Tejpal: Reaction is to culture of ‘entitlement’

By Swapan Dasgupta

There are times when a ‘scandal’ becomes more than a gripping tale of individual misdemeanours: it becomes a commentary on society and social mores. The miscarriage of justice in the case involving Alfred Dreyfus brought into the open the fissures in late-19^th century French society, particularly its pernicious anti-Semitism. The salacious tale of what came to be known as the Profumo scandal involving Christine Keeler went a long way in exposing the hypocrisy of the post-War British Establishment and contributed greatly in breaking down the culture of deference that once defined the United Kingdom.

It is still early days to be entirely sure if the grim saga of Tarun Tejpal’s conduct at a purportedly intellectual festival in Goa earlier this month will be treated by social historians of the future as an isolated act of criminality or will be regarded as a vivid illustration of the social mores of contemporary India. It is possible that the so-called “private moment” in a hotel lift points to one dirty, middle-aged man and can hardly constitute a generalisation for either the media or even those who combine artistic sensibilities with the good life. At the same time, there is an equally compelling case for the suggestion that the great champion of the underdog behaved as he did out of a sense of arrogance and entitlement—and that he isn’t the only one.

To view the Tejpal controversy as a media event—which may explain the interest it has aroused in the Fourth Estate—is only partially correct. The attempt by the boss (and, in this case, the perceived owner) of an organisation to extract sexual favours from a subordinate isn’t novel. There have been enough highly-publicised instances of ‘modern’ Indians in publishing and information technology misusing their positions to secure sexual favours for the Tejpal case to acquire any novelty. The only possible difference is that the element of consent in this case appears to be exclusively one-sided. What really marked the Tejpal case was the attempted ‘management’ of the crime by the journalist and the Tehelka management. And that is where media, politics and the social mileau of the ‘arty’ world intersected.

The failure of the Tehelka management to report the incident to the police, when it was under a statutory obligation to do so and, instead, settle matters through a private deal, has attracted many adverse comments. Equally, a lot of incredulity and disgust has surrounded the attempt by Tehelka’s Managing Editor to elevate ordinary criminality into a test of high feminist principles. At the heart of both approaches was the astonishing presumption that normal rules—whether of law or society—don’t apply to those engaged in the noble business of exposing the wrongdoing of others.

It is this insistence of exceptional standards to judge Tejpal that has both angered and mystified many. First there was the attempt to minimise the gravity of the charges against Tejpal and settle the issue through what has been described as a “private treaty”. Secondly, there was the bid by Tejpal to unilaterally award himself a punishment: a sabbatical from active journalism for six months. Thirdly, when these measures were greeted with a renewed sense of outrage, there was the attempt by the Tehelka management to establish a private dispute redressal mechanism—a committee headed by a friend of Tejpal who also happened to be a leading feminist. Thirdly, there was an attempt to put pressure on the family of the victim and persuade her to withdraw her complaint, perhaps in return for some compensation.

And, finally, there was the astonishing demand that Tejpal should have a say in deciding which authority was best placed to assess the charges brought against him. The Goa police, it was claimed, was not an appropriate authority because the government there was controlled by the BJP which apparently wanted to settle scores with Tehelka for its role in disgracing former BJP president Bangaru Laxman in a sting operation more than a decade ago.

In any ordinary case, the defendants may well have claimed that the sexual liaison was consensual but they would not have tried to establish a parallel system of justice or claimed political victimisation. That Tejpal did so was revealing and suggested that the man tried to take refuge behind his lofty status in society and his formidable political links.

Tejpal, it has emerged, was more than just an editor who also organised literary events by way of brand extension. He positioned himself as a great crusader for liberal values and secular causes. Cabinet ministers had invested in his ventures, MPs were among those who had large stakes in Tehelka and he had been appointed as a non-executive director of Prasar Bharti. In addition, he was on first name terms with the great and good of the international literary world. He could flaunt his ‘enlightened’ values on sexuality and get away with a style that was reckless. Corporate bigwigs vied for his attention and showered him with generous sponsorships for his Thinkfest in Goa. No, Tejpal wasn’t any old hack. He was among Delhi’s beautiful people, a pillar of the Establishment.

The assault on Tejpal’s pretensions has, willy-nilly, come to express the popular antipathy to the culture of licentiousness and entitlement that defines India’s governing elite. The coming days will determine if the Tejpal affair is another nail in the coffin of a rotten dispensation. 

Asian Age, November 29, 2013

                                                                                                   

An almost revolution

By Swapan Dasgupta

Those of us who watched the last remaining dome of the Babri shrine collapse in a haze of red smoke at 4.45 pm on December 6, 1992, amid the exhilaration of a frenzied crowd were fully conscious aware that we were witnessing something momentous.

To those who had fuelled a movement that had both galvanised and polarised India as never before, the demolition was akin to the storming of the Bastille—possibly heralding the collapse of the ancien regime and the dawn of a new age. That night, sweets were distributed by people celebrating the liberation of Ram lalla from 364 years of bondage and indignity.   

