Price of honour (March 24, 2006)

The suffix MP has been on sale for the past fifty years

By Swapan Dasgupta

The life of David Lloyd George, the amiable rogue who rose to be Prime Minister of Britain, if we are to believe the impish wisdom of his admirer A.J.P. Taylor, was an unending quest for the hyphen—that formidable icon of British snobbery. Born to a Welsh family with the surname George, this great Liberal statesman who steered Britain into victory in the Great War of 1914-18, insisted on being addressed as Mr Lloyd George. In 1945, after he was made an Earl, Lloyd George slipped in the hyphen and breathed his last as Earl Lloyd-George. It meant, as Taylor put it with characteristic bluntness, that “after 80 years of struggling to be Lloyd George, he was in fact entitled to do so.”

For the past fortnight, the ghost of Lloyd George has hovered over the palace and wine bars of Westminster thanks to the aspirations of other successful men with perceived social disabilities. A storm has erupted in Britain following revelations that of the dozen benefactors who had together “loaned” the Labour Party nearly £14 million, four had subsequently been nominated for membership of the House of Lords. These included one Dr Chai Patel who runs a successful healthcare business, and Sir Gulam Noon, whose contribution to Britain’s curry revolution is seminal. Patel’s nomination was objected to by the independent body that vets nominations to the House of Lords while Sir Gulam has withdrawn his candidature after the controversy erupted.

The whole matter has now been referred to Scotland Yard following allegations that a senior Labour peer close to Prime Minister Tony Blair was running a “cash for peerage” racket. More important, this operation is alleged to have run foul of something called the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act of 1925. The Act, which few people knew was in the statute books, makes it illegal to either accept or offer gifts or “other valuable consideration” for procuring “the grant of a dignity or title of honour.”

The only victim of the 1925 Act was one J. Maundy Gregory, the son of a clergyman and owner of the Ambassador Club. Gregory was arrested and convicted in 1933 on the charge of soliciting £10,000 from E.W. Billyard-Leake for the procurement of a knighthood. Billyard-Leake, a retired naval officer with a DSO, was too well connected to need the assistance of a tout and promptly reported the matter to the police. Gregory pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a term of imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs and was never heard of again.

The British establishment is good at keeping secrets and not snitching on each other. Consequently, the impression conveyed to the public was that Gregory was just a freelance, street-smart rascal who overplayed his hand and got his well-deserved comeuppance. The reality was grimmer. There was consternation in the gentleman’s clubs that “desperation and financial stringency” would prompt Gregory to be needlessly over-communicative. An operation was mounted by some Tory grandees to cut a deal with the disgraced tout before his trial. According to an account by Lord Davidson, chairman of the Conservative Party from 1926 to 1930, “someone” whispered into Gregory’s ear that “he couldn’t avoid a term of imprisonment, but that if he kept silent we would bring pressure to bear on the authorities to let him live in France after his sentence had been served.” Upon release, Gregory was whisked away to France, settled in a house and paid a quarterly pension until his death.

At a time when the dangers from Bolshevism were real, the British establishment just couldn’t afford “Gregory’s peers” being outed. Their consternation must have equalled the alarm of “Skullion’s scholars” in Tom Sharpe’s satirical farce Porterhouse Blue. The response was equally ridiculous, but effective. Just as Skullion the College Porter was made Master to keep the traditions and privileges of Porterhouse intact, one Sir Julien Cahn was elevated to a baronetcy in 1934 for paying £30,000 to Gregory as hush money.

In his diary, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald recorded his conversation with Tory leader Stanley Baldwin: “He said that Maundy Gregory… would stir up such a filthy sewer as would poison public life; …that all parties were involved; …that people like Winston Churchill, Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead were involved; that Gregory had been used by Lloyd George and Bonar Law; that the subscription lists for the rebuilding of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, were involved… The dunghill had to be cleared away without delay and £30,000 was required to do it. So I had to give the honour.” MacDonald resisted for six months and then did what had to be done for King and country.

As someone who was a product of the Labour movement, MacDonald’s squeamishness was understandable. However his predecessors were not pricked by pangs of conscience in misusing their political prerogative—even if it meant coming into conflict with Buckingham Palace. Lloyd George was the most shameless offender. In his four years as prime minister, Lloyd George rewarded the world of finance and industry with 26 peerages, 130 baronetcies and 481 knighthoods. This was in addition to the 50 newspaper proprietors and editors who were similarly honoured.

Lloyd George’s brazenness was grounded in earthy common sense. A few years after he ceased to be prime minister, he defended the “cash for honours” to a Conservative fund-raiser: “You and I know perfectly well it is a far cleaner method of filling the Party chest than the methods used in the United States or the Socialist Party… Here a man gives £40,000 to the Party and gets a baronetcy. If he comes to the Leader of the Party and says I subscribe largely to Party funds, you must do this or that, we can tell him to go to the devil.”

The point is significant: unless there is a completely harmless lure for political contributions, you are likely to be confronted with moneybags wanting to influence policy with donations. Lloyd George thought he had evolved the most pragmatic over-the-counter system of political funding—he wasn’t too choosy about who paid as long as they paid—but it was one which offended both old money and high morality.

Baldwin, the personification of stodgy Conservatism, for example, thought Lloyd George to be “a real corrupter of public life” and one who had “no moral sense at all”. On his part, after his bitter experiences with Lloyd George’s dubious recommendations, King George V is said to have remarked that if he were among the new rich, the last thing he would do would be to run after a peerage. “It was not”, wrote his biographer Kenneth Rose, that the King had lost faith in a hierarchical society; but that 25 years as the supposed Fountain of Honour had left him disillusioned by the wiles and extortion practised in his name.”

Ultimately, Lloyd George’s excesses forced the appointment of the Dunedin Commission and a law against the sale of honours. Yet, 80 years later, the problems associated with reciprocity in political funding persists. “I have lots of views on the important issues that affect our society” claimed Chai Patel who, alas, will not get a chance to adorn the red upholstered benches of the Lords. It’s a claim that is constantly echoed by those queuing before the party offices before a Rajya Sabha election, the proverbial suitcase discreetly visible. In Britain, you can buy a prefix if you are clever and socially adept. In India, the suffix MP has been on sale for over 50 years. It must be a colonial hangover.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, March 24, 2006)

New logic for new India (March 10, 2006)

There was no condescension in Bush's offer of friendship

By Swapan Dasgupta

Even after he fell from grace and spent his last years in disgrace, there was one country where President Richard Nixon was always welcome. For all its other angularities, China never forgot its indebtedness to the man who in 1971 began the process of extricating the Middle Kingdom from its post-Communist isolation.

It is still too early to say whether or not President George W. Bush will enjoy such a lofty status in India during his retirement years. Yet, when future historians chart the course of Indian foreign policy in this century, they will have to acknowledge President Bush’s unique contribution to overturning the entrenched assumptions of the Cold War. It is not merely that the controversial US President made a special effort to reach out to India. He was the first world leader of consequence who understood the enormous importance of democratic India in the 21st century world order.

In the natural course, the Indo-US understanding on nuclear energy would not have happened. Both countries had too many non-negotiable and conflicting positions. The March 2 separation agreement, which must now await the Congress’ ratification to be institutionalised and internationally acceptable, would not have happened if President Bush hadn’t taken the political decision to accommodate Indian sensitivities. The US President went out of his way to create a special place for India in the five-member nuclear high table.

Thanks to the Congress Party’s peculiar dependence on the Communists and the Muslim vote, this particular facet of the US President’s two-day visit to India has neither been adequately publicised nor appreciated. A nervous Manmohan Singh Government lacks the necessary self-confidence to flaunt India’s global coming of age as a political and diplomatic success. When it comes to the US, there is just too much historical baggage that the Congress Party has to carry. But why blame the Congress alone? The BJP, which should have shared the credit for a process that culminated in the July 18 and March 2 agreements, has been excessively circumspect—although it has raised a few important points for the Government to clarify. Consequently, it has been left to the media and corporate India to celebrate a historic step forward.

India, it would seem, is still mentally unprepared to cope with its new global status. Jawaharlal Nehru and the other eminent Nehruvians such as V.K. Krishna Menon may have been passionately interested in international affairs. Unfortunately, that interest was tempered by what can be best described as a monumental chip on the shoulder. Nehru, who was culturally steeped in Anglo-Saxon mores, was over-anxious to show that his heart went out to all the colonised peoples. Likewise, Menon never got out of the propagandist role he assumed as head of the India League in Britain. In attempting to be a “quality” in world affairs—Menon’s description—India ended up as a preachy, sanctimonious bore. Except with the Mountbattens and the liberal set in Hampstead, the British and American establishments tended to be more at ease with Field Marshal Ayub Khan and Sir John Kotelawala than with earnest Indians who shopped in London but pretended that Moscow was paradise. Despite her fierce espousal of national interests, Indira Gandhi carried this arrogant pretence to macabre heights.

It is not merely the leadership that indulged in this inverted snobbery. Feigned indignation directed at the West became a national philosophy and led to disastrous policy choices. Every failure stemming from sloth and incompetence was laid at the door of the colonial legacy. Excellence and entrepreneurship was shunned and mediocrity was celebrated in the name of self-sufficiency and Third Worldism. The economists and historians were, predictably, the worst culprits. “It has been well said”, wrote Jagadish Bhagwati, one of the early refugees from India’s socialist conformism, “that any elementary mistake in economics can be turned into a profound truth by ingenuously making the right assumptions to deduce what you want… India suffered the tyranny of anticipated consequences from the wrong premise.”

The problem hasn’t ceased with the onset of market economics and the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Some years ago, Sir V.S. Naipaul faced unwarranted hostility from the champions of political correctness by questioning the relevance of categories like decolonisation five decades after the Union Jack was finally lowered. Not that this blunt home truth has forced a re-examination of intellectual assumptions. Last month, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, a body created by the Nehruvians to shower state patronage on its chosen artistes, held a seminar to link Indian literature to other Third World experiences. At a time when Indian writers are seeking western markets for the Indian idiom and experience, the sheer absurdity of attempting contrived links with oppressed voices in Egypt and Sierra Leone was too apparent.

