Free speech? Clever cover for India bashing

Hypocrisy of Left-liberal commentariat

Activist-author-anarchist Arundhati Roy remains recalcitrant. On Tuesday she issued a statement, in which, among other things, she “the people of Kashmir live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world”, “the Indian poor pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state”, “pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds”. Curiously, or perhaps not, she claimed “Dalit soldiers” are getting killed in Jammu & Kashmir.

On Sunday, speaking at a seminar on ‘Wither Kashmir: Freedom or Enslavement’ in Srinagar, Arundhati Roy said, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact.” She said she was proud to associate herself with “resistance movements” across India and counselled Kashmiris to “consolidate the gains” of the recent four months of anti-India agitation. “The power concedes nothing unless it is forced to,” she said, and demanded demilitarisation of Jammu & Kashmir. Then she went on to urge Kashmiris not to join the State police and the Central Reserve Police Force.

Strangely, Arundhati Roy questioned the legitimacy of Kashmiris electing their own Government: “You (Kashmiris) should think how the elections were used against you.” In the same breath she added, “The Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy has not been elected.” Does she then, at least, admit India is the “world’s largest democracy”? Of course not! “India is behaving like a colonial power and suppressing one community at the hands of the other … They are sending Nagas to Kashmir and Punjabis to Manipur.”

The Union Ministry for Home Affairs believes there is sufficient evidence by way of Arundhati Roy’s seditious utterances to prosecute her under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code. This section says:

Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine.

Explanation 1-The expression "disaffection" includes disloyalty and all feelings of enmity.
Explanation 2-Comments expressing disapprobation of the measures of the attempting to excite hatred, contempt or disaffection, do not constitute an offence under this section.
Explanation 3-Comments expressing disapprobation of the administrative or other action of the Government without exciting or attempting to excite hatred, contempt or disaffection, do not constitute an offence under this section.

The Home Ministry is said to be waiting for “political clearance”. The Congress is believed to be of the view that while a case should be filed against her and she should be prosecuted, Arundhati Roy should not be arrested to avoid “negative publicity abroad”. And what if the courts hold her guilty and send her to jail? What then? Or is the Congress banking on the decrepit criminal justice system to drag the case for years and decades, by when it will be inconsequential whether she is punished or not.

Over the weekend, three distinct viewpoints have emerged. First, Arundhati Roy should be prosecuted. Second, we should ignore her just as others on the lunatic fringe are ignored. Third, she should be allowed to have her say because “freedom of speech is guaranteed” by the Constitution of India. I have already expressed my opinion on the first two points. The last view merits further comment.

Contrary to popular belief, popularised no doubt by illiterate and ill-informed members of south Delhi’s Left-liberal commentariat that rules ‘national media’, freedom of speech is not unrestrained in India.

The Constitution provides for "the right to freedom of speech and expression" [Article 19(1) a]. However this right is subject to restrictions under sub-clause (2), whereby this freedom can be restricted for reasons of "sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, preserving decency, preserving morality, in relation to contempt, court, defamation, or incitement to an offence”.

Arundhati Roy is clearly in breach of these restrictions. Anybody else violating sub-clause 2 would have faced the ire of the state. Second, by slyly referring to “Dalit soldiers” and urging Kashmiris not to join the police and CRPF, she is prima facie guilty of far worse.

That apart, for the Left-liberals to argue in support of free speech is disingenuous. The same freedom is rudely curbed when the Right wants to exercise this right.

As my friend and one of the leading scholars of West Asia, Barry Rubin, recently wrote, albeit in a different context, “Leftist attacks are designed to demonise, destroy and silence … Conservatives have been often demonised and, given liberal suspicion toward that side of the political spectrum, many liberals have believed whatever they’ve been told by often highly partisan and dishonest sources, failing to insist on fair play. Ridicule conservatives and moderate, traditional liberals will accept it without checking quotes, listening to responses, and demanding accuracy”.

In justification of their intolerance, bigotry and belligerence, the Left-liberals say, “We must draw a distinction between ‘hate speech’ and ‘free speech’.” Really? When does ‘free speech’ become ‘hate speech’? When it bruises bogus Left-liberal sensitivities? And, what if I were to insist, for good reason, that Arundhati Roy’s ‘free speech’ is ‘hate speech’ disguised in cockamamie jargon?

We could also ask whether those who have suddenly become vocal in protecting unrestricted 'free speech', which rests on the principle of absolute freedom to say anything, irrespective of consequences, had been equally vocal in protecting Varun Gandhi's right to say what he is alleged to have said (he says the tape was doctored; the issue is in court) during last summer's election campaign.

Arundhati Roy claims to be speaking for ‘justice’. There can be no justice till such time India is burdened with a flawed system based on the notion of laws being equal for all but privileges being different. The laws which she is accused of having violated shall never be applied to her because she belongs to the ‘intellectual elite’, the club of English-speaking professional dissenters who thrive on media publicity, who are feted by the commentariat, who are promoted by foreign media keen to portray India as a banana republic. Yet, the same laws are applied to others who are less privileged than Arundhati Roy and her gang of cheer leaders.

There is merit in the argument that nothing should be done to help Arundhati Roy achieve her goal of being seen as India’s Liu Xiaobo. There’s nothing she would love more than that and the adulation which would follow.

Yet, it rankles that she should listen to the grasshoppers sing while others serve time for offences far less serious. This is neither just nor fair. It’s definitely not my idea of justice.

What do you think?

Privilege of being Arundhati Roy

Since Arundhati Roy believes in a world of equals, why should she be more privileged than Chhatradhar Mahato?

If consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, as was famously (and tad bitchily) declared by the flamboyant Irish writer Oscar Wilde, then Arundhati Roy qualifies as an author-activist-anarchist lacking in imagination. For she has been consistent in denouncing the Indian nation, questioning the quality of democracy in this country, casting aspersions on the judiciary, promoting secessionism and justifying the murderous campaign by Maoists to capture state power. Outraged as most people are by her passionate espousal of azadi for Kashmir at a convention in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi last Thursday, they appear to have forgotten her previous assertion of the Kashmiris’ “right to secede” from the Union of India, not once or twice, but many times over. Similarly, this is not the first time that she has ridiculed the nation and the state or poured scorn over India’s democratic credentials which are universally acknowledged as among the best in the world.

“India needs azadi from Kashmir and Kashmir needs azadi from India,” she told an appreciative crowd of secessionists and their supporters, carted in from Aligarh Muslim University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi University and other such taxpayer-funded institutions of learning that double up as fast-breeders of Muslim separatists and Left extremists for whom nationalism is as offensive as their nationality. But this is not the first time Arundhati Roy has outraged sensitivities. Two years ago, on August 19, 2008, after attending a rally organised by separatists in Srinagar, she had excitedly told mediapersons eager to record her pearls of wisdom: “India needs azadi from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India.” She had then added with a flourish, as is by now her established style of exaggerating a point to sheer banality, “If no one is listening then it is because they don’t want to hear. Because this is a referendum… People don’t need anyone to represent them, they are representing themselves.”

Nor is this the first time that Arundhati Roy has questioned the quality of democracy in India; she has done so repeatedly. Invited for a book-reading session at New York’s Town Hall, she had stunned the gathering by suddenly launching a vitriolic attack on democracy in India. “The biggest PR myth of all times is that India is a democracy. In reality, it is not… There is no real democracy in India. Several States in India are on the verge of civil war… In Iraq, there are 1,50,000 military personnel, whereas in Kashmir Valley there are some 7,00,000,” she had said. Not surprisingly, she got a standing ovation. Who is to tell the Americans who applauded her that had India not been a democracy she would have been frog-marched to Tihar Jail immediately upon arriving at Indira Gandhi International Airport on her return?

On another occasion, while berating the police for arresting Maoists and charging them with murder, Arundhati Roy had lashed out at democracy in India for not tolerating terrorism in the name of Chairman Mao’s blood-stained ideology. “The concept of Indian democracy is the biggest publicity scam of this century. Holding elections every five years does not necessarily mean that our country enjoys democracy.” Her notion of democracy, presumably, is a system that allows unrestricted lawlessness so long as laws are being followed in the breach by her ilk — deracinated, English-speaking, cliché-mouthing ‘intellectuals’ who wax eloquent on the plight of the unwashed masses but recoil in horror at the very suggestion of being counted with those on whose behalf they claim to speak — and their rage boys who kill and maim, rape and loot, burn and destroy to satiate their perverse desire to see India suffer. It’s fashionable for them to intersperse their accented English with deliberately mispronounced words in Hindi. Hence Arundhati Roy’s description of India as “bhookhey-nangey Hindustan”; she, of course, has known neither dehumanising hunger nor the indignity suffered by a woman in tattered rags. India’s well-heeled radicals who own farm houses built on illegally ‘acquired’ tribal land are not expected to sully their manicured fingers with desi daal-roti.

