The Right's blind love for America

It does not pay to trust America
The Roman Catholic mission school I attended in Jamshedpur was run by American priests of the Society of Jesus. They were a nice lot and would leave the boys alone so long as there was no major infringement of school discipline (the rules included a non-negotiable ban on bell-bottoms, stretchlon and long hair) and homework was submitted on time. The priests lived in one wing of the school that was out-of-bounds for students, except on weekends when you could visit them in their rooms after seeking prior appointment. I recall the rooms being sparsely furnished. The corridor would reek of disinfectant — it was swept and swabbed every few hours by a retinue of cleaners, a sore point with us because we had to clean our classrooms and polish the brass handles on the doors and French windows before leaving for home — but the musty rooms smelled of starched cassocks, racks of books and stacks of comics.
They were generous with sharing the books — Ayn Rand’s novels for senior school boys and Louis L’Amour’s Wild West adventure stories for the rest — and comics which were invariably about American GIs giving it to the German ‘Krauts’ (in the tattered copies with crumbling pages) and US Marines blasting the daylights out of the Vietcong in the paddyfields of Vietnam (spanking new, all-colour copies with glossy covers). This was before 1975 and Jamshedpur was a small town with few distractions and even fewer sources of information. If you were not in school, you were at home doing sums and writing essays on weekdays. Every Saturday we would turn up at school for the weekly movie, invariably a Western or a Biblical film: Ben-Hur was an all-season favourite. The monotony was broken by the occasional screening of blockbusters. There was pin-drop silence in the auditorium when Where Eagles Dare was screened.
In retrospect, perhaps all this was not so innocent. There was a subtle attempt to promote the American worldview and to inculcate a sense of patriotism fashioned after Christian America’s loyalty to the Stars and Stripes. Impressionable minds are easier to deal with than cynical adults. So, we learned to extol the virtues of bullet-biting Americans fighting a ‘just war’ in the jungles of Indochina and snigger at the Vietcong who were ‘sly’ and ‘sneaky’. It was a worldview dominated by images of brave Americans trying to tame the rest of the world after taming the unruly and treacherous ‘Indians’ at home. Although it was never mentioned at assembly, in clasrooms or on the handball court — priests were not supposed to talk about politics and this was before Liberation Theology became popular and the American padres made way for radical desi priests in khakis and bush-shirts — but we came to believe that capitalism was better than socialism, and Communism was to be shunned at all costs. The fall of Saigon must have come as a rude shock to Fr Robert and the others, but they never showed their disappointment.
College in Kolkata opened up an entirely new world and the certitudes of school life were turned upside down. Ho Chi Minh and General Giap sprang to life; after hearing passionate discourses on Dien Bien Phu and the Tet Offensive in the college canteen, I felt silly for having believed comic book tales of the Vietnam war. Of course, I could never bring myself to admitting having read Ayn Rand and stayed up nights reading books which my college friends seemed to have read during their high school years.
And so was I introduced to Leftist writers and their ideology. And so did I realise that much as the Americans may claim it to be, the world is not entirely black and white, it is not about ‘us’ and ‘them’, and that it is not a terribly good idea to let the Americans decide for you what is in your ‘best interest’. Twenty-five years later, I have little time and lesser enthusiasm for the Left and its ideology. I find ‘liberals’ to be poseurs who really don’t have the courage to believe in anything or commit themselves to a cause. The Right makes sense since conservatives take a long-term view of issues that tend to be seen as inconsequential and therefore are treated cursorily by the Left, and are not tied to immutable ideology. In any event, even if I were reluctant — which I am not — to be known as a ‘Right-winger’, the label has been firmly pasted on me.
Yet, there is one issue on which I cannot bring myself to agree with others on the Right. And this is their implicit, almost naïve, trust in America and the eagerness with which they look up to the US for succour and sustenance. Which is not to suggest that I endorse the anti-Americanism or anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Left; just as the rest of the world can’t be all bad, everything about the US can’t be all bad either.
Indeed, there is much about the US that is admirable and worth emulating: If our Government had been half as transparent, our system half as efficient and our leaders half as committed as in the world’s oldest democracy, the world’s largest democracy would have been giving China a run for its money today. But just as not everything about the US is bad, we cannot be blind to the fact that there is a lot about America which is rotten. This is best exemplified by America’s foreign policy and its overwhelming desire to rule the world as the sole superpower. Add to this the amorality that pervades the American worldview, in which nothing matters other than what America believes to be in its interest, and you would get a sense of why many of us are uneasy about reposing faith in the US.
Yet, most of us who stand right of the centre are puzzled as to why someone among them would doubt American intentions. This point is made when some of us refuse to accept that the nuclear deal with the US, in its present form, is in India’s interest. All arguments, all reasons fail to convince them that being on the Right does not mean blindly supporting the nuclear deal simply because the Americans have offered to under-write it. In fact, it should be opposed because the Americans are pushing it with so much enthusiasm: They wouldn’t have done so had the nuclear deal been in India’s interest.
Others who trusted the US have come to grief. The mess in our neighbourhood bears testimony to this fact. Inexorably, we are moving in that direction. Tragically, the Right is as guilty as Mr Manmohan Singh for letting down India to please America.

Coffee Break / August 17, 2008

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd.

No more silent Hindu, timid Hindu

A Hindu teenaged boy on the frontline in Jammu

The bushfire of Hindu rage
For the past five weeks Jammu has been witnessing a veritable uprising against the pro-Muslim, anti-Hindu politics and policies of the establishment in Srinagar and the Government in New Delhi. At the heart of the dispute is the contrived controversy over the allotment of 97 acres of land to Sri Amarnath Shrine Board for creating temporary facilities for Hindu pilgrims who trek to the hill cave shrine every summer. The Muslims of Kashmir Valley — let us not be coy and refer to them as ‘Kashmiris’ so as to suppress the fact that they are Muslims — took to the streets, chanting blood-curdling slogans and waving the Pakistani flag, to scuttle the allotment of land. The National Conference of the Abdullah clan and the People’s Democratic Party of the Mufti clan joined the fanatics in insisting that Muslim Kashmir would not tolerate such Hindu intrusion.
Instead of standing up to the rank communalists who have Hindu blood on their hands, the Congress and its stooge, who now occupies the Governor’s office, meekly surrendered to them, thus delivering a crippling blow against the Indian state, though not for the first time. And how did the media react to this abject surrender? The cancellation of the allotment of land was hailed as a judicious decision, an assertion of secular values, to protect ‘Kashmiriyat’; it was praised as being mindful of ‘Kashmiri sentiments’ and ‘Kashmiri psyche’. Stripped of its sophistry, what all this means is that the Congress has done well to pander to Islamic fanaticism and mollycoddle those who heap abuse on India and curse Hindus. Such is the standard used by the media for judging secularism in this wondrous land of ours.
And how has the media responded to the snow-balling protest against Muslim appeasement, which has engulfed all of Jammu region and brought men, women and children out into the streets to brave bullets and batons? There has been universal condemnation; the agitation has been dubbed as ‘communal’, ‘distressing’, ‘disruptive’, ‘anti-Muslim’ and ‘needlessly provocative’. Kashmir’s Muslims have been described as ‘tolerant’ and Jammu’s Hindus as ‘ingrates’. For 365 days a year Kashmir’s Muslims hold the Indian state to ransom and not an eyebrow is lifted. For 35 days Jammu’s Hindus petition the Indian state to protect their rights and they are ridiculed. Much concern is expressed over the manufactured grievances and imagined victimhood of Kashmir’s Muslims by the lib-left intelligentsia that dominates media. But scorn is poured on the genuine grievances and victimisation of Jammu’s Hindus.
Ever since the first violent protest in downtown Srinagar against the allotment of land to Sri Amarnath Shrine Board, facts have been twisted and the truth has been obfuscated to portray Kashmir’s Muslim fanatics as saints who wouldn’t swat a fly and Jammu’s Hindus as a violent, unruly and communal lot which should be crushed into submission. There is nothing new about this perversity: We have seen in the past how the cleansing of Kashmir Valley of Hindus has been whitewashed; how massacre after massacre of entire Hindu families have been treated by media as ‘minor incidents’ not worthy of notice; how lakhs of Pandits thrown out of their ancestral land have been reduced to refugees in their own country; and, how bogus terms like ‘Kashmiriyat’ have been used as a convenient cover to hide the brutalities inflicted by Kashmir’s Muslims. All that and more is not ‘communal’ but in keeping with the ‘secular’ principles of the Indian state; if Hindus raise their voice in protest, it is not only ‘communal’ but an assault on the ‘secular’ Indian state!
For the benefit of those who have come of age in the last two decades, among them many of the 24x7 news channel anchors who talk utter gibberish while donning an air of supreme confidence to camouflage their limitless ignorance, let me recount the events of January 1990, which mark the beginning of the latest crusade against the Hindus of Jammu & Kashmir. Since ‘secularists’ are allergic to events of the distant past, we need not go into the details of how Hindus were decapitated by the Sword of Islam wielded by the original Islamists. The present will suffice to highlight the duplicity of those whose hearts beat for the hate-India hordes in Kashmir.
Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab, a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a Press release issued by Hizb-ul Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad for Jammu & Kashmir’s secession from India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order. In the following days, there is near chaos in the Kashmir Valley with then Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference Government abdicating all responsibilities. Masked men run amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting anti-India slogans. Reports of killing of Hindus, invariably Kashmiri Pandits, begin to trickle in; there are explosions; inflammatory speeches are made from the pulpits of mosques, using public address systems meant for calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying fear psychosis begins to take grip of Kashmiri Pandits.
Srinagar, January 19, 1990. Mr Jagmohan arrives to take charge as Governor. Mr Farooq Abdullah, whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling Government has all but ceased to exist, resigns and goes into a sulk. Curfew is imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance of law and order. But it fails to have a deterrent effect. Throughout the day, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizb-ul Mujahideen terrorists use public address systems at mosques to exhort people to defy curfew and take to the streets. Masked men, firing from their Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising Pandits. As evening falls, the exhortations become louder and shriller. Three taped slogans are repeatedly played the whole night from mosques: “Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-hu-Akbar kehna hai” (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-hu-Akbar); “Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa” (What do we want here? Rule of shari’ah); “Asi gachchi Pakistan, batao roas te batanev san” (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men). As the night of January 19, 1990, wears itself out, despondency gives way to desperation. And tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits across the Valley take a painful decision: To flee their homeland to save their lives. Thus takes place a 20th century Exodus.
Their wounds, as also the wounds of Hindu India, have been festering for 18 years. The simmering anger of Hindus has now burst into a raging bush fire that threatens to burn to ashes media’s perverse notions of ‘secularism’ and destroy the politics of Muslim appeasement. Consternation and panic in Delhi and Srinagar are understandable.