Like the elusive New World Information Order whose virtues are still proclaimed by the relics of an earlier era, “official” India hasn’t fully come to terms with the brash, self-confident India of this century. The energy and entrepreneurial dynamism of India which Bush detected quite early on has yet to sink into many critical areas of decision-making.

It is this incomprehension of the New India that is behind the paranoia over interacting with the wider world. The rediscovery of market-oriented economics and deregulation is only 15 years old but even within this brief period India has experienced one scare after another. The hesitant introduction of rule-based international trade under the aegis of the WTO was met by the fear of the takeover of the Indian economy by multinationals. Cable television triggered fears that the hapless villager in Azamgarh would be exposed to Baywatch and fall prey to an insidious cultural imperialism.

On almost every count these fears have turned out to be misplaced. Indian ingenuity and cultural comfort with itself have led to India dictating the rules of the market. Cricket is a case in point. When socialism prevailed in India, it was the English and the Australians who controlled the game. Today, no major cricketing decision can be taken without factoring Indian interests. In the 1970s, Yorkshireman Fred Trueman taunted Indian cricket as a matter of routine. He never toured India with any MCC side. Today, Geoff Boycott, the other Yorkshire cricketing legend, has to sing for his supper on Indian TV. His accent is regarded by Indians as quaint, just as Peter Sellers’ Indian act drew sniggers in Britain 30 years ago.

The lessons of the past decade are too significant to be brushed aside by insular Comrades and uninformed cultural chauvinists. Whenever an economically liberated India has confronted the world, it has always succeeded in turning the balance of power in its own favour. There was not a hint of condescension in President Bush’s offer of friendship and neither did he undertake the finger-wagging drill of a big brother—unlike in Pakistan. He wasn’t showering India with aid and freebees. He was imploring India to assume its rightful role in global capitalism and enrich itself. His offer lay in facilitating the removal of a irritants created by an earlier generation. Never mind all the lofty talk of democracy—which, like the Americans, Indians take for granted—Bush was speaking the language of a Texan out to cut a mutually beneficial deal.

Nehru, like the protestors who revelled in hateful anger, wouldn’t have comprehended Bush’s logic. That’s because he hated business, entrepreneurship and profit. He epitomised India’s Dark Ages. The country has moved on. And the young generation, unlike the Midnight’s Children, don’t even need to look back in anger at the 50 wasted years. They have nothing to lose but their subordination; they have a world to win.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, March 10, 2006)

Calcutta: An Exile's View (February 2006)

By Swapan Dasgupta


One of my earliest recollections of Calcutta dates back to 1961—the year the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the city.

One afternoon, my mother told me and my twin sisters that we were going for an outing to “see the Queen.” To a six-year-old that sounded exciting. To see a real Queen—I was familiar with her picture thanks to a relative’s stamp collection—truly tickled my imagination. We got into our grandfather’s enormous sky-blue Studebaker and drove to the house of one of my mother’s many relatives on, what I think was, Central Avenue. We were taken to a large portico overlooking the grand street. It was house-full there. The children were allowed the luxury of sitting on the ground and peering through the balustrade. It was the best view of the street.

I still recall the large crowds on both sides of the impressive avenue. Then, a motorcycle with a siren driven by what we called a “police sergeant” drove by. The crowd began cheering and, in a flash, there was a white lady in an open black limousine waving to the crowds. She was standing and wore white gloves. Besides her, but sitting, was an elderly gentlemen with spectacles and a generous smile. I was later told he was Bidhan Roy, the Chief Minister of West Bengal.

Although the motorcade was not really speeding, it was all over in a flash. We returned home all excited and told everyone in the large house on Ballygunge Place, where the joint family lived, that we had seen the Queen.

I don’t remember the reactions but I am fairly certain that my childish jubilation was greeted with sneers. There was always a cultural divide between my mother and the rest of the family. It was not merely that my mother was a West Bengal “Ghoti” and from a landed background, whereas my father traced his roots to Jessore district and was thus a “Bangal”. The conflict was more political—my parents spanned two extremes of the Bengali political culture.

Take my paternal grandfather, a large man who doted on me. He was always dressed in starched, white khadi. Except on one occasion when I saw him in a western-style suit and had a good laugh, he was always in a dhoti. Yet, and this is the paradox, his food habits were incredibly western—soup, roasts and Irish stew—and he travelled in one of his two enormous Studebaker cars. He was quirky and unique. He founded and ran a thriving industry and was fanatically committed to swadeshi entrepreneurship. He hated the British and had great admiration for everything American—he was one of the earliest graduates of Stanford University. Naturally, he was uncompromisingly anti-Communist, believing that every Indian Communist should be deported to China.

My maternal grandfather—who died before I was born—was one of Calcutta’s most successful lawyers. Extremely westernised and very Bengali at the same time, he was an unabashed Raj loyalist. He used to travel to London almost each year in connection with cases before the Privy Council. In his last years, he moved to Delhi to work with the Law Member of the Viceroy’s Council. My mother lamented that he died in 1942, just after he was made a CBE. “Another few years and he would definitely have got a knighthood,” she always said.

My inheritance spanned both Calcuttas. There was a Calcutta that oozed Empire and the proverbial “Black Town” which was quintessentially Bengali. Yes, there was also a Marwari Calcutta which had a culture and dynamism of own but which was unfamiliar to both wings of my family.

A glance through the Queen’s itinerary of 1961 shows that Independence didn’t put an end to what Lord Curzon once accurately described as “a European city set down upon Asiatic soil.” First, there was a garden party hosted on the lawns of Raj Bhavan—the full version of what Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire should have looked like—attended by some 4,500 handpicked guests. Next morning, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh attended a service in St Paul’s Cathedral, with a string quartet from the Oxford Mission in Behala adding to the musical efforts of the choir. They then dropped in to Victoria Memorial—Curzon’s most enduring monument to the Raj—and visited the Horticultural Gardens in Alipore. Finally, she gave away the prizes at the races from the special enclosure of the Royal Calcutta Turf Club.

As she drove down the Red Road and viewed the impressive bronzes of the stalwarts of the Empire, shook hands with the mercantile rajahs of Clive Street and read The Statesman ( still British-owned and edited by an Englishman) with her chhota hazri, the Queen must have delighted in the seamless transformation of Empire into Commonwealth.

At every place the Queen visited, she was warmly received. The British expatriates—there used to be a sizable number those days—and the Bengali gentry put their best foot forward to receive the second reigning British monarch to have visited Calcutta. The “seditious” Bengali who was the dread of every Viceroy from Curzon to Wavell was nowhere to be seen. Either British officialdom had got it completely wrong—remember, even Curzon opposed the transfer of the Capital in 1911 to a city that he called the “graveyard of empires”—or Calcutta had undergone a genuine change of heart.

It was neither. Calcutta was always a British city dominated by Bengalis. Its ruling culture was British (not English, because Scots dominated the business life) and physically, the Raj defined the city’s landmarks. In 1966—the last year of Old Calcutta—Desmond Doig, one of those oddballs who stayed on, published a series of 39 impressions of Calcutta for The Statesman. Only five of his sketches—the cluster of Shiv temples on Diamond Harbour Road, the Chitpur Road dominated by Nakhoda Masjid, the Jain temple, the “bastard baroque fantasy” called Jhagra Kothi on Armenian Street and Raja Nabakrishna Deb’s palace—can be said to skirt the colonial encounter. Otherwise, everything, from the imposing portico of La Martiniere (my alma mater) to the Eden Gardens created to commemorate the annexation of Burma and the Gowalior Monument on Strand Road honouring a long-forgotten campaign of 1843 reeks of a history that began from the time Job Charnock set up a trading post for the East India Company.

Since 1967, there has been a systematic attempt to reinvent Calcutta. It began with the wave of industrial strikes and bouts of labour hooliganism encouraged by the first Communist-dominated United Front Government. The gherao movement triggered a process of terminal industrial decline. The already beleaguered jute and engineering sectors started wilting. The British expatriates quietly packed their bags, sent their household goods to the auction houses on Russell Street and left by the last international flights from Dum Dum. The Marwaris didn’t do anything so dramatic. They stopped all reinvestment in West Bengal and quietly shifted focus to other states. Alipore and Ballygunge are dotted with well-maintained but deserted palaces of the Marwari stalwarts who began life in Calcutta but have moved on since.

The process of cultural remodelling began with the removal of the British bronzes from the heart of Calcutta in 1969. The imposing bronzes of Canning, Mayo, Havelock, Curzon, et al were lifted ceremoniously by crane and carted off to a dump in Barrackpore where they have subsequently been vandalised. More widespread vandalism was prevented because Victoria Memorial came under the Centre’s jurisdiction. Therefore, mercifully, the Old Queen still survives the desecration of the Second City of Empire.

The change wasn’t confined to removing British symbols and changing Dalhousie Square to BBD Bagh. The denial of history led to the most rampant and mindless destruction of the city’s most beautiful buildings. Urban renewal is unavoidable and necessary but when aesthetics is completely submerged by crass commerce, the results can be debilitating. The façade of the Bengal Club was torn down and replaced by a high-rise of incredible ugliness. It was the same story all along Camac Street, Theatre Road, Middleton Row and all of Ballygunge and Alipore. Nor were the casualties only the buildings that housed the boxwallahs. The houses of the old landed Bengali gentry, the foremost casualties of Partition, were the next to go all along Lansdowne Road, Gurusaday Road and Burdwan Road. The architecture of gracious living was wilfully killed by the perversity of post-colonialism.

In this age of incipient globalisation and emerging consumerism, it is painful to suggest that Calcutta was there first. From the gracious department stores Hall and Anderson, Whiteway & Laidlaw and the Army and Navy Stores to individual specialist shops in New Market and Lindsay Street, Calcutta thrived on the foundations of a free market. Till the late Sixties, Park Street and Chowringhee boasted the most vibrant night life. For those with class it was the Firpo’s, Prince’s, Blue Fox and the bar at the Great Eastern. For the flamboyant and the young there was the Golden Slipper and the Sarky Bar. And, of course, there were the clubs—the Bengal Club (once for Europeans only) which was an extension of the committee room of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce; the “old money” Calcutta Club; and the weekend Tollygunge Club.