To the liberal intelligentsia that had resolutely opposed mass mobilisation in the name of faith, the sound of euphoric kar sevaks was akin to the stomping jackboots from a relatively more recent, but equally troubled, chapter of European history. When they assembled in Delhi the following morning with placards proclaiming “sharam se kahon mein Hindu hoon”, they angrily lamented a perfidious assault on the very foundations of the Indian Republic.

Both sides of this great Indian rift were united on one point: life after that fateful December 6 would never be the same again. For months thereafter as riots and explosions scarred many cities, this seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Twenty years later, the hastily written obituaries of the Republic seem rash and premature. Ayodhya was certainly an important landmark of independent India, perhaps as momentous as the Emergency, the Mandal report or the liberalisation Budget of 199. But was it more than that? Did the Ayodhya years lead to a rupture with the past?

The definitive answer must wait a few more decades. For the moment, Ayodhya remains an almost revolution, a turning point in history when (to borrow AJP Taylor’s imagery) history refused to turn. History is not an abstraction that follows pre-determined scientific laws: it is about human behaviour. In December 1992, the emotional temperature was high enough for the country to become delirious with both rage and anticipation. Why did this apparently pre-revolutionary mood recede and why did India limp back to normalcy?

The answers are at best convoluted. The agitation to build a grand temple honouring Ram’s exact birthplace at the site of a mosque built by a Mughal general in 1528, was only partially religious. Had the movement been driven by blind faith alone, it would have not only have endured but become even more passionate which it clearly did not. Nor was it shaped by a frenzied desire to right the wrongs of history. Had that been the case, many more Ayodhyas  would have mushroomed across India.

In hindsight, the Ayodhya agitation appears strongly reactive: as an antidote to movements that sought to either dismember India (Khalistani and Kashmiri separatism) or fracture it into sectional compartments (Muslim assertiveness over the Shah Bano judgment and V.P. Singh’s Mandal move). In rallying round a proposed temple, it sought to create a pan-Hindu identity that would serve as both a vote bank and basis of nationhood. Both these endeavours have registered patchy success.

There were subsidiary currents as well. The most notable (and possibly most enduring) of these was the movement’s robust questioning of the dominant Nehruvian view of secularism. The Ayodhya stir didn’t receive any significant support from the traditional centres of intellectual activity. Yet, a galaxy of establishment figures ranging from retired bureaucrats and generals to writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri and Girilal Jain saw the movement as a great ‘awakening’. Ironically, for a movement that projected a distinctly pre-modern exterior, the intellectual impulses that guided its politics were more contemporary. Inherent to the movement was a desire to discard the ‘differentiated nationality’ that governed India’s official secularism and replace it with an idea of common citizenship that would do away with ‘minorityism’.

Ayodhya no longer agitates India as passionately as it did 20 years ago. There is all-round agreement that the property dispute can fester indefinitely in the Supreme Court. But there is something deeply symbolic about the heavily-fortified makeshift temple that sprang up 20 years ago that serves as a reminder that the last word on the subject is yet to be said.

Sunday Times of India, December 2, 2012 

TWIST IN THE TALE - Secular politics is harming the Bodo minority in Assam

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is an undeniable fact that in the hierarchy of what passes off as ‘national’ news, North-eastern India occupies the lowest rung. While periodic lip-service is paid to the need to rectify matters and bring this much-neglected part of India into the ‘mainstream’ discourse, the bewildering complexity of the region and its relative inaccessibility has ensured that the North-east remains an afterthought, a sort of Fourth World in the Third World.

So it was with last week’s violent clashes in Kokrajhar and Dhubri districts of Assam that left more than 50 people being killed and an estimated four lakh people being uprooted from their homes. A ‘humanitarian crisis’—the newest coinage of mediaspeak—of this magnitude should have led to a furore in the chat shows, with sundry human rights bodies joining the race for competitive indignation. After all, a far lesser crisis in the Kandhamal district of Orissa in 2009 had attracted far greater attention, not to speak of the Gujarat riots of 2002 which continue to dominate media space.

To argue, as has often been done, that the editorial classes are naturally callous and prefer to focus on a relatively small protest in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar is only part of the story. The reality is that the media loves simple categories—as, for example, Hindu ‘fanatics’ versus helpless Christians in Kandhamal and the ‘mass murderer’ Narendra Modi versus beleaguered Muslims in Gujarat. The situation in the northern bank of the Brahmaputra, unfortunately, was too complex to present as a clash between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Was it, as many insisted, a ‘communal’ clash involving Hindu Bodos and Muslim settlers who had arrived from what is now Bangladesh? Alternatively, was it an ethnic clash involving the indigenous Bodos and Bengal-speaking immigrants? The underlying presumption was that while a ‘communal’ clash was unacceptable, an ‘ethnic’ conflict was nominally less damning.

