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DELENG/2009/27862
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17 JULY 2023 / ` 80 w w w.o p e n t h e m a g a z i n e .c o m

AJIT PAWAR SHARAD PAWAR

Visit your nearest Nature’s Basket or Spencer’s store
 CONTENTS
17 JULY 2023

7 10 14 16 18

OPINION NOTEBOOK INSIDER INDRAPRASTHA OPEN ESSAY

Fixing climate justice An affirmation of merit By Virendra Kapoor The opium jihad
By Minhaz Merchant By Sudeep Paul By Iqbal Chand Malhotra

24

24 THE LONELINESS OF THE PATRIARCH 33 ‘TOTAL POLITICS’ AT PLAY

NCP’s best Lok Sabha tally was nine seats in 2004 but The splits in NCP and Shiv Sena have expanded NDA and
Sharad Pawar was still a prime ministerial candidate. That image hurt the opposition’s efforts to present a united challenge to
has been shattered by Ajit Pawar’s departure By PR Ramesh Narendra Modi in 2024 By Rajeev Deshpande

38 42 38 A VERY SPECIAL OFFICER

Is VK Pandian the second most important public figure in Odisha?
By Amita Shah

42 BLUE CHIP
With the US and China engaged in a trade war over semiconductors,
18 47 52 India is stepping up to take a slice of the global business
By Ullekh NP

47 SECOND COMING
From Louis Vuitton bags to auctioned Air Force 1 sneakers,
Indians are embracing the market for pre-owned luxury
By Lhendup G Bhutia

52 56 58 61 62 65 66

‘TO MAKE A FILM THAT NOW AND EVER SURVEYORS WITH THE GOOD FIGHT SOFT POWER STREAMING STARGAZER
RESONATES WITH PEOPLE A family in Rajasthan A SPYGLASS The trial of AI and the death SMART By Kaveree Bamzai
IS A GOOD THING’ revives a dying folk art Three collections of Julian Assange of liberal arts
Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap form by combining poetry tell of time and and its By Makarand R Paranjape
speaks on his new film, age-old techniques with transitions, ancient implications for
failures and hopes modern themes cities and kingdoms press freedom
By Kaveree Bamzai By Gustasp and Jeroo Irani By Aditya Mani Jha By Ullekh NP

Cover by Saurabh Singh

Disclaimer ‘Open Avenues’ are advertiser-driven marketing initiatives and Open assumes no responsibility for content and the consequences of using products or services advertised in the magazine

