particularly manner. The idea was to intimidate villagers into submission.
The Maoist reign of terror has yielded results. The 50,000 people living in the relief camps have not been forcibly relocated—as Maoist pamphleteers suggest. They are refugees who have fled their villages with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. During a visit to the Dornapal and Kutru camps earlier this month, I was struck by the absence of cattle and livestock. The adivasis said they had left all their possessions in the villages where, presumably, the Maoists had appropriated them. “We are willing to return, but only with protection” was the universal refrain in the camps.
A feckless Central Government has not yet come to terms with the enormity of what the Prime Minister called the “biggest threat” to the country’s internal security. The Maoists cannot be tamed by pouring money into inefficient welfare schemes. The guerrillas want to usurp political power by force. They can only be removed by a full-scale military operation aimed at recapturing lost territory. Salwa Judum can be a fitting complement to a mammoth counter-insurgency drive. It needs to be replicated throughout the Maoist belt.
The Telegraph, July 28, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
The biggest threat (July 28, 2006)
Salwa Judum should be replicated throughout the Maoist belt
By Swapan Dasgupta
In the dominant political culture of India, citizens are encouraged to treat terrorism as an unavoidable feature of modern existence and undertake no independent initiatives to counter it. When seven bombs on commuter trains left 200 people dead in Mumbai on July 11, the gratuitous advice from ‘responsible’ quarters was for angry citizens to observe a minute’s silence, emulate activist celebrities in wearing white on a specified date and then go back to work pretending nothing has happened. When deadly explosives packed in pressure cookers killed some 25 devotees at Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan temple, the suggested palliative was a dignified bout of Indian classical music.
When occasionally, very occasionally, citizens choose to break the shackles of liberal squeamishness and fight back, the full weight of ‘enlightened’ opprobrium is hurled against them. The human rights industry, famous for its remarkable sense of selective indignation, the editorial classes and the eminence grise of the NGO sector rise as one to discredit anything that smacks of either retribution or self-defence.
Even before the late-night massacre of 32 adivasis by Maoists in the Errabore relief camp in the Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh on July 17, a fierce propaganda offensive had been unleashed to paint the Salwa Judum movement in the darkest of colours. In December 2005, a group of ‘human rights’ activists released a report denouncing the Salwa Judum movement as an assault on the dignity of the tribal population. While silent on the atrocities committed by Maoists, the report accused “forces from other states” of “behaving like an occupation army.” The demand was made for a judicial inquiry into all atrocities committed by Salwa Judum activists and the police. In a feeble attempt to be even-handed, the report also called on the Maoists to provide details of all those killed by them.
Since this report was too tendentious to be digested by even the normally gullible media, another group, this time comprising well-connected senior journalists, retired bureaucrats and academics, with the grandiose title of Independent Citizens Initiative, ventured into Dantewada and other parts of the old Bastar district in May this year. Although there were some critical references to the Maoists, this report—which received very wide coverage—accused the BJP-led Chhattisgarh Government of using Salwa Judum to divide tribal society and use hapless adivasis as cannon fodder against the Left extremists. The handful—150 out of 5,000 to be exact—of Special Police Officers (SPO) appointed by the local administration who were issued primitive .303 rifles were also accused of unleashing a wave of terror. In these columns, Ramchandra Guha, a member of the ‘independent’ study, described the Congress’ Leader of Opposition Mahendra Karma—the man credited with kick-starting Salwa Judum—as a “dangerous populist” and compared him to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
The call for the Government to disband all relief camps and put an end to the Salwa Judum movement was subsequently echoed by the CPI(M) Politburo and the former Chhattisgrah chief minister Ajit Jogi. A meeting of the UPA-Left Coordination Committee held earlier this month, ostensibly to discuss inflation and price rise, ended up with the Communists badgering the Congress to pressure its state unit into withdrawing support to Salwa Judum.
The magnitude of the opposition to Salwa Judum may seem surprising considering its scope is so far limited to Dantewada district—a Congress, not BJP stronghold. Yet the CPI(Maoist) has thrown its entire resources—both political and military—behind an attempt to snuff out a popular movement against its armed terror. Almost the entire top Maoist leadership, mainly drawn from Andhra Pradesh, has moved into the Dandakaranya region, particularly the 3,924 sq km of the thickly forested Abujhmad region. It has shifted both men and material from adjoining Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Gadhchiroli district of Maharashtra into Abujhmad to ensure that Salwa Judum does not spread beyond the 645 villages of Dantewada. Equally, the Maoists are determined to intimidate the 50,000 or so tribals who have taken sanctuary in 32 government-run relief camps.
Salwa Judum poses an enormous long-term threat to the Maoists. Contrary to what its overground publicists claim, the so-called socio-economic underpinnings of Maoism are feeble. To craft the Pashupati-Tirupati revolutionary corridor, the gun-totting guerrillas depend on terror and inaccessibility. The presence of just a handful of AK-47-wielding, trigger happy guerrillas in a remote village—where it takes hours for any police party to reach—is enough to transform a clump of forest land into a ‘liberated’ zone. Since the state, in most cases, doesn’t have the ability to offer 24x7 protection, many villages have succumbed to the Maoists without a fight. Today, Maoists are said to be in a commanding position over some 20 per cent of India’s forests. What a senior police officer in Raipur called the “tyranny of distance” has facilitated the Maoist advance.
The Maoist takeover of a village is also accompanied by a ruthless policy of divide-and-rule which leads to one section—particularly unemployed youth—becoming collaborators. This is followed by the imposition of draconian controls over the economic and social life of the community—restrictions on tendu leaf collection, ban on toddy and cock fights and supervision of marriages. In ‘difficult’ villages, occupation is preceded by the systematic destruction of all hand pumps and the demolition of school buildings—because these can be used as makeshift police camps. Congress leader Karma was not exaggerating in describing Maoism as “an assault on our tribal identity.”
The genesis of Salwa Judum lies in the refusal of a large section of tribal society to endure this nonsense any longer. What began in May 2005 in Kutru village in Dantewada and quickly spread to neighbouring areas was essentially a non-cooperation movement against an occupying Red Army. Maoists and their sympathisers were chased out of villages and their supply chain was crippled. When large 8,000-strong gatherings of local people voted in unison to fight the Maoist menace, if necessary with bows and arrows, Chhattisgarh saw the beginnings of a popular upsurge.
The local administration had neither the force nor resources to provide adequate protection to the Salwa Judum. The Maoists responded to the challenge with characteristic savagery. On February 28 this year, 26 people died in a landmine explosion at the venue of a Salwa Judum rally. On April 28, 13 people were abducted from Mankota village and killed in a particularly manner. The idea was to intimidate villagers into submission.
The Maoist reign of terror has yielded results. The 50,000 people living in the relief camps have not been forcibly relocated—as Maoist pamphleteers suggest. They are refugees who have fled their villages with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. During a visit to the Dornapal and Kutru camps earlier this month, I was struck by the absence of cattle and livestock. The adivasis said they had left all their possessions in the villages where, presumably, the Maoists had appropriated them. “We are willing to return, but only with protection” was the universal refrain in the camps.
A feckless Central Government has not yet come to terms with the enormity of what the Prime Minister called the “biggest threat” to the country’s internal security. The Maoists cannot be tamed by pouring money into inefficient welfare schemes. The guerrillas want to usurp political power by force. They can only be removed by a full-scale military operation aimed at recapturing lost territory. Salwa Judum can be a fitting complement to a mammoth counter-insurgency drive. It needs to be replicated throughout the Maoist belt.
(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, July 28, 2006)
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Rise above Ummah victimhood (July 23, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
What do you say to a Prime Minister who, a few days after ruling out the re-introduction of a POTA-like legislation, admits to a meeting of Chief Secretaries that our response to terrorism has been “inadequate”? Should we praise Manmohan Singh for realising the truth? Alternatively, should we pillory him for abdicating one of the prime responsibilities of government—the protection of the citizen?
Since the serial blasts in Mumbai on July 11, the Government has been conducting itself like a headless chicken. Having flaunted a ritualistic G-8 condemnation of the bombings as a spectacular diplomatic triumph, it went into a tailspin after the world leaders greeted the charge of the ubiquitous Pakistani hand with more than a measure of scepticism. To cap it all, the country had to be subjected to the cocky insolence of President Pervez Musharraf demanding “proof” of Pakistan’s involvement. Having put the “peace process” on hold before embarking for St. Petersburg, Manmohan Singh returned a mellowed man.
Nor have things been any better on the domestic front. First, there was the outrageous insinuation by Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh that Hindu groups had a habit of committing atrocities and blaming the “other”. The theme was gratefully echoed by loose cannons like the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid and the redoubtable general secretary of the West Bengal CPI(M) Biman Bose. The Shahi Imam was addressing his congregation after Friday prayers and Bose was addressing a Milli Council meeting in Kolkata. Like good secularists they felt that a convenient way of averting awkward questions of culpability is to turn victimhood on its head, even if it means whitewashing murderers. .
Secondly, there were desperate attempts to deflect attention from the Government’s own failings by attacking Narendra Modi for what he did not say in Mumbai last week and Jaswant Singh for what he did not do in Kandahar seven years ago.