Coffee Break / Sunday Pioneer / August 10, 2008

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd.

Jammu Erupts in Rage

Jammu's Hindus are up in arms!

Hindu intifada

Images can have a profound impact and make a lasting impression even on the most cynical among us. They can also act as a force multiplier in a conflict zone. Recall the photographs and television footage of teenaged Palestinian boys in Gaza and the West Bank confronting Israeli tanks armed with no more than shepherd’s slings; of young men, their faces half-covered with handkerchiefs and kafiyeh, racing through billowing clouds of tear gas to hurl stones at soldiers armed with assault rifles; of middle-aged and old women violating police pickets and defying curfew. That was the first time we heard of a little-used Arabic word, intifada, which literally means to shake off but in recent times has come to mean a rebellion premised on the Biblical tale of David vanquishing Goliath, a relentless mass protest born of festering anger, deep-seated grievance and overwhelming, uncontrollable rage.
We are witnessing a similar intifada in Jammu province where young and old, men and women, are locked in an unequal battle with the police — and, since Friday, the Army — demanding the immediate revocation of the Government order cancelling the transfer of 800 kanals of land to the Sri Amarnath Shrine Board. The land was meant for creating temporary facilities for pilgrims who trek to the Amarnath shrine every year, braving inclement weather and jihadi attacks. This time, it’s a Hindu intifada, an outpouring of pent-up anger which has brought life in Jammu and other towns and villages in the province to a standstill.
It’s been more than a month that the Hindus of Jammu have taken to the streets, burning tyres, taunting policemen, braving tear gas and real bullets, violating curfew and blockading the highway to Srinagar. The images emanating from Jammu are eerily similar to those that emanated from Gaza and the West Bank during the Palestinian intifada. More tellingly, the tactics that have been adopted by the protesters are those that have often brought Kashmir Valley to a standstill. If you look at the photographs of the Hindu intifada, you will get a sense of how Jammu has decided to give Kashmir a taste of its own medicine — in this case it is Dum Dum dawai.
The details of the land transfer fiasco are well-known. The Congress-PDP Government headed by Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad had instructed the Forest Department to transfer the land to the SASB. Within days Muslims in the Kashmir Valley, led and instigated by pro-Pakistani separatists, took to the streets, insisting no land should be provided for pilgrim facilities. The All-Party Hurriyat Conference spread three canards: First, the transfer amounted to alienation of ‘Kashmiri land’; second, it would lead to intrusion of ‘Hindu culture’ in Muslim Kashmir; and, third, it would cause ecological damage.
The PDP, sensing an opportunity to revive its pro-separatist — if not brazenly anti-India/ anti-Hindu — image in the run-up to the Assembly election in Jammu & Kashmir, joined the protest and subsequently withdrew from the Government. To his credit, Mr Azad stood firm and refused to budge from his Government’s decision, till Mr NN Vohra took over as Governor, replacing Gen SK Sinha. Mr Vohra, in his capacity as ex-officio chairman of the SASB, wrote a letter to Mr Azad, returning the land and also offering to relinquish the board’s task of organising the annual yatra, thus making the pilgrimage to the Amarnath shrine subordinate to the Valley’s Muslims über alle politics and Delhi’s equally odious politics of Muslim appeasement.
Mr Vohra reportedly sent his letter to Mr Azad at 8.30 pm on June 28. “The news of that abject surrender provoked an explosion of outrage across Jammu,” says a senior member of the Amarnath Yatra Sangharsh Samiti, a broad-based organisation without any political affiliation which is at the forefront of the protest. “The Governor has violated the SASB Act. He cannot act unilaterally. Any decision of the board has to be endorsed by at least five members,” says Prof Hari Om, academic and activist. “He is also in contempt of the High Court which had passed an interim order approving the transfer of 800 kanals of land to the board in Baltal,” he adds.
For all his efforts to appease the Muslim protesters in Kashmir Valley by ‘returning’ the land that had been allotted for Hindu pilgrims, Mr Vohra was unable to save the Congress-PDP Government. The PDP pulled out from the ruling alliance on June 28; on July 1, Mr Azad, obviously under mounting pressure from his party bosses in Delhi, reversed the earlier decision.
Meanwhile, in Jammu there was a spontaneous shutdown on June 30. “I don’t recall such a massive bandh in recent years,” says a lawyer who has been involved with the protest; he does not wish to be named, fearing harassment by authorities. Neither do the protesters wish to be identified because they fear they will be picked up from their homes by the police who take their instructions from Srinagar.
So, every morning, afternoon, evening and night, students, workers, professionals, senior citizens and housewives take to the streets, engaging the police in dogfights, hurling tear gas shells back at their tormentors, chasing cops when they are outnumbered, retreating into narrow alleys when the men in uniform regather, and then surging out all over again. Their faces masked with handkerchiefs, they hurl stones; their eyes reflecting their rage. Scores have been shot and wounded; three of them have died; a young man was chased across rooftops by the police — he jumped to his death.
“Each death only makes us more determined. We are not going to be bullied by the Valley any more. Jammu wants a voice of its own. Jammu’s Hindus will no longer tolerate oppression by Kashmir’s Muslims,” says a young protester, still in his teens, from his house in downtown Jammu. His voice has just begun to crack.
The day after the June 30 bandh, Jammu flared up with street marches and protest rallies. The authorities responded by clamping curfew, in an effort to force people to remain indoors, till July 7. Women came out of their homes and dared the police to shoot them. An enduring image of the Hindu intifada is that of an aged woman, a Pandit who was forced out of the Valley along with her family and three lakh other Pandits in the early days of jihadi terror, threatening a Kalashnikov-sporting policeman at a curfew picket with her tattered and torn slipper.
On July 7, the Congress-PDP Government officially exited office; the next day the Sangharsh Samiti suspended its agitation, giving the Governor a fortnight’s time to either have the land restored to the SASB or resign from office. “Mr Vohra did neither. He only added fuel to the fire by telling some people who went to plead with him, ‘Why should I bother about Jammu? Does Jammu matter? Does Jammu exist?’ He has been insensitive and his actions have only served to provoke the protesters,” says a senior official in the Jammu administration.
“Years of neglect of Jammu by Kashmir has resulted in what you are seeing today. The people are frustrated. The Pandits have at last found a platform to vent their anger. Jammu has more people than Kashmir, but the lion’s share always goes to the Valley,” says Prof Hari Om.
Jammu province has 37 Assembly seats and two Lok Sabha constituencies. Kashmir Valley has 46 Assembly seats and elects three Lok Sabha MPs. Of the 37 Assembly constituencies in Jammu province, 25 have a Hindu-majority population; the remaining 12 have a Muslim-majority profile. “Our voice naturally gets drowned,” says an advocate who is a member of the Sangharsh Samiti.
The natural beneficiary of the Hindu intifada would be the BJP. It could end up sweeping all the Hindu-majority seats in Jammu province and even emerge as the single-largest party in the next Assembly. The Muslim vote in the Valley would be divided between the National Conference and the PDP. The Congress could get wiped out — it has little to claim as support in the Valley; following the intifada in Jammu, it can’t look forward to winning 15 seats in this province as it did in 2002.
This should have set alarm bells ringing at the Congress headquarters in Delhi. Strangely, the party’s ‘high command’ doesn’t seem to care. Or so it would seem from the near non-response to the protest.
Mr Vohra and his patrons in Delhi have “clearly underestimated the determination of Jammu’s long-suffering Hindus who have had to cope with denial and deprivation for decades as the State Government focuses only on the Kashmir Valley,” the advocate-activist says.
This explains what happened on July 22. Kuldeep Raj Dogra, in his mid-30s, who was participating in a hungerstrike at Jammu’s Parade Ground, decided to do something tragically dramatic: He consumed poison, stood up to read out a passionately patriotic poem he had penned, faltered and fell dead. “It was his way of registering his protest against Mr Omar Abdullah’s speech in Parliament … he was incensed by the National Conference leader’s duplicity,” says Prof Hari Om.
The police panicked. They forcibly took away Kuldeep’s body to his hometown, Bisnah, 15 km from Jammu, and “tried to cremate it using old tyres, kerosene oil and liquor”, according to a Sangharsh Samiti leader. Kuldeep’s widow, Shilpi, tried to prevent the cremation and raised a hue and cry. The police have been accused of “insulting, abusing and assaulting” Shilpi to silence her. But a huge crowd gathered and snatched continued Kuldeep’s body from the police. It was taken to Jammu and the situation subsequently just went out of control.
Since then, the Hindu intifada has gathered both force and speed. Curfew has been clamped on all of Jammu and Samba. The Army has been called out. The Governor has been virtually forced to remain confined within the Raj Bhavan by protesters who continue to gather at the gates in large numbers with every passing hour. Mr Vohra’s ‘eight-point formula’, which included “allowing” the SASB to “maintain infrastructure during the yatra period”, to end the deadlock, has been spurned. The Sangharsh Samiti is adamant that it will settle for nothing less than restoration of the 800 kanals of land to the SASB for Hindu pilgrims.
Just how determined the protesters are can be gauged from the manner in which thousands of them laid siege to the airport
after hearing that Mr Farooq Abdullah of the National Conference and PDP president Mehbooba Mufti were flying in. They had to be flown from the airport to the Raj Bhavan in a helicopter after the protesters refused to let them through.
Since Friday night, the intifada has escalated and spread to virtually every corner of Jammu province. Protesters, defying curfew, have been relentlessly pouring out into the streets throughout the night, daring policemen and Army personnel to shoot them. Two men were shot dead, 35 were injured when the police fired on protesters ransacking the District Magistrate’s office in Samba. By mid-afternoon on Saturday, the intifada was truly raging in Jammu and beyond.
All trucks headed for Srinagar have been stopped by protesters at Samba and on the Jammu-Pathankot national highway. No trucks are being allowed to enter Jammu from Srinagar. Kashmir’s Muslims could yet get to know what it feels like to be at the receiving end of popular fury and mass anger, as opposed to the Valley’s made-in-Pakistan rage.
Sunday Pioneer/Cover story/July 3, 2008

(c)CMYL Printech Ltd.