Then there were the invariable sub-plots that excite the TV channels. Was the Assam Government too slow to respond? Why did the Tarun Gogoi Government not take pre-emptive measures after the murder in Kokrajhar of , first, two Muslims on July 6 and the retaliatory violence that led to the killing of four Bodo activists on July 20? Was there any basis to Chief Minister Gogoi’s assertion at a press conference last week that the Army had refused to act until it got a sanction from Defence Minister A.K. Antony—a process that took two days? Is there any basis to the allegation by the Bodo Tribal Council chief Hagrama Mahilary that armed Bangladeshis from across the international border had incited the violence?

The answers to most of these questions will remain unanswered, even after the official inquiry committee eventually submits its report. However, what is clear is that in trying to slot the violence into pre-determined compartments and exploring the vexed question of administrative culpability, the media and the political class are taking evasive action. There is an uncomfortable dimension to this ethnic-communal flare-up in Kokrajhar and Dhubri that decision-makers would rather not address, not least because they have no answers to offer.

That the origins of the violence lie in demographic upheaval Assam has been witnessing for the past 100 years is undeniable. Thanks to waves of immigration from the region that is now Bangladesh, the population of Assam increased from 3.29 million in 1901 to 14.6 million in 1971, a 343.7 per cent increase compared to the all-India increase of nearly 150 per cent in the same period. Public intellectuals in Assam have stressed that the increase of the Muslim population has been disproportionate. In an unusual intervention last week, Election Commissioner M.S. Brahma suggested that the details of the 2011 Census may reveal that 11 of the 27 districts of Assam now have a Muslim majority.

While the issue of ‘illegal immigration’ from Bangladesh has formed an important part of the public discourse of the Assamese-speaking Hindus of the Brahmaputra Valley, it has become a paramount issue for the Bodo-speaking minority living in the areas that constituted the undivided Goalpara district. The Bodo-speaking minority which accounts for only five per cent of the population perceives a dual threat to their existence: a cultural challenge from the Assamese-speaking majority and a physical challenge from Bangladeshi Muslims who constitute the majority in Dhubri and whose presence is increasingly being felt in the Bodo heartland of Kokrajhar district.

The emergence of militant Bodo sub-nationalism in the 1990s was an attempt to cope with these twin challenges and led to the formation of the semi-autonomous Bodo Territorial Council in 1993. However, much of the political gains from militant identity politics have been offset by the growing assertiveness of the Muslim community. The rise of the All India United Democratic Front led by Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, the All Assam Minority Students Union and the Asom Mia Parishad has triggered a frontal Bodo-Muslim confrontation. Tensions have further risen following the AIUDF demand that the BTC be abolished because Bodos no longer constitute a majority in large areas governed by it. In an astute move, Ajmal has taken care to develop links with major Muslim organisations throughout India to ensure that the concerns of his social base are easily translated into ‘national’ Muslim concerns.

Confronted with this seemingly intractable situation, both Delhi and Dispur have fallen back on homilies. Following his tour of the relief camps earlier this week, (then) Home Minister P. Chidambaram took recourse to pious platitudes: “There are people from a variety of communities living in Assam now. Ultimately, people of all communities would have to learn to live together in peace.”  There was not a word about border fencing or possible modifications to the farcical Illegal Migrants Detection Tribunal Act. Dependant on Bodo support in Dispur but equally concerned with Muslim support at an all-India level, the Congress has very little space to manoeuvre. It can merely hope that any future conflict can be averted by more efficient administrative measures. Meanwhile, ground reports suggest an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing. Bodos in Dhubri are moving to Kokrajhar, and dispossessed Muslim of Kokrajhar are moving to Dhubri. Some may even find their way into West Bengal.

In the past, India’s liberal intelligentsia has been very vocal on the so-called ‘communal’ question, particularly the harassment of minorities. Yet, the usual suspects have been strangely quiet over this monumental upheaval that has shaken Assam. The reasons are obvious. The familiar stereotypes centred on brutish majoritarianism and vulnerable minorities don’t quite fit the bill in Dhubri and Kokrajhar. What we have instead is a very vulnerable indigenous tribal minority being squeezed from all sides, but particularly by the communal assertiveness of another minority that can leverage its national clout for local advantage.

In 2004, when the religious demography of the 2001 Census showed some strange results for Assam, the intelligentsia buried its head in the sand and ensured that all meaningful discussions on the subject were guillotined. The same process is once again at work over recent events in Assam.

In 1947, the Muslim community was a frightened minority, unsure of its position in an India that never took too kindly to the painful Partition in two wings. In 2012, Indian secularism is deeply entrenched and has ensured both dignity and political empowerment to religious minorities, sometimes by way of exceptional consideration. A problem, however, is likely to arise if the empowerment of minorities becomes a byword for injustice to others. For the Bodo minority of Assam, the practice of secular politics is coming to imply the possible extinction of their very identity.


The Telegraph, August 3, 2012