Finally, in an act that straddled a twilight zone between stupidity and lunacy, the Government decided to ape totalitarian China and block access to blogsites—the cyber variants of coffee house chatter. Reuters quoted Gulshan Rai, director of the Government-run Indian Computer Emergency Response Team justifying the ban because “the blogs are pitting Muslim against non-Muslim.”
The Government’s disorientation is not the result of some Inspector Clouseau being at the helm. It is a consequence of its inability to face up to the political ramifications of the Mumbai blasts. The investigations may not have produced concrete results as yet but they definitely point to the involvement of home-grown Muslim terrorists.
This comes as no surprise. The March 1993 blasts were also the handiwork of home-grown terrorists, many of whom subsequently fled to Pakistan, as were the Ghatkopar and Gateway of India bombings in 2003. The 1993 and 2003 blasts were attributed to retaliation for the Mumbai and Gujarat riots respectively.
What was the July 11 carnage meant to convey? That jihadis have the ability and technology to bleed India to death?
Since no group has yet claimed responsibility, the motives are still a matter of conjecture. However, the portents from the Varanasi bombings, the RDX haul from Ellora and the foiled fidayeen attacks on Ayodhya and the RSS headquarters in Nagpur are ominous. Despite official attempts to point accusing fingers at foreign paratroopers, all these incidents involved Indian jihadis. In other words, while there may be an overseas command centre of global jihad—maybe located in Pakistan—the war is actually being conducted by fiercely motivated locals.
The leadership of the Indian Muslim community can no longer take refuge in denial. Nor is there any percentage in appealing to Sonia Gandhi to stop racial profiling by the police. After Mumbai, the community bears a collective responsibility for isolating and hounding out the radicals. For this to happen, it is incumbent that Indian Muslims dissociate completely from pan-Islamism. A clutch of half-baked and fanciful theories of ummah victimhood in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, et al, are responsible for turning gullible youth into monstrous killers.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 23, 2006)
What do you say to a Prime Minister who, a few days after ruling out the re-introduction of a POTA-like legislation, admits to a meeting of Chief Secretaries that our response to terrorism has been “inadequate”? Should we praise Manmohan Singh for realising the truth? Alternatively, should we pillory him for abdicating one of the prime responsibilities of government—the protection of the citizen?
Since the serial blasts in Mumbai on July 11, the Government has been conducting itself like a headless chicken. Having flaunted a ritualistic G-8 condemnation of the bombings as a spectacular diplomatic triumph, it went into a tailspin after the world leaders greeted the charge of the ubiquitous Pakistani hand with more than a measure of scepticism. To cap it all, the country had to be subjected to the cocky insolence of President Pervez Musharraf demanding “proof” of Pakistan’s involvement. Having put the “peace process” on hold before embarking for St. Petersburg, Manmohan Singh returned a mellowed man.
Nor have things been any better on the domestic front. First, there was the outrageous insinuation by Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh that Hindu groups had a habit of committing atrocities and blaming the “other”. The theme was gratefully echoed by loose cannons like the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid and the redoubtable general secretary of the West Bengal CPI(M) Biman Bose. The Shahi Imam was addressing his congregation after Friday prayers and Bose was addressing a Milli Council meeting in Kolkata. Like good secularists they felt that a convenient way of averting awkward questions of culpability is to turn victimhood on its head, even if it means whitewashing murderers. .
Secondly, there were desperate attempts to deflect attention from the Government’s own failings by attacking Narendra Modi for what he did not say in Mumbai last week and Jaswant Singh for what he did not do in Kandahar seven years ago.
Finally, in an act that straddled a twilight zone between stupidity and lunacy, the Government decided to ape totalitarian China and block access to blogsites—the cyber variants of coffee house chatter. Reuters quoted Gulshan Rai, director of the Government-run Indian Computer Emergency Response Team justifying the ban because “the blogs are pitting Muslim against non-Muslim.”
The Government’s disorientation is not the result of some Inspector Clouseau being at the helm. It is a consequence of its inability to face up to the political ramifications of the Mumbai blasts. The investigations may not have produced concrete results as yet but they definitely point to the involvement of home-grown Muslim terrorists.
This comes as no surprise. The March 1993 blasts were also the handiwork of home-grown terrorists, many of whom subsequently fled to Pakistan, as were the Ghatkopar and Gateway of India bombings in 2003. The 1993 and 2003 blasts were attributed to retaliation for the Mumbai and Gujarat riots respectively.
What was the July 11 carnage meant to convey? That jihadis have the ability and technology to bleed India to death?
Since no group has yet claimed responsibility, the motives are still a matter of conjecture. However, the portents from the Varanasi bombings, the RDX haul from Ellora and the foiled fidayeen attacks on Ayodhya and the RSS headquarters in Nagpur are ominous. Despite official attempts to point accusing fingers at foreign paratroopers, all these incidents involved Indian jihadis. In other words, while there may be an overseas command centre of global jihad—maybe located in Pakistan—the war is actually being conducted by fiercely motivated locals.
The leadership of the Indian Muslim community can no longer take refuge in denial. Nor is there any percentage in appealing to Sonia Gandhi to stop racial profiling by the police. After Mumbai, the community bears a collective responsibility for isolating and hounding out the radicals. For this to happen, it is incumbent that Indian Muslims dissociate completely from pan-Islamism. A clutch of half-baked and fanciful theories of ummah victimhood in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, et al, are responsible for turning gullible youth into monstrous killers.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 23, 2006)
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Foreign hand or domestic? (July 17, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
A week after the outrage, no one can be certain why 200 innocent people had to die horrible deaths on Mumbai’s commuter trains. Initially, some over-zealous (but not entirely dispassionate) reporters posited the theory that last Tuesday’s serial blasts were an act of retribution against the killing of Muslims in the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat four years ago. One newspaper even chose to gleefully broadcast the names of the Gujarati diamond merchants who were killed—as if such a partial list justified the carnage. What a shame no one thought it appropriate to describe the July 11 grenade attacks on tourists in Srinagar as an ant-Bengali act. After all, six of the seven who died were hapless middle-class Bengalis from a Kolkata suburb.
When it comes to suggesting reasons why a clutch of Muslims—I say Muslims because the investigations have short listed the proverbial members of only one community—chose to commit mass murder, no one is entirely sure. Unlike the London Underground bombings last year, where the ringleader helpfully left behind video recordings of his bizarre tirade against the country and society that had nurtured and sustained him, no individual or organisation has tried use the Mumbai killings to broadcast a political message. Is this why some of the ultra-secularists in the Union Cabinet believe the bombings were the handiwork of Hindu extremists in Islamist clothing?
Of course the silence of the jihadis has come in extremely handy for a Congress Party which is understandably nervous of the political fallout. Mumbai, mercifully, did not experience the revenge killings that followed the death of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the Godhra killings in 2002. However, this exemplary restraint does not imply there will be no political backlash. The UPA Government has quite rightly been accused on nurturing a soft state and creating a lax security environment for armed militants. Under a new but unwritten security doctrine, the energies and resources of the intelligence agencies have been diverted from the war on terrorism to political surveillance. Senior intelligence officers have reported with dismay that under the new Narayanan Doctrine, named, presumably after the National Security Adviser, it is more important to know what political intrigues are being hatched than gauge what jihadis are up to.
The results are there for us to see. The Maoists have successfully overrun Nepal—only the proclamation of victory remains to be issued—while Indian diplomats settled their scores with the King. From being a bunch of beleaguered outlaws, our local Maoists have, in just two years, spread their insurgency over an area where 17 per cent of the population live. More important, the Maoists are understood to have accumulated a war kitty of some Rs 250 crore—which makes them one of the richest “political” organisations in the country. In Assam, the Congress entered into a covert understanding with the ULFA during the Assembly elections. For its political cooperation the ULFA is being rewarded with peace talks.
In an environment where national security is viewed through the prism of electoral politics, it is convenient for the Government to revive the bogey of the “foreign hand”, a euphemism for blaming Pakistan for all acts of terrorism.
Don’t get me wrong. There is undoubtedly a Pakistani connection to almost every act of Islamist terrorism directed at either the West or India. Pakistan remains the conduit for the movement of large sums of money, originating in West Asia, which is funnelled into terrorism. It is also more than likely that the military expertise of the ISI is often put to use in planning terrorist strikes in India.
However, there is a crucial difference between Pakistani facilitation and a direct Pakistani role. The Government is in a state of denial over the fact that the recent acts of terrorism in India—the unsuccessful attacks on Ayodhya and the RSS headquarters and the successful blasts in Varanasi and Mumbai—appear to be the handiwork of home-grown terrorists. We can rightly blame Pakistan for not doing enough to down the facilitation centres in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad but we have to recognise that the attacks would not have been possible unless a section of Indian Muslims were ready unfurl the banner of jihad. It is this treachery that the Government is squeamish about confronting. Blaming everything on Pakistan is a convenient diversion from our own failure to lock up a bunch of crazies and dangerous weirdos and throw the keys into the Arabian Sea.
(Published in DNA, July 17, 2006)
A week after the outrage, no one can be certain why 200 innocent people had to die horrible deaths on Mumbai’s commuter trains. Initially, some over-zealous (but not entirely dispassionate) reporters posited the theory that last Tuesday’s serial blasts were an act of retribution against the killing of Muslims in the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat four years ago. One newspaper even chose to gleefully broadcast the names of the Gujarati diamond merchants who were killed—as if such a partial list justified the carnage. What a shame no one thought it appropriate to describe the July 11 grenade attacks on tourists in Srinagar as an ant-Bengali act. After all, six of the seven who died were hapless middle-class Bengalis from a Kolkata suburb.