Cult of Muslim denial

Victims of jihadi attack on Jaipur

The truth about Islamofascism
Although the immediate context of his argument was far removed from events in India, well-known Arab journalist Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, in an article he penned four years ago, ripped the veil off the Muslim cult of denial, which is so adroitly preached by the clergy and naïvely practised by the ghetto, that the ummah and its faith have nothing to do with terrorism; that all talk of Islamist terror or jihad is no more than fiction propagated by Zionists and their patrons in the Christian West. “It is certainly true that not all Muslims are terrorists,” he wrote, “however, the majority of terrorists in the world are Muslims.” To drive home his point, Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid gave several contemporary examples: The men who held children hostage in Beslan were Muslims; the kidnappers who killed the Nepalese chefs and labourers in Iraq were Muslims; those who perpetrate acts of rape and murder in Darfur are Muslims...”. And then, with a flourish he added, “Osama bin Laden is a Muslim and most of those who carried out suicide attacks against buses, schools, houses, buildings all over the world in the past 10 years also were Muslims. What a terrible record — doesn’t that say something to us about ourselves, our societies and our culture?”
It’s no doubt a harsh indictment, but it’s not devoid of truth. Yet, every time there’s a terrorist strike and innocent people are killed, the instinctive response we get to see and hear is one of denial. What’s the proof that Muslims planted the bombs in Jaipur? What’s the evidence to blame Muslims for the bombings in Bangalore? What’s there to suggest that Muslims planned and executed last weekend’s bloodbath in Ahmedabad and botched up the plot to blow up Surat? These and other related questions make up the ummah’s refrain even as parents wail for their dead children, widows grieve for their dead husbands, and those who have been maimed and disfigured for the rest of their lives wonder whether it is really worth staying alive. As if to clinch their argument absolving their co-religionists of any blame for the ghastly bloodletting that has become common occurrence under the UPA Government’s watch, defenders of the faith triumphantly ask: Would Muslims kill fellow Muslims?
Yes, they would. Look at the slaughter in Iraq where more Muslims have been killed by fellow Muslims than by the invading forces led by the US Army. Look at the ease with which Muslim lives are laid to waste every day in Afghanistan by the blood-thirsty Taliban. Recall how a mentally challenged teenaged Palestinian boy was strapped with explosives by Hamas terrorists and then told to walk up to an Israeli checkpost and blow himself up by pulling the cord on the belt. The boy panicked as he approached the checkpost: He couldn’t remember the instructions and began to cry pitifully; the Israeli soldiers asked him to stand still and used robots to disarm him and defuse the beltbomb he was wearing. Recall also how a Muslim woman strapped her daughter, no more than a toddler, with explosives and asked her to go take chocolate from an American soldier who, while patrolling the neighbourhood, would handout goodies to Iraqi children every day. As the child reached for a Mars bar with her grubby hands, her mother, hiding in a doorway, pushed the button on the remote control. It is, therefore, not surprising that many of the victims of last Saturday’s outrage in Ahmedabad were Muslims, among them children. For the perpetrators of the crime, they are no more than collateral damage; like Mr Donald Rumsfeld, they would shrug their shoulders and say, “Stuff happens.”
Last week, this newspaper carried an article penned by Ms Hazel Blears, Britain’s Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, eulogising multiculturalism and how it has benefited her country. While British politicians with an eye to the immigrant community vote-bank are expected to trot out frothy stuff on multiculturalism, the fact of the matter is that it hasn’t really worked to Britain’s advantage. Ms Ruth Kelly’s assessment, that it has failed miserably, or Sir Vidia’s dismissive comment — “ What do they call it? Multi-culti... It’s all absurd, you know.” — is more accurate. For evidence, look at the findings of a new YouGov poll, conducted in 12 British universities on behalf of the Centre for Social Cohesion and published as ‘Islam on Campus’.
A report based on the findings of the poll, and forwarded to me by a reader of this column, says, “If ignorance and poverty are responsible for the growth of extremist views in the Islamic world, someone needs to ask Muslim students, privileged enough and bright enough to attend some of the United Kingdom’s best universities, why one-in-three of them endorses killing in the name of Islam.” Among the poll’s findings of Muslim beliefs are some revealing facts:
40 per cent want shari’ah in Britain for Muslims;
33 per cent favour a worldwide Islamic caliphate;
24 per cent think men and women are not equal;
32 per cent believe killing in the name of religion is justified;
33 per cent don’t think Islam is compatible with democracy.
The reason for this digression is not to provide an insight into the warped mindset of those who believe ‘Islam is the solution’ — much as Adolf Hitler thought he had found the ‘final solution’ to rid the world of Jews and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks god has willed him to complete Hitler’s unfinished task — but to highlight the danger posed by those who see nothing wrong with the fringe increasingly occupying the centre. The lib-left intelligentsia, whose criminal disregard of facts and aggressive peddling of fiction often persuades ill-informed and ill-intentioned journalists to suppress the truth, wants society to be tolerant of Islamofascism; to indulge the Muslim cult of denial; and, to gloss over incidents like serial bombings and suicide attacks. Those who refuse to do so are accused of Islamophobia.
Meanwhile, I wonder if the Prime Minister spent a sleepless night on Friday after reading about 12-year-old Rohan’s death in the morning newspapers. Rohan had suffered 70 per cent burns in last Saturday’s bombing of Ahmedabad’s Civil Hospital, in which his father and the family’s sole bread-earner, Dushyant Vyas, was killed. Rohan’s younger brother, nine-year-old Yash, has suffered 50 per cent burns and is battling for his life. Rohan’s mother, Geetaben, is inconsolable, and understandably so: Her life now lies in tatters, her dreams have been shattered. Since public memory is notoriously short, it would be in order to remind readers that the Prime Minister had spent sleepless nights worrying about a certain Mohammed Haneef, accused of terrorist links, and the ‘plight’ of his parents.

Coffee Break/Sunday Pioneer/July 3, 2008

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd.

Jihadi attack on Ahmedabad

After the blast outside Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad.

Was PM asleep as terror struck?
There’s something obnoxious about the anchors of 24x7 news channels, headquartered in Delhi, that makes you feel nauseated and infuriated at once. Apart from pretending to know all and being disdainful of those with a contrarian (and substantive) point of view, they also try to impose their tuppence worth of opinion and vacuous concern on viewers. This point was reconfirmed by a 20-something anchor late Friday afternoon when I switched on the television set in my office to catch the news on the serial bombings in Bangalore. The channel had managed to get Ms Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who heads Biocon and has played an admirable role in helping India’s biotechnology sector acquire an international profile, to comment on the bombings. Ms Mazumdar-Shaw was expressing her disquiet, and justifiably so, over the terrorist strike and how it would have an adverse effect on the residents of Bangalore who were bound to feel unnerved and insecure.
At this point the anchor barged in: “Don’t you think it will affect foreign investors? Won’t they flee Bangalore? What will happen to all the investments they have made?” That’s not the issue, Ms Mazumdar-Shaw tried to explain, but was cut short. “What about the foreign investors? What about their investments?” the anchor kept on repeating these two questions, imitating Long John Silver’s irrepressible parrot. Look, we need not worry about investors right now, said Ms Mazumdar-Shaw (did I detect just a hint of irritation in her voice?), adding, what’s more important is the security of the people; we should worry about whether people feel secure. But the security of the people of Bangalore — or, for that matter, any other part of the country — was of no interest to the anchor and possibly of even less importance to the channel. So, the anchor piped up, “Thank you for joining us. That was Ms Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw telling us how the serial blasts will affect foreign investments and investors.” Or words to that effect. I reached for the remote control.
It would, however, be unfair to blame either the anchor or the 24x7 news channels for such callous disregard for the fearsome consequences of terrorist attacks which, as Ms Mazumdar-Shaw pointed out, leave people shaken and shattered, both metaphorically and literally. If television channels are eager to shift attention from serious and real issues related to internal security to frivolous and bogus issues of ‘investor confidence’, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is desperate to ensure that ‘distractions’ such as serial bombings and loss of innocent lives do not prompt questions about the willingness of the Government he heads to combat terrorism. Just how unwilling the Government is to curb and contain terrorism can be gauged from the fact that Mr Singh is prone to losing sleep over the plight of terrorists and rewarding their families if they are killed by security forces which, he believes, violate human rights every time they despatch a jihadi to jannat where houris wait with open arms. It is, therefore, not surprising that Mr Singh should accuse BJP leader LK Advani of “sleeping” on his job as Home Minister in the NDA Government even as the barbarians ran amok, causing death and destruction.
There’s a problem, though, with Mr Singh’s assertion. A tally of human lives lost in Islamist terrorist attacks outside Jammu & Kashmir after he became Prime Minister (with Mr Shivraj Patil, who thinks Mohammed Afzal is a lad gone astray and deserves no more than a rap on his knuckles, as his Home Minister) will show that 570 people have died till now, most of them in serial bombings. Many more have been maimed and scarred for the rest of their lives. During the six years when the NDA was in power, and Mr Advani was Home Minister, the corresponding figure was 237. Even the most rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic, as compared to the awesome intellectual prowess of an economist who has served the World Bank, would suggest that terrorist slayings during the NDA years were far less than those during Mr Singh’s watch. If we were to add the number of people killed by Maoists, terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir and separatists in the North-East, the total would touch 15,000. With a strike rate of 3,750 lives lost to terrorism of various shades every year, the UPA Government’s record is nothing to sneer at.
Meanwhile, within hours of the serial bombings in Bangalore, which coincided with — as PTI and UNI, mindful of the Press Commission’s guidelines, would report in the 1980s — ‘members of a certain community coming out of their places of worship after Friday noon prayers’, the Intelligence Bureau had put out, with the help of obliging journalists, how it had warned the Government of Karnataka about an impending terrorist attack. Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal reiterated this point when he told mediapersons, “The Intelligence Bureau had received inputs that terrorists could target the cybercities of Hyderabad and Bangalore. Both the State Governments were told to be on high alert.” Alas, nobody in Bangalore paid any attention to the IB’s ‘inputs’.
And for good reasons, too. It remains an abiding mystery as to how much of the ‘inputs’ provided by IB is actually based on actionable and credible intelligence; it is equally opaque as to how pin-pointed this information is. To alert the Government of Karnataka about a possible terrorist strike in Bangalore means nothing: Anybody with any intelligence can figure out that given the city’s high profile, terrorists would be tempted to attack it, if only for the assured media coverage beyond India’s shores. Nor does it take an exceptionally bright mind to figure out that serial bombings like those in Bangalore or in Ahmedabad late Saturday are meant to “spread terror”, as Mr Jaiswal has sought to enlighten us. Since imitation is the best form of flattery, Mr Jaiswal is no doubt keen to emulate the Prime Minister and accuse the BJP Government of ‘sleeping’ while terrorists go about committing their deed.
But should we blame State Governments for ‘failing’ to act on intelligence ‘inputs’ that are often shockingly vague and criminally inadequate? Are we to believe that the intelligence apparatus, which has been harnessed for achieving political objectives like winning confidence votes in Parliament, is collating and processing real time ‘inputs’?
If the IB had been doing its job then we would not have had to agonise over whether the next bomb will go off somewhere close to us or our children. Ah well, we can lose sleep over the creeping threat of terrorism. But I doubt if the Prime Minister is staying up nights so that he can’t be accused of sleeping on his watch, an accusation that Mr Singh has hurled so effortlessly at Mr Advani.