The issue, therefore, is not about Arundhati Roy trying to shock Indians who are proud of their nation and nationality, Hindustanis who are perfectly at ease with Hindustan, a billion people who wouldn’t want to swap their democracy with a Talibani social order and political system which she obviously admires because she was inconsolable and in unrestrained grief after Mullah Omar and his thugs were chased out of Kabul. Only the naïve and the uninitiated would be offended by her crudity which is designed to infuriate the most tolerant and liberal among us who believe free speech is one of the defining features of democracy. The real issue is the discriminatory attitude of our state which fosters a system where the law, in theory, is the same for all but privileges, in practice, are different. Nothing else explains why Chhatradhar Mahato, a flashily dressed, dimwitted blabbermouth from the boondocks of Lalgarh in West Bengal, should be in jail for aiding and assisting Maoists in waging war on the state and helping propagate their destructive ideology, charged under the amended Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, while Arundhati Roy, a sophisticated self-publicist and articulate propagandist of every conceivable anti-national ‘cause’, should remain untouched by the proverbial long arm of the law.

The UAPA says “secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union includes the assertion of any claim to determine whether such part will remain a part of the territory of India”. The offences listed under this law include any assertion or statement “which is intended, or supports any claim, to bring about, on any ground whatsoever, the cession of a part of the territory of India or the secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union, or which incites any individual or group of individuals to bring about such cession or secession”. Prima facie Arundhati Roy is guilty of these offences when she endorses the separatists call for azadi, incites Kashmiris to break away from India, and urges impressionable young men and women to get “involved in this cause which is their future”.

There’s more. Section 18 of the amended UAPA lays down that “Whoever conspires or attempts to commit, or advocates, abets, advises or incites knowingly facilitates the commission of, a terrorist act or any act preparatory to the commission of a terrorist act, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than five years but which may extend to imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.” Section 18B says, “Whoever recruits or causes to be recruited any person or persons for commission of a terrorist act shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than five years but which may extend to imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.”

If the law of the land were truly applicable to all, then Arundhati Roy would have been in jail by now. Or, if we were to put it another way, had India’s democracy been perfect and not flawed, she would have been denied the presumed right to undermine the Indian state in so brazen a manner. Ironically, what she so crudely berates also affords her the freedom to abuse the very system of which she is a privileged beneficiary. The elite that is India’s bane would be incomplete without Arundhati Roy.

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on October 24, 2010.]

Secede from 'bhookhey-nangey Hindustan', Arundhati Roy tells Kashmiris

Delhi Police protects secessionists at anti-India 'convention'

It was a stunning display of defiance right under the nose of the Government of India and under the protection of Delhi Police – defiance of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act which has been amended to bring under its purview not only those who indulge in secessionist and anti-national activities that amount to waging war on the state but also those who propagate secessionism and assist anti-national elements in waging war on the state. And this happened right under the nose of the Government of India, a short distance from North Block where the Ministry of Home Affairs is situated. The Indian state was pitilessly ridiculed and mocked at, those waging war on the state were openly asked to step up their campaign, and terrorism was glorified under the protection of Delhi Police.

On Thursday afternoon, a group of separatists, Maobadis and their sympathisers and publicists gathered at the Little Theatre Group auditorium on Copernicus Marg in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi, ostensibly for a convention whose theme was ‘Azadi – The Only Way’. It was organised by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, a front organisation of the Maobadis.

The ‘convention’ was moderated by SAR Geelani, a key accused in the Parliament House attack case who escaped the gallows due to poor prosecution, prompting the judge to comment that it’s a pity he did not pay for his crime although it’s clear he committed it. SAR Geelani, ironically, teaches at Zakir Hussein College in Delhi; he lives in comfort at the expense of taxpayers.

The only voices of protest against the undiluted abuse and scorn that was poured on India were those of Kashmiri Pandits who repeatedly raised pro-India slogans and waved the Tricolour. After a while, SAR Geelani ‘directed’ (I use the word after due deliberation) the policemen on duty to throw out the pro-India members of the audience. The police obliged, dragging the Pandits and pushing them out of the hall.

The following are excerpts from what was said by two key participants:

Arundhati Roy: “Kashmir should get azadi from bhookhey-nangey Hindustan… India needs azadi from Kashmir and Kashmir from India. It is a good debate that has started. We must deepen this conversation and I am happy that young people are getting involved for this cause which is their future. The Indian Government is a hollow superpower and I disassociate from it… Earlier we used to talk about holding our high and now we prostrate ourselves before the US… Kashmiris have to decide whether they want to be with or get separated from bhookhey-nangey Hindustan where more than 830 million people live on only Rs 20 per day… In the early-1990s India opened two gates – one for the Babri Masjid and the other for the economy… We ushered in two kinds of totalitarianism: Hindu totalitarianism and the other economic totalitarianism... I am also aware of the stories about Kashmiri Pandits. I must tell you that Panun Kashmir is a false group…”

Syed Ali Shah Geelani: I urge Kashmiris to boycott interlocutors and reject the eight-point agenda of India for defusing the crisis in the Valley. The people of Kashmir are not against dialogue, but the talks should be on the core issue of azadi and Pakistan should also be involved in the discussions… The dialogue should not be bilateral. India, Pakistan and representatives of people of Jammu & Kashmir should sit together… They must take into account sacrifices made by Kashmiris during the last 63 years. Indian Government has to accept our five-point agenda, only then will we initiate talks with interlocutors. Otherwise, I ask Kashmiris to boycott them… We demand Indian security forces should be withdrawn from Jammu & Kashmir under UN supervision; political prisoners should be released; cases should be registered against the killers of 111 innocent people killed during the last four months… We want the right to self-determination… Today it is said that interlocutors will come and meet a host of people in the State for one year to understand what people want. This is a fraud. It is an attempt to delay everything hoping that poeple will forget… Kashmir is not an internal dispute but an international issue…

SAR Geelani added a clarification: “Kashmir does not only mean the Kashmir Valley but the entire Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh, Muzzafarabad, Baltistan and Mirpur...”

It could be argued that the principle of free speech, which is one of the pillars of democracy, allows individuals to spew venom at the state. But when free speech transmogrifies into open call for secession, should the state remain an idle spectator?

A last point. If Chhatradhar Mahato of PCPA can be held under UAPA for providing assistance to Maobadis and propagating their cause, then why should the same law not be applicable when it comes to Arundhati Roy? Because she speaks and writes in English, is a Booker winner and is feted by foreign organisations?

I have discussed this point in detail in an earlier blog entry: If there's no democracy in India, why can't she move to Swat Valley?

Games over, punish those who looted India

The knives are out in Congress

Within days of the Commonwealth Games getting over, the Prime Minister’s Office ordered a full-fledged inquiry into the ‘conduct’ of the sporting event which has cost the country’s taxpayers anything between Rs 70,000 crore and Rs 1,00,000 crore. The official estimate of Rs 27,000 crore is misleading since it does not take into account ‘miscellaneous’ expenditure: For instance, perfectly good pavements were torn up and relaid, and relaid yet again; plants that cost Rs 50 at nurseries in upmarket areas are believed to have been purchased at Rs 1,000 each; and, money meant for Dalit welfare has been diverted for building flyovers. Examples abound of the effort that has gone into making Delhi shine. The inquiry ordered by the PMO will be conducted by a committee headed by former CVC VK Shungloo, an officer known for his impeccable integrity.

With the CAG, the CVC, the CBI, the ED and now the PMO gunning for those who looted the nation in the name of the Commonwealth Games and used ‘national pride’ as a cloak to cover their misdeeds, the knives are out. Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit has pointed a not-so-dainty finger at Organising Committee chairman Suresh Kalmadi, suggesting that he is to blame for the loot.

Mr Kalmadi has not wasted time in hitting back. He has pointed out that Ms Dikshit was in charge of all construction-related work and her budget was a whopping Rs 16,000 crore while his was a measly Rs 1,600 crore. It is indisputable that much of the loot happened under Ms Dikshit’s watch. The other agency involved in the preparations for the Games was the Union Urban Development Ministry. It has a lot to answer for, too.

The Congress, alarmed by the prospects of a free-for-all, has promptly issued gag orders. That has not prevented Mr Kalmadi, who, as photographs published in Mail Today point out, has a new swagger to his walk while Ms Dikshit looks distinctly worried, from reiterating his charges and asserting that the Delhi Chief Minister can’t escape responsibility.

Meanwhile, the CAG and the CVC have reopened investigations into projects undertaken by the Delhi Government. The CBI has taken files from the OC office into its custody. The ED has launched proceedings against the OC for inexplicably inflated payments. The Income Tax Department has raided the premises of firms that were given contracts for infrastructure-related work. Among the offices that were raided on Tuesday are those of Sudhansu Mittal, known for his proximity to certain senior BJP leaders, at least one of them a member of Delhi4.

BJP president Nitin Gadkari has called for a JPC inquiry. Although a joint parliamentary committee weighed heavily in favour of the Congress is unlikely to do more than a cover-up job (recall the JPC’s report on the Bofors scandal), it’s an idea worth pursuing. At least a lot of details will become public and those who have had their snouts in the trough will be outed.