When it comes to suggesting reasons why a clutch of Muslims—I say Muslims because the investigations have short listed the proverbial members of only one community—chose to commit mass murder, no one is entirely sure. Unlike the London Underground bombings last year, where the ringleader helpfully left behind video recordings of his bizarre tirade against the country and society that had nurtured and sustained him, no individual or organisation has tried use the Mumbai killings to broadcast a political message. Is this why some of the ultra-secularists in the Union Cabinet believe the bombings were the handiwork of Hindu extremists in Islamist clothing?
Of course the silence of the jihadis has come in extremely handy for a Congress Party which is understandably nervous of the political fallout. Mumbai, mercifully, did not experience the revenge killings that followed the death of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the Godhra killings in 2002. However, this exemplary restraint does not imply there will be no political backlash. The UPA Government has quite rightly been accused on nurturing a soft state and creating a lax security environment for armed militants. Under a new but unwritten security doctrine, the energies and resources of the intelligence agencies have been diverted from the war on terrorism to political surveillance. Senior intelligence officers have reported with dismay that under the new Narayanan Doctrine, named, presumably after the National Security Adviser, it is more important to know what political intrigues are being hatched than gauge what jihadis are up to.
The results are there for us to see. The Maoists have successfully overrun Nepal—only the proclamation of victory remains to be issued—while Indian diplomats settled their scores with the King. From being a bunch of beleaguered outlaws, our local Maoists have, in just two years, spread their insurgency over an area where 17 per cent of the population live. More important, the Maoists are understood to have accumulated a war kitty of some Rs 250 crore—which makes them one of the richest “political” organisations in the country. In Assam, the Congress entered into a covert understanding with the ULFA during the Assembly elections. For its political cooperation the ULFA is being rewarded with peace talks.
In an environment where national security is viewed through the prism of electoral politics, it is convenient for the Government to revive the bogey of the “foreign hand”, a euphemism for blaming Pakistan for all acts of terrorism.
Don’t get me wrong. There is undoubtedly a Pakistani connection to almost every act of Islamist terrorism directed at either the West or India. Pakistan remains the conduit for the movement of large sums of money, originating in West Asia, which is funnelled into terrorism. It is also more than likely that the military expertise of the ISI is often put to use in planning terrorist strikes in India.
However, there is a crucial difference between Pakistani facilitation and a direct Pakistani role. The Government is in a state of denial over the fact that the recent acts of terrorism in India—the unsuccessful attacks on Ayodhya and the RSS headquarters and the successful blasts in Varanasi and Mumbai—appear to be the handiwork of home-grown terrorists. We can rightly blame Pakistan for not doing enough to down the facilitation centres in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad but we have to recognise that the attacks would not have been possible unless a section of Indian Muslims were ready unfurl the banner of jihad. It is this treachery that the Government is squeamish about confronting. Blaming everything on Pakistan is a convenient diversion from our own failure to lock up a bunch of crazies and dangerous weirdos and throw the keys into the Arabian Sea.
(Published in DNA, July 17, 2006)
Modify your backbone (July 16, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
There are some moments in the life of a nation when people eschew individualism and look for leadership. I don’t know whether history will record the carnage of July 11 as a defining point for our country—just as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 was for our grandfathers, the fall of France in 1940 was for the British, and September 11, 2001, was for the majority of Americans. It is not the scale of a disaster that prompts a country to break with the past. A decisive shift in a nation’s collective way of thinking is invariably provoked by a corresponding feeling of vulnerability and helplessness.
History records that it is at these critical moments a leader often emerges who is able to transform dejection and despondency into determination and hope. Neville Chamberlain, the rather stiff and gentlemanly soul who epitomised the policy of appeasement, was not lacking in popular support between 1937 and 1939. When he returned from Munich in 1938 with a piece of paper that promised “peace with honour” he was met by jubilant crowds grateful that war with Hitler had been averted. Winston Churchill, who opposed Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, was then regarded as a crazy killjoy—a British Bal Thackeray. Yet, by the spring of 1940, Chamberlain was unceremoniously dumped and Churchill installed.
Something similar happened in India after 1919. The nationalist leadership was slipped out of the hands of stalwarts like Lokmanya Tilak and Surendranath Bannerjee and India reposed its faith in a quirky Gujarati who cloaked politics in ethics. Many of his contemporaries saw the Mahatma as a dotty interloper. He was unique but there is no doubt that passive resistance and non-violence crippled the British Raj more effectively than all the guns and bombs put together.
Leadership involves the ability to capture the essence of popular feeling and nudge it in a clear direction. Leadership becomes inspirational, not because an individual is blessed with godly attributes, but because—to use an ill-timed slogan of a failed American presidential aspirant—“in your heart you know he is right.”
Last week, India confronted a twin threat. First, the Islamist jihadis defiantly proclaimed to the world that they have the determination, organisation and technology to strike at the heart of India. The attacks on Parliament, Ayodhya and the RSS headquarters in Nagpur were foiled and the bombings in Delhi and Varanasi were dress rehearsals. Mumbai was the real thing and it left India distraught, disoriented and exposed.
The media invocation of the “Mumbai spirit” of gritty resilience was actually a grotesque celebration of national helplessness. People spontaneously rushed to help and comfort the victims of the tragedy, took the personal discomfiture caused by the disruption in their stride and then—and this is the harsh, unspoken reality—waited for the fire next time. They played Mumbai meri jaan on TV when they should have been whistling Que sera sera—“whatever will be, will be”—the signature tune of Hindu fatalism.
As if this good-humoured march to the gallows wasn’t bad enough, India is confronted by a leadership vacuum of monumental proportions. It was absolutely revolting to hear a shamefaced Prime Minister mouthing inane platitudes about keeping the peace and defeating the nefarious designs of the terrorists. It was remarkable that even in the face of such a disaster Manmohan Singh could not rise above the template mundane.
Was Sonia Gandhi any better? She certainly upstaged Manmohan Singh by rushing to Mumbai first and comforting the victims. But where India needed the steely determination of a Margaret Thatcher, or even Indira Gandhi, she chose to play Florence Nightingale for an evening.
When defeatism parades itself as enlightenment, you know that something has to give way. We need a leader who can call a spade a spade, brook no nonsense and do what is right. We need a man the jihadis dread and loath. We also know that such a leader exists. It is time we stopped being afraid of mentioning his name.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 16, 2006)
There are some moments in the life of a nation when people eschew individualism and look for leadership. I don’t know whether history will record the carnage of July 11 as a defining point for our country—just as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 was for our grandfathers, the fall of France in 1940 was for the British, and September 11, 2001, was for the majority of Americans. It is not the scale of a disaster that prompts a country to break with the past. A decisive shift in a nation’s collective way of thinking is invariably provoked by a corresponding feeling of vulnerability and helplessness.
History records that it is at these critical moments a leader often emerges who is able to transform dejection and despondency into determination and hope. Neville Chamberlain, the rather stiff and gentlemanly soul who epitomised the policy of appeasement, was not lacking in popular support between 1937 and 1939. When he returned from Munich in 1938 with a piece of paper that promised “peace with honour” he was met by jubilant crowds grateful that war with Hitler had been averted. Winston Churchill, who opposed Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, was then regarded as a crazy killjoy—a British Bal Thackeray. Yet, by the spring of 1940, Chamberlain was unceremoniously dumped and Churchill installed.
Something similar happened in India after 1919. The nationalist leadership was slipped out of the hands of stalwarts like Lokmanya Tilak and Surendranath Bannerjee and India reposed its faith in a quirky Gujarati who cloaked politics in ethics. Many of his contemporaries saw the Mahatma as a dotty interloper. He was unique but there is no doubt that passive resistance and non-violence crippled the British Raj more effectively than all the guns and bombs put together.
Leadership involves the ability to capture the essence of popular feeling and nudge it in a clear direction. Leadership becomes inspirational, not because an individual is blessed with godly attributes, but because—to use an ill-timed slogan of a failed American presidential aspirant—“in your heart you know he is right.”
Last week, India confronted a twin threat. First, the Islamist jihadis defiantly proclaimed to the world that they have the determination, organisation and technology to strike at the heart of India. The attacks on Parliament, Ayodhya and the RSS headquarters in Nagpur were foiled and the bombings in Delhi and Varanasi were dress rehearsals. Mumbai was the real thing and it left India distraught, disoriented and exposed.
The media invocation of the “Mumbai spirit” of gritty resilience was actually a grotesque celebration of national helplessness. People spontaneously rushed to help and comfort the victims of the tragedy, took the personal discomfiture caused by the disruption in their stride and then—and this is the harsh, unspoken reality—waited for the fire next time. They played Mumbai meri jaan on TV when they should have been whistling Que sera sera—“whatever will be, will be”—the signature tune of Hindu fatalism.
As if this good-humoured march to the gallows wasn’t bad enough, India is confronted by a leadership vacuum of monumental proportions. It was absolutely revolting to hear a shamefaced Prime Minister mouthing inane platitudes about keeping the peace and defeating the nefarious designs of the terrorists. It was remarkable that even in the face of such a disaster Manmohan Singh could not rise above the template mundane.