Till the early Sixties, there were sufficient expatriates in Calcutta to keep some sporting clubs exclusively European—the Calcutta Rowing Club, the Calcutta Swimming Club and the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club with its manicured grounds in Ballygunge. In 1969, one Ram Chatterjee, a colourful politician representing the Forward Bloc (Marxist) was appointed Minister for Sports. He mobilised a hundred or so adivasis, marched into the Calcutta Swimming Club premises, undressed and jumped into the pool. It was hailed as the end of the colour bar in Calcutta. It probably was. By then, however, there weren’t enough whites to sustain the establishment.

To the outlander, it seemed that sahib Calcutta was in permanent conflict with the Black Town. Under the Raj, racism was pretty widespread and the single factor which fuelled the bhadralok demand for swaraj. Yet, as Nirad Chaudhury has forcefully argued in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, the relationship between Empire and the Bengali middle class was extremely complex.

First, the Anglo-Bengali encounter was the longest and most sustained in India. Despite the nationalist myth around Siraj-ud-Doulah, it can never be forgotten that Clive’s victory in Plassey was plotted and financed by the Bengali merchants of Calcutta. When the victorious Clive returned to Calcutta, there were celebrations and the victor of Plassey was hosted by Bengali financiers like Raja Nabakrishna Deb.

Secondly, the intellectual appeal of the European enlightenment was strongest among the Bengali Hindus because they had been only nominally influenced by the culture of the Mughal court. They took to European culture enthusiastically, sans Christianity, and easily absorbed it into their Bengali identity. The dress code in Calcutta Club, for example, is revealing: during the winter months, admission to the main dining room can be ensured only with either a jacket and tie or national dress. At the Calcutta Club however—unless the rules have been changed of late—national dress means dhoti-kurta and not pyjama-kurta. The pyjama, Bengal’s most colourful exponent of the dhoti, Aveek Sarkar, once informed a stupefied Congress maharaja, “is something you wear between the bedroom and bathroom.”

Sustained exposure to westernisation has not compromised the self-identity of Bengalis as Bengalis. Indeed, the colonial education system promoted this synergetic autonomy. Most Bengali graduates of an earlier generation who mostly studied in government schools in district towns were fluent in English, Bengali and Sanskrit. They knew their Shakespeare, Milton and Byron but they were equally at ease with the Hindu epics, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Nirad Chaudhury was the product of such a culture. In his last years in Oxford, he wore tweed when walking to town. Inside the house it was invariably the dhoti. My anglicised grandfather maintained two separate kitchens and dining room—one was only for European food. Yet, beef was strictly taboo, except in Brahmo Samaj households. Maybe this explains the high incidence of Brahmo Communists.

The flowering of Calcutta was centred on the Bengali success in detaching the idea of Britain from the reality of British rule. Not everyone could comprehend the nuances of this emulation-opposition. Working in The Statesman of the 1930s, Malcolm Muggeridge was aghast that his westernised Indian friends were strong supporters of the Congress. He thought they were humbug. “Our parts in history”, he wrote in his Chronicles of Wasted Time, “are allotted, not chosen; and their belonged to the Raj, which they hated, rather than to Swaraj, whose coming to pass they sought.”

Muggeridge misread his Bengali friends. C.R. Das, J.M. Sengupta and Tulsi Goswami—to cite some examples—were neither toadies nor hypocrites. They lived up to their convictions and it did not conflict with their lifestyles. There was a certain broadmindedness, for example, which allowed Congress heavyweights like Sengupta and Goswami to enjoy a quiet drink at the Calcutta Club with the likes of Sir P.C. Mitter, the Raja of Santosh and Sir Rajen Mookerjee. In the social interaction of Bengalis, the Congress-Loyalist divide was notional. How else would my parents have got married?

It was this Bengali harmony which epitomised Calcutta and made it such a vibrant and cosmopolitan city. Since 1967, there has been a steady breakdown of the social code. There has been an onrush of insularity, provincialism and bad taste. Where gentlemanly conduct was the norm, there has been the intrusion of both the parvenu and the outlander. To some extent this social upheaval was unavoidable but, unlike Delhi, it coincided with a prolonged period of economic stagnation and, of course, socialist deprivation. Calcutta was a city built on global trade; it was crippled by the closed economy that followed Indira Gandhi’s populist turn in 1969.

Communism finally killed Calcutta. Bengali Marxism started off as rebellious games played by boys (and some girls) from good families. As long as the Communist adventure was in the hands of the likes of Hiren Mukherjee, Indrajit Gupta, Snehangshu Acharya, Renu Chakravarty and Mohit Sen, it was more like a repeat of the Young Bengal movement. Tragically, the Bengali babu had not factored in the deep mofussil insularity, intellectual cretinism and the cultural envy that was built into the bloodstream of the CPI(M).

Apart from the shell and some outward forms of civility, the Calcutta I knew and grew up in no longer exists. The landscape has changed. The old landmarks are gone. The mindset is unappealing. This Kolkata is not my Calcutta.

(Published in Seminar, issue 559, 2006)

Of faith and distrust (January 13, 2006)

Non-proliferation faithfuls are worried about the Indo-U deal

By Swapan Dasgupta

The winter vacation on Capitol Hill is the moment for Senators and Congressmen to familiarise themselves with a world outside the Beltway and their constituencies. India being a flavour of the season, New Delhi has hosted a stream of visitors anxious to find out what is making this erstwhile exporter of communicable diseases—the parting comment of a former US Ambassador—suddenly tick. Senator John Kerry, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 2004 US presidential election, was among the more prominent of the visitors. Last Wednesday evening, the US Ambassador hosted a small, interactive dinner with the Massachusetts Senator which was useful in providing insights into the likely obstacles in the path of the proposed Indo-US nuclear understanding.

Senator Kerry’s political credentials are impeccably liberal, not least because he represents a state that even voted for George McGovern and Walter Mondale. His opposition to President George W. Bush, apart from being ideological, is also instinctive. Kerry may not be a non-proliferation fanatic but he would certainly count the so-called ayatollahs of non-proliferation on Capitol Hill as among his natural allies. This probably explains why he came to Delhi with a dhobi list of questions and clarifications about the July 18 agreement.

The Senator’s contention was couched in the vocabulary of practical and pragmatic politics. The Indo-US nuclear deal, he argued, is a principle worth supporting but there are concerns of people who see non-proliferation as an article of faith. These concerns, he feels, must be met more than half way by India being accommodating on the details of the understanding. Only then will the agreement pass muster in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Although Kerry made it clear that he was not necessarily speaking for himself but merely alerting India to the concerns of his colleagues, it is apparent that the assumptions that guided the Bush Administration into sponsoring India’s membership of the nuclear high table aren’t universally shared in Washington DC. For President Bush and, more particularly, his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the July 18 agreement was only partially about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. By attempting to remove the single impediment in the path of a robust bilateral understanding, the Bush Administration was facilitating a fundamental realignment in Asia. India, which, for historical reasons, had been outside the American radar, was being brought in as a serious strategic partner. Since the fallout of India’s 1998 nuclear tests made a full-throated relationship impossible, the Bush Administration sought to exempt India from the punitive drill associated with the closed membership of the nuclear high table. Rice, presumably, had India high on her mind when she wrote in The Washington Post last month that the US “must transcend doctrines and debates of the past and transform the volatile status quo that no longer serve our interests. What is needed is a realistic statecraft for a transformed world.”

In effect, Rice was suggesting that India should not be treated as a permanent pariah because it went nuclear in 1998, as opposed to 1968. The imperatives of “realistic statecraft” demanded that the democratic and civilisational worth of India, and its military and economic potential, be acknowledged and fitted into the larger strategic designs of the US.
It is a compelling argument that is also based on the recognition of India’s track record of not exporting its nuclear know-how for political and financial considerations. The same can hardly be said about either Russia or China.

Unfortunately for India, the Bush Administration’s pragmatic non-proliferation runs into idealistic opposition. For the sanctimonious Scandinavian countries and Japan, the roll back of nuclear weapons is an article of faith. By converting P-5 into P-6, the Bush Administration, the non-proliferation lobby fear, is redrawing the rules of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Democratic Party legislators on Capitol Hill aren’t necessarily as preachy as the Norwegians and Swedes but they too seem to want India to do more than just separate the civilian and military facilities. They want India to cap its production of fissile material. Robert James, the US Undersecretary of State for arms control and security, echoed these sentiments to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 2, 2005: “To ensure that the US and other potential suppliers can confidently supply to India and meet our obligations to the NPT, safeguards must be applied in perpetuity.”

The term “in perpetuity” is a euphemism for the defanging of India. No Indian Government can sell such a deal to its people.

The insistence on such harsh non-proliferation-linked terms is also based on the complete detachment of the July 18 understanding from the geo-politics of Asia. The gulf between the New Realists like Secretary of State Rice and the Old Idealists such as Kerry is most evident on the issue of China. Like most Clinton Democrats, Kerry perceives China as a society in healthy transition. He feels that the old Long March generation is fast yielding way to a new entrepreneurial leadership that is driven by business. To him, China does not have any expansionist or hegemonic designs, except, perhaps, in relation to Taiwan. Just before the formal interaction, Kerry stumped BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan and me by suggesting that India could be provided a nuclear umbrella by all the P-5 countries. When I asked whether he included China he grudgingly admitted that maybe not.

The Senator’s innocence is revealing. Whereas there is a convergence between the stalwarts of the Bush Administration and India’s strategic community over the potential threat posed by China, this is not shared by the liberals on Capitol Hill. To many of them, legitimising India’s nuclear arsenal is akin to giving Iran the permission to assemble nuclear warheads to target Israel. To them, there is no qualitative difference between good boy approach of India and the nuclear supermarket run by Pakistan in A.Q. Khan’s heyday. They also seem to be influenced by China’s feverish lobbying against any Indo-US nuclear deal and its warning that if Washington can legitimise Delhi, Beijing can do the same with, say, Islamabad.