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 5


EDITOR S Prasannarajan
MANAGING EDITOR PR Ramesh
CONSULTING EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Rajeev Deshpande
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Ullekh NP
EDITOR-AT-LARGE Siddharth Singh
DEPUTY EDITORS Madhavankutty Pillai
(Mumbai Bureau Chief),
Rahul Pandita, Amita Shah,
V Shoba (Bangalore), Nandini Nair,
Sudeep Paul
ART DIRECTOR Jyoti K Singh
SENIOR EDITORS Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia
(Mumbai), Moinak Mitra
SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Antara Raghavan
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Vijay K Soni (Web)
ASSISTANT EDITOR Malika Halder
CHIEF OF GRAPHICS Saurabh Singh
SENIOR DESIGNERS Anup Banerjee,
Veer Pal Singh
PHOTO EDITOR Raul Irani
DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR Ashish Sharma
BUSINESS HEAD Arun Singh
CFO & HEAD–IT Anil Bisht
NATIONAL HEAD-ADVERTISING
Swastik Banerjee
NATIONAL HEAD–EDUCATION
Virender Singh Bhati
GENERAL MANAGER–EVENTS INITIATIVES
Ashutosh Pratap Singh
GENERAL MANAGER
Uma Srinivasan (Chennai)
Jyoti Handa (West)
NATIONAL HEAD -CIRCULATION
Dhanpreet
Amol Joshi (West & East)
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N Kishore Kumar (South)
HEAD–PRODUCTION Maneesh Tyagi
HEAD DESIGN–ADVERTISING Liju Varghese
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Volume 15 Issue 28
For the week 11-17 July, 2023
Total no of pages 68
6 17 JULY 2023
OPEN MAIL
editor@openmedianetwork.in
 LETTER OF THE WEEK
India is a land of ideas and imagination (‘The Power
of Ideas and Arguments in 50 Portraits’, July 10, 2023).
It has always been seen as an attractive partner for
its pluralistic culture, democratic institutions and
historical principles like non-violence. The global
appeal of India’s culture is displayed through its
television, cinema, cuisine, and language which create
a favourable, positive international image. India’s
political values of liberty and democracy are its greatest
assets. India as the largest functioning democracy
in the world with a free and independent media and
judiciary has earned credibility in the international
scene. The country has a rich history of innovation.
Even though India is considered a developing country, active footballers. Chhetri
one cannot overlook the advancements that it has secured two prestigious
made in technology and infrastructure. accolades at the SAFF
Thanks to industry leaders and their ideas, India is Championship. His awe-
getting a step closer to becoming a global economic inspiring performance led
powerhouse with every passing year. The efforts him to clinch the highly
of entrepreneurs, filmmakers, authors and athletes coveted Golden Boot after
are reshaping us in many ways. netting five goals through
Sandeep Shukla the tournament. He was also
honoured with the Golden
Ball. With his unwavering
DEBATING DEMOCRACY is constantly supervised passion for the sport,
Chaos affords opportunity and held accountable Chhetri has solidified his
(‘Public Square’, July 10, through public debate. Many status as an icon in Indian
2023). If chaos suggests Indians make significant football and continues to
something unpredictable, contribution in nation- inspire aspiring players.
it also connotes freedom— building. We must celebrate Angad Sabharwal
the liberty to ideate, create these men and women who
and learn. Debate and are taking India forward in GROWING WITH MODI
discussions inevitably every sector. There is only one rockstar on
generate opposing views, Amandeep Singh the horizon and his name is
which is healthy for any Narendra Modi (‘Swaying to
democracy. It creates a FOOTBALL ICON Modiplomacy’, July 3, 2023).
constructive tension out of Sunil Chhetri, the long- Even US President Joe Biden
which bold ideas can emerge. standing captain, is the face rolled out the red carpet for
Democracies all round the of football in cricket-crazy him. Modi is the greatest
world should try to turn India (‘We Must Play Teams brand ambassador India has
citizens into more active Better than Us’, by Boria ever seen. He is someone
participants by involving Majumdar, July 10, 2023). He who has pushed Brand India
them in the decision-making has served Indian football for to every nook and corner of
process. Public debate more than a decade, inspiring the world. All the people he
emerges as a significant a generation of players. The met, including Elon Musk,
tool in this process. Holding 38-year-old “goal machine”, have praised him. Modi also
public debates on issues that who led his country to managed to get the whole
concern society will also victory against Kuwait in world interested in yoga.
help create a transparent and the just concluded South After Modi’s visit to the
accountable administration. Asian Football Federation US and his brilliant speech,
The risk of power abuse will Championship, is currently India has been put on
be reduced to a minimum the third highest scorer of a pedestal.
in an administration which international goals among CK Subramaniam
 OPINION Minhaz Merchant