Was Sonia Gandhi any better? She certainly upstaged Manmohan Singh by rushing to Mumbai first and comforting the victims. But where India needed the steely determination of a Margaret Thatcher, or even Indira Gandhi, she chose to play Florence Nightingale for an evening.
When defeatism parades itself as enlightenment, you know that something has to give way. We need a leader who can call a spade a spade, brook no nonsense and do what is right. We need a man the jihadis dread and loath. We also know that such a leader exists. It is time we stopped being afraid of mentioning his name.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 16, 2006)
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Awkward Outlander (July 14, 2006)
For India, Trueman symbolised a less confident age
By Swapan Dasgupta
One of my earliest birthday presents, which I still treasure, was a copy of Peter May’s Book of Cricket—a collection of cricketing tips and reminiscences of the then Surrey and England captain. I spent countless hours poring over the book, enthralled by the evocative photographs of cricketers and cricket matches. My childish imagination was captivated by matches played on picturesque grounds—Charterhouse, Fenners and Worcester. A good cricket ground, I concluded, must have a backdrop of tall spires and imposing cathedrals, and be a happy blend of sport and fairy tale.
The book captivated me so much that by my seventh year I was spouting names like Hutton, Bailey, Miller, Lindwall, Walcott, Weekes and Tyson—my equivalents of knights in shining armour—to bemused elders. Some of the more dramatic photographs added to the mystique—like Everton Weekes, front leg in mid-air, fiercely executing a square drive, and Len Hutton glancing the ball through the leg trap set by Pakistan during the final Test in 1954.
There was one photograph, however, that puzzled me. Over the caption, “The remarkable start to India’s Test at Leeds, 1952”, it featured a giant scoreboard showing the Total at double zero and Wickets 4. On badgering my father for an explanation, I was given a vivid account of what happened to the Indians in the second innings of the Headingley Test. It centred on “Troo-man”, a killer of a bowler who was so fast that no batsman could see the ball as it whizzed past them and uprooted the stumps.
Until another ogre called Griffith smashed Nari Contractor’s skull, “Troo-man”, in my mind, was the ultimate ju-ju man. A demonology was constructed around this faceless Englishman whose delivery, captured sideways in May’s book, was akin to a terrifying white X. There had already been instilled in us wariness of the hard, red cricket ball and to this was added the great fear of fast bowling.
It was a fear that wasn’t confined to wide-eyed school kids alone. The dread of being felled by the bumper and beamer stymied Indian cricket for a long time—until the Nawab of Pataudi and Sunil Gavaskar demonstrated that we had nothing to fear but fear itself.
Fred Trueman, whose death was announced to a full Headingley crowd watching Sri Lanka get the better of England on July 1, would have loved the tale of “Troo-man the nasty”. It would have bolstered his innate belief that most Indian batsmen were lily-livered ninnies, unworthy of taking the rough and tumble of a man’s game. “And how are Messrs Roy, Mantri and Umrigar?” he taunted an Indian journalist after the Lord’s Test in 1974, when India was bowled out for a shameful 42. Trueman was remembering his dream debut at Headingley in 1952.
In India’s first innings, the 5 feet 10 inches-tall fast bowler with what The Times obituary described as “an ample posterior”, took 3 wickets for 89 runs, even as Vijay Manjrekar (133) and Vijay Hazare (89) took the Indian total to 293. England replied with 334, Tom Graveney top-scoring with 71.
When India came out to bat the second time on Saturday, June 7, just before 3pm, Len Hutton asked the Yorkshire debutant to open the bowling from the Kirkstall Lane end. Writing 52 years later in his memoirs, As It Was, Trueman described the occasion: “People came from the North, East and West Ridings, the Dales, the mill towns of Halifax, Huddersfield and Bradford, from Sheffield’s city of steel and from mining communities of Rotherham, Pontefract, Castleford and my own Maltby. There were fishing folk from Hull, railwaymen from York and brewery lads from Barnsley… Being one of their own, I knew all eyes were on me.”
To cap it all, England was being led for the first time by a “professional” from Yorkshire. For Headingley, it was full house on a special Saturday.
Trueman’s first delivery pitched outside the off stump and Pankaj Roy let it to go through to wicket-keeper Evans. The second ball was a bouncer pitched on the middle-and-leg. Roy tried to hook, mistimed it, got a top edge and the ball ballooned into the hands of Denis Compton at second slip. Sensing trouble, Hazare sent in wicket-keeper Madhav Mantri, a doughty defensive bat, as number three.
The second over by Alec Bedser saw one delivery rising unexpectedly. D.K. Gaekwad couldn’t get his bat out of the way and the ball travelled into the safe hands of Jim Laker at gully. India was zero for 2.
When Trueman began his 22-yard run-up for his second over, he decided on a slower delivery. “My idea was to make the batsman play early, and that delivery to Mantri is one I shall never forget. It pitched on his middle-stump, then straightened out. Mantri’s off-stump was ripped from the ground and cart-wheeled across Headingley’s sward… Headingley erupted.”
In walked Manjrekar. “There were 34,000 people inside Headingley and it was as silent as a tomb… I let fly another straight delivery of full length… Manjrekar attempted a cover drive. Yet again the pace of the delivery was too much for the batsman. Manjrekar’s off-stump leapt out of the ground and yet again cart-wheeled across the pitch in a futile quest for freedom.”
It was sensational. India, recorded Wisden, “made Test history by losing four wickets for no runs in the first 14 balls of the second innings, three of them to eight balls from Trueman on his debut.”
In his 67-Test career, Trueman took 307 wickets—a record which endured for 11 years. Test. This amounted to one wicket every 49.43 balls. Against India he bagged 53 wickets in 9 Tests, all played in England—an incredible tally of a wicket every 33.66 balls.
Trueman, it would be fair to say, devastated Indian cricket. He didn’t merely bowl us out, he destroyed our self-esteem. He created in the Indian mind a paranoic fear of fast bowling that was to endure for another two decades. Writing in the Manchester Guardian on the Third Test at Old Trafford in 1952, John Woodcock described how “Trueman with the wind astern and all fielders crowded like vultures round the bat hurled himself into his task. He was not bowling short and he was bowling mostly straight but only Hazare, (Hemu) Adhikari, Manjrekar and (P) Sen stood firm with a stout heart. The others backed away to square leg or went berserk, afraid to stand and defend their wickets. It is hard to imagine a worse innings by a number five batsman in a Test match than that played by (Polly) Umrigar…”
Why single out Umrigar? In seven innings, Roy scored five ducks, including four successive ones. On four occasions he fell to Trueman.
As a cricketer, Trueman was everything May’s book did not prescribe. Pompous, arrogant, surly and blessed with a formidable chip on his shoulder, he was offensive to too many people. He was forever fighting his private class war—against the toffee-nosed cricket establishment, the various captains of England and, of course, the men he mocked as Gunga Din. His approach to cricket straddled the brave audacity of Robert Clive and the angst of Rudyard Kipling’s Tommy Atkins. In England, Trueman was always an outlander, the awkward anti-hero who would have been better off playing football.
For us in India, however, he symbolised another less confident age—a time when we were intimidated and psyched by the fury of the white man’s pace. It was a problem not confined, unfortunately, to cricket.
(published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, July 14, 2006)
Mumbai (July 13, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
When “London pride” was invoked a year ago to describe the grit and resilience of a city that remained undaunted by the horrible terrorist attacks on the Underground, it carried a measure of novelty. There was absolutely nothing unprecedented in either politicians or the media of Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) gushing over the remarkable display of the “Mumbai spirit” after the bomb blasts that killed nearly 200 people last Monday evening.
Human life, it is said, is remarkably cheap in India. Even so, it speaks volumes for the fortitude of Mumbaikars, as they like to refer to themselves, that after enduring Monday’s carnage and the total disruption of the public transport system, it was back to business with a vengeance next morning—with the stock exchange climbing three per cent.
The patience of Mumbai has been repeatedly tested by terrorism. In March 1993, 13 simultaneous explosions at important public buildings, including the stock exchange and the Air India building, killed 257 people in Mumbai and left another 1,400 seriously injured. There was a predictable sense of outrage but no recrimination. Mumbai, after all, was weary after five days of vicious sectarian clashes, involving Hindu and Muslims, in January that led to 900 people being killed. At that time the tensions had centred on the demolition of a 16th century mosque in faraway Ayodhya, which Hindus claimed as their own.
After 9/11 heralded the scourge of Islamist terror, Mumbai was attacked on August 25, 2003. Two powerful car bombs, including one in the car park of the Gateway of India, a British-made monument that has become the symbol of the city, killed nearly 60 people. The perpetrators, it was subsequently discovered, were Muslim activists who, it was said, wanted to extract revenge for the murder of fellow Muslims during the riots in the neighbouring state of Gujarat. Mumbai, once again, refused to be provoked, not least because the purpose of the bombings was never clear. It was a case of mysterious enemies targeting innocent people.
The rationale behind Monday’s seven serial explosions in the first-class carriages of commuter trains isn’t quite apparent 24 hours later. Nearly 200 people have died and the identity of the terrorists is still a matter of conjecture. Intelligence agencies and the police strongly believe the blasts were the handiwork of Islamist terrorists. The involvement of shadowy organisations such as the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI) which has training camps in Bangladesh, is suspected. There are also suggestions that the Mumbai blasts were timed to coincide with the grenade attacks in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir, by LeT terrorists which killed six tourists from Calcutta.
