Frontline - 18 April 2014

WILDLIFE CORBETT RESERVE
INDIA & CHINA WAR OF 1962
Delights & dangers 67
The true story 117
FRONTLINE
A P R I L 1 8, 2014 INDIAS NATIONAL MAGAZINE WWW.FRONTLINE.IN RS.6 0
Standing up to the EMPIRE

With his deant moves on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to change the rules of the game in international politics
VOLUME 31
NUMBER 7
APRIL 05-18, 2014
ISSN 0970-1710
WWW.FRONTLINE.IN
G E NER A L E L E C T I O N A tale of two campaigns 24 NORTH: Saffron euphoria Madhya Pradesh: Advantage Shivraj 26 Chhattisgarh: BJP upbeat 27 Rajasthan: BJP all the way 28 Haryana: Uncertain race 30 Delhi: Demographic dynamics 32 MAHARASHTRA: Waiting for change 34 SOUTH: Interesting contests Tamil Nadu: New alliances 36 Caste divide 38 DMK & sons 40 Karnataka: Triangular contest 41 Kerala: Evenly poised 43 NORTH-EASTERN STATES: Head start for Congress 47 Stalwarts & surprises 49 Tripura: Left in front 51 Sikkim: An alternative force 53 WOR LD A F F A I R S Libya on edge 58 Malaysian Airline tragedy: Flight into mystery 61 U.N. report on Arab integration 64 WIL D L I F E
C O V ER S T O RY
Russian riposte
With its intervention in Crimea, Russia is sending a clear message to the U.S. and its Western allies that the unipolar world order is not viable anymore and the rules of engagement have to be changed. 4
S OC I A L I S S UE S Kathputli Colony: Artists protest against demolition 93 OB I TUA R Y
Khushwant Singh: Electric man in a blub Tony Benn: A steadfast socialist TR I BUTE R.K. Srikantan: Inimitable purist ESSAY
107 110
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India-China war: The true story Jingoismfrom Jana Sangh to BJP RELA T ED S T O RI ES
117 126
Interview: Alexander M. Kadakin, Russias Ambassador to India 6 The 'Great Game' in Europe 10 U.S. double standards 19
In Jim Corbett landscape TH E A T R E International Theatre Festival of Kerala Kitchen katha Interview: Deepan Sivaraman, artistic director, IFToK Interview: Prof. M.V. Narayanan, University of Calicut 67
C OLUM N C.P. Chandrasekhar: Financial strains in China 55 K. Satchidanandan: The politics of rereading 89 Jayati Ghosh: A raw deal for migrants 104 Sashi Kumar: The act of killing 112 D A TA C AR D 128 97 130
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On the Cover Russian President Vladimir Putin.
COVER DESIGN: U. UDAYA SHANKAR
BOOKS LE TTE R S
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PHOTOGRAPH:MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS
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APRIL 18, 2014 .
FRONTLINE
R US S I A N PR E S I D E N T
Vladimir Putin signs a Bill making Crimea part of Russia, in the Kremlin on March 21.
SERGEI CHIRIKOV/AP
COVER STORY
RUSSIAN RIPOSTE
With its intervention in Crimea, Russia is sending a clear message to the U.S. and its Western allies that the unipolar world order is not viable anymore and the rules of engagement have to be changed.
B Y V L A D I M I R R A D Y U H I N IN MOSCOW
FRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
THE STAND-OFF BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE West over Ukraine has been called the worst East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War. Future historians will probably look back at it as the dawn of a new era in world politics, marked by Russias push to rewrite postCold War realities. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared Russias takeover of Crimea to Hitlers annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakias Sudetenland in 1938. Britains Foreign Secretary William Hague called it the biggest crisis in Europe in the 21st century, while NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen spoke about the gravest threat to European security and stability since the end of the Cold War. The Western ire is understandable: no country in the top league has so demonstrably challenged the post-Cold War global order as Russia did with the reunion of Crimea. Even Russias thrashing of George W. Bushs democracy beacon Georgia in 2008 did not cause so much anger because the West was not immediately involved. In Ukraine, Putin thumbed his nose directly at the United States and its European allies. Putin explained in no uncertain terms that his move in Crimea was in response to the Western policy of containment of Russia. We have every reason to assume that the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today. They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner because we have an independent position, because we maintain it and because we call things like they are and do not engage in hypocrisy, Putin said in his keynote speech at a Kremlin ceremony to sign the Crimea reunion treaty on March 18. By orchestrating a replay of the 2004 colour revolution in Ukraine, the West had crossed the line, Putin said. There is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line. Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. Putin stated clearly that in Ukraine, Russia not only defended its vital interests but stood up against what the NATO chief called the rule book the alliance members have spent decades to build. Our Western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle If you are not with us, you are against us. To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions from international organisations, and if for some reason this does not work, they simply ignore the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. overall. The West has rebuffed Russias attempts to strengthen the level of trust and to build equal, open and fair relations, Putin said. On the contrary, they have lied to
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us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATOs expansion to the East as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders, the Russian leader recalled. It happened with the deployment of a missile defence system. In spite of all our apprehensions, the project is working and moving forward. It happened with the endless foot-dragging in the talks on visa issues, promises of fair competition and free access to global markets. The current crisis is not only about Ukraine. However, the outcome of the East-West standoff in Ukraine may be crucial for deciding the success or failure of Russias new policy of deance. Crimeas takeover has solved the problem of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which Ukraines new leaders had vowed to drive out of Sevastopol and for which there is no other basing location that does not freeze in winter. Russia has thus consolidated a strategic grip on the region and the ability to project its naval and air power to the Mediterranean and beyond. But the battle for Ukraine still lies ahead. Putins key demands are that Ukraine remain neutral and switch from a unitary to a federal state structure. This would give the countrys pro-Russian south-east regions veto
power over Kievs key foreign policy decisions, such as membership in NATO, and keep Ukraine in the Russian orbit. Crimea was Putins trump card and he has played it. He has a mandate from the Russian Parliament to intervene militarily in Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians, but sending troops into mainland Ukraine is not a feasible option as this would involve military confrontation with serious international complications which Russia avoided in Crimea. Putin has other instruments of leverage to push through the federalisation agenda. Moscow has made it clear that it is ready to apply economic pressure. It has already suspended the disbursement of a $15-billion aid package it had extended to the Viktor Yanukovich government and has threatened to scrap the hefty price discounts on its gas supplies to Ukraine. This would
nearly double the price of Russian gas for Ukraine, putting a crippling burden on households and industry. The U.S. and the European Union have promised Ukraine nancial assistance but Russia believes that the West will not be willing to bear the enormous cost of bailing out Ukraines near-bankrupt economy and will eventually ask Russia to step in. Putins main card at this stage is Ukraines Russian-
speaking regions. Crimeas rebellion against the coup in Kiev has inspired Russian speakers in the east and south of Ukraine to demand greater autonomy from the central government. The rise of Far-Right and neo-Nazi groups in western Ukraine, who spearheaded deadly clashes with the police during the Kiev protests, widened the chasm between Ukraines Russian-speaking south-east and nationalist west. Thousands of people in Ukraines
Russia had no other option

RUSSIAS Ambassador to India, Alexander M. Kadakin, spoke to Frontline on the question of Crimean accession and related issues. Kadakin is a scholar in Indian studies, who rst came to the country as a young diplomat in the early 1970s. He is the senior-most serving Ambassador in the Russian Foreign Service. He has the rare distinction of having held the position twice in India. Excerpts from the interview: What was the rationale for Crimeas accession to Russia? The most important, of course, was the will of the local people, which was very clearly expressed in the referendum of March 16. The will of the people was the guiding beacon for the Russian authorities. Apart from that, there were forces in Kiev which had accelerated the process in Crimea. The rst thing the so-called new government in Kiev did was to pass a decree abolishing Russian as an official language instead of focussing on economic recovery. They rectied it later but it was a bad mistake on their part. It immediately alienated Crimeans and hastened the process [of accession]. But, apart from all that, the Crimean situation is different from similar cases around the world. First and foremost, in 1954, Khrushchev whimsically decided to gift Crimea to Ukraine, where he was once the Communist Party chief. Never before had Crimea been with Ukraine. The Russian empire had fought three major wars with the Turks for Crimea and it was only during the time of Catherine the Great that complete possession of Crimea took place. In Ukraine now, very radical ultra-nationalist elements have entered the government who, unfortunately, are ruling that satanic bowl. They are from western Ukraine, which was never originally part of that country. And Crimeans thought that with these forces having the upper hand in government, the lakhs of Russian lives laid down for Crimea would go in vain.
More than one million Russians perished in the three wars. One hundred and fty thousand Russians are buried in a cemetery in Sevastopol. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been complete neglect on the part of Kiev about the needs and requirements of the Crimean people. Worldfamous resorts there have fallen into ruin. Kiev was more preoccupied with its internal political struggles. How important is the port of Sevastopol for Russia? Even before 1954, Sevastopol had a special status as the base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. It was always subordinate throughout its history to the central government in Moscow. What about the impact of the sanctions on Russia? Inconsequential. The world has changed. There is much more interdependency now. Russia has always been and continues to be against any kind of sanctions. We never joined the West-led sanctions against India in 1998, which is somewhat forgotten these days. Against the background of globalisation, any sanctions will boomerang. Europeans are not united on the issue. The German Chancellor has said that they do not want to have an economic war with Russia. President Obama has described Russia as a mere regional power. Only God can judge whether Russia is a regional or a superpower, and the American President is not God. What would you call a country that has the capacity to destroy the planet a thousand times? Russia was suspended from the G8 and there was a call by the Australian Prime Minister to keep Putin out of the G20 summit. Their discourteous language about Russian membership in the G8 and the G20 was unwarranted. If the G8 has done its job, so be it, but it is not up to any G20 member to either expel or not invite another member state. We are not bound to those formats and do not consider it a badge of honour. The G8 is just a gentlemans club with no conse-
SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA
main industrial centres of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Lugansk have demonstrated in support of their demand to hold local referendums on a new power-sharing arrangement. With Kiev categorically opposed to reform, proRussian activists in eastern Ukraine have been setting up armed militias, vowing to resist pressure from the illegitimate government in Kiev. This has raised the spectre of a civil conict that can lead to the break-up of Ukraine.
Is Russia happy with the response of the BRICS nations and the result of the U.N. vote on Crimea? The response of the BRICS countries was constructive and well-balanced. We value the position they took. The outcome of the U.N. General Assembly vote was absolutely balanced. The vote has shown that there is a great force emerging now, which rejects the policies of a unipolar world. It reminds me of the golden days of the Non-Aligned Movement. Is Russia not unhappy with India and China for abstaining from the U.N. vote? Not at all. President Putin in his Kremlin speech after the incorporation of Crimea emphatically thanked the Indian and Chinese governments for their far-sighted and objective position. He also singled out India for its constructive approach. Is the continued expansion of NATO a concern? Unfortunately, double standards and deceit have always been the guiding principles of our partners. They had given assurances to the Soviet Union and Russia that they would not move to our borders. Now Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic republics that were part of the USSR are members of NATO. Then what are their promises worth? Not even a paisa. There was betrayal even in Ukraine. Yes. What was the value of the agreement the three Foreign Ministers signed in Kiev? One day Yanukovich was very much at the helm and the next day the agreement was discarded like toilet paper by the West. The West has been using the pretext of a Russian military build-up on the Ukraine border to ratchet up the tensions. We do have to protect Russia from the instability in the neighbouring countries and even fraternal countries. Look what happened yesterday in Kiev. Those bandits stormed the Parliament building. Putin had clearly stated that he did not want any fragmentation of Ukraine. He said that he wanted a prosperous and stable Ukraine. Chaos in Ukraine is not in Russias national interest. John Cherian
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YURIY LASHOV/AFP
quence. The G20 is denitely more important.
P E OP LE QUE UE UP to get their Russian passports in the Crimean capital of Simferopol on March 24.
Moscow hopes to persuade the Western backers of the new government in Kiev that federalisation of Ukraine is the only way to keep it from falling apart. Despite their tough rhetoric, the U.S. and the E.U. have so far refrained from slapping biting economic sanctions against Russia that would inevitably have a crippling blowback effect on Europes struggling economy. The assets-freeze of select Russian individuals is likely to misre since Putin ordered all government officials last year to close their bank accounts and sell off properties abroad. If and when wider economic sanctions come, Russians appear to be solidly lined behind their leader. A March poll found that more than 90 per cent of respondents supported Crimeas reunion with Russia. Western efforts at international isolation of Russia have had limited effect. Russia has shrugged off its suspension from the G8, pointing out that the group has been losing its relevance anyway. China, India and other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) partners have refused to join the Western campaign to condemn Russia. In his March 18 speech, Putin thanked India and China for their stance on the Ukraine crisis. Even as G7 leaders announced their boycott of Russia at a meeting at The Hague on the sidelines of a nuclear security conference on March 25, the BRICS Foreign Ministers, meeting in the same venue, denounced the use of sanctions and hostile language and rejected Australias threats to block Russia from attending a G20 summit in Brisbane later this year. The Ukraine crisis has prompted fears of a new Cold War between Russia and the West. However, in Putins calculus, this is an unlikely scenario. Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is deeply integrated into the world economy. It is the E.Us third-largest trading partner and Russian oil and gas supplies meet 80 per cent of Europes energy needs. The U.S. needs Russias cooperation on Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. Putting too much pressure on Russia would push it
AT THE RED S Q UA R E in Moscow
on March 18, people celebrate the incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation.
closer to China. Russia would step up defence supplies to China and reorient its energy exports from Europe to the East. During Putins upcoming visit to China in May, the two countries are expected to nalise a contract for the sale of Russias latest Su-35 ghter jets and a long-pending deal for Russian gas exports to China. China would be only too happy to strategically bind Russia to itself, said Fyodor Lukyanov, Chairman of Russias authoritative Council for Foreign and Defence Policy. China is calculating that by the 2020s, when the strategic rivalry with the U.S. is likely to take on a new military-political dimension, Russia will have no slack to play with and will have to side with its Asian neighbour, he said. Japan, Chinas main competitor for Russian natural resources, has refused to cancel ambitious investment plans in Russia. On the day Russias apex court endorsed the Crimea reunication treaty, a major Russia-Japan investment forum opened in Tokyo, attended by 1,000 businessmen. India may also benet from Russias pivot to the East. Russias First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov has said that Moscows top priority in the post-Ukraine scenario is to nd new partners and those who look kindly for our attention, and we need to turn to them and discover opportunities to sell our goods. Igor Sechin, Putins trusted lieutenant and head of Rosneft, Russias largest oil company, visited India in the last week of March to offer the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) 10 offshore oil and gas blocks in the Barents Sea and in the Black Sea. India is a very important country for Russia. We want to expand our cooperation, Sechin told PTI. We are (also) looking at supplying crude oil to Indian reneries. Putins long-term policy is not to reignite East-West confrontation but to make the West see the realities: the
post-Cold War unipolar system has collapsed and world powers need to agree on new rules of the game. Back in the era of George Bush Sr, the U.S. ignored Putins idea of building a new global security architecture from Vancouver to Vladivostok. In his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin returned to the idea: I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security. In the wake of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Russias then President Dmitry Medvedev proposed a draft European security treaty that would address territorial disputes and renounce the use of force. The West turned a deaf ear again. With his move in Ukraine, Putin has screamed to the West: either we sit down and write a new rule book or the world sinks into free-for-all chaos. Russia has started a very big game. The risks are great, but the possible gains are enormous as well, analyst Lukyanov said. The old world order has almost stopped functioning and a new one is about to take shape. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the rst to speak about the need for a new world order in 1986, failed to build it. Vladimir Putin is returning to the crossroads to make a new attempt. Early reactions from the West are not very encouraging for Russia. On March 21, the E.U. signed the political part of an association and free trade accord with Ukraine which commits Kiev to the same deal that former President Yanukovich refused to sign last November and which led to his overthrow. The political accord binds Ukraine to Europes defence and security policy, while the free trade pact, to be signed later this year, would prohibit Ukraine from joining the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. Is the West back at its old game of containing Russia?
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DMITRY SEREBRYAKOV/AFP
COVER STORY
The Great Game in Europe

In its eagerness to complete the encirclement of Russia by turning Ukraine into a forward country for positioning NATO bases, the U.S. is paving the way for fraternal genocide and ethnic cleansing. A closer strategic alliance between Russia and China may well be the one positive outcome of the Ukrainian asco. B Y A I J A Z A H M A D
A P OS T E R with a Nazi swastika printed on a Russian ag and reading The colours of the occupiers in Independence
Square in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, on March 12.

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YURY KIRNICHNY/AFP
In 1919. Lenin gave her several Russian provinces to assuage her feelings. These provinces have never historically belonged to Ukraine. I am talking about the eastern and southern territories of todays Ukraine.. Then, in 1954, Khrushchev, with the arbitrariness of a satrap, made a gift of the Crimea to Ukraine.. As a result of the sudden and crude fragmentation of the intermingled Slavic people, the borders have torn apart millions of ties of family and friendship. Is this acceptable? I am myself nearly half Ukrainian, I grew up with the sounds of Ukrainian speech. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian Nobel laureate, in an interview on May 9, 1994. I sometimes get the feeling that somewhere across that huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing. Vladimir Putin, Russian President, March 4, 2014 ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN WAS A LEGENDary anti-communist, the man who successfully injected the word Gulag into an intercontinental vocabulary for discussions of the Stalin period, the novelist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature as part of the Swedish Academys anti-Soviet drive but whose literary merit, like that of Boris Pasternak, was acknowledged even by Georg Lukacs, the great Marxist philosopher and literary critic. In the passage quoted here from his interview given in 1994, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he expresses a double regret: that while Ukraine was still a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), its territory was wrongfully enlarged by awarding it large chunks of Russian territory and Russian-speaking population; and that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union precipitated an unwarranted territorial break-up of the Union between Russia and Ukraine (sudden and crude fragmentation of the intermingled Slavic people so that borders have torn apart millions of ties of family and friendship, in his words). After the recent referendum in the Crimean peninsula and its reintegration into Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian leader who initiated the dismantling of the Soviet system, expressed a similar view. A historic wrong has been corrected, he said. We shall return to these issues of the intermingling of the Slavic people and the fragmentation of borders and peoples with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Suffice it to say for now that the United States-sponsored EuroNazi coup in Kiev in February 2014 and, in response, the reintegration of the Crimean peninsula into Russia in March signify something of a turning point, a watershed event, in the post-Soviet era. Let me begin by listing some of the salient aspects of this novel development and then offer extended comments on some of these aspects: 1. Quick on the heels of President Barack Obamas
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much-brandished Asian pivot, with the express intent of tightening the noose around China, has come a spectacular and violent turn in Americas European pivot, with the even more urgent intent of completing the encirclement of Russia and of abolishing the one, crucial buffer that was still left between Russia and the dogged advance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisations (NATO) network of bases into territories that were formerly part of the Warsaw Pact and, in some cases, of the Soviet Union itself. 2. Samuel Huntingtons famous Clash of Civilisations thesis, highly inuential in Washingtonian circles, draws a sharp civilisational line between what he calls Western Christianity (Catholics and Protestants of Western Europe) and Eastern Christianity (the Orthodox churches, Russian, Greek, Levantine). Ukraine is a borderland shared by the two, as was the Serbo-Croatian region in the former Yugoslavia. We know how Croatia with its Catholic majority was encouraged to break the union with the predominantly Orthodox Serbia, with murderous, even genocidal consequences all around. In attempting to turn Ukraine into a forward country for
C HI N E S E P R E S I D E N T HU J I N TAO (right) ushers Russian President Vladimir Putin to the welcoming ceremony of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 5, 2012.
REUTERS
positioning of NATO bases against Russia, the U.S. is paving the way, wittingly or unwittingly, for potentially that same kind of fraternal genocide and ethnic cleansing. They once put together an international jehadi army in Afghanistan for the containment of communism; the consequences of that are still with us, across the globe. What happens when the equivalent of an Afghanistan is staged in a major country that is geographically at the junction of East and West inside Europe. 3. The Ukranian economy isand has beenin dire straits. According to Moodys rating agency, the country will need $24 billion to cover its budget decit, debt repayment, natural gas bills and pension supports just in 2014. Over the past two decades, the Russian subsidy for Ukraines oil and gas purchases has amounted to about $200 billion, in addition to other kinds of loans and nancial support that Russia has offered, essentially to safeguard Ukraines neutrality as well as to help the one country in its immediate neighbourhood with which Russia is linked most closely by history, language, ethnicity and emotional bonds of various kinds. The West is
P R O- R US S I AN D E M ON S TR A TOR S clash with Maidan
supporters as they storm the regional government building in Kharkiv on March 1. Some 20,000 people joined the protest against Kievs new pro-West government after the ouster of the Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovich, and later around 300 people launched the assault on the government building. offering little driblets of money and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans if Ukraine agrees to the kind of austerity that has been imposed on Latvia, Slovenia, Greece, and others. In Latvia, IMF-imposed austerity meant that 10 per cent of the population, including much of its professional personnel, left the tiny country and became economic refugees in other countries. Without Russian generosity, the Ukrainian economy will be in ruins. IMF-imposed austerity on a ruined economy and NATO-propelled militarisation for eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Russian power is just the kind of combustible combination that may well lead to a civil war, a regional war, and heaven knows what elsein a
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and which currently control the security apparatus of the statewith the overt patronage of the U.S. and the full consent of the European Union (E.U.). 5. This neo-Nazi march into the highest offices of a major European country, with the full backing of all the Western countries, is bound to serve as a heady elixir for other parties of the fascist vintage across Europe. Conversely, this use of the Nazi-led coup in the encirclement of Russia is a qualitatively new stage in American democracy promotion through forces of the Far Right. We have known the good jehadis in the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan; the good narco-terrorist militias in subverting El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Latin American Left more generally; the good Al Qaeda unleashed in Syria, and so on. Now, we have the good Nazison European soil itself. 6. While Crimea was still a part of Ukraine, Russian was the rst language for roughly half the population of Ukraine. With Crimea gone, they still comprise over a third of the population, which is largely concentrated in the eastern and southern zones. The extreme hatred of all things Russianthe language, the culture, the peoplethat continues to emanate from the new rulers of Kiev means that a third or more of the population now lives in mortal fear and may even be thinking of exercising the Crimean option, that is, opt out of Ukraine itself either peacefully, through a referendum, or through ethnic strife and civil warunless the U.S. steps back, reshuffles its Ukrainian clients and opts for a radical constitutional reform that turns Ukraine into a loose federation with substantive and extensive powers vested in the regional governments. Even that will not be enough. Ukraine needs massive economic rescue. Russia has paid most of the bills so far. Going from that into the full embrace of the IMF and Western nance is likely to create a level of economic distress that may well snap social and inter-regional bonds.
TWO WESTERN LIES
country where 70 per cent in a recent Gallup poll voted against joining NATO. (In another poll about the same time, 56 per cent said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster.)
GOOD NAZIS, BAD NAZIS
SERGEY BOBOK/AFP
4. It is no longer fashionable to call oneself a nazi or a fascist. Since they are so much a part of Europes political landscape, they now call themselves nationalists, and the media obliges them by referring to them as right-wing nationalists, extremists, xenophobes, and so on. However, as the saying goes, a rose by any other name is still a rose. Descendants of fascists have been used extensively in the formation of governments in a number of post-socialist states such as Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia. Parties of fascist vintage also have a major presence in some West European countries, including France, Austria and Denmark. However, Ukraine is the rst European country to now have in its government at least three distinct political groupings which openly identify themselves with the Nazi heritage
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7. Paul Craig Roberts, who served as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan, is so appalled by the Western medias willingness to routinely repeat the lies told by Western leaders that he has taken to refer to them as presstitute media. We are now faced with two momentous lies, told by the U.S. government and repeated ad nauseum by every media outlet, from cheap tabloids to The Guardian, the prestigious British newspaper, and from Fox News to the supposedly Left-liberal Bill Maher on U.S. television. The rst lie is that the new government in Kiev has been taken over not through a coup but through a constitutional procedure. The second lie is that Russia invaded Crimea and the referendum there was unconstitutional, manipulated, and so on. We shall come to the facts later. The point here is that these two lies lead then to the hysterical demands that sanctions must be imposed on Russia and that President Vladimir Putin must be held personally responsible and punished. 8. Putin is no angel but it is also the case that no
Russian leader since Joseph Stalin, istic chauvinisms that do not have whether communist or anti-commurecourse to past grandeurs on the nist, has been vilied as vociferously as scale of Russia, Turkey or India. It he. We shall come to the issue of sancwas therecopiously, shamefullytions later, at some length, when we in the Czarist upper class; it got discuss the economics of it all. Briey, repudiated by the Bolsheviks, who our belief is that no serious, far-reacupheld the proletarian, the peasant hing, substantive sanctions of the sort and the pleb, always as deant tothat may in fact hurt the Russian ward the European capitalist core as economy decisively are possible withthat core was contemptuous of them, out doing extensive damage to Westnot just politically but also culturern economies and the world economy ally; and, as a new kind of Russian in general; Russia is too big an ecoclass was just striving to emerge, the nomic power now, and there is far too rst signal of the counter-revolution much interpenetration between the that this particular author picked up Russian and E.U. economiesthe was when Gorbachev started pratGerman economy in particularfor tling on about our common EuropeY U LI A T Y M O S HE N KO. The the U.S. to be able to impose serious an home. That is the problem with former Ukrainian Prime Minister economic sanctions. Putin. He still talks too much of our became a leader of the 9. Lacking that leverage, what is American and European partners. movement to overthrow the the likely U.S. line of action? Two Delusions of the 19th century Ruselected government. things are likely. One, the lie that sian bourgeoisie haunt him. there was a Russian invasion of Cri12. But what happens when the mea (thus of Ukraine) shall be used to portray Russia as a Americans decide to teach him a bitter lesson, tell him militarily belligerent menace to its neighbours and, that he is not one of them, threaten to send him to the therefore, to dramatically increase the U.S. military pres- gallows for the crime of insubordination. Will he wake up ence and power not only in the European states and to the fact that he may be a European, personally, but statelets close to Russia but also in the so-called -stans most of Russia really is not and that it is in fact selfin Central Asia that were once part of the Soviet Union. divided between histories and cultures of St Petersburg Additional advantage of the latter is that those -stans are and Vladivostok? Spurned by the G8, as the grouping also close to China. petulantly redenes itself as G7, and supported on the 10. The second move, legitimised for the people of the question of Russias membership of the G20 by the Western democracies by the representation of Putin as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) the latest of the sinister gures ranging from Adolf Hitler countries and the Non-Aligned Movement, more generand Stalin to Ayotollah Khomeini/Saddam Hussein/ ally, might he not recall the Shanghai Cooperation OrgaMuammar Qadda/Bashar al-Assad, would be to launch nisation? The Russian bourgeoisie has steadfastly kept internal subversion in Russia in the shape of a colour its face turned towards the West even as the West ignored revolution for democracy and against dictatorship or slapped that face. Now, slapped hard by a declining and corruption. Watch for social movements in the and desperate imperialism, but ush with oil and gas, streets of Moscow as nuclear warheads get moved into leading not a prostrate but a newly prosperous Russia, Poland, Romania and (who knows) Ukraine. sharing a virtually interminable border with a China that 11. Russia suffers from an unresolved conict in the commands immense resource of cash but is dreadfully cultural history of its dominant elitesa schizophrenia exposed to the machinations of those who control the that should be much too familiar to us here in India. global markets in energy resources (not the least through Russians tend to be inordinately proud, almost mystical- petrodollars), might Putin, the Euro-Russian bourgeois, ly so, of the antique traditions of their church, their Slavic turn East? Decisively? Strategically? uniqueness, the vastness of their lands, the distinguished history of their cities, their medieval arts, their unity in P R A I S E F O R C H I N A A N D I N D I A diversity, and so forth. At the same time, centred as all 13. In his historic address to the Russian Duma on March this pride is in the European parts of Russia, they agonise 18, Putin chose his words carefully: We are grateful to over not being European enough, there being just too the people of China, whose leaders have always considmuch Asia/East in them as a totality, aching to be Eu- ered the situation in Ukraine and Crimea taking into ropeans like the French. They wish to be accepted as they account the full historical and political context, and are and, at the same time, mistaken for being Parisians. greatly appreciate Indias reserve and objectivity. FulThis is a characteristic of great many nationalisms out- some praise for China, great appreciation for Indias side the core countries of advanced capitalismthe dis- reserve. He thanked none other. Russia and China have ease of feeling superior because you feel inferior; the sort already agreed on hugely well-funded supply lines for of thing that goes from Kemalism and Nehruvianism at Russian energy to Chinese hubs. Putin is visiting China in the grandest level to the pettiest kind of ethno-national- May. The U.S. appears to be full of bluster after putting in
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power an alliance of meek IMF-oriented clients and unruly, mutually feuding neo-Nazis, but faced with decisive action by the Crimean populace as well as the Russian government, the U.S. also seems to be at a loss as to how to proceed. This indecision is compounded by the fact that European governments, pliant as ever, are nonetheless afraid of what Russia (only if backed by China, silently) might do to them if they go too far. Six hundred German companies doing business in Russia, with tens of billions of dollars at stake and, therefore, breathing down her neck, Chancellor Angela Merkel wonders while the rest of Europe holds its breath, waiting for her to speak. 14. An alliance between Russia and China is a fatality for the American empire that is waiting to happen; Russia has the worlds largest pool of energy resources, China has the largest pool of cash to play any sort of market, for commodity or nance. Unlike the Americans, the Chinese seem to prefer investing over speculation. American arrogance might make this marriage between energy resources and nance in contiguous countries happen quicker than it might otherwise. The bizarre irony of it all is that both of them, Russia and China, have offered themselves as abject junior partners time and again, and it is the U.S. that is unwilling to grant either of them the place that is rightfully theirs. Which is predictable. For the rising power it is safer to grow in the shadow of the declining one, until a point is reached when the balance between the declining and the rising powers shifts. But the declining power knows this too. Hence, the enhanced U.S. aggression towards both. A closer strategic alliance between Russia and China may well be the one positive outcome of the Ukranian asco. 15. With the predominance of its economic power in relative decline, the U.S. nevertheless commands a military machine and a global empire of military bases that the combined power of the next 10 most powerful countries cannot match. Hence, the propensity to seek solutions through credible military pressure and frequent exercise of military power. Part of the reason behind the war on Syria was the bid to deprive Russia of its naval facility in Tartus. Part of the impetus to stage a dramatic coup in Kiev and pull Ukraine swiftly into NATO was to grab the Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimean coastthe birthplace of Russias Black Sea Fleet, in Putins words (not just the birthplace in fact but a permanent home of that eet for close to 300 years). This kind of American military belligerence is likely to continue. 16. With the controversial and ecologically disastrous technologies of hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking) ready to be used in exploitation of coalbed gas deposits and for production of shale oil over vast expanses in Canada and the American Midwest, the U.S. hopes to soon become the worlds leading energy producer, competing with and, perhaps, bypassing Russia, Saudi Arabia and other energy-rich counties. If the E.U.s energy dependence on Russia turns out to be the main impediment blocking E.U.s full compliance with U.S. military designs, the U.S. can offer to make up for the shortfall by
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releasing sizable quantities of oil and gas from its own strategic reserves in the short run and, for the long run, dangle the fruits of fracking in front of the energy-hungry European states. Making a serious dent in Russias energy exports and incomes and securing European markets for its own envisioned shale oil and gas production is very much a part of the U.S. bid to bring the Great Game into Europe itself.
UKRAINE, CRIMEA, RUSSIA: CHEQUERED HISTORIES
Four lines into his March 18 address to the Duma, Putin said: This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptised. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The graves of Russian soldiers whose bravery brought Crimea into the Russian empire are also in Crimea. This is also Sevastopol, a legendary city with an outstanding history, a fortress that serves as the birthplace of Russias Black Sea Fleet. Then, towards the end of the speech, he added: Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other. The intensity of the sentiment and the sense of a common history (of the intermingled Slavic peoples) is the same as the one encountered in the words of Solzhenitsyn at the beginning of this article. We might regard all this as part of an expansive Russian national-chauvinism (even though Solzhenitsyn identies himself as nearly half Ukranian). So, we might turn to an American scholar, Gary Leupp, Professor of History at Tufts University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. Appalled by the ignorance and arrogance of the Washingotonian establishment, he writes: Why, many Russians must think, is the West so intent on incorporating Ukraine, fountainhead of Russian culture, into the Western zone? Dont they know that the Russian state traces its origins to Kievan Rus in the early ninth century, before there was a Russia or Ukraine? Dont they know that Ukraine only emerged as a state after the Mongol invasions, and then as a satrapy of Poland, before joining Russia in 1654 by the Treaty of Pereyaslav? And then not as an independent kingdom but as a Russian principality? Dont they realise that that Russian principality of Ukraine for over two centuries was centred in the region west of the Dnieper river, and that the Russian-speaking eastern section was only added after the Bolshevik Revolution, with the inception of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic? And that the Crimean Peninsula had been Russian territory since 1783, until 1954 when it was turned over, perhaps foolishly and capriciously, to Ukraine? Dont they care about Babi Yar? Do they even know what this was? No doubt they dont. Brand new territorial states try to give the impression that their origins go deep into a remote historical past. In reality, Ukraine as a separate, independent state came into being for the rst time only about 20 years ago, and
that too messily, resulting neither from a lasting independence movement nor even a referendum but out of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, encompassing the enlarged territories bestowed upon it by the leaders in Moscow. Even after the recent departure of Crimea from this newly minted state, ethnic Russians account for roughly 45 per cent of the population in the remaining eastern provinces. The Ukranian elite itself likes to speak Russian as the Czarist aristocracy of Saint Petersburg spoke French as the language of high culture. We might illustrate the point with reference to the bizarre personality of Yulia Tymoshenko. Yulia Tymoshenko is a former Prime Minister who was sentenced to a prison term by the Ukrainian courts on charges of massive corruption, and at the height of the recent mass demonstrations, she was released thanks to U.S. pressure, became a leader of the movement to overthrow the elected government and is now manoeuvring to regain her position as Prime Minister. Her persona is that of a militant Ukrainian nationalist, and in public, she speaks only in Ukrainian. A phone conversation of Yulia Tymoshenko with Ukrainian Member of Parliament and former government official Nestor Shufrych was leaked on YouTube recently in which she is recorded as saying, among other things: One has to take up arms and go wipe out these damn katsaps together with their leader, (meaning Putin; katsaps is the Ukrainian abuse word for Russians). She also said, I am hoping that I will use all my connections and will get the whole world to rise up so that not even scorched earth would be left of Russia. According to AFP, Discussing the fate of Ukraines eight million ethnic Russians with Shufrych, Yulia Tymoshenko was also heard as saying that they should be nuked. Faced with the recording of her own voice, she acknowledged the conversation but claimed that the objectionable pronouncements have all been injected into her speech by Russian intelligence. The signicant fact is that all this anti-Russian venom is delivered not in the Ukranian language but in impeccable Russian. Towards the end of the passage we have quoted above, Professor Leupp refers to Babi Yar as an illustration of those crucial aspects of a shared Russian/Ukrainian historynot in the remote past but in mid-20th centurythat are seared into the memory of modern Russians. What iswasBabi Yar (aside from serving as the title of Yevgeny Yevtushenkos famous poem? The opening passage of the Wikipedia entry on Babi Yar runs as follows: Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by the Nazis during their campaign against the Soviet Union. The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 2930, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation. The massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and is considered to be the largest single massacre in the history of the
Holocaust to that particular date. Victims of other massacres at the site included thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, communists, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists and civilian hostages. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 lives were taken at Babi Yar during the German occupation. Admirers of those German occupiers now hold key posts in Kiev, not far from that ravine, after the recent coup.
QUESTION OF FASCISM
Susan Rice, the U.S. National Security Adviser, claims that the allegation of fascism is a red herring trumped up by opponents of the revolution in Kiev. It is best, therefore, to recall certain basic facts. The phenomenon is actually far wider but the two major organisations of fascist vintage are the Svoboda (Freedom) party and Praviya Secktor (Right Sector). Svoboda was founded in 1991 and was originally called National-Social in memory of the official name of the Nazis, National Socialist German Workers Party. It claimed to be a successor to the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) founded in 1929 by Stephen Bandera, a man of many parts who was later jailed by the Nazis themselves, but before the falling out, Bandera had received large sums of money from them and had raised two battalions for them to ght against the Soviet troops; according to the Simon Weisenthal Centre, a think tank that documents details of the Jewish Holocaust, one of Banderas battalions is known to have rounded up 4,000 Jews for the Nazis in Liviv in July 1941. In celebrating the memory of his heroes in the OUN, Svoboda party leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has said: They did not fear but took up their automatic ries, going into the woods to ght Muscovites, Germans, Jewry and other lth and he calls upon his own followers to liberate Ukraine from the Muscovite-Jewish maa. As late as 2010, the official Svoboda website read (in part): To create a truly Ukrainian Ukraine in the cities of the East and South, only one lustration will not be enough, we will need to cancel parliamentarism, ban all political parties, nationalise the entire industry, all media, prohibit the importation of any literature to Ukraine from Russia completely replace the leaders of the civil service, education management, military (especially in the East), physically liquidate all Russian-speaking intellectuals and all Ukrainophobes (fast, without a trial shot. Registering Ukrainophobes can be done here by any member of Svoboda), execute all members of the antiUkrainian political parties When Svoboda won 12 per cent of the popular vote and an impressive number of seats in the Ukrainian elections in 2012, the resolution adopted by the European Parliament on December 13, 2012, On the situation in Ukraine, said unambiguously: Parliament is concerned about the rising nationalistic sentiment in Ukraine, expressed in support for the Svoboda party, which, as a result, is one of the two new parties to enter the Verkhovna Rada [Ukraines parliament]; recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic
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A R U S S I A N N A V Y ship enters the harbour of Sevastopol, Crimea, on March 18.
views go against the E.U.s fundamental values and principles and, therefore, appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party. Max Blumenthal, author of the bestseller Republican Gomorrah among other books, gives an account of what he saw during the agitation leading up to the coup: White supremacist banners and Confederate ags were draped inside Kievs occupied City Hall, and demonstrators have hoisted Nazi SS and white power symbols over a toppled memorial to V.I. Lenin. After [Viktor] Yanukovich ed his palatial estate by helicopter, Euromaidan protesters destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died battling German occupation during World War II. Sieg heil salutes and the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol have become an increasingly common sight in Maidan Square, and neo-Nazi forces have established autonomous zones in and around Kiev. In the Ukrainian Parliament, where Svoboda holds an unprecedented 37 seats, Tyahnyboks deputy Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn is fond of quoting Joseph Goebbelshe has even founded a think tank originally called the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center. According to Per Anders Rudling, a leading academic expert on European neo-fascism, the self-described socialist nationalist, Mykhalchyshyn is the main link between Svobodas official wing and neoNazi militias like Right Sector. In a leaked phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria] Nuland revealed her wish for Tyahnybok to remain on the outside, but to consult with the U.S. replacement for Yanukovich, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, four times a week. Before getting elevated to this position, Tyahnybok used to appear at rallies with U.S. Senator John McCain. Members of Svoboda now hold several ministerial posts, including that of Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Defence, and Prosecutor General. Meanwhile, Right Sector,
which criticises Svoboda for being too pacist and provided the most vicious of the storm troopers for the coup that overthrew an elected government through street violence, holds key posts in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible for the police. Between the two, they more or less monopolise the whole of the national security apparatus, that is, the means of violence at the disposal of the Ukrainian statein addition to their own militias (paramilitary training is compulsory for membership in Right Sector.) It is quite possible that the E.U. and the U.S. shall get eventually embarrassed by so overt and dominant a position of fascists and anti-Semites at the helm of a government they have sponsored in a major European country. Some kind of camouage and reshuffle is likely. However, two kinds of mass unrest are also likely in the near future. First, the rampant, loud, vicious anti-Russian hatred among all sections of the new ruling dispensation is likely to cause social unrest in the eastern provinces in particular and, more generally, among ethnic Russians thinly spread even in the western parts. Second, consequences of the IMF-imposed austerity that is so much in the offing will compound the social unrest in unpredictable ways. Democratic institutions in Ukraine are fragile enough, all the so-called liberal political parties are dominated by criminals and oligarchs, and the fascists, having tasted power, are not going to go away so easily. Indeed, as various kinds of social unrest increase, these reorganised fascists may well emerge as the indispensable party of order for liberals of all stripes, Ukrainian, American, Eurolanders. In other words, the Ukraine crisis is still unfolding and it is still too early to judge its eventual contours and consequences, nationally or internationally. In the second part of this article, we shall try to answer a complex question: Are we at the threshold of a new Cold War?
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COVER STORY
U .S. PR E S I D E N T B A R A C K O B A M A and other G7 leaders meet at The Hague on March 24, on the sidelines of the
Nuclear Security Summit, to decide the response to Russias incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation.
U.S. double standards

