Rajnath can’t hope for easy upturn

BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA

In 1940, even as Britain suffered a series of military defeats at the hands of a formidable German war machine, the top echelons of the ruling Conservative Party brushed aside the misgivings of backbench MPs and stood solidly behind the leadership of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Whereas the public clamoured for the decisive leadership of Winston Churchill, the Conservative establishment refused to countenance the claims of a man who was regarded as an individualistic maverick.

The turning point came during a debate in the House of Commons when, quite unexpectedly, a backbench Conservative MP named Leo Amery stood up and denounced the ineffective Prime Minister. He concluded with the ringing words of Oliver Cromwell to the Long Parliament: “In the name of God, go!” Amery’s speech triggered a political avalanche and forced the notables of the party to finally jettison Chamberlain.

Historical analogies are never exact but I would unhesitatingly say that last week Yashwant Sinha assumed the mantle of Amery. By merely sending an aide to the BJP office to collect the nomination papers for the election of the national president, he jolted a smug BJP establishment into the realisation that a contrived backroom consensus which flew in the face of both the wishes of the party rank-and-file and public opinion wouldn’t stand scrutiny.

Yes, there were people who had to swallow their pride and grudgingly acknowledge that the re-election of Nitin Gadkari for another term would constitute an affront to the party’s countless foot soldiers. That wisdom dawned on them belatedly is reassuring. The half-cock change of guard is proof that in competitive politics, the vanguard doesn’t really have the ability to resist the tide of popular sentiment. Even control has to have a large measure of legitimacy. This is not to say that the hapless Gadkari is guilty of departing from his self-professed standards of social entrepreneurship.

The former BJP president may indeed have a compelling defence to the charges of financial impropriety that have been gleefully levelled against him by the authorities. But what was always clear is that in the context of the growing public exasperation with corruption, he was politically damaged.

Persisting with him as the organisational face of the BJP would have had two consequences. First, it would have painted the BJP as a self-serving clique; and second, it would have taken away anti-corruption as a political plank. The impact of both these would have been felt in the elections. The most serious problem the BJP has faced since the defeat in the 2004 general elections has been an inspirational deficiency.

For nearly a decade, the party has been unable to replenish its ranks with fresh blood. The so-called demographic dividend that has accrued to the country and which has kept it going despite nine years of shameful misgovernance, has bypassed the BJP.

Whereas Rahul Gandhi has (despite all his personal imperfections) at least correctly diagnosed the problem inside the Congress, the BJP has been content to playing meaningless parlour games involving a clutch of tired old war horses. The BJP’s smugness has been further compounded by the complete absence of any central authority since LK Advani committed political hara-kiri during his Pakistan visit in 2005.

Attempts to fill the void through organisational tinkering have failed, for the very simple reason that the party has been devoid of a big idea. Activity for the sake of activity is no substitute for good politics, whether played out on the streets or in the meeting rooms of Lutyens’ Delhi.

The election of Rajnath Singh as party president after a night of high drama alters the picture only marginally. The BJP may at least no longer be burdened by the need to explain its president’s business practices but it still needs to address the same problems that have confronted it since 2004. The belief that growing exasperation with the Congress will involve power falling into its lap in 2014 is based on unwarranted optimism.

A spate of opinion polls have, quite clearly indicated that the principal Opposition formation is not the only beneficiary of the anti-Congress mood. Indeed, the clever feature of Rahul Gandhi’s ‘acceptance’ speech to the faithful in Jaipur last week was his attempt to appropriate the Opposition’s rhetoric. Whether or not Rahul succeeds will depend entirely on how the BJP adjusts to emerging realities.

Opinion polls have actually indicated to the BJP the only way to move forward. They quite clearly indicate that there is a staggering difference between the support for the BJP-led alliance as it exists today and a willingness to vote for the formation in the event the leadership is settled in favour of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Few parties can be as potentially lucky as the BJP. In the midst of its apparent paralysis, the country has also clearly indicated that there is a ready-made solution. Had the polls suggested that Rahul enjoys the same degree of public approval as Modi, the Congress would have unhesitatingly taken the next logical step. We may even have seen Prime Minister Manmohan Singh being gently taken on an inspection tour of his retirement bungalow.

Unfortunately, the BJP continues to act as if there are 24 months in a year. It is still grappling with the internal implications of Modi filling the void left by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani. The fragmentation of authority has meant that there are too many leaders and factions worried about the prospect of merging their little fiefdoms into a larger entity. Some of them are even reconciled to remaining permanently in Opposition as long as their little turf remains undisturbed.

In 1940, after it was clear that Chamberlain would have to go, the backroom bosses of the Conservative Party toyed seriously with the idea of replacing him with the Earl of Halifax (he had earlier served as Viceroy of India).

Halifax was considered a safe bet who didn’t suffer from illusions of grandeur. Fortunately for Britain, Halifax understood his own limitations and found the prospect of conducting a war against Hitler too daunting. He opted out, leaving the Conservative establishment no option but to grudgingly endorse Churchill. For the BJP, its Halifax moment has arrived. There is a mismatch between what the top leadership seeks and what public opinion demands. How the issue is resolved will help shape the final outcome in 2014.

Sunday Pioneer, January 27, 2013

The Netaji Riddle

By Swapan Dasgupta

January 23 is a public holiday in West Bengal and has been so since Independence. It is the birthday of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Netaji that most Bengalis and many other Indians believe, should rightfully have been at the helm of the post-1947 dispensation.

In the 1950s and until the early-1960s, almost every January 23 was marked by the whisper that this was the day Netaji would miraculously reappear to lead India to a new dawn. The most ardent of Netaji’s followers never bought the story that the head of the INA died in a Taipei hospital after an air-crash shortly after the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Like his elder brother Sarat Chandra Bose who once announced in 1949 that Subhas was actually in China and would return to India soon, they felt that the last word on Netaji’s supposed death had not been heard. Samar Guha, one of India’s more vocal Opposition MPs in the Lok Sabha (1967 to 1980) used to be vociferous in claiming that Netaji was not dead but actually living as a sadhu in Faizabad. Earlier, others had insisted that a sadhu in North Bengal was actually Subhas Bose.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was another twist in the tale. It is known that after the Japanese surrender, Netaji had no intention of surrendering to the Allied Powers for trial as a war criminal. With India still under a tottering British Raj, he planned to reach Manchuria and then cross over into the Soviet Union. Having been in touch with the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, Netaji believed (perhaps out of desperation) that he could remain an undercover guest of Stalin until it was opportune to return to India. It was while undertaking this journey to Manchuria, or so the story went, that he died in the air-crash.

Netaji loyalists have disputed this theory. The Taipei air-crash story, they believed was a deliberate piece of misinformation put out by both Netaji and his Japanese hosts, to mislead the Anglo-American fugitive hunters. In reality, they say, Netaji reached the Soviet Union. But what happened subsequently was unknown. The Soviet authorities and all successor Russian governments have steadfastly maintained that there is no record of Bose having entered Soviet territory. Yet, there is some uncorroborated anecdotal evidence suggesting that Netaji was kept as a ‘guest’ by the Stalinist regime in Siberia presumably because they didn’t quite know what to do with him.