In mid-August Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had promised that those guilty of wrongdoing would be handed out “severe and exemplary punishment”. The nation expects him to keep his promise.

India deserves far better than a tacky closing ceremony that reminded me of Sports Minister MS Gill telling mediapersons not to worry about the poor and tarred preparations, assuring them the Games would be like a “big fat Punjabi wedding”.

When Hindus abandon Hindus under attack...

Humiliated and fearful of the organised fury of the Muslim mob, Hindus don't celebrate Durga Puja this year in Deganga.

(Photo shows desecrated Kali Mandir in Deganga)

There was a time, not that many decades ago, when Hindu grief in one part of the country would not go unnoticed in its other parts. And so it was that Hindus across north and central India, as it existed before the demise of British colonial rule a year later, observed a ‘black’ Diwali in the autumn of 1946 to commiserate with their co-religionists of Noakhali in Bengal. The infamous Noakhali riots, which erupted on October 10 even before the last corpse had been removed from the bustees of Calcutta which had burned for days following Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s call for ‘Direct Action’ on August 16, witnessed what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was to later describe as a call to Hindus to leave or perish in the “flames of fanaticism”. If Direct Action Day led to the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’, the “organised fury of the Muslim mob” — as an enraged member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly rudely but pithily put it — was unsparing in Noakhali. Hindu homes were set on fire, Hindu women were raped and girls abducted, Hindu men were murdered. It was this unrestrained butchery and the Hindu grief in its wake that moved a million Hindu hearts in central and north India and the diyas remained unlit that Diwali.

Six-and-a-half decades later, Hindus, it would seem, are no longer moved by the plight of Hindus. The pseudo-secularism aggressively peddled by political parties of all shades — even the BJP has begun to subscribe to the bunkum made fashionable by the Left-liberal intelligentsia in the hope of ridding itself of its ‘communal’ (read Hindu) tag — and the divisive politics of caste identity have made Hindus inure to the plight and sorrow of fellow Hindus. Nothing else explains the indifference of Hindus towards their hapless co-religionists in Deganga who, after suffering the “organised fury of the Muslim mob”, led by Trinamool Congress MP Haji Nurul Islam, have been virtually abandoned by both community and state to their fate. Starting September 6, Haji Nurul Islam and his thugs, who met with resistance when they tried to demolish the main Durga Mandap that has existed for long, ran riot in Deganga block of West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, a short distance from Calcutta. Hindu homes were ransacked, Hindu shops were set on fire, Hindu temples were desecrated. All this happened while the district administration and the police twiddled their thumbs. In West Bengal, the Marxists are loath to take on the mullahs; for the Trinamool Congress, the mullahs are powerful allies in Ms Mamata Banerjee’s quest for power at any price.

Humiliated and simmering with rage, abandoned and forsaken by their own in West Bengal and elsewhere, the grieving Hindus of Deganga decided not to celebrate Durga Puja, the most important festival in the Bengali Hindu calendar, this year. The Durga Mandaps in Deganga wore a deserted look, the joyous sound of dhaak, the traditional drum, was not heard, and an overwhelming sense of mourning prevailed. Fear played spoil sport, too: If the September riots were any indication, Muslim belligerence was not to be taken lightly. Meanwhile, in a demonstration of crude triumphalism, Haji Nurul Islam and his goons, with the full support and blessings of the Trinamool Congress, have built and inaugurated a new mosque right in the middle of Deganga market. The high-volume and high-pitched azaan is more a taunt to the Hindus than a call to prayers for the faithful.

The ghetto now rules Deganga. The Hindus, reduced to an awful minority by Muslim ‘settlers’ who entered West Bengal illegally and settled in Deganga as ‘citizens’ after being provided with ration cards by the local committee of the CPI(M) that facilitated the inclusion of their names in the voters list, can only grieve over their persecution today. Ironically, the Hindus voted en bloc for the Left, as did the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants-turned-Indian citizens. Then the demography changed radically; the pampered minority became the oppressive majority. That coincided with the waning of the Left Front and the waxing of the Trinamool Congress which, mindful of numbers, chose Muslims over Hindus in Deganga and strengthened its hold by patronising the likes of Haji Nurul Islam. When Ms Mamata Banerjee went around ‘inaugurating’ Durga Puja at various pandals in Hindu majority constituencies of Kolkata this year, she did not spare a thought for the Hindus of Deganga; she need not have because their votes do not matter. That’s the power of demographic change, forced and natural.

Nor does the Left Front, especially the CPI(M), care about the Hindus of Deganga. The Marxists believe survival depends not on alienating the mullahs but pandering to them. Hence the recently announced communal quota; hence, too, the West Bengal Government shamelessly looking the other way as students of a tax-payer funded Islamic ‘university’ — really an over-glorified madarsa — in Kolkata force their women teachers to wear the burqa on campus. Then there is the media which has blacked out the plight of Hindus in Deganga, striking an ideological posture with which we are all too familiar. But it is not Left-liberalism that has kept Deganga out of the columns of newspapers and prime time bulletins of 24x7 news channels: It is the fear of incurring the wrath of both Ms Mamata Banerjee and her Marxist foes. The tragedy that has befallen the Hindus of Deganga is similar to the stuff that once made Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not’ a popular inclusion in Sunday papers.

Postscript: I have received the following e-mail from Hindu Samhati, the only organisation which has been trying to draw the attention of media and authorities to the fear that reigns in Deganga, admittedly without any success so far:

“Minor Hindu girl abducted by Muslim youth in Deganga in broad daylight on October 1.

Victim — Sangita Mandal; age 17 years, four months. Class 12 student. Daughter of Sukumar Mandal. Address: Village Purba Changdana, PS Deganga.

Kidnapper — Naharul Islam; age 22. Son of Abdul Rahim. Address: Village Doharia.

Sangita was abducted in a Maruti Omni van at Ambika Nagar in front of Polytechnic College.”

In a similar case of abduction and forced nikah when the mother of the minor girl appealed for justice to a division bench of Calcutta High Court earlier this year, the honourable judges of secular India’s secular justice system had cited sharia’h to legitimise the ‘marriage’, insisting that the age of the girl was inconsequential. We live in depressing times.

[This appears as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on October 17, 2010.]

Ram ki Nagri, once again

But Ayodhya judgement at best a partial closure

During a recent television debate on ‘Saffron Terror’ (the coinage is an oxymoron, but such details don’t bother the ‘secular’ intelligentsia of this wondrous land of ours) I found myself seated next to Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen president and MP from Hyderabad Asaduddin Owaisi. Within minutes I was convinced that Mr Owaisi, dressed in an achkan and his heart bleeding profusely for suspected terrorists, lacked both manners and grace. He would interrupt everybody, insisting he had the right to have his say -- without, of course, conceding that right to others. Half way through the show, he suddenly turned towards me and smugly asked, “Will you accept the court’s verdict on Babri Masjid?” I refused to answer him, and for good reason. Later, after the show was over, I asked him, “Will you accept the verdict?” His answer was spontaneous, “Yes, we will.” And then added slyly, “But that’s not the issue. Will you accept it?” I headed for the studio exit.

Mr Owaisi’s question was not as innocuous as it may have seemed to others. For nearly three months a story had been doing the rounds in Delhi, the sum and substance of which was that the much-anticipated judgement in the Ayodhya case would be a two-one majority verdict in favour of the Muslims, upholding the Sunni Waqf Board’s claim to the disputed 2.7 acre land where the Babri Masjid stood till it was demolished by enraged Hindus on December 6, 1992, to reclaim Ram Janmabhoomi and rid India of one of its many monuments glorifying invaders who remorselessly laid the lives of kafirs to waste and destroyed their places of worship with vengeance.

Those who believed this story pointed to tell-tale signs: The pattern of deployment of security forces; the choice of date for the verdict (it was originally scheduled for September 24, a Friday); and the cockiness of Muslim organisations not known for holding the secular judiciary of India in high esteem and their repeated assertion that they would abide by the judgement. Mr Owaisi had obviously heard and believed the story. When I expressed my doubts about its veracity to a fellow columnist, he sneeringly replied, “You are living in denial.” Days before the judgement, questioning the wisdom of those who did not want it to be delayed any further, he tweeted that the “verdict will leave lotuswallahs disappointed”.

South Delhi’s commentariat is adept at the game of Chinese whispers, but it is also divorced from reality, preferring fiction over fact. The verdict of the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court -- really three separate judgements with the judges concurring on certain key issues -- bore no resemblance to the inspired ‘leak’. The judges agreed on three important issues: Muslims do not have exclusive claim to the site held sacred by Hindus; the ground where the central dome of the Babri Masjid stood belongs to Ram Lalla as has been argued for centuries by Hindus who believe it is Ram Janmabhoomi; and, a temple existed at the spot that was selected by Mir Baqi to build a mosque to celebrate Babur’s victorious military campaign in the region. On the third point, two of the three judges also agreed that the temple was desecrated and destroyed to build the mosque; one of them held this to be un-Islamic, a point validated by theology.