Crimeas overwhelming vote to rejoin Russia, assailed by the U.S., is of a piece with Kosovos separation from Serbia and Croatias and Slovenias from Yugoslavia, all backed by the West. B Y J O H N C H E R I A N
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN, DESPITE THE loud threats of sanctions and other punitive actions by the West, went along with the wishes of the people of the Crimean peninsula and on March 21 duly signed a treaty incorporating the region into the Russian Federation. The overwhelming vote by the Crimeans in favour of rejoining Russia in the March 16 referendum had left President Putin with no other choice. Putin, in his speech to the Russian Parliament, pointed out that Crimeas referendum was in line with the United Nations Charter, which speaks of the right of nations to self-determination. Putin reminded his Western critics that Ukraine had followed a trajectory similar to Crimeas when it seceded from the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Moreover, the Crimean authorities referred to the well-known Kosovo precedenta precedent our Western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the uni19
lateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the countrys central authorities, Putin said in his speech. Coincidentally, it was 15 years ago that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) launched its 78day war on Yugoslavia, leading to the complete fracturing of the Yugoslav Federation and ultimately the creation of Kosovo in 2008. Before that, in 1991, Croatia and Slovenia had conducted their own referendums on the issue of secession from Yugoslavia. These referendums had the full backing of the West. In January 1992, the European Union recognised the independence of the two states. A similar referendum held against the will of the central government in Belgrade was repeated in Bosnia in 1992. The West was quick to recognise the independence of that state. These events signalled the beginning of the bloody war in the Balkans, which ended with NATO
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military intervention and the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation. Putin highlighted the double standards of the West, led by Washington, saying that they do not adhere to the rule of law but to the rule of the gun, believing in their exclusivity and exceptionalism. They use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle If you are not with us, you are against us.
SUPPORT FOR RUSSIA
VLA D I M I R P UTI N with Crimeas Prime Minister Sergei
Aksyonov (front left), Crimean Parliament Speaker Vladimir Konstantinov (hidden) and Sevastopol Mayor Alexei Chaliy in Moscow on March 18 after signing a treaty on making the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula a part of Russia.
The international community is, therefore, not impressed with the stand of Washington and Brussels that Russia has impinged on the sovereignty of Ukraine. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group, represented by their Foreign Ministers, issued a statement on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit at The Hague in the last week of March that it regretted the use of sanctions as a weapon against Russia. The bloc rejected a move initiated by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to suspend Russia from the G20 summit due to be held later this year in Brisbane on the Crimean issue. Abbott even suggested that Putin be barred from attending the summit. The statement by the BRICS nations is a clear indication that the developing countries have no appetite for the sanctions regime that the West wants to impose on Russia. The escalation of hostile language, sanctions, countersanctions, and force does not contribute to a peaceful
and sustainable solution, according to international law, including the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter, the BRICS statement said. In a pointed criticism of the Australian Premier, the statement said no single member of the G20 can unilaterally take a decision on behalf of the group. Russia has been getting support from Latin American countries like Argentina. Argentine President Christina Fernandez accused the United States and the United Kingdom of having double standards. She compared the referendum in Crimea with that held in the Falklands (the Malvinas), an island over which Argentina has valid claims. The two countries were quick to recognise the results of the referendum in the island, in which the 2,000 residents there voted to stay part of faraway Britain. We demand that when the great powers talk of territorial integrity, that it be applicable to everyone, Christina Fernandez said in a speech in Paris. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai also came out in strong support of Russias action in Crimea. China and India have been more circumspect. The issue of self-determination for disputed territories is a
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delicate issue for both governments. China has to deal with separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang and the question of reunication with Taiwan. For India, the Kashmir issue has been recognised as a territorial dispute by the international community since the early 1950s. Neither country wants Crimea to be a precedent. China abstained in the vote on the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the referendum in Crimea and did not join Russia in vetoing it. U.S. President Barack Obama had a meeting with he Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of The Hague summit and sought to canvass support against Moscow. Xi Jinping, while voicing support for Ukraines sovereignty, refrained from saying anything critical about Russias actions in Crimea. Putin had made it a point to call up Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after the crisis erupted. He publicly thanked India and China for their understanding and support. The new Ukrainian government itself is being viewed as illegitimate, having replaced a duly elected government by using violent means and outside support. The U.S. and the E.U. lent a helping hand in the overthrow of the democratically elected President, and Washington took the lead in condemning Moscow. Obama, in a vitriolic attack in a speech in Brussels, said Russia was challenging truths and added that the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn by force. He even whitewashed previous American military interventions, including those in Kosovo and Iraq.
E.U. RESTRAINT
that could have a signicant impact on the Russian economy. In his landmark speech to the Russian Parliament on March 18 announcing Crimeas incorporation into the Russian Federation, Putin gave an assurance that there would be no further moves to split Ukraine despite the growing clamour in the Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine for breaking away. In the U.S., both Democrat and Republican lawmakers are unhappy with the lukewarm steps most European nations have taken so far against Russia. The E.U. is far from united on the issue of dealing with Russia. Many European leaders realise that a showdown with Moscow at this juncture will have a negative impact on the economic recovery programmes in their countries. Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy and Cyprus will be particularly affected if the economic warfare between the West and Russia escalates. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking after a meeting with his American counterpart John Kerry at The Hague, stressed the need for the new government in Kiev to institute constitutional reforms that would take into consideration the interests of all the Ukrainian regions. According to Lavrov, that is the only way the current political crisis in the country can be resolved. Lavrov had a meeting at The Hague with the newly appointed Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Andrei Deschytsia. This was another strong indication that Moscow was keen to calm the diplomatic waters and that it did not intend to move militarily beyond the Crimean peninsula.
CONTROVERSIAL UKRAINE-E.U. PACT
European leaders have been more restrained in their criticism of Russia. Germany, the most inuential E.U. member, has strong economic and energy ties with Russia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel supported the E.U.s move to cut its long-term dependence on Russian oil and gas supplies. A former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, is however of the view that Russias action in Crimea is completely justiable. Many Russian oligarchs have parked their funds in London, the nancial hub of Europe. The E.U. does ten times as much trade with Russia as the U.S. does. The Obama administrations decision to target a few oligarchs and its plans to impose economic sanctions could hurt European governments more in the long run. Some Russian commentators say Putin will not be unhappy if the nancial clout of the oligarchs, who made their fortunes in the days of Boris Yeltsin, is further diminished. Russia has imposed countersanctions on U.S. and Canadian businessmen and officials. The G7 leaders meeting at The Hague in the last week of March decided unanimously to suspend Russia from the G8. The G8 summit was scheduled to be held in the Russian city of Sochi on the Black Sea coast later this year. The G7 leaders issued a statement condemning what they termed as Russias illegal attempts to annex Crimea in contravention to international law. The G7 leaders warned that they were ready to intensify actions
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But the interim government in Kiev is using the secession of Crimea to forge closer military and economic ties with NATO and the E.U. In the third week of March, the government, which lacks a popular mandate, signed a political association agreement with the E.U. It was President Viktor Yanukovichs decision not to sign such an agreement that led to his being overthrown. Lavrov was of the view that Kiev should have waited for the formation of a popularly elected government before rushing into an agreement with Brussels. One of the rst things the pro-Western leaders now running the government did was to call for the deployment of NATO troops in the country. The government is mobilising its army and has allotted more than $600 million to bolster its military defences. The U.S. and the E.U. are providing the necessary funding for a newly created 60,000-strong National Guard. The leadership of the new force will be under the neo-fascist and right-wing politicians belonging to parties like the Svoboda and the Right Sector. There are already signs of disunity in the interim government. A notorious paramilitary leader of the Right Sector, Oleksandr Muzychko, who had played a leading role in the violent demonstrations in the Maidan, was killed by Ukrainian security forces in late March. The Ukrainian Defence Minister, Ihor Tenyukh, has been removed from his post, to which he was appointed only in
P U TIN C H A I R S A M E E T I N G of his government at his residence outside Moscow on March 19.
February. He has been blamed for the asco faced by Ukrainian military units trapped in their bases in Crimea. In the last week of March, Ukraine withdrew all its remaining troops from Crimea. Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a darling of the West, was caught on tape calling for the annihilation of Russians. She was talking to one her condants after the Crimea and Sevastapol accession treaty was signed. This is really beyond all bounds. It is about time we grab our guns and go kill all katsaps together with their leader, she was heard saying in the phone conversation which has since been uploaded on YouTube. Katsaps is a derogatory Ukrainian word for Russians. For good measure, she added that if she were in power there would be no f*****g way they would get Crimea. Yulia Tymoshenko has not denied that the voice on the tape is hers but has accused Russian intelligence of doctoring it.
NATO-UKRAINE TIES
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has pledged a new partnership with Ukraine after a recent visit to Kiev. The proposed partnership includes development of ties with the Ukrainian military as well as the expansion of joint drills. The NATO chief announced that henceforth NATO would more actively involve Ukraine in its multinational projects regarding the development of military potential. Poland, a NATO member since 2004, has announced plans to form a multinational military brigade that will include Ukraine and Lithuania. There are efforts to draw in Georgia and Azerbaijan into this alliance, which will be a cats paw for NATO. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has threatened to close the Bosphorus Straits for Russian shipping in case there is violence against the Crimean Tatar minority. Turkey, a NATO member, had sent its military to create the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983. Turkey had intervened on the pretext of protecting its compatriots on the island from the Greek Cypriots.
In his speech to the Russian Parliament, Putin underlined the threat posed by the Western military alliance knocking at the countrys doors. NATO remains a military alliance, and we are against a military alliance, and we are having a military alliance making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historical territory. I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit NATO sailors, remarked Putin. Sevastopol on the Black Sea is Russias only all-weather naval base. Obama during his visit to the NATO headquarters in Brussels stressed the need to strengthen the military grouping further in the wake of the recent events in Ukraine. He urged the European nations to contribute more to strengthen NATO. Most European nations had sharply curtailed their military budgets after the end of the Cold War. The U.S. President also referred to the importance of Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which requires member-states to come to each others aid in case of a military attack. The U.S. has worked for a long time to get Ukraine and Georgia to be NATO members. The U.S. has military bases in all NATO member-states that surround Russia. The ongoing effort to expand NATO and the E.U. does not bode well for lasting peace and tranquillity in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Russia has many diplomatic cards to play yet. The U.S. needs Russias help to deal with Iran in the ongoing nuclear talks. Russia is in a position to ease the draconian sanctions regime on Iran by engaging in barter trade that would enable Teheran to sell more of its oil. Russias help will also be needed when American troops start withdrawing from Afghanistan and to deal with the bloody political aftermath the withdrawal is sure to trigger in that country. Russia and the U.S. are also engaged in nding a resolution to the crisis in Syria. Though Obama has said that he does not consider the accession of Crimea to the Russian Union a done deal, Washington will have to reconcile with the facts on the ground and start doing business as usual with Moscow again. Russia, after all, is not the USSR and there is no great ideological divide between the two countries.
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ALEXEY DRUZHININ/AFP
GENERAL ELECTION
A tale of two campaigns

The two major parties are nding the going tough. While the BJP is faced with dissent and revolt by senior leaders who are upset with the growing personality cult, the Congress has trouble convincing its heavyweights to enter the election fray. B Y V E N K I T E S H R A M A K R I S H N A N
MANISH SWARUP/AP R.V. MOORTHY V.V. KRISHNAN ROHIT JAIN PARAS
L .K. A D V A N I , Sushma Swaraj, Murli Manohar Joshi and Jaswant Singh. The current BJP campaign has seen a series of
insults and humiliations heaped upon a number of senior leaders.
THE heat of the campaign often generates witticisms from the grass roots that can sum up a developing situation in a better way than political analysts can. One such witticism that has started doing the rounds in several parts of north India, including in Delhi, the national capital, involves inventing new names for the two main parties in the fray, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP has been renamed the Bharatiya Jagada (tussles) Party in this popular refrain. The Congress was rst the Indian Reluctant Congress and later the Indian Compulsion Congress. Evidently, these witticisms were linked to the situations that developed in the two big parties around the resistance of leaders to contest and then the choice of candidates. The internal tussles in the BJP on the question of nominations reached such a stage that many of its veteran leaders decided to challenge the existing power structure and contest as independents. They include leaders like former Union Minister Jaswant Singh, who held such important portfolios as Finance and External Affairs, and Lalmani Choube, one of the senior-most leaders of the BJP in Bihar.
The decision of these leaders to contest as independents came at the end of a series of insults and humiliations heaped upon a number of leaders, including former Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Sushma Swaraj, by the reigning power centres in the party headed by president Rajnath Singh and prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. While Joshi was denied his favourite Varanasi seat to make way for Modi himself, Advani was made to stick to Gandhinagar in Gujarat though he wanted to shift to Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. Jaswant Singh was denied a seat outright, overlooking his sentimental attachment to his home constituency of Barmer in Rajasthan. Along with these humiliations came the accommodation of persons like B. Sriramulu, the controversial aide of the mining baron Janardhana Reddy of Bellary, in Karnataka and Colonel Sonaram Chaudhary in Barmer in Rajasthan. The latter, who was preferred over Jaswant Singh, had switched to the BJP from the Congress only recently. In Sriramulus case, the opposition of Sushma Swaraj was brushed aside nonchalantly. Her tweets that the denial of a seat to Jaswant Singh was not decided by the
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Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder central election committee were also Singh, Punjab State party president not addressed seriously. Pratap Singh Bajwa, and senior leader Sections of the BJP and even the Ambika Soni. There are indications that larger Sangh Parivar perceive these dethe Congress is cracking the whip on velopments as the by-product of the many other reluctant leaders and forcpersonality-oriented campaign that the ing them to contest. BJP and the National Democratic AlliAmidst all this, the smaller parties ance (NDA) have built around Narenare making their forays into the electodra Modi. The main slogans of the BJP ral eld. These include the Aam Aadmi in this election are Ab ki baar Modi Party (AAP), the Left parties under the Sarkaar (This time Modi government) leadership of the Communist Party of and Har Har Modi (Everybody is MoIndia (Marxist) and the Communist di). The BJP was forced to withdraw this Party of India (CPI), the Mulayam slogan following objections from Hindu Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party seers who saw it as an insult to the Har (S.P.), the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Har Mahadev chant praising Siva. Party (BSP), the Nitish Kumar-led JaPersonality-oriented campaigns nata Dal (United), the Jayalalithaa-led have been witnessed only twice before All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazin the country. The first was in 1980, hagam (AIADMK), the Dravida Munafter the collapse of 1977-79 Janata Parnetra Kazhagam (DMK) led by ty government, when the Congress Karunanidhi, the Mamata Banerjee-led came up with the slogan Indiraji ko Trinamool Congress and the YSR Conbulavo, India bachavo. Then, in 1998, gress led by Jaganmohan Reddy. the BJP sought to advance its case using While all these parties have their Atal Bihari Vajpayees candidature with own areas of inuence, the AAP, as in the slogan Bari, bari, sab ki bari, ab ki the Delhi Assembly elections of Decembari, Atal Bihari. But there is little ber 2013, has unleashed spirited camdoubt that the scale and magnitude of the current Modi campaign is light paigns in different parts of the country. years ahead of the 1980 and 1998 camIt has also been able to grab more media paigns. All this has strengthened the space than other non-Congress, nonfeeling that there is a rising personality BJP parties by striking uncharacteristic cult in the BJP. Such is the strength of political postures. The decision of AAP this perception that even Rashtriya convener Arvind Kejriwal to take on NaSwayamsewak Sangh (RSS) sarsangrendra Modi in Varanasi was one such chalak Mohanrao Bhagwat cautioned move. By all indications, the traction RSS activists at a national meet in Banthat it has generated in the temple town galore that chanting Namo Namo and nearby constituencies is indeed should not be their job. worrying the BJP. The decision of the C O N GRES S LE AD E R S who If this is the uneasy and at-timessaffron party to hastily tie up with the refused to enter the fray: volatile situation in the BJP, the ConApna Dal, an Uttar Pradesh-based re(from top) P. Chidambaram, gress is going through a different kind gional party with a predominantly OBC Manish Tewari and of upheaval. Senior leaders are running Kurmi support base, is perceived as a K.V. Thangkabalu. away from the contest and the partys reaction to the panic. The Apna Dal has top brass, including Congress president pockets of inuence in the AllahabadSonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi, have Varanasi region and can prove to be a valuable electoral had to compel many of them to enter the fray. The ally for the BJP. wisecracks about the Indian National Congress turning Other regional parties such as the Telugu Desam into the Indian Reluctant Congress and then into the party (TDP) and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) Indian Compulsion Congress have their genesis in these are playing multiple games at the same time. Both the convulsions. parties are, so to speak, behaving like political penduThe pressure exerted by leaders such as Sonia Gandhi lums: they are alternately seeking and distancing from an did indeed compel relatively junior leaders such as Sa- alliance with the BJP. The TRS had initially announced chin Pilot to contest the elections, but others, including that it would ally with the Congress but later turned to Ministers P. Chidambaram, Manish Tewari and G.K. the BJP. Later, it was in discussions with the CPI. Clearly, Vasan, as well as former Union Minister K.V. Thang- these are early days yet in the long election process and kabalu, withstood the pressure and refused to face the one will witness many more such somersaults. In the electoral challenge. Other leaders who ultimately suc- meantime, the redenition of the two big parties is also cumbed to the high command diktat include former bound to acquire new dimensions.
M. VEDHAN SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR KAMAL NARANG
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FRONTLINE .
APRIL 18, 2014
GENERAL ELECTION/NORTH
SAFFRON EUPHORIA
In north India, the BJP hopes to strike it rich in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh while its chances are uncertain in Haryana. In Delhi, it will be a tight battle between the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party.
M A DH YA PR A D E S H C H I EF M I N I S T ER Shivraj Singh Chouhan (left) at a rally in Satna.
MADHYA PRADESH
Advantage Shivraj
BY PURNIMA S. TRIPATHI OUR tiranga has three colourssaffron, green and white. We have already seen a Green Revolution, we have also seen a White Revolution. Now it is the time for a saffron revolution, thundered the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, while inaugurating the rst solar power plant of Madhya Pradesh at Neemuch near Indore on February 26. While he was referring to the saffron revolution metaphorically, associating the colour saffron with energy, he might as well have been talking of the political colour of the State. Madhya Pradesh, which saw a saffron wave in November
2013 taking the BJP to power for a third successive time, might see a repeat of the wave that could help the BJP full its dream of capturing power at the Centre. The State leaders of the party did not call it a day after the conclusion of the Assembly elections. The political process was carried forward, Delhi being the destination this time. We intend to better our 2004 performance, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan happily declared at Neemuch. In 2004, the BJP won 25 out of 29 seats and captured 48.13 per cent of the votes. This, however, dipped to 16 in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, and the vote share also went down to 43.45 per cent. The Congress, on the other hand, improved upon its 2004 performance, winning 12 seats with 40.14 per cent of the votes. In 2004 it had won only four seats with 34.07 per cent of the votes. What worked in favour of the Congress in 2009 was not any exceptional leadership charisma but the scare among minorities of having a BJP government
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at the Centre and State simultaneously. This polarised the situation in favour of the Congress. We dont want a Gujarat to be repeated in Madhya Pradesh, said a minority community leader. Though the BJP hopes to improve upon its 2009 performance, the fear factor among the minorities is even greater this time. Muslims are having nightmares about Modi, waking up from their sleep with a start, a Muslim cleric told Frontline recently. This fear, he said, might force them to vote en bloc for the Congress, though complaints against the Congress, too, are many. At least it is the lesser evil, he said. And it is this realisation that makes the Congress smug. Muslims will vote for us lock, stock and barrel. We will do even better than in 2009, said a senior Congress leader from Bhopal. Another thing that may go in favour of the Congress is the resentment brewing within the BJP. The partys senior leaders are being ignored and some candidates are not known gures. All this will go in our favour, said a Congress leader. But given the respective parties performance in the last election, the balance appears heavily tilted in favour of the BJP, which improved upon its performance considerably in the previous Assembly elections. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is extremely popular and people may well vote in order to see him as the next Prime Minister. His low-prole, humble image and his easy accessibility and his pro-people schemes such as the Ladli Laxmi Yojana (under which nancial assistance is given to a family at the birth of a girl child) and Kanyadaan Yojana (mass marriages) for girls from poor families have made him popular across castes and religions. The fact that his Kanyadaan initiative benets Hindu and Muslim girls has won him many supporters. Though Madhya Pradesh lags behind in various key indices of development, people still view him as one who has at least tried and delivered to the best of his ability. In cases where he has not been able to full his promises, he has cleverly shifted the blame to the Centre, claiming that there has not been enough cooperation from the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The popular perception is that a BJP government at the Centre will help the State government perform better. This feeling runs across castes and communities. There has never been a Chief Minister like him. He has shared our joys and sorrows and has not discriminated between Hindus and Muslims. He has helped many poor families marry off their daughters. What more can we ask? said Shaukat Khan of Salamatpur
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village in the Vidisha Lok Sabha constituency. Chouhans overwhelming inuence on the States politics is something which even his rivals grudgingly admit. His own image, his style of working and his comparatively good performance is something which gives the BJP a certain advantage, said a senior Congress leader in Bhopal. What may make the results in Madhya Pradesh crucial is the probability of the BJP falling short of a majority in the next Parliament and Chouhan, who has always been viewed as a rival of Modi, emerging as a consensus candidate for prime ministership. L.K. Advanis preference for him has been well known. Recently, Advani expressed a wish to contest from Bhopal instead of Gandhinagar. Advanis preference for Chouhan was also evident again at a ceremony to inaugurate the linking of the Kshipra river with the Narmada, which was held in Ujjayani near Ujjain on February 25. Praising Chouhans success in getting the project completed in time and in rejuvenating the Kshipra with Narmada waters, Advani spoke of a similar work having been done in Ahmedabad by another Chief Minister who had similarly revived the Sabarmati river there with Narmada waters. The reference to Modi was clear, yet Advani did not pronounce Modis name even once. He went on to say that Chouhan had achieved a miracle. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has so far not made its presence felt in the State. Madhya Pradesh, on the whole, has mostly seen a bipolar contest and that is likely to remain unchanged this time.
CHHATTISGARH
BJP upbeat
BY PURNIMA S. TRIPATHI IN Chhattisgarh, the BJP, buoyed by its victory in the November Assembly elections, is upbeat. Its election slogan is Ek aur ek gyarah (one and one is eleven), implying that the Raman Singh-Narendra Modi combine will sweep all the 11 Lok Sabha seats in the State. With a BJP government ruling the State, the party is trying to sell the promise of faster development if there is a BJP government at the Centre. What we are saying has a basis. We have the Chhattisgarh model to showcase. We can tell people that the sort of development that has taken place in Chhattisgarh will be seen all over India if the BJP comes to power, said Pankaj Jha, the BJPs election management committee member, in Raipur. Signicantly, it is not the Gujarat model of development but the Chhattisgarh model that the party is talking about. In both 2004 and 2009, we won 10 out of 11 seats here. This time we are aiming at winning all the 11 seats, that is why the Ek aur ek gyarah slogan is immediately establishing a connect with the people, said Jha.
Yet, the sailing may not be all that for victory, said a senior Congress smooth for the BJP. The Congress leader from Raipur. According to him, gave the party a tough ght in Novemthe Congress has been a loser in the ber and lost the Assembly elections by Lok Sabha elections for some 15 years, just 0.7 per cent of the votes. If the so the workers seem to be bogged trend continues, the Congress may down by the realisation that the party well win three or four seats, including has nothing to gain or lose. If Jogi or a couple of seats in the crucial tribal Mahant win or lose, it is their personal areas where it won eight of the 12 Asvictory or defeat, not of the party, and sembly seats in November. Senior BJP this realisation seems to be bogging leaders admit in private that it may not down the average party worker, said be an easy election. Despite the Cona senior leader. gress losing all but one seat in 2004 It is, however, surprising that a and 2009, that of Ajit Jogi in Mahasaparty which came so tantalisingly mund, we cannot write it off. Ajit Jogi close to victory barely a few months is back in Mahasamund, and there he ago should appear so demoralised has his own inuence and is likely to now. The Congress won 39 seats while win that seat again, said a senior BJP the BJP formed the government with C H H A T T I S GA R H C HI E F leader. 49 seats in the 90-member Assembly. M I N I S T ER Raman Singh during There are two or three other seats Interestingly, the Congress does have a visit to New Delhi. where the BJP is likely to face a tough a substantial number of votes in ght from the Congress: Korba, for Chhattisgarh: in the 2009 Lok Sabha instance, where former State Congress president Charan elections, it won only one seat but got 37.31 per cent of the Das Mahant is the candidate; and Bilaspur, where Karu- votes. In 2004 also, the Congress won just one seat but na Shukla, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayees 40.16 per cent of the votes. The BJP, on the other hand, niece, is the candidate. Charan Das Mahant was a Union won 10 seats both the times, with 47.78 per cent of the Minister, but last year he was sent to the State to revital- votes in 2004 and 45.03 per cent of the votes in 2009. ise the party after most of the top State Congress leaders The BJPs vote share actually went down in 2009, but the were killed in a naxalite attack. He did manage to put life Congress did not benet from this. back into the Congress, which was evident in the tough The AAP has elded Soni Sori, a tribal schoolteacher ght it gave the BJP. Mahant is inuential in his area and who was jailed on charges of being a naxalite sympais a strong candidate. thiser. How her presence will impact the election reKaruna Shukla switched sides during the Assembly mains to be seen. Besides, the Left parties also have elections after being sidelined in the BJP and cam- decided to contest four seats: Kanker, Bastar, Janjgir paigned for the Congress candidate, Alka Mudaliyar, the Champa and Sarguja. The Communist Party of India widow of the slain Congress leader Uday Mudaliyar, in (CPI) will ght in the rst three while the Communist Rajnandgaon, where Chief Minister Raman Singh was a Part of India (Marxist) will contest in Sarguja. The tribal candidate. The Congress did manage to give the BJP a vote this time will get divided four ways and ultimately scare. end up helping the BJP, feels a veteran CPI leader from With Karuna Shukla herself being a candidate from Chhattisgarh, C.R. Bakshi. Bilaspur now, the BJP there is slightly nervous. These But with Rahul Gandhi taking a personal interest in three-four seats can be tough, we may or may not win the selection of candidates in the State and visiting it them, a BJP leader said. frequently, the Congress may just pull itself together. The Congress, on the other hand, is still to get its act together. After the Assembly election defeat, the RAJASTHAN State president was replaced with senior leader Bhupesh Baghel, but that has not shown any visible effects on Congress work- BY T.K. RAJALAKSHMI ers morale. Having lost THE outcome of the elections to the parliamentary the Assembly elections with such a narrow mar- seats from Rajasthan, to be held in two phases on April 17 gin, it is normal for work- and 24, is not going to be vastly different from the results ers to be demoralised. of the Assembly elections in December 2013. Of the 25 Besides, the leadership too seats, six are reservedfour for the Scheduled Castes and has yet to exhibit that killer two for the Scheduled Tribes. The BJP, which swept the Assembly elections under instinct which is required
BJP all the way
FRONTLINE .
APRIL 18, 2014
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R.V. MOORTHY
the stewardship of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, winning 163 of the 200 seats, is expected to repeat its performance in the Lok Sabha elections, too. This has been more or less the trend in the State, where Assembly results have often mirrored the outcome of the preceding Lok Sabha elections. The additional reason why the BJP will do well is that the Vasundhara Raje government, being relatively new, will face negligible anti-incumbency effect. The Congress, which won 20 seats in 2009 against the BJPs four, is now a demoralised unit and may win about four seats.
CONTROVERSIES GALORE
What is interesting is that despite the overwhelming mood favouring the BJP, the State unit of the party has witnessed intriguing dissension in its ranks, with former Union Minister and MP from Darjeeling Jaswant Singh deciding to contest the Barmer seat as an independent. He was denied the ticket while the official BJP nominee, Colonel (retd) Sona Ram, is actually a former Congress legislator who was defeated by Jaswant Singhs son Manavendra in the recent Assembly elections. Barmer is going to be keenly watched as it will be a three-cornered contest. It is intriguing that in the case of Jaswant Singh, a combination of State and central leaderships apparently essayed a role in denying him the nomination. The reason given was that a Jat candidate was needed; Jaswant Singh is a Rajput. The matter went public with leaders such as Sushma Swaraj expressing her unhappiness over the way things were handled and Arun Jaitley sermonising on how leaders should learn to accept no after being showered with privileges. Needless to add, Jaswant Singh, who had not yet made up his mind to contest, became even more resolute and responded by saying that even a peon has a better place, and is treated in a better way, than the place he had in the BJP. Jaswant Singh, who has represented Jodhpur and Chittorgarh in the past, accused Vasundhara Raje and BJP president Rajnath Singh of betraying him. Barmer is
BJP C A N D I D A T E S A N W A RLA L J A T presents a memento to Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje at a public meeting in Ajmer on March 26.
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the largest parliamentary constituency in the State. All the eight MLAs in this constituency are from the BJP and have sworn their allegiance to Jaswant Singh. While Jaswant Singh quit the BJP, Buta Singh left the Congress to join the BJP and is now the partys nominee for the Jalore (reserved) seat. At Sikar, too, the BJP is facing a problem, with three-time MP and former Rural Development Minister Subhash Maharia deciding to contest as an independent after being denied the ticket, which, on the recommendation of yoga guru Baba Ramdev, went to one Swami Suvidhanand, a political nonentity from Rohtak. All the six BJP legislators in Sikar objected to his nomination. There were violent protests on the day he led his nomination but later the protesters were placated by the Chief Minister. Apparently, two candidates of the BJP, one in Sikar and the other in Alwar, are the unofficial nominees of Baba Ramdev and both of them are from Haryana. Like the BJP nominee, the Congress nominee too is a political greenhorna former bureaucrat with little experience in ghting elections. In fact, Sikar may see a multi-cornered contest with a BJP rebel, a Congress rebel, official party nominees, and four-time MLA of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Amra Ram in the fray. Unlike the other candidates, Amra Ram, who is the president of the All India Kisan Sabha, has a history of leading and participating in successful farmer agitations in the Sikar-Ganganagar area. The other constituency to watch out for is Dausa, where it is a battle between two brothers, both former Directors General of Police (DGPs): Namo Narain Meena, a sitting MP from Tonk-Sawai Madhopur and Minister in the UPA government, is pitted against his younger brother, Harish Meena. Interestingly, Kirori Lal Meena, the sitting MP (independent) from Dausa, wanted his younger brother, Jagmohan Meena, to be given the Congress ticket, which created some resentment in the local unit there. The choice of the Congress nominee for Tonk, cricketer Mohammad Azharuddin, was met with resistance as the party was accused of ignoring the claims of the local unit. At Churu, too, the local Congress unit has been up in arms against the official nominee, calling him an agent of the BJP. The BJP also has its share of celebrity nominees. Olympic medallist Rajyavardhan Rathore will taken on former Pradesh Congress Committee chief and senior All India Congress Committee member C.P. Joshi in Jaipur Rural. Ajmer is another seat to watch out for as here the newly inducted PCC chief and MP Sachin Pilot is pitted against State Cabinet Minister Sanwarlal Jat. In the Assembly elections, the Congress did not win a single seat
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from Ajmer. It was learnt that the BJP was keen to add Ajmer to its kitty and hence elded one of its senior Ministers with a view to woo Jat votes. It has been observed that caste and candidate calculations play a role only to the extent of helping consolidate support in favour of a party that already has an edge. The emphasis on elding family members of discredited Jat candidates in the Assembly elections did not yield any dividends to the Congress, given the strong mood against the party. In Kota, the Congress has renominated its sitting MP, Ijyaraj Singh. Vasundhara Raje, who had a major say in the ticket allocation process, has elded her condant Om Birla from there in the hope of winning back the traditional BJP seat. She was present on the day Birla led his nomination, but said that she did not possess a magic wand to solve all the problems of the State. The opposition has justiably picked up on this statement. In Jhalawar, sitting MP Dushyant Singh, who is the Chief Ministers son, faces former Congress legislator Pramod Jain Bhaya. While Vasundhara Raje has consolidated her position as the undisputed leader of the BJP in the State and may have called the shots as far as ticket distribution is concerned, it is also clear that some veterans in her party, such as Ghanshyam Tiwari, who won from Jaipur with the largest margin, 65,000 votes, in the Assembly elections, are unhappy at being denied a Lok Sabha nomination. In Bharatpur, too, the local BJP unit is unhappy that Digambar Singh, who lost the Assembly elections, has been instrumental in deciding who would get the Lok Sabha nomination for the seat. In what is going to be a largely bipolar contest, the spoils will be unequally distributed between the two main parties, with the advantage going to the BJP. This is because there has been no ostensible reason for people to get enthused by the Congress and the effects of the double anti-incumbency factor that were felt in the Assembly elections will resonate once more. Other political formations, such as the Bahujan Samaj Party, the National Peoples Party and the Rashtriya Loktantrik Morcha, a broad front of non-Congress and non-BJP parties, will play a role but not to the extent of winning seats.
ferring to the BJP having inducted at least eight Congress members on udhaar (loan), viewers were left stupeed. He was referring to the exodus from his own party. While this highlighted the relative political bankruptcy of the BJP, it left no one in doubt about the similarity of the policies and politics practised by the two major parties. While the predominant mood continues to be very much against the establishment in the State and at the Centre, certain developments coupled with the lack of a much-talked-about wave show that the Congress, which had been completely written off earlier, may yet, notwithstanding the defections, be able to weather the storm, albeit to a reduced degree. It is now clear that there are going to be multicornered contests for each of the 10 seats in the State, with the parties vying for a share of the caste pie. Price rise, corruption, unemployment, and widespread insecurity faced by women and Dalits continue to be major issues affecting the incumbent government at the State and the UPA at the Centre, but the division of the electorate may throw up some interesting results, which could have a resonance in the Assembly elections later this year. The Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), which has always been the principal opposition party in the State, is contesting all 10 seats on its own with a little support from the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), a constituent of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal campaigned for the INLD candidate at Hisar, a development that did not go down well with the State unit of the BJP. As pointed out by Frontline (Honour at stake, April 4), the BJP, which was expected to reap much of the benets of anti-incumbency factor, may have miscalculated by having an alliance with the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC), founded by the late Bhajan Lal. In the process, the BJP dumped the INLD, its long-term ally. The BJP is contesting eight seats and the HJC two, Hisar and Sirsa. Predictably, the understanding of the INLD with the
HARYANA
Uncertain race
BY T.K. RAJALAKSHMI THE cliched adage In politics, there are no permanent friends or foes may be apt for Haryana where not only have major switchovers taken place in March, but the political weather seems to have somewhat eased for the ruling Congress. In fact, when Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda declared rather triumphantly on television Tamaasha dekho (watch the fun), while reFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
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CHI E F M I N I S TE R B HUP I N D E R S I N G H HOOD A
with his son and Congress candidate Deepender Singh Hooda at a public meeting in Rohtak on March 21.
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SAD with regard to the Sirsa seat has not gone down well with the BJP. The INLD candidate here is none other than a sitting MLA of the SAD. The Sirsa seat will be one to watch out for as the newly anointed State Congress president, Ashok Tanwar, is pitted in a four-cornered contest there. His main rivals include the candidates of the HJC and the INLD. The HJC candidate is supposed to be a formidable opponent; it is learnt that Tanwar was reluctant to contest from the seat and delayed ling his nomination until the last minute.
REBELLION ACROSS THE BOARD
The prominent Congress leaders who have either joined the BJP or been made nominees include sitting Gurgaon MP Rao Inderjit Singh; Ambala MLA and the right hand man of the Chief Minister, Venod Sharma; two-term Congress MLA and Chief Parliamentary Secretary Dharambir, who is contesting on the BJP ticket from Bhiwani-Mahendargarh against the sitting MP, Shruti Chowdhary; and Sushil Kumar Indora from Sirsa, who is contesting on the HJC ticket. Indora has twice been an INLD MP. He lost in the 2004 elections and later joined the Congress only to leave it again. At Sonepat, the denial of the ticket to Pradeep Sangwan, son of the late Kishan Singh Sangwan, three-time MP of the BJP, led to a rebellion. In fact, the Congress had given up on this seat when its sitting MP, a condant of Hooda, declined to contest again, fearing defeat. Pradeep Sangwan decided to join the fray as an independent. Later, on March 25, he joined the Congress and withdrew his candidature. Given the dissension within the BJPs ranks, the situation seems to favour the Congress nominee. The official BJP candidate here is a former Congressman. In Karnal, too, where the local unit refused to accommodate former Congressman, Venod Sharma, the official BJP nominee, an outsider, is considered weak. At Rohtak, where the re-election of two-time MP Deepender Singh Hooda of the Congress was being considered an uphill task in what has become a four-cornered contest (the AAP launched its campaign from Rohtak with a huge rally), the open rebellion within the BJP has now made his election rather smooth. In fact, by disregarding the claims of both party spokesperson Captain Abhimanyu and State vice-president Naresh Malik and making Om Prakash Dhankar, national president of the Kisan Morcha, the nominee, a virtual rebellion has broken out within the BJP. State president Ram Bilas Sharma was shown black ags. Similarly, in Bhiwani31
Mahendargarh, too, the local BJP unit has expressed open resentment as the official nominee here, Dharambir, was with the Congress until a few weeks ago. There appears to be no wave favouring any particular person or party at the moment despite the highly personalised nature of national campaigns. Voters do not appear enthused as the opposition is highly fragmented and appears opportunistic as well. The AAP, too, has had its share of rebellion. The general observation about the party has been that it had put up khaas aadmi (special people) as opposed to aam aadmi (ordinary people). There were reports of en masse resignation from the Gurgaon unit of the party a day after AAP convener Arvind Kejriwals road show in the region. The lack of an organisational structure is proving to be debilitating for the party even though there appears to be a fair degree of sympathy for Kejriwal. At best, the AAP is expected to ruin the equation in seats where tough contests and narrow margins are expected. As a political observer said, the AAP started off with the politics of non-politics. Therefore, it was not difficult for the party to call on non-governmental organisations, farmer outts and even khaps to join it. When a section within the AAP criticised the party for the invitation to khaps, the AAP leadership made the invitation conditional, expressing reservations about some of the unlawful pronouncements by the caste councils. This had the effect of khaps turning down the invitation extended at the Rohtak rally. Khaps are not non-political bodies. They are highly political. This had to boomerang, commented an academic.
THE ISSUES
While on the face of it there appears to be no dearth of issues, barring the Left parties, and the AAP to an extent, no other political outt has been highlighting them. The Left parties are contesting ve of the 10 seatsthe CPI (M) three and the CPI two. The Left parties have held rallies in Hisar and Karnal. Several populist sops were announced by the Hooda government but there has been resentment brewing at various levels. The Left parties have promised the implementation of the Swaminathan Commission recommendations. The commission, which was set up in 2004 in the rst term of the UPA at the insistence of the Left parties, came up with several profarmer recommendations, such as returning 50 per cent of the cost of production to the farmers as minimum support price, offering cheap credit to them, and implementing land reforms. Interestingly, the BJP, which remained silent for long, has started talking about implementing the commissions recommendations. A large section of the Dalit community that faced sustained violence during Congress rule also feels let down. In fact, Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi visited the village in Narwana district where a Dalit girl had committed suicide and vice-president Rahul Gandhi visited Mirchpur village where Dalit homes were set ablaze and an elderly man and a disabled girl died. But there were many more incidents that needFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
ed the attention and response of the State government. The All India Democratic Womens Association (AIDWA), supported by the CPI(M), pursued several cases, including the gang-rape of a student in Dabra village in Hisar, which led to the arrest of the accused. The promise of the government to allot 100 square yards (84 square metres) of land to landless families too caused frustration. Where it was allotted, the registration was not done. Where registration was done, no possession was given. There were cases where land was allotted in areas already owned by private individuals or which were under illegal possession, a villager pointed out. There were several decisions of the government pertaining to the recruitment of teachers or to the land acquisition that had been set aside by the courts. There were several protests in the State over the increase in toll tax which raised bus fares, the increase in electricity tariffs, the imposition of development fees and regularisation charges for unauthorised colonies, and the proposed privatisation of Haryana Roadways. For three days in January, employees representing various sectors went on a strike across the State. There is a feeling that even if the government gave some sops like old-age benets, it took away much more with other measures, an employee said. There is discontentment among the people but there are few alternatives. The manner in which the major political parties are conducting themselves, hoping to blunt the public anger by elding star speakers and campaigners, is all there to see. Given a highly fragmented polity and a divided opposition, coupled with the absence of a wave in favour of any particular dispensation, no one party is likely to score a clear victory in these elections.
DELHI
Demographic dynamics
BY AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA WHEN the Congress secured all the seven parliamentary constituencies of Delhi in 2009, riding an unprecedented wave of popularity, it looked as if there was no turning back for the grand old party of India. Such an epic victory from the National Capital Region had significant strategic impact for the party at the national level. First, it galvanised the powerful secular-urban intelligentsia of the city to move into the fold of the Congress. Secondly, with around 60 per cent votes polled in its favour, the party re-emerged as the ag-bearer of the citys poor and a sizeable number of migrants. In 2014, however, the tables are turned. In the Assembly elections held in December 2013, voters showed
the Congress the door by giving it just eight seats in a 70-member House. A resurgent BJP and the edgling AAP were the beneciaries of a perceptible anti-incumbency sentiment against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Congress has renominated the same candidates for all the seven constituencies. We could not have taken the risk of elding new candidates, given the anti-incumbency sentiment against our party. We had to rely on the sitting MPs to perform well in the election, a senior Congress leader told Frontline. With the Congress still recovering from the shock of the Assembly election defeat and with hardly any time to launch its political campaign on a different note, repeating candidates was the safest possible strategy. The idea is not just to exploit the traditional caste equations that have worked in its favour until now but also to cash in on the celebrity status of some of its MPs. For instance, in constituencies such as Chandni Chowk and New Delhi where a large number of literate, urban voters dictate the results, the candidatures of political bigwigs Kapil Sibal and Ajay Maken have helped the Congress make the contest tougher for the opposition parties. Similarly, the Congress believes that elding Ramesh Kumar, brother of the tainted Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, will help it garner the support of the Jats, a force to reckon with in South and Outer Delhi. With Mahabal Mishras candidature, the Congress hopes to cash in on the Poorvanchali (migrants from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) votes again. The Congress clearly has no novel electoral strategy. Despite a growing anger against price rise and other problems bothering the common man in the metropolis, the Congress candidates are still beating the old drums of infrastructure development during the partys regime. While the message from the urban poor was clearly against the Congress in the last Assembly elections, the party seems to have learnt little. For instance, Sandeep Dikshit, its MP from East Delhi, listed the redevelopment of highways and the removal of traffic bottlenecks as one of his primary achievements. On the other hand, both the BJP and the AAP are talking about issues such as sanitation, living conditions of the poor and issues of livelihood. Political analysts say that for these reasons Delhi will vote for a party with a political vision and not for individual candidates. The political discourse in Delhi, they say, is held together by a vocabulary of idealism that the AAP has initiated in the capital. At a time when the gen32
NAR E N D R A MO D I and yoga guru Baba Ramdev during a Yoga Mahotsav in New Delhi on March 23.
eral election is being sought to be projected as a referendum on the BJPs prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, Delhi seems to be an exception. Here, the AAPs campaign on livelihood issues has forced the BJP to shun its development discourse and, instead, talk of the actual concerns of people in every constituency. The BJP, therefore, is leaving no stone unturned. It is talking about a corruption-free government, better facilities for people, and its plans for greater social expenditure in the citya break from its national campaign that relies on the neoliberal development model. To counter the AAPs inuence among the Delhis poor, it has prepared a list of the failures and lies of the 49-day AAP government, using it as its primary campaign material. It has elded Bhojpuri superstar Manoj Tiwari as one of its candidates as part of its efforts to give representation for the sizeable Poorvanchali population of the city. This is the rst time the BJP has elded a Poorvanchali candidate. The Congress elded Mahabal Mishra, a Poorvanchali candidate, in the last election. There seems to be a discernible shift in the BJPs strategy. Unlike the last few elections, the BJP has elded national leaders such as Meenakshi Lekhi and the recent recruit, Udit Raj, a Dalit leader, to counter the celebrity faces of the Congress. The party also hopes that Modi will become a huge factor in inuencing peoples choices as the elections draw nearer. Modi, therefore, is the face of its campaign in Delhi. The AAP has elded candidates from various backgrounds. Ashish Khetan, a journalist known for his investigation into the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat and, more recently, for his sting operation on the Gujarat Police tailing a woman allegedly at the behest of Modi, is contesting from the New Delhi constituency.
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Author and Mahatma Gandhis grandson Rajmohan Gandhi has been elded against Sandeep Dikshit in East Delhi. The kind of electoral representation that each political party is giving weight to suggests that political equations have drastically changed in Delhi in the last 15 years. I would have never imagined such diverse representation a few years ago. Every political party tried to exploit only the traditional Punjabi-Khatri and Jat votes in the city. This is a signicant moment in Delhis politics. Adequate representation of all communities and an equal stress on the anti-corruption dialogue, a politics of idealism, are coming-of-age factors in Delhis politics, said Sanjay Kumar of the New Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). Such change in electoral dynamics was only possible because of the changing demography of the city, which got adequately represented in the delimitation exercise in 2008. Now there is not one constituency in Delhi where a political party can bank on the support of just one dominant caste group for victory. For instance, North West Delhi constituency, which was carved out of the erstwhile Jat-dominated Outer Delhi constituency, is the largest of the seven Lok Sabha constituencies (17.9 lakh voters) and has the highest percentage of Dalit voters (21 per cent). The constituency, which shares its border with Haryana, also has a sizeable Jat population (16 per cent). Among the other communities that make up the constituency are Brahmins (12 per cent), Banias (10-11 per cent), Other Backward Classes (20 per cent) and Muslims (5-8 per cent). The BJP and the Congress do not have the bipolar electoral advantage that they have traditionally enjoyed because of the predominance of any one caste segment. The composite demography of Delhi, in a way, has aided the grand entry of the AAP, which was the rst political party to have successfully addressed the concerns of the public in this scenario. Therefore, despite the BJP playing up the Modi factor, it is clear that Dalits, the urban poor, and a signicant section of the lower middle class are supporting the AAP. Muslims did not vote for the AAP in the last Assembly elections. However, in the last two months, we see a signicant number of Muslims shifting towards the party, said Kumar. The BJP will be banking upon the upper caste and upper class votes. Kumar says that the elections in Delhi will see a great divide between the rich and the poor voting for different parties. The upper class and the upper caste could vote for the BJP, given Modis projection as the Prime Minister candidate. However, if it has to win, it cannot do so without the support of the poor in Delhi. Delhi will see a clear division of votes in terms of class, he said. At present, therefore, the elections are pitched as a tough battle between the BJP and the AAP, with the Congress hoping to benet from an unprecedented division of votes that Delhi will witness for the rst time in its electoral history.
ADNAN ABIDI
GENERAL ELECTION/MAHARASHTRA
Waiting for change