In his book India’s Biggest Cover-up, Anuj Dhar the indefatigable Netaji-hunter has rightly mentioned the Soviet Union’s record of suppressing information and plain lying. He mentioned the case of the Swedish human rights activist Raoul Wallenberg who was claimed by the Soviet authorities to have been murdered by pro-German forces in Hungary towards in April 1945. Relentless pursuit of the story by Swedish and American investigators led to the sensational discovery that Wallenberg had in fact been kept as a Soviet prisoner until his death in 1957. Had something similar happened to India’s Netaji?

The truth, Dhar has suggested, can never be unearthed unless independent research is backed up by unceasing diplomatic pressure by India on Russia. Unfortunately, he say, the Government of India has merely made perfunctory noises that suggest a disinclination to find real answers to an abiding mystery.

Over the years, the Netaji mystery has attracted a small clutch of serious researchers but a larger band of conspiracy-theorists and cranks. After three commissions of inquiry there is an understandable exasperation with the whole controversy. Common sense would inform us that even if Netaji didn’t die in Taipei in August 1945, it is unlikely he is alive today. As such, a Netaji hunt of 2013 has a different connotation from a similar exercise in the 1950s when a possible re-emergence would have unsettled the regime of Jawaharlal Nehru. In the 1950s, when anxious Bengalis waited for him to emerge from his spiritual retreat, the Netaji mystery was a political question. Today, it is an academic issue, centred on dusting away some of the cobwebs of history.

There are enough grounds to suggest that the commissions headed by INA veteran Shah Nawaz Khan and Justice G.D. Khosla were a little too mindful of the political ramifications of suggesting that there is no conclusive evidence of either a plane-crash in Taipei in late-August 1945 or the death of Netaji. Certainly neither inquiries were rigorous in chasing all the available leads. The final inquiry by Justice M.K. Mukherjee concluded that there was no certainty that Netaji died in August 1945. However, its inquiries were marred by government indifference, bordering on hostility.

To suggest that there should be yet commission of inquiry into Netaji’s disappearance is absolutely needless. But what can legitimately be demanded is that the papers relating to the man and his disappearance which have been classified by successive governments are sent to the archives for public access. These must include the relevant records in the PMO, Foreign Ministry and the Intelligence Bureau. It is not that the files will bring us one step closer to solving the Netaji riddle. But at least they could help dispel the belief that the Government of India was party to a monumental conspiracy to suppress the truth about the fate of one of India’s most prominent freedom fighters. It is time that this controversy is finally laid to rest.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, January 25, 2013 

‘The Poor And Afflicted’: Vivekananda’s Many Gods Much of the life-blood of our freedom struggle doesn’t conform to Nehruvian republican ideals. Swamiji’s life must be seen in its socio-political context.

By Swapan Dasgupta

There is a scene from the late-Sixties’ mushy and jingoistic Bengali film Subhashchandra that is worth recalling in a less innocent age.

The moustachioed head of the local thana in Cuttack walks into the book-lined room where a teenage Subhas Chandra Bose is engrossed in his studies. Brandishing his baton menacingly, he glowers at the numerous photographs on the wall—including one of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee the author of Anandamath and one of martyr Kshudiram Bose who was executed for killing an Englishman. The policeman then turns his disapproving gaze on Subhas. “You’ve overlooked one,” interjects the boy insolently and points to another wall. The camera focusses on a portrait of Swami Vivekananda. The policeman stares at the photograph intently. Then, pointing his baton at Vivekananda, he declaims: “That is the raja of all the revolutionaries. Whichever revolutionary we catch, his picture is with them.”

More than 65 years after Independence and with ‘official’ history being constantly reworked, it is both fashionable and obligatory to brush aside the inspirational importance of Swami Vivekananda to earlier generations. He was a sanyasi in saffron robes who was unabashedly committed to the propagation of spiritualism and national regeneration and who, at the same time, didn’t shy away from his self-identity as a proud Hindu. That such a man greatly inspired India’s passage to freedom may seem at odds with the puerile perception that contemporary Indian nationhood is based solely on universalist, secular and republican ideals. A complex past has become unwanted baggage that, if not discarded, is best left in storage. Unfortunately, what we were happens to be markedly different from what the champions of a spurious cosmopolitan modernity believe we are and, more important, should be.

To the Left-liberal elites that have a stranglehold on the citadels of intellectual power, the ‘idea of India’ is governed by the broad acceptance of the Nehruvian consensus and adherence to what might loosely be described as ‘Constitutional patriotism’. Anything which doesn’t fit into this neat scheme is deemed to be in conflict with the national ethos and, as happened to Vande Mataram, quietly relegated to the ante-room. Alternatively, awkward facets of an infuriatingly complex inheritance are sanitised, bowdlerised and, like balls of plasticine, made to fit any shape.

“The intelligentsia of my country”, Nirad Chaudhury wrote slyly in his Autobiography, “have always had the faith—which certainly is justified by the secular changes in our political existence—that they are indispensable as mercenaries to everybody who rules India.” 

In 1993, just after the demolition of the Babri structure in Ayodhya, the then Human Resources Development Minister Arjun Singh attached considerable importance to celebrating the centenary of Swami Vivekananda’s speech to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The focus then was on projecting the “Orange monk” as the epitome of inclusive religion, tolerance and egalitarianism—in fact a man who anticipated the ‘enlightened’ secularism and even socialism of the Nehruvian order. The underlying agenda was to deny an aggressive BJP and Sangh brotherhood a monopoly claim over Hindu symbols. The project also had the blessings of “progressive” historians and even the tacit nod of a Ramakrishna Mission which was engaged in a bizarre battle to claim ‘minority’ status by declaring itself to be outside the Hindu fold. The Supreme Court, mercifully, rejected that claim in 1995.

Two decades later the enthusiasm for appropriating Swami Vivekananda for the good fight against the dark forces of bigotry appears to have lost momentum. Last year, as the evocative photographs in Outlook (January 21, 2013) reminded us, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi did something characteristically audacious: to coincide with the 150^th anniversary of the Swami’s birth, he packaged his pre-election tour of the state as the Vivekananda Yatra.  Nor was this entirely a gimmick based on the fact that the Bengali monk and the Gujarati CM shared a first name. As someone who has been inspired by Vivekananda since his youth—he even sought to join the Ramakrishna Mission as a monk—Modi’s symbolism was not disingenuous. It was centred on broadly the same assumptions that made Vivekananda the inspiration for generations of Indian nationalists, particularly prior to 1947.