Coffee Break/Sunday Pioneer/July 27, 2008

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd.

Let them eat nuclear bijli

The other India: Hungry. Homeless. Pauperised. Marginalised.

Sonia promises nuclear energy for all!

Addressing a large public rally — hordes still turn out to gawk at her, marvelling at her high-pitched English and stilted Hindi, pallu firmly in place a la Mrs Indira Gandhi, amma to millions south of the Vindhyas — in the boondocks of Nellore last week, Congress president Sonia Gandhi made a solemn promise to the unwashed masses of India. The surge in India’s power production on account of nuclear reactors that will mushroom after the signing of the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, she said, will light up every home in every village. Actually, Ms Gandhi promised more than that: “Our Government has signed an international agreement that will enable more nuclear power plants to generate power. I am sure many of you are asking yourselves why this is so important. It is extremely important because as our economy grows, the demand for power would rise. We need power for our farms, hospitals, schools, factories and every home in every village.”
I am not too sure whether Ms Gandhi is right about the 123 Agreement having been signed, but given the Prime Minister’s propensity to keep secrets from the very people whose destiny he presides over, and whom he tends to mislead ever so often through word and deed, one can never say for sure what exactly is the status of the nuclear deal. That apart, Ms Gandhi’s speech at Nellore provides a clue to the Congress’s main campaign issue in the next general election, which could be held any time between early-winter and early-spring next year, depending on whether the UPA Government survives tomorrow’s confidence vote.
The aam admi, the poor, the struggling, the impoverished masses living on the edge, we can now be sure, will be told that their lives will take a turn for the better with the signing of the nuclear deal which will enable Government to supply nuclear power to one and all. Parched farms will become verdant as pumpsets energised by nuclear power will suck out water from the bowels of the Earth; classrooms in schools without teachers, blackboards and drinking water facilities (children can relieve themselves in the fields, so toilets are unnecessary) will be well lit with nuclear power bringing alive fused bulbs; production at factories will double and treble as machines powered by nuclear energy work faster than workers can cope with and managers can keep track of; and, it shall be Diwali every night in wretched villages where power is now considered a luxury and dwellers of hovels still make do with oil lamps provided they can afford kerosene sold in the black market. India won’t be shining; it will be glowing brighter than a thousand suns.
For a moment, let’s believe that I am not being facetious and that Ms Gandhi’s speech was written by someone higher in the food chain than a ‘promotee’ information officer of the PIB. Can all this be achieved by signing the 123 Agreement? Will there be such a surge in our power generation capacity? The answers to these, and other related questions, lie in basic facts that have been swamped by needless propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s variety. While the truth could have served the larger purpose of justifying the need for India to forge a strategic relationship with the US, bunkum is being resorted to to justify the Prime Minister’s strange obsession with the nuclear deal and his sly efforts to foist an iniquitous agreement on the nation. Bogus claims are being made to fool the people into believing that a bright future awaits them, never mind the subjugation of India’s strategic interests to those of America and the business interests of American firms.
So, here are some basic facts that should help realise the stupendous folly into which we are being led by a Prime Minister desperate to keep his commitment to the Americans before both he and President George Bush demit office. The share of nuclear power from existing reactors in the power produced in our country today stands at 2.8 per cent. If new reactors are set up, and if they go critical without any time overrun, then this share will increase to at best eight per cent by 2020. This is inconsequential, given the rate at which demand for power is increasing by the day. Nor will an increase in the production of nuclear power decrease our demand for, and consumption of, oil — in India, oil is not used for generating energy. In other words, the money we will spend on acquiring nuclear power reactors will not be offset by savings in our oil import bill.
Which brings us to the cost of nuclear power. At present, power from existing nuclear reactors costs, after huge subsidies, between Rs 2.70 and Rs 2.80 per kWh. The coal-fired Sasan mega power project in Madhya Pradesh will be supplying power at Rs 1.196 per unit. The real cost of power from existing nuclear reactors is around Rs 4 per unit; the cost of power produced by new reactors will be around Rs 5.50 per unit. Compare this to the real cost of power produced at thermal plants: Rs 2.50 per unit. What the UPA Government, therefore, is seeking to achieve is to permanently raise the cost of power by leaps and bounds, a cost that will have to be paid by the masses whom Ms Gandhi addressed last week.
The story does not end here. We are being told that to cushion our energy needs from the volatile oil market, we need nuclear power. That’s hogwash: Our power sector is not dependent on oil. But that’s only one reason. The other reason why this argument does not hold is that the uranium market, monopolised by a clutch of suppliers and controlled by an even smaller group of countries, is as, if not more, volatile than the oil market. The international spot price of uranium has risen at a rate faster than that of oil. A little known fact — with hindsight deliberately suppressed by the Government — should help us understand just how volatile is the uranium market. Between 2005 (when the India-US nuclear deal was first proposed) and 2007 (when the 123 Agreement was finalised), the spot price of uranium has quadrupled. According to a June 2008 market assessment, a further 58 per cent increase is expected.
There is more to the story. And this is about who gains from the nuclear deal. American and French firms dealing with nuclear reactors and starved of orders — no new reactor has been set up in the US in the last 35 years; the first new reactor in Europe is being set up in Finland after 17 years and has already run into a huge cost escalation of more than $2 billion — are hoping to revive their fortunes by entering the Indian power sector. They are expecting business worth $100 billion over the next 20 years. Since they will not be footing the bill, the Government will have to either raise money from the market or pass on the buck to hapless consumers. With a fraction of this money, a lot more thermal, hydel and gas-fuelled power plants could have been set up to supply clean and affordable power to the people at less than half the cost of nuclear power.
Yet we are being told that nuclear power will benefit the masses. It is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s suggestion that starving French peasants who couldn’t afford bread could eat cake. Or, as a biographer has pointed out, what she really meant was they could eat “crumbs from a bread pan”.

The Pioneer / leading article / July 21, 2008

For India's sake, Congress must go!

It's the PM's commitment; where does India fit into it?