Though many scams have rocked the State, the run-up to the elections has been quiet, with parties engrossed in their own internal troubles.
BY LYLA BAVADAM IN THANE AND NASHIK
IT is odd that ve years after the last elections, neither the ruling Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) combine nor the saffron Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (SS-BJP) alliance can nd a stout enough stick of omissions or commissions to beat each other with in the run-up to the elections. In both rural and urban Maharashtra, there has been no dearth of issues. Here are just a few of the larger ones. Unseasonal rain and hail in 28 of the 35 districts destroyed crops in over 19 lakh hectares. The tragedy intensied when an estimated 37 farmers ended their lives, unable to sustain their families. There was the Rs.70,000-crore irrigation scam. In the Adarsh Cooperative Housing Society scam, illegal beneciaries were granted ats in a building meant for retired armed forces personnel. Others include the controversial land allotment for a tech park in Pune, the Rs.1,000-crore education scam involving State-run schools, a public distribution system scam involving bogus ration cards, BJP leader Gopinath Mundes boast that he had spent more than Rs.8 crore in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, and, most recently, NCP chief Sharad Pawars exhortation to his loyal mathadi workers to vote twiceonce in Mumbai, where they work, and then again in their villageswith a reminder to erase the voting dot. There is no area of life that has not been touched by some sort of corruption. And yet, there is no palpable feeling that the opposition is raring to attack the government. Parties are going around with furrowed brows, engrossed in their own troubles. The BJPs prime problem is ironically also its greatest trophy. The larger-than-life image of Narendra Modi is turning out to be larger than the party. And while this was initially exciting, it has progressively lost a great deal of its shine. A BJP source compared Modis campaign to a sele [in which] one is only thinking about oneself and how one looks you are the subject, you are the
photographer nothing else is important. The point being made by this disgruntled senior BJP worker is that the campaign is all about Modi, and the party has been relegated to the back seat. Indeed, the BJPs headquarters in Mumbai proves this with its huge hoarding that proclaims: Vote for India Vote for Modi. What happened to voting for the BJPs State MPs, or can they be dispensed with? This is the sort of question that is being murmured in Mumbai though not too loud because the Big Brother style of functioning (and its consequences) that Modi has entrenched in Gujarat is only too well known. Modi himself has been taking huge strides across the State, visiting farmers in Yavatmal who have lost their crop to hailstorms, holding a rally in Mumbai, and conducting his chai pe charcha meetings. His prime ministerial aspirations and his casual manner towards some senior BJP leaders have created a new set of problems for some of the States parties. The Senas Uddhav Thackeray stubbornly supports the old guard in the BJP. This naturally means that Uddhavs cousin, Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), had to take a contrary view. Modi, the realist, tried to get the Sena and the MNS on the same page, knowing the value this would have for the Sena-BJP combine in terms of garnering votes. But he had not reckoned with the fact that the cousins had split not over ideology but over power-sharing and hence could not be appealed to. In fact, the BJP has been trying to persuade the MNS to either ally with them or not contest the Lok Sabha elections. In 2009, the MNS had unwittingly eaten into the saffron vote and indirectly helped the Congress-NCP to win all six Mumbai seats. Despite this, the MNS has decided to contest as a separate entity. The SS-BJP combine has extended its inuence with a pre-election alliance with the Republican Party of India (Athavale) and the Swabhiman Shetkari Sanghatana.
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SH IV S E N A C H I E F UD D H A V T H A C K ERA Y
addressing an election rally at Dombivli near Thane. The Sena has seen unprecedented defections in the run-up to this election. With Uddhav at the head after the death of his father, Bal Thackeray, the Sena has been in a ux. Uddhavs milder ruling style has been (wrongly) mistaken for weakness, and after the breaking away of his ery cousin Raj, membership in the Sena is no longer seen as a lifelong commitment. Among the spate of defections, the most shocking one was that of Rahul Narvekar, the vociferous spokesman-cum-lawyer, who left the Sena saying that he was being victimised by the party. Three sitting MPs have quit the Sena and joined the NCP. Part of the reason for the defections is supposedly Uddhavs weak leadership, but if this were true, then the defectors should logically go to the MNS, which is closest to the Sena in terms of ideology. But the MNS seems to have zzled out after its impressive debut in the 2009 Assembly elections. So the reason for Sena men leaving seems to have more to do with their feeling that Uddhavs neglect of Modi, as well as his poor relationship with BJP leader Nitin Gadkari, may lead to the Sena itself being marginalised politically. Thus, the defections have more to do with personal career paths than with political factors. In the Congress, perhaps the most interesting person is Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan. Incidentally, he has just completed three years in office. Not only did he inherit an administration that was burdened by scams and inefficiencies but he has also had to survive political storms. Now he has the additional responsibility of ensuring that the Congress and the NCP put up a good show so that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) can return to power in New Delhi. With more than seven crore voters and 48 Lok Sabha seats, Maharashtra is second only to Uttar Pradesh when it comes to the numbers game in politics. The opportunistic behaviour of candidate-hopefuls and party functionaries and the low level of public engagement by the parties have so far made this a very jaded pre-election period. Perhaps the only aspect of the elec35
tion that seems to have some semblance of integrity and excitement is the entry of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The AAP came into prominence in the State when the lid was blown off an irrigation scam in 2012 in which the NCPs Ajit Pawar was allegedly involved. The AAP has consciously pitted itself against all the 22 NCP candidates. Social activist and national executive member of the AAP Mayank Gandhi has called the NCP a corrupt political party, pointing out that NCP Ministers like Ajit Pawar and Chhagan Bhujbal face corruption charges while Water Resources Minister Sunil Tatkare and Higher Education Minister Rajesh Tope have been indicted by a judicial committee in the Adarsh scam. Notable candidates of the AAP in the State are the activist Medha Patkar, irrigation scam whistle-blower and retired bureaucrat Vijay Pandhare and ex-banker Meera Sanyal. For Mumbaikars, the constituencies worth watching will be Mumbai South, where Meera Sanyal takes on the Congress sitting MP and Union Minister of State for IT and Communications Milind Deora, and Mumbai North-East, where Medha Patkar faces sitting MP Sanjay Dina Patil of the NCP and Kirit Somaiya of the BJP. South Mumbais slum population has increased drastically. Like all established parties, the Congress has not neglected slum voters, and this has lessened newcomer Meera Sanyals chances of a political advantage. In Mumbai North-East, Medha Patkar has a distinct advantage despite this being her rst foray into politics. She is up against two seasoned ghters who have the nancial backing of their parties while her campaign managers have been forced to appeal to the public to fund the campaign. However, her activist image will stand her in good stead in this constituency where she was well known long before she entered politics. She has fought for the right to housing and livelihood in the area, which has been beleaguered by infrastructure projects that have left many homeless. To that extent, Medha Patkar has already proved her mettle to her potential voters. She has another advantage over Sanjay Dina Patil who, in the last election, won only by a small margin of fewer than 10,000 votes. In Mumbai North-West, Mayank Gandhi has been pitted against the Congress stalwart and sitting MP, Gurudas Kamat, who has had ve terms from this constituency. Showing its spunk, the AAP has even entered the lions den, elding a retired Indian Police Service officer, Suresh Khopade, against Sharad Pawars daughter Supriya Sule in Baramati. Likewise, in Nagpur, the AAP has elded its Maharashtra convener Anjali Damania against Nitin Gadkari. What voters are talking about is a need for change. The only sense of impending change comes from the AAP, but the party is too inexperienced. The non-AAP opposition, which has so much ammunition to use against the government, is caught in a trap of Modi monotheism. Gridlocked with internal issues, it is unable to belabour the Congress-NCP combine. All in all, it has been an extraordinarily dull start to the 16th Lok Sabha election campaign.
PTI
GENERAL ELECTION/SOUTH
INTERESTING CONTESTS
In Tamil Nadu, there is no big issue working against the AIADMK, but the formation of the DMDK-led front has made the picture a bit unclear. In Karnataka, there is disconnect between the Congress and the masses, and the BJP appears rejuvenated with the return of B.S. Yeddyurappa. In Kerala, the Congress and the CPI(M) are aiming to win the maximum number of seats.
TAMIL NADU
New alliances
BY T.S. SUBRAMANIAN THE April 24 single-phase elections to the Lok Sabha from Tamil Nadu promise to be interesting because a six-cornered contest is in the offing in almost all the 39 constituencies. The lone seat in the neighbouring Union Territory of Puducherry also faces a multi-cornered contest. In 2009, the battle was essentially between the two powerful alliances led by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). The DMK has no major allies after it pulled out of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Centre in March 2013 over what it perceived as the Centres insensitive stand on the Sri Lanka Armys killing of an estimated 60,000 Tamils in May 2009 during the nal stages of its war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The DMK has retained its alliance with the Viduthalai Chiruthai Katchi (VCK) and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). It has also brought into its fold the Manithaneya Makkal Katchi (MMK) and the Puthiya Thamizhagam (P.T.), both of which were with the AIADMK during the 2011 Assembly elections. The DMK will contest 35 seats, the VCK two, and the IUML, the P.T. and the MMK one each. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) plans to contest 25 seats.
C HI E F M I N I S TE R Jayalalithaa speaking at an AIADMK
election campaign in Theni district on March 25. The AIADMK is going it alone. In a display of overcondence, the ruling party showed the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) the door; both were its allies in the 2009 and 2011 elections. The All India Samathuva Makkal Katchi (AISMK), founded by the actor and legislator R. Sarathkumar, and a few caste outts are backing the AIADMK. Chief Minister and party general secretary Jayalalithaa named the AIADMKs candidates for the Tamil Nadu and Puducherry seats on February 24, her birth36
R. ASHOK
day. The announcement carried a hint of what was in store for the Left parties. She, however, said talks were under way with them on seat-sharing. After an agreement is reached on the sharing of constituencies, the AIADMK candidates will withdraw from the constituencies allotted to these two parties, Jayalalithaa said. She then swung into the election campaign from March 3, ignoring the two Left parties. Left leaders held several rounds of negotiations with AIADMK leaders. In the end, Jayalalithaa despatched a few Ministers to the CPI (M) office on March 4. Amma had asked them to tell the Left leaders that we came together happily and let us part gladly, the Ministers said. The AIADMK thus unilaterally broke this partnership. Unfazed, the CPI(M) and the CPI decided to face the elections together, a decision that has enthused their cadre. The two parties will contest nine seats each. We are not able to ascertain the causes for the AIADMKs unilateral decision, a senior CPI(M) leader said. It is a political decision. It is not the number of seats that led the AIADMK to break its relationship with us, he added. Informed sources said that with pre-election surveys predicting a win for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Jayalalithaa did not want to antagonise the BJP by remaining in the company of the Left. She shed her ambition of becoming the Prime Minister as she did not want to be seen as a rival to the BJPs Narendra Modi. If a government were to be formed at the Centre with the AIADMK taking part in it, the people of this country will get a lot of benets. You will also get benets. Tamil Nadu will prosper, is her refrain as she reads from a prepared text at meeting after meeting. While she attacks the DMK and also the UPA, of which it was a constituent, for corruption and nonperformance, she spares the BJP. She does not even utter the name BJP in her 45-minute addresses. No wonder CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, State CPI(M) secretary G. Ramakrishnan, and CPI State secretary D. Pandian criticise her for her silence on the BJP. According to informed sources, however, Jayalalithaa is annoyed with the BJP for its camaraderie with actor-turned-politician Vijayakant. She had tried to neutralise the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) he leads, and eight of its legislators had deserted it. The BJP worked for about three months to herd together sworn rivals such as the DMDK, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), the Kongu Nadu Makkal Desiya Katchi (KNMDK) and the Indian Jananayaga Katchi (IJK) under its overarching umbrella. Thamizharuvi Manian, a writer and former Congressman, played an important role in forging this coalition of parties with differing ideologies and caste affiliations. While the lions share of 14 seats has gone
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to the DMDK, the BJP and the PMK will contest from eight constituencies each, the MDMK from seven, the KNMDK, the IJK and the All India N. Rangasamy Congress (in Puducherry) from one each. What holds ones interest are the developments on two different fronts. One is the plight of the Congress, which is completely isolated in Tamil Nadu. The other development is the sibling feud between M.K. Azhagiri and M.K. Stalin, sons of M. Karunanidhi, DMK president and former Chief Minister. Azhagiri would not accept Karunanidhis virtual declaration that Stalin would be his successor. His activities resulted in his expulsion from the party on March 26 (see box).
CONGRESS PREDICAMENT
The Congress, which nds itself without any allies, has to blame itself for this pitiable situation. The factors that have alienated the Tamil voter include the insensitive handling of the issue by the Centre of the Sri Lanka Navy ring on shermen from Ramanathapuram, Tiruvarur, Nagapattinam and Pudukottai districts of Tamil Nadu; its claim in the Supreme Court that the Katchativu island belongs to Sri Lanka and not to Tamil Nadu; and the perception that it is shielding Colombo from an international probe into its war crimes against Tamils in May 2009. Defeat is staring so hard at the State Congress that its senior leaders such as P. Chidambaram, G.K. Vasan and K.V. Thangkabalu have ed the ring even before the bell has rung for the bout. Chidambarams son, Karti, will be the Congress candidate from Sivaganga, which has been the Union Finance Ministers bastion. The Congress is elding its candidates in all constituencies. Congress leaders told Frontline that their party found itself in this terrible situation because of the AICCs [All India Congress Committee] attitude and approach in providing guidelines to the TNCC [Tamil Nadu Congress Committee] on who should be its election partners. The AICC did not consult the TNCC about the partys strategy for the Lok Sabha elections in the State and it had no planning managers to devise State-wise strategies, one of them said. Even after the AIADMK decided not to have any truck with the Congress and the DMK general council resolved on December 15, 2013, that the party would not align either with the Congress or with the BJP, the AICC was in no hurry to nd out whether the State unit could forge an alliance with the DMDK, the PMK and others. In the DMK camp, party treasurer Stalin was 100 per cent against the revival of ties with the Congress. Stalin was able to resist pressure from a powerful group that included Azhagiri (who had to resign as Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers when the DMK pulled out of the Manmohan
M DMK G E N E R A L S E C RET A RY V A I K O , DMDK president
Vijayakant, BJP president Rajnath Singh and PMK leader Anbumani Ramadoss at a meeting in Chennai on March 20 when the three parties joined the NDA. Singh government), T.R. Baalu, Kanimozhi (Karunanidhis daughter), N.K.K.P. Periasamy and Suresh Rajan, all of whom saw nothing wrong in the renewal of ties. The NDA, too, hit big roadblocks when seat-sharing talks were on. The sticking points were constituencies from where the BJP, the PMK and the DMDK wanted to contest. For instance, the BJP, the PMK and the DMDK wanted to contest from Salem. Besides, the DMDK and the PMK demanded Villupuram, Arni and Kallakurichi. The BJP was put in an embarrassing position when Vijayakant started his election campaign on March 14 as planned although no seat-sharing agreements had been reached. He began his campaign from Gummidipoondi in Tiruvallur constituency and even named the DMDK candidates for Madurai, Tiruchi, Namakkal, Tiruvallur and Chennai Central. His failure on March 14 to canvas for the BJP or mention Modi created consternation in the BJP. It took six more days to iron out the differences before the BJP-led front became a reality in the presence of BJP president Rajnath Singh. During an election tour of Madurai, Theni, Virudhunagar, Sivaganga, Tirunelveli, Tenkasi and Kanyakumari constituencies in southern Tamil Nadu between March 17 and 20, this correspondent found that there was no big issue working against the AIADMK. If the 16-hour daily power cut hobbled the industrial and farm sectors and made homes dark for 30 months after the AIADMK came to power in May 2011, the duration of
daily power cuts varies between four and 10 hours now. While Jayalalithaa maintained that she inherited the power shortage from the previous DMK government, Karunanidhi blamed the AIADMKs failure to start new electricity generation projects when it was in power from 2001 to 2006 for the power crisis.
NORTHERN TAMIL NADU
Caste divide
BY R. ILANGOVAN IN the 12 constituencies (four reserved) in the parched Vanniyar heartland (spread over Kancheepuram, Cuddalore, Vellore, Villupuram, Tiruvannamalai and Tiruvallur districts), there are interesting pointers to the fact that the contest this time has moved beyond the contours of the traditional rivalry between the two Dravidian majors. The formation of the front including the BJP, the DMDK, the PMK and the MDMK has forced mood readers and poll strategists to rework their calculations. Much to their surprise, besides issues such as water scarcity and prolonged power outages, intense caste affiliations have taken centre stage in this round of elections. PMK founder S. Ramadoss 14-month-long mobilisation of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the Most Backward Classes (MBCs), predominantly Vanniyars, against Dalits seems to have changed the caste demography in the northern districts and laid a strong foundation for identity politics.
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S.R. RAGHUNATHAN
The high point that occasioned this shift was the death of a Dalit youth, Elavarasan, after resistance to his marriage with a Vanniyar girl sparked a caste are-up in Natham colony, where he lived, in Dharmapuri district. For the rst time in a general election, voters remain divided sharply on caste lines, where migration from one to another is strictly prohibited. My caste is important for me since people of my caste can help me and my family in times of crises. Although other political parties have elded candidates belonging to my caste, I will support Doctor Ayya [Ramadoss] who wants us to remain united as one caste block, said Govindan, 55, a vegetable farmer and a Vanniyar in Ural, a remote hamlet in Villupuram district. Ural is part of Arani constituency, where former Union Minister A.K. Moorthi is contesting as the PMK candidate against candidates of the AIADMK and the DMK, also Vanniyars. The PMKs annual Chitra Pournami (full-moon day in the Tamil month of Chitirai) conferences at Mahabalipuram (organised by the Vanniyar Sangam, a community organisation attached to the PMK) had played a major role in facilitating Vanniyar consolidation and restoring the PMKs electoral relevance and bargaining power, which it had lost following a steep fall in its political prospects. The hate campaign against Dalits is all-pervasive in almost all the villages falling under the 12 constituencies. Dalits have been pushed to the margins, socially and politically. Thimmaraju, 35, of Periyathappai hamlet, some 17 kilometres from Palacode block in Dharmapuri district, claimed that the Chitra Pournami conclave had instilled caste pride in him. We prefer doctor Anbumani [son of Ramadoss and a rst-time contestant in Dharmapuri constituency]. A vote for the PMK is a vote for Vanniyars, he said. The Vanniyars strong preference for the PMK does not come as a surprise. In fact, they dismiss Vanniyar candidates elded by other parties as aliens. When we have no other choice, we support caste candidates of other parties, explained M. Pandiyan of Mangalam village in Tiruvannamalai district, who, surprisingly, is a DMK loyalist. The PMK is contesting in Tiruvannamalai against the AIADMK and the DMK, both of which have elded OBC candidates. Thus, the message from the community is loud and clear: the PMK is for Vanniyars and Anbumani Ramadoss, who has been studiously marketed through effective caste-based manoeuvres, is the partys future face. But the sociopolitical churning in these districts is not welcomed by the OBCs, such as Mudaliars, Reddys and Chettiars. The OBCs feel they are caught between two major social blocks. The emerging Vanniyar consolidation and the increasing alienation of Dalits, they fear, will prove risky in the long run. The balancing mechanism needs to be in place for peaceful coexistence, said an officebearer of a weaving society in Arani. The weavers are mostly Mudaliars, a major landholding group which con39
trols the economy in this region. But this time they have decided to back the PMK since a few fringe local Dalit groups are trying to threaten their economic superiority. OBC voters in the reserved constituencies prefer candidates belonging to non-Dalit parties. For instance, nonDalit voters in Tiruvallur (Scheduled Caste) constituency have decided to vote for the AIADMK candidate and sitting MP, Dr P. Venugopal, instead of D. Ravikumar, a senior functionary of the VCK. The fear the vested interests have instilled in the minds of the OBCs against the militant Dalit groups has vitiated the social environment, which is very unfortunate, said Stalin Rajangam, a Dalit sociologist based in Madurai. But I remain a peoples candidate, above caste and creed, Ravikumar said. This polarisation was visible in Chidambaram (reserved) constituency where VCK leader Thol. Tirumavalavan is seeking re-election. He is banking on the DMK and minority votes besides the votes of Dalits, who con-
PTI
D M K C HI E F M. Karunanidhi with his sons, M.K. Azhagiri and M.K. Stalin, at an event in Chennai on January 13, 2009. Dayanidhi Maran, former Union Minister, is standing behind him.
stitute a formidable 27 per cent of the electorate, almost equal to Vanniyars. But the gamble of politically isolating Dalits, which appears to be successful at present, may have social consequences. A counter-mobilisation is under way even in remote villages. Dalits have started reacting aggressively to the subtle attempts to isolate them politically. They are naturally backing candidates elded by Dalit parties. Besides, they have decided to vote for the DMK in the other constituencies. We will never vote for the DMDKled BJP alliance because it includes the PMK, said RenFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
DMK and sons

THE problem is over. It does not exist anymore, exulted a senior leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) at Anna Arivalayam, the partys headquarters located in Chennai, on March 26, reacting to the dismissal of M.K. Azhagiri, the elder politician son of party president M. Karunanidhi, from the party. Our leader made adjustments to the maximum. But Azhagiri kept overreaching himself. The people with him are no good, the leader said, explaining why the former Union Chemicals and Fertilizers Minister and DMK south zone organising secretary was expelled the previous day. It is a moot point whether the problem is over. That is, whether the long-suppurating sibling feud between Azhagiri and his younger brother, M.K. Stalin, on who should take control of the DMK from Karunanidhi, has come to an end or will continue to smoulder. But the day after the high command took the swift and decisive action against Azhagiri, a relaxed atmosphere prevailed on the Anna Arivalayam premises, giving the impression that Azhagiris expulsion was a non-issue. Azhagiri was suspended from the party on January 24 after he questioned the leaderships attempt to rope in the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) headed by Vijayakant into the DMK-led alliance for the coming elections. The die was cast when Azhagiri met Vaiko, general secretary of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), on March 23. The meeting took place at Azhagiris residence in Madurai. Soon after the meeting, Vaiko claimed that Azhagiri had agreed to support the National Democratic Alliance candidates in Tamil Nadu in the April 24 elections. In the eyes of the DMKs top leadership, Azhagiri meeting Vaiko was a cardinal sin. For the DMK high command had suspicions about Vaikos ambitions in the 1990s before he quit the DMK in 1993 to found the MDMK. Besides, Azhagiris reported promise to support Vaiko and other MDMK candidates was a grave provocation. It would affect the prospects of DMK candidates. The DMK leadership has not forgotten how Azhagiri elded rebel candidates in the 2001 Assembly elections and ensured the defeat of several party candidates in the southern districts. As if on cue, candidates belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress made a beeline for Azhagiris residence and requested his support for their candidates. Those who met him included H. Raja (BJP), who is contesting from Sivaganga, and J.M. Haroon Rashid and Bharat Natchiappan (Congress), who are contesting from Theni and Madurai respectively. Hence, the DMK high command decided to take the bull by the horns. Karunanidhi, party general secretary K. AnbazFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
hagan and Stalin held talks on March 25, after which Anbazhagan put out a terse statement that Azhagiri had been dismissed from the DMK for ridiculing the leadership and for damaging the partys interests. Azhagiri had done all this when he was under suspension for contravening party discipline and bringing disrepute to the party, the statement said. Karunanidhi told reporters that Azhagiri had not only failed to provide a proper explanation for his actions but continued to slander top leaders. Hence, the general secretary [Anbazhagan] and I consulted each other today and announced that Azhagiri is being permanently removed from the party, said Karunanidhi. In Madurai, Azhagiri told reporters that he would challenge his expulsion in the court as no show-cause notice had been served on him. No notice had been served when he was suspended in January either. Azhagiri was punished for pointing out certain shortcomings in the selection of district secretaries and party candidates for the Lok Sabha elections. Is there any rule that one should not highlight such shortcomings? he asked. Azhagiri made light of his meeting with Vaiko. How can I say no when Vaiko wanted to meet me? he asked. He pointed out that Karunanidhi had met Vaiko in the Special Court at Poonamallee, near Chennai, when he was jailed under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. He said he and his supporters would always remain with the DMK as they had contributed to the partys growth. Anna Arivalayam was built with my hard work, too, Azhagiri said. In the sibling rivalry over who should succeed Karunanidhi, the father favoured Stalin and systematically groomed him for the job. The on-off feud burst into the open on January 6, 2013, when Karunanidhi declared that if I, as an individual, were to get an opportunity, I would propose only Stalins name for leadership. Azhagiris reaction was sarcastic. The DMK is not a [religious] mutt, he said (Frontline, February 8, 2013). The rivalry erupted again in January this year when Azhagiris supporters put up posters in Madurai announcing their intention to hold a rival DMK general council meeting, leading to the suspension of 10 of his supporters and his own suspension on January 24. He was also suspended from the post of the DMKs south zone organising secretary (Frontline, February 21). The issue came to the fore yet again when posters reappeared in Madurai in March announcing the formation of Kalaignar DMK. The posters virtually called Azhagiri the new partys general secretary and announced that the party and its ag are ready and we will meet the parliamentary elections. The posters had the pictures of Azhagiri, his son Durai Dayanidhi, and the DMK ag in black and red with a picture of Karunanidhi in the middle. T.S. Subramanian
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ganathan, a petty Dalit trader of Attur village near Kancheepuram. The caste divide, many fear, will revive the bitter memories of violence and destruction. A.K. Moorthy arrived to a hostile reception in Periya colony, a Dalit habitation in Vandavasi in Tiruvannamalai district. Stones were hurled at him, forcing him to withdraw his campaign hastily. Our votes are not for Vanniyars, said Sureshkumar, a 20-year-old carpenter from the colony. But Moorthy dismissed the incident as an aberration. I am condent of winning, he told Frontline. It is Ramadoss who frayed the peace that prevailed in the northern districts after both the PMK and the VCK decided, in 2004, to bury their differences and share a common platform, ostensibly for the cause of Tamils. Everything went on smoothly after that. Peace prevailed and no untoward incident took place until violence erupted in Dharmapuri [over the inter-caste marriage]. We even worked together amicably for the local body elections and also in the 2011 Assembly elections, Ravikumar said. For political considerations, Ramadoss is playing the caste card, which is unfortunate, he said. In a highly fragmented electoral eld, the chances of a vote transfer from the DMDK (10 per cent) to the PMK (5.75 per cent) and vice versa are remote. The electoral understanding between these two parties, which were hostile to each other in the not-too-distant past, remains conned at the top level. Can you expect a Vanniyar in Salem to vote for the DMDKs L.K. Sudheesh, a nonVanniyar? asks a senior PMK functionary in Salem. The PMKs youth wing secretary, R. Arul, had to withdraw in favour of the DMDK candidate under alliance compulsions after having canvassed for nearly 150 days. The BJP is a nonentity here and Narendra Modi a stranger. Guhanraj, a college student in Villupuram district, said: My village has always voted for the AIADMK. The BJPs rainbow coalition has distanced the minorities from both the PMK and the DMDK. This is discernible in Vellore where Muslims are present in predominant numbers.
KARNATAKA
Triangular contest
BY RAVI SHARMA JUST under a year ago, a rejuvenated State Congress, riding on a wave of voter disenchantment with the incumbent BJP government, swept to power in Karnataka by winning 121 of the 223 Assembly seats on offer, in the process decimating the saffron party and neutralising the vote-pulling capacity, if any, of its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi. The defeat was a big blow to the BJP, which came to power in 2008 hoping to make Karnataka its political springboard in the south. The BJP managed to win just 40 seats and secured under 20 per cent of the votes polled. The Congress polled 36.59 per cent of the votes.
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The BJPs State unit was lost and in disarray. With its party workers disillusioned and its primary support base among the dominant Lingayat community broken, it looked incapable of replicating in the future the feat it had accomplished in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections by winning 19 seats (the highest number of seats for the party among all the States) and 41.63 per cent of the votes. The Congress appeared to be in a position to ace out a lame-duck BJP and an equally divided Janata Dal (Secular), which has remained an H.D. Deve Gowda and sons party for more than a decade. But, almost a year on, the political scene in the State, whose 28 Lok Sabha constituencies will go to the polls on April 17, could not look more different. For a start, most of the constituencies will witness the traditional threecornered contests, unlike the four- and even multi-cornered contests seen in the Assembly elections in May 2013. While the Congress will be locked in a straight ght with the BJP in the northern, central and coastal districts, it must grapple with the Janata Dal (Secular) in the Old Mysore area (comprising Bangalore, Mysore, Mandya, Kolar, Tumkur, Chitradurga, Shimoga and Hassan districts). The AAP is yet to generate the kind of noise or interest that can help it win a few Lok Sabha seats. Signicantly, despite the relatively efficient administration led by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, there is a disconnect between the Congress and the masses. The grand old party is rattled by dissidence and dissatisfaction over seat distribution. Also spoiling the partys interests and fortunes is the spectacularly poor performance of the UPA government at the Centre. With perception being everything in politics, this is not good news for the Congress in Karnataka, which has always looked at cashing in on the achievements of the national leadership rather than banking on its own accomplishments. The Congress, which won six Lok Sabha seats in 2009 and polled 37.65 per cent of the votes, has failed to capitalise on the anti-BJP sentiment and adequately trumpet the Siddaramaiah governments social justice programmes. The State BJP, after being in the doldrums for almost 10 months, has got a boost from two factors: the return of senior BJP leader and Lingayat strongman B.S. Yeddyurappa, who had broken away from the party and formed the Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP), to its fold, and, to a lesser extent, the return of the Bellary politician B. Sriramulu. A close ally of the Bellary mining baron G. Janardhana Reddy, Sriramulu quit the BJP in 2011 and formed the Badava Shramika Raitha (BSR) Congress after he was denied a berth in
B.S. YE D D YUR A PPA , the BJP candidate for Shimoga, on his way to le his nomination papers on March 20.
C HI E F M I N I S TE R Siddaramaiah greets Nandan Nilekani
(left), Congress candidate for South Bangalore, on March 24. barga, Bellary, Koppal and Raichur), where the Congress won 23 of the 40 Assembly seats and the BJP just ve. Of the 69,56,806 votes polled in this region, the Congress secured 17,98,885 votes, while the votes of the BJP, the KJP and the BSR Congress added up to 20,36,539. An analysis of the voting gures for the Assembly elections shows that the BJP could have more than doubled its seat tally of 40 had it remained undivided. Therefore, it came as no surprise that the State BJP unit convinced the central leadership to forget, if not forgive, Yeddyurappa and Sriramulu for their indiscretions and allow them back into the party. With corruption being a non-issue except in television chat rooms and in the campaign of the AAPthanks to the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular)s own share of tainted leadersthe re-induction of Yeddyurappa and Sriramulu has not been raked up at political meetings. Although it is important to have alliances to win seats, the BJP State units enthusiasm to rope in friends of all hues has left the central leadership red-faced. On March 23, the State unit inducted Pramod Mutalik, the controversial chief of the Sri Rama Sene, a self-appointed Hindu right-wing vigilante organisation whose moral policing, including the January 2009 attack on young women and men patronising a pub in Mangalore, has drawn protests. Mutalik, who is facing over 40 criminal cases, had threatened to contest against the BJP if he was not given the ticket. The State unit felt the need to rope him in so as to avoid the loss of potential support in his constituency. However, wiser counsel prevailed and the central leadership hastily directed the State unit to annul Mutaliks induction. The BJP is hoping that Modi will turn out to be its vote winner. In 2013, Modi undertook two campaign visits to Karnataka and addressed rallies in Belgaum and
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the D.V. Sadananda Gowda Cabinet. The BJP hopes his re-induction into the party, notwithstanding senior BJP leader Sushma Swarajs opposition, will revive the partys fortunes in Bellary (where it won only 19.35 per cent of the votes in the Assembly elections), Raichur and Koppal parliamentary constituencies. Yeddyurappa was forced to step down as Chief Minister after being indicted by the Karnataka Lok Ayukta on corruption charges. Subsequently, he quit the party in 2012 and vowed to defeat it. In the 2013 elections, his nascent party won six seats but took away 9.79 per cent of the votes, which would have otherwise gone to the BJP. His KJP was able to take away crucial votes, primarily those of Lingayats, who constitute 18 per cent of the States population. In Karnataka, where identity politics read caste politicsis the key factor and vote your caste, not cast your vote is the norm, the Lingayat vote becomes crucial in the nal outcome. Lingayats, along with Vokkaligas, constitute the States social, economic and political powerhouse. Concentrated in critically high numbers in almost all of the States Bombay-Karnataka, Hyderabad-Karnataka and central regions, comprising Chikkodi, Belgaum, Bagalkot, Bijapur, Gulbarga, Raichur, Bidar, Koppal, Bellary, Haveri, Dharwad, Davanagere, Tumkur and Chitradurga Lok Sabha constituencies, Lingayats helped the BJP win 12 of these 14 seats in 2009. The Congress former Chief Minister N. Dharam Singh and Railway Minister Mallikarjuna Kharge won Bidar and Gulbarga respectively, because of their individual popularity. Following Yeddyurappas exit from the BJP, the Lingayat vote split three ways between the KJP, the Congress and the BJP, inuencing the outcome. An illustrative example is the Assembly segments in the HyderabadKarnataka regions ve Lok Sabha seats (Bidar, GulFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
G.P. SAMPATH KUMAR
VAIDYA
Mangalore, but failed to make any real impact on the voters even in the Hindutva heartland of Dakshina Kannada. The BJP, which has held the Dakshina Kannada parliamentary seat (called the Mangalore Lok Sabha seat before the delimitation exercise in 2008) since 1991, nds itself on the back foot, with the Congress holding all but one of the constituencys eight Assembly segments. The BJP is banking on Modis divisive brand of politics. State party president Prahlad Joshi explained the partys stand when he stated that it was his job to ensure that the Modi effect was maximised in the State and the party capitalised on it. Senior BJP leader Suresh Kumar said: The nation wants change and a strong leader and Modi fulls these needs. Modis visit to Karnataka on September 13 galvanised our campaign and we were able to transform and energise ourselves. We were the rst to hold booth committee meetings, we organise outreach programmes for non-BJP supporters and visited homes in the rural areas to educate voters on the lack of governance by UPA-II. We have focussed on development, stability and an able leadership. The BJP hopes to win 16 to 18 seats, most of them from the northern, central and coastal areas. Interestingly, the party has never won in Hassan, Kolar, Mandya, Chamarajanagar and Chikkaballapur. In Bangalore Rural, it has won just once (1998). The Congress, which according to Siddaramaiah will win at least 20 seats, sees no Modi factor in Karnataka. Education and Tourism Minister R.V. Deshpande said: We are not bothered by the Modi factor. In fact, he will have no inuence on Karnatakas electorate. There is an entire section of society that has reservations about him and he is seen as dictatorial. He has been harping on the success of Gujarat. But much of this so-called success is untrue. The Plan expenditure has not been met, poverty levels are high, and farmers demands have not been fullled. The elections will be fought on the achievements of the UPA and the Siddaramaiah governments versus the corruption and tyranny that prevailed during BJP rule. Deshpandes son Prashant Deshpande is contesting from Uttara Kannada. If the BJP is banking on the support of Lingayats, Brahmins and voters in the urban areas and the Modi effect, the Congress, which lacks a strong Lingayat leader, hopes to counter this with the continued support it enjoys from the Backward Classes (B.Cs), the Scheduled Castes and minorities. This block has contributed the most to the Congress 32 to 37 per cent vote share in most elections. A consolidation of this base is what the Congress is looking to achieve. Although the B.Cs have had a long history of asserting their identity, going back to the 1920s when they were provided reservation in the princely state of Mysore, they did not become a force to reckon with until the 1970s when Chief Minister D. Devaraj Urs, in a bid to break the Vokkaliga-Lingayat domination, consolidated and gave them a political identity. But not being a homogeneous group (they are made up of more
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than 100 sub-sects) has meant that the B.Cs continue to play second ddle to Vokkaligas and Lingayats. Siddaramaiah, who was instrumental in launching Ahinda (Kannada acronym for minorities, B.Cs and S.Cs) in 2005 after he quit the Janata Dal (Secular), is often accused of overly championing the interests of his own Kuruba community (the third most populous community in the State and a powerful constituent of the B.Cs). The Congress, of course, is hoping that dissenting groups under the Ahinda umbrella will not play spoilsport. While some Muslim leaders have criticised Siddaramaiah for inadequate representation for their community in his Cabinet, S.C. leaders, including Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president M. Parameshwar, have said that despite their communitys continued support to the Congress, the party had prevented S.C. leaders such as Kharge, B. Basavalingappa and K.H. Ranganath from even becoming Deputy Chief Ministers. Although the Janata Dal (Secular) enjoys strong support among Vokkaligas, minorities and agriculturists, the party has lost much ground in recent years. Out of power ever since H.D. Kumaraswamy, Deve Gowdas son, stepped down as Chief Minister in 2007, the party has stumbled from one defeat to another. It is also seen as anti-Lingayat and not urban-friendly. There are no indications that the party is coming out of the morass, but it is likely to retain the Hassan seat and win Mandya, where the Congress is facing a rebellion of sorts.
KERALA
Evenly poised
BY R. KRISHNAKUMAR GIVEN the scandals that had besieged his government and the troubles in his party and the ruling coalition earlier, few would have expected Chief Minister Oommen Chandy to declare that the April 10 Lok Sabha elections in Kerala would be a referendum on the State government too, or that, if the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) fared badly in the State, the responsibility for it would rest on him primarily. The condence with which Oommen Chandy said this implied that the credit for a possible good showing should also be his own. This, perhaps, was the signicant part of his inaugural campaign pitch. But, regardless of his statement, both the Congress and the CPI(M), the leading partners of the two coalitions in Kerala, have decided that their principal goal will be to win the maximum number of seats from Kerala. And both sides are acutely aware of the harm that overcondence would result in this time. For one, Keralas political landscape has changed a lot since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, when the UDF won 16 of the 20 Parliament seats in the State. It also won nearly 70 per cent of the seats in the local body elections
CH IE F M I N I S T E R O O M M EN C H A N D Y addressing an election rally of the UDF in Kannur on March 24.
held a year later. In the Assembly elections in 2011, however, it came to power in the State with a narrow margin, winning 72 of the total 140 seats, just four seats more than the Left Democratic Front (LDF). Meanwhile, since the 2009 elections, an incremental realignment of political forces has altered the nature and sphere of inuence of the only two fronts that have ruled the State. The LDF has seen three of its prominent partnersthe Kerala Congress (Joseph), a splinter group of the Janata Dal (Secular) and recently, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP)leave its fold during this period, displeased with the treatment they received from the CPI(M), and seek refuge in the UDF. The latest and the most shocking of these departures was that of the RSP, a Left Front partner for over three decades, in protest against it being denied the Kollam Lok Sabha seat (its most inuential region) for the third time in a row by the CPI(M). The result, for the Congress (I) and the UDF, was the short-term benet of bringing in more sections of voters under its inuence (and, surely, the possibility of longterm acrimony when it comes to the sharing of the spoils). The parties that left the LDF were among the CPI (M)s most inuential minor partners, with their own vote pockets; but those which sought to replace them were much weaker groups, such as the Janathipatya Samrakshana Samiti (JSS) and the Communist Marxist Party from the UDF, the Forward Bloc, the Indian National League (INL) and so on. Second, this election is different in that faction feuds within the Congress (I) and the CPI(M) have been tamed to a large extent and have not marred the candidateselection process, the campaign, or (according to early indications, at least) the prospects of the candidates or the coalition partners in both the fronts. Within the Congress (I), such election-eve geniality was achieved by the decision of the party high command
to appoint V.M. Sudheerana veteran leader with a clean image who had remained largely neutral during the long factional wars within the partyas the Pradesh Congress Committee (I) president. In the CPI(M), on the other hand, cordiality sprouted abruptly, just as this seasons campaign was about to begin, with the opposition leader, V.S. Achuthanandan, doing a volte-face and openly concurring with the official party line on the highly sensitive issues of the murder of the Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) leader T.P. Chandrasekharan and the SNC-Lavalin corruption case.
UNITED FACE
Just as the LDF campaign was about to begin, Achuthanandan, in a television interview, surprised Kerala by speaking in defence of the conclusions of the official party inquiry into the Chandrasekharan murder (which, unlike the ndings of a lower court, claimed it to be the result of personal rather than party-instigated political enmity). This was contrary to his earlier stand on this issue. Similarly surprising was his response to a question on the SNC-Lavalin case. He said that CPI(M)s State secretary, Pinarayi Vijayan, once an accused in the case, cannot any longer be considered guilty of any act of corruption now that a lower court had exonerated him in the case. The dismay that Achuthanandans volte-face generated among RMP leaders, party detractors and a section of the general public who had helped sustain Achuthanandans rebellion within the CPI(M) until now, especially against the official group led by Pinarayi Vijayan, could only be matched by the salving that followed in equal measure within his own party because of it. Achuthanandans unexpected alignment with the ofcial party line during what is obviously a very crucial election for the CPI(M) in Kerala led to even Pinarayi Vijayan describing the subsequent phase in the State party as something which every party member and friend had been looking forward to.
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S.K. MOHAN
But the election-eve cordiality within the Congress (I) and the CPI(M) has the potential to create quite the opposite effect on the Kerala electorate. While the Congress and the UDF seemed to be all the more better for the unity that its leaders have achieved, the CPI(M) is likely to lose rather than gain, at least in the short term, for having co-opted Achuthanandan to the official party line on the two issues. For, the line adopted by Achuthanandan against the State party leaderships position on these and several other issues was exactly what made him a star campaigner for the LDF in many elections in Kerala. On several occasions, it had stood the party in good stead and helped it rally the support of not just an exasperated rank and le, but independent sections of the general public also under its banner, even as they disagreed with the partys position. This new unity, if it can be sustained, may prove benecial to the CPI(M) in the long term, but it is unlikely to benet it and the LDF in this election.
UNSETTLING ISSUE
The third signicant facet of this election is the threat the UDF faces in several of its traditional strongholds from an unexpected issue: the controversy that grew out of the State governments responses to the recommendations of the Gadgil and Kasturirangan Committees for the protection of the ecology of the Western Ghats. Genuine fears about the impact of the restrictions recommended by the committees in ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs) on the lives and properties of nearly 22 lakh people living in the 123 villages along the Western Ghats have been used well against the Congress and the State government by a combination of forces. They include: (a) the Kerala Congress (Mani), which used the issue as a leverage for its demand for an extra seat (Idukki) within the UDF; (b) the vested interests who fear that the proposals would affect their business interests; and (c) the opposition LDF, which saw it as a grand political opportunity to win the condence of the settler farmers in constituencies that has been the preserve of the Congress (I) and its coalition partners. What they have reaped together, therefore, is the large-scale disaffection among the settler farmers of Kerala, who have been the UDFs traditional and reliable vote bank, who constitute a strong lobby of largely Catholic Christian voters, with a majority of them spread over at least ve of the 20 constituencies in the State. As the campaign progressed, the only factor that might help the Congress (I) in these constituencies was the softening of the attitude of the Catholic church towards it.
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The UDF was also on the defensive over several antiincumbency factors, especially the Team Solar corruption case that rocked the Chief Ministers office, scandals involving some Ministers and MPs, allegations of corruption and grievances over rising prices of petroleum products and essential commodities. But how these factors would play out at the ground level in each constituency would be known only during the last phase of the campaign. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the CPI(M), then ruling the State, lost 10 of the 14 seats it contested. It squeezed through in the four seats it won then: Attingal in the south, Palakkad, Alathur and Kasargod in the north. All the four candidates that the CPI, the second largest partner in the LDF, elded, in Thiruvananthapuram (against Shashi Tharoor), Pathanamthitta, Thrissur and Wayanad, also lost. The UDF, on the other hand, won 10 of the 11 southern and central Kerala constituencies from Thiruvananthapuram to Thrissur (except Attingal, a CPI(M) fortress), and six of the nine others in north Kerala. The Congress (I) won 13 of the 17 seats it contested; the Muslim League won both Malappuram and Ponnani, its strongholds, and the Kerala Congress (Mani) won Kottayam, its native turf, for the rst time, defeating threetime CPI(M) MP Suresh Kurup. The April 10 election will certainly be a tougher one for the UDF and the LDF, with close contests expected in at least a dozen constituencies, including Thiruvananthapuram, Pathanamthitta and Wayanad. The Congress (I) is contesting only in 15 seats this time (instead of 17 in 2009), to accommodate the RSP and the Janata Dal, in Kollam and Palakkad, respectively. The RSPs rebellion in the LDF had a sobering effect on the two fronts, especially with regard to the demands and concerns of smaller coalition partners. While the RSP itself was welcomed wholeheartedly into the UDF, with the offering of the Kollam seat, the Janata Dal factions in the two fronts, whose claims were ignored initially, were offered one seat each by the CPI(M) and the Congress (I). Thus, Socialist Janata Dals (SJD) M.P. Veerendra Kumar is the UDFs candidate in Palakkad (against the CPI(M)s M.B. Rajesh) and his former party colleague, Mathew T. Thomas of the Janata Dal (Secular) is ghting Jose K. Mani in Kottayam. The contest in Kerala has become a close one, and for the rst time in its history, the CPI(M), which is contesting in 15 seats, has invited individuals with no previous link with the Left to contest as independent candidates in ve of them. Among them are two disgruntled Congressmen, Peelipose Thomas (a former All India Congress Committee memFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
OP P O S I T I O N L E A D E R V.S. Achuthanandan speaks at an election meeting of LDF candidate M.B. Rajesh in Palakkad.
ber from Pathanamthitta) and V. Abdurahiman (in Ponnani); a popular comedian in Malayalam cinema, Innocent (pitted against P.C. Chacko, the chairman of the joint parliamentary committee(JPC) probing the allocation of 2G spectrum, in Chalakkudy); and Christy Fernandez, a Gujarat-cadre IAS officer who served the former President Pratibha Patel as well as in the Narendra Modi administration. Prominent CPI(M) candidates this time include Polit Bureau member M.A. Baby (in Kollam, against the RSPs former MP and Minister, N.K. Premachandran); all the four current MPs of the party, P. Karunakaran (Kasargod), M.B. Rajesh (Palakkad), P.K. Biju (Alathur) and A. Sampath (Attingal); a former State Minister, P.K. Sreemati (Kannur); and a former MP, A. Vijayaraghavan (Kozhikode). The CPI is contesting in four seats, and has also elded an independent, a nominee of the Church of South India (CSI), Dr Bennet Abraham, in Thiruvananthapuram, reportedly with an eye on the substantial number of Nadar Christian votes in the constituency where Union Minister of State Shashi Tharoor is seeking a re-election and is locked in a multi-cornered ght with the BJPs O. Rajagopal, among others.
THE OTHER PLAYERS
The AAP is taking its edgling steps in Kerala in this election by targeting mainly the sections that are sick of the corruption and the complacency of the parties that have been in power. It has attracted some attention by elding the writer Sarah Joseph (in Thrissur), the journalist Anita Pratap (in Ernakulam), the anti-endosulfan campaigner Ambalathara Kunjikrishnan (in Kasargod) and a former IPS officer Ajith Joy (in Thiruvananthapuram). The AAP is, however, still far from making a dent in the two-coalition political tradition in the State. The BJP has once again elded its strongest candidates, O. Rajagopal, former Union Minister of State for
Railways, and K. Surendran, a State general secretary, in Thiruvananthapuram and Kasargod constituencies where it hopes to break through nally this time. The BJP, however, is yet to break through the coalition arrangement in Kerala and win in an Assembly or Parliament election, despite gaining between 6.22 to 10.39 per cent of votes in the past ve Lok Sabha contests. But its votes are spread throughout the State and not concentrated in pockets like the smaller partners of the two coalitions that use them to win elections. Moreover, the partys divisive agenda often alienates it further from the voters and political alliances in a State like Kerala. Narendra Modi was, however, the rst national leader to visit Kerala before the election, to address a huge rally of the Pulaya Maha Sabha, which represents a prominent backward class community in the State. Last year, too, he was in the State, participating in a meeting organised by the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam at Varkala, and wooing the powerful Ezhava community in the State. In the end, it may be Narendra Modis BJP which may turn out to be the key factor in turning the vote for or against the two coalitions in Kerala. Muslim and Christian communities have a sizeable presence in the State, with the former accounting for 25 to 60 per cent of the population in the eight northern constituencies from Palakkad to Kasargod. A similar Christian concentration of between 22 to 37 per cent of the population is present in eight central Kerala constituencies from Pathanamthitta to Thrissur, as well as in Thiruvananthapuram in the south. The Congress (I) and the CPI(M), especially the former, may be banking on the possibility of a last-minute consolidation of minority votes against the Modi factor in the northern and central districts of the State, for eventually tilting a more or less equally poised election in their favour.
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THE HINDU ARCHIVES
GENERAL ELECTION/NORTH-EAST
Head start for the Congress

In Assam, the failure of the BJP and the AGP to form an alliance and the AIUDFs soft approach are likely to work to the Congress benet. In the rest of the region, too, the Congress appears better prepared. B Y SUSHANTA TALUKDAR
IN the Lok Sabha elections in Assam, to be held on April 7, 12 and 24, the main contestants are the ruling Congress, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). In 2009, the BJP, in partnership with the AGP, doubled its tally to four seats and expanded its organisational base in the Brahmaputra Valley. However, the AGP failed to derive much benet from the alliance. It could win only one seat, Tezpur, which it wrested from the Congress, and lost the two seats it held, Lakhimpur and Dibrugarh. In 2009, AIUDF president Maulana Badruddin Ajmal wrested the Dhubri seat from the Congress. The AIUDF was also responsible for the erosion in the Congress support base among Muslims, which helped the BJP win the Gauhati seat and regain Silchar. In Gauhati, the AIUDF candidate, Sonabor Ali, secured 73,316 votes and caused the defeat of the Congress Captain Robin Bordoloi. The BJPs Bijoya Chakrabarty won the seat by 11,855 votes. This time the Congress has pinned its hopes on winning the Gauhati seat because the AIUDF has elded a non-Muslim candidatethe partys MLA from Boko, Gopinath Das. It is hopeful of the Muslim votes, which earlier went to the AIUDF, going to the ruling party candidate this time. Besides, the sitting BJP MP will have to face the AGP heavyweight and former Rajya Sabha
RA H U L GA N D H I , C O N GRES S VI CE - P R E S I D E N T, on the campaign trail at Nagaon in
Assam on February 26.