It’s politically correct to say there are no winners and losers following the Ayodhya verdict. But we all know that’s not true. Why else would Mr Owaisi, whose party was last in the news for opposing ‘Hyderabad Liberation Day’ celebrations on September 17 because “many Muslims (razakars) were killed” when the people rose in revolt in 1948 against the Nizam for refusing to join the Union of India, be incandescent with rage? The same man who, having willed himself into believing the cockamamie story that two of the three judges would rule in favour of the Muslims, told me he would accept the High Court’s verdict, is now indulging in what comes easily to him and his ilk: Intemperate, provocative language. “We are not satisfied with the judgement. The evidence presented by Muslims to the court was strong… It seems that it has not been given due consideration,” he told one newspaper. To another he said, “There is anger building up among the Muslim community over the verdict but, god willing, it may not translate into street violence.” Notice how he is leaving the option of mobs taking to the streets wide open. Mr Owaisi is not alone; he has Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav of “ek parinda bhi paar nahi kar sakta” fame, to keep him company.

At the same show I was interrupted by a leading light of south Delhi’s commentariat when I made bold to suggest that little purpose will be served if we keep on going back to history. “What history? Tell us,” he tauntingly said and, along with Mr Owaisi, broke into raucous laughter. I could have given the example of the vandalism that had occurred in Ayodhya in 1528, and elsewhere in India since then: Varanasi, Mathura, Ajmer, Delhi -- the list is endless. But I chose not to bite Mukul Kesavan’s bait, choosing, instead, to place my faith in the wisdom and fair play of our secular justice system. That faith stands vindicated today. At one level, the Ayodhya judgement liberates Ram Janmabhoomi and serves to address, albeit partially, latent and lingering Hindu disquiet. At another level, it is a deeply personal victory for me and some other writers, all of them close friends and professional associates, who chose not to sway with the wave and told the truth as it was rather than join the crowd of intellectually bankrupt dhimmis who unfortunately hold positions of power and authority in free, secular India. They are the real losers and look more pathetic than ever before.

Let me conclude by quoting Nirad C Chaudhuri, a writer whom I greatly admire for speaking his mind freely and without caring a hoot about how many toes he tread upon: “Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain about the desecration of one mosque in Ayodhya. From 1000 AD every temple from Kathiawar to Bihar, from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas has been sacked and ruined. Not one temple was left standing all over northern India. They escaped destruction only where Muslim power did not gain access to them for reasons such as dense forests. Otherwise, it was a continuous spell of vandalism. No nation with any self-respect will forgive this. What happened in Ayodhya would not have happened had the Muslims acknowledged this historical argument even once.”

Well-meaning people believe the Allahabad High Court’s judgement will help bring the Ayodhya dispute to a closure. But the Ayodhya dispute is a manifestation of the historical faultlines that run deep through our society. Till such time we admit the existence of the faultlines and accept the causative factors, there can be no real closure. Settling a title suit is not quite the same as addressing what Niradbabu described as the “historical argument” of India’s imperfect past which makes our future tense. Sadly, though not unexpectedly, there is little or no reason to believe that we are anywhere near a real closure in the absence of any meaningful and sincere acknowledgement of the “continuous spell of vandalism” as symbolised by the monument to honour Babur which stood in Ram ki Nagri till December 6, 1992, and whose reconstruction is still being sought.

Who gains from the Games?

If the people and the country have not benefited from the Commonwealth Games, then who are the beneficiaries? We don’t have to look far for an answer to this question.
(What's in it for her? A labourer's child at a CWG venue.)

Delhi is bedecked with huge banners and festoons in garish colours, creating a faux festive atmosphere to mark the Commonwealth Games which begin on October 3. Foreign sportspersons and delegates arriving in India’s capital city to participate in the Games can be forgiven for thinking that the residents of Delhi are celebrating a much-anticipated event which the organisers, in spite of the scandalous manner in which the preparations have been handled, bringing shame to India and all Indians, strangely insist will be ‘better’ than the Olympic Games at Beijing and the Commonwealth Games at Melbourne. Little would they know that the residents of Delhi, as also the vast majority of this country’s population, are seething with rage and do not share the enthusiasm of those who have let India down wilfully, smugly confident that they shall never be held accountable for their sins of omission and commission.

Nor will the foreign visitors get to see the ungainly sights of Delhi. All along the road from the Games Village, built on the flood banks of Yamuna violating all environmental norms and with an eye to the ‘premium’ that can be charged from prospective buyers of these apartments after the event is over, to the various stadia, huge boards have been put up, beyond which lie ramshackle ‘colonies’ that are in reality sprawling urban slums. Ironically, even if the visitors can’t see the ‘other’ Delhi, they will get to smell it: There’s no way the organisers can block the stench that rises from the open sewers of these ‘colonies’.

Yet, despite the last-minute sprucing up and the banners and festoons, India’s most pampered city doesn’t quite look pretty — or prettier than what it looked like till a fortnight ago. If anything, it looks tacky. A fellow blogger’s description comes to mind: It’s like lipstick on a pig. Apart from politicians, bureaucrats and contractors who had their snouts in the trough for the past seven years and have only now been sent scurrying by a Prime Minister appalled by the battering the nation’s image has received in recent days to try and salvage whatever can be salvaged, at this late hour, of the country’s dignity and honour, nobody is celebrating what was supposed to be India’s coming out party.

The banners and festoons are embossed with the seemingly seductive slogan, “Come out and play”. If the organisers thought this would make CWG 2010 a people’s event, like almost everything else to do with the Games, they have got this wrong too. For the people of Delhi, the sub-text of the message reads: Don’t you dare come out of your homes while the Games are on. Such is the apprehension of harassment on the roads, coupled with antipathy towards an event that has fetched abiding national shame instead of unleashing a tidal wave of national pride, that those who can afford to get out of the city have booked their passage. Sensing windfall profits, even low-cost airlines have trebled the cost of tickets.

Offices have offered their staff the option of working out of home. Vendors and kiosk-owners who make an honest living from a hard day’s work, unlike the organisers of the Games, have been banished. Thousands of migrant labourers who have toiled at the Games venues for the past many years, setting up home in hovels, have been told to pack up and leave, just disappear. For all practical purposes, the city will wear a deserted look during the Games.

Which brings us to the question: Whose Common- wealth Games is it anyway? When the NDA Government agreed to bid for the Games in 2003, it was obviously guided by those who sold the ‘India Shining’ lemon to the BJP. Confident that the NDA would win the 2004 election and the one after that too, they saw the Games as a celebration of India’s arrival on the global scene as a major economic player. The NDA, as we all know, did not win the 2004 election and lost further ground in 2009. But its legacy could not be disowned by the UPA Government; the Congress saw the Games as an opportunity to make political capital, at home and abroad: It would mark the triumphant return of the party to the centre stage of Indian politics from the margins to which it had been pushed.

So the Games became a party — and partisan — affair with control over its preparations and conduct vested with the Delhi Government, the Union Ministry of Sports, the Union Ministry of Urban Development and the CWG Organising Committee. Between themselves, they carved up the pie. Institutions became irrelevant as individuals emerged as key players. Understandably, there was neither accountability nor responsibility attached to the planning and completion of projects. And nobody bothered about the escalating cost of the Games as taxpayers, and not the Congress, were funding the extravaganza. From the initial budget of Rs 1,899 crore, the total expenditure now stands at anything between Rs 70,000 and Rs 100,000 crore. Such was the brazenness of the Delhi Government that it did not think twice before diverting funds meant for Dalit welfare to building roads that have already begun to cave in. And such is the disdain towards the people that Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit airily dismissed the import of a showpiece overbridge collapsing like a pack of cards by saying it was not meant for foreign athletes but spectators.

If anybody stands to gain from CWG 2010, an orgiastic celebration of everything that is venal and abhorrent about public life in India, it is the organisers and their political patrons. The sorry plight of India’s sportspersons will remain unchanged; they have gained nothing from this event whereas they should have been the focus of attention. In any case, the Common- wealth Games is not considered a major sporting event and is rated lower than the Asian Games. Yes, Delhi will have more flyovers and underpasses, but that’s a small consolation for a city turned upside down and whose people will now have to live with the ravages of the Games for years to come.

The question we should really ask is: What has India gained from the Games? The gross mismanagement, the discomfiting questions raised by auditors, the shocking disregard for financial integrity and the embarrassment of overshooting deadlines not by days and weeks but by months have caused enormous damage to India’s image abroad. More important, it has shaken the confidence of Indians at home — they are no longer too sure that their country can take on the world; for them, “Come out and play” is not a challenge but a taunt.

When CWG 2010 begins with the promised gala opening ceremony (provided it doesn’t rain and the organisers don’t make a hash of it) with dancers in sequined dresses gyrating to AR Rahman’s music (never mind the silly lyrics which, like everything else about this colossus scam, do not make any sense) and a spectacular fireworks display, millions of Indians will be left wondering whether what Sports Minister MS Gill calls a “big fat Punjabi wedding” is justified in a country where 37 per cent of the people live below the poverty line and children go to sleep hungry. If the people and the country have not benefited from the Games, then who are the beneficiaries? We don’t have to look far for an answer to this question.