It is a menacing suggestion but, tragically, its threatening overtones have not been adequately discussed. Kerry may have returned to Boston much better informed about Indian strategic perceptions of China but it is unlikely the other sceptics on Capitol Hill will have the same exposure. China is perhaps the driving rationale behind the Bush Administration reaching out to India. The growing concern over China’s Middle Kingdom impulses is also the reason why a large section of the Indian political establishment wants to kiss and make up with the US. The China factor is the reason why the CPI(M) would rather bring down the UPA Government than permit the evolution of a Indo-US special relationship.

Yet, and in a bizarre way, there is no open discussion of the China factor. It is at best referred to in code—disparagingly as the strategic competitor and disingenuously as another strategic partner. There are few like former Ambassador Robert Blackwill who bluntly will admit that while the nuclear deal “is not about containing China… it’s about responding to the rise of Chinese power and seeking to develop relationships with India and Japan to better manage it.”

People like Kerry don’t see it that way. They may well try and push India to a point where signing the agreement would become dishonourable for India. Fortunately, there are others who look beyond technical nit-picking to the larger canvas of two of the largest democracies acting in concert. It is hoped that they will not let this opportunity pass.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, January 13, 2006)

Not into the sunset (Dcember 2, 2005)

Neither India nor the BJP has heard the last of Uma Bharti

By Swapan Dasgupta

Sometime in 1993, I received a call from Uma Bharti to meet at her flat on Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Delhi. She wanted some help in getting out of yet another sticky situation, substantially of her own making. She had antagonised the top brass of the Madhya Pradesh unit of the BJP by accusing former chief minister Sunderlal Patwa of plotting to kill her. It was a wild charge and deserving of some disciplinary action.

After a few pleasantries and a quick round-up of Madhya Pradesh politics, I bluntly asked Uma why she was hell-bent on tormenting Patwa. Surely she should realise that you couldn’t get anywhere in the state by alienating a powerful group in the BJP that included Patwa, Kushabhau Thakre and the Rajmata of Gwalior? “I can’t help it”, retorted Uma, “it’s in my genes.”

It was the strangest answer I ever heard from a politician. The question is: has Uma ever really been a politician?

She somehow got out of that little spot of bother in 1993. She has also extricated herself from many other acts of indiscretion because, at the end of the day, the sombre notables of the BJP don’t know whether to take her seriously or treat her as the resident eccentric. Accustomed to a political style centred on anushashan (discipline), they just don’t know how to cope with a sanyasin who is both a tomboy and a natural charmer. One moment she threatens and curses, and before the day is out she plays the sweet, vulnerable girl who had momentarily let her emotions get the better of her rational judgment.

Uma is forever getting the benefit of doubt. That’s because everyone in the BJP know they are also dealing with a highly gifted individual, an indefatigable campaigner and an accomplished communicator. Words come naturally to Uma. A professional preacher since the age of six, she can still cast a spell on just about any audience. She can master a complicated subject effortlessly and communicate it to a rural audience through parables from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Whether she’s proclaiming the glory of Lord Ram or denouncing the Congress, Uma knows how to strike the right note.

She is also a charmer and plays mind games. During the 2003 Madhya Pradesh campaign, she entered into a fantastic partnership with Arun Jaitley to demolish the Congress. She would perennially tease Jaitley, and then go on to harass him to the point of exasperation. With Venkiah Naidu she was forever aggressive and even intimidating. With the party stalwarts such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh, she would be remarkably coy and paint herself as a homely and slightly spoilt child. At the same time, she possesses a sort of village cunning that propels her into preying on people’s vulnerabilities and pandering to their pet hates.

With Uma, you have to be on your guard. Her behaviour can and does, at times, leave the party leadership fuming. Yet, there are few who bear permanent grudges – women, ironically, judge her more harshly than men. “Uma is mad”, is the common refrain and the precursor to acts of collective forgiveness. Everyone knows they were dealing with someone special and unique.

Uma’s impulsiveness has always been the problem. On reflection, she readily concedes that she has overshot the limits of endurance and rush to friends and charm them into lobbying for her rehabilitation. This, ironically, adds to her vulnerability. Her patrons lobby hard to restore her to favour but, in the process, they also identify her with her own little agendas. When Uma speaks, you can be sure she is speaking her mind; when she pens lengthy letters, which invariably find their way to the media, you can almost be sure she is being led by the nose. Three months ago, she lost the confidence of the RSS by denouncing some pracharaks by name in a letter. It was someone else’s agenda.

When Uma was thrust into Madhya Pradesh politics in early-2003, she went very grudgingly, wrongly believing the move to be part of an elaborate conspiracy to discredit her. Yet three months into touring the vast state she correctly gauged that the Congress could be defeated. She visited every constituency in the state and, backed by a formidable organisation of both the party and the RSS, won a landslide victory for the BJP.

Unfortunately, the rigours of governance proved too much for her. Restless and impulsive, she failed to delineate her priorities and frittered away her energies moving from one scheme to another. Worse, she surrounded herself with people who did her reputation and image no good. In a sense she was glad that the Hubli chargesheet extricated her from a job she was finding difficult to cope with. Agitation was her forte and she was glad to get to where the action was. At the same time, she wanted to be the real power behind the new chief minister. Neither Babulal Gaur nor the party, however, were willing to oblige.

It was around March this year that Uma got it into her head that she must reclaim the chief minister’s post. She set about carefully plotting her return. Never popular with the MLAs because of her whimsical and tempestuous ways, she set about wooing the top leadership of the party. She used every trick to get back into the good books of Vajpayee and Advani. Yet she made absolutely no headway with the so-called second generation. Nor, despite roping in a Mylapore brahmin close to the RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan, did she succeed in persuading the Sangh to give her another shy at the chief minister’s post.

Two years ago the opposition of the second generation and the RSS would not have weighed against support from Vajpayee and Advani. In November 2005, with the damaging Jinnah controversy behind it, the veterans no longer have the final say in the party. The power centre in the BJP has shifted and the second generation feels more comfortable with a safe pair of hands like Shivraj Singh Chauhan at the helm in Bhopal. Uma never had the support of a majority of MLAs; she was trying to hustle a diktat from the top. When that failed to materialise, she lost her composure, went totally berserk, levelled wild allegations against Naidu, Pramod Mahajan and Jaitley and forced the BJP to take the second disciplinary action against her in less than a year.

For the moment, Uma’s predicament is unenviable. She has literally shot herself in the foot and she invokes little sympathy within either the party or the wider movement. Her defiance, however, is unlikely to be unrelenting. Once the magnitude of her isolation sinks in, Uma is certain to use every trick in the book to inveigle her way back into the BJP. She is fiercely ambitious and talented and she is aware of the exceptional latitude allowed to her. She is certain to play on the party’s definite need for her at the national level, even if she realises that Madhya Pradesh is now completely out of bounds.

As she proceeds on a meaningless yatra, Uma looks like she is walking into the sunset. But don’t count on it. Uma Bharti has always demonstrated the ability to write her own rules, rather than be dictated by institutional discipline. She won’t be content just playing with her dogs or retreating into the caves of Badrinath. Neither India nor the BJP has heard the last of this prodigy from Tikamgarh.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, December 2, 2005)

A bomb too many (November 18, 2005)

The attitide of the Indian Left to the Iran question is suspect

By Swapan Dasgupta

The diaries of former Soviet official I.A. Benediktov, deposited in the archives of the Cold War International Project of the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC, offer some interesting insights into the mentality of Indian Communists. Benediktov, who served as Moscow’s Ambassador to India in the early-1960s, documented his meeting with E.M.S. Namboodiripad in October 1962 after Pravda temporarily reversed its scepticism of Beijing’s stand in the Sino-Indian border dispute because it feared the Cuban missile crisis would trigger a global conflict between the Soviet Union and the US.

“We ask that you transmit this to the C(entral) C(ommittee) CPSU," Namboodiripad told the Soviet Ambassador, "that the publication of this article and the advice of the CPSU contained in this letter of the CC CPSU, truly will help our party get out of the extremely difficult position it is now in. Before this there were moments when we felt ourselves to be simply helpless, but now the party will be able to remedy this situation. We are grateful to the CC CPSU for this help; you cantransmit this personally from me and from Comrade B(hupesh) Gupta."
Namboodiripad then went on to argue that “The most typical mistake of many Communists ... is that they cannot clearly distinguish (between) patriotism and bourgeois nationalism.” In other words, this great Marxist theoretician, who is lauded by the CPI(M) and who serves as the inspiration to its present leadership, was categorical that in the event of a clash between Indian nationalism and the foreign policy objectives of a so-called socialist state, Indian Communists must necessarily bat for the latter.

S.A. Dange was, perhaps, a notable exception who more or less bamboozled the CPI in 1962 into taking, what Mohit Sen in his autobiography, A Traveller and the Road, described as “a stand in support of the nation.” Yet, as Sen noted, neither Dange “nor anybody else went beyond categorising the Chinese attack as a mistake and an aberration. The deeper implications … for Communist ideology, theory and practice were never raised… Not the CPI alone but the whole Communist movement would have to pay a heavy price for evading troublesome questions.”

The chickens, it would seem, are now coming home to roost. In 1998, the two Communist parties went apoplectic when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government transformed India into a nuclear power. Their response was largely guided by Beijing’s sharp opposition to India entering the exclusive five-member nuclear club, although for the sake of respectability they used the language of the American and Scandinavian non-proliferation zealots. Whereas the Indian Communists had earlier welcomed the “worker’s bomb” of the Soviet Union and China, their unrelenting opposition to “bourgeois nationalism” prevented them extending such a courtesy to India. Communist “patriotism”, with a Hindu tinge, naturally involved abjuring Indian nationalism in favour of a make-believe socialist internationalism.

Today, the Indian Communists have resumed their battle against the old nationalist enemy. This time, however, they have chosen a more intriguing issue. Last week, the CPI and CPI(M) joined hands with the Samajwadi Party and the Muslim clergy to attack the Manmohan Singh Government’s alleged capitulation to the US on the Iran question. Declaring that foreign policy could not be conducted behind closed doors, the Left has demanded that the Government either make amends for siding with the US at the previous International Atomic Energy Authority meeting, or face the consequences of a full-scale revolt by some 100 MPs who were hitherto supporting the UPA Government. If India votes with the US at the next IAEA meeting on November 24, the CPI leader A.B. Bardhan has said menacingly, “they will have to repent it.”