Fixing Climate Justice

The European Union’s new carbon levy violates every tenet of fair trade

R
ICH COUNTRIES, RESPONSIBLE for over 90 per industrialise. India’s total CO2 emissions since 1751 have
cent of today’s global warming, are seeking to penalise been under 48 billion metric tonnes.
countries that had little role in polluting the world by Having built industrialised, prosperous societies,
imposing on them what amounts to a new carbon export tax. Europe, the US, and Canada have been trying for years to
The European Union’s (EU) carbon ‘tax’ is a tool to put impose tough carbon emission norms on developing
a price on the carbon emitted while producing specific nations like China and India.
goods exported to EU. Called the Carbon Border Adjustment Climate change is a global problem. While the histori-
Mechanism (CBAM), the new EU levy violates every tenet of cal responsibility for polluting the world’s atmosphere lies
fair trade under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. It squarely with the rich world, every country needs to move
specifically violates the “common but differentiated respon- rapidly towards clean energy. Europe has set 2050 as a dead-
sibilities” over climate change agreed upon at the United line for achieving net-zero emissions. China has set 2060
Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015. for net zero, and India 2070, reflecting each geography’s
The EU’s carbon tax comes into force on October 1, 2023. varying stages of economic development.
India, along with South Africa and other developing coun- Europe, the biggest culprit of historical global warming,
tries, plans to retaliate by fixing the car- has failed to honour its commitment
bon content in EU imports and levying a to climate justice by financing the
duty based on the principle of reciproc- efforts of developing countries to move
Europe, the biggest
ity. Simultaneously, a challenge will be towards clean energy.
mounted at WTO against EU’s carbon culprit of global warming, Europe and North America’s carbon-
tax masquerading by sleight of hand as has failed to honour its spewing industrialisation for over 200
the CBAM. commitment to climate years has despoiled the world’s atmo-
According to Indian officials, “The justice by financing sphere to crisis levels. Even cutting car-
EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment efforts of developing bon emissions to recently agreed levels
Mechanism is just a customs duty by an- by all countries may not help. A recent
other name. Going by the logic behind
countries to move Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
this levy, we are also free to impose a towards clean energy Change (IPCC) report says that the
tax on imports taking into account his- Arctic is warming so rapidly that it may
toric carbon emissions by them. We are have ice-free summers by the 2030s.
working out the contours of how a carbon tax will work. According to Dick Notz, a Hamburg University oceanog-
Retaliation can be in two ways. One is to do something simi- rapher, “We basically are saying that it has become too late
lar, for which we need to measure the carbon content in im- to save the Arctic summer sea ice. There’s nothing really
ports. The second option is to retaliate on something else.” we can do about this complete loss anymore because we’ve
Europe, historically the world’s biggest polluter, is now been waiting for too long.”
the world’s fastest-warming continent, according to a new Climate justice requires the rich world to, first, hon-
report by the World Meteorological Organization and EU’s our its pledge to the Loss and Damage (L&D) fund agreed
Copernicus Climate Change Service. The report says that upon at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh in November 2022. As
temperatures have risen in Europe by 2.3 degrees Celsius the world’s chief polluters, developed countries must step
over the pre-industrial 1700s. That’s twice the global up to the plate. Targeting developing countries that missed
rate of warming. the early Industrial Revolution because they were kept in
How did this happen? Between 1751 and 2022, the world colonised penury adds insult to injury.
emitted 1.6 trillion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) EU’s new carbon export tax must go. If it doesn’t, India
into the atmosphere. Europe emitted 550 billion metric must lead developing nations in exposing the export tax
tonnes, one-third of the global total, as it industrialised. for what it is: an attempt to railroad poorer countries into
Emissions from Asia, Africa, and South America, which accepting carbon emission norms ahead of declared time-
European powers such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, lines while dishonouring the pledge on the L&D fund.
Belgium, and the Netherlands colonised, were negligible. Ensuring justice for past global warming is the key to
Colonisers ensured that those they colonised did not a cleaner and fairer future.