Not nuclear empowerment, but bondage
Ever since the Left broke ranks with the Congress and withdrew its support to the UPA Government after the Prime Minister slyly authorised the circulation of the draft safeguards agreement with the IAEA and made its details public to the world while keeping them a secret from the people of India, a campaign has been launched to portray next Tuesday’s trust vote in the Lok Sabha into an up or down vote on the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement. As always, the Congress is being deceitful: This is not a vote for or against the deal; it is a vote on whether this Government is deserving of Parliament’s, and, therefore, the nation’s trust. Given the Congress’s efforts to stack up numbers in its favours and the Prime Minister’s apparent lack of scruples about surviving in office with the help of convicted criminals, it is entirely possible that the Government may win Tuesday’s vote. But that will at best be a pyrrhic victory and in no way demonstrate that the charlatans in power enjoy the support of the masses.
Linked to this misleading campaign by the Congress and its drum-beaters is their attempt to portray divisions within the main Opposition, the BJP and the NDA, on the nuclear deal. On Saturday, Union Minister for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal claimed on television that senior BJP leader LK Advani had endorsed the nuclear deal during a meeting with the Prime Minister last year, and that his opposition to the deal was on account of pressure from some party colleagues. The meeting Mr Sibal has referred to was a classified briefing session with a condition attached to it: Neither the Government nor the BJP was to disclose details of what transpired to the media. Since Mr Sibal has violated the confidentiality clause, it would be in order to place on record that there was no such endorsement; on the contrary, questions raised by Mr Advani and his colleagues who attended the briefing still remain unanswered. It is tempting to disclose further details of what transpired during the briefing session, especially what was said by the Prime Minister, but I shall resist that temptation because to spit and scoot would be tantamount to emulating the Congress's cowardly tactics.
Suffice it to say that within 48 hours of the India-US joint statement of July 18, 2005, delineating the contours of the proposed nuclear deal — the final draft does not conform to those details and is far more discriminatory than was feared then — Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, speaking on behalf of the BJP, had registered his unqualified opposition on three basic counts. First, what was being offered by the Americans would, in the short-term, contain India’s strategic nuclear deterrence. Second, in the medium-term, it would curb India’s strategic nuclear capacity. Third, in the long-term, it would roll back India’s strategic nuclear programme.
Three years later, with the unveiling of the Hyde Act, the draft 123 Agreement and the draft safeguards agreement with the IAEA, those apprehensions have been proved to be prophetic. The deal, as it stands today, is not about empowering India, but emasculating our nation. It is not about enabling India to harness the civilian benefits of nuclear energy, but disabling our nation from maintaining a minimum credible deterrence. It is not about ending India’s so-called ‘isolation’, but lumping our nation with nuclear have-nots and bringing us into the non-proliferation regime through the backdoor.
In brief, the stage is being set for us to be denuded of the right to decide for ourselves what is good and in the best interest of the nation, to supplant our national strategic interest by foreign commercial and strategic interests, especially those of the US. If this deal, in its current form, is formalised, we will become a client state requiring approval and endorsement of every move we make to assert our independence and sovereign rights.
The UPA, more so the Congress, is a complicit partner in this elaborate charade to fool the people of this country while surreptitiously replacing India’s independent nuclear policy — including the nation’s nuclear strategy and nuclear doctrine — with one dictated by America. The decades of hard work put in by our scientists, enabling and empowering India to emerge as an equal of the P5, is being sacrificed for ‘gains’ that remain unexplained. The courage of conviction demonstrated by Mrs Indira Gandhi on May 18, 1974, has now come to be replaced by amoral duplicity.
In the past, India was enslaved by East India Company; our wealth was plundered to feed the British Empire’s greed. That unfettered loot was made possible by quislings and turncoats among us who were vulnerable to colonial manipulations. Today, we are on the verge of being indentured to the nuclear neo-colonialism of the 21st century, thanks to quislings and turncoats among us.
It is a fact that the BJP took the initiative to engage the US in a strategic dialogue, but it is also a fact that India was an equal participant and not a supplicant in that dialogue. Unlike the Communists, the BJP believes that a strategic alliance with the US is in India’s interest, as much as a strategic alliance with Russia and European powers. Unlike the Congress, the BJP believes that India today has the might and right to be treated as an equal and not as a nation deserving of crumbs from the high table. Hence, the BJP has been consistent in categorically asserting that it will renegotiate the nuclear deal to safeguard India’s interests by removing debilitating clauses when it comes to power. Unless this is done, India’s interests will be mortgaged irredeemably.
In the debate preceding Tuesday’s vote, the BJP should assert these points if it wishes to emerge as a credible alternative to the Congress. But, more importantly, it must strive to expose the despicable politics of the nuclear deal — the Dr Singh-and-Mr Hyde manner in which it has been ‘negotiated’; the shroud of secrecy that continues to hide the implications of rushing into an agreement that is blatantly loaded against India; the attempt to bluff the nation into believing something that is patently untrue; and, the belittling of India’s Parliament, and hence its people, not once or twice, but repeatedly.
Never before has a ruling party staked the Government of India to fulfil the ‘commitment’ of an individual to a foreign Government. In the past, Governments have fallen on account of internal policy issues or realignment of political forces. This is the first time that we are witnessing the impending fall of a Government because the Congress, which has already lost the political authority and moral right to remain in power, by its own admission, would rather have the UPA voted out than fail in keeping the Prime Minister’s ‘commitment’ to the Americans.
India can do without such a Government.

How CPM lost the game

An enraged Prakash Karat declares war on Congress...

... But he has only himself to blame
Ardhendu Bhushan Bardhan, I am sure, can’t stop telling himself that he had it right a year ago but his comrades, especially those in the CPI(M), would not listen to him. A quick recall of the events that followed the Prime Minister’s threat to call the Left’s bluff — “if they want to withdraw support, so be it” — conveyed to AK Gopalan Bhavan and Ajoy Bhavan through The Telegraph, would show this is no exaggeration, although people tend to scoff at the CPI of which Mr AB Bardhan is the general secretary. Rumours were rife — as they usually are in Lutyens’ Delhi even when there’s nothing much happening and the silly season has set in — that the Prime Minister was in high dudgeon (not for the first time) and had threatened to resign (also not for the first time) if he was not allowed to have his way with the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement. The coordination committee that had been set up to win over the Communists had failed to break the logjam; Mr Prakash Karat was unbending in his opposition to the nuclear deal. And then came the Prime Minister’s interview to The Telegraph, asking the Left to go take a walk — they could either take it or lump it.
The Left got into a huddle, Mr Bardhan told mediapersons that the Congress-Left marriage of convenience had reached a dead end and “divorce is imminent”. The Congress as well as its allies in the UPA went into a tizzy. Many of those who are now vociferously proclaiming their support for the nuclear deal — and in the process talking a whole lot of gibberish while trying to regurgitate the mumbo-jumbo fed to them by babus eager to stack up American IOUs — had on that occasion turned on the Prime Minister, rudely snubbing him and his obsession with the nuclear deal. Finding himself isolated, the Prime Minister had rapidly retreated from his position and meekly declared his intention to learn to “live with disappointments”.
Mr Bardhan was not impressed. He was unrestrained in his assessment that any further discussion on the nuclear deal would be nothing more than a dialogue of the deaf. Given the CPI’s past association with the Congress — it had stood by Mrs Indira Gandhi and was no stranger to the party’s guiles — Mr Bardhan could sense that the parting of ways was inevitable; that it was only a matter of time before the ‘strategic’ alliance collapsed under the weight of inner contradictions. But he was ignored by Mr Karat while Mr Sitaram Yechury, who is trying to fashion his politics after that of Mr Harkishen Singh Surjeet (which, just in case his friends don’t get it, is no compliment) convinced his comrades that he would succeed in brokering a deal over the nuclear deal and everybody would live happily ever after. With Mr Pranab Mukherjee as the interlocutor, he couldn’t go wrong.
Last week’s events prove three points. First, Mr Karat may be a brilliant strategist in the classical Marxist mould but he is a poor tactician. The Congress, which is not burdened by ideology and hence not hostage to linear thinking, has checkmated the Left and finessed Mr Karat. Second, Mr Yechury may have begun to look like a political fixer (in Lutyens’ Delhi this is not a pejorative term), he has a long way to go before he can play the role of Mr Surjeet. He has been shown up for what he is: A callow politician who over-reached his abilities. Sanctimonious and smug, he is tireless in pouring scorn and spitting bile at others, especially the BJP, while disingenuously justifying every deed and each move of his party. Mr Yechury’s self-righteousness now lies in tatters; hopefully he will take a break from his preachy politics of denunciation. Third, the CPI(M) must start listening to its leftists allies, including the RSP, rather than ignoring them. If only Mr Karat had paid heed to Mr Bardhan’s views and taken his assessment seriously, then it would not have found itself dumped so unceremoniously by the Congress 11 months later. Adding insult to injury, the Samajwadi Party, which the CPI(M) thought was a fraternal party, has come forward to bail out the Congress. Bourgeois politics has won the day, but the battle has not yet been lost.
It is not often that one sees the unflappable and usually smiling Mr Karat in a rage. But the day after the Government authorised the circulation of the draft of the India-IAEA safeguards agreement among the members of the nuclear watchdog body’s Board of Governors, he was incandescent with rage. “We will make it politically impossible for the Government to implement the deal,” he thundered. Whether or not the Left is able to achieve this objective remains to be seen, but it can surely make the situation tricky for the Congress if it were to decide, and stick to its decision, not to prop up another Congress-led Government at the Centre in the name of ‘protecting democracy’ and ‘defeating communalism’. No, I am not suggesting that the Left should join hands with the BJP or the NDA; even the slightest hint of such a development, absurd and impossible as it may be, would hurt both of them politically. These are two poles that can never meet, not even in the ‘national interest’. Past efforts to uneasily cohabit have proved to be disastrous, notwithstanding elaborate breakfast meetings at Mr VP Singh’s residence. This is not about ‘political untouchability’ but political incompatibility.
Not many years ago, the CPI(M) believed that “the Congress party has degenerated both politically and organisationally. It is a party in decline, as it has pursued when in power, economic policies which militate against the people; it is a party riddled with corruption... The Congress is no more a party which can govern at the Centre or provide the country with a new agenda”. In the past decade, the Congress has not transformed itself into something which is different from what it was described as in the Left’s Election Manifesto of 1998, drafted and published by the CPI(M). Mr Karat’s recent experience only serves to reaffirm this point.
So, let him — and the CPI(M) as well as its allies — swear that never again shall the Left join hands with the Congress for the sheer pleasure of exercising power without responsibility. Then only can Mr Karat seek to make it politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Congress to cut corners with India’s interest. If there is no such resolve, then we can only assume that once his anger has dissipated, Mr Karat will allow a rerun of events as Mr Bardhan watches from the margins. The deja vu won’t be his alone.