The Left’s position is puzzling in two ways. First, the Communists have glossed over the apparent inconsistencies in opposing India’s own nuclear ambitions and endorsing Teheran’s clear bid to channel a part of its nuclear programme into the manufacture of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Islamic Republic already has an intermediate-range ballistic missile, anti-ship missiles to call the shots in the crucial Gulf of Hormuz and it is also developing an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that could have a range of 6,000 miles. According to the Washington Post, a US National Intelligence Estimate report earlier this year indicated that the weaponisation process could take another 10 years of surreptitious activity.

Second, Iran has absolutely no socialist pretensions; it is unabashedly Islamist in orientation. There may be theological differences between the Shia mullahs who constitute the last word in Iran’s national affairs and the Wahabi-inspired Islamist resurgence in the larger Muslim world but the contradictions are submerged in the wider battle against the “Great Satan” and its local ally, Israel. Iranian President M. Ahmadinejad’s threat to obliterate Israel from the map of the world wasn’t a casual indiscretion. It was in line with his Inaugural Address boast that “a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution … will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world.”

President Ahmadinejad may well be guilty of a polemical exaggeration that comes with inexperience. Time and a show of understanding, many well-meaning votaries of appeasement contend, will almost certainly blunt his revolutionary impetuosity. But, can hope be a basis for international indulgence? Ahmadinejad has, after all, warned that “A country that is ready for martyrdom can do anything.”

For India, the issue is neither academic nor just an extension of the emerging special relationship with the US. Iran’s nuclear programme has been shown to have an “unofficial” Pakistani link, courtesy the ubiquitous A.Q. Khan. China too has its finger in the Iranian nuclear pile. Therefore, while the US certainly has reason to be concerned about the implications for the safety and security of Israel and equations in West Asia, India has to confront an additional issue. In plain language, can India afford the presence of two contiguous Islamic nuclear powers on its western borders?

Coupled with an assertive China in the east, a nuclear Iran will become a security nightmare for India. Apart from being a major psychological boost to Islamist radicalism, Iran’s nuclear might will enhance India’s strategic vulnerability and increase its dependence on the US. In such a situation, a strategic alliance between India and the US, far from being a boost to India’s regional clout, will become a defensive necessity. The alternative would either be a seriously weakened India or an India forced into an unequal strategic relationship with China.

Since it is not the apparent intention of the Communists to nurture Indo-US friendship, its motives in making the Iranian question a prestige issue are plainly suspect. Socialist countries created in the Stalinist mould have never had inhibitions in using local Communist movements to further its foreign policy objectives. China is no exception.

It is not in Beijing’s economic or strategic interests to have a democratic India playing a major role in Asia, either in conjunction with Washington or independently. Its opposition to India’s entry into the P-5 nuclear club and its determination not to allow any other permanent Asian member into the Security Council are part of a larger design to both contain and encircle India. In this scheme, the Indian Communists have an important role to play in muddying the waters domestically. This makes it obligatory for India’s pre-eminent nationalist parties, the Congress and BJP, to work discreetly in tandem to secure the country’s future and prevent the blatant communalisation and subversion of foreign policy.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, November 18, 2005)

On a common plane (November 4, 2005)

The Oil For Food shindig has raised issues of ethics

By Swapan Dasgupta

India’s beleaguered External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh and the equally harried British MP George Galloway are about as similar as chalk and cheese. Singh, a refined product of Mayo College, St Stephen’s and Cambridge, is a former diplomat who married into the Patiala royal family. Galloway, on the other hand, proudly boasts his working class Scottish origins and revels in a form of inverted snobbery. If Singh speaks in measured tones, is a bibliophile and oozes charm and courtesy, Galloway is brusque and is prone to flying off the handle. Those who watched Galloway’s dramatic re-entry to the House of Commons in the face of overwhelming odds last May will remember his memorable slugging match with TV presenter Jeremy Paxman. In the Beltway, they still talk about his pugnacious banter with the stuffed shirts at a Senate Committee hearing earlier this year, when he gave as good as he got. By contrast, Singh’s foray into the pre-Cold War world of non-alignment is a guaranteed cure for insomnia.

Yet, today, thanks to very strange circumstances, Singh and Galloway find themselves in the same boat. Both have been accused by the UN-sponsored independent committee headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker of benefiting financially from the regime of the ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Singh has been called a “compromised” politician and a lobbyist and the Opposition BJP has demanded his resignation. Galloway has been compared to Lord Haw Haw—the English renegade who became a publicist for Hitler—and described by a US Senator as “not an honourable man or a good man”. His conduct is being investigated by the British parliamentary commissioner for standards. Both have vehemently denied the accusations, both have threatened legal action and both are fighting for their political survival.

The alleged misdemeanours of Singh and Galloway centre on Saddam’s successful subterfuge of the UN-monitored Oil for Food programme in Iraq. Having decided that its oil wealth could be transformed into a powerful foreign policy weapon and an instrument of Baathist self-aggrandisement, the Saddam regime honed in on individuals who could gauge the lucrative potential of anti-imperialism. What Saddam did was nothing novel. He merely emulated the patronage disbursement methods of the erstwhile Soviet Union. More to the point, these complicated financial dealings would have remained undiscovered had President George W. Bush not forced a regime change in Iraq in 2003.

For George Galloway, if the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee inquiry and the Volcker Report are to be believed, the Iraqi gift of oil sale rights meant entering into an understanding with Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian businessman friend. It was Zureikat who sold these rights to Switzerland-based oil traders, received the money, collected the illegal surcharges and funnelled the proceeds into the accounts of a charity run by Galloway and his estranged Palestinian wife Amineh Abu Zayyad. The linkages between money paid by Swiss oil traders into Zureikat’s account and their disbursement into bank accounts in Jordan held by Zayyad have been established by both committees. Galloway’s former wife benefited to the tune of $700,000, a not inconsiderable sum.

Although Singh’s alleged dealings with the Iraqi regime have not been scrutinised in as much detail, the Volcker Report has divulged enough to put a question mark on his political future. Singh and the Congress Party were allegedly granted similar oil sale rights. The allotments were passed on to a Swiss company Masefield AG for handling. The Volcker Report, however, has provided no details of payments made to either Singh or his nominees, but there is a presumption that payments were made which yielded the beneficiaries a profit which, many believe, were as high as 30 per cent of the contract value.

There are, however, another set of transactions which are more damaging. The Iraqis, it would seem, also gave oil rights directly to Masefield. The Volcker Report says it that Singh was to be the “non-contractual beneficiary” of these deals. In concrete terms this meant that the illegal surcharge amounting to $749,197 would be handled by Singh or his nominee. Consequently, $748,540 was paid to Hamdan Export and its owner Andleeb Sehgal, a close family friend of Singh, in Jordan at various times in 2001, presumably by Masefield. The money was then further diverted into the accounts of Iraqi officials, as kickbacks.

The Volcker Report refers to “layers of individuals and companies between the allocation and end-use of Iraq’s crude oil (which) resulted in transactions where the UN could not determine from the face of the contract who actually was benefiting from or controlled the purchase of oil.” In the transactions with which Singh is linked, there are two routes. The first involved the contracted beneficiary selling his rights to an oil trader and making a profit from the commission. The second involved the oil trader securing the allotment directly but channelling the surcharge into the accounts of the specified “non-contractual beneficiary”. This money was then routed back into Iraq. At this point, the “non-contractual beneficiary” became the handling agent of Iraqi kickbacks.


The Volcker Committee says that its claims are backed by the records of the Iraqi State Oil Ministry Organisation (SOMO), bank records in Jordan and other records found in Baghdad. If true, it would suggest that both Singh and Galloway have some explaining to do. Certainly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s stated belief that the facts are “insufficient” to warrant “any adverse conclusion” against Singh seems a trifle hasty. It does not behove a Prime Minister to dismiss an international inquiry so peremptorily.

What is interesting is that in protesting their innocence both Singh and Galloway are speaking the same language. Galloway has suggested that the documents implicating him are “fabricated” and Singh told The Hindu that the Volcker Report was based on “forgeries.” Testifying under oath to the US Senate committee on May 17, Galloway stated that “I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf.” He added that the businessman Zureikat “never gave me a penny from an oil deal, from a cake deal, from a bread deal, or from any deal.” On his part, Singh hit back with a series of questions: “Is there any evidence that I or my son ever had contact with this company (Masefield AG) or any other company involved in this? Is there any evidence that I had ever heard of this company?”

Finally, Galloway has consistently seen the attacks on him as part of an orchestrated political campaign. He has stuck to his position with great theatrical aplomb, prompting Senator Coleman to observe that “It’s a constant pattern of deny, deny, deny… It’s something he does all the time—shifting the focus to something that is not in front of you.” Being India’s External Affairs Minister, Singh should have been more inhibited. But he too has charged Volcker of targeting those who opposed US intervention in Iraq. “I opposed sanctions, I opposed the war and I opposed sending Indian troops to Iraq.”

Both Singh and Galloway are blessed with political certitudes. Of course, they are not alone. Throughout India and Britain there are countless well-meaning individuals who believed President Bush’s Iraq war was a misadventure. Fortunately, few of them find their names listed as “non-contractual beneficiaries” of illegal deals cut by a tyrannical regime. The issue is not politics but ethics. It is this issue that has to be addressed by both the anti-imperialist patrician and the radical plebeian.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, November 4, 2005)

Conservative wisdom (October 21, 2005)

There is a deep distrust of inner-party democracy in India

By Swapan Dasgupta

As a political creed, Conservatism, with a capital C, is naturally nation-specific. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and even Lee Kuan Yew may inspire Conservatives across national boundaries but, at the end of the day, Conservative parties depend on home-grown heroes and a very indigenous idiom. Apart from the loose commitment to individual freedom, entrepreneurship and national identity, there is little that President George W. Bush has in common with, say, President Jacques Chirac. Yet both represent the dominant Conservative trends in the US and France. Likewise, there is a marked difference between the Conservatism of Lord Salisbury, whose portrait occupies the pride of place in London’s Carlton Club, and Margaret Thatcher. One was a 19th century Tory grandee who flaunted his “illiberal” credentials; the other, a grocer’s daughter, was in many ways a radical.