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UTPAL BARUAH/REUTERS
member Birendra Prasad Baishya. The AIUDF was oated by Badruddin Ajmal after the Supreme Court, in July 2005, scrapped the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act. It accused the Congress of not doing anything to prevent the scrapping of the Act, which was seen as a piece of soft legislation that protected the minorities from undue harassment during the identication of illegal Bangladeshi migrants. The AIUDF won 10 seats in the 126-member Assam Assembly in the 2006 elections. The party increased its tally to 18 in 2011 and emerged as the principal opposition party in the Assembly, pushing the AGP, which had 10 seats, to the second position. The AGPs attempts to forge a pre-election alliance with the BJP this time failed because of differences within the leaderships of both parties and opposition from the B AD R UD D I N A J M AL, president of the AIUDF. He is State BJP unit. AGP president Prafulla Kumar Mahanta perceived as being soft on the Congress this time. blamed the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and the State BJP leadership for the parties failure to forge an alliance. The AGPs overtures towards the BJP pushed tosh Mohan Dev, as the candidate. The BJP has the party away from the two Left parties. The Communist renominated the sitting party MP, Kabindra Purkaystha, Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of for the seat. India have elded candidates in three and one seat reThe Congress won nine Lok Sabha seats in Assam in spectively. 2004 when the AGP and the BJP did not have an alliance The Congress hopes to reap dividends from a possible and the AIUDF did not exist. The AGP and the BJP won split in the anti-Congress votes among candidates of the two seats each, while the Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF), opposition parties. Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi is con- the Congress ally, won one seat. The BJP in the State is hopeful of the Modi wave dent that his party will get more seats than last time and claims that the Modi magic will not work in Assam. He causing a severe erosion in the Congress support base in downplays the dissidence within the party and says that favour of the BJP to balance the split in votes between the despite differences the party will rise in unison to win the AGP and the BJP. BJP leaders argue that leaders and workers have deserted the AGP and joined the BJP. They maximum number of seats from Assam. The AIUDFs choice of candidates for this election cite the instances of former AGP president Chandra has fuelled speculation that the party has reached a tacit Mohan Patowary and former Minister Hitendra Nath Goswami quitting the AGP and understanding with the Congress. joining the BJP. Patowary is the BJP Both the Congress and the AIUDF candidate from Barpeta where the have denied allegations of such an AGP has elded its senior leader understanding and of having elded Phanibhushan Choudhury. weak candidates in any constituenThe exodus of top AGP leaders cy. to the BJP began in 2011 when the Election watchers pointed out present State BJP president, Sarbathat in 2009 Badruddin Ajmal himnanda Sonowal, quit the AGP along self contested the Silchar seat apart from Dhubri, which he won. Howwith his supporters. Sonowal, who ever, this time the AIUDF rst anwon the Dibrugarh seat on the AGP nounced the name of Pervez ticket in 2004, is contesting from Ahmed, son of former President Lakhimpur this time against sitting Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, as its candiCongress MP and Union Minister date for Silchar. However, Pervez for Tribal Affairs Ranee Narah. Ahmed joined the Trinamool ConDr Nani Gopal Mahanta, Progress the next day and the party fessor of Political Science in Gauhati named him as its candidate for the University, observes: Barpeta seat. Assams complex demographic The AIUDFs vacillation fuelled mosaic will not provide a smooth the speculation about its alleged unride for the so-called wave of the derstanding with the Congress, BJP under the leadership of NarenP RA F U LLA K UM A R M A HA N TA which has renominated its MLA dra Modi. However, the Modi image from Silchar, Sushmita Dev, daugh- releasing the AGPs manifesto in is discernible for those dissatised ter of former Union Minister San- Guwahati on March 14. with the performances of the ConFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
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RITU RAJ KONWAR
RITU RAJ KONWAR
gress governments in the State and at the Centre. At a time when the State is highly polarised on religious lines on the issue of illegal migrants from Bangladesh, the BJP may secure a sizeable chunk of the Assamese caste-Hindu and Bengali Hindu votes, which went to the Congress in 2009. However, the challenge for the BJP is that it has to contest with the prominent regional party of the state, the AGP, for its vote share. A BJP-AGP combination would have been a formidable challenge for the Congress and the AIUDF as the two parties draw their support from a similar political base. The AGP may be spoiler for the BJP this time. As the election dates approached, the ruling Congress appeared better prepared. It was ahead of others in choosing candidates, while the opposition parties had to settle for party hoppers in some constituencies.
Vincent H. Pala, appears to have the advantage in the absence of any alliance of regional parties against it. The Hill State Peoples Democratic Party (HSPDP), the United Democratic Party (UDP), and the Khun Hynniewtrep National Awakening Movement (KHNAM) had come together as the All Regional Parties Alliance (ARPA) and formed a non-Congress Executive Committee (EC) to rule the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council (KHADC), elections to which were held recently. However, the APRA failed to put up a common candidate in Shillong, with the UDP elding its working president Paul Lyngdoh and the HSPDP and the KHNAM backing an independent, Rev. P.B.M. Basaiawmoit. In Tripura, the CPI(M)-led ruling Left Front is condent of retaining both the Lok Sabha seats (see separate story).
Stalwarts & surprises

THE 25 seats of the seven north-eastern States and Sikkim play an important role in the numbers game at the Centre. Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Manipur elect two Lok Sabha members each, and Nagaland, Mizoram and Sikkim one each. In 2009, the Congress won six of these 11 seats, the CPI(M) two and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the Naga Peoples Front (NPF) and the Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF) one each. The region as a whole grapples with problems of a similar nature, including insurgency involving ethnic outts clamouring for overlapping ethnic homelands, a serious development decit, illegal migrants, crippling unemployment, and poor connectivity. These are the issues that come into play in both Assembly and Lok Sabha elections across the region. In Meghalaya, the return of former Lok Sabha Speaker Purno Agitok Sangma to national electoral politics, ending six and a half years of retirement, has made the elections all the more interesting. He is contesting the Tura seat, comprising the Garo Hills region of Meghalaya, as a candidate of the National Peoples Party (NPP), which he heads. In 2009, Sangmas daughter and former Union Minister Agatha Sangma won the seat on the NCP ticket. She rst won the seat in a byelection in 2008 to become the youngest member of the 14th Lok Sabha while making her debut in electoral politics. Purno Sangma is in a straight contest with the ruling Congress Daryl William Ch. Momin, the 27-year-old grandson of Captain Williamson A. Sangma, the rst Chief Minister of Meghalaya. The Congress, fresh from its victory in the 2013 Assembly elections, is eyeing the seat on the strength of its performance in the Garo Hills. The party won 13 of the 24 Assembly seats in the region. This was up from the seven it won in 2008 when the NCP led by Sangma won 15 seats in the 60-member Assembly, 13 of them in the Garo Hills. In Shillong, the only other Lok Sabha seat in the State, the Congress, whose candidate is the sitting MP
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RITU RAJ KONWAR
P UR N O S AN G M A , former Lok Sabha Speaker, on his way to address an election rally in East Garo Hills in Meghalaya. He is the NPP candidate in Tura in the Garo Hills. At left is his daughter and former Union Minister Agatha Sangma.
Arunachal Pradesh will have simultaneous elections for the two Lok Sabha seats and 60 Assembly seats on April 9. The tenure of the Assembly was to end on November 4, but with the Governor, on March 6, accepting the recommendation of the State Cabinet to dissolve the Assembly and advance the elections, the Election Commission decided to hold it along with the Lok Sabha elections. The move by the Nabam Tuki government appeared to be aimed at ensuring that the outcome of the
G E G O N G A PA N G , former Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, returns to the BJP and is welcomed by party president Rajnath Singh, in New Delhi on February 19.
Lok Sabha elections did not have a bearing on the Assembly elections. The Arunachal East Lok Sabha seat is poised for a three-cornered ght between sitting MP and Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs Ninong Erring of the ruling Congress, former MP Tapir Gao of the BJP and Wangman Lowangcha of the Peoples Party of Arunachal (PPA), which won four of the 60 Assembly seats in the 2009 Assembly elections. In the Arunachal West seat it is a multi-cornered contest. Those who have led their nominations are the sitting MP Takam Sanjoy of the Congress; Kiren Rijiju, a former MP of the BJP; Jalley Sonam of the PPA; Habung Payeng of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP); Gumjum Haider, former president of North East Students Organisation (NESO), as the Trinamool Congress candidate; Gicho Kabak of the NCP; and Taba Taku of the Lok Bharati Party. The return of Gegong Apang, a former Chief Minister and a Congress stalwart, to the BJP has come as a force multiplier for the party. Apang led the rst BJP government in Arunachal Pradesh and in the region for a year before defecting to the Congress ahead of the 2004 Assembly elections. However, with Congress candidates winning unopposed in seven Assembly seats, it is clear that the opposition parties were caught napping by the advancement of the Assembly elections. In Manipur, the Congress has renominated its two sitting MPs. The BJP is contesting both seats and is backed by the Manipur Peoples Party (MPP). However, neither the BJP nor the MPP could win any seat in the Assembly elections in 2012. In Inner Manipur constituFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
ency, the sitting Congress MP, Thokchom Meinya, is locked in a multi-cornered contest with the candidate of the BJP, the CPI and the Trinamool Congress. Of the seven seats that the Trinamool Congress won in the last Assembly elections, six are part of the Inner Manipur Lok Sabha constituency. The CPIs M. Nara came second in the 2009 elections. The CPI drew a blank in the 2012 Assembly elections. The Congress expects its candidate to win this time too because of the division of the nonCongress votes. In the Outer Manipur constituency, the Congress Thangso Baite faces a stiff challenge from the Naga Peoples Front (NPF), the Trinamool Congress and the BJP. The constituency has 20 Assembly seats in the hills and eight in the valley. In 2012, the Congress won 14 Assembly seats in the hills and seven in the valley. The NPF, the ruling party of Nagaland, won four Assembly seats. In Nagaland, Chief Minister Neiphu Rio, who has been heading a regional party government for the past 11 years, is the consensus candidate of the ruling Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) led by the NPF for the lone Lok Sabha seat. The Congress has elded former Minister K.V. Pusa. Neiphu Rios bid to enter national politics has signalled a likely change of guard in the State, where the dominant issue is the ongoing peace talks between the insurgent National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) and the Government of India. Rio is also the convener of the North East Regional Political Front (NERPF) formed by 10 regional parties in October 2013 in Guwahati. The BJP, an ally in the NPF-led DAN, won seven seats in the 60-member Assembly in 2003, but its number fell to two in 2008 and to one in 2013. For the lone Lok Sabha seat in Mizoram a triangular ght is on the cards between the sitting Congress MP C.L. Ruala, Robert Romawia Royte of the United Democratic Front (UDF) led by the Mizo National Front (MNF), and M. Lalmanzuala of the AAP. The Congress is banking on its agship New Land Use Policy (NLUP) to retain the seat. It helped Chief Minister Lalthanhawla steer his party to a landslide victory in the November 2013 Assembly elections: the Congress won 34 seats in the 40member Assembly. The opposition Mizo National Front (MNF) won ve seats and its ally, the Mizoram Peoples Conference (MPC), won one seat. The core objectives of the NLUP are to wean farmers away from jhum (slash-and-burn cultivation) practices and assist them to nd employment in economic ventures that create productive assets in each family, to keep 60 per cent of Mizorams total land area under rainforests, and to improve the income of both rural and urban poor through sustainable farming, micro-enterprises and small and cottage industries. It will be a challenging task for the UDF and the AAP to reach out to all the beneciaries of the programme and promise them something more attractive. The Congress appears to be in an advantageous position in the absence of a formidable opposition in the northeastern States where it is in power.
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GENERAL ELECTION
Left in front
The Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front is likely to retain the two seats in Tripura. B Y S U H R I D S A N K A R C H A T T O P A D H Y A Y
FRESH from its resounding victory in the Assembly elections just a year ago, the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front in Tripura seems set to retain both its Lok Sabha seats in the upcoming general election. The voting will be held in two phases in the StateApril 7 for the West Tripura constituency and April 12 for East Tripura. The Left Front, under the leadership of Chief Minister and CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Manik Sarkar, returned to power for the fth consecutive time in the State, winning 50 of the 60 State Assembly seats last year. It is not likely to face any problem in the Lok Sabha elections against a disunited and dispirited opposition comprising the Congress, the All India Trinamool Congress, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This time the Left is elding new candidatesSankar Prasad Datta, the State general secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), from West Tripura, and Jitendra Choudhury, the State Minister for Forests, Rural Development, and Industries and Commerce, from the East Tripura seat reserved for the Scheduled Tribes. The Left has been going from strength to strength in the State with its thrust on peace and development, while the opposition has been falling increasingly into disarray. The alternative policies that are being pursued by the Left Front government in Tripura have been welcomed by the people. Our overall performance in every sphere of development has brought about a major socio-economic change in the State. We hope to increase our vote share by at least 5 per cent in this election, Gautam Das, spokesperson for the CPI(M) in Tripura, told Frontline. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the total vote share of the Left Front was 61.69 per cent. The Congress-led front consisting of the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Twipra (INPT), the National Conference of Tripura (NCT) and the Peoples Democratic Front (PDF) is still reeling from its defeat in the Assembly elec51
TR I P UR A CHI E F M I N I S TE R Manik Sarkar.
tions. There has been a steady erosion of its support base, and it has been losing its workers not only to the Trinamool Congress, which has of late been trying to assert itself in the State, but also to the Left. The two candidates elded by the Congress are Arunoday Saha, former ViceFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
RITU RAJ KONWAR
TR INA MO O L C O N G R ES S candidate Ratan Chakraborty ling his nomination papers in Agartala on March 19.
Chancellor of Tripura University, in West Tripura and Sachitra Debbarma in East Tripura. Essentially these candidates were chosen for their good image. They are individuals who will be accepted by the people, said a Congress leader of the State. However, the dwindling crowds in its rallies, the lacklustre performance of its workers, and its inability to hold its ock together do not paint an encouraging picture for the Congress. On the other hand, the Trinamool Congress, which did not eld any candidate in the Assembly elections last year but will contest both the Lok Sabha seats this year, has been more successful than the Congress in drawing crowds. The recent migration of a large number of workers as well as some leaders from the Congress has bolstered the condence of Mamata Banerjees party unit in Tripura. Even though we have not had much time to prepare, the main battle in this election will be between the Left Front and the Trinamool, Ratan Chakraborty, the Trinamool candidate from West Tripura, told Frontline. Mukul Roy, the general secretary of the All India Trinamool Congress, had said a few months earlier in Agartala, the State capital: We have no doubt that we will snatch power from the CPI(M) in the next Assembly elections. However, in reality, the Trinamool Congress has not yet taken over the position of the main opposition party, probably for the simple reason that it has not had enough time to establish a solid base across the State. The recent exodus from the Congress is unlikely to alter drastically the present political equations in the State though undeniably it has left the Congress considerably weaker and
more demoralised. Some of the inuential leaders who left the Congress include former Minister Ratan Chakraborty, former Tripura Pradesh Congress president Surojit Datta, and former Leader of the Opposition Jawhar Saha. The Pradesh Congress leadership, as expected, has been dismissive of the Trinamools prospects. The leaders who have left the Congress to join the Trinamool wield little inuence in the State. Their departure will make no difference to the Congress. In Tripura, the two main political parties will always be the CPI(M) and the Congress, and even if Mamata Banerjee comes here a hundred times, she will not be able to make a dent here, Birajit Sinha, chairman of the Pradesh Congress Election Committee and a ve-time MLA, told Frontline. The BJP, though never a major player in Tripura, hopes to secure more votes this time. Its presence in the State, however, is so negligible that it is unlikely to make any difference. In fact, according to political observers, even if the BJPs vote share does increase, it will work to the Left Fronts advantage as it will result in a further division of the anti-Left vote. As far as the opposition is concerned, the coming election in the State is likely to be a tussle for the second position. While the Left Fronts message to the electorate is of a national nature, calling for a non-Congress and non-BJP secular alternative, the main thrust of the opposition parties campaign is a paribartan (change) in the State. However, the way political equations stand, it is doubtful that the Lok Sabha election will be a harbinger of any paribartan in Tripura.
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PTI
GENERAL ELECTION
An alternative force
The ruling SDF faces a strong challenge from the newly formed SKM in Sikkim. B Y S U H R I D S A N K A R C H A T T O P A D H Y A Y
FOR the rst time since 1999, the ruling Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF) may face a tough challenge from the main opposition, the newly formed Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM), in the upcoming Assembly and Lok Sabha elections in Sikkim, which will be held simultaneously on April 12. However, the SDF seems set to return to power in the State for the fth consecutive term and also retain the lone Lok Sabha seat. In the last two elections, the SDFs political dominance in the State was absolute. In the 2004 elections, it won 31 out of the 32 Assembly seats, and in 2009, it made a clean sweep, winning all 32 seats, including the Sangha seat reserved for the monks and nuns of Sikkims monasteries. For long, the main opposition was the Congress. This time, however, the challenge comes from the SKM under the leadership of an erstwhile heavyweight of the SDF, Prem Singh Golay, a three-time MLA, a Cabinet Minister since 1994, and until last year the second-most powerful man in the SDF after Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling. Golay quit the SDF last year and formed the SKM. In a State where politics is dominated by individuals rather than political parties, the battle between Chamling and the former number-two man in his party promises to be interesting. The last time the SDF faced any kind of challenge was in 1999, when the Sikkim Sangram Parishad (SSP), led by former Chief Minister Nar Bahadur Bhandari, won seven seats and secured 41.8 per cent of the votes. Chamling is contesting from his usual seat, Namchi-Singithang, and also from Rangrang-Yangang in South Sikkim district, while Golay is contesting from Upper Burtuk in East Sikkim district, where he is the sitting MLA, and also from Soreng Chakung, his home constituency in West Sikkim district. For the Lok
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C HI E F M I N I S TE R and Sikkim Democratic Front president Pawan Kumar Chamling, a le photograph.
Sabha seat, the SDF candidate, Prem Das Rai, who won by a margin of 84,868 votes against the Congress Kharananda Upreti in 2009, will be looking to retain his seat, but this time his opponent is the SKMs T.N. Dhakal, a former bureaucrat and a new face in Sikkim politics. The SDF has the tradition of supporting whichever party or alliance that comes to power at the Centre. One interesting fact is that for the rst time since 1979, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, formerly of the Congress and a three-time Chief Minister, is not a factor in the politics of the State. Bhandari, who was the main political opponent of Chamling for the past 20 years and who fought the 2009 elections as the president of the Sikkim Pradesh Congress, disappeared into political obscurity after his party was routed by the SDF. He has since rejoined his old party, the SSP, which he had left to join the Congress in 2003. The Congress, which has been the main opposition since 2004, has lost its relevance in the State. While it is largely acknowledged that the SDF has
SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH
SIKKI M K R A N T I K A R I M O RC H A chief Prem Singh Golay addressing a rally at Singtam in February.
been performing well and development work has been going strong with substantial growth in the tourism sector, the States main revenue earner, it is also undeniable that the anti-incumbency factor is quietly at work. It is this desire for change that the SKM has taken up with its call for paribartan (change). For the last 20 years of the SDFs rule, it has been one persons control over everything. The people now want a change. They want political and economic freedom; they want equal opportunities for all, SKM leader Jacob Khaling told Frontline. The SKMs election campaign also highlights the allegations of corruption and nepotism against the SDF government. The main thrust of the SDFs campaign has, as usual, been on development work. We have secured peace, prosperity and security for the people of Sikkim. We are a tried and tested party that has the best imaginable credentials. Already, the people are getting disenchanted with the SKM and the politics of violence that it is associated with, senior SDF leader Prem Das Rai told Frontline. However, according to political sources in Sikkim, the SDF leadership has reasons to be worried. People from various other parties, including the Congress, have been shifting to Golays camp, and Golay is the most formidable opponent Chamling has faced in a long time. Not only is Golay aware of the functioning of the SDF, he is also believed to have played a key role in many of the SDFs sweeping electoral victories. Moreover, the Other Backward Classes (OBC) which account for over 52 per cent of the total electorate and are so far the most important component of the SDF vote base may split, with a section voting for the SKM. This is the rst time in many years that the opposition has a leader, Golay, who belongs
to the OBC. This must be worrying the SDF, a political source told Frontline. According to political observers, the fact that the SDF, in spite of the anti-incumbency factor working against it, chose to introduce only 10 new faces, retaining 11 of its sitting MLAs and recalling nine ex-MLAs, indicates that Chamling is not willing to take any chances, and is relying more on veterans this time. The SKM, on the other hand, has chosen to eld mostly new faces as a counter to the SDFs strategy. The main battle is expected to take place in the East and West districts. The South district still remains an SDF stronghold, while the West district is considered the heartland of the SKM. However, the SDF is not without any inuence in these. The main advantage that the SDF has over all its opponents is its disciplined, well-oiled, cadre-based party machinery. It was the rst to release the list of candidates; and while other parties, including the SKM, were desperately trying to nalise their own lists, SDF leaders were already on the campaign trail. With less than a month left for the elections, the scenes at the different party offices were revealing. While the SDF headquarters in Gangtok wore an empty look, with most of its leaders out at work, there was frenzied activity in the offices of the other parties as last-minute details were nalised. Moreover, when all the other parties have been in a state of ux for the last six months, with leaders and party workers constantly shifting allegiances, the SDF camp suffered hardly any attrition. Even when Golay left the SDF, not too many leaders followed him. But it cannot be denied that the idea of the SKM as an alternative to the SDF has been gathering momentum in the State. The result can go either way, said a resident of Gangtok.
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PTI
Financial strains in the new China

Two recent cases of debt default bring into focus the rising corporate debt in China, estimated at around $12 trillion in 2013, with most of the loans provided by trust companies that populate the shadow banking sector and account for 30 per cent of credit advanced in 2013.
ARLY in March, the largest private steel producer in China, Shanxi Haixin Iron and Steel Group, defaulted on loans from Minsheng Bank estimated at 20 billion yuan ($3.57 billion) that had fallen due. This set off one more spurt of speculation on whether we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Chinese growth miracle, precipitated by an internal meltdown of the nancial sector. The international nancial media are replete with stories on the fragile foundations of Chinas rapidly built edice of bond-based debt and the possibilities of a crisis. There are a number of reasons why an event relating to a rm that is a relatively small steel producer compared with its state-owned rivals is seen as heralding the collapse of an emerging giant. To start with, a few days earlier, another relatively small company, Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science & Technology, failed to
meet its commitment to pay up 89 million yuan ($14.5 million) in interest due on bonds worth 1 billion yuan ($163 million) it had issued two years back. With these defaults com-
CHINESE PREMIER LI KEQIANG.
He said recently that defaults on bonds and other nancial products were unavoidable.
55
ing in quick succession, the two events could be seen as indicators of an emerging trend that could spiral into a debt crisis. Such speculation seems plausible also because there are many economic sectors in China that have experienced the creation of large excess capacities nanced with easily accessed credit and are now in trouble. A typical example is the steel sector to which Haixin belongs. According to reports, other steel mills burdened with excess capacities and large debts are running losses because of the slowdown that China and the world economy are experiencing. But steel is not the only industry thus affected. There are many more in areas as diverse as solar power and real estate. Finally, while debt defaults may be common in other contexts, these are special events in China. The Chaori Solar instance was the rst
WANG ZHAO/AFP
corporate default in the country in 17 years. Like many other so-called emerging markets, and on a much larger scale, China has seen a huge credit boom over the years, with that boom having been augmented by the stimulus measures adopted in response to the 2008 global crisis. But this did not seem to matter because the government had always intervened to bail out potential defaulters and foreclose any possibility of instability in nancial markets, which are important instruments for sustaining Chinas investment-led growth. This encouraged the belief that all debt from the nancial system was implicitly guaranteed by the state. The condence that came with that belief is now being challenged. Not just by the Chaori and Haixin defaults, but also by evidence that there is a subtle change occurring in the stance of the government.
DEFAULTS UNAVOIDABLE
T H E C H I N A M I N S HE N G BA N K in Beijing. Shanxi Haixin Iron and Steel
Group, the largest private steel producer in the country, defaulted on loans estimated at $3.57 billion from this bank.
In the period between the two defaults under discussion, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, suspected by many to be a neoliberal reformer, announced at a press conference that defaults on bonds and other nancial products were unavoidable. This seemed to be a signal that there are sections at the top in government which want to withdraw the hand of support the state had provided borrowers and lenders in order to prevent default so as to deal with the problem of growing moral hazard. The implicit promise of a bailout when needed reduces the pressure to exercise due diligence when making lending decisions. The governments decision to stand back in the two recent cases of default is surprising because a little more than a month earlier it had intervened to bail out investors in an unusual trust product or security issued by China Credit Trust, one of Chinas many shadow banking companies. Named Credit Equals Gold No. 1, it attracted investments to the tune of 3 billion yuan ($490 million), but proved a dud because it was backed by loans to a coal mining company that went bust. Yet the investors were bailed out by intervenFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
T H E P RO D UCTI ON LI N E at Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science and
Technology Co Ltd in Jiujiang. The company failed to meet its commitment to pay up $14.5 million in interest due on bonds it had issued in 2012. tion to make good the loan, with only interest for the third year reportedly shaved off. According to Financial Times, Moodys, as expected, declared: Although the current proposed settlement does entail losses to investors in terms of foregone interest, by fully repaying their principal, it reinforces the perception that investors will be bailed out one way or another when the products go sour, which is contrary to the establishment of sound market discipline and a healthy credit market. Given this
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history, it must be the case that either sections in the government that are in agreement with nancial markets have gained the upper hand, leading to the Chaori and Haixin defaults, or the government now nds itself faced with a wave of defaults that it cannot simultaneously address without some difficulty, making some of them unavoidable as Premier Li put it. If more defaults are inevitable, they could trouble China, where corporate debt, for example, has soared
REUTERS
JASON LEE/REUTERS
R U B B L E O F R E S I D E N T I A L B U I LD I N GS demolished to make room for
skyscrapers in downtown Shanghai. According to a 2013 survey, about 65 per cent of Chinas wealth is invested in real estate, much of it speculative. in recent years. According to reports, Standard & Poors has estimated the size of corporate debt in China to be around $12 trillion or 120 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of 2013. At the margin, a large chunk of these loans has been nanced with investments in trust products issued by the shadow banking sector, such as Credit Equals Gold. According to gures released recently by the Peoples Bank of China (PBC), Chinas central bank, loans provided by trust companies that populate the shadow banking sector rose by an annual 23 per cent to touch RMB17.3 trillion ($2.9 trillion), or 30 per cent of credit advanced in 2013. Around $650 billion of trust loans are expected to fall due in 2014, raising the possibility of further defaults in different parts of the economy. Under observation are rms such as Zhejiang Xingrun Real Estate, a provincial real estate developer that would have to repay RMB3.5 billion ($569 million) of debt soon. The other borrowers receiving large loans were local governments, which, after a central borrowing ban in 1994, set up off-budget local government nancing vehicles to receive the loans and nance infrastructural and other prestige projects. They received loans not just from official agencies such as the China Development Bank but also from the trusts. According to Chinas National Audit Office, local government debt had risen by as much as 70 per cent from the end of 2010 to touch $3 trillion in June 2013. To this must be added the large volume of credit that has poured into Chinas real estate sector, giving rise to its own version of a housing and commercial real estate bubble. According to a 2013 survey by the economist Gan Li (quoted by William Pesek of BloombergView), about 65 per cent of Chinas wealth is invested in real estate. A lot of this investment could be speculative, with 42 per cent of housing demand in the rst half of 2012 coming from those who already owned at least one home. In many areas, these new properties remain unoccupied, indicating that some of the construction is in areas where demand is low. This has led to price declines that can be damaging since the investment has been nanced by credit that needs to be repaid. Overall, credit in China is estimated to have risen from 130 to 210 per cent of GDP over the last ve years. The need to restructure this overhang of debt, by imposing losses in areas where the risks are not seen as systemic, may be driving the decision of the reformist elite to allow defaults to occur. But the problem is to identi57
fy which of the problem loans carry systemic risks with them. Consider Shanxi Haixin, for example. It may not just be a borrower unable to meet payments that fall due but rather an entity that is carrying risks residing in other parts of the economy. Some argue that Haixin is entangled in a web of debt involving other companies. It was, reportedly, the lead investor, along with other partners, in a credit guarantee company that guaranteed the debts of others for a fee (Financial Times, March 14). Exploiting nancial liberalisation, companies such as these have given themselves a foothold in nance to beef up prots. As in the case of Enron and other such companies engulfed by the lure of prots from nance rather than from production, it seems unclear to what extent Haixin is a brick-and-mortar steel company and to what extent a nancial intermediary. If its latter role is important, the systemic implications of its failure can be much larger than its size as a steel producer indicates. Moreover, many companies such as these use raw materials. Their failure could affect demand and depress the prices of raw materials. That would affect the value of the stocks of these raw materials used as collateral for loans. Recent bond defaults are reportedly adversely affecting copper prices, already under pressure because of rising inventories. If debt guaranteed with metals such as copper, zinc and iron ore face default, investors will bring more metal to market, depressing prices further. What all this suggests is that what were being considered unrelated problems in separate compartments of the Chinese economy are, in fact, part of a web that nance has woven. That has happened because China chose to liberalise its nancial sector and continues to do so despite the warning signals it receives. At a recent press conference, Li Keqiang placed his emphasis on energising the market and stimulating social creativity rather than on reining in speculative capital. In his words: How can an arrow shot be turned back? Were most determined to see the reform through.
ALY SONG/REUTERS
WORLD AFFAIRS
LIBYA ON EDGE
CR E W ME M B E R S of the tanker that had made off with illegally bought oil from the rebel-controlled Es Sider port being brought to Tripoli port on March 23. U.S. forces seized the tanker, which is now docked at Tripoli.
Ravaged by terrorism and hit hard by reduced oil exports, Libya nds itself in a chaotic situation. B Y J O H N C H E RI AN
LIBYA SEEMS TO BE ON THE VERGE OF imploding three years after the regime change imposed on it by the West. The interim government does not even have control of the capital, Tripoli, if recent events are any indication. The seat of parliament has been raided by militias, political gures have been targeted for assassination, the international airport has been targeted with missiles, and the Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan, was briey kidnapped. In the second week of March, Zeidan was forced to ee the country after the government issued a warrant for his arrest. This was after he was dismissed from his post by the interim parliament, dominated by Islamist parties, on charges of incompetence and corruption. Meanwhile, tribal militias and Al Qaeda-affiliated groups are ruling the roost in other parts of the country. Militias of various political and tribal hues have their own jails and torture cells. Saif al Qadda, the former Libyan leaders heir apparent, is in the custody of the Zintan militia. They are a law unto themselves and have refused to hand over Saif al Qadda either to the central government or to international authorities for trial. And in late February, the government in neighbouring Niger handed over another surviving son of the former ruler, Saadi Qadda, to the Libyan government to stand trial. The government of Niger is no doubt aware of the chaos and lawlessness prevailing in the country. In February, an Indian doctor was killed in Derna, a stronghold of extremist groups. There are fears that Indian medical professionals, numbering over 1,600, may nd it difficult to stay on. The Libyan health-care system will collapse if there is an exodus of Indian doctors. On February 14, one of the leading Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assets in Libya, Major General Khalifa Hifter, announced that he would carry out a military takeover of the government. The national command of the Libyan army is declaring a movement for a new road map to save the country, Hifter declared. He grandiosely announced the suspension of parliament. He claimed that he was replicating the path being taken by Gen. Abdul Fattah El-Sisi in Egypt. Gen. Sisi had also announced a new road map for Egypt while staging his coup last July. The Libyan army, powerless as it is, did not respond to the call made by Hifter,
I T W A S T H E G O V ERN M EN T S F A I LU RE
a man with a seedy reputation. He was own in by the Americans from his exile in the United States prior to the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011. On January 18, a group of heavily armed men stormed an air force base outside the city of Sabha in southern Libya. They expelled forces loyal to the interim government. There are reports that in areas dominated by black Libyans in the south of the country, the green ag of the previous government is once again uttering. Early this year, the Deputy Industry Minister, Hassan al Drouie, was assassinated in the city of Sirte, a stronghold of Qadda and one of the last cities to fall to the rebels and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The situation today is so grim that the Libyan government had to issue an appeal in the third week of March to the international community for urgent help to ght terrorism. The appeal comes in the wake of a series of suicide bombings and terror attacks in Benghazi and clashes with militias controlling oil reneries and ports. A U.S. security official, Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, who led the elite U.S. security force in Libya before the targeting of the American consulate in Benghazi and the killing of the U.S. Ambassador, has said that there are now more Al Qaeda ghters in the country than before. The U.S. Congress was told that between 10,000 and 20,000 surface-to-air missiles were still unaccounted for. According to a recent United Nations report, sophisticated arms from Libya have reached insurgent groups all over the continent, including the Boko Haram, which has been causing mayhem in northern Nigeria. Many of the weapons from
HANI AMARA/REUTERS
to stop the illegal export of oil that led to the exit of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan (right).
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AFP
A R E B E L under militia leader Ibrahim Jathran guards the entrance of Es Sider port in Ras Lanuf on March 11.
Libya were sent to Syrian rebel forces under the patronage of the Americans and the Gulf monarchies. The U.N. report suggested that members of the Libyan armed forces were continuing to sell handguns in their inventories to civilians. Given the general breakdown in law and order in the country, there is a great demand for such weapons. The U.N. report said that the security situation had considerably deteriorated and that incidents of carjacking, robbery, kidnappings, tribal disputes, political assassinations, armed attacks and clashes, explosions from improvised explosive devices and demonstrations had increased markedly.
REDUCED OIL EXPORTS
The country is almost totally dependent on oil exports for survival. But its oil exports have been sharply reduced, from 1.5 million barrels a day in 2011 to 250,000 barrels today. Hariga, the countrys largest centrally controlled oil terminal in the eastern region, is now under the control of armed militias that are bent on secession. Even petrol for domestic consumption is now in short supply in Tripoli, which has a population of more than two million, one-third of the countrys population. The government accused terrorist groups of waging war against Benghazi, Sirte and other cities. The Libyan army, trained by Western and Gulf Arab countries, is not up to the task of militarily confronting the well-armed militias, which are organised mainly on a tribal and regional basis. Washington has now decided to do handson training of Libyan army troops. According to reports, the U.S. has already begun preparations for a larger mission to train Libyan troops in Bulgaria. Around 500 soldiers from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division will train around 8,000 Libyan troops in basic combat skills as part of the larger NATO effort to improve security in the country. It was the inability of the government to stop the illegal export of oil that precipitated the exit of the Libyan Prime Minister. The military was unable to stop a tanker carrying illegally purchased oil from the rebel-controlled Es Sider port in eastern Libya from leaving Libyas waters. Initially, the tanker was described as North Koreanowned, but it was actually contracted by a rm with its headquarters in Dubai. Two Israelis and a Senegalese
were arrested by the police in Cyprus on charges of attempting to buy the cargo. Libyan naval ships destroyed by NATO have not been replaced. The Libyan Air Force is rudderless after the dismissal of its chief. Most of the pilots refused to obey government orders to interdict the rogue oil tanker. The ship was nally interdicted by the U.S. Navy and returned to the custody of the central government. The action against the ship has not gone down well with the powerful militia grouping led by Ibrahim Jathran, who was previously the army-appointed head of the national oil protection force. Last year he had set up the Cyrenaica Political Bureau in deance of the central government, demanding that the bulk of the oil revenues from his region be ploughed back for the benet of the residents there. Libya was divided into three independent partsTripolitana, Cyrenaica and Fezzan until it was colonised by Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini. After the ouster of Muammar Qadda, separatist feelings have resurfaced with a vengeance. Much of the oil produced in Libya comes from the eastern province of Cyrenaica. Jathran claims that at this juncture he is only ghting against the Muslim Brotherhoods domination of politics in Tripoli. But his spokesman has said that if the Muslim Brotherhoods policies lead to civil war, the east would be forced to become an independent state. But with the intervention of the U.S. Navy on behalf of the central government in the incident involving the tanker carrying oil being sold by the Cyrenaica Political Bureau, the rebel militias now have the Western powers to contend with. The U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Deborah Jones, described the sale of oil by the Jathran-led militia as a theft from the Libyan people. However, Jathran now has an ally of sorts in the ousted Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan. Speaking after his dramatic escape from Tripoli, Zeidan, hand-picked by the West for a leadership role in post-Qadda Libya, blamed the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated interim government in Tripoli for his tribulations. He accused the Islamists of wanting to impose their will on the country and described his dismissal as illegal. The powerful Zintan militia in the west of the country has rallied in support of him. If they join with Jathrans forces in the east, the central government might well face the prospect of a total blockade on the export of oil from the west as well as the east. The central government now has aligned with a powerful group of militias from the south, called the Libya Shield, from the city of Misrata. They have been tasked with liberating the reneries and ports in the east that are under the control of Jathran and other militias supporting his bid for greater control over the oil and gas produced in the region. The federalist forces in Cyrenaica, with their stronghold in Benghazi, are preparing for a showdown. There are reports suggesting that the militias in Benghazi are preparing for a unilateral declaration of independence for Cyrenaica. The rebel forces hope to get the support of the Libyan Air Force. Three air force bases had earlier supported the abortive coup by Gen. Hifter.
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ESAM OMRAN AL-FETORI/REUTERS
WORLD AFFAIRS
MALAYSIAN AIRLINE TRAGEDY
Flight into mystery

The official announcement that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 probably crashed into the Indian Ocean brings little relief to the families of those on board and leaves many questions unanswered as the search for the plane continues. B Y J O H N C H E R I A N
they were individually informed by the Malaysian authorities about the loss of the aircraft. In the fortnight after the plane disappeared on March 8 while on a scheduled direct ight from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing, close kin of the missing passengers were already distraught with the slow ow of information, some of which was misleading, from the Malaysian authorities. After the loss of the aircraft was officially announced, relatives and friends of those who perished led an angry demonstration in front of the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing. The Chinese authorities had to use force to stop the protesters from entering the Embassy compound. In a statement released to the media, the Malaysian authorities said that the ongoing multinational search operations will continue, as we seek answers to the questions which remain. The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Boeing 777 could end up as one of the unsolved mysteries of our times. The navies and air forces of the major countries of the world have been helping the Malaysian government to locate the plane since it disappeared from the radar screens in the early hours of March 8. Initially, on the basis of the preliminary information provided by the Malaysian authorities, intensive search operations were conducted in the Andaman Sea between India and Thailand. Now the focus has shifted decisively to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean, 2,500 kilometres south-west of Perth, where Australian, Chinese and French satellite imagery showed what appear to be large pieces of oating debris belonging to the plane. International aviation authorities will now focus on locating the black boxesthe cockpit voice recorder and the ight data recorderwhich will be key to the investigations into what happened to the passenger jet. The Malaysian authorities have now nally come around to the theory that the plane suddenly changed direction and turned back, initially ying over the Malacca Straits.
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M A L A YS I A N PR I M E M I N I S T ER N A J I B RA Z A K
making the formal announcement on March 24 about the loss of Flight MH370. Also in the picture is Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who concurrently holds the transport porfolio.
THE FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT BY MALAYSIAN Prime Minister Najib Razak that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 had in all likelihood crashed into the Indian Ocean south-west of the Australian city of Perth will not bring immediate closure to the grief and anger that the incident has left in its wake. The Malaysian government based its conclusions on the new satellite data provided by the British company Inmarsat that conclusively showed that the last position of the plane was in the southern Indian Ocean. Floating debris, spotted by satellites and by search aircraft, in the area is further proof of the general location of the crash. At the time of writing, it is yet to be conrmed that any of the debris is connected to the plane. Relatives of the Chinese passengers on board the plane, who were assembled in hotels in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, were naturally shocked and some of them had to be hospitalised after
GOH SENG CHONG/BLOOMBERG
They now admit that their radars had data that showed that the plane had taken a sudden turn and gone in a southward direction. Malaysian officials say that they could only denitively decipher the data after consulting with their American counterparts. Analysts say that in the process precious time was wasted in the search operations. Most experts have warned that even if parts of the plane are found, nding the main body of the plane could take many years. The sea in the present search area is around 4 km deep, with waves currently reaching the height of 6 metres. This air accident is similar to the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 in June 2009. The plane, an Airbus A330-220 ying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. It took three years for the mystery of the missing Air France plane to be solved. The plane had stalled in mid-air and plunged into the ocean because of pilot error. Statistics have shown that more than 50 per cent of fatal air crashes are due to pilot error. Aviation experts are divided in their opinion on what could have led to the crash of MH370. Many have concluded that a calamitous engine failure an hour or so after the plane departed from Kuala Lumpur and entered Vietnamese air space led to the plane going off course, while others have not ruled out a human hand in the crash. More than 150 of the 239 passengers on board the
A CR E W M E M B E R of the Australian Navy ship HMAS
Success looking for debris in the southern Indian Ocean.