Three features of Vivekananda’s philosophy warrant special emphasis. First, unlike other Hindu religious leaders who made the quest for God a matter of personal salvation, Vivekananda enlarged the scope of his spiritual quest. It became co-terminus with a nebulously defined national service. “The poor, the illiterate, the ignorant, the afflicted”, he wrote, “let these be your God, know that service to these alone is the highest religion.” It was an invocation that, in the context of the times, was unmistakably revolutionary.

Secondly, Vivekananda was clear that what distinguished India from the materialist West was its attachment to a Hindu ethos grounded in spiritualism. Yet, he didn’t reject this-worldliness out of hand. In his study Europe Reconsidered (1988), historian Tapan Raychaudhuri argued that Vivekananda saw the West “as an admirable manifestation of rajas, manly vigour, a necessary step to higher things. Indians sunk in tamas, pure inertia and all that is brutish in man, had to emulate that quality first.”  Vivekananda addressed a question that was preoccupied middle-class India at the turn of the 20^th century: what facet of the West should India accept or reject? Raychaudhuri suggested that Vivekananda “proposed a fair exchange of ideas, a synthesis based on national dignity.”

Finally, Vivekananda’s priorities for national regeneration were determined by the prevailing conditions in India, particularly the grim realities of political subordination. Despite his avowed defence of the principles of the Vedic caste system—one of the few things he had in common with Mahatma Gandhi—Vivekananda was unequivocal in his denunciation of the corrupted institution, particularly the rules of ritual purity that made Brahmins the oppressor and Sudras the victim. He saw caste as a major impediment to the forging of a purposeful, united nation.

Added to this was his impatience with the physical inadequacies of a subject people and his over-weaning desire to contribute to the emergence of a muscular Hinduism which would not countenance servitude and humiliation. It would be fair to say that the lessons he drew from the Bhagwad Gita was radically different from those drawn by Gandhi.

Vivekananda was essentially a product of his times. He belonged to a period when the early infatuation with westernisation was yielding to a more nuanced understanding of the wider world that blended with the grim realities of India as a subject nation. Moreover, in his short life—he died at the age of 39—he spent five active years outside India fostering an understanding of the India’s Hindu heritage. Predictably, his attention was focussed on projecting India’s innate strength rather than highlighting its many shortcomings. How he would have evolved had he lived to witness the political turbulence that accompanied the Partition of Bengal in 1905 is a matter of conjecture. Would he have retreated into a personal quest within the monastic order he created? Or would he have travelled in a more politically active direction? It is significant that most of his contemporaries believed his message was relevant in shaping public life.  

It is tempting to dissociate Vivekananda from his context and see him through the prism of contemporary politics. This is precisely the underlying tone of Outlook’s sensational description of him as the “The Hindu Supremacist” that implicitly identifies him with a form of Hindu fascism. This approach is in line with other recent interventions that have projected Vivekananda as the epitome of a regressive machismo.

Fortuitously, this attempted vilification of a towering symbol of Hindu pride may have unintended consequences. That Vivekananda was much more than yet another in the long line of eminent Hindu spiritualists preoccupied with personal salvation is obvious. By linking his life and teachings with the evolution of the political Hindu, his detractors may have unwittingly helped in locating him in the larger debate on the shape and future of an emerging India. After all, the liberal elite’s disavowal of everything ‘Hindu’ is not universally shared in India. 

Outlook, January 28, 2013

SEARCH FOR A BETTER LIFE - In economic terms, Gujarat is on a roll

By Swapan Dasgupta

Attending the Vibrant Gujarat summit at Gandhinagar last week, I was pleasantly surprised to find a good representation of journalists from Kolkata-based media organisations. Subsequently, I was informed that the Bengali press had given generous coverage to the event, perhaps in anticipation of the investor meet organised by Mamata Banerjee in Haldia. Whatever the motivation, I was tickled by the idea that the buzz in India’s fastest-growing and most entrepreneur-friendly state was resonating in a state that is being viewed as a basket case. Perhaps something from Gujarat would rub off on West Bengal.

Back in Delhi, I mentioned this to a friend who occupies a senior editorial position in a national publication. “Oh well”, she retorted dismissively, “as long as the coverage was confined to Bengal.” “Here in Delhi”, she added joyously, “the papers have barely mentioned it.”

This supercilious dismissal of a bi-annual event that is the nearest equivalent to a Davos in Asia—minus the fine dining and the paraphernalia surrounding Heads of State—isn’t unusual. Ever since 2002, it has become obligatory for the Left-liberal fraternity to either ignore or debunk the economic achievements of the Gujarat Government. In the early days until 2007 it was believed that a combination of political disapproval, judicial activism and diplomatic isolation would result in Modi falling off the map.  

Every attempt was made to encourage the Chief Minister’s detractors to attack the state government with all guns blazing. Almost every vocal critic of Modi was rewarded with committee posts, Padma awards, Rajya Sabha seats and international prizes. Simultaneously, anyone who dared suggest that there was more to Modi than the failure to prevent the post-Godhra killings was mercilessly hounded. A former Director of Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies was eased out of his post after he wrote a report in 2005 suggesting that Gujarat ranked number one among states in terms of economic freedom. Interestingly, seven years down the line, Gujarat remains at the top of that pile.

That the tide has turned is obvious. Today, Anil Ambani’s hyperbolic testimonial to Modi doesn’t provoke outrage in the same way as Ratan Tata’s 2007 remark that industry would be “stupid” if it wasn’t in Gujarat. India Inc. has given a resounding thumbs- up to Gujarat. For that Modi has, in a small measure, Mamata Banerjee to thank. The story of the development of Sanand as an automobile hub in just four years began when Tata Motors shifted its Nano plant from strife-torn Singur in West Bengal. India has not witnessed such a spectacular success story in recent times.

In economic terms, Gujarat is on a roll. Whether it is Jagdish Bhagwati or Lord Meghnad Desai, there is a growing line of ‘respectable’ people unafraid to sing the virtues of the ‘Gujarat model’ or even suggest that India would realise its full potential if there was a leader like Modi at the helm. Even the US and European Union’s unstated diplomatic ‘sanctions’ against the government in Gandhinagar appears to be crumbling. There was a mega-size British delegation at Vibrant Gujarat and the British High Commissioner’s speech on the occasion was described by someone as representing a “720 degree turn”. The Canadians were there in full strength, as were the Australians showcasing their fast-growing knowledge economy and, of course, the Japanese who have invested heavily in the 1,483 km Delhi-Mumbai freight corridor (nearly 38 per cent passes through Gujarat), the hottest development of the next decade.

Indeed, the Special Investment Region in Dholera is arguably the most talked- about venture in the whole country, blessed as it is with special legislation that meets almost every item (including labour flexibility) on industry’s wish list. Shardul Shroff, the Managing Partner of Amarchand Mangaldas, who briefed delegates on the exciting legal ramifications of the SIR legislation, told me that the investor-friendly facilities were actually available to every state in the country (including West Bengal). Yet, it is significant that only Modi has followed it through with state legislation. Just as Gujarat has circumvented political hostility of the UPA Government and extracted its full quota of monetary allotments from the Centre by adhering strictly to the rules.