Notwithstanding the absence of anything remotely resembling a Conservative International, the British Conservative Party holds a very special place in the hearts and minds of most ideological Conservatives—to be distinguished from instinctive Tories. First, Britain has the longest, unbroken tradition of political Conservatism. Second, this Conservatism, in a very un-Conservative way, has actually been articulated as a philosophy by thinkers by, among others, Edmund Burke, Sir Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph. Theoretical rigour may now be the hallmark of the Neo-Conservatives in the US Republican Party, but the process predated the Jewish intellectual concerts from Trotskyism. Finally, the British Conservative Party has had the uncanny ability to reinvent itself periodically. For over 150 years, it has demonstrated its willingness to not only change but change for the better.

This week, the Conservative Party has completed the first round of an elaborate exercise to elect a leader to succeed Michael Howard. From a field of four, the party’s elected MPs in Westminster have short-listed two candidates. Approximately 300,000 Conservative Party members across Britain will now elect one of them as leader. As an exercise in democratic consultation, the process is exciting. Unlike the past when either the incumbent chose his successor or left it just to the MPs, the present procedure ensures that the new leader is both acceptable to parliamentary colleagues and endorsed by the foot soldiers. Since MPs are most concerned with winning power and the grassroots activists with Conservative values, the winner in the leadership race is expected to marry the twin imperatives of pragmatism and ideology.

It is instructive to scrutinise the leadership contest in the Conservative Party in view of the imminent changes in the Bharatiya Janata Party, the only party that fits the Conservative tag in India. In end-December, at the conclusion of the party’s National Council meet in Mumbai, party president L.K. Advani will hand over charge to a “colleague”. With just 10 weeks to go before the event, there is an eerie silence from within the party over the succession. While the media has speculated wildly over Advani’s successor, the party itself is in denial about the succession.

The contrast with the Conservative leadership contest couldn’t be more pronounced. For the past four months there has been a vibrant public debate about the future of Conservatism in a post-Thatcher Britain. Has the image of the party become excessively “ugly”? What has to be done to connect Conservatism with modernity? Should core values prevail over electoral imperatives? Should the new leader merely look to the committed or address floating voters? These are some of the important questions that have been addressed by the candidates for the top post. There has, in short, been a healthy exchange of ideas.

True, some of the preoccupation has been over image and the background of the candidates. The privileged Eton and Oxford background of 39-year-old David Cameron has been juxtaposed against the more humble origins of David Davies. At 65, Kenneth Clarke has been painted as a man of the past. There have been rude remarks of him having too much hair in his nostrils. Some retired colonels in the Shires have expressed indignation over Cameron’s ambivalence over a wild past, while old ladies have warmed up to him as the new “alpha man”.

The extent to which the replication of American primaries in the Conservative Party helps its members make a wise choice is still a matter of conjecture. However, there is little doubt that the process itself will be invigorating for a party that has tasted three consecutive election defeats. Although the Westminster system is parliamentary, electoral encounters are invariably presidential in nature. Voters in Britain do select an MP but they actually vote for a Prime Minister.

As of now there is little clarity in the BJP as to whether it is choosing a president to run the organisation or selecting a leader who will be the public face of the National Democratic Alliance in the next general election. In all probability, the wise men in the Sangh Parivar will settle for a president who can bring some order and stability back into the party and help it get over the turbulence of the past year. The choice of a prime ministerial candidate is likely to be deferred, at least till as long as Advani remains Leader of Opposition.

Yet, the choice cannot be deferred indefinitely. While the return of stability in the organisation is imperative for the BJP to play the role of a robust opposition, the NDA will need a face to posit against Sonia Gandhi in the next general election. There are at least four leaders, three of whom were Cabinet ministers in the previous NDA Government and one who is a Chief Minister, who could, arguably, occupy the space vacated by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But how will the leader be chosen?

The question arises because there has been a deep distrust of vibrant inner-party democracy in India. Neither Mahatma Gandhi nor Jawaharlal Nehru could countenance a Congress president elected against their wishes. Both Subhas Bose and Purshottam Das Tandon were unceremoniously dumped after winning presidential contests. To circumvent the problem, the very idea of elections for top political posts was done away with. Regimented consensus and unanimity became the norm. A spurious form of discipline was posited against the dangers arising from factionalism. Consequently, splits became the norm in India because the avenues of discussion and dissent were foreclosed.

The BJP faces the problem as much as the Congress does. Whereas in the Congress it is the ubiquitous high command that calls the shots, in the BJP a clutch of elders take all the crucial decisions. Pramod Mahajan’s veiled protest against this practice, in a TV interview last week, was valid. Equally valid was his suggestion that the National Council should elect the next party president. However, unless the outgoing president is bent on imposing an unacceptable candidate on an unwilling party, it is unlikely that anything remotely resembling the Conservative Party leadership contest will be witnessed in Mumbai in December. Even if a contest is forced, it will end up as a non-contest.

The political culture in India hasn’t sufficiently evolved for inner-party battles to be conducted in the public gaze without this jeopardising the overall health of the organisation. The overwhelming consensus is that family matters should be settled internally and behind closed doors. The BJP perceives itself as a joint family. In such a set-up, it is always the moral guardians who are entrusted with crucial decisions on behalf of the collective.

It is not classical democracy in the Western sense but it is a manifestation of Indian Conservatism.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, October 21, 2005)

Truth beyond the archive (October 7, 2005)

A public inquiry into Mitrokhin's disclosures would be helpful

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is habitual for the Opposition to make exaggerated demands on the Government of the day, and equally routine for ministers to reject them peremptorily. Yet, it was singularly discourteous of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to, first, disregard a joint letter on The Mitrokhin Archive disclosures from Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Leaders of Opposition from both Houses of Parliament and, then, organise an uninformed media response by the Minister of State for Home Affairs S.P.Jaiswal. In view of the grave charges of KGB penetration into the Government, intelligence agencies, politics and media of the country, particularly in the 1970s, the BJP leaders pressed for a public inquiry. In the first official reaction to the disclosures, Jaiswal claimed that the BJP indignation was “devoid of merit.” Echoing the Congress spokesman’s charge of unsubstantiated “sensationalism” levelled against Vasili Mitrokhin, the Minister said that the Government was not expected to take note of every allegation by retired spooks.

Despite Jaiswal’s misplaced bluntness, the Government’s response fits a pattern. From the day extracts from The Mitrokhin Archive-II began appearing in the media, nervous Congressmen and Communists have been consciously trying to equate the disclosures with some of the more incredible tell-all memoirs of defectors and ex-spies. The voluble CPI leader A.B. Bardhan, for example, called the book a “spy thriller” and the Congress spokesman even suggested that it “should not be dignified by (a) reaction.” To add to the volley of trivialisation, a retired intelligence officer conveniently revealed that two leaders of the erstwhile Jana Sangh held “secret” meetings with a KGB agent at Wengers, once a favourite meeting point for Delhi politicians. The CPI(M) too fleetingly entered the battle screaming libel, and then quietly withdrawing when it dawned on its leaders that it was actually the KGB which had sullied the late Promode Das Gupta’s reputation by painting him as an IB informer.

While it is compelling to suggest that there is little point in raking up the past, now that the Soviet Union is itself history, it would be a mistake to view Mirokhin’s disclosures as yet another motivated and unsubstantiated leak. First, unlike the spy hunts that routinely arouse Cold War nostalgia in the West, The Mitrokhin Archive is not based either on intelligent deductions or casual reminiscences of retired George Smileys. Mitrokhin, who defected to the UK in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was not personally involved in the KGB operations he has described. He was an archivist who had unique access to all the KGB files, including the identities of moles, sleepers and informers. For more than a decade, he made copious notes in longhand from the files and, when the opportunity presented itself, passed these on to the British MI6. The Mitrokhin Archive is the closest approximation to a history of the KGB, as seen through the organisation’s own records. Its importance is stupendous.

Second, although Mitrokhin was personally anxious to secure the publication of all the material he smuggled out of the erstwhile USSR, the British Government was more circumspect. Realising the explosive nature of its contents and its likely consequences, it evolved a rigid criterion to determine what should be published and what should be left unsaid. Malcolm Rifkind, the Home Secretary in John Major’s government decreed that “The names of people the KGB had targeted for recruitment or attempted to influence could not be made public unless they had been prosecuted or convicted or they had agreed to the release of their names.” Rifkind was particularly insistent that it was not up to the intelligence agencies “to decide whether or not names should be revealed.” He also made it clear that this “did not apply to British names.”

The decision to impose political control over the publication of the Mitrokhin archive was subsequently upheld by a June 2000 report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons, chaired by Tom King. The King Report specified that the release of details would be undertaken in a “controlled manner” and that “none would be published without Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Security Service clearance.” An inter-departmental working group under Whitehall’s Intelligence Coordinator was established and it ensured that “the policy on the exclusion of certain categories of information from the book was complied with.”

The predictable dismay among readers that The Mitrokhin Archive names only those who are dead is understandable. However, that is not because Mitrokhin’s notes were patchy. The names of those who helped the KGB in the past and who continue to play a role in public life have been carefully omitted for diplomatic reasons. The British Government, it would seem, was anxious to ensure that it was discreetly detached from a publication that is for all practical purposes an official publication.

Yet, the agonised soul-searching in Whitehall does convey a powerful message. It implies that the carefully vetted details which were found suitable for publication bear an official stamp of authenticity. For an Indian Minister to describe the The Mitrokhin Archive as a series of baseless claims is an act of puerile evasion.

In pressing for a public inquiry, whether in the form of a Joint Parliamentary Committee or a specialist investigation like the one that followed the Kargil war, it is instructive to read British Home Secretary Jack Straw’s statement to the Commons on October 21, 1999. “Thousands of leads from Mr Mitrokhin’s material have been followed up world-wide”, he said. “As a result our intelligence agencies in cooperation with allied Governments have been able to put a stop to many security threats. Many unsolved investigations have been closed; many earlier suspicions confirmed; and some names and reputations have been cleared. Our intelligence and security agencies have assessed the value of Mr Mitrokhin’s material worldwide as immense.”