plane were Chinese nationals, ve were Indians, and there were nationals of 12 more countries. The Chinese authorities did background checks of their nationals and cleared them of links to terrorism. On March 1, Uighur extremists killed 29 people in a gruesome terror attack in the Chinese city of Kunming. The initial fears of Uighur extremist involvement in the disappearance of the plane have now been ruled out. There was one Chinese national of Uighur ethnicity on the ight. Two young Iranian nationals travelling on fake passports were also given clean chits. The needle of suspicion continues to point to the pilot, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and the co-pilot, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid. As the investigations go on, conspiracy theories are growing by the day. Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who concurrently holds the transport portfolio, had initially told the media that data had been deleted from the ight simulator the pilot had kept in his home. This statement raised eyebrows. Before that, the Malaysian Prime Minister had suggested that someone had deliberately diverted the plane one hour after take-off. Hishammuddin in one of his many briengs to the media had conrmed that two satellite communications systems in the plane were also deliberately switched off. The Malaysian police are continuing with their investigations of the two pilots. Zaharie was an experienced pilot. Leaders of Malaysias opposition were critical of the Defence Ministers remarks, saying that he was imputing motives to a man who was not in a position to defend himself. Zaharie was related to the daughter-in-law of the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. Ibrahim was recently sentenced to another ve-year jail term on sodomy charges, which many Malaysians view as being trumped up. He is currently free on bail pending an appeal. Zaharie was openly sympathetic to the opposition. Malaysia today is politically polarised down the middle. In the elections last year, the opposition won the majority of the popular votes but got fewer votes than the ruling United Malays National Organisation, which has monopolised power since the country became independent. Mike Glynn, a member of the Australian and International Pilots Association, said that pilot suicide is the most likely cause for the disappearance of Flight 370. A pilot rather than a hijacker is more likely to be able to switch off the communications equipment, he told the media. There are two well-publicised incidents of this kind. A SilkAir crash during a ight from Singapore to Jakarta in 1997 and an EgyptAir ight from Los Angeles to Cairo in 1999 were blamed on pilot suicide. In the 1999 crash, the co-pilot deliberately plunged the plane into the Atlantic Ocean. Investigators from the United States concluded that the co-pilot, after nding himself alone in the cockpit, switched off the autopilot and pointed the plane down while repeating the sentence I rely on God 11 times. The last communication from the Malaysian plane was from the co-pilot. His last words were All right. Good Night. Mozambican officials are still investigating a plane crash that killed 33 people last No62
REUTERS/HANDOUT
R E L AT I V E S O F PA S S EN GERS of MH370 at a protest rally outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing on March 25.
vember. Preliminary investigations blame the pilot for deliberately bringing down the plane. The Chinese authorities are treating the incident as a national calamity. Distraught families, almost all of whom have lost an only son or daughter, have been waiting for denitive answers from the Malaysian authorities. The general consensus is that the Malaysian officials, who are dealing with an aviation disaster of this scale for the rst time, have not measured up. There has been a lot of criticism in the Chinese and international media of their disaster management capabilities. However, the Chinese Ambassador to the country, Huang Huikang, diplomatically stated that the Malaysian authorities had done their best but they had insufficient capabilities, technologies and experiences in dealing with the MH370 incident. China has put a lot of its resources into the search mission. A Chinese warship and an icebreaker, the Sea Dragon, have reached the remote Indian Ocean area where the oating debris was seen. China has reason to feel slighted at the attitude adopted by Malaysian authorities, who have preferred to depend more on the U.S. for technical help and military expertise. The U.S. took its time to respond to Malaysias plea to share information gathered in Pine Gap, Americas top intelligence-gathering base in Australia. Hishammuddin had said that the U.S. had the best capability to locate the plane using its radar and satellite systems.
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The Barack Obama administration was instead keener to rush agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to Kuala Lumpur. India did not accede to Chinas request to be allowed to send its ships and planes into Indian territorial waters for the initial search-and-rescue mission in the Andaman Sea. Australia, a staunch member of the Western military alliance, on the other hand, has allowed Chinese military planes to operate from its bases. Ian Storey, a senior fellow at Singapores Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, told the Reuters news agency that there was still a lot of distrust among countries in the region. Countries are unwilling to share sensitive intelligence because it reveals their military capabilitiesor lack of capabilities, he said. The Wall Street Journal reported that Indian officials gave conicting comments on whether radar systems in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were operational on March 8. The Malaysian Defence Minster showed his unhappiness with the level of cooperation he was receiving in the initial stages. He said that his country had put aside national security and urged other countries to decide on what sort of military and other data they are willing to share with us. If there had been more coordination, the location of the wreckage could have been identied much earlier and the pain and agony of the next of kin of those on the missing plane could have been alleviated to an extent.
AFP
WORLD AFFAIRS
ARAB NATIONS
Arab phoenix
The U.N. report on Arab integration roots itself in the Arab renaissance traditionhonest about the problems that bedevil the region, but hopeful about the future that must come for a people who have ample resources to construct it. B Y V I J A Y P R A S H A D
IN LATE FEBRUARY, THE United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) released a report, Arab Integration: A 21st Century Development Imperative, in Tunis (Tunisia). Ordinarily, a report such as this does not merit comment in the press. Over the course of the past 30 years, U.N. reports have not been given the kind of consideration once afforded them. In the 1950s and 1960s, high U.N. officials spoke like oracles, providing moral leadership alongside the newly emboldened leaders of the Third World. As those leaders stepped off the stage of history and as their states convulsed before a host of problems, the U.N.s star was also eclipsed. Wars and refugee crises marked the U.N. Its agencies, such as those for the rights of children (UNICEF) and for food security (the Food and Agriculture Organisation, or FAO), became accumulators of data on the escalating crisis of human well-being. U.N. reports seemed written to ameliorate the thin skin of the donor states (largely the West). What point was it to pay attention? It was sufficient to extract the data from the reports and move along. Little in the new ESCWA report resembles what one generally sees from the U.N. It comes as the shine of the Arab Spring has begun to tarnish. The lead authors of the report are some of the leading intellectuals of the Arab world, most from the generation of the 1960s who have seen the promise of Arab independence fade and who have marvelled at the rise of the Arab masses in 2010-11. Habib Mohamed Marzouki helped write the Tunisian Constitution, Haifa Zangana is a major Iraqi novelist and activist, Abdullah al-Dardari is a former Vice-Premier of Syria, while Nader Fergany is an Egyptian scholar who was the primary author of the landmark 2002 Arab Human Development Report. That the ESCWA decided
to release the report in Tunis is signicant. A month before, Tunisiawhere the Arab Spring rst broke out saw the passage of a new Constitution. It took its National Constituent Assembly nearly two years to draft the document, which, despite some consistency problems with Article 6 on religion, redeems the promise of the Arab Spring. The ESCWAs head, Rima Khalaf, called the constitution the most important in the Arab region, as it guarantees rights and liberties and consecrates the Tunisian peoples aspirations for freedom and dignity. Tunisias success is overshadowed by the collapse of the promise in the rest of the Arab world. Egypts revolution appears in cold storage (Cairos quest, April 4). Syrias war continues to metastasise, with the death toll rising beyond the U.N.s actuarial capacity (Road to Raqqa, February 7). An emboldened Saudi monarchy has now turned its diplomatic and nancial muscle against Qatar, whose support for the Muslim Brotherhood in the region threatened Saudi interests and expectations. This Saudi-Qatari feud shows that the kingdoms rulers no longer imagine a secular and democratic movement as their main threat. Tahrir is quiet, the guns in Aleppo are loud, and the opening of 2010-11 seems to have closed. At least that is how things seem at present.
THE PHOENIX TAKES FLIGHT
The phoenix of Tahrir Square took ight not long after it appeared. Arab intellectualssuch as those who authored the ESCWA reportdig amongst the ashes of Tahrir in search of reminders of the phoenix and for clues as to how to reconstruct it. The fruits of their consideration are in many documentsreports, newspaper columns, poems, stories, the sighs of the living room and the cafe. It is impossible to travel anywhere in the region and not nd oneself in the midst of this ongoing conversation. The ESCWA report puts itself rmly in this discussion. It celebrates the uprising but its writers are too honest to be blinded by it. They turn quickly to the reasons not for its failurebecause that would be too nalbut for its in64
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ANTI- G O V E R N M E N T demonstrators (background) confront supporters of the Hosni Mubarak regime during the Arab Spring uprising, in Cairos Tahrir Square on February 2, 2011. Arab intellectuals, such as those who authored the ESCWA report, dig amongst the ashes of Tahrir in search of reminders of the phoenix and for clues as to how to reconstruct it.
completion. The forces of change may have found themselves temporarily stalled by events, they write, but that does not mean that they have been deterred. Transitions are complex events, with much longer timescales than the expectations of the people or the news cycle of television. Comparison with the transitions in Eastern Europe provides two quick answers to its incompleteness: unlike the Eastern European situation, the Arab worlds upsurge came during the worst economic recession in recent memory and it was hastily beset by hostile and inuential forces in the region with vested interests in restoring the status quo. The authors leave this last point vague. As a U.N. body, it cannot point its ngers at this or that member state. But the dramatis personae are clear. Will the dynamic of Tahrir sit quietly as its promise is squashed by vested interests? The U.N. report is more optimistic than most other accounts. Democracy in the Arab countries will encounter obstacles and pitfallsas has been the case everywhere else in the worldbut there is little doubt that it will ultimately prevail. What gives the authors this condence? They have walked the squares and streets and seen the faces of the civic resistance. That public, especially its younger cohort, has exed its muscles, tasted freedom and demonstrated the power of active civil resistance in the face of injustice. It will not
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brook a counter-revolution on its watch. But nor will the vested intereststhe Gulf Arab monarchies and their Western allies. The Gulf monarchies have much more to lose than the republican dictators of the Arab world. For the latter, the removal of the leader (Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak) did not mean the destruction of the state. State institutions, such as the military, remained intact and provided the platformfor good or illfor the new order that emerged. In the Gulf, the collapse of the ruling family would mean the collapse of the state, which ironically means that the ruling families have a much deeper coalition that works to retain them in power. The social base of the counter-revolution, therefore, is much more secured than it seems from the outside. Arabia without sultans? After the sheikhs? This seems more wishful thinking than realistic analysis. Rather than a full frontal assault on the vested interests, the U.N. report provides a strategic vision for Arab regionalism. It calls for the three goals to enhance freedom, two of which are long-term threats to the culture of monarchy and of dictatorship. A call for a robust notion of dignied Arab citizenship with a new social contract challenges the idea that Arabs are culturally incapable of democracy and politically unwilling to ght for it. The idea of dignity was a fundamental call in the streets during 2010-11in Tunisia, they named their
ceas any renaissance in the global Southmust contend with the debate between reason and received wisdom, whether in the domain of religion or in economic policy.
JEWISH STATE
M E MB E R S O F T H E T U N I S I A N National Constituent Assembly celebrate the adoption of the new Constitution in Tunis on January 26. It is hailed as one of the most progressive Constitutions in the Arab world.
uprising the Thawrat al-Karamah, the Dignity Revolution. Economic integration, the second freedom goal, is far more familiar to the ESCWA. The U.N. created regional economic and social commissions to promote integration of national projects in the Asia-Pacic (ESCAP, 1947), Latin America (ECLAC, 1948), Africa (ECA, 1958) and West Asia (ESCWA, 1973). These commissions have worked with nation-states to nd ways to increase regional trade, reduce burdens of customs duties to enhance trade, and provide ways to integrate the social and cultural landscape of neighbours. The most successful example of regionalism in the current period has been in Latin America, whereunder the inuence of Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuelaits states have attempted to draw the continent together and to develop along an alternative policy path. Nothing like that has worked elsewhere. The ESCWA does not look to Latin America in its report, but it might. Its own suggestions remain within a neoliberal policy framework. The third freedomto unshackle Arab culture from self-inicted limits and conictsis a powerful challenge. Too often the global South looks outward to the West for cultural validation. This longing turns the elite against its own population and drives a wedge between a countrys present and its past. Cultural freedom also includes a challenge to religious thoughtthe aim is to break the doctrinal and institutional chains that have conned religious thought to the past and to liberate true Islam from rigid interpretations by restoring independent reason. Some would cavil that scholars of Islam have always been in the midst of the confounding debate over reason. This might be so but it does not translate into educational institutions that favour rote learning over critical thought, the latter being a crucial element in the revitalisation of Arab institutions. Any Arab renaissanFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
One of the great impediments to Arab integration has been the unresolved Palestinian struggle. The Wests uninching support for Israel has corrupted the ability of states in the region to nd common ground. Old trade routes that linked Syria to Egypt have been interrupted and resources that should have been turned towards social development have perforce been shifted to military purposes. Billions of dollars of military aid from the United States to Israel and Egypt and U.S. treaties for the defence of Saudi Arabias monarchy lower the need for regional peace. Arab Integration wades rmly into the morass of discussions about Israel. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claims to have a new approach to bring the Palestinians and the Israelis to the table. There is little regional pressure to make this happen. Egypt and Jordan both have full relations with Israel, and the Gulf Arab monarchies play a duplicitous game with Palestinian aspirations. The report challenges the Arab states to live up to their international obligations, including a boycott of goods produced by Israeli industry in the burgeoning settlements on Palestinian land. Without directly naming them, the report points to Egypt and Jordan as Arab states whose purchase of illegal Israeli products hinders the possibility of a Palestine state. One other barrier to Arab integration and to Arab dignity is the constant suggestion in the Western media and in Israel that Arabs are incapable of democracy and that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The report frontally challenges this assertion. Israel insists on being recognised by the world and the Arabs as an exclusively Jewish state, write the authors. It imposes this recognition as a condition for reaching a settlement with the Palestinians. This policy is based on the concept of the religious or ethnic purity of states, which brought to humanity the worst crimes and atrocities of the twentieth century. These are strong words. It implies that a better comparison for Israel than its preferred glance westward is to the southto Saudi Arabia, another state that bases itself on religious supremacy and denies minorities rights. It is a comparison that the Israelis might not want to adopt. No wonder that they have strongly opposed this report, and asked the U.N. Secretary-General to rectify the situation. The report ends with a quote from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwishs Identity Card (Bitaqat Hawiyya, 1963): Write down, I am an Arab! Darwish was a nahdawi, a person of the Arab renaissance, who was eager for his world to make its appointment with modernity. The ESCWA report roots itself in that tradition honest about the problems that bedevil the region, but hopeful about the future that must come for a people who have ample resources to construct it.
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AIMEN ZINE/AP
WILDLIFE
In Jim Corbett landscape
TI G E R P UG M A R KS on
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IMAM HUSSEIN
a riverbed in the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve.
A walk through the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand, taking in its many wildlife delights.
By A.J.T. JOHNSINGH and BIVASH PANDAV
ABUNDANT tiger and elephant signs along the Paterpani sot (spring, stream) indicated that this sot in the heart of the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand was the favoured haunt of tigers and elephants in the reserve. Their tracks overlapped on the sandy and muddy stream bed, and a strong smell of tiger spray and elephant dung and urine permeated the air. Over the tracks of these two charismatic animalsone the national animal and the other the national heritage animalthere were signs of other animals too, such as the chital and the sambar. The
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A R OBUS T T I G E R , a camera-trap image. Pressures from
Kotdwar town (in the background) are a threat to the Rajaji National Park-Corbett Tiger Reserve corridor. overall ambience reminded us that the Corbett Tiger Reserve was a place where one has to walk with immense respect for the elephant, the tiger and the king cobra (later we came across the body of a three-metre-long king cobra in a pool on a different riverbed). We were accompanying 20 officer trainees of the
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10-month diploma course of the Wildlife Institute of India on their orientation tour to the reserve. It was late September 2013 and the torrential rains that had brought untold misery to the people of Uttarakhand had stopped, and yet the water in the stream was turbid. The seven-kilometre walk along the stream to the Paterpani forest rest house, built in the early part of the 20th century, and the nine-kilometre return walk along the road through a forest with a dense tiger population to the saddle dam of the picturesque Ramganga reservoir
BIVASH PANDAV
formed one of the highlights of the tour. Sightings in the pools of the stream of the golden mahseer (one of the most beautiful wildlife species of India) that came up from the reservoir to spawn, the goral (a mountain goat) on the steep hill slopes, and birds such as the Himalayan pied kingsher and white-crested laughing thrushes (whose cackling often coincided with someone slipping and falling down on the stream oor) and frequent enFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
counters with oriental pied hornbills were the high points of the walk. The rst time one of us (Johnsingh) wanted to take the trainees on this walk nearly 15 years ago, accompanied by two armed guards, the reserve director, aware of the frequent use of the stream by the tiger, the elephant and the sloth bear, gave us permission but with a warning: You are doing the walk at your own risk. The
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A TUS KE R standing its ground.
faculty during the September 2013 trip included, besides Bivash Pandav (a third batch MSc Wildlife Science student of the institute), who has walked all over the Corbett landscape in the past 10 years, Suresh Kumar (fth batch), who is good at bird identication; Johnson, an expert on sh; and Abhijit, who has a great passion for amphibians and reptiles. There were 14 trainees from India, ve from Bangladesh and one from Vietnam.
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We had two guards, one carrying a double-barrelled shotgun and the other a rie. If required, the gun, which could spray pellets, could be used to scare away elephants, while the rie would be effective against poachers. Guards of the Corbett Tiger Reserve would impress anyone with their dedication, tness, knowledge of the area and animals, the way they carry their weapons (always pointing towards either the sky or the ground, never
at people), and their courage in times of need. Our rst surprise, as soon as we started walking along the stream, was the near absence of the mahseer, weighing upto 3 kg, which used to be a common sight in the pools. We had come prepared with atta (wheat our) balls to attract and view the sh, but none turned up when we threw the balls into the water. It is reported that the golden mahseer tends to retreat to the reservoir/main river after spawning in the streams, and as Uttarakhand had received heavy rains in early June, they had possibly completed spawning and gone back to the reservoir.
THE HOG D E E R , an endangered species, in the tiger
reserve. As we walked, we soon came across a large pool where some years ago we had spotted the bones of a nearly four-year-old elephant calf which had been killed and eaten by four tigers. The staff on patrol duty had seen the tigers feeding on the kill. Tigers killing elephant calves is not a rare occurrence, and one factor that could be controlling the population of the around 800 elephants of the Corbett landscape is
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One factor that could be controlling the 800-strong elephant population in the Corbett landscape is predation on elephant calves by tigers.
predation on calves by tigers. Angered tigers are capable of killing even a bull elephant, as epitomised by E.A. Smythies in Journal of Bombay Natural History Society (Volume 41: 654-656). This ght, between a tusker and two tigers, took place on the right bank of the Sharada river in September 1939, and eventually the bull, which carried tusks weighing close to 60 kg, was killed. Now, the burgeoning Tanakpur town has encircled the location where the ght occurred. As we walked along the stream, a goral ran across, a barking deer gave an alarm and, as usual, we found the last bit of the walk (about 500
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m) to reach the rest house through the elephant grass which had grown rank during the rains a bit taxing as there was no clear path. The rest house overlooks a valley where the sot begins. The valley is in a typical bhabar area. Whatever water is received, either as rain or as oodwater, rapidly percolates, leaving the valley dry even in early winter. So the grass in the valley is dominated by species such as Imperata cylindrica, Saccharum spontaneum and Saccharum munja, which are characteristic of the at areas of the bhabar habitat. Anyone sitting in the veranda of the rest house and observing the riverbed in the valley in the morning and evening for two or three days is bound to glimpse a tiger. One memorable stay for us in the rest house was in early summer in 1992 when Johnsingh brought the third batch of MSc (Wildlife Science) students from the Wildlife Institute of India accompanied by colleagues G.S. Rawat and Ajith Kumar. The reserve was then managed by A.S. Negi, an exemplary forest officer of the Uttaranchal cadre. He permitted us to walk around escorted by two armed guards. One day, while returning to the rest house, which was then kept in exceedingly good condition, after exploring the nearby hill, which appeared to be a goral habitat from a distance and while crossing the Paterpani sot, we saw three hog deer. The staff identied them as chital and we explained to them the difference between hog deer and chital. The grassland-dependent hog deer within the Corbett Tiger Reserve is an endangered species as the major
BIVASH PANDAV
BIVASH PANDAV
CONT R O L O F T H E J A C K A L P O P U LA T I O N may revive the hog deer population.
population of 30 to 50 animals is now largely conned to the Dhikala and Phulai chaur (grassland) of the reserve. The total habitat of the two grasslands in summer, when the water level in the Ramganga reservoir recedes, could be close to 10 square kilometres, which may be large enough to support 300500 hog deer. Nevertheless, two problems continue to depress the population. One is predation by the jackal and the other is the periodic inundation of the Phulai chaur by the Ramganga reservoir during the rains in July and August. When the grassland is submerged, the hog deer is forced
to move to the forest where they may be easily preyed upon by the tiger and the leopard. Johnsingh once collected leopard scat from Kanda (1,000 m, where Jim Corbett shot the Kanda man-eater), which along the road is 20 km from Phulai chaur (300 m). The scat contained the remains of a hog deer. When chased by jackals, which often hunt in pairs, the hog deer does not run into the forest to escape but turns around and runs back into the grassland, where it is killed by the jackals. If we are determined to save the hog deer in the
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BIVASH PANDAV
WOOD L A N D S W I T H M EA D O W H A B I T A T S can ensure the nilgais presence along the reserves southern boundary.
Corbett Tiger Reserve, we should keep the Dhikala and Phulai chaur free of jackals for several years and closely monitor the hog deer population. Except in the Kaziranga Tiger Reserve (where nearly 600 hog deer die in oods every year), in almost all other places the hog deer faces a dismal future. While returning from Paterpani, along the road to the Saddle dam, the repeated alarm calls of the hog deer alerted us. Bivash went ahead and photographed three hog deer by the side of a stream in a patch of grassland, which is a continuation of the Paterpani chaur. Johnsingh joked with Bivash that the three
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hog deer he photographed, which turned out to be little out of focus, were the same seen 20 years ago when Bivash had come to Paterpani as a student. During this programme we found time to visit the Jhirna (built in 1908) and the Dhela (1926) forest rest houses. As part of various exercises, largely along the southern boundary of the tiger reserve and often along the riverbeds, the class had walked a total of about 50 km. On the sandy and muddy riverbeds, an amazing number of tiger signs were seen but not a single leopard track. On the walk between Paterpani and saddle dam, we
CH A M PA , A G UJ J A R anti-poaching watcher, who survived a tiger attack.
had checked a camera trap maintained by the Forest Department. There were many pictures of tigers but only one of the leopard. The tiger considers the leopard its arch enemy, and therefore at the rst opportunity it tries to kill the leopard and the killed leopard is eaten up. If the habitat is suitable with hills and climbable trees, a leopard can escape from a tiger. But in an area with high tiger density, such as the Corbett Tiger Reserve, although the terrain is hilly, leopards are often pushed to the periphery of the forest areas. The stately sal trees, with straight and large boles, which are common in the reserve, may not be suitable for leopards to escape from the tiger when they are rushed. On the last day, the sky was sea blue and the sun was bright and warm, and we walked from the saddle dam road to the main roada distance of 6 kmwatching the
A.J.T. JOHNSINGH A.J.T. JOHNSINGH
THE J HI R N A forest rest house, built in 1908.
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U R E N A L O B A T A in the tiger reserve.
IP OM O E A N I L in September.
goral, the langur and birds and taking pictures of profusely owering plants. Notable among the plants were Ipomoea nil with pinkish blue owers, Ipomoea quamoclit with blood-red owers, Ipomoea pes-tigridis with white owers and leaves like tiger pug marks, Urena lobata with small rose-coloured owers and Mimosa himalayana which was profusely decorated with reddish-violet and cream-coloured owers. As we crossed the main dam and drove to the edge of
A.J.T. JOHNSINGH
A.J.T. JOHNSINGH
the forest, we observed that the Irrigation Department, which manages the dam, had unnecessarily fenced off areas below the dam with barbed wire and iron rods with spikes, thereby preventing elephants, tigers and sambar from freely using the area. The department had done so with the intention of maintaining a park. In fact, there is no need for such a park within the tiger reserve. This problem is known to Surendra Mehra, the current Director of the Reserve, a former trainee officer of the Wildlife
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A.J.T. JOHNSINGH
M IM O S A H I MA L A YA N A in September.
Institute of India, and he assured us that he would get the fences removed. There should never be barbed wire fences within wildlife habitats as they can cause injury to large mammals. Mehra also informed us that he was aware of the importance of the inconspicuous Kalagarh corridor (a small nallah that drains from the saddle dam area to the Ramganga river). He promised to take measures to protect it by banning woodcutting along the nallah by the
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people of Kalagarh village and by removing structures, including barbed wire fences, below the nallah, established in the past for the Kalagarh township. If a tiger or an elephant decides to move from the extensive forests south and south-east of the reservoir (when full, the reservoir spreads over an area of about 80 sq km) to the Kalagarh forests to the west of the Ramganga river, the easiest and the safest route is to go along the nallah, cross the river and enter the Kalagarh forests. Therefore, the
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nallah and the patch of forest below it should be kept totally free from disturbance. Before returning to Dehradun, we made a brief visit to Kaladhungi, where Jim Corbetts winter homenow a museumis situated. Before reaching Kaladhungi, we had to cross the Boar river, and as we walked over the iron bridge, we discussed Corbetts days, when he used to catch his dinner, 23-pound (11.5 kg) golden mahseer, in the river even in March. Now, in summer, the Boar river below the bridge runs bone dry. When we crossed it, there was a copious amount of water. But, as persons who are familiar with the status of the golden mahseer along the foothills, we would say that 23-pound mahseer no longer inhabit the Boar river. Our return journey to Dehradun was through the magnicent forests of Kalagarh and Lansdowne where we had sightings of a large group of nilgai, a group of four sambar with a superb stag in the last stages of velvet (most sambar stags get into hard antlers and ready for rut in November), and barking deer. We also met Champa, a brave Gujjar anti-poaching watcher on patrol duty, who has the unique experience of surviving a tiger attack. As soon as we crossed the Ramganga river, we saw the nilgai in a Zizyphus woodland, where the ground was covered with a carpet of short grass. We had not seen the nilgai during our ve days of wandering in the forests east of the river where, within the boundary of the Corbett Tiger Reserve, it, like the hog deer, is an endangered animal. A minimum population of 100 could be supported provided we maintain Zizyphus woodlands with short grass rather than tall grass (for example, Vettiveria zizanoides) in locations such as Dhara, Jhirna, Kotirau and Laldhang where successful village relocation (thanks to A.S. Negi) and lantana eradication (thanks to Rajeev Bharthari, former Director of the reserve, and Professor C.R. Babu of Delhi University,) have taken place.
BIOTIC PRESSURE
Jim Corbett shot the Rudraprayag man-eater upstream of the Ganga, the Kanda and Mohan man-eaters north of the present-day tiger reserve, and the Thak, Chuka and Talla Des man-eaters upstream of the Sharada on its right bank. Therefore, this bhabar landscape in Uttarakhand, which holds the bulk of the tiger and elephant populations, can be rightly called the Jim Corbett landscape. The unbroken part of this landscape stretches from the eastern part of the Rajaji National Park to the Gola river and is in the safe hands of Surendra Mehra, Saket Badola (Deputy Director, Corbett Tiger Reserve, and a wildlife-trained officer who does a lot of foot patrolling), Amit Verma (Divisional Forest Officer, Kalagarh Forest Division, who is responsible for the notication of the Nandhour Wildlife Sanctuary and who does foot patrolling and works on the resettlement of Gujjars from the Division), Neha Verma (Divisional ForMISTY DILLON
THE TI G E R R E S E R VE is a stronghold
of the golden mahseer.

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A.J.T. JOHNSINGH
TH E PI C T UR E S Q UE Ramganga reservoir.
est Officer, Lansdowne Forest Division) and Subhudi, Director, Rajaji National Park, who is determined to establish the long-pending Chilla-Motichur corridor across the Ganga and persuade the Gujjars in the landscape to opt for resettlement and move out of the forest. The upcoming Rajaji Tiger Reserve will have the Laldhang and Kotdwar ranges, which are at present in the Lansdowne Forest Division, as part of its buffer zone. This will hopefully keep away proposed development works such as a State highway through these ranges. Roads bring in lots of threats to the forest areas, which are already under enormous biotic pressure. One problem to which the Uttarakhand government is not yet alive is the growing rewood and fodder needs of the people living in the towns and numerous villages in the bhabar track. The tiger and elephant habitat is gradually getting whittled away by woodcutting. Khatima
Range in the Terai East Forest Division is almost lost to rewood cutting by people from Nepal and India. There should be a dedicated, sustained programme throughout Uttarakhand encouraging people to grow fodder and rewood on their private lands and along the forest boundary. The best-known fodder species is mulberry (Morus alba), which should be propagated in the thousands wherever possible. We should not hesitate to grow even exotics such as Acacia auriculiformis, Eucalyptus spp and Casuarina equisitifolia along with Dalbergia sissoo to meet the growing rewood needs of the people of the bhabar area. Otherwise the Jim Corbett landscape of Uttarakhand will gradually lose its reputation for a high density tiger population.
A.J.T. Johnsingh is with Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore, and WWF-India; and Bivash Pandav is with Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun.
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THEATRE
Stage of transition
SAT YA S H O D H A K was performed by safai karmacharis of the Pune Mahanagarapalika Kamgar Union.
PHOTOGRAPHS: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
International Theatre Festival of Kerala 2014 made possible a platform where different kinds of concerns on the range of subjects that constitute theatre could be articulated. B Y D E E P A G A N E S H
WHEN Mohan Rakesh wrote Aashad Ka Ek Din, he was trying to re-image history in terms of the present; by extricating history from its space and recasting it into the present as a work criss-crossing questions of literature and theatre, he had rendered history ctional. Rakesh also went on to say that his Hindi drama was not linked to any theatrical tradition. Aashad Ka Ek Din was for Rakesh, which he said in a later response, clearly a search for new theatrical possibilities. Theatre, like any other performance art, has tried from time to time to redene what it constitutes in terms of its language and narrative. Aashad Ka Ek Din, mentioned here as a case in point, uses history to speak of its departure from it. Constantly interrogating its relationship with tradition, theatreas both written and performance textshas wondered what the nature of its connection with the past should be, what the breakaway point is, and what the contemporary needs of theatre and society are. Theatre today is exploring new spaces and new modes of articulation. In this exploration one sees a conglomeration of ideas and narratives waiting to be crystallised into mature expressions. Having dis83
banded Western notions of stage, theatre looks for different possibilities, closer to the lived experiences of today. What is transition, or change, in theatre? Is modern contemporary? If contemporary theatre captures todays experience and is therefore authentic, does then one understand that tradition is past and hence irrelevant to contemporary experience? In post-Independence India, modern theatre, or theatre of the roots as it was called, was that which forged new connections with the ancient. This was born in an attempt to reject the Eurocentric idioms of
theatre that were prevalent during the British Raj. We, in this present moment, are talking of yet another modernity, one that wants to shed the baggage of the past to evolve contemporary theatre practices. It seeks to break away from the idea of performing spaces, and get down to the nitty-gritty, to methods of storytelling. The sixth edition of the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK) was held from January 27 to February 3 in Thrissur and had transition as its theme. The huge turnout each day to this festival of inspiring dynamism was proof of the Malayalis quintessential love for theatre going. Through plays, seminars and discussions, the ITFoK brought to the fore theatre in the process of being redened as an experience that was more directly linked to the here and now, establishing its connections with the sociopolitical, erasing boundaries between
theatre and other performing arts, and privileging interdisciplinary ideas and freedom of narrative over adherence to the disciplines of form or content. The curatorial team said ITFoK 2014 would be a curtain-raiser to welcome 21st century world theatre where the strict boundaries of theatre and visual art were slowly fading, and a new form of post-dramatic theatre was emerging. It certainly challenged spectatorship and on how theatre was viewed and experienced.
SATYASHODHAK
For the director Atul Pethe, transition was more a systemic issue. Evolving a new aesthetic with his cast and its suppressed folk music traditions, Pethe in his play Satyashodhak stressed the power of theatre to bring about social change. The work, based on G.P. Deshpandes play on the life of Jyotiba Phule, the revolutionary reformist of Maha-
Kitchen katha
NEELAM MANSINGH CHOWDHRY is a theatre director and academic. Roysten Abels play The Kitchen brought back memories of her sensory treat Kitchen Katha, performed in the 1990s. The play, which had an elaborate kitchen on stage, told the story of women for whom the kitchen was a sanctuary; it was a place where they could unburden themselves and garner energy. Recalling the play, Neelam Mansingh says: My play Kitchen Katha spoke of the olfactory, which had never been explored in theatre before. My father grew up in a gurdwara in Rawalpindi. Post-Partition, when my grandparents moved to Chandigarh, they lived in a gurdwara in Amritsar. Whenever I visited them, I was witness to a lot of eating, sharing, cooking and doing things together. The kitchen of a gurdwara is central to several activities. This picturesque way of
life in the gurdwara and its kitchen was lying in the archives of my memory. The Punjabi poet Surjit Patar, with whom I have done a lot of work, wanted me to do a play on food. As I started thinking about it, a narrative evolved. It is something that takes place between women working in the kitchen as they share stories of Partition, life, their relationships and several other things that are part of their inner life. Food here is a medium for expressing their emotions and escaping miseries. For Chand Kaur, the simple act of peeling an onion, for instance, is the perfect subterfuge for some quiet tears. A spirit of community comes from the food, and it nurtures the soul and space. Food has always fascinated me visually, so I also wanted to capture the transformation of food in the play, apart from other things. Deepa Ganesh
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rashtra, reinterprets the reformers vision in the modern context. The play was originally performed nearly 20 years ago by the Jana Natya Manch, and now Pethes production is being performed to an overwhelming response from audiences across States. It all began for him with a lm he made on sewage and sanitary workers, The Garbage Trap. Working on it was an eye-opener to their appalling living conditions: Social change hadnt reached them. Doing proscenium theatre and addressing middle-class angst seemed so supercial. I wanted to create awareness and change the perceptions of people more than make something beautiful, explained Pethe of his inner stirrings. Although the play was written when the country was burning with the agitations over Mandal Commission report, it gains many more dimensions in the light of contemporary politics. Speaking about his political plays, G.P. Deshpande himself said that it was important to look at the political culturally. For him, transition was not something that absolved itself from history or the past. It was primarily a look at the political process. I wanted to question and attack our too unambiguous, too uncomplicated view of history as a grand, welldened story. The fresh look at history amounts to coming to terms with ones own surroundings, with ones own errors and mistakes because someone like me has come through very different kinds of ideological and political positions, and been tormented in the process. My third objective, of course, is the retrieval of the language. Satyashodhak does not seek to radically change the narrative style or alter established theatrical processes. The fact that it is performed by safai karmacharis of the Pune Mahanagarapalika Kamgar Union is revolutionary and the telling gains an unusual authenticity. They are illiterate, but very sharp. They understand politics far better than the educated middle class, said Pethe. The lm and the play have been getting an immense public response, so much so that the government has
FR OM T H E F E S T I V A L S O P EN I N G P LA Y , Roysten Abels The Kitchen
(Can & Abel Theatre, India).
mizhavu itself and the couple occupy the front of the stage. As they embark on the elaborate procedure of making the payasam, a raging ght ensues between them: as the payasam gets cooked, the audience, too, gets cooked in their rage. The stunning scenography, the aesthetic and visual grandeur keeps one engaged with the happenings on the stage. However, the performance leaves one with disjointed, fragmented experiences. There is no moment of dialogue between the mizhavu players and the couple, and everything remains as disparate as it is in the beginning. In this wordless play with striking visual qualities, even the drama that the act of making the payasam invokes becomes a part of the design, failing to transcend into a metaphysical experience. The deeply spiritual nature of the mizhavu remains haunting, independent of everything else. In all, the philosophy of the play remains a statement and not an enactment. The Kitchen is fraught with the danger of privileging aesthetics over actual theatre.
THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE
K.K. NAJEEB
BE R T O L T B R E C H T S T H E C A U C A S I A N C H A LK C I RCLE performed by
Janakaraliya (theatre of the people), Sri Lanka. released 80,000 job opportunities for the members of the safai karmachari community. Excellent performances and the remarkable musical abilities of the safai karmacharis make Satyashodhak a moving piece of theatre.
THE KITCHEN
The festivals inaugural play was the ceremonial, grand production of Roysten Abels The Kitchen. Encapsulating transition in stage language, the play juxtaposed two very different things. A one-line story of a couple, traditional payasam makers,
who get into a ght as the payasam gets cooked. It is set against the ritualistic mizhavu drumming, an accompaniment for the traditional koothu and koodiyattam performances of Kerala. The play references Rumis kitchen in Turkey, not only in trying to forge a connection between food and spirituality but also in the manner in which the play is laid out it is said that Rumi sat to meditate on a raised platform, with the cooks on a level below that. The extraordinary mizhavu players from Kalamandalam occupy tiny chambers in a huge structure that resembles the
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The reasons for Janakaraliya moving away from the audience-goes-to-thetheatre convention were completely social. This Sri Lankan mobile cultural group takes theatre to the people: it moves from one place to the other within the country holding performances in the huge tents it carries along with it. For the director, Parakrama Niriella, the journey of the multi-ethnic Janakaraliya into the interiors of Sri Lanka is with the intention of creating bridges between communities and taking the message of peace. This practice, known as applied theatre, seeks to socially mobilise underprivileged rural communities and help war-torn Sri Lanka surmount its difficulties culturally. Janakaraliyas tent was packed for the lively and engaging performance of Bertolt Brechts The Caucasian Chalk Circle. The play, which in many ways reects the lives of the Sinhalese, is about how civil war and political upheaval can turn lives upFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
M.D. PA L L A V I in her cutting solo performance C Sharp C Blunt (Flinntheatre and M.D. Pallavi, Germany and India).
R E VOLUTI ON A R Y M E S S A G E S (Grusomhetens Theatre, Norway) and (on facing page) Transguration (Olivier de Sagazan, France) blurred the lines between theatre and dance.
side down. Although it is unusual for a Brechtian play to be kind to the human lot, The Caucasian Chalk Circle upholds the resolute spirit of mankind. With the ring of the tent transforming into its performance space, Janakaraliya struck an instant chord with the audience, who gradually became a part of the goings-on. The festival brought into focus many dimensions of the question of transition. Transition meant different things to different practitioners, local and international. If for some depiction in terms of language and scenography was crucial, for others it was intent. Quoting Elizabeth Le Compte of the Wooster Group, Noel Witts, in his lecture on shifts in the language of European theatre, said: My meaning is in the piece itself. Witts said that performance material could be representative of a country or a choreographer or a directors personal concerns. It could be a collective solution or an attitude to space or an acknowledgement of the need of new and younger audiences.
NOT ONLY ABOUT STAGE
Theatre is not only about stage, said Bartosz Szydowski, the Polish director of Bath New Theatre. With the belief that theatre was also about
building a commune, he started the biggest project of his life eight years ago in the neglected Nowa Huta post-industrial district of Krakow. This was his return to old-fashioned concepts such as community and social responsibility, taking the route of sustainability. It seemed that he could renew the perception of a modern society. When we started our Laznia Nowa Theatre in an old factory and in a place that was deserted, with media support we told people to come, discuss and chat with us. Not just about theatre, but to bring objects from their homes and tell us stories. Even as Szydowski triggered the communitys imagination with his project, he realised that it was possible to practise good theatre without giving up ones dreams. This model of publicly funded institution has strengthened the bonds of the community, and theatre has become an organic part of the life of people in this marginalised district. Nowa Huta now occupies an important place in the map of theatre and its festival is now one of the most sought after in Europe. Found theatre, said Prof. Susie Tharu, was thinking of theatre as the staging or framing, in other words, a reection and analysis, of events that
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were actually taking place in real life. This, in a way, extended the thoughts of many practitioners. But apart from transition, since the discussion was also around gender and violence, basing her analysis on the campus broadsheet of the English and Foreign Languages University, she said even though many of the writings were based on gender issues, they marked a major shift in thinking about gender. It is a breakaway from yesterdays engagement with sexual violence, including the tools and concepts that were developed. However, gender discourses in university spaces were more inclusive to issues, she felt.
THE WALK
The actor, director and theatre teacher Maya Raos performance The Walk, in response to the December 2012 Delhi gang-rape incident, seemed to say that methods of violence against women may have changed, but the body bore a historical memory, and hence it was a matter of continuity. A performance that has stirred and motivated audiences at universities, on the streets, on formal stages and several other venues recognised that there were hardly any de-gendered spaces for a wom-
For visual language

Interview with Deepan Sivaraman, artistic director of ITFoK 2014. B Y D E E P A G A N E S H
DEEPAN SIVARAMAN, artistic director of International Theatre Festival of Kerala 2014, is an associate professor at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions of Ambedkar University, Delhi. What were your guiding concerns as the artistic director? I have been part of earlier editions of the ITFoK, and as we stand in the 21st century, I asked myself what the questions we need to address in this festival are. It is important to question our notions of text and stage. So where is drama? What kind of theatre gains validity in this context? What is its language? Theatre has to be seen as collaborating with other visual arts. So I decided to bring productions that use a new language of theatre. I wanted people to watch it and become a part of the debates. Over the years, one has to recognise that ways of seeing have also changed. Proscenium theatre is largely a civilised performance. We are so used to seeing it in one single way. The world over they have experimented with theatre space. It was important for me to record the transition in spectatorship. Every artistic director comes with his own curatorial concerns. Do you think your beliefs about the practice of theatre took it in a particular direction? Theatre is a response to society, so you cannot do away with the story. Whether it is Brecht or Shakespeare, there has to be a story. Then, as we were discussing, the subject of violence came up. The recent Supreme Court verdict about sexuality brought even this into the curatorial space.
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Going by your works, your idea of theatre is very different from the prevalent modes of telling. Can you explain? It is not easy to step back or move away from your beliefs. I have been exploring theatre for the past 10 years. The philosophical inquiry the world over has been into visual language. All these years the supremacy was with text, and hence the writer was the core of the play and not the director. The dialogue is a dramatic text; only when the transition takes place will there be a performance text. You watch a performance, and listen to a performance. I think it is time to move away from a textual performance to a visual performance. Performances like Mephisto Waltz, Transguration and Revolutionary Messages pose quite a challenge to the Indian viewer. Do you not feel that avant-garde performances such as these are alien to the Indian experience? We are a country of storytellers with rich oral traditions. Most works that came had the story format for their narrative. But radical things are happening outside India. And the theatre audience in India needs to know exactly what is happening even when they have the right to reject it. For me, ITFoK 2014 is a curtain-raiser for theatre of the world. It is easy to access the world of cinema and literature and nd out what is happening. But it is nearly impossible in theatre. People may hate a play like Revolutionary Messages, but you should see it to relook into our own theatre practices.
an. Wondering if in the actual sense of the term she was a mere performer in The Walk, she said: The Walk is not just about the freedom to walk the street at any hour of day or night without fear; its about taking hold of the night to think, reect, talk to each other. There was certainly a great element of the personal for M.D. Pallavi in her cutting solo performance in C Sharp C Blunt. Have things changed for the woman operating in the modern, technology-driven world or have forms of violence just grown sharper and more nuanced? Playing with language, the performance brought into sharp focus the altered methods of commodication of the woman; while she continues to be a sexually loaded object, she is now also a userfriendly app. In contrast to the seemingly sophisticated modern world are societies like those in Africa, where violence lives in its blatant forms. Homosexuality is seen as going against African spirituality by men and women in African society. Their method to set lesbians straight is something called corrective rape, explains Sara Matchett, who teaches at the Department of Drama, University of Cape Town. The overwhelming civil response in India to the horric gang rape in Delhi shook South Africans, at least momentarily, surprising in a society which has
Now the focus is on the material of theatre

Interview with M.V. Narayanan, Professor of English, University of Calicut. B Y D E E P A G A N E S H
M.V. NARAYANAN, Professor of English at the University of Calicut, was in the three-member team that organised the colloquium at the ITFoK. He was able, with clarity and scholarship, to map the trajectory of theatre theory and practice. Has body become central to the new discourse of theatre? There is a moving away from the literary text to focus on the actuality of theatre. It is a moving away from tradition to what is actually happening, a looking at the self. Body and space are becoming key issues in our discussions in theatre. Now the focus is on the material of theatre. Words are becoming less important. If it is through the body you know the world, body becomes an embodiment of culture. With the self forming the epicentre, does it take theatre away from the community? Body is not necessarily the individual body. Chandralekhas work focussed on the body in many different ways. They were bodies in interaction with each other. So, questions like what is body? what can be done? how do you work through the body? come up. In all these questions, there are other bodies involved. Pinter speaks of a door. Its very presence constitutes anticipation. If a person comes in, it changes the dynamics of the room. If no one does, there is anticipation of someone coming. The presence of a body is always in anticipation of another. So body is not a biological body but a cultural body.
Is theatre more political than before? Can we wish away tradition? As spectators, audience, theatre makers, we are perhaps more aware of it. In the world that we live in, every action is loaded, it is difficult to ignore that. He or she is constrained to act in a certain way, question in a certain way. This knowledge is reected in their practice and work. Having said that, in all these years of history was there anything that was apolitical? Our life is made up of stories; we are constantly making stories and it is something that we can never avoid. We need to be conscious of the various levels of the story. We unmake one thing to make something else of it. Interpretations always try to be total, whereas phenomena are not. A performance like Mephisto Waltz coexists with Bharatanatyam and Koodiyattam; however, the responses to them are contemporary. You can ght and resist Bharatanatyam and Koodiyattam, nevertheless you are working within it. Why does theory and practice always remain separate? It is true of most creative discourses. They are like oil and water. There needs to be a dialogue, but there are also limitations to that dialogue. In fact, writers like [Wole] Soyinka spoke about the importance of knowing the nittygritty of theatre. I am not sure how far a critical discourse will help a creative artist. Theory is another ball game altogether.
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no space for gender imbalances in most of its struggles. In South Africa, a woman gets raped every 26 seconds. The issues of transition and gender have from time to time been addressed by theatre. In the light of sociopolitical transformations, they acquire new dimensions, which could be in experimenting with form, language, stage design, and so on. To sum it up, Anuradha Kapoor, former director, National School of Drama, said: Through an aggregation of productions made largely by women directors, the 1980s saw a body of work that signalled realities that were on a register different from the one dominantly inscribed in the eld. Women directors devised, improvised, reinterpreted given texts, and repurposed classical narratives. They also sought to open up questions of gender, subjectivities and identities in ways that were new. These jolted the spectator out of a moral complacency. The generation of theatre makers now appear to be the affiliates. These are lateral ties spreading on the ground. ITFoK 2014 made possible a platform where different kinds of concerns on the range of subjects that constitute theatre could be articulated. It brought together ideas and ideologies of what transition meant to practitioners, local and international. Avant-garde performances like Mephisto Waltz, Transguration, and Revolutionary Messages, which blurred the lines between theatre and dance, opened a window to changing theatre practices in the rest of the world. The audience, going by its reaction, certainly remained amazed by what the human body could achieve. Nevertheless, theatre is more important for what it says and disseminates than for the material it brings together. Whether one remains with history and tradition or moves away from it, whether theatre is playwright-centric or directorcentric, whether it employs a new language and new dynamics, theatre is a lot about a story told effectively, stories that have the power to change society. The ITFoK set in motion a meaningful debate.
The politics of rereading

Rereadings of canonical texts side by side with the discovery of buried and forgotten texts have certainly unleashed a lot of radical energy in the realm of criticism.
EREADINGS and counterreadings are a way of retrieving texts and making them available to contemporary readers in new ways in which they can easily relate to them as also for diverse aesthetic and ideological uses. The theoretical premise that encourages multiple readings of a text was prepared chiey by reception theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Roman Ingarden and Jonathan Culler and thinkers and analysts like Pierre Macherey, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida whose meta-readings of old and new texts led to their radical re-evaluations. There are many factors that can make a rereading radical or otherwise: the social and historical premise; the ideological tools being used; the readers (critics) positions vis-avis gender, social class, caste, race, sexuality and majority/minority which could be status-quoist and hegemonic or revolutionary and counter-hegemonic/subaltern. I am speaking here only of rereadings, which however cannot completely be extricated from rewriting, of which examples abound in contemporary
literature, especially in the work of subaltern writers who have rewritten episodes from epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana, religious texts like the Bible as well as regional myths and legends. But that is subject enough for another essay. I may just point to Ramayana Stories in Modern South India edited by Paula Richman (University of Indiana Press) as one anthology where several rewritings of episodes from Ramayanaby Kumaran Asan, N.S. Madhavan, K.B. Sreedevi, C.N. Sreekantan Nair, K. Satchidanandan, Kuvempu, Vijaya Dabbe, Subrama-
nia Bharati, Pudumaipithan, Ambai, Chalam, Volga, and othershave been brought together. Writers like Pratibha Ray, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, P.K. Balakrishnan, S.L. Bhyrappa, Girish Karnad, Ratan Teyam, Mahasweta Devi and Lathalakshmi have attempted rewritings of episodes and re-visioning of characters from Mahabharata while others like Paul Zacharia, Sara Joseph and Anand have rewritten tales from the Bible. Rereadings of canonical texts side by side with the discovery of buried and forgotten texts have certainly
Thapar reveals the Orientalist determinations behind the reception of Sakuntala.