Police investigations may bring out the details of the murderous conspiracy in Mumbai. For the moment, however, bewildered Mumbaikars are asking the questions: Why us? What do these terrorists want? In London and Madrid, the bombers were protesting the presence of British and Spanish forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there are no Indian troops assisting the US peacekeepers anywhere in the world. There is, of course, a Muslim secessionist movement in Jammu and Kashmir but, with the exception of last October’s bombing of two crowded markets in Delhi, the Kashmiri separatists have confined their activities to the northern state.
The Mumbai blasts lack both a face and an ostensible reason. Some of the terrorists may be motivated by a crazy wish to usher in an Islamic Caliphate throughout the world but this desire is too fantastic for ordinary comprehension. There are also some rogue elements within the Pakistan security establishment which would love to bleed India with “a thousand cuts.” Yet, popular antipathy towards Pakistan is nowhere as intense as it was when the Indian Parliament was attacked on December 13, 2001 and the then Prime Minister angrily promised a “war to the finish”.
Today, Mumbaikars combine a sense of horror with an air of phlegmatic resignation. They have put their admirable sense of community—rushing the wounded to hospital, donating blood for the injured, feeding stranded commuters and offering lifts to total strangers—over any contrived outrage against an invisible enemy.
The adversary, however, is not entirely unknown. Over the past two years, India has been in a state of denial over mounting evidence that the emerging threat is not from those acting at the behest of their controllers in Islamabad, but home-grown jihadis. In Mumbai, for example, the finger of suspicion is pointing to terrorist modules based in either the town of Aurangabad or the cyber-city of Hyderabad. Last month the police seized an incredible 43 kilograms of RDX and 13 AK-47s from the tourist town of Ellora, near Aurangabad. The man facing charges for organising the bombings in the temple town of Varanasi on March 7 this year is a small-time Imam from a neighbouring town who was earlier a full-time SIMI organiser. The audacious attack on the disputed temple in Ayodhya last year too was facilitated by local Muslims acting in concert with terrorists who entered from Bangladesh.
The suggestion that Islamist terrorism has developed strong roots within the country is uncomfortable for the government in New Delhi to face up to. The Congress Party, the regional parties and the Communists who are the constituents of the coalition depend substantially on the 13 per cent-strong Muslim population for political sustenance. This explains why Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has encountered strong resistance for pressing on with India’s deepening strategic relationship with the US. It also accounts for the government’s complete unwillingness to act on intelligence reports that the protests against President Bush’s visit last February had the generous backing of the clerics in Iran.
Around the same time as Bush visited India, the Congress and Communist-dominated state legislature of Kerala passed a unanimous resolution seeking the release, on “compassionate grounds”, of a Muslim extremist who masterminded a series of explosions, which killed 58 people in the southern city of Coimbatore in 1998. A Cabinet Minister took his appeasement policy to the absurd level of joint meetings with a look-alike of Osama bin Laden!
India has often boasted that its vibrant democracy ensured that there was no Indian to be found in Al Qaeda. Nominally, the claim is incontrovertible but Islamist terrorism is not manifested through the direct control of bin Laden alone. The LeT, HuJI and SIMI are carbon copies of Al Qaeda. They all have Indian Muslim adherents, including educated professionals, many of whom have received arms training in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Indian politicians have frequently blamed the “foreign hand” for terrorism in the country. The assertion is not untrue but after Monday’s carnage they would also do well to look at a growing home-grown menace. The Mumbai blasts may symbolise Islamism in India coming of age.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator and a former Managing Editor of India Today.
(Published in Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2006)
When “London pride” was invoked a year ago to describe the grit and resilience of a city that remained undaunted by the horrible terrorist attacks on the Underground, it carried a measure of novelty. There was absolutely nothing unprecedented in either politicians or the media of Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) gushing over the remarkable display of the “Mumbai spirit” after the bomb blasts that killed nearly 200 people last Monday evening.
Human life, it is said, is remarkably cheap in India. Even so, it speaks volumes for the fortitude of Mumbaikars, as they like to refer to themselves, that after enduring Monday’s carnage and the total disruption of the public transport system, it was back to business with a vengeance next morning—with the stock exchange climbing three per cent.
The patience of Mumbai has been repeatedly tested by terrorism. In March 1993, 13 simultaneous explosions at important public buildings, including the stock exchange and the Air India building, killed 257 people in Mumbai and left another 1,400 seriously injured. There was a predictable sense of outrage but no recrimination. Mumbai, after all, was weary after five days of vicious sectarian clashes, involving Hindu and Muslims, in January that led to 900 people being killed. At that time the tensions had centred on the demolition of a 16th century mosque in faraway Ayodhya, which Hindus claimed as their own.
After 9/11 heralded the scourge of Islamist terror, Mumbai was attacked on August 25, 2003. Two powerful car bombs, including one in the car park of the Gateway of India, a British-made monument that has become the symbol of the city, killed nearly 60 people. The perpetrators, it was subsequently discovered, were Muslim activists who, it was said, wanted to extract revenge for the murder of fellow Muslims during the riots in the neighbouring state of Gujarat. Mumbai, once again, refused to be provoked, not least because the purpose of the bombings was never clear. It was a case of mysterious enemies targeting innocent people.
The rationale behind Monday’s seven serial explosions in the first-class carriages of commuter trains isn’t quite apparent 24 hours later. Nearly 200 people have died and the identity of the terrorists is still a matter of conjecture. Intelligence agencies and the police strongly believe the blasts were the handiwork of Islamist terrorists. The involvement of shadowy organisations such as the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI) which has training camps in Bangladesh, is suspected. There are also suggestions that the Mumbai blasts were timed to coincide with the grenade attacks in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir, by LeT terrorists which killed six tourists from Calcutta.
Police investigations may bring out the details of the murderous conspiracy in Mumbai. For the moment, however, bewildered Mumbaikars are asking the questions: Why us? What do these terrorists want? In London and Madrid, the bombers were protesting the presence of British and Spanish forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there are no Indian troops assisting the US peacekeepers anywhere in the world. There is, of course, a Muslim secessionist movement in Jammu and Kashmir but, with the exception of last October’s bombing of two crowded markets in Delhi, the Kashmiri separatists have confined their activities to the northern state.
The Mumbai blasts lack both a face and an ostensible reason. Some of the terrorists may be motivated by a crazy wish to usher in an Islamic Caliphate throughout the world but this desire is too fantastic for ordinary comprehension. There are also some rogue elements within the Pakistan security establishment which would love to bleed India with “a thousand cuts.” Yet, popular antipathy towards Pakistan is nowhere as intense as it was when the Indian Parliament was attacked on December 13, 2001 and the then Prime Minister angrily promised a “war to the finish”.
Today, Mumbaikars combine a sense of horror with an air of phlegmatic resignation. They have put their admirable sense of community—rushing the wounded to hospital, donating blood for the injured, feeding stranded commuters and offering lifts to total strangers—over any contrived outrage against an invisible enemy.
The adversary, however, is not entirely unknown. Over the past two years, India has been in a state of denial over mounting evidence that the emerging threat is not from those acting at the behest of their controllers in Islamabad, but home-grown jihadis. In Mumbai, for example, the finger of suspicion is pointing to terrorist modules based in either the town of Aurangabad or the cyber-city of Hyderabad. Last month the police seized an incredible 43 kilograms of RDX and 13 AK-47s from the tourist town of Ellora, near Aurangabad. The man facing charges for organising the bombings in the temple town of Varanasi on March 7 this year is a small-time Imam from a neighbouring town who was earlier a full-time SIMI organiser. The audacious attack on the disputed temple in Ayodhya last year too was facilitated by local Muslims acting in concert with terrorists who entered from Bangladesh.
The suggestion that Islamist terrorism has developed strong roots within the country is uncomfortable for the government in New Delhi to face up to. The Congress Party, the regional parties and the Communists who are the constituents of the coalition depend substantially on the 13 per cent-strong Muslim population for political sustenance. This explains why Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has encountered strong resistance for pressing on with India’s deepening strategic relationship with the US. It also accounts for the government’s complete unwillingness to act on intelligence reports that the protests against President Bush’s visit last February had the generous backing of the clerics in Iran.
Around the same time as Bush visited India, the Congress and Communist-dominated state legislature of Kerala passed a unanimous resolution seeking the release, on “compassionate grounds”, of a Muslim extremist who masterminded a series of explosions, which killed 58 people in the southern city of Coimbatore in 1998. A Cabinet Minister took his appeasement policy to the absurd level of joint meetings with a look-alike of Osama bin Laden!
India has often boasted that its vibrant democracy ensured that there was no Indian to be found in Al Qaeda. Nominally, the claim is incontrovertible but Islamist terrorism is not manifested through the direct control of bin Laden alone. The LeT, HuJI and SIMI are carbon copies of Al Qaeda. They all have Indian Muslim adherents, including educated professionals, many of whom have received arms training in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Indian politicians have frequently blamed the “foreign hand” for terrorism in the country. The assertion is not untrue but after Monday’s carnage they would also do well to look at a growing home-grown menace. The Mumbai blasts may symbolise Islamism in India coming of age.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator and a former Managing Editor of India Today.