Coffee Break / Sunday Pioneer / July 14, 2008

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd

Chutney as a political idiom

Indo-Caribbean culture and politics in Trinidad
The distance that ‘East Indians’ — men and women from what is known as the Bhojpur region, apart from those from Bengal, of whom there were few — indentured to work on sugarcane plantations in Mauritius, and later in British colonies in the Caribbean, travelled in jampacked ships and in abysmal conditions across the kala pani, was not only geographical but also cultural. Within a span of three to four months, the time taken by schooners to transport the indentured labourers from the dockside in Calcutta to the disembarkation jetties at Port Louis in Mauritius, Port of Spain in Trinidad, and other similar destinations, these men and women, fleeing what a historian has described as “the appalling poverty and joylessness of life under such conditions that cannot be easily pictured”, found themselves in an alien land with alien practices that violently clashed with their centuries-old religious and social traditions. Draupadi not only became Drupatee and Sriprasad was renamed Seepersaud, courtesy immigration clerks, but along with their new names they were also confronted with the choice of disowning their past or clinging on to it. Some disowned it; most refused to break free of all that they had learned and inherited by way of tradition, rites and rituals. Tattered copies of the Ramayan became the most valued possession; pandits with knowledge of Sanskrit found themselves pushed up the social ladder; and, despite its best efforts, the Presbyterian Church failed to separate ‘heathens’ from their ‘heathenism’.
In the post-colonial era, the cultural identity of the East Indian community — referred to as Indo-Caribbean in Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana and other Caribbean states — became the foundation of their political aspirations: Politics was, and remains, a means of protecting identity and asserting the right not to be swamped by Afro-Caribbean, or Black, culture. But for all their efforts, the East Indians have not entirely succeeded in this, as is evident from the creeping influence of Creole culture and Black culture, even among those who remain firmly rooted in Hindu traditions linking them to their homeland. The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul, by Patrick French, provides a certain insight into this conflict between past and present and the gradual accommodation and assimilation of cultures as memories recede with each passing generation. While keeping the past alive has been easier in Mauritius, where descendents of the indentured labourers are in a majority, it has been more difficult in the Caribbean where East Indian communities are suffering numerical erosion as the affluent among the new generation seek fame and fortune in the US and Europe. The uneven electoral performance of the United National Congress in Trinidad and Tobago and the trials and tribulations of Mr Basdeo Panday are indicative of the community’s declining numbers, although infighting and back-stabbing, the staple of politics in India, have played no mean role in preventing the UNC from becoming the dominant political force. The Afro-Caribbean politicians have not missed the opportunity to exploit the Indo-Caribbean community’s weaknesses to their advantage, thus retaining power when they should have really been in the Opposition.
The immediate provocation for these thoughts is a fine collection of essays in the journal, Man in India (Serial Publications, New Delhi), whose special issue on the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean provides a fascinating insight into the post-colonial lives of the descendents of indentured labourers. Edited by Prof Kumar Mahabir of the University of Trinidad & Tobago, among the best-known scholars of the East Indian experience, it brings together views from Trinidad, St Vincent, Suriname, Guyana and Martinique. My favourite is Kai Abi Barratt’s essay, ‘I found my East Indian beauty’. While reading it, I was transported back in time to an evening spent in the frangipani-scented lush lawns of the residence of Mr Basdeo Panday, who was then Prime Minister. After a sumptuous dinner, we were treated to live chutney music.
The relevance of the show dawned the next day when a group of young East Indian activists met me at the hotel and launched into a long tirade against the UNC Government for sponsoring that year’s calypso carnival and thus poking the community squarely in the eye. Afro-Caribbean musicians, I was told, use calypso to denigrate East Indians and flaunt their prowess by using sexual innuendoes: The wilting Indian beauty succumbing to the raw charms of the macho Black. An agitated young Maharaj, his first name slips my mind, said Mr Panday should have withdrawn official support for the calypso carinval and instead promoted chutney, integral to the East Indian culture, to make a political point. By not doing so, he had pandered to the Blacks at the cost of East Indian sentiments. Apparently, community elders had lodged a similar complaint with Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee. To disprove his critics, Mr Panday ensured there was a lot of chutney at the official dinner he hosted for the visiting Indian Prime Minister and we had a riotous time.
But like all things Indian, community opinion, it now transpires, is divided on chutney, described as “representing Indian cultural continuity and persistence” in the Caribbean, too. Drupatee Ramgoonai, the most popular exponent of chutney and whose album Pepper Pepper (Mirchi Mirchi in Hindi) was a huge hit, has riled community leaders with her lyrics and performance skills. In the popular chutney song, Lick down mih nani, she sings,
Lick down mih nani
He fender break
On nani waist
Now she can’t move
She two knee bruise
While he drivin he was gazin
Ah feeling sad, she bump she hard...
What is seemingly incomprehensible to us Indians in India is replete with shocking double entendre for conservative East Indians in Trinidad for whom Drupatee Ramgoonai’s music is as outrageous as that of Executor and Dictator, popular calypso artistes. Kai Abi Barratt quotes a Maharaj incandescent with rage, “For an Indian girl to throw away her upbringing and culture to mix with vulgar music, sex and alcohol in carnival tents tells me something is radically wrong with her psyche. Drupatee Ramgoonai has chosen to worship the gods of sex, wine and easy money.” In a sense, it’s the same old story of the past jostling with the present for a future that is tense.

Say NO to Gorkhaland

Darjeeling must remain with West Bengal

In the summer of 1966, Hope Cooke, the American socialite-turned-Gyalmo, or Queen Consort of the ill-fated 12th Chogyal of Sikkim, created a furore in New Delhi by contesting, in an article published in the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology’s bulletin, India’s possession of Darjeeling that was ‘gifted’ to East India Company by Tsugphud Namgyal. In his book, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, Pioneer columnist and former editor of The Statesman Sunanda K Datta-Ray recounts how she argued that “no Sikkimese monarch was empowered to alienate territory”. According to Hope Cooke, Tsugphud Namgyal’s gift to the Company was “in the traditional context of a grant for usufructage only; ultimate jurisdiction, authority and the right to resume the land being implicitly retained”. She claimed Darjeeling’s cession was the “gift of a certain tract for a certain purpose and does not imply the transfer of sovereign rights”.
The immediate context of the Gyalmo’s assertion of the Chogyal’s indivisible rights was the web of deceit that was being spun, with more than a little help from the Kazi and other local players, by New Delhi to bring Gangtok within the orbit of its absolute control, converting India’s suzerainty into sovereignty over Sikkim. What happened subsequently is well known: Sikkim was annexed and made a part of the Union of India; the Chogyal was stripped of all powers and died a broken man; and, Hope Cooke, after separating from the Chogyal, returned to the US where she now lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York. These details are inconsequential today. What, however, is relevant is the history of Darjeeling, which is once again in the news, this time because Gorkha settlers are asserting their right to set up a homeland in the three hill divisions — Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Kurseong — apart from Siliguri and the Dooars, which they want to re-christen Gorkhaland.
History tells us how Sikkim’s borders once stretched up to eastern Nepal; how Prithvi Narayan Shah, who welded feuding clans and warring regions into a sprawling kingdom, grabbed Darjeeling; and, how General Ochterlony’s campaign against the Gorkhas resulted in the Treaty of Sugauli (also spelt Segouli) in 1816 when Nepal ceded 10,000 sq km of territory, including Darjeeling, to the East India Company. That’s where history begins and ends for the Gokhas both in Nepal and in India who are clamouring for Gorkhaland: Darjeeling was Nepali territory ceded to the British and, therefore, must now revert back to the Gorkhas.
But history also tells us, much to the discomfort of the champions of Gorkhaland, that the Treaty of Sugauli was followed by the Treaty of Titlya in 1817, whereby the British restored the land between Mechi and Teesta rivers to Sikkim, to which it legitimately belonged. Eighteen years later, the then Chogyal leased Darjeeling to the British who wanted to set up a sanatorium in its soothing, sylvan climes. In the brief lease agreement signed on February 1, 1835, the Chogyal is referred to as the ‘Sikkimputtee Rajah’. The Bengal Gazeteer informs us that in 1841 the East India Company granted the Chogyal a compensation of Rs 3,000; it was later raised to Rs 6,000.
This is how Darjeeling, till then an uninhabited mountain region, came to be inhabited. The British administrators needed ‘natives’ to first build and then maintain the picture postcard town that came up in Darjeeling. Some Bhutias and Lepchas were already there, others came from Sikkim. The demand for labour increased after planters cleared forests for tea gardens and Darjeeling Tea became a source of enormous revenue. The Gorkhas came, as did tribals from what is now Jharkhand, to work as ‘coolies’ in the gardens, plucking leaves and working shifts in the tea-curing and packaging factories. Bengalis sought and found employment as babus (clerks) in the tea gardens, in the municipal administration and other establishments, for example schools set up by missionaries primarily for the children of Anglo-Indian families.
In 1907, the Hillmen’s Association petitioned the British for a separate administrative set-up free from Bengal; the petition was contemptuously ignored, and rightly so. After independence and the reorganisation of States, Darjeeling, along with the Dooars, became a part of West Bengal. Darjeeling has since been designated a separate district, Siliguri is part of Jalpaiguri district in the foothills, and the Dooars are part of Cooch Behar district. The Gorkhas who came and settled in Darjeeling, Siliguri and the Dooars became citizens of India in 1950; a separate Gazette notification was issued to settle this point and remove any doubts about their citizenship.
The status of Darjeeling may have been considered a settled issue by Kolkata and New Delhi, and after Sikkim’s annexation, Gangtok, but not by the Gorkha settlers. In 1986 Mr Subash Ghising launched a violent agitation to press the Gorkha National Liberation Front’s demand for a separate Gorkhaland, citing West Bengal’s “step-motherly” treatment of Darjeeling and “exploitation” of its residents. He was clearly motivated by dreams of helping re-establish ‘Greater Nepal’ by creating a bridge between Nepal and Sikkim. The agitation ended with the signing of an agreement, which resulted in the setting up of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, an elected and empowered body that would look after development-related issues. Mr Ghising failed to deliver and became a Sagina Mahato, putty in the hands of the West Bengal Government and happy to have his snout in the trough.
Cut to 2008: Mr Bimal Gurung, a former associate of Mr Ghising, has parted company with the GNLF and floated his own separatist organisation, the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha, and revived the demand for Gorkhaland. He has audaciously staked claim to the three hill divisions of Darjeeling as well as Siliguri and the Dooars. The revival of the agitation coincides with Maoists — who hope to re-establish the frontiers of Prithvi Narayan Shah’s ‘Greater Nepal’ — coming to power in Kathmandu. Mr Gurung’s agitation has little to do with “local aspirations” of Gorkhas; it is as insidious and dangerous as the assertion of ‘Kashmiriyat’ in Kashmir Valley.
Those who are “sympathetic” to the demand for Gorkhaland would do well to bear in mind that ‘Greater Nepal’ is not only about Nepal expanding its territory in the east up to Teesta, but also recovering the land ceded by Prithvi Narayan Shah which stretches up to Sutlej. If we concede the demand for Gorkhaland, we should be prepared to concede vast tracts of land in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. If the latter is not acceptable, then a third partition of Bengal is equally unacceptable.

(Sunday Pioneer, Coffee Break, June 29, 2008.)