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer.]

Corrupt rulers, cynical people

The filthy underbelly of Delhi, best described in Kipling’s words as a ‘packed and pestilential town’, has been exposed by the CWG mess.
(Toilets at CWG Village. Organisers said hygiene is not an issue! - BBC)

August 24, 1690. This day at Sankraal, I ordered Captain Brooke to come up with a vessel to Chuttanuty, where we arrived about noon, but found the place in a deplorable condition, nothing being left for our present accommodation, the rains falling day and night.” The “deplorable condition” of ‘Chuttanuty’ (Sutanuti), laid to waste by the Nawab of Bengal three-and-a-half years ago, would have dampened the spirit of any other official, but Job Charnock, no stranger to Bengal, had set his mind on building the headquarters of East India Company at this place and remained undeterred. His persistence paid off when Calcutta was born of the union of three villages — Sutanuti, Gobindapur and Kalikata. Much later, it was to become the Empire’s Second City, the centre of British affairs in India.

Yet, for all its economic, political and social importance, Calcutta was not free of blots and blemishes. Two centuries after Charnock landed in Sutanuti, the celebrated chronicler of British India and for a while Assistant Editor of this newspaper, Rudyard Kipling, visited Calcutta and was not impressed either by its magnificent buildings that symbolised the power of the Raj or the splendorous lifestyle of the ‘White nabobs’ who controlled trade and commerce. Rather than lavish praise on the city and its residents, Kipling caustically wrote:

Thus the midday halt of Charnock — more’s the pity! —
Grew a City
As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed
So it Spread
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built on the silt
Palace, byre, hovel — poverty and pride —
Side by side;
And, above the packed and pestilential town,
Death looked down.

Kipling was accused of being cynical and allowing his antipathy towards Hindoos who, though restricted to native quarters, shared the city with their colonial masters, get the better of his judgement. In retrospect, Kipling was just being prescient in his own inimitable style. Even before the Union Jack fluttering atop Governor House was replaced by the Tricolour at Raj Bhavan and the last British official, trader and fortune-seeker-turned-boiler operator at Victoria Jute Mill left Calcutta, the city had begun to crumble. Garbage and poverty, hunger and disease, death and decay enmeshed to become the leitmotif of Calcutta, compared to which Delhi, Bombay and Madras were small towns.

As Calcutta’s collapse gathered speed, Delhi — or rather New Delhi — emerged as free India’s First City, pampered at the expense of every other urban centre. Over the decades, Delhi has grown, “As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed; So it (has) Spread; Chance-directed, chance-erected”, but it has never had either the glitz and glamour of Bombay or the sedate respectability of Calcutta. It’s a city of ghettos, both real and of the mind, where the elite live in what are referred to as ‘posh colonies’ while politicians and bureaucrats occupy sprawling bungalows in Lutyens’s Delhi. Then there is another Delhi where people live in festering urban slums and ‘unauthorised’ colonies of various kinds. The chrome-and-glass malls, bridges and underpasses are an alluring distraction from the city’s filthy underbelly. If Calcutta was India’s ‘pestilential city’ in the 19th century, Delhi best fits Kipling’s description in India of the 21st century. For evidence, look at the alarming outbreak of dengue and swine flu. Neither class nor cash serves as a protective barrier in this “packed and pestilential town, (where) Death looks down.”

Despite the huge sums of money that are spent every year to make Delhi a “world class city” — a phrase popularised by Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit — there really is little to show by way of public services that are in any manner better from those provided in India’s other, and lesser, cities. A corrupt administration supervised by venal politicians who believe glib talk is a substitute for governance cannot be expected to perform any better. Delusions of grandeur no different from those that clouded the mind of the last Mughal Emperor whose writ did not run beyond the walls of his serraglio prompted Delhi’s rulers to believe they would be able to stage the “best-ever Commonwealth Games” and stun the world.

In the event, the preparations for the Games, which have cost India’s honest tax-payers upwards of `70,000 crore, have turned out to be no more than the Great Indian Rope Trick. Initial audit reports suggest limitless loot by those entrusted with the task of creating new and refurbishing existing infrastructure; a final assessment would reveal the enormous scale of the thievery that has taken place in the name of hosting the Games.

It would, however, be dishonest to blame politicians, bureaucrats and contractors alone for fetching such ignominy and abiding shame: India is being laughed at by the entire world; this nation has been reduced to an object of ridicule and pity. More than politicians and organisers, bureaucrats and contractors, it is the people of Delhi who are to blame. There is a certain callous disregard for values and ethics that sets apart the elite of Delhi from their counterparts in other cities. So long as their lives are not adversely affected, they are reluctant to take a stand on behalf of others, leave alone the nation. Scrutiny of Government’s actions that involve spending taxpayers’ money by citizens is an alien concept in Delhi.

Nor are the elite of Delhi easily moved by the horrific realities of life to which others are subjected in this city — poor sanitation, non-existent civic services, corrupt babus, rationed water, endless power cuts, ill-equipped hospitals and a criminally indifferent police force. It is amusing that there should be widespread anger over Games Organising Committee secretary-general Lalit Bhanot insisting that excreta-encrusted toilets and bathrooms at the CWG Village (which Ms Dikshit says is better than the one built for the Melbourne Games) are “clean to both you and us” but “may not appear so to some others”. If only newspapers had published, equally prominently, the bathrooms and kitchens at All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, we would have known that accepting filth and squalor as ‘normal’ is a way of life, and not an exception, in India’s “world class” capital city.

By this time next month the Games will be history; what will remain are the leftovers of an orgiastic feast at the taxpayers expense: Bridges that are badly designed and poorly built, roads that are no more than a layer of asphalt and stadia with leaking roofs nobody will use. Life will go on as usual. The slums will become more squalid than before. Yamuna will once again be reduced to a fetid drain. And we will still be ruled by the same lot who have let India down. As for the guilty men and women, none of them will be either shamed or shunned.

[This appeared as Edit Page Main Article in The Pioneer.]

History and faith are beyond law

Belief is independent of who owns the disputed land in Ayodhya and is manifested in the unshakeable faith that a Ram Mandir shall rise again where it once stood.
(Babri Masjid, built by Babar after demolishing temple at Ram Janmasthan.)

James Tod joined the Bengal Army as a cadet in 1799, presumably looking for a life of adventure in the heat and dust of India. He swiftly rose through the ranks and, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, provided valuable service to the East India Company. His uncanny ability to gather information helped the early colonisers smash the Maratha Confederacy. Later, his assistance was sought during the Rajputana campaign. Colonel Tod, as he was known, was a natural scholar with an eye for detail and a curious mind. He was fascinated by the history of Rajputana and its antiquities as much as by its palace intrigues and the shifting loyalties of its rulers and their factotums. That fascination led to his penning two books that are still considered mandatory reading for anybody interested in the history of the Rajputs, although latter-day scholars of the Marxist variety would disagree with both the contents and the style, neither leavened by ideological predilections. The first volume of Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan was published in 1829 and the second in 1832, nearly a decade after he returned to Britain.

Thousands of people, Indians and foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims, visit Ajmer every day to offer a chaadar at Dargah Sharif of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, a shrine where all are welcome and every prayer is answered, or so the pious choose to believe. Many stay on to visit the other antiquities of Ajmer, among them a magnificent mosque complex which bears little or no resemblance to its name: Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra. People gawk at the columns and the façade intricately carved with inscriptions from the Quran in Arabic. They pose for photographs or capture the mosque’s ‘beauty’ on video cameras and carry back memories of Islam’s munificence towards its followers. Don’t forget to visit Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra, they will later tell friends and relatives visiting Ajmer. As for Indian Muslims who travel to Ajmer and see Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra, they would be tempted to wonder why similar mosques are no longer built, a wonderment that is only partially explained by the fact that sultans and badshahs no longer rule India. The crescent had begun to wane long before Bahadur Shah Zafar was propped up as Badshah of Hindoostan by the mutineers of 1857.

Such speculation as may flit through troubled minds need not detain us, nor is there any need to feel sorry for those who wallow in self-pity or are enraged by the realisation of permanent loss of power. Hundred and fifty years is long enough time to reconcile to the changed realities of Hindustan. So, let us return to Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra in Ajmer. Few who have seen and admired this mosque complex would be aware of Colonel Tod’s description of it in the first volume of Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan: “The entire façade of this noble entrance … is covered with Arabic inscriptions … but in a small frieze over the apex of the arch is contained an inscription in Sanskrit.” And that oddity tells the real story of Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra.