(Published in Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2006)
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Failure in full strength (July 9, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
It has taken the Indian middle classes just over 25 months to formally terminate their honeymoon with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the UPA Government. The point of endurance had been unacceptably stretched during the kerfuffle over reservations in April and May but the flak had largely been directed at Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh. This month the Rubicon has been crossed.
First, there was the Government’s complete inability to cope with the spiralling prices of daily necessities. The attempt by the Congress to be too clever by half and distance itself from its own government also came a cropper. Few, if anyone, bought the ingenuous argument that consumers were paying more for dal, sugar and tomatoes because the previous government erred some four years ago.
Secondly, the UPA’s benign neglect of investment in infrastructure is beginning to manifest itself in bottlenecks and disruption. North India has been plagued by unbearable power cuts, and the business of Mumbai has been disrupted by the failure of successive governments to upgrade the sewers. Never mind fulfilling the Prime Minister’s promise of replicating Shanghai, it is now doubtful whether India will be able to successfully host the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Meanwhile, Rs 40,000 crore is being poured into the cesspools of corruption under the guise of rural employment because someone wants to appear Lady Bountiful.
Thirdly, the explosion of private agendas is making governance incoherent. If Arjun Singh’s quota game wasn’t bad enough, the past fortnight has witnessed a reckless Health Minister trying to govern through flights of whimsy. Coalitions have in-built uncertainties but by now every bit player has chosen to do his own thing. The PMK wants the AIIMS Director out; the DMK won’t countenance a Cabinet resolution on a small divestment of Nyeveli Lignite Corporation; the Information and Broadcasting Minister is proceeding with legislation that will make the Indian media as “free” as China’s; and the Commerce Minister would rather he wasn’t ridiculed by the international media for putting World Cup football over WTO negotiations.
Even foreign policy, hitherto the prerogative of the Centre, appears to have been outsourced. The CPI(M) is cutting its own deals with Nepali Maoists, with tacit approval of a section of the government. The DMK is pressing for a U-turn in India’s Sri Lanka policy—a move calculated to have catastrophic consequences. The Muslim lobby has coerced the government into once again endorsing the fanatics and suicide bombers in West Asia, over the one country that has been a consistent friend. And the National Security Adviser is busy playing the Kerala card in the UN and making India a laughing stock in the race for the Secretary-General’s post.
Finally, the country seems no longer in any mood to digest all those stories about serial unhappiness in Race Course Road. We heard that the Prime Minister was “unhappy” with Natwar Singh but he nevertheless issued him a clean chit on the Volcker Report. He was “unhappy” that his HRD Minister started another quota war but he hasn’t moved his little finger to check the future onrush of divisive legislation. And now he is said to be “unhappy” and “anguished” that the DMK, backed by the Communists, have made a monkey of all plans to raise resources without imposing crippling new taxes. So severe was his distress that whereas M. Karunanidhi asked for status quo on Neyveli Lignite, the Prime Minister ended up putting all divestment on hold. With this phenomenal explosion of unhappiness, is it any wonder that every blackmailer is convinced that there is percentage in keeping Manmohan Singh permanently aggrieved?
In less than a month India has witnessed a subtle but important transformation. From a weak Congress-led coalition government the country has moved into a Third Front Government headed by the Congress. Those who missed out on the chance of experiencing Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Deve Gowda, and I.K. Gujral or, for that matter, Muhammad Shah Rangila, have their opportunity to relive history.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 9, 2006)
It has taken the Indian middle classes just over 25 months to formally terminate their honeymoon with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the UPA Government. The point of endurance had been unacceptably stretched during the kerfuffle over reservations in April and May but the flak had largely been directed at Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh. This month the Rubicon has been crossed.
First, there was the Government’s complete inability to cope with the spiralling prices of daily necessities. The attempt by the Congress to be too clever by half and distance itself from its own government also came a cropper. Few, if anyone, bought the ingenuous argument that consumers were paying more for dal, sugar and tomatoes because the previous government erred some four years ago.
Secondly, the UPA’s benign neglect of investment in infrastructure is beginning to manifest itself in bottlenecks and disruption. North India has been plagued by unbearable power cuts, and the business of Mumbai has been disrupted by the failure of successive governments to upgrade the sewers. Never mind fulfilling the Prime Minister’s promise of replicating Shanghai, it is now doubtful whether India will be able to successfully host the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Meanwhile, Rs 40,000 crore is being poured into the cesspools of corruption under the guise of rural employment because someone wants to appear Lady Bountiful.
Thirdly, the explosion of private agendas is making governance incoherent. If Arjun Singh’s quota game wasn’t bad enough, the past fortnight has witnessed a reckless Health Minister trying to govern through flights of whimsy. Coalitions have in-built uncertainties but by now every bit player has chosen to do his own thing. The PMK wants the AIIMS Director out; the DMK won’t countenance a Cabinet resolution on a small divestment of Nyeveli Lignite Corporation; the Information and Broadcasting Minister is proceeding with legislation that will make the Indian media as “free” as China’s; and the Commerce Minister would rather he wasn’t ridiculed by the international media for putting World Cup football over WTO negotiations.
Even foreign policy, hitherto the prerogative of the Centre, appears to have been outsourced. The CPI(M) is cutting its own deals with Nepali Maoists, with tacit approval of a section of the government. The DMK is pressing for a U-turn in India’s Sri Lanka policy—a move calculated to have catastrophic consequences. The Muslim lobby has coerced the government into once again endorsing the fanatics and suicide bombers in West Asia, over the one country that has been a consistent friend. And the National Security Adviser is busy playing the Kerala card in the UN and making India a laughing stock in the race for the Secretary-General’s post.
Finally, the country seems no longer in any mood to digest all those stories about serial unhappiness in Race Course Road. We heard that the Prime Minister was “unhappy” with Natwar Singh but he nevertheless issued him a clean chit on the Volcker Report. He was “unhappy” that his HRD Minister started another quota war but he hasn’t moved his little finger to check the future onrush of divisive legislation. And now he is said to be “unhappy” and “anguished” that the DMK, backed by the Communists, have made a monkey of all plans to raise resources without imposing crippling new taxes. So severe was his distress that whereas M. Karunanidhi asked for status quo on Neyveli Lignite, the Prime Minister ended up putting all divestment on hold. With this phenomenal explosion of unhappiness, is it any wonder that every blackmailer is convinced that there is percentage in keeping Manmohan Singh permanently aggrieved?
In less than a month India has witnessed a subtle but important transformation. From a weak Congress-led coalition government the country has moved into a Third Front Government headed by the Congress. Those who missed out on the chance of experiencing Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Deve Gowda, and I.K. Gujral or, for that matter, Muhammad Shah Rangila, have their opportunity to relive history.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 9, 2006)
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Man and his mettle (July 3, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
In the mid-1990s, when India’s economic liberalisation was still in its infancy, it was relatively rare for the Indian community to welcome an entrepreneur from India as a new settler into Britain. There were lots of bankers, MNC executives and even a clutch of refugees fleeing from FERA and COFEPOSA who made London their home, but a well-to-do, legit entrepreneur was a different ball game altogether.
S.N. Gourisaria, an endearingly eccentric Marwari who came to London as a student and never returned, made this point to me in 1996 while introducing Lakshmi Mittal, “the new boy” in town. Gourisaria, who then ran a small weekly newspaper, was a repository of knowledge on matters “Indian-Indian”, as opposed to British-Indian, could be trusted to detect an emerging trend.
I recalled Gourisaria’s observation in the summer of 2001 while attending a party at a house in Regent’s Park hosted by another successful London-based Marwari entrepreneur. Two things struck me about that June evening. First, the complete absence of white faces among the guests—they were very much there as waiters. Secondly, the visible signs of a significant entrepreneurial exodus from India to London. I came across at least eight Marwaris, all below 40, who had shifted base to London in the past two years. They were all from established business families and they had all invested their Indian seed capital in businesses controlled from London.
Today, in part thanks to enlightened, investor-friendly British immigration policies, many hundreds of high net-worth individuals from India have made London their operating base. These new immigrants are qualitatively different from the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and East Africans who immigrated to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The manufacturing units of the new entrants may be located in Ireland, China or Kazakhstan, and, like Mittal Steel, their companies may be incorporated in Holland, but London has become their new home.
I refer to this phenomenon in the context of the jubilation across India at Mittal’s successful merger of his Mittal Steel with the blue-blooded European steel giant Arcelor. Since the flashy tycoon, who also happens to be the richest man in Britain and the third richest in Europe, had to negotiate racist taunts and social snubs to overcome the formidable opposition of the Arcelor management, there is a temptation to view Mittal’s success as symbolic of a resurgent India prevailing over a declining Europe.
Without dampening the sense of national pride at Mittal’s achievement, it is necessary to drive home an obvious point that India has chosen to conveniently gloss over. The meteoric rise of Mittal over the past decade constitutes an advertisement for Britain, rather than India. It is well known that the United Kingdom is a high-tax, high-cost economy. The cost of property and labour is absolutely prohibitive, even by Western standards. Despite these obvious shortcomings, why has a community of Indian entrepreneurs flocked to make London their base? What does the UK offer that India doesn’t?
The answer in one word is environment. Over the years, India has produced a steady stream of economic refugees who have gone overseas in search of opportunities. Initially the problem was absolute scarcity. Gradually this gave way to the oppression of the license-permit-quota raj. Finally, when the futility of socialism was grasped, our politicians refused to let go all the reins of control.