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R OM I LA THA P AR .
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FRONTLINE .
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unleashed a lot of radical energy in the realm of criticism. Just to take examples from a single language, Malayalam, critics like B. Rajeevan, V.C. Sreejan, S.S. Sreekumar, E.V. Ramakrishnan, P. Udayakumar, V. Sanil, S. Saradakkutty, J. Devika, Dileep Menon and M.T. Ansari have been consistently rereading texts from various, mostly subaltern, points of view. They have been trying to expose the ideological determinations that underlie representations, especially of Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis and women, in the texts they choose to reread. The new readings of Sree Narayana Guru and C.V. Raman Pillai by P. Udayakumar, the reading of Pothery Kunhambus Saraswativijayam, a Dalit novel, by Dileep Menon, the readings of Chandu Menon by M.T. Ansari, the readings of some texts of Kumaran Asan by S. Saradakkutty and V. Sanil illustrate this trend. B. Rajeevan and P. Udayakumar, for example, have looked at the evolution of the concept of the body in Sree Narayana Guru as he moves from works like Mananateetam, Siva Satakam and Indriya Vairagyam to Atmopadesa Satakam, Advaita Jeevitam and Suddhipanchakam. Sree Narayana Guru denies ontological status to the body, but gives it epistemological status and discovers a subtle body (sookshma sareera) within the gross body (sthoola sareera). The body can attain purity once it is liberated from the gross body. Then it will be capable of spiritual bliss. This is the moment where community enters Sree Narayanas system, for, the reforms within the communitiesin education, economy, health, etc.enable societies to attain this bliss, as the material and spiritual arrangements need to be coordinated like the organs of a body to lead to enlightenment, to recall his statement in Advaita Jeevitam. Here he reminds us of Tirumular, the Tamil Saivite saint, as well as Basava, the Kannada Saivite reformer, both of whom accepted the interdependence of the body and the soul. It is the body that bears the organic marks of distinction in man; caste marks and caste titles are an aberration that
The anthology edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita traces the evolution of women's writing in India across centuries.
hide these organic markers. So there are only two castes among humans men and women. (The third gender was probably theoretically invisible at that point of time.) Sree Narayana thus views caste as a false distinction, religion as nothing more than a matter of opinion, and the community as the locus of concrete social action. In 1916, Sree Narayana declared that he did not belong to any caste or religion. Human community, he said, would be born only when false distinctions and hierarchies disappeared. This was the basic principle of the Renaissance that was soon to transform the society in Kerala. Dileep Menons reading of Saraswativijayam, a novel by Pothery Kunhambu published in 1892, looks at Kunhambus project closely to discover that initially he, too, had thought of reforming the Hindu society but later abandoned it as impossible. The author, an Ezhava who was often called Pulayan Kunhambu for his concern for the Pulaya community, found that tradition was impervious to modernity. The novel is an example of the spatial delineation of issues of power, hierarchy and inequality as the characters traverse different territories of freedom and knowledge. Travel becomes a metaphor of individual redemption here as the cruel landlord, Kuberan Namboodiri, travels to Kasi, Marathan, the Pulaya protagonist travels to Madras, and Subhadra, the Namboodiris daughter falsely accused of extramarital relations and banished from her caste, travels to Kannoor to escape from the enclosed space of historical memory. Kuberan has a change of heart; Marathan converts
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to Christianity, studies law and becomes a judge; Subhadra, too, converts and becomes a teacher and gets reunited with her husband who, too, converts to Christianity. Christianity is the mediator of modernity in the text. Kunhambu did share the creative tension between the possibility of an internal critique of Hinduism and the pragmatic and robust alternative of empowerment through colonial education, though nally he found that liberation was unattainable within the Hindu fold, a fact that Ambedkar, too, was to discover later, though his choice was not Christianity, but Buddhism. Saraswativijayam is not a revenge novel, nor a conversion tract; conversion here is a metaphor for the new possibilities opened up by colonialism and modernity. It may be noted that while elite thinkers like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Dayananda Saraswati championed an internal critique of Hinduism and found habitation within reformed religion, most of the subaltern thinkers found a solution to caste inequality only in conversion. Sree Narayana was an exception, as, through a philosophical inversion, he could free himself from all religions.
DIFFERENT SAKUNTALAS
Romila Thapar has reread Kalidasas Abhijnana Sakuntalam from a historical point of view to reveal the Orientalist determinations behind its reception. She has shown how Kalidasas Sakuntala is delicate, shy, meek, faithful and unquestioning in her obedience, returning with tears from Dushyantas court when he disowns her, as different from the Sa-
This collection, edited by Paula Richman, brings together several rewritings of episodes from Ramayana.
kuntala of Adiparva in the Mahabharata where she is strong and independent and boldly interrogates Dushyantas sense of justice and decorum. She puts certain conditions even before she enters into a gandharva relationship with the king. Kalidasas description ts in very much with the romantic concept of the innocent forest virgin embarrassed by the awakening of desire. In fact, there is a whole romantic opposition at work here between the simple, picturesque ashram in the woods that represents rusticity and innocence and the splendid palace of the king that stands for the urban with its accent on power and cunning. Kalidasas Sakuntala was the kind of ideal heroine that the romantics were looking for. Goethe describes her as a rustic girl, a child of nature with elegant limbs and graceful undulating gait. Popularised in the West through Monier Williams English translation, from which the German translation was done by Georg Forster in 1791, Abhijnana Sakuntalam tted very well with the Orientalist project of romanticising the East reected equally well in colonial photography and the Company paintings. The Germans also exulted in the racial bonds between the ancient Indians and Europeans whom they considered Aryans, whatever that term stands for. For French Indologists like Sylvane Levy and Russian Indologists like Oldenberg, Sakuntala was part of their fantasy about India. She was the ideal Hindoo woman, also, for the Indian middle class nationalists, who, like the Orientalists, bemoaned the fall of the ideal Indian womanhood. Rabindranath Tagore also upheld Sakuntala, combining in his approach the British Orientalist attitudes of the 19th century, the nascent nationalist sentiment and Victorian moralism. Romila Thapar upholds Shantarams portrayal of Sakuntala in his lm Stree as being faithful to her portrayal in the Mahabharata as also the contemporary interpretation one comes across in Nachiket Patwardhans Anant Yatra, which brings Sakuntala to modern Bombay where Dushyanta is a business executive. The lm hints that any appreciation of the naive and frail Sakuntala today can only be an escape from contemporary oppressive patriarchal urban reality. Postcolonial readings, especially informed by Edward Saids theoretical insights, have helped unearth the colonial prejudices behind a lot of work on Indianot literature alone, but also photographs and paintings. These interrogations, while at times reductive or eclectic, have helped make writers and readers conscious of the dangers of (mis)representation. The patriarchal canons are being interrogated, myths revisioned, texts decoded and literary history revised by many feminist critics and theoreticians. Susie Taru and K. Lalita have traced in their introduction to the anthology Women Writing in India, Sixth Century B.C. to the Present (Oxford University Press) the evolution of womens writing in India across centuries. Uma Chakravarty, Vijaya Dabbe, Madhu Kishwar, Sonal Shukla, Leela Mullati, Parita Mukta, Vijaya Ramaswamy and others have reread the poetry of women saints like Lal Ded, Akka Mahadevi,
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Satyakka, Kadire Rammavve, Ayadakki Lakkamma, Muktayakka, Andal, Karaykkal Ammayar, Meerabai, Gangasati, Janabai and Bahinabai to show how Bhakti was to them a tool to escape gender distinction, patriarchal oppression and domestic connement just as it was to the Buddhist nuns like Mutta, Ubbiri or Sumangalamata of the sixth century BCE. God becomes a way of dissolving an otherwise impossible situation in these saints. Their worldly marriages, actual as well as potential, represent both the lure and the bondage of the world while their relationship to God represents a renunciation of the world and the womans traditional roles in it. Like Susie nds the lyrics of Terigatha to be, their poems are epiphanic experiences in which the painful constructions of secular life fall away and the torment of feelings subsides as the peace and freedom of nirvana are attained. While they exult in their new life transformed by Bhakti, they also contrast it to the painful worlds they have left behind. These poets created an alternative family, resisted the oppressive social role imposed upon them by the maledominated society and simultaneously created a parallel language of experience and emotion. A lot of scholars and academics like Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Malashree Lal, Vrinda Nabbar, Brinda Bose, Ruth Vanita, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, J. Devika, Anita Devasia, G.S. Jayasree and S. Saradakkutty have also done considerable research in womens discourses and the representation of women in literary texts by men. Same-sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (Macmillan), while being an anthology of gay and lesbian texts, also rereads a lot of ancient and medieval Indian texts like Mahabharata, Krittivasa Ramayana, Manikanthajataka, Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, Padmapurana, Bhagavatapurana, Skandapurana and Shivapurana from the homoerotic point of view. Eco-criticism is another mode of rereading that focusses entirely on
the text without looking at its organic relationship with nature and the larger universe. Even though it was William Rueckert (Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Eco-Criticism, 1978) who introduced the term, it was Joseph Meekers The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1974) that rst dened the subject. According to Meeker, literary ecology was concerned with the biological themes appearing in literature. Its aim was also to discover the role of literature in human ecology. Literary works, he said, often reveal mans beliefs about the truth of natural processes and the cultural ideologies that have brought human race to the modern environmental crisis. Cherryll Glotfelty, who edited the rst eco-criticism reader (1996), describes eco-criticism as an attempt to unravel the exchanges between nature and culture. It has one leg in literature and the other on earth: as a theoretical discourse it connects equally with human beings and non-human ones. Writers world is not only the social world, but the ecosphere itself. Earth, she says, is at the centre of eco-criticism just as gender is at the centre of feminist criticism and class at that of Marxist criticism. Eco-criticism, according to Lawrence Buel, brings space into the critical agenda that has so far been conned to the theme, plot and characters. He sees it as an umbrella term that embraces various modes and approaches. It has also been called ego-criticism (Sven Birkerts, Only God can Make a Tree: The Joys and Sorrows of Eco-Criticism) as it rereads literature to discover what it has to say about mans egocentrism, greed and craze for wealth and power. Some eco-critics also draw strength from Engels Dialectics of Nature, Raymond Williams insights into the city-country contradictions, and the works of Adorno, Walter Benjamin and other new Marxist thinkers. The anthology Haritaniroopanam Malayalathil (Green Criticism In Malayalam) edited by G. Madhusoodanan carries 76 different samples of what can be broadly called eco-criticism in MalayalaFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
malong with 16 theoretical piecesthat began to grow with the environmental awareness generated by the struggle against the proposed dam in the rainforests of the Silent Valley. The book carries rereadings of many Malayalam literary texts based on the concepts of eco-Marxism, eco-Feminism, eco-Ethics and eco-Spirituality in literary criticism. It was perhaps Sharad Patils book in Marathi, Abrahmani Sahityanche Saundaryasastra, that rst launched an attack on Brahmin aesthetics and spoke of the need for a counter-poetics. Sharan Kumar Limbale in his book Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature has attempted a critique of status-quoist Marathi aesthetics as also of the adulatory as well as negative criticism of Dalit literature by savarna critics. He points out that Dalit literature is not meant to entertain readers but to provoke them into rethinking their society and its ethics and aesthetics. It is impossible to investigate Dalit writing with its rebellion, rejection and commitment with the established critical tools meant for the literature of acquiescence and consent. He does not agree with critics like Yadunath Thatte who want to enlarge the rasa theory to include revolt and cry as the tenth and eleventh rasas. What is needed is a new aesthetics that takes into account the differentness of Dalit writing in content as well as form. Aestheticist criticism cannot digest the non-traditional stance of Dalit literature. For that freedom will have to be recognised as an aesthetic value. The intensity of experience, the way the experience is socialised, its power to cross the boundaries of time and spacethese are the standards Limbale proposes for the evaluation of Dalit literature.
DALIT IMAGINATION
D.R. Nagaraj in his book The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in India has gone deeper into the specics of Dalit sensibility and Dalit imagination and the problem of cultural memory in the context of the cosmologies of caste and the realism in Kannada ction. He traces the cultural memory of Dalits to the sub92
altern, radical, traditions, folk cosmologies, rural myths and oral narratives which are getting lost in the oppressive process of Sanskritisation pursued by Hindu revivalists. He looks at the cults of Madeswara and Manteswamy in southern Karnataka as examples. He points out how the cultural paradigm of the nationalists had no place for Dalit cultural traditions and practices. The monolithic cultural model erected on the basis of Vedanta by the Hindu Right also precludes all the philosophic and cultural expressions of Dalits. Nagaraj makes a very insightful comparative rereading of U.R. Anantha Murthys Samskara and Devanoor Mahadevas Kusumabale to show how caste has been an important factor in determining their modes of representation and imagination. Samskara gives the readers an insight into the self-image of the Brahmin by allowing them to see the world through the eyes of Pranesacharya, whose attempts to break the system miserably fail as against that of Naranappa, his alter ego who completely breaks free of tradition and its taboos. This, according to him, is also the failure of the novel as it cannot establish the sexual contact between the Brahmin and the non-Brahmin as a possible way to break free of the oppressive caste society. Realism frustrates the novels radical ambitions. But Kusumabale rejects the notion of veriable reality at the very outset and follows a folk narrative form. While Samskara ignores the socioeconomic power structures, thus turning its concern more metaphysical, Kusumabale counterposes the personal and the political realms of the caste structure and nds that sexual contact like the one in Samskara can only lead to violence within the existing power structure. Devanoor Mahadeva revives the Dalit mode of imagination as when a cot tells a story and a lamp turns into a woman who comments on the events of the day. The narrative is open and works at multiple levels while Samskara is highly centred and has an ending that closes the narrative. satchida@gmail.com
SOCIAL ISSUES
Strings attached
Residents of Kathputli Colony protest against the Delhi Development Authoritys plans to demolish their slum and develop it with the help of a prominent construction company. B Y A J O Y A S H I R W A D M A H A P R A S H A S T A
ON March 9, New Delhi witnessed an unusual exhibition of traditional art forms at a most unlikely venue. Acrobats walked the tightrope displaying their bravura and puppeteers put up a good show in a ne exhibit of their skills. In a corner, a few artists deftly carved complicated animal gurines out of wood, while in another, some women dexterously made chic, colourful wall mounts in minutes. Qawwals, or Su vocalists, brought out their spiritual selves on stage, and traditional percussionists drummed up enthusiasm for a uniquely pulsating environment created by this diverse group of artists. A display of skills rather than art, this exhibition stood out for its magnicence. However, what seemed like celebrations galore were in fact a protest against the government by these artists who live in a slum that stands, perhaps, only to be demolished by April 1. Kathputli Colony, the venue of the exhibition, is a slum or what the Delhi government calls a jhuggi jhopri cluster in west Delhi. It derives its name from the puppeteers who rst settled here around 60 years ago. As time passed by, it became a slum inhabited not only by artists, artisans, and sculptors from different parts of the country but also migrant labourers, safai karmacharis, construction workers and masons. Today, there are at least 12 organised communities that stay here, each community with its own pradhan, the nominated head. The residents of the slum claim that the puppeteers from Rajasthan converted the erstwhile swampy, high grasslands of what is now called the Kathputli Col-
AN AR T I S T R E S I D I N G I N K A T H P U T LI C O LO N Y at the cultural exhibition to protest against the Delhi Development Authoritys move to demolish the slum and develop it.
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MEETA AHLAWAT
KATH PUT H L I C O L O N Y derives its name from the puppeteers who rst settled there around 60 years ago. Today it has artists, artisans, sculptors, daily-wage labourers, construction workers and safai karmacharis.
ony into a liveable place. There were just jungles in and around this place. We lled up this land to make it inhabitable. Since we were a group of artists staying here, it became a natural abode for other poor artists who came to Delhi for work, said Ramesh Tandon, a puppeteer who was born in the slum 55 years ago. Kathputli Colony is unique because of its composition. Being a slum populated mostly by artists, it is a colourful colony, with most residents moving around in their tradiFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
tional attire. Children pick up their familys traditional art form at an early age. One can see children as young as ve years playing drums or the shehnai, trying their hands at making sculptures, or working on puppets. Many have been called to perform at international venues. Many have also received government awards. And yet they have remained poor, with hardly any income to live beyond their own jhuggis. In the last fortnight, Kathputli Colony became one of the most
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prominent sites of contestation between the people and the government. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the capitals premiere urban planning body under the Union government, plans to demolish the slum and develop it with the help of a prominent construction company. What the DDA promises the slum-dwellers at present is a multistorey apartment complex in situ in a period of two years. If the project goes through, each registered family will get a 38-square-metre house in this complex. In the meantime, the DDA wants the residents of the colony to shift to a transit camp made for them in Anand Parbat, around 12 kilometres from the colony. The transit camp is run by the construction company. Under the Rajiv Awas Yojana, a scheme that was started in 2009 to cater to the housing needs of the urban poor, the construction rm landed the contract the same year to develop the slum. In a public-private partnership (PPP) project, the DDA awarded this rm around 14 acres of land (one acre is 0.4 hectare) to construct a multistoreyed apartment complex in Kathputli Colony for its residents. In return, the builders were asked to deposit Rs.6.11 crore with the DDA as tender money and a refundable sum of Rs.10 crore as performance guarantee. After the completion of the project, the builders are to be given 0.97 acre of land, in which they can construct commercial complexes and residential apartments. However, given the history of slum demolitions in New Delhi, the residents are sceptical. Instead of a multistoreyed house, they are demanding that if at all the DDA is planning to develop the colony, they should be given plots of land in which they can make their own houses according to their requirements. They told Frontline that none of the slums that had been demolished were rehabilitated in situ. We do not believe that the DDA will let us come back here if we leave. It has sold off our homes to the builders, said Dileep Bhatt, pradhan of Bhule Bheesre Kalakaar Sahakar Samiti, a
MEETA AHLAWAT
MEETA AHLAWAT
A SL UM PO PUL A T E D M O S T LY B Y A RT I S T S , Kathputli Colony is a colourful place. Most residents move around in their traditional attire, and children pick up their familys traditional art form at an early age. One can see children as young as ve years playing drums or the shehnai, trying their hands at making sculptures, or working on puppets.
conglomerate of artists living in Kathputli Colony. The samiti has been in existence since the 1970s.
REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT
The government did not consult us even once before it went ahead with this redevelopment project. It must understand that such small houses in a multistoreyed apartment will be redundant for us as we need more space to work. Some of us make puppets, some are sculptors. Where will we keep our paraphernalia in a one-
room house? Even the drummers, the Kalandars and the magicians in the village will need space to keep their instruments. The DDA should conduct a public hearing to understand our demands, he said. The transit camps where the residents of the colony are expected to stay in the interim period are constructed with bre and are one-room sets, something like porta cabins. The residents claimed that most people who had moved into such transit camps in other parts of the city were
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never rehabilitated. But what bothered them the most was that the shift could take a heavy toll on their livelihoods. Most women in the colony work as domestic helps in nearby areas. It will burn our pockets to commute from the transit camps. Many work as daily-wage labourers in the locality. We fear our work will suffer if we shift, said Rama, a resident of the colony. The DDA dismisses the residents fear. We want them to live in hygienic conditions and in modern
houses. What is wrong with the project? If the builders are unable to perform, we will conscate the security amount, said S.P. Auluck, the DDA official in charge of the project. However, information accessed by a few residents through the Right to Information (RTI) Act suggests that the DDA has been quite lenient with the builders. When the construction rm was awarded the contract, the completion date for the project was September 2011. But, violating the terms and conditions of the agreement, it was given an extension without any hesitation when it could not complete the project. The residents feel that the project will only benet the private developer who stands to make a prot of around Rs.600 crore. They are protesting against four main irregularities after they accessed information under the RTI. Firstly, the audit report of the project by the Auditor General, Delhi, in March 2011 reports that Kathputli Colonys land, costing Rs.1,043 crore according to a conservative estimate, was auctioned off to the construction rm for a mere Rs.6.11 crore. Secondly, the State Environmental Appraisal Committee and the Delhi Urban Arts Commission have pointed out problems with the site plan and expressed grave concerns about the misuse of FAR (oor area ratio) provisions to enlarge commercial and remunerative components while reducing the space available for the 2,700 EWS ats (under the economically weaker section category) proposed for the residents of Kathputli Colony. Thirdly, of the roughly 3,200 families on the site who were surveyed in 2010-11, only 2,641 gure on the list published on the DDAs website as on February 24, 2014. Over half of these families are recorded to have no supporting documents other than the ration card, which will have to be further veried. And lastly, in the viability calculation of the project, the actual costing of the ats has been done on the basis of 19.6 sq m as opposed to the 38 sq m promised to the residents. To top the woes of residents,
there have been minimal efforts by the DDA to introduce transparency in the whole process and win the condence of the residents. Instead, through the month of February, the DDA and police officials were threatening the residents with force, most residents claimed. After sustained protests by the residents of Kathputli Colony, the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi postponed the demolition until April 1. Taking note of the opacity in the process of eviction, the Delhi High Court directed the DDA on March 21 to conduct a survey to ensure that all families eligible for relocation were included. It also took an undertaking from the DDA that no force would be used during the resettlement process.
SANITISING THE CITIES
Redevelopment of slums in Indian metropolises has come to mean sanitising the cities and driving out the poor to their peripheries. Kathputli Colony is not the rst one that could meet this fate. In 2010, during the preparations for the Commonwealth Games, many big slums of New Delhi were razed to put up a facade of a world-class city in front of the foreigners who visited India. Instead of implementing dynamic urban designs to accommodate the poor within the city limits, the governments have sought to demolish the habitations of the poor in big cities. And this is being done in the name of redevelopment of slums. The New Delhi-based Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) has attempted to track forced evictions across India during 2013. The data are not complete, but according to information received on instances of forced evictions, at least 11,400 families, which means at least 60,000 people, including women, children, members of religious minorities, the Scheduled Castes, persons with disabilities and the elderly, were forcibly evicted from their homes in 2013, for reasons ranging from road widening to city beautication. Rehabilitation has reportedly not been provided in most of the cases and the majority of the displaced families have been left to fend
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for themselves. The HLRN lists out 20 such incidents in 2013 where rehabilitation has not happened. A document prepared by the National Forum for Housing Rights points out that the so-called Gujarat development model that is being celebrated by the Bharatiya Janata Party has a very poor record when it comes to affordable housing and slum demolition. As recently as February 2014, the government of Gujarat forcibly evicted 474 families (affecting over 2,500 women, men and children) across the State and demolished their homes, its press release says. As per Census of India 2011, a total of 13.75 million households live in slums. Many believe the gure is an underestimation. The Rajiv Awas Yojana proudly claims that it intends to build a slum-free country. However, a crony capitalist system has led to private builders benetting the most out of the scheme. In the process, the urban poor are pushed to the peripheries of the city. In her essay Maximum City, Minimum Shelter, Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer, while speaking about the slum demolition drive, says, The Indian city is in the throes of change. It is being reimagined, with ambitions of becoming a Shanghai, a Singapore, or, more generally, a world city. Naturally, there is no longer any space in it for the poor and their squalid settlements. Characterising the slum-dweller as an encroacher and as being in illegal occupation [of] government land has lent language and an assumed legitimacy to the epidemic of demolitions that has been unleashed on the urban poor the imagery has taken the slum-dweller past illegality to criminality. The protest in Kathputli Colonys is only a symbol of the bigger disconnect that has happened between the Indian state and its people. What ostensibly looks like slum demolition is actually a systematic process through which the Indian city is gradually transforming its demographic character. The sanitisation of the Indian city comes at the cost of the poor.
BOOKS in review
Committed anarchist
An insight into revolutionary politics from below. B Y S H E L L E Y W A L I A
Oh good elector, inescapable imbecile, poor wretch go home and start a strike. Octave Mirbeau E cannot lose faith in the collective will and power of citizenship. The participatory politics of peoples movements lends respectability to the idea of democracy and sends out a clear message: it is time for the public to realise that every ve years the country engages in an electoral exercise that bestows power in the hands of a few while the public is totally silenced until the next elections. This is an electoral lie of democracies. As Elisee Reclus, the French anarchist, argued, to vote is to abdicate. Choose your masters and then sanction privileged ways of maintaining the powerful institutions of domination. Through the right to vote, you become the self executioner of your right to dissent or intervene. Normand Baillargeon, in his timely book Order Without Power, argues through his analysis of the philosophy of anarchism that in order to full human nature and ensure that human life thrives, it is imperative to respond to and resist the global phenomenon of oppression. His examination of the history of social and political mise individual freedom, which is ones birthright, is through a brand of anarchism that has both a historical force and a deeply positive ideology of absolute welfare of the public. Unfortunately, in the hands of the media and their controllers, this school of thought takes a rather destructive or negative complexion as seen in the heated debates over the unlawful interventions of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Noam Chomsky is of the view that anarchism is a tendency in the history of human thought and action which seeks to identify coercive, authoritarian, and hierarchic structures of all kinds, and to challenge their legitimacy. Baillargeon elaborates that the philosophy of anarchism is misunderstood not only by the common man but also by the rightwing intellectuals. It is not the absence of government or order, as regarded by many, but etymologically anarchy stands for the absence of power or authority, where an means absence and archie government. Order in society does not ensue from control or governance; order, born in the absence of power, is produced in a state of freedom. Opposition to authority is not a state of disorder; it is a cry for freedom and justice, an
Order Without People An Introduction to Anarchism: History & Current Challenges by Normand Baillargeon Seven Stories Press, New York
Pages: 143 Price: $16.95
dissent demonstrates that there have been upright, law-abiding citizens who believed that they had been driven by their conscience to alter the system over issues that infringed the fundamental rights of man. In a constantly changing world, it is through resort to protests that antiquated laws are revisited and then undergo necessary revisions. Vaclav Havel, the writer and former President of Czechoslovakia, maintains, You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
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Under the overwhelming force of capitalism and bureaucracy, the smouldering undercurrents of anarchism will always be there, which, in the words of Rudolf Rocker, the anarcho-syndicalistwriter and activist, is a denite trend in the historic development of mankind, which strives for the free, unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Anarchism must replace democracy with its foremost objective being to secure the personaland social freedom of men. However, the state takes all measures to silence the anarchists to a routine of established inertia or irrelevance so visible in the working of our established and unchanging governance mechanisms. Keeping in view the political philosophy of JeanJacques Rousseau, the Cartesians and other libertarians, it is believed that the best way to maxi-
idea inimical to the state apparatus that holds its legitimacy through a constitution that weighs heavily towards public control. It must be clear to those who consider anarchism unruly that it refrains from overlooking institutions that use power for the enforcement of legitimate regulations. Georges Brassens, the famous French singer, put it emphatically: I am such an anarchist that I go out of my way to cross at the crossroads! The concept is, therefore, wrongly given the semantics of violence and disturbance. Legitimacy cannot be read into fossilised systems of authority that fail to achieve the desired results. The surveillance of any drug trafficking by the public, for instance, gains legality if the police system fails. Although appearing to be the assertion of turbulent ideas or what is often termed unconstitutional interference, the anarchy that we have seen in the past few months in India has behind it what Peter Kropotkin, the Russian revolutionary philologist, calls the innite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilised being. Opposition leaders would tell you that a modest-sized party like the AAP is of no consequence. This is the argument of those who have no idea of revolution, underscoring their distaste for dissent and reaction against a popular and inspiring uprising against established institutions. Political movements across the globe, from the Zapatista-led revolution in Mexico to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring,
have been made possible by the masses possessing the audacity to challenge the status quo of a moribund system and with no interest in power.
DEMOCRATIC SPACE
In view of the critical analysis of anarchism, the book makes out a case for living with dignity and not the triumph of a single party, but to create a democratic space where diverse points of view can be heard. The libertarian anarchist stance combined with a socialist ideology that anarchists like AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal adopt leads to the ght for causes of social justice, unmasking the perceptible duplicity of politicians and intellectuals. Such ideological positions involve building autonomous structures that give people not only water and electricity but an environment conducive to a developed civil society where the judiciary, the executive and the legislature work in collaboration to usher in economic and judicial processes that ensure basic standards of living. Still, the mainstream media, in tandem with the oundering political parties, disparage such movements by ingenious strategies of incessant debates to convince the public of its unconstitutional and anarchic functioning and dismiss what is accomplished. Anarchism, therefore, as a revolutionary philosophy in the works of thinkers such as William Godwin, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman and Chomsky, focusses on the idea of the common human abilities that can
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speak truth to power. External control cannot check the evolution of moral and intellectually rebellious cultures. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the University of Berlin, and John Dewey, the philosopher, as well as Adam Smith, have written extensively on the treason of the intellectual elite and the political leadership that works for prot at the cost of public exploitation. Rather than laying out a plan for any single revolutionary moment that would bring about the intended social transformation, their emphasis is on the imperceptible changes that would occur under a process that seeks to liberate people from oppression and domination, an ideology that has as its central tenet the understanding of social reality and commitment to change. This school of thought is blatantly anti-capitalist with the underpinnings of a non-hierarchical social structure. The liberalism of the American New Deal brand of cut-throat competition and corporate authoritarianism in the industrial sector is what elite intellectuals take upon themselves to support, whereas the socialist anarchist stands polemically opposed to such hierarchical fascism so integral to corporate thinking. The deception cast by the media, by the ood of literature at all levels of special institutions such as schools, churches, television and cinema, makes the people believe in the sincerity and moral action of the state. The facade of classlessness or democracy is cast on the public, manipulating it to
believe that the state upholds the principle of equal opportunities. Empowering individuals is one way of meeting this challenge and providing a meaningful form of freedom, a critical practice that refuses to put all initiatives and solutions in the hands of the bureaucratic establishment. Therefore, the idea is not to overthrow governments but to take over institutions so that they begin to work more in favour of the sovereignty of the people. This is the Cartesian underpinning of an inspiring and adamant movement, an impulse towards the non-systematic and highly relative and exible character of everything in society from organisations to individuals. Here, governance as a communal activity is not to be left in the hands of the specialists who focus narrowly on their respective areas of interest, ignoring the larger well-being of society. The book is relevant to the understanding of revolutionary politics from below. However, there is no reason to suppose that the battle is won. The structures of authority and domination are not easy to dismantle. It would be naive to undervalue the power and privileges of the state. As Chomsky argues, In todays world, the goals of a committed anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them, while trying at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public participationand ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.
BOOKS in review
Mussolini and the Vatican

The book investigates an unwritten understanding between Italian fascism and the Catholic church despite their many differences. B Y L U C Y H U G H E S - H A L L E T T
N 1938, Pope Pius XI addressed a group of visitors to the Vatican. There were some people, he said, who argued that the state should be all-powerfultotalitarian. Such an idea, he went on, was absurd, not because individual liberty was too precious to be surrendered, but because if there is a totalitarian regimein fact and by rightit is the regime of the church, because man belongs totally to the church. As David Kertzer demonstrates repeatedly in this nuanced book, to be critical of fascism in Italy in the 1930s was not necessarily to be liberal or a lover of democracy. And to be anti-Semitic was not to be unchristian. The Pope told Mussolini that the church had long seen the need to rein in the children of Israel and to take protective measures against their evil-doing. The Vatican and the fascist regime had many differences, but this they had in common. Kertzer announces that the Catholic church is generally portrayed as the courageous opponent of fascism, but this is an exag-
The Pope and Mussolini The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe By David I. Kertzer Oxford
Pages: 549 Price: 20 (hardback)
geration. There is a counter-tradition, John Cornwells ne book Hitlers Pope on Pius XII (who succeeded Pius XI in 1939) exposed the Vaticans culpable passivity in the face of the wartime persecution of Italian Jews. But Kertzer describes something more fundamental than a church leaders strategic decision to protect his own ock rather than to speak up in defence of others. His argument, presented not as polemic but as gripping storytelling, is that much of fascist ideology was inspired by the Catholic traditionthe intolerance of opposition, the authoritar99
ianism, and the profound suspicion of the Jews. Pius XI (formerly Achille Ratti), librarian, mountain-climber and admirer of Mark Twain, was elected Pope in February 1922, eight months before Mussolini bullied his way to the Italian premiership. For 17 years, the two men held sway over their separate spheres in Rome. In all that time they met only once, but they communicated ceaselessly by means of ambassadors and nuncios, through the press (each had his tame organ) and via less publicly accountable go-betweens. From the copious records
of their exchanges, Kertzer has uncovered a fascinating tale of two irascible and often irrationalpotentates, and gives us an account of some murky intellectual nagling, and an often startling investigation of the exercise of power. The accession of Mussolini, known in his youth as mangiaprete (priesteater, or anti-clerical person), did not bode well for the papacy. The fascist squads had been beating up clerics and terrorising Catholic youth clubs. But Mussolini saw that he could use the church to legitimise his power, so he set about wooing the clergy. He had his wife and children baptised. He gave money for the restoration of churches. After two generations of secularism, there were once again to be crucixes in Italys courts and classrooms. Warily, slowly, the Pope became persuaded that with Mussolinis help Italy might become, once more, a confessional state. Only gradually did it become clear how much the church might lose in the process. Pius fretted over inadequately dressed women backless ballgowns and the skimpy outts of female gymnasts were particularly worrisome. Mussolini played along, solemnly declaring that, in future, girls gym lessons would be designed only to make them t mothers of fascist sons. He was accommodating in aiding the Popes war on heresy banning Protestant books and journals on demand. But Mussolini was
P R E M I E R B E N I T O MU S S O LI N I (centre) surrounded by officials of the Vatican and the Italian government, on February 11, 1932, the occasion of his rst visit to Pope Pius XI.
creating a heresy of his own. Schoolchildren were required to pray to him: I humbly offer my life to you, o Duce. In January 1938, he summoned more than 2,000 priests, including 60 bishops, to participate in a celebration of his agricultural policy. Neither the Pope nor his secretary of state was happy, but they feared offending the dictator. And so the priests marched in procession through Rome. They laid wreaths not at a Christian shrine but on a monument to fascist heroes. They saluted Mussolini as he stood on his balcony and attended a ceremony where they were required to cheer his entrance, to pray for blessings upon him and roar out O Duce! Duce! Duce! That the fascists (beginning with their precursor, Gabriele dAnnunzio) had appropriated ecclesiastical rituals and liturgies could perhaps be taken as a compliment to the church, but to recruit its priests for the worship of a secular ruler was to humiliate Gods vicar on earth. Mussolini was cocka-hoop. It was easy to manipulate the church, he told his new allies in Nazi Germany. With a few tax
concessions, and free railway tickets for the clergy, he boasted, he had got the Vatican so snugly in his pocket it had even declared his genocidal invasion of Abyssinia a holy war.
RACIAL LAWS
When it comes to the Jewish question, Kertzer demonstrates that the Popes failure to protest effectively against the fascist racial laws arose not simply from weakness but because anti-Semitism pervaded his church. Mussolini scored a painful hit when he assured Pius that he would do nothing to Italys Jews that had not already been done under papal rule. Roberto Farinacci, most brutal of the fascist leaders, came close to the truth when he announced: It is impossible for the Catholic fascist to renounce that anti-Semitic conscience which the church had formed through the millennia. And Catholic anti-Semitism was thriving. Among Pius most valued advisers were several whoas Kertzer amply demonstratessaw themselves as battling against a diabolical alliance of communists, Protestants, Freemasons and Jews.
Avoiding overt partisanship, Kertzer coolly lays out the evidence; he describes his large and various cast of characters, and follows their machinations. We meet the genial Cardinal Gasparri who, narrowly missing the papacy himself, became Pius secretary of state, handling the negotiations that led in 1929 to the Lateran Accords between the Vatican and the regime. Gasparri, a peasants son who had risen far, considered Mussolini absurdly ignorant and uncouth; Mussolini thought him very shrewd. We meet the Jesuit father Tacchi Venturi, Pius unofficial emissary, a rm believer in conspiracy theories, who claimed to have been nearly killed by an anti-fascist hitman (the story does not stand up). We meet Monsignor Caccia, Pius master of ceremonies, who was known to the police and to Mussolinis spies for luring boys to his rooms in the Vatican for sex, rewarding them with contraband cigarettes. And we meet the motley crew familiar from histories of fascism: the doltish Starace, Mussolinis bulldog; Ciano, plump and boyish and, in the opinion of the Amer-
ican ambassador, devoid of standards morally or politically; and Clara Petacci, the girl with whom Mussolini spent hours of every day on the beach. Some of this is familiar territory, but what is new, and riveting, is how fascist and churchmen alike were forced into intellectual contortions as they struggled to justify the new laws. Racism was good. Exaggerated racism was bad. Anti-Semitism was good, as long as it was Italian. German anti-Semitism was another thing entirely. Eventually Pius XI drew back from this casuistry. Kertzer describes the old Pope on his deathbed, praying for just a few more days so that he could deliver a speech with the message that all the nations, all the races (Jews included) could be united by faith. He dies. Cardinal Pacellisuave, emollient and devious, where Pius XI was a tablethumper who had no qualms about blurting out uncomfortable truths clears his desk, suppresses his notes and persuades the Vaticans printer, who has the speechs text ready for distribution, to destroy it so that not a comma remains. Eighteen days later, Pacelli becomes Pope Pius XII. It is a striking ending for a book whose narrative strength is as impressive as its moral subtlety.
Lucy Hughes-Halletts The Pike: Gabriele dAnnunzio has won the Samuel Johnson prize for nonction, the Costa biography award and the Duff Cooper prize.
Guardian News & Media 2014
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THE HINDU ARCHIVES
BOOKS in review
A class apart
Mythily Sivaramans nuanced understanding of the importance of class struggle and her belief in the rights of the working class and women come out vividly in the compilation. B Y T . K . R A J A L A K S H M I
ECONSTRUCTING someones richly lived life through a pastiche of shared memories, experiences and actual writing can be a daunting task. More so when the person is Mythily Sivaraman, former national vice-president of the All India Democratic Womens Association (AIDWA), who spent almost four decades of her life highlighting the importance of class struggle through her activism and writings. Her experiences, detailed in her articles, shaped her own understanding even as she fought for the rights of the working class and women. A life that began as a child looking at various inequalities in the private realm and the public sphere; a life that was shaped by the social, economic and political forces of the times, and which took a decisive turn after the burning alive of 44 Dalits by a landlord at Keezhvenmani (now in Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu) in 1968, her writing reects a certain integrity devoid of schmaltzy activism. The year 1968 was an epochal period in more
Haunted by Fire Essays on Caste, Class, Exploitation and Emancipation By Mythily Sivaraman LeftWord Books, 2013
Pages: 467
than one sense. This was the year Mythily Sivaraman joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and was associated with the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, one of the largest central trade unions in the country. Not only did she participate in industrial strikes in various public sector units but also actively associated herself with the Institute of Social Sciences in Chennai, which published The Radical Review, a journal of socialist ideas and politics. She was its full-time editor and wrote extensively. Some of the articles she wrote for The Radical Review, Economic & Political Weekly
and Mainstream have been included in Haunted by Fire. Mythily Sivaramans understanding of the world, therefore, is very much derived from the ideology she believed in. V. Geetha and Kalpana Karunakaran (Mythilys daughter), who have written the introduction to the book, have compiled her writings, jottings and ideas. This was after Mythily Sivaraman was diagnosed with Alzheimers. They felt the need to put all her thoughts on major issues together and in the process helped her recapture a lot of those memories. The book is divided into
seven sections with several chapters and subsections, which are inextricably connected to one another. Section I is on Dalits, which includes her writings from the late 1960s, under the titles Children of Darkness and Harijans. The rst one (published in Mainstream in 1969) was written when the nation was celebrating the Gandhi centenary year. It is a case study of a village in Tamil Nadu, where Mythily Sivaraman found a hierarchy among Harijans (this was the time when the nomenclature Dalit had not yet entered political parlance), which made her realise that casteism was not an exclusive monopoly of the higher-ups. Harijans have their own hierarchy too with the Pallars at the apex and living separately from the Paraiyas. She nds that caste hierarchy was also based on food habits. The second section, Understanding the Dravidian Movement, looks critically at the limitations of the model of social and economic emancipation of the main Dravidian parties, the gaps between their socialist rhetoric and the politics they practised on the ground. In the third section entitled Land and Labour, her articles closely look at the caste massacres of Keezhvenmani and Puducheri in Thanjavur district, which were in response to the resistance organised by the Communist labourers against the landlords. The demands were the samefair wages. Ironically, four decades
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the Working Class, shows that no government in Tamil Nadu, despite its socialist pretensions ever did any good to the interests of the working class in meaningful terms. Through three shocking narratives of police torture, she provides a vignette of the Emergency excesses. The section on Electoral Politics in Chapter 6 looks critically at the ways in which the communist parties should chart their path independently without losing sight of the class character of the parties with whom they enter into electoral alliances sometimes. What emanates from her writings is her rm belief that there can be no alternative other than the Left.
DISARMING HONESTY
M Y THI L Y S I V A R A MA N visiting Keezhvenmani (now in Nagapattinam district) in 1969, where 44 Dalits had been burnt alive by a landlord a week earlier.
down the line, the demands continue to be the same though now couched in the sophistry of rights and entitlements and espoused by several non-governmental organisations. The basic demand and ght for fair and just wages continues and has been left to the communists. In Workers and Unions, she nds that there was not much difference between the industrial policies of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Congress.
The DMK sought to use the socialist rhetoric. From the scientic socialism of 1962 the DMK had come a long way in 1971 to socialism without tears to socialism with private property intact. DMK has broken no new ground, made no major radical departure from the policy of the Congress. There are two case studies of union actionthe workers strike in Madras Rubber Factory (MRF) in 1971 and the plantation workers strike
in the Annamalais. The government attempted to break the strike at any cost. In this effort, she points out, there is not much of a difference between the DMK, the ruling party in Tamil Nadu then, and the Congress, which was in power at the Centre. The third section in this chapter is about the murderous attack on V.P. Chintan, a trade unionist and senior leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The subsequent section, All-out attack on
The articles, written mostly in the 1970s and early 1980s, remain relevant even today. Mythily Sivaraman uses self-criticism as a tool for a better understanding of the world. In the manner of a true communist, her writings reect a disarming honesty and candour. For instance, when she writes about the relevance of E.V.R. Periyar in a 1971 article in The Radical Review, she says that the Left had not understood him entirely. She is critical of the non-Brahmin movement (Justice Party) in its initial stages when it collaborated with the British. However, she says, when Periyar helped form the Madras Provincial Association, which was the nationalist counter to the Justice Party, things underwent a radical change. But he failed to see the link between the methods of production and so-
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BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
M Y THI L Y S I V A R A MA N (standing) with (from right) Vimala Ranadive, Ahilya Rangnekar, Sushila Gopalan and Papa Umanath at the 5th national conference of AIDWA held in Bangalore in 1998.
cial, cultural and political values and substituted caste for class, she writes. His direct action was more against Brahminism, not capitalism. Even as she is critical of Periyar and is conscious of the limitations in his approach as well as the many contradictions that emerged, Mythily Sivaraman feels that the communist movement did not adopt a clear policy on Periyar on the basis of study and analysis. According to her, Tamil nationalism and its understanding of the class struggle, capitalism and caste needed a closer look. In fact, writing in the 1970s, she observes how ritualism had become widespread and the DMK was able to do little about it. However, in the era of identity politics where
classes exist with the castes of the oppressed and where politics has developed around caste identity, the questions that she raises are relevant. Mythily Sivaraman argues that Marxists should have understood other phenomena such as mass culture. Had they inuenced and carried forward the linguistic and cultural aspects of Tamil culture, it would not have been the DMK that had ridden the anti-Congress wave. And Tamil nationalism would not have been reduced to rabble-rousing. She minces no words in her critique of the damage that identity politics of caste had done to the class struggle. To an extent, her critique of the inability of Marxists to occupy the space taken by the Dravi-
The articles, written mostly in the 1970s and early 1980s, remain relevant even today.
dian parties appears legitimate. However, had Marxists taken the nonBrahmin movements line, they would have succumbed to the idea of the notional emancipation symbolised by the nonBrahmin struggles early on. The fact that none of the so-called non-Brahmin caste-based parties could actually address the economic questions of inequality shows the limitations of ghting class questions through caste organisations. In another article in The Radical Review in 1970, she writes how in the absence of a commitment to the socialist ideology based on a scientic understanding of the evolution of social history and in the absence of adequate experience in working class struggles, the DMK had proved much too vulnerable to pressures from the dominant economic interests. In the section expounding the class character of the DMK, she says
that the party in its initial years may have had the character of a bourgeois democratic party but subsequently it had come to reect capitalist interests. And the recent quagmire of scams and corruption that the DMK has found itself in can perhaps be traced to its deviations since the 1970s. On reading these articles written more than three decades ago, one nds that the understanding of caste and class by contemporary analysts is pedestrian. With this understanding, the debate does not go beyond the supercial framework of dignity, a parameter the government is comfortable with because it does not ask for anything morea decent and living minimum wage, for instance. The inadequacy in understanding the class hierarchies within the oppressed castes has been the biggest failure of the Dravidian parties. It is precisely because of this failure that they have been unable to eradicate the caste scourge. Why is it that even after 45 years of the Keezhvenmani massacre caste atrocities continue in the State, which has been alternately ruled by the two major Dravidian parties? The reason lies not in the resilience of caste but in the Dravidian parties failure to take social transformative politics to the realm of economic contradictions. Mythily Sivaramans writings make it clear that there cannot be any shortcut approach to class struggle. And there is no doubt in her mind at least as to who should play the role of the vanguard in that struggle.
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A raw deal for migrants