This is no place of worship built over weeks and months for the faithful to congregate five times a day, it is a monument to honour Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghauri who travelled through Ajmer after defeating, and killing, Prithviraj Chauhan in the second battle of Tarain in 1192 AD. Stunned by the beauty of the temples of Ajmer and shocked by such idolatory, he ordered Qutbuddin Aibak to sack the city and build a mosque, a mission to be accomplished in two-and-a-half days, so that he could offer namaz on his way back. Aibak fulfilled the task given to him: He used the structures of three temples to fashion what now stands as Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra. Mindful of sensitivities, his men used their swords to disfigure the faces of figures carved into the 70 pillars that still stand. It would seem India’s invaders had a particular distaste for Indian noses portrayed in stone and plaster.

The story of Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra is not unique. Hindustan’s landscape is dotted with mosques built on sites where temples stood, often crafted with material from the destroyed places of worship. Quwwat-ul Islam, the first mosque built in Delhi, bears testimony to the invader’s smash-and-grab policy, as do the mosques Aurangzeb built in Kashi and Mathura, or the mosque Mir Baqi built at Ayodhya on the site Hindus believe to be, and revere as, Ram Janmasthan. The pillars and inner walls of Babri Masjid, as the structure was known till it came crashing down on December 6, 1992, were those of a temple that once stood there, a fact proven beyond doubt. Somnath was fortunate: It was sacked repeatedly, but no mosque came to occupy the land where it stood — and still stands — in Gujarat.

By next Sunday, we will know who owns the land where Babri Masjid stood and a Ram Mandir now exists. Unless something extraordinary happens between today and Friday, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court is all set to give its judgement on the title dispute that has been pending in various courts for more than six decades. It is anybody’s guess as to what shall be the verdict of the three-judge Bench; what is for sure is that the claimant who loses the case will immediately appeal to the Supreme Court and it will be quite some time before the issue is resolved beyond further legal dispute. Hence, there is no need for either celebration or mourning, with its attendant consequences, at this stage.

In any event, we must bear in mind that courts can at best decide on who owns the land, not the sanctity or otherwise of the land. Similarly, court judgements can neither rewrite history nor controvert historical facts. Faith and history are not subjects of legal scrutiny, nor do they require to be constrained by the narrow interpretation of law. Hindus believe Maryada Purushottam Ram was born at the spot where the Babri Masjid was built in 1528 by Babar’s army of invaders as one of the many mosques that came to symbolise, over hundreds of years, Islam’s conquest of Hindustan. That belief is independent of who owns the piece of land today and is manifested in the unshakeable faith that has sustained the hope for five centuries that a magnificent temple shall rise again where it once stood on the banks of Saryu.

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer.]

Time for Hindus to leave or perish?

Is it time again for Hindus to leave or perish ‘in the flames of fanaticism’? If yes, where will they flee to? Isn’t India their land too?
(A Kali Mandir desecrated by rioting Muslims in Deganga.)

In 1946 there was no ‘Right-wing media’ and ‘Left-liberal media’ in Bengal (or, for that matter, in India as it existed then). There were newspapers and journals that were clubbed together as the “Hindu Press” because they did not blindly echo the Muslim League’s raucous demand that all of Bengal must go to (East) Pakistan, and there was the “League Press” comprising dailies, weeklies and monthly magazines, of which there was a surfeit those days, all of them virulently anti-Hindu and hence pro-Pakistan — with the notable exception of The Statesman which was then edited by Ian Stephens who was pro-Pakistan and hence anti-Hindu.

Curiously, newspapers and journals opposed to the League’s politics, policies and programmes were labelled as “Hindu Press” by Bengal’s blatantly communal Government led by the Muslim League and headed by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy as well as the Province’s British administrators who were never quite comfortable with the “Hindoo baboo” although he had proved to be an invaluable ally in first setting up and then managing the colonial enterprise after the sepoy mutiny of 1857 which left the Mussalman out in the cold, to be tolerated but not to be trusted. Newspapers like The Star of India, which wielded considerable influence among Muslims, and The Statesman, whose columns were brazenly used by Ian Stephens to try and sway official policy and public opinion in favour of Pakistan, were just referred to as the “League Press”, as were Urdu and Bengali rags that openly called for murder and worse if Hindus stood in the way of their ‘homeland’ — or the “land of the pure” as the name selected by the League, which was to become the core of separatist propaganda, promised its supporters.

Six decades later, newspapers and news channels that, as a matter of editorial policy, intentionally gloss over Muslim communalism which is no less sinister and debilitating for our national life as was the fanatical hatred towards Hindus preached and practised by the Muslim League, are strangely referred to as the “secular media”. Measured by the same yardstick, the “League Press” was the “secular media” of 1946, although Ian Stephens would have protested at the suggestion, not least because he would have considered it antithetical to Muslim interests which were then represented by the politics of Muslim separatism about which there was nothing secular.

But we digress. The polarisation of the media, pitting the “Hindu Press” against the “League Press”, became starkly noticeable before, during and after the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ of August 1946. A month before that ghastly blood-letting on the streets of Calcutta by mobs owing allegiance to and instigated by the Muslim League, the self-appointed ‘sole spokesman’ of India’s Muslims, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had dropped all pretensions of being a moderate constitutionalist: He had rejected both the Constituent Assembly and the British offer to transfer power to an interim Government in which the Muslim League would be a partner of the Congress. It was either Pakistan or ‘Direct Action’, he threatened; the Muslims, he declared at a Press conference, were ready to “launch a struggle (for which they) have chalked a plan”. Asked what he meant by ‘Direct Action’, an incandescent Jinnah, who never relished answering questions, caustically replied, “Go to the Congress and ask them their plans. When they take you into their confidence I will take you into mine. Why do you expect me alone to sit with folded hands? I also am going to make trouble.”

It is tempting to wonder whether Jinnah had any idea of the ‘trouble’ that he threatened to make on ‘Direct Action Day’, August 16, 1946. If he knew that the League’s rage boys would run riot across Calcutta and mercilessly butcher men, women and children, he did nothing to prevent it. And, if Jinnah was repulsed by the gruesome sight of corpses piling up faster than they could be removed by a paralysed city administration, he never expressed his regret nor did he castigate Suhrawardy, who sat in the police control room during the killings to ensure the police did nothing to stop the ‘direct action’. Records of the time are not entirely reliable. The “League Press” played down, if not entirely glossed over, the murder and mayhem let loose by Muslim League activists; the “Hindu Press” was accused of inflating the numbers of those killed and injured. The official inquiry report would put to shame white-wash jobs done by latter day official inquiries, for instance the one into the 1984 genocide of Sikhs in Delhi. Subsequent literature places the death toll at anything between 5,000 and 10,000. We will never really know the truth.

The story, however, does not end with the harrowing days and nights of August 1946 when vultures descended in large numbers on the roads, streets and gullies of Calcutta, feasting on corpses rotting in the sweltering post-monsoon heat. In a sense, ‘Direct Action Day’ was a curtain-raiser, the prelude to another ghastly massacre. The minority Hindu community of Ramganj in Noakhali district had no inkling of the “organised fury of the Muslim mob” that was unleashed on October 10, 1946. Within days, nearly all of Noakhali was engulfed by communal violence — Hindus were slaughtered like so many sheep; those who tried to flee were waylaid and killed. The “Hindu Press” reported thousands lost their lives; the “League Press” incredibly not only downplayed the violence but insisted there was no loss of lives. Ashok Gupta (no relative of mine and a Gandhian to boot) who accompanied Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on his Noakhali sojourn prepared a report on the riot in which he recorded tales of Hindus being killed, forced to embrace Islam, and Hindu women being abducted or coerced into marrying Muslims. Such details are missing in official records which merely mention that the riots led to the loss of 200 lives.

The New York Times, reporting on Noakhali, published an AP despatch from New Delhi: “Mohandas K Gandhi, who has been attempting to insure communal peace in the Bengal and Bihar areas, said religious strife in the troubled Noakhali section of Bengal seemed to call for Hindus to leave or perish ‘in the flames of fanaticism’... He released telegrams from Congress workers in Noakhali, which is predominantly Moslem, in which they described attempts to burn Hindus alive.”

Sixty-four years later, areas of West Bengal which have witnessed a tectonic shift in their demographic profile due to unrestrained illegal immigration from Bangladesh, are slowly turning into volatile ‘Noakhalis’. Last week we had a glimpse of the communal belligerence that is building up when the minority Hindus in Deganga faced the “organised fury of the Muslim mob” led by Haji Nurul Islam, a Trinamool Congress MP. Is it time again for Hindus to leave or perish ‘in the flames of fanaticism’? If yes, where will they flee to? Isn’t India their land too?

[This appeared as my column Coffee Break in The Pioneer.]

Targeting the Armed Forces

Manmohan Singh is believed to be working on an ‘Eid Package’ to appease separatists in Kashmir Valley. Will AFSPA be diluted?
(Pakistani flag hoisted by separatists at Lal Chowk, Srinagar, on Eid-ul-Fitr, 2010.)