Just examine some of the hurdles Mittal had to overcome. First, there was the contrived xenophobia over preserving “European values.” It was almost akin to the bogus invocation of “swadeshi” by the ITC management when BAT tried to resume control over the cigarette giant in the mid-1990s. However, whereas the Arcelor management’s posturing was shunned by organised shareholders, BAT couldn’t muster the courage to move ahead in a climate of xenophobic hostility.
Second, Mittal had to deftly fight away the political opposition of the governments of France, Spain and Luxembourg. He succeeded because he put the cold logic of capitalism above sentiment. Imagine a hostile takeover bid in India that has also to confront government opposition. Will any entrepreneur either dare or be allowed to counter politics with economics? When any Indian government wants to block a corporate move, it has to merely unleash the organised might of babudom on the victim. If it wants to favour someone, things are made to happen.
Mittal wouldn’t have done too badly had he stayed on in India. But, like the Tatas who battled on bravely in India, he wouldn’t have been the world leader.
(Published in DNA, July 3, 2006)
In the mid-1990s, when India’s economic liberalisation was still in its infancy, it was relatively rare for the Indian community to welcome an entrepreneur from India as a new settler into Britain. There were lots of bankers, MNC executives and even a clutch of refugees fleeing from FERA and COFEPOSA who made London their home, but a well-to-do, legit entrepreneur was a different ball game altogether.
S.N. Gourisaria, an endearingly eccentric Marwari who came to London as a student and never returned, made this point to me in 1996 while introducing Lakshmi Mittal, “the new boy” in town. Gourisaria, who then ran a small weekly newspaper, was a repository of knowledge on matters “Indian-Indian”, as opposed to British-Indian, could be trusted to detect an emerging trend.
I recalled Gourisaria’s observation in the summer of 2001 while attending a party at a house in Regent’s Park hosted by another successful London-based Marwari entrepreneur. Two things struck me about that June evening. First, the complete absence of white faces among the guests—they were very much there as waiters. Secondly, the visible signs of a significant entrepreneurial exodus from India to London. I came across at least eight Marwaris, all below 40, who had shifted base to London in the past two years. They were all from established business families and they had all invested their Indian seed capital in businesses controlled from London.
Today, in part thanks to enlightened, investor-friendly British immigration policies, many hundreds of high net-worth individuals from India have made London their operating base. These new immigrants are qualitatively different from the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and East Africans who immigrated to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The manufacturing units of the new entrants may be located in Ireland, China or Kazakhstan, and, like Mittal Steel, their companies may be incorporated in Holland, but London has become their new home.
I refer to this phenomenon in the context of the jubilation across India at Mittal’s successful merger of his Mittal Steel with the blue-blooded European steel giant Arcelor. Since the flashy tycoon, who also happens to be the richest man in Britain and the third richest in Europe, had to negotiate racist taunts and social snubs to overcome the formidable opposition of the Arcelor management, there is a temptation to view Mittal’s success as symbolic of a resurgent India prevailing over a declining Europe.
Without dampening the sense of national pride at Mittal’s achievement, it is necessary to drive home an obvious point that India has chosen to conveniently gloss over. The meteoric rise of Mittal over the past decade constitutes an advertisement for Britain, rather than India. It is well known that the United Kingdom is a high-tax, high-cost economy. The cost of property and labour is absolutely prohibitive, even by Western standards. Despite these obvious shortcomings, why has a community of Indian entrepreneurs flocked to make London their base? What does the UK offer that India doesn’t?
The answer in one word is environment. Over the years, India has produced a steady stream of economic refugees who have gone overseas in search of opportunities. Initially the problem was absolute scarcity. Gradually this gave way to the oppression of the license-permit-quota raj. Finally, when the futility of socialism was grasped, our politicians refused to let go all the reins of control.
Just examine some of the hurdles Mittal had to overcome. First, there was the contrived xenophobia over preserving “European values.” It was almost akin to the bogus invocation of “swadeshi” by the ITC management when BAT tried to resume control over the cigarette giant in the mid-1990s. However, whereas the Arcelor management’s posturing was shunned by organised shareholders, BAT couldn’t muster the courage to move ahead in a climate of xenophobic hostility.
Second, Mittal had to deftly fight away the political opposition of the governments of France, Spain and Luxembourg. He succeeded because he put the cold logic of capitalism above sentiment. Imagine a hostile takeover bid in India that has also to confront government opposition. Will any entrepreneur either dare or be allowed to counter politics with economics? When any Indian government wants to block a corporate move, it has to merely unleash the organised might of babudom on the victim. If it wants to favour someone, things are made to happen.
Mittal wouldn’t have done too badly had he stayed on in India. But, like the Tatas who battled on bravely in India, he wouldn’t have been the world leader.
(Published in DNA, July 3, 2006)
Congress, the joker of calibration (July 2, 2006)
By Swapan Dasgupta
Those familiar with diplomatic gobbledegook will have noticed the generous overuse of the term “calibrated” to describe a prevailing confusion or tentativeness of existing policy. Often used as a euphemism for “nuanced”, a “calibrated” strategy invariably involves moving in one direction without any clear sense of purpose, and with one eye on a possible exit route.
It would be ungenerous to suggest that the Left approach to the exercise of political power at the Centre is whimsically calibrated. On paper, the Communists are in the twilight zone between wielding power at the Centre and being in opposition—the only caveat being that they will not allow the UPA Government to collapse in a hurry. At the same time, they have ensured that a generous clutch of their fellow-travellers—the “eminent historians”, the professional seminarists and the custodians of left-liberal conscience—have found their way into advisory committee and government-funded quangos. From these watchtowers of the establishment, they have begun the battle to shape the ideological debate in the country.
In the past month, many of the usual suspects who are otherwise battling Narendra Modi and supporting terrorists have initiated a campaign to rubbish the robust, one-year-old Salwa Judum campaign against Maoist terror launched by the adivasis of Chhattisgarh. Beginning with a press conference in Delhi by members of a Independent Citizen’s Initiative, the mainstream media has been inundated by demands that the Salwa Judum camps be disbanded and a cease-fire offered to the CPI(Maoist)—an insurgent group described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the “single biggest internal challenge” faced by the Republic. These demands have been endorsed by the Communists and a section of the Congress which hopes to benefit politically from an expedient understanding with the Maoists. It is only a matter of time before the human rights industry now descends on Chhattisgarh to plead the terrorists’ case.
Given the array of forces ranged against Salwa Judum, it is apparent that the patriotic adivasis of Chhattisgarh are doing something right. It has long been said that left-wing extremism cannot be countered as a purely law and order problem. There is no empirical basis to sustain the argument that winning a civil war against a non-ethnic insurgency involves delving into complex socio-economic formulations. The Naxalites in West Bengal in the 1970s, the JVP in Sri Lanka in the late-1980s and the Khalistani secessionists in the early-1990s were crushed by the effective use of the coercive arms of the state. But inspirational policemen like Ranjit Gupta in West Bengal and J.F.Rebeiro and K.P.S. Gill in Punjab also used civil society groups adroitly to combat terrorism. Leaders like Siddhartha Shankar Ray and Priya Ranjan Das Munshi also led the charge against Red terror in West Bengal.
It is this aspect of the anti-terrorist operations which scare Maoists. The Maoists have traditionally used their guns to intimidate villagers into submission. By temporarily resettling locals into camps—a technique first tried with great success in the anti-Communist drive in Malaya in the early-1950s—the Salwa Judum campaign has created the opening for effective police action. Salwa Judum is not the be-all and end-all of counter-insurgency; it has secured an environment for the effective use of force.
The Maoists want Salwa Judum called off for two reasons. First, it will send a powerful signal to the adivasis that the Maoists have political clout to supplement their guns and claymore mines. Those who took the initiative to fight terror will end up as sitting duck targets of the Maoists. Second, the Maoists have over-extended themselves and need a little respite to regroup, rearm and re-fund their units. The CPI(Maoist) wants a breather to take advantage of the transition in Nepal. If there is some deal to legitimise the People’s Liberation Army as a parallel force to the Royal Nepal Army, the surplus weapons of the Nepal Maoists will start flowing to the Indian Maoists.
There is nothing “calibrated” about the CPI(M) simultaneously playing interlocutor with Nepal’s Maoists and facilitating India’s home-grown terror in Chhattisgarh. Both amount to the same thing. The joker of calibration is the Congress which wants to fight Maoists but can’t resist the temptation of cutting short-term deals with them to unsettle a state government run by the BJP.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 2, 2006)
Those familiar with diplomatic gobbledegook will have noticed the generous overuse of the term “calibrated” to describe a prevailing confusion or tentativeness of existing policy. Often used as a euphemism for “nuanced”, a “calibrated” strategy invariably involves moving in one direction without any clear sense of purpose, and with one eye on a possible exit route.
It would be ungenerous to suggest that the Left approach to the exercise of political power at the Centre is whimsically calibrated. On paper, the Communists are in the twilight zone between wielding power at the Centre and being in opposition—the only caveat being that they will not allow the UPA Government to collapse in a hurry. At the same time, they have ensured that a generous clutch of their fellow-travellers—the “eminent historians”, the professional seminarists and the custodians of left-liberal conscience—have found their way into advisory committee and government-funded quangos. From these watchtowers of the establishment, they have begun the battle to shape the ideological debate in the country.