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 7

 OPENINGS
NOTEBOOK

An Affirmation of Merit

A
SIAN AMERICANS, ESPECIALLY of Indian The need to increase the numbers of Black and Hispanic as
and Chinese descent, do well in standardised tests, so well as Native American students on campus, thereby not only
much so that if extra-academic criteria were excluded adding to diversity but also practising social engineering to
from the parameters of admission, nearly half the en- enforce socio-economic justice, meant taking race into consid-
trants at Harvard would be Asian Americans. That isn’t a shot in eration when evaluating the test scores: Did your ethnicity—in
the dark but the content of a document from Harvard’s Office of effect, the colour of your skin—and the geography you come
Institutional Research presented to the US Supreme Court by the from play a role in how you performed? Could it mean that if
Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) led by anti-affirmative action a Black student scored the same in SAT as a white student, the
activist Edward Blum. And yet, Asian Americans have not been former would be preferred? Yes, on the assumption that the
unanimous in celebrating the end of affirmative action as per the Black student battled greater odds than the white student.
court’s ruling against Harvard and the University of North Caroli- Asian Americans, too, appeared to lose out to this reasoning
na (UNC). According to a 2022 survey by AAPI data, 69 per cent of since most of them battled far fewer odds, if any, as shown in
Asian Americans supported affirmative action. And according to their good test scores which were assumed to mean a certain, or
a still more recent Pew survey published earlier this year, support a lot, of social, economic and familial security. But did it help set
for affirmative action was at 60 per cent among Indian students the wheels of social justice rolling? Not if a poor Black student
while it was lower at 50 per cent among Koreans and 45 per cent scored one notch below a rich Black student but missed the bus
among Chinese. Why then is it axiomatically accepted that the because the admissions office only considered the fact that they
end of affirmative action on the American campus will be ‘good’ were both Black and gave the ticket to the higher scorer. Think
for Indians? Or, that it will be unequivocally bad? about reservations in India looking to improve the socio-eco-
Part of the reason behind thinking the end of affirmative ac- nomic status of the marginalised and, for a long time, the more
tion is a good thing from an Indian or Indian American perspec- affluent or better connected among them benefitting the most,
tive lies, for instance, in what a 17-year-old Indian American, re- leaving the most deprived still out of the picture.
jected recently by one Ivy League after another despite top scores The heart of the matter, as eloquently laid out by Chief Justice
and impressive extracurricular credentials, had to say. Here’s John Roberts, is: “Many universities have for too long done just
what he told the BBC: “The worry that myself and many other the opposite [of granting admission based on an individual’s
Asian Americans have is that when [the] admission officer sees qualifications, experience, etc]. And in doing so, they have
Patel, when he sees a Lee, when he sees a concluded, wrongly, that the touch-
Kim, when he sees any Asian last name, stone of an individual’s identity is not
basically the image that comes up is [a] challenges bested, skills built, or lessons
kid just sitting in his school on classes It’s not that Asian Americans learned but the color of their skin. Our
studying away math, and not doing aren’t diverse enough. Their constitutional history does not tolerate
anything that has an impact on society.” that choice.” Was it just a conservative-
It’s not that Asian Americans, among the
problem has been the truism majority court flexing its muscles in
wealthiest and best-educated generation- that they are usually better a series of judgments that began with
ally of minorities, aren’t diverse enough. than most on test scores. the undoing of Roe vs Wade last year or,
Their problem has been the truism that When merit alone does not sell indeed, as Justice Roberts said, “Elimi-
they are usually better than most on test and there are historical wrongs nating racial discrimination means
scores. When merit alone does not sell
and there are historical wrongs to right
to right in an unequal and eliminating all of it”? Nine US states had
eliminated race-based admissions in
in an unequal and reputationally dis- reputationally discriminatory state-funded institutions over the last
criminatory society, one set of minorities society, one set of minorities few decades, and in the case of Califor-
tend to lose out to another. tend to lose out to another nia, alternatives seem to have worked,