There is absolutely no ground for believing that what is true for the West isn’t true for an India which was described by Mitrokhin as “the easiest country for KGB operatives to penetrate.” What needs to be investigated is not merely the lavish funding of the Communist Party and its fellow-travellers. Mitrokhin has underlined the broad contours of the subversion of India’s intelligence agencies, the diplomatic service and the media. As an emerging global power, India cannot be unmindful of the disastrous consequences of a rotten inheritance.

Is a public inquiry feasible? More important, can such an inquiry go beyond what has already been published?

The answer to both questions is a categorical Yes. Britain may have been loath to make all the details provided by Mitrokhin public but it has indicated its willingness to share, in a “proper and controlled manner”, additional information with “liaison partners”, a euphemism for intelligence agencies of friendly countries. Indeed, there is enough reason to believe that some of this information was supplied to Indian intelligence during the time the NDA was in power. If not, the British Government has kept open the possibility of sharing much more of what Mitrokhin revealed as a part of “reciprocal exchanges of information between liaison partners.” India and Britain share extremely cordial relations and there is an institutionalised arrangement of intelligence sharing. The Government cannot proceed on the a priori assumption that Britain will not oblige Indian requests for more information.

In a sense, it all depends on the UPA Government’s sincerity in pursuing an inquiry that could well show up its Left allies in very poor light. With the right measure of political will and diplomatic adroitness, The Mitrokhin Archive could pave the way for an overhaul of India’s national security.

(Published in The Telegraph, October 7, 2005)

Wrong time to speak up (September 23, 2005)

Advani is the victim of his own creative restlessness

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is becoming a habit for L.K. Advani to spring unpleasant surprises on the BJP. He did it on June 4 at the mausoleum of Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Karachi and triggered a crisis which would have paralysed the party had it not been settled by the cease-fire agreement with the RSS on June 11. Three months later, on September 18, he again surprised the BJP National Executive at Chennai with a carefully prepared concluding statement which, defying tradition, he read out in English.

That Advani would relinquish the post of party president wasn’t a surprise. Although the terms of the June 11 truce were never made public, it was understood that the BJP would revert to the one-man-one-post principle after the National Council session in end-December. It now transpires that the Pact had also specified that he would announce his decision to quit at the Chennai National Executive. For at least a week before the Chennai meet, Advani had indicated his determination to make that announcement, despite suggestions that he defer it till the Bihar poll results. During the week neither the BJP office bearers nor the RSS leadership indicated they wanted him to reconsider.

The surprising feature of his concluding statement in Chennai, therefore, was not Advani’s announcement that “a colleague” would assume charge after the National Council meet. The BJP National Executive was mystified by his rigid insistence, despite last-minute advice to the contrary from anxious general secretaries, on using the occasion to speak about the creeping distortions in the BJP-RSS relationship. Advani spoke about the need to counter the prevailing impression “that no political or organisational decision can be taken without the consent of the RSS.” The RSS, he said, “provide valuable inputs for our decision-making process.” The BJP, however, was a political party and had its own compulsions. “It is in protecting the ideological moorings of the BJP and in articulating it in an idiom and language the people understand that great care is needed.”

Advani's message was blunt: the BJP could do without RSS micro-management. The relationship between the two bodies had to be “symbiotic”, rather than filial, and based on trust. The RSS and BJP belonged to an ideological family but there could be no question of domination and subordination. It had to be a partnership of equals. In effect, Advani sought to transform an unstated Hindu undivided family into a binding confederal code.

Tensions, even dissatisfaction with the RSS, both at the local and national level, are not new to the BJP. Almost all the BJP stalwarts—from Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat in Rajasthan to Uma Bharati in Madhya Pradesh—have at some time or the other come into conflict with the local RSS functionaries. Present relations between Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the state RSS leadership are, for example, incredibly strained, with anti-Modi dissidents being egged on by local pracharaks. In Rajasthan, many RSS stalwarts feel that Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje is, like Modi, too high-handed.

Regardless of how the RSS conducted its political interventions in the Jana Sangh days, the friction in recent times--since the BJP started controlling governments--has invariably followed two themes: those involving appointments and postings, and those concerned with government policy and contracts. Matters came to a head during the NDA Government because expectations were high and demands insatiable. Unlike the Congress which is quite brazen in seeing government as the dispensing agency of political patronage, the sangh parivar carries a lot of ethical baggage. This may be a reason why run-of-the-mill corporate lobbying during the Vajpayee years had to be cloaked as commitment to lofty principles like swadeshi. It is a different matter that a few RSS leaders couldn't see through this humbug.

Apart from the hiccups over Jaswant Singh’s appointment in 1999 and tensions over the NDA’s rough handling of the Ayodhya agitation in 2003, the clashes of the past didn’t sour the overall BJP-RSS relationship. That was because they weren’t, by and large, concerned with the RSS’ ideological priorities. Some pracharaks in Gujarat griped about Modi’s imperiousness but they couldn’t really fault his inflexible determination to ensure that the BJP wasn’t another carbon copy of the Congress. Consequently, the dissident problem in the state hasn’t degenerated into a BJP versus RSS fight; it has remained an intra-BJP affair, with some RSS functionaries fishing in troubled waters.

Likewise, Vajpayee, as Prime Minister, sought to enlarge his personal base by reaching out to figures in the erstwhile Congress establishment. He routinely turned down requests from both the RSS and the party. The atmosphere of the Vajpayee court was decidedly anti-RSS. No wonder the Sangh felt slighted, even humiliated. But Vajpayee was Vajpayee, and always a law unto himself.

There may well be some takers for Advani’s terse message that the RSS should not get into micro-managing the BJP. It is generally agreed that it does not behove the RSS leadership to press the case of every swayamsevak aspiring to a position. With the phenomenal growth of the BJP in the past 15 years, there is some resentment in the BJP that RSS members enjoy an unfair advantage in the party hierarchy. This is despite the awareness that the contributions of some RSS-inducted functionaries are less than modest.

Yet, Advani’s plea for a debate to iron out the wrinkles in the RSS-BJP relationship was greeted with a sense of exasperation. For a man whose contribution to putting the BJP and the RSS ideology on the national stage is seminal, there was not a voice of anguish when he made his resignation statement.

Part of the reason lies in the perception that although a debate on the RSS-BJP relationship is interesting in itself, there is insufficient provocation for such an exercise at this moment. The controversy over Jinnah, which sparked the present turmoil in the BJP, arose because rank-and-file BJP members were outraged by what their leader said in Pakistan. It was their anger that led to Advani’s isolation in the party and the erosion of his moral authority. The RSS merely echoed what BJP activists felt.

When the RSS chief had earlier, during a TV interview, called for Vajpayee and Advani to retire the party rallied behind the two stalwarts. By showering praise on Jinnah’s vision, and that too in Pakistan, Advani alienated himself from both the party and the Parivar. Consequently, his concluding address in Chennai was viewed as a personal statement. At a time the UPA is on the backfoot, confronting the RSS with a theoretical debate wasn’t a BJP priority. Indeed, there was a feeling that Advani had become too self-absorbed.

That there is a special relationship between the BJP and RSS is undeniable. Some BJP activists treat the RSS as the mother organization, others see it as a moral guide and yet others view its role in strictly utilitarian terms and that too during elections. All these views co-exist harmoniously because the relationship with the Sangh, apart from being individual, is also an evolving one. It has to be nurtured and managed, with both sides sharing the responsibility, and it is just not prone to codification. When problems arise, as they invariably do, they have traditionally been resolved through protracted dialogue conducted outside the public gaze. The element of discretion is overwhelming.

In disavowing this unwritten code, Advani did himself grave injustice. The BJP’s sharpest thinker was a victim of his own creative restlessness.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, September 23, 2005)

The discreet charm of Amartya (September 19, 2005)

Review Article

By Swapan Dasgupta

Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Allen Lane, London, 2005) pp. 409, Rs 650

Ever since dissent became the leitmotif of the teaching classes, there has been a clamour among historians and radical activists to debunk the notion that history writing is the preserve of the ruling classes. “I am seeking”, explained Edward Thompson in his celebrated 1963 preface to The Making of English Working Class, “to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” In 1982, the historian Ranajit Guha initiated the Subaltern Studies project which, apart from challenging “elitist historiography”, sought to highlight “the contribution of people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this (Indian) nationalism.”

These were worthwhile correctives to a historiography geared to understanding the exercise of power. Tragically, the correctives ended up becoming the mainstream. Whereas 50 years ago, the study of British constitutional precedents and the Afghan policy of British India, to mention two stray examples, were obligatory, today’s history curriculum devotes more attention to “peasant studies” and “popular” movements.

Electorally, the Left hasn’t prevailed in India and is unlikely to do so in a hurry. However, since the 1970s it has acquired hegemonic status in some of the important centres of intellectual production, particularly the history departments and the media. There is a striking mismatch between how Middle India thinks and how its intellectuals react.

The mismatch has been in sharp evidence for the past two decades. The rise of assertive Hindu nationalism and the six years of a BJP-led Government at the Centre triggered sharp intellectual reactions. Apart from an aesthetic revulsion to the outlanders, there was considerable disquiet at the assault on cherished Nehruvian assumptions of nationhood. It was painfully apparent that Hindutva was Middle India’s protest against a counter-culture that, quite inexplicably, was becoming the dominant “idea” of India.

Amartya Sen is not, and has never been, a doctrinaire Marxist. He is an archetypal ‘progressive’—the child of an expedient marriage between liberal cosmopolitanism and welfare economics. His sense of enlightenment is very Bengali. He combines his love for the universalism of Rabindranath Tagore with an almost Brahmo Samaj-like disdain for ritualised Hinduism. A creature of the multi-culturalism that is celebrated in the columns of The Guardian and New York Times, Sen reacted to the 1992 Ayodhya demolition, the 1998 nuclear tests and the 2002 Gujarat riots with outrage. In the process, he also effected a curious alliance with the Left and libertarian critics of ‘majoritarian’ nationalism. This collection of essays is the outcome of this intellectual metamorphosis.