In the past month, many of the usual suspects who are otherwise battling Narendra Modi and supporting terrorists have initiated a campaign to rubbish the robust, one-year-old Salwa Judum campaign against Maoist terror launched by the adivasis of Chhattisgarh. Beginning with a press conference in Delhi by members of a Independent Citizen’s Initiative, the mainstream media has been inundated by demands that the Salwa Judum camps be disbanded and a cease-fire offered to the CPI(Maoist)—an insurgent group described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the “single biggest internal challenge” faced by the Republic. These demands have been endorsed by the Communists and a section of the Congress which hopes to benefit politically from an expedient understanding with the Maoists. It is only a matter of time before the human rights industry now descends on Chhattisgarh to plead the terrorists’ case.
Given the array of forces ranged against Salwa Judum, it is apparent that the patriotic adivasis of Chhattisgarh are doing something right. It has long been said that left-wing extremism cannot be countered as a purely law and order problem. There is no empirical basis to sustain the argument that winning a civil war against a non-ethnic insurgency involves delving into complex socio-economic formulations. The Naxalites in West Bengal in the 1970s, the JVP in Sri Lanka in the late-1980s and the Khalistani secessionists in the early-1990s were crushed by the effective use of the coercive arms of the state. But inspirational policemen like Ranjit Gupta in West Bengal and J.F.Rebeiro and K.P.S. Gill in Punjab also used civil society groups adroitly to combat terrorism. Leaders like Siddhartha Shankar Ray and Priya Ranjan Das Munshi also led the charge against Red terror in West Bengal.
It is this aspect of the anti-terrorist operations which scare Maoists. The Maoists have traditionally used their guns to intimidate villagers into submission. By temporarily resettling locals into camps—a technique first tried with great success in the anti-Communist drive in Malaya in the early-1950s—the Salwa Judum campaign has created the opening for effective police action. Salwa Judum is not the be-all and end-all of counter-insurgency; it has secured an environment for the effective use of force.
The Maoists want Salwa Judum called off for two reasons. First, it will send a powerful signal to the adivasis that the Maoists have political clout to supplement their guns and claymore mines. Those who took the initiative to fight terror will end up as sitting duck targets of the Maoists. Second, the Maoists have over-extended themselves and need a little respite to regroup, rearm and re-fund their units. The CPI(Maoist) wants a breather to take advantage of the transition in Nepal. If there is some deal to legitimise the People’s Liberation Army as a parallel force to the Royal Nepal Army, the surplus weapons of the Nepal Maoists will start flowing to the Indian Maoists.
There is nothing “calibrated” about the CPI(M) simultaneously playing interlocutor with Nepal’s Maoists and facilitating India’s home-grown terror in Chhattisgarh. Both amount to the same thing. The joker of calibration is the Congress which wants to fight Maoists but can’t resist the temptation of cutting short-term deals with them to unsettle a state government run by the BJP.
(Published in Sunday Pioneer, July 2, 2006)
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Mulling over Mittal (June 30, 2006)
Is this India's achievement or the achievement of an Indian?
By Swapan Dasgupta
For reasons that have as much to do with ethnicity as with national pride, Lakshmi Mittal’s doughty success in effecting the merger of the Luxembourg-registered Arcelor SA with his Mittal Steel has been widely celebrated in India. Apart from being seen as a glorious chapter in the annals of Indian entrepreneurship, Mittal’s triumph is also perceived as a successful assault on European prejudices. The gripping story of an Indian entrepreneur, who dared take on an entrenched establishment and win, is the stuff legends are made of.
The five month saga that began with Mittal’s hostile bid for the European steel giant Arcelor on January 27 was in many ways akin to a clash of civilisations. It is not that Mittal’s credentials in the steel industry were in any doubt—even before the bid for Arcelor his Rotterdam-registered company had already made a mark as the largest producer of steel in the world. Nor was it the case that Mittal’s earlier experience was confined to turning around dilapidated steel plants acquired at knock-down prices in countries of the erstwhile Warsaw Pact. Mittal Steel has a substantial stake in the United States too.
As the richest man in Britain, and the third richest in Europe, with a net worth of some £14.9 billion, Mittal was already a known figure in the European Union. His generous donations to the British Labour Party, his acquisition of a mansion in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens and the lavish reception he hosted in the Palace of Versailles for his daughter’s wedding had already made him a celebrity. To those with old money, Mittal may have seemed a trifle too flashy and comparable to some of the louder Texan billionaires who are routinely denied entry into some of the snootier gentleman’s clubs in Pall Mall and St James’, but at least he was not an unknown entity. Neither was Mittal some lesser-known Arab sheikh and nor was he mysteriously low-profile like the Barclay brothers who took over The Ritz in London and The Daily Telegraph. If analogies are to hold, Mittal was almost in the same league as the then Australian Rupert Murdoch when he bought The Times from the Thompson family.
Guy Dolle, the outspoken CEO of Arcelor, who led the robust resistance to the takeover of Arcelor was indiscreet enough to identify the problem with Mittal Steel as being too “full of Indians” but the fact remains that race was only a subliminal factor in the ugly corporate battle. Regardless of his assertion that Mittal was blessed with “monkey money” and was “incompatible with European cultural values”—a disqualification which did not hold true for Alexey Mordashov, the Russian owner of Severstal, the suitor favoured by the old Arselor management—political correctness ruled out dwelling too much on Mittal’s national origins and the colour of his skin. In any case, as President Jacques Chirac discovered during a visit to India last February where he was dogged by the Mittal controversy, the collateral damage of playing the race card was too much for the French economy to digest. With France hoping to sell commercial aircraft and nuclear reactors to India, screaming “bloody Indians” was plain untenable.
The fear of Mittal was actually centred on management style. Arcelor was in many ways one of the last vestiges of what is called “gentlemanly capitalism”. Blessed with a fine wine cellar and its own resident cheese expert in its Luxembourg headquarters, Arcelor epitomised the relaxed, high-cost and protectionist style of traditional European business. The Arcelor management viewed Mittal’s low-cost style of steel production—unlike Arcelor, Mittal Steel operates out of rented accommodation in London’s Berkeley Square—as a threat to a languid way of life. Dolle’s assertion on January 30 comparing the “perfume” produced by Arcelor with the “Eau de Cologne” churned out by Mittal was an evocative expression of the sharply contrasting styles. His reacted in exactly the same way as the pampered printers of Fleet Street and the clubbable journalists to Murdoch’s acquisition of The Times.
It is a tribute to the business environment of Europe that neither political pressure from the governments of France, Luxembourg and Spain nor contrived xenophobia could ward off the cold logic of capitalism. The Arcelor management tried many tricks—from announcing a company buyback of shares to proposing a merger with Russia’s Severstal—to beat back Mittal. They failed, not least because of a revolt of ordinary shareholders—a rebellion that was said to have been orchestrated by both Adam, an organisation of small French investors, and Goldman Sachs, one of the advisers to Mittal Steel. Finally, after Mittal raised his bid from the original 18.6 billion Euros to 26 billion Euros and lowered his family stakes to 43.5 per cent in the merged entity, even the Arcelor management succumbed, leaving only the Russians crying foul.
Of course, there was a final diplomatic compromise by Mittal. The new entity, which will control some 10 per cent of the world’s steel output will be known as Arcelor Mittal, rather than Mittal Arcelor. As one commentator put it, for the man who has travelled a long way from a Rajasthan village and Kolkata, “it was not worth risking the derailment of a world-domination strategy because of quibbles over whose name comes first.”
Viewed in totality, Mittal’s achievement is awesome and India is right to feel very proud of him. Yet, the question remains: is this India’s achievement or the achievement of an Indian? The answer seems clear-cut. Mittal’s meteoric rise in the world of steel began from the day he branched away from his family’s steel business in India. Mittal could leap into the big league and dream of global domination only after he extracted himself away from the suffocating business environment of India. He could achieve in a decade what the Tatas haven’t been able to manage in a century, not because his business acumen was more formidable, but because he wasn’t dragged down by an environment where there is a glass ceiling put on entrepreneurship and growth. He could succeed because he was not hemmed in by protectionism and could operate globally.
It is indeed ironic that the triumph of Mittal, who still holds an Indian passport, constitutes an indictment of India and a ringing endorsement of the West. Why is it that despite its high taxes and class biases, an immigrant entrepreneur can end up as the third richest man in Europe? Why is Indian entrepreneurial talent unable to find full expression in India? Why are there limits to the growth of Indian corporate houses operating from India?
The answers, without doubt, lie in the business environment of the West. Mittal had to fight prejudice and stomach a lot of gratuitous insults from native Europeans. In addition, he had to counter the resistance of a powerful section of the political class. He could overcome these because at the end of the day Europe allows full play, much more than, say, the US, to the logic of capitalism. Would a hostile takeover that encounters political resistance be allowed to succeed in India? Can India overcome its own xenophobic instincts as effortlessly as the European did?
These are questions that Indians need to mull over in the wake of Mittal’s spectacular business success. By gloating over Mittal showing the white man his place, India will be clutching at the wrong end of the stick. For India, the Mittal story suggests that Indians can come into their own—outside India.
(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, June 30, 2006)
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