The fact that Gujarat has developed a huge land bank for industry and townships gives it a natural advantage for new development. But the transfer of land from low-yielding agriculture to industry would not have been possible unless rural folk had not detected the possibilities of self-improvement from abandoning their traditional livelihood.

The most reassuring feature of contemporary Gujarat—both urban and rural—is this unending search for better opportunities and a better life. The thousands of ordinary, middle-class individuals who flocked to the seminars making copious notes weren’t there as part of the latest tamasha in town. Some of them were there purely to be exposed to modern business practices and some, particularly the owners of the SMEs, were there to sniff for ideas and opportunities. The country seminars whether hosted by developed countries or nations that never feature in the Indian consciousness, weren’t about foreigners investing in Gujarat; they were about inviting Indians to do business overseas and investing there. When it comes to politics, Gujarat is quite spiritedly nationalist (some would say xenophobic) but when it comes to business, Gujaratis are quite unequivocally global. Little wonder that the regressive economics that marks a section of the BJP finds no mention in the political language of Modi.

In a recent, broadly sympathetic article, Vivek Dehejia, a Canada-based economist, has asked an interesting question: in the free-market ethos of Gujarat, why is there such an emphasis on the government and the Modi cult? The implication is obvious: if the impulses observed in the Vibrant Gujarat meets have struck roots in society, they will surely outlive the Chief Minister’s tenure in Gandhinagar.

Gujarat’s development may well be on auto-pilot. However, as the freeze on reforms at the Centre between 2004 and 2012 suggest, it doesn’t take long for an economy to stagnate in the absence of leadership and political direction. Much of what Gujarat has achieved has been due to the single-minded determination of Modi to circumvent political opposition through exemplary economic growth. It is Modi’s no-nonsense style of functioning and his ability to pick the right team and motivate them that has made all the difference. A more laid-back approach that incorporated political venality wouldn’t have ruined Gujarat or diminished its economic importance. However, it would have meant that the state would be deprived of its cutting edge and sustained double-digit growth. A glance at neighbouring Maharashtra suggests the possible plight of a Gujarat that has eschewed the Modi legacy. Without inspirational leadership, Indians as a collective tend to merely chug along. By insisting on a relentless pace, Modi has actually been very un-Indian.  

After his third successive election victory, the discourse on Modi has shifted. His detractors are now asking whether the Gujarat model is applicable to a diverse, fractious country with uneven levels of development. I leave it to Modi to answer that question. However, in a recent conversation he underlined a facet of Gujarat’s development. Gujarat, he told me, merely has a seafront. It has no raw materials—no iron ore for steel, no coal for power and no diamond mines. Yet it has made huge strides in these fields. Imagine, he added, if we had the natural resources of an Assam, a Jharkhand and a West Bengal: “I would have changed the face of India.”

For India’s sake I hope he gets the opportunity. 

The Telegraph, January 18, 2013

Pakistan provocative, India squeamish

By Swapan Dasgupta

There were two template reactions within India to the killing and mutilation of two jawans by Pakistani troops along the Line of Control last week.

First, apart from an influential minusculity that is disproportionately represented in the media and among the power elite of Lutyens’ Delhi, few Indians were surprised by this latest example of Pakistani butchery. They, in fact, saw the decapitation of a slain Indian army jawan as just another instalment in a saga that began with the monstrous genocide in East Pakistan in 1971 and became the new normal with the Pakistan army’s emergence as the operational hub of insurgency and terrorism throughout South Asia.  

I think it is wrong to refer to Pakistani perfidy. With Islamabad’s sponsorship of the war of a thousand cuts, the Kargil war, attack on Parliament, blasts in numerous Indian cities and the 26/11 massacre in Mumbai, the shedding of Indian blood has become an addiction to the Pakistan Establishment. Its nationhood, it would seem, depends on its ability to cause grief across its borders. Those who believe that Pakistan will somehow change are hallucinating. For them, it is a case of ‘Daman ki asha’.

The second predictable response was from the Indian Government. Since its election in 2004, the Congress-led UPA Government has proceeded on the principle that India is obliged to seek the normalisation of relations through “uninterrupted and uninterruptable” engagement, come what may. True, the ferocity of public indignation forced it to put a halt to the process in the aftermath of 26/11 but that was treated as an unfortunate aberration. Like the Panchshila doctrine that beguiled Jawaharlal Nehru into lowering India’s guard against China, the Manmohan Singh Government has reposed all its faith in the spirit of the Sharm-el-Sheikh.

In practice this has meant that every Pakistani provocation (barring the 26/11 attack) has been met with hand-wringing squeamishness. It has almost appeared that the victim is embarrassed by the brazenness and audacity of the perpetrators of crimes against itself. This seems to be the precise meaning of the “nuanced” and “calibrated” responses that South Block has forever promised. No wonder the Pakistan High Commissioner was caught on TV with both a smile and a smirk when he entered South Block last Wednesday. It was as if he knew that the diplomatic rebuke was a meaningless ritual New Delhi had to undertake to placate an angry public.  

The charade doesn’t end here. There are the odd occasions—as was the case last week when TV channels competed with the social media to wave the flag and express indignation over the killings and mutilations—when it becomes impossible to fob off the sense of outrage. In those times, ministers take turn to assure the nation that the sacrifices of the martyrs will not go in vain and that a “fitting response” awaits the blackguards in Pakistan. The calculation is that the dust will soon settle, the media focus will shift elsewhere and then it will be business as usual.

This is not to suggest that that our ministers aren’t patriotic or that people who have been entrusted with providing a holistic view of national security are disciples of the late but unlamented Neville Chamberlain—the British Prime Minister who believed that the best way to maintain peace was to concede everything to the adversary (and even pretend that the enemy was actually a friend). Yes, India’s decision-makers are fully aware that no belligerent action can be taken casually because we are, after all, dealing with a nuclear power. They are also aware that unilateral action risks internationalising a bilateral problem—something that Pakistan craves for.

Yet, behind these legitimate constraints is a far more acute problem about which India chooses to be in denial: New Delhi’s institutional awareness of the cross-currents in Pakistan is imperfect and its capacity for punitive action (that is, at the same time, deniable) is almost zero. In plain language this means that there is no worthwhile Indian network inside Pakistan, either for intelligence gathering or for covert action. Whatever little we know is courtesy friendly third countries.

This was not always so and there was a time (at least till the end of the 1980s) when India’s decision-makers knew exactly what was going on inside both civilian politics and the cantonments. The descent into ignorance came sometime between 1997 and 1998 when, in an act of monumental folly, the I.K. Gujral administration wound up the networks—some of which dated back to pre-Independence days. This dissolution was more than a casual administrative order. It even resulted in the betrayal and physical elimination of deeply embedded ‘assets’. Predictably, Pakistan did not reciprocate India’s unilateral genuflection at the altar of asymmetry. Its ability to cause pain to India is unimpaired. But the damage this early variant of Aman ki asha diplomacy did to India’s strategic interests is incalculable.