The Union Government, according to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is “groping for a solution” to the current unrest in the Kashmir Valley where separatists, with the help of their rage boys whom they pay to pelt the police and security forces with stones, have been virtually holding the administration to ransom for the past couple of months. Just in case people expect the Government to act firmly and restore the authority of the state without allowing the situation to worsen any further, Mr Singh has let it be known that “we are not dealing with an easy problem… The country and the people must be patient”. After all, a problem that has been allowed to fester for 60 years cannot be solved in six years; that would be an unfair expectation.

Yet, the need to do something, or at least to be seen to be doing something, in response to the worsening law and order situation in the Kashmir Valley and arresting the slide into separatist violence and chaos reminiscent of the late-1980s and early-1990s, cannot be entirely wished away. The Prime Minister, therefore, has called a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security to “discuss the Kashmir issue threadbare”. It’s amazing that he should have waited till now to do so. But, as the cliché goes, better late than never.

However, the manner in which the Prime Minister has phrased the agenda of the CCS meeting should cause disquiet and discomfort, at least among those Indians who still passionately believe that Jammu & Kashmir was, is and shall remain an integral part of the Union of India; that instead of conceding even an inch to the Pakistan-sponsored separatists, we should focus on governance and restoring law and order; and, that the best option at the moment is to ride out the storm while minimising collateral damage.

It is, in a sense, alarming that Mr Singh, given his penchant for ‘thinking out of the box’, should propose to “discuss the Kashmir issue threadbare” along with his colleagues in the CCS. That would imply discussing the entire range of issues raised by the separatists, including azadi, the demand for “autonomy” voiced by the National Conference (articulated in the voluminous report that was drafted and approved by the State Assembly when Mr Farooq Abdullah was Chief Minister) and the People’s Democratic Party’s insistence on “greater autonomy” (a delightfully undefined and vague concept which includes accepting Pakistani currency as legal tender in the State).

However, we can seek comfort in the fact that it is unlikely the CCS, after “discussing the Kashmir issue threadbare”, will come to any definitive conclusions. For instance, it is unimaginable that the Government would be authorised to use its executive powers to grant either ‘autonomy’ or ‘greater autonomy’. Apart from the fact that this cannot be done with a note being sent out by the PMO or a notification being issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs, the political backlash would be too strong for the Congress to risk, leave alone weather. India’s corrupt, cynical and self-seeking urban middle-class may have become indifferent to the nation’s unity and integrity, but the masses still carry the vote on polling day.

Any changes in the existing arrangement through amendments to the Constitution can similarly be ruled out. The BJP may not have sufficient votes in Parliament to force the deletion of Article 370, but it can block the strengthening of this debilitating Article through further amendments to the Constitution. The Government is presumably mindful of this simple arithmetical fact and will not make a promise that it will later regret having made to the separatists (and their masters in Pakistan).

But something is cooking, of that we can be sure. Or else Chief Minister Omar Abdullah would not have been summoned by Mr Singh for discussions, nor would a meeting have been convened to “discuss the Kashmir issue threadbare”. We are told that the Prime Minister is keen on announcing an ‘Eid Package’ to restore peace in the Kashmir Valley. If there is any truth in it, then we should expect a dramatic gesture of capitulation — nothing less than that would make the separatists feel they have won half the battle and ask their rage boys to take a break — amounting to appeasing those who repudiate India’s sovereignty.

And this is most likely to come in the form of the Government announcing its decision to amend the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Separatists and their stooges among jholawallahs masquerading as human rights activists want the Act to be repealed. Since the Government wouldn’t dare do that, it will seek to dilute the law that makes life difficult for the lawless. While it is anybody’s guess as to what those amendments, which will probably be introduced through an Ordinance and then ratified by a Bill that will require a simple majority in Parliament (and hence cannot be blocked by the BJP), will be, but a fair guess can be attempted on the basis of the discussions that have taken place so far between the Government and the Armed Forces.

The amendments are likely to focus on three clauses in the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. First, the right of Army personnel to search premises and arrest individuals believed to be guilty of terrorism and separatist violence without warrants will be sought to be curtailed. The Army has rightly asserted that without this power its counter-insurgency operations will be rendered futile.

For, it’s frightfully stupid to expect the Army to deliver results without the element of surprise that is necessary to raid a hideout or arrest a terrorist. In Jammu & Kashmir, where the civil administration has been infiltrated by the separatists and their sympathisers, information about the Army seeking and securing warrants to raid a particular house where terrorists may be hiding or arrest a suspect will not remain a secret. Indeed, it will be communicated within minutes and the Army will be left looking silly; its men will become objects of ridicule and worse.

The second amendment that is being proposed will make it mandatory for the Army to hand over those who have been arrested to the police or a magistrate within 24 hours of the arrest. Given the terrain of operations and the logistics involved, this will prove to be virtually impossible. If implemented, this amendment will force the Army to abandon mopping up operations; jawans will have to rush to the nearest police station or magistrate’s court instead of sanitising the area and ensuring there are no more militants hiding there. This is a patently absurd proposition and is designed to raise obstacles for the security forces rather than make their task easier.

The third amendment which the separatists and their jholawallah friends are pushing for is a sinister move to tarnish the reputation of the Indian Army and a devious ploy to prevent it from fearlessly performing its duties. The UPA Government, which has a pronounced bias towards jholawallahs, has apparently agreed to the demand for setting up ‘grievance cells’ in every sub-division.

This would be a perfect recipe for disaster. The right to file a complaint will be merrily misused and there will be a flood of allegations, dealing with which will become the main occupation of the Army instead of conducting counter-insurgency operations. Even without such a mechanism, the Army has been repeatedly accused of ‘violating’ human rights, more often than not with the sole purpose of tarring the dignity and honour of our men in uniform.

Along with financial sops at the tax-payers’ expense, these and other amendments to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act would make a perfect ‘Eid Package’ for the separatists: They can celebrate a big victory in the proxy war they have been waging against the nation with the help of its foes. But the ‘peace’ such abject surrender may bring will be a prelude to another offensive for azadi which will be timed to coincide with US President Barack Hussein Obama’s November visit. Make no mistake about that.

[This appeared as Edit Page leading article in The Pioneer.]

It’s India’s land that China occupies

Gilgit-Baltistan is part of Jammu & Kashmir
(The Karakoram Highway linking China and Pakistan)

While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh waxes eloquent on the need to bridge the “trust deficit” in relations between India and Pakistan, infusing fresh enthusiasm among mombattiwallahs on both sides of the border, the Government he heads faces a severe crisis of ‘trust deficit’ of a different kind. The confused response of the Government over the presence of Chinese troops in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir — what Beijing describes as “northern Pakistan” — demonstrates this point. It appears that the Ministry of External Affairs is now virtually out of the loop on crucial matters, starved of vital intelligence input necessary for a coherent response to issues that have a direct bearing on foreign affairs and policy. It is impossible that R&AW, which is well-clued into what’s happening in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir despite depleted ‘assets’, should not have been aware of PLA soldiers being flown into what were earlier known as Northern Areas and since 2009 are referred to by Pakistan as Gilgit-Baltistan after the recent floods caused massive destruction of strategic infrastructure, including the Karakoram Highway.

Yet, the Ministry of External Affairs commented on it only after Selig S Harrison, director of the Asia Programme at the Center for International Policy and a former South Asia bureau chief of The Washington Post, wrote about the “quiet geopolitical crisis ... unfolding in the Himalayan borderlands of northern Pakistan, where Islamabad is handing over de facto control of the strategic Gilgit-Baltistan region in the north-west corner of disputed Kashmir to China” in The New York Times. Even after the article was published, presumably placing in the public domain information that had already been secured and processed by R&AW, all that the Ministry of External Affairs could (or would) say is, “We are seeking an independent verification... If true, it would be a matter of serious concern and we would do all that is necessary to ensure the safety and security of the nation.”

That would have been reassuring had the Ministry, which is part of the national security structure, not been so woefully ill-informed. For, by then there was confirmation of the presence of PLA troops by Pakistani officials who said the Chinese were in Gilgit-Baltistan for “relief work”. Last week, China, while denying the presence of 11,000 of its soldiers in Gilgit-Baltistan, has confirmed that it is ‘helping’ Pakistan with men and material to cope with the disaster. India’s feisty Ambassador to China, Mr S Jaishankar — he should have been sent to Beijing long ago — has subsequently conveyed our ‘concerns’, but whether these have been taken seriously is anybody’s guess.

Two inter-linked facts are now abundantly clear and indisputable. First, China has crafted a Jammu & Kashmir policy that is apparently heavily loaded in favour of its ‘all-weather friend’ Pakistan and is inimical to India’s interests. In reality, it is designed to serve China’s strategic interests more than anything else. The main elements of this policy are: Delegitimise India’s sovereign right over Jammu & Kashmir by treating the State as ‘disputed territory’ (hence the stapled visas for Indians living in that State); legitimise Pakistan’s claim to all of Jammu & Kashmir and thus treat Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (including Gilgit-Baltistan) as Pakistani territory or ‘northern Pakistan’ (visas are stamped on Pakistani passports used by residents of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir); and, thereby seek to convert Pakistan’s patently illegal act of ceding 5,180 sq km of occupied Indian territory, known as ‘Trans-Karakoram Tract’ (virtually all of Gilgit-Baltistan) to China in 1963 into a legal transaction.