Sen’s central thesis is disarmingly simple and unexceptionable. India, he maintains, quite rightly, has the gift of the gab. Its people are naturally loquacious and argumentative. “Prolixity”, he writes, “is not alien to us in India.” Indian democracy is blessed with deep, indigenous, cultural roots. As they say in Indi-speak, we are like that only.

Pluralism, argues Sen, is also ingrained in the religious tradition of the Hindus and the history of Buddhism. He traces scepticism to verses in the Rig Veda, cites its recurrence in the Ramayana and notes the multi-polarity of Hindu philosophy, including the existence of a strong atheistic current. Curiously, Sen doesn’t even have a passing mention of the Kerala-born Sankara who travelled throughout India in the 9th century debating the philosophy of Advaita with Hindu and Buddhist scholars. Nor does he cherish Swami Vivekananda’s dialogue with adherents of the Christian faith. These are not by-the-way omissions. They indicate that rounded history is, perhaps, not Sen’s priority. Like Thompson and Guha, he too is into fetishising footnotes.

As for secularism, Sen notes that its earliest modern adherent was the Moghal emperor Akbar. “To take Aurangzeb as the ‘typical’ Moghal monarch, or as the quintiessential Muslim ruler of India, would be an extremely strange historical judgment.” He even suggests that Alberuni’s contemporary account of Hindu revulsion at the iconoclastic vandalism of Mahmud of Ghazni was a case of “overgeneralizing a little.”

Sen’s emphasis on the cross-religious basis of Indian secularism is well-intentioned. Yet, he does not pause to consider why the other countries in the subcontinent have chosen a less tolerant route. Till the 10th century at least, the Hindu-Buddhist civilisational extended right up to Afghanistan. What made Afghanistan and Pakistan evolve differently? Even Bangladesh, which Sen describes “as the safest country to live in, in the subcontinent”, isn’t quite as idyllic. Give this grim neighbourhood picture, Sen may find it worthwhile considering why the “inclusionary Indian identity” stopped at the Radcliffe line. Is there a greater Hindu basis to Indian secularism and democracy than is politically expedient to admit?

It is widely recognised that Hinduism cannot be equated with codified religions of the book. This is why the term Sanatan Dharma is preferred to describe what is in essence a way of life rooted in the geography of India. Sen is absolutely right to emphasise that Hinduism is inherently plural and lacking in certitudes. He is, however, alarmed by a feeling that the Hindutva movement “has entered into confrontation with the idea of India itself.” He sees in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement an attempt to refashion Hinduism into a monolithic set of certitudes.

Sen, unfortunately, is not contesting a dangerous idea; he is demolishing a caricature. Like most things Indian, the Hindutva movement is a coalition of very different impulses. They range from those who believe in the divinity of Ram and the existence of an exact birthplace in Ayodhya, to those who are self-confessed ‘political’ Hindus. It also includes Indian conservatives who see Hindutva as a loose, emotional anchor of nationhood. Hindu nationalism is itself a broad church. Sen may be an “unreformed secularist” but his understanding of the Hindutva ‘Other’ is not nuanced, and marred by over-reliance on the contrived alarmism of the likes of Arundhati Roy. In describing his enemy, Sen lacks empirical rigour; he becomes another non-resident polemicist.

Being a collection of published essays and lectures, The Argumentative Indian was not meant to be a comprehensive study of Indian identity. Yet, when Sen makes his passionate plea for “internal pluralism and external receptivity” to define India’s sense of self, it is natural to look at the contemporary global context. The reader, unfortunately, will have to search in vain for any reference to either 9/11 or terrorism within India. It is as if these traumatic developments had no bearing on today’s India.

With Sen, omissions are never casual. They follow the choppy trajectory of selective indignation.

Heroes and charlatans (September 9, 2005)

History has become a rarefied conversation among historians

By Swapan Dasgupta

Over the past few weeks, I have busied myself trying to understand the dynamics of an encounter that agitated corporate India of the 1920s and 1930s—the conflict between the fledgling Scindia Steam Navigation Company and the well-entrenched British India Steam Navigation Company (BI). It was a vicious and, occasionally, no-holds-barred battle for dominance over coastal shipping and international routes. The conflict was ultimately resolved in favour of Scindia after 1947 when the Government excluded foreign players from domestic shipping.

For a historian, there are various ways of studying the subject. He could, if he chose, assume a position of theoretical loftiness and treat the Scindia-BI war as an incidental brush-stroke in the wider canvas of imperialism. Mapping the contours of an allegedly exploitative relationship between the metropolitan centre and the periphery would, consequently, become the focus. Alternatively, he could look upon the shipping war as a powerful case study of the confrontation between Indian economic nationalism and the British Empire. It would involve exploring the fascinating but complex relationship between Indian business and the nationalist movement, and between British commercial interests and the Government of India, in the final decades of the Raj . Both approaches would be perfectly valid and would make for scholarly monographs and even a Ph.D thesis or two.

Fortunately, the Scindia-BI war was not merely about trade statistics and the proceedings of various commissions of inquiry on maritime matters appointed by the Governments of India and Great Britain. It was primarily the story of two men who spoke differently, dressed differently, came from very different backgrounds and were yet temperamentally exactly like each other. The tale of the confrontation between Walchand Hirachand, one of the pioneers of Indian capitalism, and James Lyle Mackay, the first Earl of Inchcape, is worthy of both a Jeffrey Archer novel and a Bollywood extravaganza.

It’s a story that has to be handled with great sensitivity and, if I may say so, some degree of imagination. Walchand, or ‘Sethji’ as he was called by his employees, was both a self-made entrepreneur and a nationalist. It could even be said that his robust sense of nationalism arose from his entrepreneurship—by the 1920s he could sense the end of Empire. Apart from being India’s first shipping magnate, his business ventures included shipbuilding, the manufacture of motor cars and aircraft, sugar mills, engineering and construction. Had Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies not been so heavily biased against capitalist enterprise, Walchand would probably have been among the first Indians to make a global impact.

Pitted against him was Lord Inchcape, a self-made Scot who came to India at the age of 23 as a clerk in Mackinnon Mackenzie and rose to become the Sheriff of Calcutta, President of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and a non-official member of the Viceroy’s Council. As head of BI, he effected the merger of his company with the redoubtable Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) in 1914, which established him as the czar of British shipping. He was at one time considered as a possible successor to Lord Minto as Viceroy and was even offered the crown of Albania after the Great War. Fanatically committed to the Empire, he was a high imperialist who combined his romance with India with an uncompromising hatred of Indian nationalism.

The war between Walchand and Lord Inchcape was in many ways an unequal battle in which the Indian finally prevailed because he was on the right side of history. Yet, it was not a straight forward battle between a ‘good’ Indian and an ‘ugly’ imperialist. In their different ways, both men were deeply committed to India. Walchand believed in a self-governing India where the greatest opportunities would be reserved for Indians. Lord Inchcape was completely sincere in his conviction that the transition of India from medieval backwardness to quasi-modernity had been made possible by the dedication and duty of countless Britons who were committed to the idea of Empire. Lord Inchcape believed that network of coastal shipping had been developed by British companies in the face of grave uncertainty. He was damned if he was now going to allow Indian interlopers to run away with the profits of his investment. To him, Walchand was a “pirate”. To Walchand, Lord Inchcape was the real “pirate” for preying on the wealth of India.

Judged through the prism of post-colonial realities, the judgment of history is unquestionably in favour of Walchand, never mind the awkward reality of Scindia subsequently becoming “sick” and being incorporated into the state-run Shipping Corporation of India. At a time India is rediscovering the virtues of entrepreneurship and global capitalism, Walchand is an inspirational figure, on par with the stalwarts of the Tata family and G.D.Birla.

India, on the other hand, has not been kind to Lord Inchcape. For all his contributions, he won’t even merit a mention in the Indian history books of today. Those who are on the wrong side of history tend to end up as non-persons, victims of what E.P. Thompson, in a different context, called the “enormous condescension of posterity.”

The reason does not lie in political correctness alone. The fault lies with the priorities and preoccupations of professional historians. In the quest to make history “scientific”—a mission lauded in these columns earlier this week (“Clio is not for worship” by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, September 4)—the practitioners of the craft have chosen to forget that the past is ultimately a narration of human achievements and follies, a compendium of interesting stories about real men and women. To reduce the Walchand-Inchcape battle to a clinical dissection of imperialism, capitalism, et al, would be a criminal folly. Walchand was more than just another member of the national bourgeoisie and Lord Inchcape was more than another ‘nabob’ with an estate in Scotland.

E.H. Carr bears a heavy responsibility for the degeneration of a discipline that once epitomised the liberal arts and was considered the training ground for the enlightened exercise of power. His disavowal of the “Bad King John and Good Queen Bess” approach to history writing in the 1961 Trevelyan lectures had a crippling impact on historiography. The negation of individual-centred story-telling made the study of history an abstruse, specialised discipline. With post-modernists and the humourless disciples of Edward Said chipping in, history became a rarefied and, occasionally unintelligible, conversation between historians. Since communicating with non-specialists was no longer obligatory, historians began talking in code. It was the end of History as we knew it.

The battle over history teaching is not a simple tussle between nation-building and the celebrations of fragmented diversity. These constitute the toppings of a more fundamental divide. The fuss is essentially an expression of anger against historians who have lost sight of their primary obligation to tell a true story creatively. Today’s historians are less concerned with actual men and women than with the weight of impersonal forces.

No wonder Bollywood is stepping in to fill the void. Their films tell charming stories based on heroism and perfidy. They have no “scientific” pretensions—as if human responses to their surroundings are clinically pre-determined. Predictably, there are distortions born out of either ignorance or artistic licence. Yet, they must suffice because the alternatives—state-sponsored treatises on mercantilism and false consciousness—are more fearful.

The cheerful dumbing down of our past by Bollywood is a direct consequence of mindless pandering to the pseudo-intellectualism of academia. It is time to rescue Clio from the charlatans.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, September 9, 2005)