In the past week, India has been witness to an important phenomenon: public opinion is far ahead of the Government and the official strategic community in pressing for a robust defence of national interests. The Government’s passivity is based on a meek acceptance of the country’s strategic constraints; public impatience is centred on the belief that India can’t afford to be a permanent punching bag. One day, hopefully, public opinion will begin to shape government policy. Until then the country can merely grieve and fume in frustration. 

Sunday Pioneer, January 13, 2013

A dish best served cold

By Swapan Dasgupta

Last Wednesday, Pakistani troops crossed the Line of Control, fired on an Indian army patrol and killed two jawans. They then subjected the bodies to “barbaric and inhuman mutilation”—an act that revived memories of the brutal killing of Captain Saurabh Kalia and the mutilation of his body during the Kargil war.

Not unnaturally, this provocative act has outraged public opinion and nullified the contrived, gush-gush diplomacy of recent months. No foreign policy can work in defiance of the popular mood and, for the moment, attempts to ‘normalise’ India-Pakistan relations are destined to be in deep freeze. However, before emotive calls for retribution unsettle matters further, it is instructive to travel down a by-lane of history.

History is rarely the great healer but its reading can often help understand contemporary events a shade better.

In Return of a King, a thoroughly researched and gripping account of the First Afghan War of 1839-42, popular historian William Dalrymple has vividly described the unspeakable horrors of two military expeditions across the Khyber and Bolan Passes. A passage relating to the return journey through the Khyber Pass of the ‘army of retribution’ in November 1842 stands out: “The following day, (Neville) Chamberlain and John Nicholson cork-screwed down the path just below Ali Masjid, accompanied by the chaplain Allen. Turning a sharp corner the three found the road thickly strewn with the bodies of their colleagues from whom they had parted the previous afternoon. The entire party had been trapped and overwhelmed by an Afridi ambush. Now their remains were ‘lying here and there, stripped and mangled, some already devoured by dogs and birds of prey…’ Among the dead was Nicholson’s younger brother. His body was stark naked, and hacked to pieces. In accordance with Afridi custom, Alexander had his genitalia cut off and stuffed in his mouth.”

Nor was this bestial conduct reserved for the feringhee ‘dogs’, it was extended to the ‘kaffir’ sepoys of the British-Indian army. Indeed, for many of the Afghan tribes participating in the jehad, the Sikhs were a particular enemy on account of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s occupation of Peshawar and Kashmir which the Afghans saw as belonging to them.

As opposed to the rah-rah histories of the imperial age, Dalrymple has proffered an alternative ‘Black Armband’ view of a past British encounter with Afghanistan. Written with a sharp eye on the West’s grim predicament in the war against a Pakistan-backed Taliban, its message is unequivocal: the pacification of the tribal badlands along the Durand Line is a hopeless project.

To an India confronted with an unending conflict along the LoC with an enemy that believes it has a legitimate claim on the Kashmir Valley, this history may sound ominous. But it need not be so.  

First, there are clear lessons in allowing a grand strategic vision—in the 19^th century it was the fear of Russia encroaching on India from the North—to determine diplomatic and military options. Mercifully, today’s governing elite in India lacks any vision, strategic or otherwise. Foreign policy tends to be either ad hoc or governed by mushy sentimentalism, neither of which (mercifully) are conducive to adventurism.

Secondly, approaching Afghanistan with a ‘strategic’ baggage, British officials allowed themselves to be swayed by dodgy intelligence reports that reinforced pre-existing convictions. Other ground reports which didn’t fit into a grand design were wilfully ignored, with disastrous consequences. The implication is obvious: no policy is workable without a credible intelligence network which, alas, is not a Government of India priority.

Finally, the disaster which overtook the Army of the Indus was a consequence of the failure to comprehend the complexities of Afghan society and, most important, its value systems. The British made a grave error in judging Afghans through a European prism, a mistake subsequently rectified by the work of the Political Department. Independent India has, unfortunately, frittered away this institutional understanding of local societies with different moral orbits. Policy is often made in a sociological void.

In sum, India needs a prolonged period of capacity building before it can substitute angry frustration with meaningful action to hit the enemy where it really hurts. Do we have the foresight and will to do what it takes? 

Sunday Times of India, January 13, 2013

Rape is rape, in India as in Bharat

By Swapan Dasgupta

In the late-1980s, and for a time between 1987 and 1991, Devi Lal became a prominent player on the national scene. Deeply rooted in the politics and rural ethos of Haryana, he was known for his earthy wisdom and disdain for all things that didn’t fit into his ‘kisan’ experience. A particular target of his derision was that section of the country that has come to be known as ‘India’—as opposed to ‘Bharat’. The true representative of this land, Devi Lal used to say, were those whose addresses would be prefixed with the name of the VPO—Village Post Office.

It was an interesting formulation and perhaps something that even Mahatma Gandhi with his utopian notions of self-sufficient village communities would have tacitly approved. The problem was that it left a lot of people (including myself) with a feeling of being second-class citizens. Urban India may well be the Devil’s workshop but it happens to be the only place many Indians can call home.

Nor is it accurate to regard rural India as the natural epicentre of virtue and holiness. In his lifetime, Babasaheb Ambedkar was eclipsed by the larger-than-life influence of the Mahatma and the Congress. But it is worth remembering that the Dalit icon always regarded Village India as the citadel of prejudice and oppression against all those who were damned for being ‘untouchable’ by birth. The self-governing qualities of the local panchayat didn’t inspire Ambedkar. To him and to many who were concerned with caste-based oppression, rural hierarchies didn’t have space for those who were condemned to live apart. The stereotype of happy kisans harvesting grain, flanked by women in colourful clothes, didn’t always incorporate the brutal underbelly of an economic order where some communities were regarded as sub-humans, and their women treated as commodities.

Rape, the RSS chief asserted in Silchar last Friday, is essentially an ‘Indian’ phenomenon. He is only partially right. The brutalisation of women is more widespread in the ecosystems of Bharat—and has been so for centuries.

Mohan Bhagwat is also entirely right when he maintained that the respect for women is idealised in Indian culture. But he would be the first to admit that traditional society was less than welcoming and applied very different standards to those groups it regarded as being outside its social orbit—an attitude that has been transmitted into the widespread disrespect for white, women tourists. The deep reverence for ‘stree shakti’ in Bengal, for instance, didn’t prevent the cruel custom of sati and the social degradation and sexual exploitation of widows by ‘respectable’ sections of society. It also didn’t prevent collective sanction for the sexual exploitation of women from the ‘lower orders’.