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd

Muslim rage against America

This isn’t about India’s interest!
Strolling along a flagstoned Byzantine lane in the Arab quarter of the walled city of Jerusalem near the Temple Mount — the Al Aqsa mosque is an imposition of later vintage — I spotted a bowl containing pieces of exquisite coral in the window of a Bedouin jewellery shop. The man behind the counter was obviously an Arab, one of the many who live and work in Israel and are far better off than the Palestinians in Gaza Strip and West Bank, although they are loath to admit it. I greeted the man in halting street Arabic and inquired about the coral. A smile broke out on his face and he asked, “Indian?”
In Egypt, the question would have been, “Indian or Pakistani?” Since Pakistanis do not visit Israel, the second option did not arise. I answered in the affirmative and tried to steer the conversation to the price of the coral, but he would not have any of it. He issued rapid-fire instructions to his assistant, asking him to get mint tea, which arrived within minutes. Meanwhile, he launched into a harangue on how India had dumped Muslims both at home and abroad to “befriend the Zionists and the Americans”.
For evidence he cited the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement and Israel’s supply of military hardware to India. His knowledge of the twists and turns of the nuclear deal, the rejection of it by India’s Muslims and the Left’s ideological opposition to New Delhi forging a strategic relationship with Washington, DC, was truly amazing.
Asked about the source of his information, he said, “Arab newspapers from Misr (Egypt) and Saudi Arabia”. Apparently, local Arab sheets published in the Palestinian Authority areas had been reproducing commentary and opinion articles from newspapers published from Cairo and Riyadh. As for Indian Muslims feeling agitated about India moving closer to the US, the Internet, he said, was an excellent source of information.
The shaai was good, but the coral was far too expensive for me — I had a feeling he had raised the price after sensing my unease over his diatribe and at times abusive references to how “Hindus are conspiring with Jews and Christians against Muslims”. So we parted company after the customary round of kissing; I promised I would return for the coral, perhaps he knew I wouldn’t.
But the halt at this Arab jewellery shop was not entirely wasted: It had provided me with an insight into the ‘ummah web’ — how Muslims separated by borders, land and sea remain connected, feeding on each other’s anger and fuelling each other’s rage with the help of conspiracy theories and imagined grievances. Much of the rage is directed at the West; most of the anger is aimed at the US. As for the Zionists, if the ummah had its way, insha’allah, Israel would cease to exist.
Months later, at an international conference on radical Islam, in which most of the participants were Muslim scholars and theologians, this perception of the ummah’s worldview was strengthened as participants stopped short of chanting “Death to America!” while caustically rebuking both the Congress and the BJP for taking India closer to the US and Israel. A participant from India, by no means a fanatic mullah with hennaed beard and skullcap, asserted that if the Government went ahead with formalising the nuclear deal with the US, it would be as good as “ignoring the sentiments of 150 million Muslims at home” and “enraging Muslims abroad”.
There is nothing startlingly new about such aggressive assertion of ‘Muslim sentiments’, which are invariably pegged to imagined grievances and inflamed by perceived notions of Christians and Jews — and, in India’s case, Hindus — conspiring against the ummah. From Indonesia to Turkey, via the sand castles of Islamic states in between, the targets of Muslim ire are the same; the intensity of rage ebbs and flows depending on events as they happen and as they are seen to happen.
So, cartoons that allegedly lampoon Mohammed published in a Dutch newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, of which nobody had ever heard before, become the cause of angry street protests and threats of murder and mayhem one day; on another, jaundiced reports of torture at Guantanamo Bay, whose details pale in comparison to the horrors inflicted by the Taliban, result in violent outrage. At Friday sermons, the two disparate issues are slyly merged into one: Islam is under assault; the ummah is endangered; and, America is to blame.
It would be erroneous to trace the Muslim rage that we see to post-9/11 American policy and the war on terror being waged by President George W Bush. It is true that Muslims view the Taliban’s loss of power, which Mullah Omar and his band of Deobandi fanatics wielded ruthlessly and which saw the sickening debasement of women and girls, as a blow against the ummah and their faith. It is equally true that Muslims grieve over the fall and death of Saddam Hussein, who turned to god after decades of Ba’athist atrocities that included mass slaughter and terrible torture.
Yet, Muslim displeasure with America is not merely on account of the discontinuation of the shocking spectacle of shari’ah being enforced in its purest, most pristine form in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein getting his just desserts. It predates 9/11. Mr Zafarul-Islam Khan, editor of Milli Gazette, published from Delhi, traces the “roots of Muslim anger at the US and West to long before the illegal and unjust current imperialist crusade in Afghanistan under the guise of fighting terrorism”.
The ‘roots’, according to him, lie in “normalisation of relations with Israel”, “US role in condoning Serbian aggression in Bosnia” and “economic attrition of the Muslim world resources”. The list of imagined grievances is too long to be reproduced here, but it does highlight two points: First, Muslim concerns — for instance, in India — transcend local realities and are essentially pan-Islamic issues that agitate the entire ummah; second, even if there were no India-US nuclear deal, India’s Muslims, as also their co-religionists elsewhere, would have been equally angry with America and Mr Bush; they would have still gathered in frighteningly huge numbers in Delhi and rioted in Lucknow to protest against his visit to India.
Seen in this context, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member MK Pandhe was merely stating the fact when he warned the Samajwadi Party of a Muslim backlash if it supported the nuclear deal and joined forces with the Congress to push it through. The Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind’s protest against the CPI(M)’s “attempt to communalise the issue” and the claim by other Muslim organisations, especially the Jamaat-e-Islami, that Muslims are opposed to the nuclear deal because they believe it is “not in the national interest”, need not be taken seriously.
Unless we must believe that the Arab shopkeeper in old Jerusalem who chided me for New Delhi’s increasing proximity to Washington, DC and Tel Aviv shares the ‘concern’ of Indian Muslims for India’s national interest. If this is absurd, as surely it is, so is the Jamaatis’ concern for India’s national interest, which, thankfully, has not yet been supplanted by the ummah’s interest.

(The Pioneer, leading article, Edit Page, June 28, 200g)

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd.

Prime Minister in high dudgeon

A supplicant in the court of George W Bush

The Prime Minister, by all available accounts, is in high dudgeon. Having promised the Americans that he would ensure the bilateral agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation is signed, sealed and delivered before President George W Bush vacates his current lodgings, Mr Manmohan Singh finds the deal foundering on the rock of Communist obstinacy. Ever since the July 18, 2005 joint statement, which was issued after his meeting with Mr Bush at the White House, Mr Singh has pursued the deal with single-minded determination, caring little for national pride and even lesser for national interest. He has had no compunction keeping the Opposition in the dark on so momentous an issue; at the same time, he has craftily invoked Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee's name to convince the BJP into supporting what is patently an unfavourable deal, not least because it serves American commercial and strategic interests, subsuming those of India.

Three years down the line, with time running out rapidly both for him as well as his mentors in Washington, DC, Mr Singh, under increasing American pressure to deliver on his promise, is now desperate to conclude the nuclear cooperation agreement. So, though not for the first time, Mr Singh has slyly let it be known that he is prepared to resign from office rather than see the deal die its deserved death. At a time when the national economy is in the doldrums and prices of essential commodities are shooting through the roof, all that he can think of is appeasing the Americans at any which cost. He is least concerned about the appalling performance of the Government he heads or the shenanigans of his Cabinet colleagues. The fact that governance, and along with it India's development story, has virtually come to a grinding halt does not appear to bother him. Nor is he particularly perturbed about the gloomy internal security situation.

All that he wants is the draft 123 Agreement to be converted into a bilateral arrangement that will severely compromise India's strategic interests even while serving US commercial interests by reviving the out-of-business American nuclear power industry, without fetching us any tangible gains. Since propagandists have been claiming that the deal will allow us access to American technology, it needs to be said, and said again, that this is so much bunkum and no more. The ban on transfer of dual-use high technology shall continue to remain in place and the commercial nuclear power technology that will be provided will be under restrictive safeguards. Of course, Mr Bush will be able to claim a foreign policy 'success' and his end-of-term report card shall not be drenched in red ink. The Democrats, who are slated to seize control over both Capitol Hill and the White House after this November's elections, will then use the agreement to further their non-proliferation agenda: Forcing India to sign the CTBT is only the thin end of the edge; the crushing blow will come in the form of the missile technology control and fissile material cut-off regimes to which we shall have to abjectly surrender.

In this wondrous land of ours, such fine details are of little or no consequence. You are either with America or against America. If you are with America, and believe that it is in India's interest to have a strategic relationship with the US -- which is indisputable -- then you must support the deal. What if you do believe in forging a strategic partnership with the US but are opposed to the nuclear deal in its present form for reasons that have nothing to do with ideology but national and strategic interest?

The Left's obstruction of the deal stems from its ideological opposition, call it posturing if you will, to 'American imperialism'. For evidence, look at the CPI(M) Polit Bureau's statement issued on Saturday: "A massive disinformation campaign has been mounted that nuclear energy is a solution not only to the shortage of electricity in the country but also an answer to the oil price rise. This is nothing but a cover to promote the strategic ties with the US." Earlier last week, the CPI(M) had berated the Government for trying to forge an India-Israel-US axis, which to the Marxists would be evil personified. But there are also those who are opposed to the deal as much as they are opposed to the Left's anti-imperialism sloganeering and its bogus anti-Americanism. Most, if not all, of them belong to the same middleclass which our politicians mistakenly believe unequivocally and blindly supports everything American.

It is entirely possible that the Congress, or at least certain sections of it, faced with mounting disquiet over rising prices -- inflation now stands at 11.05 per cent, the same level as in 1995 when Mr Singh was the Finance Minister in PV Narasimha Rao's Government -- has come round to the view that it can mollify the middleclass by pushing through the nuclear deal with the US. It may not be entirely coincidental that the latest effort by the Prime Minister to conclude the agreement follows the publication of the results of the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, which shows that 55 per cent of Indians support Mr Bush; 66 per cent view the US favourably; and, 90 per cent are gung-ho about trade with America. What it does not highlight is that these findings reflect the 'attitudes' of 2,056 Indians who live in chrome-and-glass cities, many of whom would do whatever it takes to see their children migrate to the US and become American Green Card holders if not citizens. The remaining more than a billion Indians do not necessarily agree with them, which, however, does not suggest India hates America.

The fact of the matter is Mr Singh is as clueless about prevailing national sentiments and concerns as the Congress. Cocooned in the sanitised world of 7, Race Course Road and South Block, he has no idea about the anger that is boiling over in India's cities and villages as people struggle to keep their home fire burning. It will be hugely entertaining to hear Congress leaders, and their lackeys in the UPA, tell voters at election rallies that while the Government may have failed to hold the price line, it has succeeded in securing cockamamie guarantees of nuclear fuel supply, which in turn, at some distant date, will provide the people with nuclear power. What they will not mention is that nuclear power, when new reactors go critical more than a decade later, will be frightfully expensive and never contribute more than a tenth of India's requirement of electricity. So, never mind if you are hungry now, vote for the Congress.

Meanwhile, I have missed the deadline hoping to hear that the Prime Minister has made up his mind.