A signicant part of economic migration is still the result of desperation rather than hard-headed economic calculation. This, in turn, affects the conditions under which workers migrate and their lives and work as well.
ERHAPS the most poignant moment in the lm Peepli Liveeven though the movie is really more about the media than about the socio-economic realities of Indiais at the very end, when the hapless protagonist, now a former farmer presumed to be dead and so without an identity, is seen as one of the many faceless workers on one of the innumerable large construction sites that clutter the urban landscape. The story leading up to that particular denouement may be concocted and exaggerated, but the background of many migrant workers in urban India is often no less dramatic, reecting not just simple differences in wage expectations but extreme exigencies of domestic circumstances and individual survival. The forces generating the movement of people for work are complex and rarely unidimensional, but it is still the case that a signicant part of economic migration is the result of desperation rather than hard-headed economic calculation. And that, in
APRIL 18, 2014
turn, affects the conditions under which workers migrate as well as their lives and their work in the destination. The signicant increase in shortterm distress migration of both men and women in the mid-2000s was,
therefore, associated with quite appalling conditions, especially for women workers, who typically faced not only low wages and dreadful living conditions but even threats to their physical security. This was somewhat ameliorated from 2006
M I GRA N T W OR KE R S take a break at a construction site in Gurgaon.

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FRONTLINE .
MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP
onwards by the spread of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), even though the rural employment programme has still not been implemented fully in either letter or spirit. Certainly, employers in the construction industry and other activities reliant on migrant labour were heard to be complaining that workers were no longer available at the real wages (often breadline and lower than subsistence) that had become the norm. In recent years, the rise of real wages and the expansion of the construction industry has led some analysts to argue that migration (even short-term migration) is no longer distress-driven but demand-led, resulting from the rapid economic growth that has led to a proliferation of non-agricultural jobs in urban and peri-urban areas. The implicit corollary is that this is associated with signicantly better conditions of migrant workers, as employers are forced by labour market pressures to offer a better deal for workers. This rather optimistic assessment can be interrogated, of course, and recently several studies have highlighted that the conditions of migrant workers, especially recent and short-term migrants, remain problematic and even pathetic. A new study of migrant workers in Gurgaon district of Haryana (Exploring rural-urban dynamics: A study of inter-State migrants in Gurgaon, Society for Labour and Development, March 2014) throws this into sharp relief.
THE GURGAON EXAMPLE
PTI
A T A P RO T ES T I N G UR G AON by workers of various auto manufacturing
units in and around Gurgaon.
Gurgaon is possibly one of the most iconic representations of the new India, combining in its shiny new exteriors and squalid byways all the possibilities, inequalities and contradictions of emerging Indias recent rapid economic growth. Unlike Faridabad, its sister satellite city in the National Capital Region, Gurgaon emergedone could even say eruptedin completely unplanned fashion, with civic authorities always several steps behind the private land developers who exploited its loca-
tional advantages. The township is now a city in its own right, with between two and three million estimated residents, even without counting the otsam and jetsam of temporary and unregistered migrants who are essential to its construction and existence. It is home to some of the important automobile manufacturers who have made this an important exporting industry; to software companies; to services both modern and traditional that cater to those employed in these companies; and of course to the land development and construction industry that made it all possible in the rst place. Many of the countrys elite now live in Gurgaon, commuting to the nations capital, in a reection of the
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fact that the power that used to radiate outwards from the central heart of New Delhi is now nding other more upstart sources. But it is still a Wild West kind of place, bubbling with energy and aggressive assertiveness, only just beginning to be moderated by some norms as settlements begin to take root. So the conditions of migrant workers in this most dynamic of urban locations must surely be at least a proximate guide to how they are faring elsewhere in the country. This recent study is fascinating because it examines migrant workers in their current location of Gurgaon as well as their earlier conditions and the lives of their families in their place of origin. It covered 200 migrant workFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
In a recent survey in Gurgaon, workers reported authoritarian practices, physical or verbal abuse and a climate of intimidation created by hired goons.
ers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, with the districts of Rural Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Nalanda, Nawada and Hazaribagh being chosen specically for their predominance as place of origin among the migrant community in Gurgaon. The surveyed workers included those in the garments and auto parts industries, in construction, in domestic work, and self-employed people in various activities. Four-fths of the interviewees were male workers, while the females were all either garment workers or domestic workers. The respondents were mainly young, nearly 90 per cent of them between 18 and 40 years old. They also dominantly came from Other Backwards Classes, with a sprinkling of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The most striking result of this survey was just how low the wages were for these migrant workers: 70 per cent of them earned between Rs.5,000 and Rs.7,000 a month, and 17 per cent more than Rs.7,000 but less than Rs.10,000. In all their cases, the monthly income of households back home was even lower, which constituted an obvious and important reason for migration. The power relations experienced by them in both work and life generally were skewed heavily against them. The migrant workers in this survey reported authoritarian management practices, frequent physical or verbal abuse and a climate of intimidation created by hired goons, and in general a sense of the work environment being both unfriendly and unhealthy. Average daily work hours ranged between eight and 12 hours without overtime, and four to six additional hours of overtime. In the auto parts and garments factories,
during periods of heavy production, overtime work was made compulsory to full the demand. Nearly three quarters of the surveyed workers worked six days a week, while onefth worked all seven days of the week. Taking more than a weeks leave from work, for whatever reason, could result in dismissal. This was particularly an issue for the women workers, who got absolutely no maternity benets. Both domestic and garments workers could not claim paid maternity leave as a right. Indeed, the women working in garments factories noted that it was uncomfortable to work in the maledominated factory oor in the last few months of pregnancy. So it was the typical practice for women workers to leave the job several months before delivery and return after childbirth to search for a fresh job. None of the respondent workers had secure contracts, and even those who had been in the city a decade or more had changed several jobs, without any provision for job loss compensation. The insecurity of tenure also affected living conditions since rented accommodation became more difficult to access and landlords typically did not agree to certify that the workers were their tenants on a regular basis. This in turn affected other quotidian aspects of urban life such as getting a gas connection, opening a bank account, and so on. One result was that most of the workers buy LPG for cooking at the market price of Rs.100 a kg, which came to Rs.1,450 a cylinder. In any case, the living quarters of the workers were generally cramped and ranged from modest to appalling. Their places of residence varied from rented room in chawls and
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multistoreyed buildings to temporary slum dwellings. The rented rooms were typically in buildings that contained anywhere between 30 and 100 rooms. Generally, a 10 x 10 square feet room was occupied by four to six workers. The investigators found that many of the rooms occupied by the migrant workers did not have proper ventilation, full-time water supply and electricity, and proper sewage and drainage systems, and several buildings did not even have all-weather accessible roads. For these rooms, rents had to be paid by the 7th or 10th of every month, with a fee penalty for late payment and likely eviction for repeated nonpayment. Inevitably, sanitation conditions were dreadful as well. In the chawls and rented buildings, toilets were shared across ve to eight rooms, with uncertain water supply. Only 2 per cent of the workers described the conditions of their toilets as good, while more than half thought they were bad or very bad. Open and overowing drains were common sights in the localities where they lived. Unhygienic conditions were likely to be associated with more frequent illnesses, especially of waterborne diseases and pollution-related chest and lung problems. Yet the workers could ill afford the luxury of falling ill because of the loss of their wage incomes and the costs associated with privatised medical care. Low wages combine with really impoverished living conditions and all for the necessity of remitting at least some money back home. If this is demand-pull migration, what on earth would the distresspush kind look like? And what sort of destitution and degradation is prevailing in rural areas and the urban hinterland to encourage movement of labour in such dreadful conditions? Reports like this one, and others that expose the real conditions of migrant workers in India, need to be focussed on much more not only by policymakers but by citizens in general. We cannot hope to build a civilised and just society on the basis of such crass exploitation.
OBITUARY
Electric man in a bulb

Khushwant Singh (1915-2014) could talk to and entertain his readers without being condescending, and there will be no one like him again.
BY AJITH PILLAI
THAT he was prolic is clearly an understatement. With close to 100 books, Khushwant Singh, who died on March 20 at the age of 99, was a phenomenon. For many, he was a curious icon who could write in a very engaging style about things serious and yet slip into inexplicable mediocrity of thought. But, like him or not, the verdict on Khushwant is that whatever he penned was entertaining and he could churn out copy like few others can. The man himself admitted that he had lost count of all that he had writtenhis weekly columns, short stories, novels, memoirs and assorted books on varied subjects, including the celebrated and scholarly two volumes on Sikh history, were too much to keep track of. Five decades of writing feverishly cannot be committed to an individuals memory. When he was asked in his later years about the secret behind his humungous and unrelenting output, Khushwant came up with this self-effacing reply so typical of him: No one has so far invented a condom for a writers pen. From what one learns from those who knew Khushwant well, he never took himself seriously and, in turn, he looked at others through the same bifocal. It did not matter who or how powerful his targets were or whether they were dead or alive. He made irreverence his trademark and his right. As a result, he stepped on many toes and often came in for severe criticism. The editor Vinod Mehta has jocularly observed in his memoir Lucknow Boy that some of Khush-
AFP
K H U S H W A NT S I N G H, a 2004 photo.
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want Singhs columns deserved to come with the statutory warning Can be dangerous. He should know. While he was editing The Sunday Observer in the 1980s, the Sardar with malice towards one and all had made some observations on the former Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee president Rajni Patel after the latters demise. Khushwant wrote about the colourful life of the Congressman with a socialist bent who loved the good things in life (including women) and recalled how one evening Patel had invited a bevy of millionaires to raise money to help the drought-stricken in Maharashtra. With Royal Salute whiskey and French champagne we discussed hunger and famine. The column angered many, including Patels rst wife Bakul, and friend and condant, the late adman and writer Frank Simoes. Simoes wrote a rejoinder in which he turned all his ire on Khushwant. To quote: If I grieved at the death of my friend Rajni Patel, I was immeasurably saddened by Kushwant Singhs degrading epiphany. From time to time, one has observed Mr Singh putting the boot into a prostrate foe. But sticking a knife into a dead body is self-inicted mutilation, the castration of the psyche, and serves no useful purpose. The Sardar bravely took the criticism on his chin and left it to his son, Rahul Singh, to rise up in defence. He said that all his father had attempted was an objective obituary of Rajni Patel. For all his claims that he was open to and unfazed by criticism, there was one attack on him that hurt him deeply. It was an objective, though imaginary, obituary of Khushwant Singh by the talented young journalist Dhiren Bhagat, which was published in The Sunday Observer on February 13, 1983, 31 years before Khushwant left his earthly abode. It is rather ironic though that the writer of the imagined obit died in November 1998 in a road accident. Khushwant Singh outlived him by 26 years, but when the piece appeared he was upset and even wrote to the editor of The Sunday Observer that he would never
ever write for any publication that he edited or was associated with. He only made his peace with Vinod Mehta much later, after he launched Outlook in the mid-1990s. What apparently upset Khushwant was the fact that people started calling up his family, offering condolences. Many failed to see that what they had read was a spoof and reckoned that it was not impossible for a man of 68 (that was Khushwants age then) to pass away a few years too soon. Given the impact it had on the man, it would be in the order of things to recall what Dhiren had written. So here goes: I was saddened to read that Khushwant Singh passed away in his sleep last week. What a quiet end for so loud a man. How the gods mock the mocking. Contradictions surrounded Khushwant at every stage of his life. He strove to give the impression that he was a drunken slob yet he was one of the most hard-working and punctual men I knew. He professed agnosticism and yet enjoyed kirtan as only few can and do. He was known nationally as a celebrated lecher but for the past thirty years at least it was a hot-water bottle that warmed his bed. He devoted his last years in the service of a woman who decisively spurned him in the end. He made a profession of living off his friends important names and yet worked single-handedly to diminish that very importance. Empty vessels make the most noise but Khushwant was always full of the Scotch he had
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cadged off others. He was a much misunderstood man. So before the limp eulogies start pouring in (how Khushwant would have hated them!) let me set the record straight. As Khushwant once said, the obituary is the best place to tell the truth, for dead men le no libel suits. (An agnostic to the end, he didnt believe in the Resurrection). Much after the storm over the obit had died down I asked Dhiren why he had written the piece. He said he did it simply because he wanted to have fun and Khushwant was a bubble waiting to be burst. I thought Khushwant being Khushwant, he would take it in the right spirit. But, of course, I was questioning his very existence which was perhaps going too far and getting too personal, I recall him saying. To be fair to Khushwant, though he raised objections on that one occasion, he was in the main not averse to criticism. In fact, he had no pompous pretensions of being an intellectual and said he simply wrote what came to his mind, which, luckily, sold well, generating more demand for outpourings from his pen. However, he also believed that churning out copy like he did was no easy task. Im a hack. I dont hold myself in any esteem. Someone once accused me of making bullshit into an art form. I told him: You try it. It isnt so easy, he said in a magazine interview. For all his efforts to downplay his intellectual capabilities and placing his Banta Singh-Santa Singh racial
Revamping The Illustrated Weekly of India was his major contribution to journalism.
jokes on the same pedestal with everything else that he wrote, there was also a scholarly side to Khushwant. His two volumes on Sikh history are a case in point. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the book was researched in Delhi, London, Canada, the United States, Japan, Burma (Myanmar) and Singapore. It took Khushwant four years to write the book, which was published in 1963 by the Princeton University Press and led to several teaching assignments abroad, including the universities of Rochester, Princeton, Hawaii and the Swarthmore College near Philadelphia. According to Khushwant Singhs son Rahul, getting teaching assignments abroad and being considered an academic was rather peculiar given that his father had not done well in either school or at university and was a rather mediocre student. He did not even have a doctorate to aunt. Teaching Indian culture and history to foreign students was a challenge in that it was difficult to keep their interest alive in subjects so alien to them. Khushwant revealed later that he managed to keep the students awake by being very simplistic and spicing up lectures with anecdotes. This he said was the same mixthe serious with the masalahe adopted when he took over as the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1969. Revamping that publication was his major contribution to journalism. Until then, the concept of a general interest magazine did not exist
in India. Most publications merely recorded social events. Khushwants weekly was markedly different and covered social changes and trends, politics, cinema and what have you. The not-to-be-missed feature of every issue was the Editors Page with the iconic illustration by Mario Miranda of a Sardar in a light bulb with Scotch and dirty pictures. The Illustrated Weeklys circulation skyrocketed from 60,000 to 4.1 lakh during Khushwant Singhs editorship. He was with the magazine for nine years before the management asked him to leave one week before his retirement. The Editors Page moved with him and when he nally joined The Hindustan Times, it metamorphosed into the column With Malice Towards One and All, which was later syndicated and became a hit nationwide. For a prolic writer like him, once you take out his short stories, there are only a handful of signicant books to speak off. The novel Train to Pakistan is the most written about and perhaps the most evocative. It deals with Partition and is based in the imaginary village of Mano Manjra on the India-Pakistan border where Muslims and Sikhs live in harmony. And then a local moneylender is murdered, shattering the peace. The crime, it is believed, was committed by the local hood Juggut Singh, who is in love with a Muslim girl. Violence spews out of control when a train with bodies of Sikhs arrives at the village. The book was later made into a lm. Some of his other writings, like the historical novel Delhi, The Company of Women and Burial at Sea, were panned by critics. In fact, in his book on his father, Rahul Singh confesses that he has not read some of the novels written by Khushwant. Delhi and The Company of Women got such scathing reviews that I decided not to read them, though I knew that Delhi was the culmination of several years of research, mainly on the history of the city. Both the books did well commercially, though Khushwant did not gloat in their success. They get panned but they sell, was his constant credo.
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Khushwants tryst with politics was a controversial one and it began while he was editing The Illustrated Weekly. When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in 1975, he was initially shocked but later he felt he had to defend her and her son Sanjay Gandhi. Given the position he took, he expected his days to be numbered at the Weekly once the Emergency was lifted and elections were announced. Rahul Singh, in the biography of his father that he wrote, alleges that it was Morarji Desai, who replaced Indira Gandhi as the Prime Minister, who insisted that Ashok Jain, chairman of the Times of India group, announce a change of guard at the Weekly. When the new government fell and Indira Gandhi returned to power, Khushwant Singh was given the Rajya Sabha ticket. He was elected to the Upper House but soon became disillusioned with politics. After Indian troops stormed the Golden Temple in 1984, he returned as a mark of protest the Padma Bhushan he was awarded in 1974. After that he devoted himself to writing, although, through his columns, he took strong positions on communal and political issues. He also stood up against the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and condemned the 2002 Gujarat riots. In the nal analysis, will there be another Khushwant Singh? One cannot see anyone on the horizon like him with such remarkable perseverance. Khushwant was a writer who could communicate with his readers without looking down on them or preaching from a pulpit. He was also someone who thought that life without a bit of fun was no life at all. Among his quotable quotes is one where he declares that every novelist puts sex in his novels. If he doesnt, he has no business writing ction and that one persons pornography turns into anothers love story. He became famous, or infamous, for the naughtiness in his writings. But do not be surprised to see his translations of Urdu and Persian poetry, or the evening and morning prayers of Sikhs sharing space on the bookshelves with his more popular work.
OBITUARY
A steadfast socialist
Tony Benn (1925-2014) was a veteran Labour politician in the U.K. who came to be regarded as an anti-establishment voice for democracy.
BY P A T R I C K W I N T O U R & R O W E N A M A S O N
TONY BENNthe lodestar for the Labour left for decades, orator, campaigner, diarist and grandfatherdied aged 88 after a long illness, his family announced. Tributes poured in for one the countrys most extraordinary and controversial MPs, who, in what he described as the blazing autumn of his career outside Westminster, came to be regarded as an anti-establishment voice for democracy. Although he said self-deprecatingly in one of his later interviews: All political careers end in failure; mine just happened to end earlier than most, many regarded his nal decades outside Westminster with greatest affection. In a statement, his children Stephen, Hilary, Melissa and Joshua said: It is with great sadness that we announce that our father Tony Benn died peacefully early this morning [on March 14] at his home in west London surrounded by his family. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all the NHS [National Health Service] staff and carers who have looked after him with such kindness in hospital and at home. We will miss above all his love which has sustained us throughout our lives. But we are comforted by the memory of his long, full and inspiring life and so proud of his devotion to helping others as he sought to change the world for the better. Born Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, he entered Parliament in 1950
T O N Y B EN N . His inuence tended to emerge through his thinking, diaries,
oratory and, latterly, appearances at literary festivals and political rallies.
as MP for Bristol South East, becoming the youngest member of the House at the age of 25. He had to leave the Commons a decade later, as the death of his father, a Labour peer, meant he inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate. However, he campaigned for a change in the law and returned to his seat three years later after renouncing the title. During his 50-year parliamen110
tary career, Benn served as Minister for Technology, Industry and Energy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He also campaigned against European Union membership and oversaw the development of the Concorde. After a successful Cabinet career under Wilson in the 1970s, he swung to the Left politically and challenged Denis Healey for the Labour deputy leadershiponly losing by the nar-
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rowest of margins after one of the key unions switched sides at the last minute. He then became instrumental in using Labour Party machinery to develop a left-wing manifesto on which Michael Foot fought the 1983 election. He was also central to the campaign to make Labour MPs more accountable to their constituencies through automatic reselection, a reform hated by many Labour MPs at the time but now regarded as wholly uncontroversial. After Foots defeat and the emergence of Neil Kinnock as party leader in 1983, the party shifted to the centre, and Benn began to lose his direct political inuence over the party. He was heavily defeated when he stood against Kinnock for the party leadership in 1988 and left Parliament in 2001, after the rst term of the Tony Blair government, to spend more time on politics. From there on his inuence tended to emerge through his thinking, diaries, oratory and latterly appearances at literary festivals and political rallies. He became known for his campaign against the invasion of Iraq, addressing the United Kingdoms biggest ever demonstration during the Stop the War rally of 2003. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said: The death of Tony Benn represents the loss of an iconic gure of our age. He will be remembered as a champion of the powerless, a great parliamentarian and a conviction politician. Tony Benn spoke his mind and spoke up for his values. Whether you agreed with him or disagreed with him, everyone knew where he stood and what he stood for. For someone of such strong views, often at odds with his party, he won respect from across the political spectrum. This was because of his unshakeable beliefs and his abiding determination that power and the powerful should be held to account. Miliband said he had done work experience with Benn at the age of 16. I may have been just a teenager but he treated me as an equal, the Labour leader said. Margaret Beckett, a contempo-
All political careers end in failure; mine just happened to end earlier than most.
rary during some of the most bitter Labour inghting in the 1980s said: He was an absolutely brilliant speaker he had such clarity of expression. She added that he was a charming, nice man. He made enemies and kept enemies but on the whole most people regarded him with a good degree of affection long before it came to the stage when it was thought he could cause no harm. He was out of step for many years with whoever was in the charge of the leadership. He wanted to make people think and that was an admirable thing. David Cameronwho once said he had been strongly inuenced by Benns book Arguments for Democracytweeted: Tony Benn was a magnicent writer, speaker and campaigner. There was never a dull moment listening to him, even if you disagreed with him. The former Labour Cabinet Minister Peter Hain said: Tony Benn was a giant of socialism who encouraged me to join Labour in 1977: wonderful inspirational speaker and person: will be deeply missed. The Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Diane Abbott, also paid tribute to Benn. Admired so many things about Benn, she said. Unwavering principles; always open to new ideas; stellar political speaker but unfailingly courteous. Shami Chakrabarti, director of the British civil liberties advocacy organisation Liberty, said: In the nal decade of an extraordinary political life, Tony Benn was a great friend of Liberty and human rights. He spoke
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to packed audiences up and down the country against internment and identity cards and for values of internationalism and humanity. And he often shared the stage with speakers of different political stripes with considerable generosity. I shall never forget his many kindnesses to me, including when he ripped up a prepared speech he was about to deliver, in order to make my own nervous and novice remarks sound slightly less unplanned. In an age of spin, he was solid, a signpost and not a weathervane. Benn was a divisive gure within the Labour Party because of his steadfast support for traditional socialism. His son Hilary, the Labour MP for Leeds Central and shadow Secretary of State for communities and local government, famously described himself as a Benn, not a Bennite. The Sun once asked whether his rebrand views made him the most dangerous man in Britain. Some old ministerial colleagues from the 1970s and 1980s privately made plain they would be making no public comment, reluctant to speak ill of the dead. But bitterness against what they still see as his destructive and dishonest conduct during the Bennite ascendancy remains toxic. His death prompted tributes from many Eurosceptic MPs who remembered his longstanding opposition to the E.U. Benn had suffered from ill health since a stroke in 2012, spending much of the subsequent year in hospital. In an interview with Daily Mirror last year, he said he was not frightened about death. I dont know why, but I just feel that at a certain moment your switch is switched off and thats it. And you cant do anything about it, he said. Benn was admitted to hospital again in September last year and had recently moved to sheltered accommodation near his Holland Park home in west London. Outside his home in his garden stands the bench on which he proposed to Caroline, the wife he was devoted to and whom he missed grievously after her death.
Guardian News & Media2014
The act of killing

Joshua Oppenheimers documentary The Act of Killing is a blistering unblinking gaze at the humungous nature of human cruelty.
MAGINE a documentary set against the backdrop of the violence unleashed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which those who killed, maimed, raped, disembowelled pregnant women and destroyed foetuses gloat about how they went about it, in gory detail; how they keep sickening score of how many each of them dealt with. In the current climate of political correctness, you are not allowed to proceed with that imagination without matching it, balancing it, with another remembrance: of the slaughter of, and equally despicable atrocities inicted on, Sikhs in 1984. So go ahead and be even-handed and imagine a parallel documentary on the perpetrators of that carnage, too, crowing about their handiwork. And, since it is only imagination, and really costs nothing, take it a step further and think of some of these people, in the process of their lending themselves to the making of the documentary, revisiting what they have done, and, unknown to them, their veneer of grisly accomplishment peeling off to reveal a throb, a twinge of self-doubt. This is very different from an institutionalised and cathartic truth
APRIL 18, 2014
and reconciliation effort where victimiser and victim come face to face and, sometimes, to terms with one another; although such an exercise may have been, in both the instances of 1984 and 2002, far more useful than the rigmarole of a commission of enquiry whose proceedings drag on and on until they are in a limbo. There was a semblance of a truth and reconciliation moment when two iconic and polar opposite images of the 2002 Gujarat riots recently came together. The tailor Qutubuddin Ansari, whose visage of victimhoodhis shirt specked with blood, his eyes brimming with tears of desperateness, his hands folded in a beseeching prayer for pity and succouris seared in the public memory, and the cobbler Ashok Mochi, whose visual as victimiserhis arms thrust aggressively in the air, an iron rod held aloft in the right hand, with a saffron band around his head, a menacing mien and a re raging in the backgroundis also etched in the popular consciousness, shared the same platform in Kannur in Kerala, made up and shook hands and declared themselves on the same side against
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Modi. The import of that meeting did not, perhaps, proceed beyond a photo-op, but it was, nevertheless, signicant. There is a potential documentary there in what took Mochi and Ansari through what they respectively did and underwent, and what now brings them together. It is in the former category of the hatchet man willingly collaborating with the documentarist and unwittingly coming face to face with his own hideousness that Joshua Oppenheimers The Act of Killing belongs. It is a throwback (only in terms of reference; there is no period recreation or footage) to Indonesia in 1965-66 when Suharto displaced Sukarno and it was open season on all communists in the population, more than 500,000 of whom (or who were assumed to be communists) were ruthlessly killed in a purge across the country. Four decades later, it does not take Oppenheimer too much effort to seek out those who did the actual killing, because they are not shying away, are not repentant or remorseful, and are in fact eager to brag about what they did. Communism and communists continue to be seen
FRONTLINE .
JOSH UA OP P E N H E I ME R with the
best documentary award for "The Act of Killing" at the BAFTA Film Awards in London on February 16.
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as pathogens that need to be kept out of the body politic of Indonesia even today. Those who persecuted and exterminated them continue to enjoy the status of folk heroes. Oppenheimer encounters 40 such eager beavers before he settles on the fortyrst, Anwar Congo, an elderly, benign-looking man, as the main character, and a handful of his contemporaries and younger cohorts as the real-life cast of his lm. Congo has the personal satisfaction of having himself killed 1,000 persons, in a variety of ways. Imagination plays a crucial role in the work, but not in sanitising or obfuscating the callous cruelty that drives its protagonists. It becomes a clever hook to draw them out in their incriminating entirety by pandering to their Hollywood xations and using role play and re-enactment as devices to get them to graphically, in eerily dead earnest, recapitulate their crimes. When we come across news, in the daily media, about the police taking an accused person who has admitted to his crime to the scene of the crime to re-enact the crime, we pass by it as a routine investigative chore which combines some logistics and some forensics to establish a foolproof case or to fully understand the modus operandi of the criminal. But when the criminal, with an air of assurance of impunity and approval for his deeds, volunteers details and takes the investigator (in this case the lm-maker and his team) through a conducted tour of the locations of his murders, recounting in chilling clinical detail how he tortured and killed, all of this as if particular to establish his stamp of ownership on what to us is repulsive violence, the sheer description of which
makes us cringe, but to him is a job well done, or should one say, well executed, we dont want to look and yet cant look away. It is not as if the lm-makers coolly homicidal subject belongs to a different moral universe. The killer is now a fond grandfather who plays with his grandchildren, was even then, when he took to and led a life of killing, full of the zest for the good life, loved Hollywood movies and Western pop, idolised John Wayne and the way he went after the Red Indians, and Elvis Presley and his musical amboyance, and Al Pacino as mobster boss, in fact initially made a living peddling movie tickets in the black, was fond of stylish hats, good clothes and cuisine and drinks and shing and the rest. It was perhaps as normative to be all this and be pathologically anti-communist at the same time in Indonesia of the mid-1960s as it was in the national mood that prompted the persecutions and prosecutions of communists or their sympathisers in the United States by the House of Representatives Committee on un-American Activities from the late 1930s. In fact, the U.S. state and Hollywood stand indicted at one remove in The Act of Killing. At one point in the lm, when the question of accountability for their crimes and the possibility of being hauled up before
the International Criminal Court at The Hague are raised, Anwar Congos friend and fellow executioner from 1965, Adi Zulkadry, counters scoffingly that it would not be in the interest of the West to do so, that after all George W. Bush too has his Guantanamo Bay and his stigmatiseand-eliminate operation against Saddam Hussein and the lives of numerous Iraqi civilians to answer for. Oppenheimer himself, who has, for over a decade, been tracking the circumstances of the massacre of the communists in Indonesia in 1965, states categorically in an interview that it was a U.S.-sponsored genocide, with the U.S. providing money, weapons and communication support to carry it out. Hollywood is as much implicated as imbricated, in terms of its formal and aesthetic structuring and the inspiration its central gure draws from its lm lore, in the work. In 1965, the Indonesian Left had led a boycott of American lms because the head of the American Motion Picture Association in Jakarta, the body responsible for importing lms from the U.S., was revealed to be a CIA operative involved in the overthrow of the Sukarno government. The languid pace of The Act of Killing is part of the lm-makers ploy and does not, in any case, detract one whit from the visceral engagement in which it holds you. There is, you know, something devastating waiting for you round the next corner, and the next. The director provides time and space for his characters to just be themselves, and introduces, every once in a while, a stretch of make-believe atmospherics for them to reconstruct their crimes as conscious and conscientious actors on camera, or driving the action themselves in their alternate role play of directors behind the camera. They are on a macabre roll. The overall effect is weird and surreal and more truthful than factual. There are in the documentary, shot over a longish span between 2005 and 2011, snippets of contemporary
ADI Z UL K A D R Y A N D A N W A R C O N GO (right), two of the subjects featured in The Act of Killing, being made up before recreating one of the 1965 massacres in Medan, Indonesia.
life and political practice in Indonesia which come across as anachronistic enough to make us wonder whether we are talking about this day and age, and indicate a virulently unrelenting mindset against the Left, which has, since it was literally wiped out in the mid-1960s, struggled to cling on in the margins. Oppenheimer, in a television interview, describes his own impression of this strange political psychosis akin to wandering into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust with the Nazis still in power there. We see the incestuous, bloodstained relationship between people like Anwar Congo and the leaders and cadres of the Pancasila Youth, a notorious banding of rogues and thugs who did Suhartos dirty job for him of snuffing out the communist resistance and physically eliminating anyone suspected to be a communist. We see the new generation of the Pancasila brigade, now supposedly three-million-strong, whipping
themselves up into a frenzy of hatred for anything liberal, their leader taunting detractors, saying, They say Pancasila Youth is a gangster organisation. If we are gangsters I am the biggest gangster of all. He then proceeds to the golf course where between hitting the ball he laments that we have too much democracy. Its chaos things were better under military dictatorship. The rather stupid epicurean motto he lives by is Relax and Rolex. We see, even more disturbingly, Anwar Congo viewing his shot footage on a television screen and rather irritated with himself for wearing the wrong kind of clotheshe always wore, he reminisced, dark colours when he was engaged in his killing, nothing like the white trousers in which he was now canned recreating itand for laughing out of place and not giving the scene the criminal gravitas it called for. We see him demonstrate with verve and fun how he and his accomplices would be
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seated on a table, their legs dangling, all of them gaily singing together, Hello Bandung, city of good times city of happy memories the enemys burned you down, now lets win you back, while one leg of the table was all along placed on the throat of their victim lying facing upward on the oor, crushing his windpipe. We see him almost become his old agile self as he shows, with nimble dance steps thrown in, and on the same rooftop terrace of the building that he did it days on end, the bloodless (theres no need to clear the bloody mess after, you see) and labour-saving ( you only need one man to do the job) advantage of garrotting victims using a long length of cable: tie one end of the cable rmly to a pipe or pillar, pass it a short stretch later around the victims neck, and pull at the other end until his life is wrung out. We see too his younger cronies extorting money, with threats and insults, from the shopkeepers in the ethnic Chinese quarter of the town. The mix of long suffering and fear on their faces, as they hasten to pay this ragtag bunch of bullies its demanded price to leave them alone, is poignant. The legacy of evil that seems to sit lightly on Anwar Congo as he goes about his daily chores with jaunty steps and a tune on his lips has, however, begun to eat into him in the process of the making of the lm. When we have almost given him up as irredeemably damned, he begins to crack under the weight of his crimes. The Act of Killing is a blistering unblinking gaze at the humungous nature of human cruelty. What is really frightening is that it can all be recalled and recounted, by those who have revelled in it, so normally, like a quotidian narrative. The lm was nominated in the documentary category at the recent 86th Academy Awards, but lost to Twenty Feet from Stardom. Just as well, because Hollywood was an ineluctable part of Anwar Congos curious mental make-up. The lm somehow seems better off without an award from the same source that was part of its problem.
ANONYMOUS/FINAL CUT FOR REAL/AFP
TRIBUTE
Inimitable purist
R.K. Srikantan (1920-2014) was a follower of the chaste Carnatic vocal tradition and never hankered after recognitions. B Y R A N J A N I G O V I N D
EVEN at 94, the Carnatic vocalist R.K. Srikantan had a packed schedule. He travelled to perform at nearly 70 music events in 2013 and that made him the only nonagenarian performing musician in the country. He was a follower of the chaste Carnatic paddhati or tradition, was blessed with a voice with a resonant timbre, and had good control over it until his end came on February 17 in Bangalore. Thatha, how are you feeling, is your voice okay? his grandson Achintya had enquired a day before Srikantans death in hospital. I feel physically weak, but my voice has all the strength, shall I sing? Srikantan replied. The next six minutes was a beautiful build-up of Begada, recollects Achintya about his grandfathers voice booming from his hospital bed. Breathing exercises and meditation were part of his voice maintenance routine for several decades. A voracious reader, Srikantan constantly updated his vidwat (knowledge) and used them in every way for his musical interactions, but it was time-honoured music formats that he religiously stuck to. The conviction with which Srikantan journeyed through his beliefs, the simplicity of life that he vouched for, and the exacting ways in which he taught his 500-odd students for nearly ve decades were features that reected the scrupulously principled mans towering personality. No wonder the ace mridangist Umayalapuram Sivaraman often music, as Naada Soukhya (melodic bliss) is all I yearn for till my end, he said. Be it my students or my guests, it is this cosy room that hosted them all along. This modest lifestyle is what I relish. But when it comes to food, I am like a king, hot rasam and badam halwa being my good voice companions! His younger son Kumar said his resolve and willpower was iron-like, and that nothing would disturb his focus. Another appreciable quality was his sincerity to his commitments. My father, who had a hip fracture in 1995 at the age of 75, never even entertained thoughts of cancelling his Ramanavami season concerts that year. He literally hopped onto platforms with support and presented nearly a dozen concerts seated on a chair! he said. Ramakanth, his eldest son and a vocalist who accompanied Srikantan for two decades, said, Even 10 days before his death, when cough and cold were bothering him, we had asked him to cancel a temple concert in the city. But he rmly retorted, In case you dont want to come, I can go ahead and keep up my word to Lord Anjaneya! Srikantan hails from a family of rened and cultured Vedic scholars and musicians from Rudrapatna, who savoured the revered Cauvery water and chose to stay away from the comforts of the royal patronage in Mysore, said Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer when he arrived for Srikantans 75th birthday celebration. Hailing the purity of the music Srikantan was taking forward, SemFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
R. K . S RI K A N TAN addressing a
seminar on performing arts in Bangalore in August 2011.
commented, Srikantan is the Semmangudi Iyer of Karnataka. When this writer, who was working on his biography Voice of a Generation, released in January 2014, visited him a few months ago, thousands of books on music, literature and poetry, and a host of notepads with notes, notations and songs sat in all corners of his 10x10 room at his residence. With several award certificates and citations hanging on the wall, his satisfaction seemed immense, his contentment evident in the way he reminisced about his musical life, sitting in his rosewood chair. This chair is like a throne to me, I feel as if I am in a palace of
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V. SREENIVASA MURTHY
mangudi said: A huge lifetime investment that Srikantan made was in reserving time every day for developing his students musical skills. Call it the best and prudent outlay of his musical life.
SANKETI HERITAGE
Rudrapatnam Krishna Sastry Srikantan was born on January 14, 1920, at Rudrapatna village in Hassan district of Karnataka. He went to Mysore when music and other cultural activities received the patronage of the Wadiyar rulers. He belonged to the Sanketi community, a small sub-sect of the Siva worshippers in Karnataka who are said to have migrated from Shencottai in southern Tamil Nadu nearly a thousand years ago. They are found mostly in the Old Mysore area of the State (especially in the neighbourhood of the Cauvery and Tunga rivers) which was noted for agriculture, study of the Vedas, and classical music. They speak a dialect that has words and grammatical structures freely borrowed from Kannada, Malayalam and Tulu, besides some original Tamil elements. Srikantans father, Krishna Sastry, was a Sanskrit and Veda scholar, while his three elder brothersR.K. Venkatrama Sastry, R.K. Narayanaswamy and R.K. Ramanathanwere performers during their times. His father and brother Venkatrama Sastry were Srikantans initial tutors. He went on to gather the ner nuances of rendering vocal after imbibing the best from several yesteryear stalwarts of the genre (Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Musiri Subramania Iyer and Semmangudi), which gradually evolved into a signature Srikantan baani, acknowledged by the then music stalwarts in All India Radio (AIR) where Srikantan had joined as a staff artist in 1947. Having gathered the best of the mores from musical geniuses of the era and in a climate that got him further acclimatised to the genre by visiting musicians at AIR, Srikantan gave on air music classes called Gaanavihara, which over the years earned him scores of indirect disciples throughout south India in the
1970s. He even scored melody to hundreds of Dasa Sahityakirtanas of the Haridasas of Karnatakain the authentic Bathis raga musical scales which were originally propagated by the 13th century Dasas themselves. He set to tune verses of Karnataka litterateurs and poets; his workshops and lecture demonstrations on the Trinity and other academic aspects were judged veritable textbooks for students and connoisseurs. Said Ramakanth: In 1949, the renowned Kannada poet Pu.Ti. Narasimhachar agreed to the melodic rendering of his poems on AIR Mysore only because it was to be sung by the inimitable purist Srikantan. The same conformist could get away from the shackles of orthodoxy and perform at the open-air Orion Mall, declares his student Mahendran Unni. He practised simplicity, but mediocrity in rendition never appealed to him. Once during my swara rendition he intervened to demonstrate how sarvalaghu patterns were brought about pleasingly than korvais that fastened artists to technical eccentricities. A surprised Unni had then asked him: You need no practice, sir? Srikantan was forthright: Music requires lifelong practice! T.S. Sathyavathi, Sanskrit scholar and a student of Srikantan, said: My gurus sangeeta was a mirror of his wholesome personality. His Mysore shastreeyate brought in him an impeccable diction, while his assiduously nurtured manodharma made him conform to a madhya vilamba pace in his rendering, a facet of his rened melodic standing. The umpteen raga deliberations from us will never match a single sangati of our maestro who pithily sketched the absolute essence of the raga bhava. He revelled in succinct phraseology that conveyed the best in the opening expressions itself. His voice had an emotive calling to it, a dard that his dwani conveyed, so intense with bhava rasa. I can trace these features to his saatvika aahaara and his calm mental disposition for ever exploring divinity. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K. Radhak116
rishnan, a student of Srikantan for 35 years, says, The best way to remember R.K. Srikantans teachings would be to have his lessons aired by Akashvani [AIR] as a series on connoisseurs. In this post-Srikantan phase we need to resurrect the treasure trove of the AIR archives where RKS Gaanavihara, Geetharadhana or Sangeetha Samrajya will prove to be a fund of knowledge-gathering music sessions. It is essential that his meaningful school of music is carried forward through his large set of students to help future generations be aware of the great master. RKS performances matched his teaching capabilities, and senior musicians such as Ramakanth, M.S. Sheela and T.S. Sathyavathi, who were his shishyas, stand testimony to this. But was he ever rewarded in his lifetime for all the treasures he created for posterity? Says Chiranjiv Singh, former Additional Chief Secretary to the Karnataka government and an acionado of the classical genres: Srikantan was far above all awards, they didnt mean anything to him. Who remembers all awardees anyway? Did Bade Ghulam Ali Khan or Ustad Amir Khan get Padma awards? Their music is still immortal. I have seen people run after awards, but the modest Srikantan never ever entered the portals of the Vidhana Soudha [State Assembly] soliciting such recognitions. I met him only at music platforms! He belongs to the league of Girija Devi, Mallikarjun Mansur, Kishori Amonkar and Gangubai Hangal, for whom music was a lifelong tapasya. Incidentally, it was on Chiranjiv Singhs official insistence that Srikantan got the Padma Bhushan in 2011. Singh says, I would have been happier if he had received the Padma Vibhushan. RKS was so evolved, says Singh, that after a point everyone knew he was singing only for the divine. Be it the kritis of the Trinity or the Devaranama, he internalised them to convey the inherent bhava. And whenever I heard a Tyagaraja kriti, rendered so poignantly by him, I always thought even Tyagaraja must have sung it that way.
ESSAY
INDIA-CHINA WAR: THE TRUE STORY