A feature of the vibrant social reform movements that arose in the 19^th and early-20^th centuries was their willingness to first admit the shortcomings of Hindu society and then address the question of possible remedies. Some of the reformers—notably Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda—were modernists and had imbibed the intellectual currents of the West. But others such as Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar were steeped in tradition and approached the question of reform from a humanist perspective.

The point to note is that for the Hindu stalwarts of the past two centuries, there was a clear understanding that the Hindu, both as an individual and as a collective, wasn’t the epitome of perfection. In today’s context, going by the admission that cosmopolitanism has distorted the minds of ‘India’ and encouraged unwholesome attitudes towards women, the issue to be addressed is: what can be done to change society? After all, there must be glaring imperfections in the modern Hindu that facilitates the ready acceptance of misogyny—the utterances of the Congress MP from Jangipur and a senior BJP minister of Madhya Pradesh being two recent examples. (I am confining my remarks to Hindu society because it sets the tone for India.)

More to the point, the heads of cultural organisations such as the RSS must begin to ask why their unceasing activism over more than eight decades hasn’t altered things. Why have the samskaras they have sought to inculcate in their followers not had a wider effect on society? Maybe the fault doesn’t lie in the samskaras—although a little less patronising attitude towards women would help greatly—but in the priorities of groups that have sought to create a moral leadership for India. If there was greater emphasis on regenerating the institutions of what goes by the name Hinduism rather than on exercising control over a political party, the nation would have been better served.

There is little point celebrating the 150^th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda in style unless the grand speeches are complemented by serious attempts to cleanse the temples of venality, casteism and even the exploitation of women devotees by perverted priests. Vivekananda spoke and wrote at length of the Brahmanical religion’s cruel indifference to the plight of the Sudra and the Chandal. Was he exonerating Bharat and indicting India? Was he creating false binaries?  

Any rape, whether it happens in Delhi or rural Madhya Pradesh, is a collective blot on both India and Bharat. There is little point in saying that one is pristine pure and the other contaminated because it is just not true. We are the children of the same country and together we must hang our heads in shame. 

Sunday Pioneer, January 6, 2013

A DIGNIFIED RESURGENCE - December 2012 may have unexpected consequences

By Swapan Dasgupta

The past fortnight has been rather unique for a Delhi that often gives the impression of being detached not merely from Bharat but from India as well. For the first time in living memory, the festive season was marked by candlelight marches rather than candlelight dinners. The Delhi Gymkhana cancelled its annual New Year party and a Rap singer by the unlikely name of Honey Singh was forced by the strength of public opinion to give his performance at a leading hotel a miss. Those who could took the flight to Goa to celebrate with the owner of a near-bankrupt airline that also publishes girlie calendars. But most of Delhi’s elite bowed to the prevailing mood and fell back on uncharacteristic sobriety to usher in 2013.

Whether the wave of protests that followed the gang-rape and subsequent death of a young trainee physiotherapist from a modest background, was India’s great middle class moment is for posterity to judge. Coming in the wake of an equally spirited anti-corruption crusade by Anna Hazare that somehow got derailed, the commemoration of the spirit of the one who was named Nirbhaya and Damini has unsettled many assumptions. Far from material prosperity and consumerism luring the youth and the middle classes into individualism and indifference, the anger at India Gate and Jantar Mantar unequivocally demonstrated that public spiritedness is alive and kicking. If the London riots of 2011 revealed one facet of thwarted aspirations, Delhi 2012 gave a glimpse of the wholesome face of an Indian resurgence.

What was witnessed in Delhi was a near-spontaneous exasperation with an old order steeped in insensitivity, arrogance and shoddy governance. There were many brutally blood-curdling solutions to the harassment and brutalisation of women that the young women with placards sought from a nervous Establishment. These included the public lynching of rapists, mandatory capital punishment and even chemical castration. And yet, quite paradoxically, this was not a movement driven by a Madame Defarge mentality. It was in every respect a 21^st century movement fuelled by modernist impulses.

It will be some time before the anger over the rape and murder of an ordinary girl whose parents lived in two small rooms of a basement in an unauthorised colony is fully deconstructed. Those who are inclined to dismiss the stir as stemming from the boredom of “dented and painted” ladies from privileged families clearly misjudged the social composition of the protestors. Worse, they were clueless about the fact that the protests struck a chord among many more people than were physically present at India Gate and Jantar Mantar.

This was a misreading that was not confined to the newly-elected MP for Jangipur or even Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde who actually felt that the young people should go home after a small hand-picked delegation had been ushered into the august presence of Congress President Sonia Gandhi to air their grievances. The Congress’ heir-apparent Rahul Gandhi didn’t think the explosion of emotions was serious enough to warrant a modification of his travel plans for the holiday season. A man who the Congress Party believes is destined to rule India, just like his great-grandfather, grandmother, father and mother, didn’t believe that the feelings of so many people warranted anything more than a perfunctory, written statement.

The inability to comprehend the outrage of urban India is certain to rankle in the minds of many long after the dust has settled over this brutal murder. The Prime Minister’s wooden proclamation of sympathy on TV (followed by the theek hai giveaway), the indiscriminate use of water cannons on Raisina Hill, the beating-up of demonstrators in India Gate, the cynical transportation of the dying girl to Singapore and her hush-hush cremation at dawn were tell-tale signs of a regime that just didn’t know how to react to dignified anger. It would have been much easier had the agitation actually turned violent and the protestors had rushed into nearby Khan Market or Connaught Place to loot shops and molest innocent citizens. But that was not to be. The moral advantage remained with those who were angry rather than with those who were shielded by the metal barricades.  

The great fear in the political class is that emotions that galvanised the protests will start affecting political choices, particularly with a general election just a year away.

The Congress in particular has reason to be the most concerned. First, there is anxiety that the blend of cash transfers of subsidies and the promise of a golden age of economic reforms will be overshadowed by mundane issues of bad governance. However, this fear seems exaggerated. A general election has a momentum of its own and it is unlikely—unless the degradation of women reaches epidemic proportions—that the events of the past fortnight will linger in the public memory for another year.

However, the Congress has reason to be alarmed on another count. The outrage over the Delhi rape wasn’t confined to a robust rejection of the social attitudes that contributed to women being viewed as commodities. In a curious sort of way it escalated into impatience with the warped priorities of a government that put greater emphasis on the security of VIPs than on the safety of ordinary citizens. This in turn has led to a questioning of the culture of political privilege that has also been linked to the larger issue of corruption. In 2009, the Congress stole a march over its opponents by giving party tickets to a large number of  young ‘inheritors’ who seemed better able to represent a young and aspirational India.

Ironically, throughout this agitation the young inheritors who are such a fixture on the social circuit of Delhi were nowhere to be seen. Their contribution to understanding and sympathising with the concerns of a young India was absolutely zero. Leading the march to irrelevance was of course the great ‘youth icon’ but the rest of the pack were not far behind. Their abdication of issues that agitated young people was noticed, commented upon and derided. Indeed, the puncturing of the myth of a new political culture to be ushered by the young MPs under the leadership of the Gandhi heir is likely to be the immediate fallout of the December 2012 stir. Nurtured in an environment of privilege and blessed with a sense of both entitlement and noblesse oblige, they have shown their inability to transcend an ossified political culture. Having been accustomed to a supplicant India, they cannot seem to be able to cope with a more self-confident and assertive country that is not moved by hierarchy.