A resurgent China, having raced ahead of Japan and secured for itself the status of the world’s second largest economy and tamed the US into playing second fiddle (recall President Barack Hussein Obama paying obeisance in the Chinese court), now feels confident of pushing its strategic frontiers beyond geographical boundaries. This is where the second factor of China’s deftly-crafted Jammu & Kashmir policy comes in: It wants to assert its hold over the Northern Areas and make its presence felt to both Pakistan and India, albeit for different reasons. This precedes the planned expansion of China’s strategic infrastructure through and beyond the ‘Trans-Karakoram Tract’ by building a rail link between Kashgar in Xinjiang province and Havelian near Rawalpindi. With Gwadar Port providing it access to the Persian Gulf and an amplified land route across the Karakoram range in place, China would have vastly secured its strategic interests, trouncing those of India. That’s called pursuing a robust policy of enlightened self-interest which underpins both national security and strategy in the shifting sands of 21st century’s geo-politics.

Of course, duplicity laces this policy which is often articulated with a forked tongue. “As a neighbour and friend of both countries, China believes that the (Kashmir) issue should be left to the two countries so that it could be properly handled through dialogue and consultation,” Ms Jiang Yu, the spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told mediapersons in Beijing last week, insisting that China “has no intention to interfere in the Kashmir issue” which “we believe is an issue left over from history between India and Pakistan”. Such pious declarations of China’s ‘non-interference’, however, fly in the face of Beijing’s actions. Asked whether China would review the policy of issuing stapled visas to Indian passport holders of Jammu & Kashmir, Ms Jiang Yu said, “Our visa policy towards inhabitants in the Indian-controlled Kashmir region is consistent and stays unchanged”.

It would be easy to attribute such deliberately un-nuanced — some would say belligerent — articulation of how Beijing views New Delhi’s concerns to a rising China’s arrogance. But the belligerence of those with whom India does business, literally and metaphorically, is not entirely divorced from Indian realities. We cannot escape from the twin facts that our own Jammu & Kashmir policy is stuck in a grey zone of self-doubt, self-pity, self-flagellation and self-recrimination, and our political class is deeply divided on how to deal with an ever recalcitrant minority (that’s what the separatists in Kashmir Valley represent) in a State we insist is inseparable from the Union of India. The all-party resolution that was adopted by Parliament to stop then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao from persisting with his “anything short of azadi” approach at the behest of a certain Robin Raphel (who now oversees American aid to Pakistan), restating India’s sovereign right over all of Jammu & Kashmir, including Pakistan-occupied Kashmir of which Gilgit-Baltistan is an integral part, is now a forgotten document. If only successive Governments since then had premised their foreign policy on that resolution and aggressively sought to reclaim India’s territory from Pakistani — and de facto Chinese — occupation, we would have been spared the humiliation that is being heaped on us today.
[This appeared as my column Coffee Break in The Pioneer.]

Whimpering India, assertive China

While New Delhi has floundered for 63 years on Jammu & Kashmir, Beijing has deftly made Tibet an integral part of China

On August 11, His Holiness the Dalai Lama met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ostensibly to thank him for “the good care India has taken of him and his followers living in exile for the past 50 years”. The Dalai Lama’s meeting with Mr Singh followed Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao’s visit to Dharamsala last month where she met the Tibetan spiritual leader and his senior aides. What transpired at that meeting is not known, but we can presume it was a routine discussion between the senior-most official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and India’s guests who would rather describe themselves as members of the ‘Tibetan Government-in-Exile’ which is based in Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama’s representative in New Delhi, Kalon Tempa Tsering, says too much should not be read into who called on whom where and when: “What’s so unusual about the meeting? It is part of the Dalai Lama’s regular interaction with Indian leaders … He keeps meeting Indian leaders… He met Vice-President Hamid Ansari a year ago.”

Mr Ansari no doubt holds an exalted office; if the President’s job were to fall vacant due to unforeseeable circumstances before Ms Pratibha Patil’s tenure comes to an end, he would become the head of state, if only as a stop-gap measure. That apart, as Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, he is not really important enough for the Government of the world’s second largest economy to get into a lather over his meeting with the “splittist” Dalai Lama. New Delhi’s pecking order is as well-known in the Gymkhana as in Washington, DC or Beijing: The Prime Minister matters, the Vice-President doesn’t.

So, it’s not surprising that China should have taken offence, and made it clear that it feels offended, when the Prime Minister agreed to meet the Dalai Lama. Beijing views this as granting legitimacy to the Dalai Lama’s claimed status as the undisputed leader of all Tibetans, whether living in exile or in their homeland, vested with both spiritual and temporal authority by “his people” of “his Tibet”. Beijing’s position is clear, unambiguous and asserted without any sense of either self-doubt or hint of apology: Tibet belongs to China, the people belong to both Tibet and China, and the Dalai Lama has no business to poke his nose into temporal affairs — for all practical purposes he is a persona non grata and the “splittist clique” he heads comprises anti-national elements.

We need not agree with that position. Indeed, history can be cited to contest China’s claim on Tibet. But if we are to take a moral position, if we are to contest China’s version of history, then we should have the courage and the wherewithal to stand by our conviction and be prepared to face the consequences. The Chinese have responded predictably by upping the ante on Jammu & Kashmir and denying a visa to Lt Gen BS Jaswal who heads the Northern Command. Whether the Chinese tit followed the Indian tat or it was the other way round is not quite clear because the visa is believed to have been denied in July while the Prime Minister met the Dalai Lama in August. But irrespective of the sequence, it is abundantly clear that Beijing has considerably lowered its threshold of tolerance and New Delhi has not exactly planned for a showdown.

To merely insist that “Jammu & Kashmir concerns our sovereignty and is as sensitive to us as Tibet is to them” is neither here nor there. That we are still reluctant to call a spade-a-spade, which China does without bothering about bruised egos — the Ministry of External Affairs spokesman said Lt Gen Jaswal could not visit China for a scheduled defence-related programme “due to certain reasons” although those reasons are no secret — is indicative of our inherent weakness. Diplomacy in the 21st century is not about maudlin sentiments and polite niceties; it’s about aggressively, unapologetically promoting, and securing, self-interest. China does that with great élan; we talk about “sensitivity to each other’s concerns”, a principle we tend to follow in the breach.

Since the Government of India has chosen to compare Jammu & Kashmir with Tibet — a needless comparison really because accession and annexation aren’t one and the same — it would be in order to elaborate upon the comparison. What New Delhi has failed to achieve in 63 years, Beijing has achieved in 50 years. Jammu & Kashmir, more so the Valley, remains a running sore for India, threatening to turn septic every now and then, a cesspit teeming with avaricious politicians and corrupt officials where hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees in ‘development aid’ have disappeared over the decades with little or nothing to show by way of either development or securing India’s strategic interests. In sharp contrast, as I witnessed during my visit to Lhasa earlier this month, Beijing has converted Tibet truly into an integral part of China. The Chinese Central Government has spent more than 100 billion yuan on just developing Tibet’s infrastructure over the past five decades and every yuan has been well spent. It’s not just roads and houses and hospitals and schools, or for that matter the Beijing-Lhasa rail link which is an engineering marvel, but the assertion of Chinese sovereignty over the Tibetan Autonomous Region which is at once impressive and instructive, especially for us in India.

Sixty-three years after Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession, we are still debating the constitutional status of Jammu & Kashmir. A succession of Prime Ministers, despairing at Kashmiri separatism, have offered ‘autonomy’ ranging from “anything short of azadi” to “azadi short of separation”. Article 370 stands as a psychological and legal barrier between India and a State the Government of India claims to integral to India. China dealt with the issue of autonomy for Tibet by restricting it to protecting Tibetan culture (for instance, polyandry is allowed but not encouraged; the one-child norm is relaxed but there are incentives for those who shun the relaxation; lamas are left alone but monasteries are guarded by the PLA) and allowing participation in what we call the political process “under the leadership of the Central Government”.

Most important of all, China does not restrict Chinese from settling in China’s Tibet, unlike India restricting Indians from settling in India’s Jammu & Kashmir. No, the Hans have not flooded Tibet, as is often alleged by the “splittist clique”, but they are free to seek jobs, set up businesses, acquire and develop property, and invest in Tibet’s economy, adding to the region’s prosperity. While New Delhi has squandered time and opportunity talking about ‘Kashmiriyat’ and ‘Insaniyat’ and other such bunkum, Beijing has firmly established its supremacy over Tibet: Every signboard in Lhasa is in Tibetan, but superscribed in Mandarin. Every address ends with China. And nobody shouts — alright, make that nobody dares shout — “Go China, go back!”

[This appeared as my Sunday column, Coffee Break, in The Pioneer on August 29, 2010.)