Now that the Henderson Brooks report is out in the public domain, are we at least now prepared to accept the historical truths, swallow false pride, alert the nation to the truths and make an earnest, determined bid for a solution to the boundary dispute with China? BY A . G . N O O R A N I
F Maxwell were to put the report online, no red faces will be noticed in South Block. They will be covered with egg. I take no credit at all for this prediction (Publish the 1962 War Report now; The Hindu, July 2, 2012). For the last two decades I have been pleading for its publication (Looking back: A case for publishing the Henderson Brooks report; Frontline; April 10, 1992). I cited evidence to prove that Australian journalist Neville Maxwell had a copy of the report, a fact which I learnt as far back in 1970 from the proofs of his article in The China Quarterly (London). I pointed out also that his book Indias China War, published by Jaico (Bombay) in 1970, was very much based on that report, which was prepared by a two-member internal inquiry team comprising Lieutenant General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier Prem Singh Bhagat of the Indian Army. The Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) Wajahat Habibullah, who on March 19, 2009, rejected Kuldip Nayars application to make available a copy of the report, had egg on his face when the report was put online on March 17. Unlike him, his colleague, Information Commissioner M.L. Sharma, did not give press interviews or appear on the TV to justify the report on spurious grounds. Even more shameless was the reaction of the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) spokespersons. Never short of
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D E C E M B E R 6, 1962: Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru and Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan talking to jawans in one of the bunkers in the forward areas in NEFA. venom, they picked on Jawaharlal Nehru as the target of their fusillades. In this, they are being dishonest, characteristically so (see box). Predictably, Maxwell came in for abuse because he is uncritically and stridently pro-China, whether on the Sino-Soviet boundary dispute or on Hong Kong. We are in for a repeat performance of this pantomime when Maxwell fulls his promise: A second edition of which [his book] will appear shortly (Economic & Political Weekly; December 22, 2012). He had earlier, in the same journal, revealed his possession of a copy of the report: The Henderson Brooks Report is long (its main section, excluding recommendations and many annexures, covers nearly 200 foolscap pages) (EPW; April
PHOTOGRAPHS: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
14, 2001; emphasis added throughout). Thanks to Habibullahs disgraceful order, the public is deprived of a vital part of the reportthe recommendations, besides, of course, the telltale annexures. No prizes for guessing the identity of the source who revealed to the media that the annexures contain Lieutenant-General B.M. Kauls letters with juicy details. In 1962, Kaul was Chief of the General Staff under General P.N. Thapar, Chief of Army Staff. Kauls Deputy was Major-General J.S. Dhillon. Brigadier D.K. Palit was Director of Military Operations. The Eastern Command, based in Lucknow, was headed by its GOC-in-C, Lt.-Gen. L.P. Sen, ever at loggerheads with Lt.-Gen. Umrao Singh, who led the XXXIII Corps based in Shillong. Lower down came 4 Division, based in Tezpur, commanded by Major-General Niranjan Prasad with its two Infantry brigades. 7 Brigade was commanded by the famous BriFRONTLINE . APRIL 18, 2014
AP R I L 19, 1960: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru greeting Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai upon his arrival in New Delhi. Zhous visit afforded the Jana Sangh an opportunity to address a memorandum to Nehru on China's supposed evil designs on India.
gadier John Dalvi, author of Himalayan Blunder. Reading the 190 pages of the report, one admires, and feels grateful to, Neville Maxwell for providing in 1970, in elegant prose, an extremely lucid and readable survey of the report. This document is itself ably written and free from jargon. Predictably, the issues it raises are overlooked in the partisan noises as well as the disingenuous efforts by some to belittle the document.
HONEST APPRAISAL
But the report brooks no underestimation. It is an honest
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appraisal, in restrained language, which is amply documented in the record. It squarely raises four issues: (1) Its origin. Why was the inquiry set up? (2) The course of the inquiry and the hurdles put in its way; (3) The bogey of violating the terms of reference; and (4) What does the report actually say? There are, however, issues beyond and outside the report which the BJP dare not reckon with because, along with others, it was complicit in the folly of spurning a compromise and seeking a military solution to a boundary dispute. We must also consider the implications of the CICs order in the light of the law, international practice and the many contradictory and self-serving explanations to the media by its chief, Wajahat Habibullah. It is as unprecedented as it is highly improper. Lastly, it is imperative that we reect on the fundamental issueare we at all prepared even now to accept the historical truths, swallow false pride, alert the nation to the truths and make an earnest, determined bid for a solution to the boundary dispute with China? All comments have centred on the military aspectthe Forward Policyto the neglect of this basic question which persists still. True, it was an internal army inquiry, but one instituted to allay public disquiet and in fullment of Prime Minister Nehrus promise to Parliament on November 9, 1962. I hope there will be an inquiry so as to nd out what mistakes or errors were committed and who was responsible for them. Informing Parliament of the conclusion of the probe, Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan acknowledged on September 2, 1963, that this inquiry is the type of inquiry which the Prime Minister had in mind when he promised such an inquiry to the House in November 1962. But publication of this report which contains information about the strength and deployment of our forces and their locations would be of invaluable use to our enemies. Even Chavan did not suggest that publication would undermine Indias case on the boundary dispute or affect its relations with China as Habibullah said nearly 50 years later.
HAMPERING THE PROBE
The probe was hampered from the word go by none other than the main culprit, Kauls condant, the wily D.K. Palit (see his book War in the Himalaya, Lancer International, 1991; pages 388-392). He refused to hand over the documents, telling Henderson Brooks, falsely, that following the Army Chief Gen. J.N. Chaudhuris orders he had not kept a copy of my review in the Directorate (page 389). But earlier (page 376) he records how he gave the Chief two copies of my Summary of Events and Policies and told him deantly that I intend to keep a personal copy too when the Chief said I dont want any record of this kept in your office. He also refused to hand over the papers to Lt.-Gen. Prem Bhagat, Henderson Brooks colleague in the probe. I was not authorised to hand over government les, records or notes and the Army Chief had no authority either. Only the PM or the Defence Minister can authorise the documents in question to be released to a non-ministerial
committer of inquiry (page 389). This was sheer nonsense. The Chief and the man he had asked to inquire had that authority. It is a pity that Brooks and Bhagat did not seek an explicit mandate from the Defence Minister after this stone-walling. It is a pity, no less, that they did not ask Kaul and Dalvi to give evidence nor (to the best of my knowledge) my [Dalvis] repatriated Commanding Officers. R.D. Pradhan, Private Secretary to Chavan, records Chavans decision. The inquiry would be ordered by the COAS on the basis of a directive from the Defence Minister himself. The COAS nominated Lt. Gen. Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P.S. Bhagat V.C. to undertake the probe (Debacle to Revival; Orient Longman, 1998; page 138). The Cabinet Secretary, S.S. Khera, who was also the principal Defence Secretary, was asked to prepare a statement on the report for Chavan to read in Parliament (page 143). The job was actually done by one of the ablest civil servants we have known who, sadly, died prematurely, Deputy Secretary Susheetal Banerjee. It was revised by Pradhan. The report, including the appendices, ran into seven bound volumes. It was in two sets and was not available to the Defence Ministry or Army HQs for several years (page 175). Maxwell, Pradhan claims, could not have seen the report. Pradhans book was published in 1999. Maxwells access to the report was known by 1970. Small wonder that the report repeatedly refers to inadequate information and lack of access to Army Head Quarters documents. Minutes of important meetings were not kept on Defence Minister V.K. Krishna Menons orders, the report repeatedly complains. There was no telephonic log, either. To be sure, Brooks and Bhagat crossed their remit in some respects, but, inevitably so. The Army Chief instituted an Operation Review on December 14, 1962, to go into the armys reverses and what went wrong with training, equipment, system of command, physical tness of the troops, and capacity of commanders at all levels to inuence the men under the command. That capacity, surely, depends on their ability to inspire respect and condence. Now, read at page 74 of the report. In any case, the General Staff, sitting in Delhi, ordering an action against a position 1000 yards northeast of Dhola Postto say the leastis astounding. The country was not known, the enemy situation vague, and for all that there may have been a ravine in between, but yet the order was given. This order could go down in the annals of history as being as incredulous as the order for The Charge of the Light Brigade. That no action was taken on this signal is natural, but it was orders such as these that could well shake eld commanders condence in their higher commanders and the General Staff. This was a reference to a signal of September 15, 1962, ordering capture of Chinas post 1,000 yards North East of Dhola post. Could this have inspired condence among the ranks? Was this then not a valid part of the remit? The quality of intelligence is also a relevant factor. The report can hardly be faulted for scrutinising the intelligence set-up. It also mentions the irritation and
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Menon, published a map to depict Indias gains. The Western Command, headed by the formidable Lt.-Gen. Daulat Singh, protested against the Forward Policy on August 17, 1962. (Like all other documents it gures in full in an appendix). He wrote: It is imperative that political direction is based on military means. If the two are not coordinated there is a danger of creating a situation where we may lose both in the material and moral sense much more than we already have. Thus there is no short cut to military preparedness to enable us to pursue objectively our present policy aimed at refuting the illegal Chinese claim over our territory. Kaul like, Mullik, Director of Intelligence Bureau, and above all the Prime Minister, were all convinced that China would not react. Foreign Secretary M.J. Desai heartily concurred. Kauls deputy, Major-Gen. Dhillon, told Lt.-Gen. L.P. Sen in September 1962 that the experience in Ladakh had shown that a few rounds red at the Chinese would cause them to run away.
WHY THE FORWARD POLICY AT ALL?
tory. This defensive step on our part at best might irritate the Chinese but no more. This was how, I think, this new policy on our borders was evolved which was referred to by some as forward policy. By the end of the year (1961), we had established over fty such posts in Ladakh and NEFA (North-East Frontier Agency] and hence our occupational rights in some 2000 square miles of Indian territory. These posts were set up, not for the purpose of administration, as there was no population there, but to ensure that the Chinese did not repeat the Aksai Chin story in NEFA or even in Ladakh. I think Nehru framed this policy principally for the benet of the Parliament and the public and also perhaps as a strategy of beating the Chinese at their own game. (B.M. Kaul; The Untold Story; Allied; 1967; pages 279-281). The Chinese were expected to sit back and watch.
NEHRUS REFUSAL TO NEGOTIATE
One must pause here and ask why such a policy was conceived at all in the rst place, quite irrespective of how it was executed. What was the motive? Kaul reveals, Nehru was aware of the mounting criticism of the people on this subject but also knew the handicaps from which our Armed Forces were suffering. He was therefore anxious to devise some via media and take action, short of war, in order to appease the people. Nehru accordingly had a meeting in his room somewhere in the autumn of 1961 in which Krishna Menon, General Thapar and I were present. He rst saw on a military map all the recent incursions China BR IG AD I E R PR E M S I N GH had made against us. BH A G A T . He was Brooks He said that whoever colleague in the inquiry. succeeded in establishing (even a symbolic) post, would establish a claim to that territory, as possession was nine-tenths of law. If the Chinese could set up posts, why couldnt we? A discussion then followed, the upshot of which I understood to be that (since China was unlikely to wage war with India), there was no reason why we should not play a game of chess and a battle of wits with them, so far as the question of establishing posts was concerned. If they advanced in one place, we should advance in another. In other words, keep up with them, as far as possible, and maintain a few of our symbolic postswhere we couldon what we were convinced was our terri-
However, there was more to it than this. Even before Zhou En-lais arrival in New Delhi in April 1960, Nehru had said that there was no common ground between the two sides. He rejected Zhous offer which included acceptance of the McMahon Line. He told the Rajya Sabha on February 20, 1961, The question will only be settled when they leave this territory. Indias case was almost foolproof. Nehru had painted India into a corner by his adamant refusal to negotiate; his unilateral changes to the official map in 1954; and, what is little realised, unilateral changes to the alignment of the McMahon Line. It is a border which is not described in the agreement in words (The Indo-Tibetan Exchange of Notes on March 24, 1914). It is simply delineated on a map attached to the Notes; a line drawn with a thick nib dipped in red on a map (8 miles to the inch) which suffers from the cartographic inrmities of a map of 1914. We have aerial cartography now. Here again, Nehru arrogantly did the incredible and the illegal, if not indefensibly immoral. On September 12, 1959, Nehru candidly told Parliament that, in some parts, the McMahon Line was not considered a good line and it was varied afterwards by us. On June 4, 1962, the Dhola Post was set up within that altered line but beyond the map linean area of 60 square miles. On September 8, Chinese troops took up positions dominating it. Responding to public anger, Nehru ordered their eviction. Taxed for laxity in Ladakh, Nehru had always pleaded, We attached more importance to it (NEFA). Now, the McMahon Line itself was in peril, as he wrongly imagined. Fed on the official myth, so did the nation, and so it does even now. The BJP will not accept that nor will the other opposition parties. But as far back as in September 1959 China had demurred to the Indian claim on the precise alignment of the McMahon Line, as distinct from its legality. This was made all too clear on a map published by Peking Review on September 15, 1959. It was not banned then. The most important part of the report is the section dealing with this venture. DHOLA Post was established
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NOVEMB E R 14, 1962 : A rally in Bangalore in support of the military action. The nation, fed on myths, believed that the McMahon Line was under threat.
NORTH of the McMahon Line as shown on maps prior to October/November 1962 edition. It is believed the old edition was given to the Chinese by our External Affairs Ministry to indicate the McMahon Line. It is also learnt that we tried to clarify the error [sic] in our maps, but the Chinese did not accept our contention. The General Staff must have been well aware of this; and it was their duty to have warned lower formations regarding the dispute. This was not done, and the seriousness of the establishment of the DHOLA Post was not fully known to lower formations. The post was set up on June 4, 1962. In 1954 Nehru had ordered revision of the 1950 map to depict the Aksai Chin as Indian Territory and demanded that China accept the 1954 map. He repeated this on the McMahon Line as well. At a meeting on September 12, 1962, the Army Commander (East) Lt.-Gen. L.P. Sen said that there was some doubt in the minds of Officers regarding the alignment of the McMahon Line west of Khinzemane. The doubt was shared by none other than the Commander of the 4 Division in the affected sector, Maj. Gen. Niranjan Prasad based at Tezpur, as Palit mentions: westward from the Khinzemane, the Line was marked as lying well
to the South of the main Thag-la ridge (Palit; page 188). Dalvi reminded the Army Commander Lt.-Gen. L.P. Sen that we had all along been apprehensive of establishing a post in an area which the Chinese do not concede to be ours (page 170). He calls it a disputed area and the post a potentially explosive commitment (page 134). Prof. H.K. Barpurjari is a historian of international repute who specialised in the history of Assam. He noted that in NEFA the Assam Ries pushed up and occupied several new positions; some of these, particularly Dhola or Che Dong, South of the Tag La ridge was located a few miles North of the (McMahon) Line. (Problem of the Hill Tribes: North-East Frontier 1873-1962; Spectrum Publications, Gauhati; 1981; Vol. III; p.318).
DOUBTS ON ALIGNMENT
The report says: It is clear in the planning stage and after the establishment of the DHOLA Post that XXXIII Corps and formations under it were working under the impression that the McMahon Line as such was as given in the map then available to them. XXXIII Corps letter of 24 February 1962 (Annexure 37) recommending the establishment of posts specically mentioned the establishment of a post at the old version of the TRI JUNCTION (Sketch H). Later, in their letter of 15 August 1962 (Annexure 42), after the DHOLA Post was established, XXXIII Corps brought out the doubt and asked
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NOVEMB E R 27, 1962 : Tibetan refugees haul long sticks of wood along a mountain road in NEFA to help Indian troops.
for clarication as also the fact if Posts could be established on the THAGLA Ridge. No clarication of the alignment nor decision for establishing posts was given till this conference. Had this been done earlier perhaps we might have forestalled the Chinese. The Foreign Secretarys suggestion of establishing a post on THAGLA Ridge alongside the Chinese, viewed against the happenings in LADAKH, seems incredible. The report sets out the deliberations on the schedule for Chinas eviction. Kaul leaked to Prem Bhatia his eviction plans which he reported in The Times of India on September 27, 1962. On October 4, Kaul was made head of a new IV Corps. Nehru and the nation entire were bent on staking the countrys prestige on this disputed piece of land and on territory in dispute all through the 19th century, as the British consistently acceptedthe Aksai Chin.
CHINAS POSITION
the Line runs from here eastward, and that the Kechilang River and the Che Dong area are north of the Line. But the Indian side insists that the western extremity of this Line is at 27 degree 48N, 91 degree 40E. In this way the Line is pushed north of the Kechilang River. This is arbitrarily shifting the position of the so-called McMahon Line. The Indian troops intrusion into the Kechilang River and the Che Dong area on this pretext was all the more a deliberate violation of the line of actual control between the two sides and a provocation of armed conict.
THE LOCATION OF DHOLA
Annexed to the famous Premier Zhou En-lais letter to the Leaders of Asian and African countries on the SinoIndian Question, dated November 15, 1962, were a set of six tell-all maps including the Indian Surveyor Generals map of 1950 and Nehrus altered one of 1954 as well as the map annexed to the India-Tibet exchange of Notes on March 24, 1914 (in 2 sheets) and an enlargement to show Indian posts beyond the McMahon Line. The legend read thus: This is an enlargement of that part of the original map of the illegal McMahon Line showing the western end of the Line. It can be seen that the western extremity of the Line is at 27 degree 44.6N, 91 degree 39.7E, that
All this was known to anyone who cared to read the maps which New Delhi wisely kept under wraps. In 1962, The Indian Express, which had its main editorial set-up at Sassoon Docks in Bombay under the editorship of Frank Moraes, had on its staff an English journalist Stephen Hugh-Jones who wrote also for The Manchester Guardian and The Economist, which he joined in 1964. After his recent retirement he contributes now an erudite column to The Telegraph on the quirks of the English language. I began writing a column in The Indian Express in April 1961 and stopped writing for it in 1992. Stephen and I became, and remain, good friends. Imagine my surprise when in September 1962, shortly after the Dhola post incident, he showed me a map he had bought in London, which unlike Indian maps, showed the coordinates in detail and revealed that the Dhola Post was to the north of the McMahon Line. Stephen denounced China when it launched its armed attacks on October 20, 1962. The
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Embassies in New Delhi were no less informed. Zhous letter had a huge impact.
CIC DECISION
A W OUN D E D VI C TI M of the war being carried to an
Indian Air Force helicopter in NEFA for evacuation to a hospital. known to the knowledgeable even in 1962, is now accepted by all except the Establishment and its stooges. It cannot possibly affect the talks. That applies also to the second groundThe detail on what precipitated the war of 1962. That is as well known and it is puerile to say that it will seriously compromise (a) security and (b) the relationship between Indian and China. China will not be offended by Indias acceptance of the well-known truth. It might be pleased. On this fatuous conclusion is built another pleathus having a bearing both on internal and external security. Even enlightened babus would know better; only Establishment babus would write thus, and they are the ones who abused the law to block the offending websites. But the Central Information Commission is a quasijudicial body set up by a statute, the Right to Information Act, 2005. The order is too clever by half. It cites a Delhi High Court ruling that access to information is the rule and its refusal an exception. Section 8(1)(a) of the Act has the usual bar on disclosure inter alia of information which affects security or relation with a foreign state. But Sub-section (2) has an overriding proviso, which says: Notwithstanding anything in the Official Secrets
This brings us to the CICs Decision Notice on March 19, 2009, on Kuldip Nayars application. It cited only three grounds for the rejection. There is no doubt that the issue of the India-China Border particularly along the North East parts of India is still a live issue with ongoing negotiations between the two countries on this matter. The disclosure of information of which the Henderson Brooks report carries considerable detail on what precipitated the war of 1962 between India and China will seriously compromise both security and the relationship between India and China, thus having a bearing both on internal and external security. We have examined the report from the point of view of severability u/s 10(10) (of the Act). For reasons that we consider unwise to discuss in this Decision Notice, this Division Bench agrees that no part of the report might at this stage be disclosed. The duo, the CIC Wajahat Habibullah and M.L. Sharma, were shorn of doubt though all the three grounds cited are manifestly spurious. It is not a live issue in the negotiations with China. The dialogue has moved far in the last half a century. The subtext of course is the Armys doubt on the Dhola Posta tacit but honest admission of the truth about it. But that truth,
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Act, 1923, or any of the exemptions permissible in ac- 1962, the deployment of our armed forces has not subcordance with sub-section (1), a public authority may stantially changed in these areas. So, declassifying will allow access to information, if public interest in dis- lead to supplying the Chinese with defence information. closure outweighs the harm to the protected interests. Moreover the report on the role of the Indian army is To be sure, this is quoted in the Decisionas a so scathing that it would have a demoralising effect on prelude to the result which makes a mockery of it. It is not the forces even now. Which is the true reason? The one open to a judge or a member of a quasi judicial tribunal to on the deployment is laughable; the other on demorgive press interviews or appear on the TV. Wajahat Habi- alisation disregards the Armys justied resentment at bullah did so with abandon. The episode serves as a the conduct of the top brass. It wanted them to be warning against planting civil servants on the CIC. censured. Let us consider at least four of Habibullahs apol3. After the publication of the report, the tune ogies. On August 25, 2010, he told a correspondent: The changed. Habibullah made two pronouncements on the report reveals the incompetence of the military top brass. very next day, March 18, now injecting a tone of regret. But that was not why we rejected the plea for its dis- He told DNA that the question still trails him as to why closure. It (CIC) felt that the report hinged on the ques- he did not agree to release the secret report. I often ask tion [sic] which are still items of negotiation between myself whether I should have allowed to release that India and China (The Times of India; August 26, 2010). Henderson Brooks report. Personally speaking, I strong1. Apart from the impropriety of the interview, un- ly believe that every Indian has the right to know what precedented in a quasi-judicial body, the rst part com- had actually happened and what went wrong during the pounds it. He abused his privileged access to the report in 1962 war. Disclosure of information, on what precipitata public capacity under a statute arrogantly to pro- ed the war of 1962 between India and China will seriously nounce in a personal capacity, in a press interview, his compromise security and the relationship between India opinion on the conduct of the army which he professes to and China, and would have a bearing on internal and love ardently. In this, he had no greater rights than any external security. citizen. But he barred access to the citizen while feeling Since I have an army background, I have a soft free himself to pronounce his opinion. The second part, corner for the army. And if the report were allowed to be items of negotiation, to use his quaint language, is, as made public, it would have certainly had an impact on the the record shows, utterly false. morale of our armymen and might have compromised on 2. On October 22, 2012, Hindustan Times published national security. In that case he ought to have recused yet another Habibullah fatwa based on his privileged himself, not hawked his soft corner to justify a wrong access to the report. It bears quotation in extenso, for it is decision. But he still harped on national security, as most revealing. India presented contradictory maps on even it is I, I and I all the time. the McMahon Line to China in the fties and in 1960-61, 4. Faced with the anchor and other participants on a which ultimately led to the war with China in 1962. This TV channel, his defence crumbled. He now pleaded that revelation was made by Wajahat Habibullah, former he grew up in a family with an army background and Chief Information Commissioner (CIC), perhaps the on- some of the senior officers he called uncle. Subtext? ly civilian besides defence secretaries to have officially Forgive me, I was moved by emotion. What was shocking accessed the top secret Henderson beyond words was this claim on the Brooks-Bhagat report. TV show in the evening of March 18: We had given maps with serithe CICs decision was based on the ous contradictions on the layout of decision of the Army headquarters. the McMahon Line to China. This If they had said so we had no obled the Chinese to believe that one of jection. This is abject abdication of a the pickets being controlled by our statutory duty. The Right to Inforforces in the Northeast was theirmation Act mandated him to decide saccording to one of the maps givas a matter of public duty whether en to them by us, said Habibullah, the Armys objections were justied declining to name the picket along or not. Instead, he based his decithe Arunachal Pradesh border with sion on that of the Army. PersonChina. Accordingly, on October 20, allybut, of coursehe was only too 1962, the Chinese army crossed over willing to oblige and was sorry for the to occupy the border picket, leading decision. to open hostilities. The report, he WARS ARE NOT FOUGHT revealed, was in 28 volumes. OVER MAPS The offence is repeated with a Countries do not go to war over dispalpably wrong appraisal of the W A J A H A T H A BI BULLAH , who, crepant maps. Every student knows cause of the conict. Stating that he as Chief Information Commissioner, when China decided to go to war and still believes the report should not be rejected an application for a copy of why. Cheng Feng and Larry M. Wortdeclassied, Habibullah said: From the Henderson Brooks report.
K. MURALI KUMAR
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FRONTLINE .
APRIL 18, 2014
Jingoismfrom Jana Sangh to BJP

BRIGADIER JOHN DALVI truthfully wrote: 1962 was a National Failure of which every Indian is guilty. It was a failure in the Higher Direction of War, a failure of the Opposition; a failure of the General Staff (myself included); it was a failure of Responsible Public Opinion and the Press. For the Government of India, it was a Himalayan Blunder at all levels. (Himalayan Blunder; 1969; page xv). It is a personal narrative of 7 Infantry Brigade. Dalvi was captured as prisoner of war. In 1958, Acharya J.B. Kripalani declaimed in the Lok Sabha: We had believed that in a non-violent India, the last thing the government would contemplate would be an increase in the military budget, but I am sorry to say, and I think it would disturb the soul of the father of the nation [Gandhi], that in recent years there has been an increase of about [Rs.1,000 million] more than in the previous year, and then in the supplementary demands there was an increase of [Rs.140 million]. May I ask why we are increasing our military establishment? (Maxwell, page 190, the Penguin edition, 1972). Yet, his Praja Socialist Party (PSP), the Swatantra Party, the Lohia Socialists, all consistently pressed for military actions against China to expel the aggressor from our territory. Leading the pack was none other than the Jana Sanghs leader in the Lok Sabha, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The BJP is the Jana Sangh itself, dissolved in 1977 and revived in 1980 under a false label. On September 12, 1959, Vajpayee tabled a motion in the Lok Sabha demanding that (a) More effective steps should be taken to meet Chinese inroads into Indian territory than hitherto adopted and to this end: (i) China be asked to vacate aggression by a particular date line, (ii) China be informed that negotiations in respect of any border adjustments can be held only subsequent to such vacation, and that too only on the basis of the McMahon Line, and (iii) Circulation of Chinese Maps which have falsely depicted parts of India as Chinese territory, and of Chinese magazines, or other literature, which have been publishing such maps, be banned in India; and (b) Immediate steps be taken to reinforce our northern defences and develop transport and communication facilities in border regions for better protection of the area. (Lok Sabha Debates, 12 September 1959, Cols. 8001-8002). In August 1960, the same stand was taken at the Jana Sanghs General Council meeting in Hyderabad when its president demanded military action by India as an imperative for our national dignity and our sovereignty. The party resented that Prime Minister Nehru had allowed a clear case of aggression to be converted into just a boundary dispute by avoiding the use of the
word aggression and by agreeing to examine at an official level the matter regarding the border. The situation today simply stated in this; China continues nonchalantly to consolidate her illegal hold on Indian Territory while India continues to look on in abject D E E N D AYAL helplessness. (Motilal A. UP AD HYAYA , Jana Jhangiani; Jana Sangh and Sangh leader. In early Swatantra; Manaktalas, 1962, he was condent Bombay, 1967, pages 66-67). that the Indian forces The Nagpur session of the would drive the Jana Sangh in January 1960 Chinese out. called for the military expulsion of the Chinese and advocated: (1) recognition of Tibetan independence; (2) the withdrawal of Indian support for Chinas admission to the United Nations; (3) a close watch on pro-Chinese elements in India; and (4) increase in Indias military capacity. While these demands have changed in detail or have been more strongly emphasised they remain the basic posture of the Jana Sanghs successor toward Communist China. The visit of Zhou En-Lai to Delhi in April 1960 gave the Jana Sangh an opportunity to address a memorandum to Nehru as to the evil designs of the Chinese on India. The Jana Sangh was against holding the Nehru-Zhou En-lai summit and demanded that no concessions be made in the talks (Craig Baxter; The Jana Sangh; University of Pennsylvania Press; 1969; page 199). Two days before his arrival in New Delhi, several thousand Jana Sangh volunteers went to Nehrus residence waving placards that proclaimed: Invaders, quit India; no surrender of Indian territory; down with Chinese Imperialism (Maxwell; page 155). Nath Pai of the PSP was not one ever to be left behind in jingoism or demagogy. May I ask one small question of the Prime Minister? If the setting up of a base on our territory by the Chinese Republic [sic], he does not think will lead to wars why should we be worried that destroying the base set up by them will lead to war? He lived to see in 1962 the sheer folly of this question which he so condently posed in the Lok Sabha on November 28, 1961. The Jana Sangh president Deen Dayal Upadhyaya saw to it that he was never left behind in this contest in jingoism. Early in 1962 he asserted boldly: Jana Sangh is condent that our armed forces are quite competent to turn the Chinese out. The government [sic] apprehension of a world war, if there happens to be an armed conict in Ladakh, is nothing but an aberration of a
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
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weak mind(Upadhyaya in S. L. Poplai (ed.); 1962 Elections, page 57). As late as on September 24, 1962, the Jana Sangh was demanding that the government issue an ultimatum to China (The Hindu; September 25, 1962). One wonders if Upadhyaya or VajpayeeL.K. Advani was a nobody thenhad the slightest knowledge of military affairs or had made the slightest effort at educating themselves in these matters. It was an utterly irresponsible behaviour inspired not by a concern for the national interest but for petty political gains. As Maxwell remarked, On the Right, the Jana Sangh probably reaped some benet from the nationalist emotions aroused by the border war, and from the sense of national humiliation, more lasting, that followed it. But the inuence of the Sino-Indian dispute on the political balance within India was far from radical, and probably it did no more than accelerate trends already in progress (page 484). Large sections of the Congress and the media were infected. Remember the National Democratic Alliance governments Defence Minister George Fernandes denunciation of China in 1998 as a main threat to India? He attacked the Nehru government for speaking the language of capitulation before China. Invited to deliver the D.R. Mankekar Memorial Lecture in August 1998, he launched into a tirade against China to the embarrassment of former Indian diplomats present there. Its upshot was his sponsoring a new edition of Mankekars The Guilty Men of 1962 (1968), which was worse than badly written. It was a shoddy piece of work. Mankekar did not disclose to the reader what he disclosed to Maxwell, who wrote in the Preface to his book: D.R. Mankekar, in his research for a history of the post-independence Indian Army, was similarly given access to unpublished les, and I am grateful to him for allowing me to quote from his original transcription of a crucial memorandum. That was Nehrus memo of July 1, 1954, ordering Indias official maps, which showed the boundary in Ladakh as undened, should be altered to show a dened boundary which was not open to discussion. Maxwell suspected Mankekar had been accorded access to the Brooks report. The latest in the series is the BJPs prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modis denunciation of China, on February 22 as an expansionist power. This was said at an election rally in Arunachal Pradesh. (It was North-East Frontier Agency in the relevant period, 1959-1962). To think that this is the man the BJP wants to send to the Annual Sessions of the United Nations General Assembly and to talk to the heads of government of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.
A.G. Noorani
zel mention in their brief study of the war that In July 1962 Chairman Mao Zedong instructed the PLA [Peoples Liberation Army] on the guiding principles to counter Indias canshi zhengce, or nibbling policy. Briey stated, Chinas anti-nibbling rules told PLA troops: Never make a concession, but try your best to avert bleeding; form a jagged, interlocking pattern to secure the border; and prepare for long-time armed co-existence. The PLA General Staff Department Headquarters told Chinese troops to implement the rules of engagement strictly, and explained the guiding principles in greater detail: If Indian troops do not open re, Chinese frontier guards should not open re. If Indian troops press on toward a Chinese sentry post from our direction, Chinese frontier guards should press on toward the Indian stronghold from another direction. If Indian troops encircle Chinese frontier guards, another Chinese force should encircle the Indian troops. If Indian troops cut off a retreat route for Chinese forces, Chinese frontier guards should cut off the Indian troops retreat. Chinese forces should keep a distance away from Indian troops, leaving them some leeway, and withdraw if Indian forces permit withdrawal. That was soon after India had planted a post at Dhola on June 4, 1962. The situation did not improve. Diplomatically there was a deadlock. On June 23, China struck a deal with the United States on Quemoy, enabling 500,000 troops to be withdrawnto be sent eastward to Tibet. Mao Zedong returned to Beijing from Beidaihe on August 6. Xu Yans book The True History of the SinoIndian Border War records that, on October 6, the border forces were ordered to hit back. On October 16, the Chinese decided to annihilate Indian troops. The orders followed the next day. On October 14, Khrushchev, had given the Chinese Ambassador his green signal for the attack. The Chinese were faced with the Forward Policy, in both sectors, east and west, revealing Nehrus decision to settle the dispute by recourse to force. In this the nation backed him; the opposition was the most vociferous on this. The enduring lessons of the Henderson Brooks report is not so much on the military aspect as on the diplomatic aspect: for, that mentality still governs Indias policy which our Defence Minister A.K. Antony so well summed up on February 23, 2014, a propos the Italian marines affairThere is no compromise.
POSTSCRIPT
Ananth Krishnan reported that in October 2012 China declassied documents on the 1962 war (The Hindu, October 20, 22, 25, 2012). On March 12, 2014, Englands Court of Appeal rejected the Prince of Wales Prince Charles claims of privacy in respect of the letters he had shot off to government departments on environment issues. In doing so, the three judges did not express any regret at their refusal to accept the plea of one who was like a nephew to them and whose mother, the Queen, they loved as much as one loves an aunt.
127
129
FRONTLINE .
APRIL 18, 2014
LETTERS
Development
of Russians in Ukraine without infringing on Ukraines national integrity so that the world can see that intervening in a nations affairs can be done without involving its populace in fratricidal warfare, something the U.S. failed to achieve in Syria, Sudan and several other nations.
MD. SHAHID ANWAR DHANBAD, JHARKHAND
RITU RAJ KONWAR
er, some of the governments other decisions such as opening up the sector to private players, outsourcing regular bank jobs, and handing over rural banking to so-called business correspondents are fraught with disastrous consequences for the industry and must be stopped.
J. ANANTHA PADMANABHAN TIRUCHI, TAMIL NADU
Syria
THE article Rebels in retreat (April 4) made one thing absolutely clear: Bashar al-Assad continuing as President of Syria is inimical to permanent peace and the crisis in the country is worsening because of his callous and brutal rule.
G. AZEEMODDIN ANANTAPUR, ANDHRA PRADESH
Death penalty
THE Supreme Courts verdict commuting the death sentences of the assassins of Rajiv Gandhi is unfortunate (Life after death, March 21). Although the reason behind it was to ensure judicious disposal of all clemency petitions in order to prevent the mental torture of convicts, it is ironic that criminals who have committed heinous offences expect humanitarian consideration from the highest judicial fora! It needs to be understood that in the instant case the death sentences were commuted primarily because of a systemic failure to dispose of mercy petitions in a time-bound manner and not because the convicts are innocent. Hence, the jubilation expressed by some people after the verdict is misplaced. These convicts are hard-core criminals who had scant regard for human life and committed a cold-blooded assassination, which truly ts into the category of the rarest of rare cases.
B. SURESH KUMAR COIMBATORE, TAMIL NADU
THE Cover Story Whose development is it anyway? (April 4) was informative and thought-provoking. States are only decentralised units of administration. How can they claim separate economic and development models? Gujarat cannot boast of its capitalism, Bihar cannot eulogise itself as a harbinger of socialism and the future Telangana cannot foresee exceptional growth. Most developmental and livelihood indicators are more or less the same in all States except for Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Alas, when all political parties are ghting elections under the banner of the neoliberal model, one really does not have any choice between political parties and is only left with the NOTA (none of the above) option.
ARAVEETI RAMA YOGAIAH HYDERABAD
Reliance
DHIRUBHAI AMBANI was a visionary, and the establishment of Reliance amidst political chaos is an indication of his clear intentions regarding its formation (Cover Story, March 21). In order to expand his empire, he dealt with political bigwigs in a manner that the situation demanded. By building Reliance, Dhirubhai took India to a new global platform, marking the culmination of an era of industrial growth and development.
SHREYA JHA PATNA
I AM really sad to say that your report on the Gujarat development model was blatantly biased. I do not have any statistics at my disposal to measure development. But the changes I have seen for myself are phenomenal. The water supply meets the requirements of most of the people. Similarly, electricity is in surplus in spite of Gujarat being a highly industrialised State; there are good roads and transportation facilities are good. Besides, millions of jobs were created to cover almost the entire population. Is this not development? The non-working class will always have complaints. They are leeches who drain the economy of all its resources.
V.R. GOPINATH KOZHIKODE, KERALA
CORRUPTION together with crony capitalism has become the major issue just before the election. Before every election, political parties raise these kinds of issues to get votes and afterwards they forget what they promised the people and tag along with the same capitalist class. And the vicious cycle of corruption continues. To eradicate corruption and crony capitalism, people must rst be made aware of their constitutional rights and ethical duties, and for this the literacy rate needs to be increased from the grass-roots level, accountability in public service has to be ensured, and the legal system has to be bolstered.
SUBHRADEEP SARKAR KOLKATA
Arun Ferreira
IT is worth protesting against the Maharashtra government and police for the injustice done to Arun Ferreira (Free at last, this fortnight, March 7). His torture by the police cannot be pardoned. Frontline through this article rightly revealed the ghastly face of the State government and police. The Rs.25 lakh lawsuit that Ferreira has led against the government is no remedy. Those responsible must be punished and sent to jail for their disregard for human rights so that no government will ever dare to arrest innocent people.
BIPINCHANDRA S. SHAH MALEGAON, MAHARASHTRA
Ukraine
FROM the article on Ukraine, one was able to discern that Russia intervened in Crimea because of geopolitics and to protect the interests of the more than a million ethnic Russians who live in Crimea (Crossing the line, April 4). Russia should nd a way to ensure the security
Banking
PUBLIC sector banks have played a stellar role in the growth of India and should be given credit for expanding their ambit to the unbanked rural areas (Backbone of the economy, March 21). The government did the right thing by allowing them to increase their branches there. Howev130
ANNOUNCEMENT Letters, whether by surface mail or e-mail, must carry the full postal address and the full name, or the name with initials.
Published on alternate Saturdays.WPP No.AP/SD-07/WPP/2014-15 & MH/MR/South-180/2012-14.Postal Regn. No.H/SD/479/14-16. RNI No.42591/84

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WILDLIFE CORBETT RESERVE

INDIA & CHINA WAR OF 1962

Delights & dangers 67

The true story 117

Standing up to the EMPIRE

APRIL 05-18, 2014

S OC I A L I S S UE S Kathputli Colony: Artists protest against demolition 93 OB I TUA R Y

APRIL 18, 2014 .

Russia had no other option

SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

quence. The G20 is denitely more important.

AT THE RED S Q UA R E in Moscow

The Great Game in Europe

Square in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, on March 12.

P R O- R US S I AN D E M ON S TR A TOR S clash with Maidan

A R U S S I A N N A V Y ship enters the harbour of Sevastopol, Crimea, on March 18.

U.S. double standards

VLA D I M I R P UTI N with Crimeas Prime Minister Sergei

P U TIN C H A I R S A M E E T I N G of his government at his residence outside Moscow on March 19.

A tale of two campaigns

insults and humiliations heaped upon a number of senior leaders.

APRIL 18, 2014

M A DH YA PR A D E S H C H I EF M I N I S T ER Shivraj Singh Chouhan (left) at a rally in Satna.

BJP all the way

APRIL 18, 2014

CHI E F M I N I S TE R B HUP I N D E R S I N G H HOOD A

Waiting for change

C HI E F M I N I S TE R Jayalalithaa speaking at an AIADMK

M DMK G E N E R A L S E C RET A RY V A I K O , DMDK president

NORTHERN TAMIL NADU

DMK and sons

C HI E F M I N I S TE R Siddaramaiah greets Nandan Nilekani

G.P. SAMPATH KUMAR

CH IE F M I N I S T E R O O M M EN C H A N D Y addressing an election rally of the UDF in Kannur on March 24.

THE HINDU ARCHIVES

Head start for the Congress

RA H U L GA N D H I , C O N GRES S VI CE - P R E S I D E N T, on the campaign trail at Nagaon in

Assam on February 26.

RITU RAJ KONWAR

RITU RAJ KONWAR

Stalwarts & surprises

RITU RAJ KONWAR

TR I P UR A CHI E F M I N I S TE R Manik Sarkar.

RITU RAJ KONWAR

C HI E F M I N I S TE R and Sikkim Democratic Front president Pawan Kumar Chamling, a le photograph.

SIKKI M K R A N T I K A R I M O RC H A chief Prem Singh Golay addressing a rally at Singtam in February.

Financial strains in the new China

CHINESE PREMIER LI KEQIANG.

T H E C H I N A M I N S HE N G BA N K in Beijing. Shanxi Haixin Iron and Steel

T H E P RO D UCTI ON LI N E at Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science and

R U B B L E O F R E S I D E N T I A L B U I LD I N GS demolished to make room for

ESAM OMRAN AL-FETORI/REUTERS

Flight into mystery

GOH SENG CHONG/BLOOMBERG

A CR E W M E M B E R of the Australian Navy ship HMAS

Success looking for debris in the southern Indian Ocean.

In Jim Corbett landscape

APRIL 18, 2014

a riverbed in the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve.

A R OBUS T T I G E R , a camera-trap image. Pressures from

A TUS KE R standing its ground.

THE HOG D E E R , an endangered species, in the tiger

CONT R O L O F T H E J A C K A L P O P U LA T I O N may revive the hog deer population.

CH A M PA , A G UJ J A R anti-poaching watcher, who survived a tiger attack.