An underlying theme of the protests was the demand for purposeful and no-nonsense governance, particularly in matters relating to crime and sexual harassment. Quite unintentionally, there is now a growing demand for an end to a protracted spell of weak and blundering government. There is a yearning for democratic responsiveness but this is also coupled by the need for a tough rule-based system that puts safety and security of the individual over the human rights of the criminal or insurgent. The search for a leader who can create an environment of modernity and ruthless efficiency of the state apparatus could lead a very large section of India’s voters into unexpected directions. This is what troubles both the dynastic Congress and the stodgy BJP.

History doesn’t always move by design. In hindsight, December 2012 may trigger a series of unintended consequences. We can only await these with unconcealed excitement. 

 The Telegraph, January 4, 2013

Arnab wins Bharat as 'nation wants to know'

By Swapan Dasgupta

It may sound flippant but if I was to name the Indian of the Year for 2012, my choice would be Arnab Goswami of Times Now. The reason has nothing to do with the fact I am an occasional participant on his Newshour debates. Nor is it connected with his hectoring style which I find enthralling at times and quite exasperating on other occasions. Arnab’s foremost contribution to the public discourse (at least the English language discourse which still sets the tone for others) is his unending search for what “the nation” wants to know.

The definition of his imagined community is important. Hitherto, the media was reasonably modest in its inquisitiveness. Its rationale for demanding answers was invariably couched in terms of either ‘viewer interest’ or, at best, ‘the public interest’. In projection the ‘nation’ as the inquisitor—and I notice that even in rival channels ‘nation’ is fast becoming a substitute to the more passive use of the ‘country’—Arnab has succeeded in doing something quite remarkable: he has successfully made ‘nationalism’ the core attribute for assessing public life.  

This is a remarkable feat. For long, the English language media was in real danger of being overwhelmed by a spurious liberalism, borrowed from the ethos of the New York Times, Guardian and BBC, and complemented by the insidious political correctness of the American campus. Those who subscribed to this ‘idea of India’ became members of a privileged club; those who persisted with alternative approaches were relegated to the fringes and barely tolerated. The defining feature of this ultra-liberalism was its profound intellectual arrogance and its characterisation of other perspectives as base ‘prejudice’.

In positing the ‘nation’ as the ultimate arbiter of the larger ‘national good’ and doing so with passion, verve and eloquence, Arnab managed to create a constituency of people who refused to be patronised by the superior assumptions of a handful of the ‘enlightened’. On issues relating to Pakistan, he refused to be cowed down by the mushy sentimentalism of the Aman ki asha pseuds and on China he ruthlessly questioned the ‘nuanced’ sophistry of the professional prevaricators in South Block. On corruption, he was single-minded in his determination to cut through the obfuscation and piffle. And on mundane political fights, he was both sceptical and irreverent.

It is not that on every issue he got the tone right. He didn’t. To me what was important was the yardstick of national interest he set for judging issues. In an environment where others were highlighting the values of cosmopolitanism, internationalism, liberalisation and oozing concern for the human rights of every extremist who sought the vivisection of India, Arnab re-popularised the validity of proud nationalism.

For helping India recover this eroding inheritance, ‘the nation’ must be thankful to him. He has been the best corrective to the babalog media.

There was an additional feature to Arnab’s discourses each week night that I find both amusing and encouraging: his polite insolence. India may well have a long tradition of being argumentative but in recent times this free spirit has suffered on account of an educational system that discouraged scepticism and promoted the inculcation of every form of received wisdom.

In the mid-1970s, just prior to the Emergency, there used to be huge hoarding on the inner circle of Connaught Place which proclaimed “The leader is right, the future is bright”. It had been put there by one of those disagreeable publications that existed on the patronage of the first families of India, Iran, Libya and, of course, the great ‘progressive’ bloc around the Soviet Union. The message was crass but it was an accurate description of what the rulers expected from the ruled: unquestioning docility.

That is the way Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, for example, sees the world. Why, he asked a TV channel, were the protesters still persisting with their gatherings on India Gate? After all, some of them had a midnight meeting with Sonia Gandhi.

Actually, he wasn’t being disingenuous. To a very large section of India’s establishment, politics is all about, first, bringing an issue or a grievance (preferably through an intermediary) to the proverbial attention of those entrusted with the responsibility of governance and plead for a solution. Then there is the process of waiting patiently and often indefinitely for the system to creak into action. The voting classes are not expected to be either insistent with their demands or insolent in their engagements with professional politicians. In particular, netas don’t believe in being buttonholed by a TV anchor and informed that the “nation demands to know”. 

At best, politicians don’t mind the occasional convivial chats with ‘reasonable’ people—just recall the you-gush-and-I-gush interviews that the Delhi Chief Minister gave to two channels last week after Sonia’s darshan left the nation underwhelmed. Arnab, unfortunately, is ‘reasonable’ only off camera. On air he becomes a voice of indignation, anger and even insolence. These are qualities which the little man doesn’t possess in abundance. He wants to kick the errant netas. Since he can’t, he is happy for Arnab do it for him.

Arnab didn’t create the hatred for the political order. He just helped the little man feel that a larger community of Indians shared his frustrations and his unwillingness to settle for the second-best. Full marks to him for helping India lower the bar of forbearance. 

Sunday Pioneer, December 30, 2012

Why young MPs avoid insolent India

By Swapan Dasgupta

The protests that gripped Delhi over the past 10 days may have begun as a spontaneous expression of outrage against a particularly brutal gang-rape. But somewhere along the way, they escalated into something more far-reaching and yet ill-defined.

What makes citizens of India’s showcase Capital take to the streets periodically— remember the similar response to Anna Hazare’s movement last year—to vent their dissatisfaction against the ‘system’ is prone to divergent interpretations. Can the unrest be attributed to the arrogance of the rulers and the wide gulf that separates them from the ruled? Is it a problem linked to breakneck urbanisation that nurtures aspiration but leads to the simultaneous breakdown of established values? Alternatively, is ‘civil society’ a made-in-media tamasha? 

Whatever the trigger, one thing is absolutely clear: India’s political class has been left bewildered by the street protests involving large numbers of  mostly apolitical and leaderless individuals. President Pranab Mukherjee’s son has quite rightly been pilloried for his “denting and painting” remark but it is easy to understand the incomprehension of a middle-aged inheritor whose own experiences of student movements didn’t involve rubbing shoulders with “pretty women” in western apparel.