A conversation with Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies, the latest novel by Amitav Ghosh based on the cultivation of poppy along the Ganga in the Bhojpur region to feed East India Company's opium factories and sustain Britain's illicit opium trade with China that left the imperial coffers in London overflowing with wealth, has just been published. It is a fascinating story that unfolds in the 1830s, centred around Deeti, and reminds us of the journey undertaken by 'girmitiyas' — indentured workers who signed an agreement or 'girmit' — across the forbidden kala paani to foreign shores to work in sugar plantations. It is about disinherited nobility, disempowered peasantry, caste, community and kin — the many identities that make up the Indian identity at home and abroad. The following are excerpts from a conversation between Kanchan Gupta and the celebrated writer that took place on a rain-drenched afternoon in Delhi

Kanchan Gupta: I am sure it feels great to have your tenth book published. Sea of Poppies has made a big entry and been received with rave reviews. The British newspapers have lavished praise on the book, especially The Times. And this is only the first of a trilogy…

Amitav Ghosh: A trilogy, yes…

KG: So, how do you plan to carry forward the story of Sea of Poppies?

AG: You know, I think my approach to it is going to be like driving a car at night. You can't see very far ahead of what you can see in your headlight. You keep driving slowly down the road so someday you will get there. I don't think that one can have a sense of what it is going to be like at the end of it. The interest and pleasure of it will really lie in the writing.

KG: But surely there's a big picture… there could be various routes to reaching the final destination. Even if you are driving at night you do know where you want to go…

AG: Yes, there are various routes, various options. But you know, two or three years down the line I may decide to take a different route… It's impossible to talk about something that's not written yet.

KG: In a recent article you have mentioned how one of your ancestors travelled from East Bengal to Chapra and although there's no conclusive evidence, most probably he was involved in the opium trade… Is that what triggered your interest or is it that you wanted to build a story up to 1857 since it is very much there in our conscience now?

AG: No, it's nothing like that. You know my interest really began while I was writing the Glass Palace. I became very interested in the whole business of indentured workers. The process of indenture and how it happened.
It's a curious thing about indenture… the children of the indentured workers, I mean the great, great grand children, you know, there are some very great writers among them… VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul… some of our greatest contemporary writers… and they have given us a very vivid picture of what it was for the descendents of these people to grow up wherever they happened to be.
But from our end, from the Indian end, we really never had any sense of what happened. How those processes came into being, how the indentured labourers left, what was the mechanism by which they left. And for me this had a very personal connection simply because of my family having lived in the Bhojpur region for a long time.
I wanted to write about the early years, when indenture first started, which is actually in the 1830s. Once I started looking into it and researching it, it became pretty inescapable because, I mean, it's a strange thing that we have so completely forgotten it now, but this was the biggest opium-producing region the world has ever known.

KG: Michael Binyon, in his review of Sea of Poppies in The Times, begins his article with a very telling line, "The British version of history glosses over the time when this country was the world's biggest drug pusher." That was 200 years ago…

AG: Not even 200 years, until the 1920s it was the biggest drug pusher in the world.

KG: And now you have Afghanistan growing the poppies and feeding Europe's hunger for heroin!

AG: You know, we can take no pleasure in that, this is one of those stories. The whole business of drugs is quite an incredibly grim and hideous thing. I mean, I don't think it's a pleasurable irony in that sense. You don't want this scourge inflicted upon any nation. It's good to remind ourselves of this history. You know, really it was these drugs grown in India that brought about the downfall of China.

KG: Some Indian authors have written about indentured labour, or mentioned it in their novels. Sunil Gangopadhyay…

AG: Aachchha? I didn't know about this…

KG: Why did you choose poppy cultivation and the opium trade? It could have been indigo. After all, indigo cultivation and the entire process was equally dehumanising and fed imperial coffers, it was equally devastating.

AG: Indigo and opium are not quite similar, you know. Indigo was a plantation crop, opium was not a plantation crop. There was some idea of converting opium into a plantation crop. So, we must resist the temptation of assimilating them, although they were similar in the sense of imposing a monoculture. But the mechanism was quite different.
These (poppy cultivators) were peasant farmer who basically were given advances to work on the land and it was through this mechanism of credit that things intensified.

KG: How did you think up Deeti?

AG: You know, the difference between writing history and writing novels is that history scholars are there already while in novels sometimes you just have an idea or you have an image. All my novels have begun with certain images, certain pictorial or visual images. And that's how it happened with Deeti.
As much as Deeti sees Zachary (who steers Ibis, the ship carrying indentured labourers to Mauritius, in the book) while she is standing in the Ganga, I similarly had a sense of actually being able to see her. She became for me the centre of the book around whom the story unfolds or anchors itself.
It happens like that. You know, you can't plan a book the nuts and bolts way.

I knew Deeti would be an important character right from the start — all my characters are important — but I didn't really expect she would become the central figure the way she has. She did become for me, how shall I say, she became the mast...

KG: She carries the book forward, linking the various strands and layers or the story…

AG: That's right.

KG: And then you built the other characters keeping her in mind or they just happened?

AG: No, no. They are completely individual and separate characters.

KG: Kalua, the 'untouchable' bullock cart driver who rescues Deeti, for instance…

AG: Kalua, too. He is a completely individual and separate character. You know what happened with Kalua (laughs) was when I went to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius — which is a truly marvellous archive and they have preserved all the earliest papers of the indenture, including the immigration slips — I looked through the papers carefully and I came upon one which had this name Kalua!
It's a strange thing, a lot has been written about these indentured labourers and immigration certificates that they took, but I discovered something which I have never seen anyone comment upon. I will tell you what it is.
See the immigration slips are like this (draws a rectangle in the air) and they have a few printed lines for name, age, caste, appearance, weight. Later they began attaching photographs but on the earlier ones there were no photographs.
All of this is written in English. If you turn the thing over, in the corner it's written in Bangla, you know, little notations are written in Bangla. And that was what really caught my attention. The things that were noted on the back of the slips tell a peculiar history. Each of the notations ended with a Dafadar — for example, Ismail Dafadar, Rafiq Dafadar or Lallu Dafadar and so on.
That's one thing you would see on the back of the slips. And also in Bangla you would see a version of the name of the indentured labourer. So, clearly what happened is that these dafadars were the ones who recruited the indentured labourers and brought them to Kolkata. There he went to some gomusta or serishta, a Bengali babu, to whom he would hand over the slips and he would be told to bring his gang. The gomusta or serishta would
ask for the names of those seeking indenture, scribble them on the back of the slips and then put down the dafadar's name who would be paid per head. This would be the initial
notation.
The slips were then passed on to another gomusta or serishta, also a Bengali clerk, who would then translate the names into English. So, on the back of the slip in Bangla it is written 'Kalua', on the other side it is 'Colver'! When you see that piece of paper you already see such an enormous journey.

KG: In Trinidad I was told that the corruption of names took place when the indentured labourers got off their ships and English clerks entered their names in ledgers. So Basudev became Basdeo …

AG: This is the mythology. They had to have the migration certificates before they left. The corruption of names was done by Bengalis sitting in Kolkata! That was to me a real discovery.

KG: Why Mauritius and not Trinidad? After all, Trinidad symbolises everything about indentured labour.

AG: Well, the Trinidad indenture began much later. Mauritius indenture is the first. In proportion of numbers, it's the biggest. Also, it is the only place in the world where the descendents of indentured labourers are a numerically preponderant group.
So, in many ways the Mauritius indenture is the most interesting because it establishes the patterns for all the subsequent indentures. Among the girmitiya communities around the world, they look upon the Mauritians as the aristocrats!

KG: We have forgotten that Mauritius was also a penal colony where people were despatched as punishment. People only refer to Andaman islands…

AG: Yes, and prisoners would be stripped and photographed. In a way, the penal colony in Mauritius was the original Abu Ghraib. Photographing them naked was an assertion of control and served the purpose of humiliating the prisoners. It remains the metaphor of the imperial experience.

KG: You have used words that we don't come across every day… a language that was spoken during the East India Company days by the sahibs. The reviewer in The Times could not comprehend most of the stuff. He has written, "But the clothes — zerbaft brocade, shanbaff dhoti, alliballie kurta, jooties and nayansukh — or the ranks and offices — dasturi, sirdar, maharir, serishtas and burkundaz — are frankly incomprehensible. And that is Ghosh's trick: We clutch at what we can, but swaths of narrative wash over us, just as they did over those caught up in a colonial history they could neither control nor understand."

AG: It's all about assimilation of words. I have used words from the Oxford English Dictionary. Today we hear that English is more absorptive and assimilative, that it has become global. But in the 19th century the role played by Asian languages in English was much, much greater than today. In the 20th century what happened, without being stated, is a purification of English where Asian words were dropped or treated as marginal to English language.
When you read this book, you will find many words that have crept in so completely that they are not even recognised to be foreign. But there's a category of words that even though they are English, appear in the guise of something alien. If they go and look at the Oxford English Dictionary and find these words there, what is The Times going to say? Why are these words any more foreign to English than the other words they are accustomed to?
We are taught there's a standard English and these are the words that can be used. So, if it's a gun, you can't call it a bandook, although it is in the Oxford English Dictionary. Take for instance balti. If you look up the Oxford English Dictionary, balti is defined as north Indian style of cooking. But actually balti is a Portuguese word which was introduced to Indian languages by the laskars, it meant a ship's bucket. Which Indian will believe balti is not an Indian word?

Languages, for me, are like water, they flow into each other and cannot be distinguished from one another.

KG: You deserve to be complimented for the effortless ease with which you introduce entire phrases and sentences in Bangla and then continue in English. Do you do this because you just take it for granted that the readers will get the hang of it, even if they do not understand Bangla?

AG: Look, when we were kids, we were reading books in English, books which had things like 'potted meat'. I had no idea what potted meat meant, but that didn't stop me from reading the book! You can't expect to understand every word of a book, and why should you? In any book that you are reading there will be things that will elude you, that are going to be outside your comprehensive understanding.

KG: It was a pleasure speaking to you.

AG: We had a very interesting conversation.

("India was the biggest opium producing region in the world" -- The Pioneer, Opeditorial page, June 20, 2008. (c) CMYK Printech Ltd.)