In pre-liberalisation India, the angry young men and women who burnt buses and threw crude bombs in Calcutta were invariably scruffy and fitted a jholawala stereotype. Certainly, what was derisively called the ‘South Calcutta’ (or, for that matter, ‘South Delhi’ and ‘South Mumbai’) types would never be seen chanting slogans on the streets. Until the anti-Mandal protests of 1990, the creamy layer of the middle class was politically invisible.

Yet, appearances can be remarkably deceptive. One of the features of the media interviews of the protestors at India Gate was the glaring mismatch between outward appearance and social status. A few of those interviewed were extremely articulate in English, suggesting a privileged schooling, but most of the women in jeans and fleece jackets were naturally at ease in Hindi. There was little in their outward appearance to distinguish one social set from another. Casual wear has become the great leveller.  

For these lower middle class individuals, many of whom come from India’s dynamic small towns, life in the metros is both liberating and deeply oppressive. Their fierce desire for self-improvement in a city that offers opportunities is coupled with an aspirational lifestyle which, in the context of economic globalisation, also involves adopting the trappings of westernisation. They have consciously broken away from the ‘behenji’ mould that defined their mothers’ generation. At the same time, they are confronted by the regressive patriarchal assumptions of neighbourhoods and workplaces where women in trousers are typecast as ‘fast’ and ‘loose’, not least by a police force that has internalised the khap panchayat ethos.

An earlier discourse suggested that this social transformation would be met by Gen Next politicians who didn’t share the fuddy-duddy assumptions of earlier leaders. However, as the Delhi protests vividly revealed, labelling someone as the “youth icon” or proclaiming a young MP’s familiarity with the social media didn’t qualify them to respond to the anger with purposeful politics.   

Why, it was often asked, didn’t Rahul Gandhi arrive at India Gate to meet the aggrieved?

The answer is curiously simple. An overwhelming majority of India’s young MPs are inheritors who have long been accustomed to the aam aadmi looking up to the netas with forlorn eyes and the leaders in turn responding with a show of noblesse oblige. For them, good politics always meant doling out favours to a supplicant India.

The protestors who gathered to demand better policing and exemplary punishment of molesters and rapists weren’t pleading before dynastic icons with folded hands. They were self-confident, angry and exasperated. They represented a new, assertive and even insolent India. Their expectations couldn’t be met by discretionary hand-outs and even cash transfers. Their demands are a key element of modern politics: the expectation that the state will be responsive and efficient. The chalta hai fatalism of an earlier age has been replaced by a voluble rejection of a meek theek hai.

The people are changing and the political class isn’t. This mismatch will not be unending. Sooner, rather than later, the yearnings of an assertive India will find political expression. 

Sunday Times of India, December 30, 2012

On a whim and dare

By Swapan Dasgupta

Earlier this month, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee convened a meeting of industrialists in New Delhi. The purpose was obvious and unexceptionable: to talk up West Bengal and invite investment to a state that, for all practical purposes, had dropped off the economic map of India.

Unfortunately for her, the exercise proved self-defeating. It is not that those who responded to her invitation came with a closed mind. Most industrial houses, especially the older ones, had a substantial presence in West Bengal, at least until the early-1970s when new investment plans were shelved. For corporate India, West Bengal is a state whose turn-around was overdue and would be enthusiastically welcomed. So far, and despite being more than a year in power, Mamata has been able to achieve little forward movement.

Yet, it was not merely the absence of concrete action on the ground that deterred those who came to hear the Chief Minister in Delhi. What struck many of those present was the leader’s complete lack of seriousness. In many ways, with her impulsiveness on full display, Mamata gave the impression that she didn’t understand the first thing about business. Her utterances were all over the place and there was no focus. At a time when there is furious competition among states to attract capital and create additional employment, West Bengal’s was an amateur act.

The irony of the situation is that Mamata is blissfully unaware that she is not doing something right. That she means well is undeniable. She works hard, often late into the night in her offices at Writer’s Buildings. She travels extensively throughout the state and is not averse to interacting with ordinary people. And she takes a keen, often over-bearing, interest in every aspect of government and political functioning.

Perhaps it is this penchant for micro-management that warps her priorities. No problem is too small to not warrant her direct intervention. Whether it is the shortcomings of a police officer in a local thana or a factional feud in a Block committee of the Trinamool Congress, the Chief Minister is always at hand to lead the charge. If Jyoti Basu was the archetypal aloof Chief Minister who was too imperious to bother about niggling local details, no problem is too small or inconsequential for Mamata. She is always willing to dive headlong into every cesspool.

Take two cases that earned her enormous disfavour with the very same middle class that has backed her resolutely since she stormed into the political world by defeating the redoubtable Somnath Chatterjee in 1984. The gang-rape of a woman in the vicinity of Park Street was a heinous crime that should have been investigated thoroughly and professionally by the Kolkata Police. As Chief Minister, Mamata’s role lay in instructing the police to get on with their job and improve the efficacy of late-night policing in the city. Instead, she decided to get enmeshed in the nitty-gritty of the case, smelling a monumental political conspiracy to defame her government where none existed. She ended up making outrageous statements, punishing a senior police officer for doing her job professionally and conveying a picture of insensitivity.

It is this penchant for paying disproportionate heed to local tittle-tattle and smelling conspiracies that explained her bizarre over-reaction to the circulation of an innocuous cartoon over email by a teacher of Jadavpur University. Regardless of whether the said gentleman was a CPI(M) supporter or not, the point is that Mamata had absolutely no business to get herself directly embroiled in such a controversy. Nor did she do herself any favour by flying off the handle and denouncing a young student who asked her an insolent question on TV as a Maoist.

A Chief Minister is expected to conduct herself with a measure of even-handedness and detachment. Throughout her political career Mamata has preferred a grassroots approach—which also explains the fierce loyalty she commands among the TMC cadre. The problem is that in becoming a Chief Minister of the grassroots, she has set the tone for governance by flights of whimsy. Mamata has lost clearly lost sight of the big picture.

However, to conclude that her temperamental behaviour and her utter failure to make West Bengal a source of ‘positive’ news has also jeopardised her politically, is to over-read her vulnerability. As of today, Didi has certainly become an object of ridicule to a section of the middle-class bhadralok who were hoping that the end of the Left Front’s cadre raj would be replaced by a meaningful, economic revival of the state. What it sees instead is a process of drift which, if unchecked, will steer West Bengal towards social anarchy.

The gloom and doom of the ‘respectable’ classes is not universally shared. Mamata still retains the goodwill of a vast section of society, the most important of which is the Muslim community which is witnessing a silent assertiveness. In addition, the defeat of the CPI(M)-inspired petty tyranny in the countryside is still too fresh in the minds of rural folk for any immediate backlash to set in.

Yet, as 2012 turns to 2013 and a general election looms closer, Mamata would be foolish to disregard the stray writings on the wall. To endure politically, a government needs to show a few tangible achievements or fall a victim to unfulfilled expectations. Mamata just has to forget the mohulla squabbles and start addressing the big picture.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, December 28, 2012