10 17 JULY 2023

as a result of which its university system has been admitting a
higher percentage of Black and Hispanic students after the state’s
ban on affirmative action in 1996 than before.
Of the two Black justices on the Supreme Court, Clarence
Thomas, a conservative and long-term opponent of affirmative
action said: “Universities’ self-proclaimed righteousness does
not afford them license to discriminate on the basis of race,”
while liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman
on the court, said, eloquently enough to rival or undo Roberts:
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls
the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.
But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
Thecourthasgivenuniversitiesleewaytofindothermeans.Since
the Civil Rights Act introduced affirmative action in the 1960s, its
constitutionality has been questioned given that race-based quo-
tas are deemed unconstitutional. Economic status, gender, even
religious belief, will be considered by universities in pursuit of
diversity and social justice. But is it anything more than an ideal?
Reality, of course, is always more complex. A 2004 study
by historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr found
that between two-thirds and half of Black students at Harvard
were immigrants or the children of immigrants. They were
not descended from American slaves. Therefore, it remained
unsettled how much, if any, of the injustice of the past was actu-
ally being redressed. Between ideal and intent on the one hand
and practice and outcome on the other falls the shadow.
To dig further is to return to the pre and immediate post-war
period when elite American universities still had unwritten
rules to limit the number of minority or immigrant entrants—
a negative quota. And the group that suffered most were Jewish
Americans, in many ways the forerunners of Asian Americans
in terms of academic merit. But Jewish Americans excelled and
left their mark on America’s socio-economic and academic
17 JULY 2023
A protest against affirmative
action outside the US Supreme
Court in Washington DC,
June 29, 2023
AP
life despite such negative discrimination. A recent essay in
Tablet magazine, titled ‘Ivy League Exodus’, argues: “The Ivy
League schools are jealously protective of their self-image as the
vanguard of the national elite—a self-appointed purpose that
was always the sole determinant of whether Jews or any other
demographic group would be admitted in large numbers. The
Ivies operate like rentier states whose legitimacy depends on
the wise dispersal of a lucrative and diminishing resource. In
Ivy League administrations, that resource is prestige.”
The Jewish case is instructive for Asian Americans not
merely because Ivies have been “swapping out wealthy Jews for
wealthy Asians”. It has been statistically demonstrated that at
every Ivy League university, except Brown, Jewish Americans
have been the biggest victims of affirmative action, and not just
because they are considered a subset of ‘white’.
Multiple, even opposing, truths clash here. Beneficiaries of
affirmative action are living examples of how the policy has
made a positive difference, and often, it was also a triumph of
merit when they ended up in the top 10 per cent of their class. If
the end of affirmative action is a victory for merit, which in turn
would be good for them, why then that high percentage of Asian
Americans supportive of affirmative action? Claims of minority
solidarity don’t wash because the SFFA is an Asian American out-
fit that took Harvard and UNC to court. Part of the answer could
lie in whether you are in America or outside, looking in. A student
from India applying to a place like the University of Pennsylvania
could benefit from the “first generation” applicant criterion if her
parents were educated outside the US. But that won’t work for
an Indian American if her parents were educated in the US. And
what works at UPenn doesn’t work elsewhere. This was never a
black-and-white case, whichever way one approached it.
By SUDEEP PAUL
www.openthemagazine.com 11
 OPENINGS
PORTRAIT AJIT AGARKAR
TEAM BUILDER
The new chief selector must guide Indian
cricket through a smooth transition phase
T HE LAST TIME the chief selector of the Indian cricket team at-
tracted intense curiosity was probably the period in 2013 when
Sandeep Patil occupied the post, and the 200th Test match of
Sachin Tendulkar was looming not too far in the distance. The ques-
tion hanging on the lip of every Indian cricket fan and jumping out
from cartoons and headlines in newspapers then wasn’t just directed at
Tendulkar—‘would he or would he not call it a day?’, but also at Patil—
‘could he or could he not force that hand?’ Whatever may have transpired
behind the scenes, Tendulkar announced his retirement, and Indian
cricket moved on.
It is a question that also invariably arises about every decade or so for
not just an individual but the team. There may be arguably no Tendulkar-
sized players now, nor anyone approaching their late 30s or their 200 Test
matches. But the superstars of the last decade are getting older, and talk of a
smooth transition plan being set is beginning. Into this interesting space,
now comes Ajit Agarkar. The former fast-medium bowler has now been
appointed as the new head of the Indian team’s selection panel.
For nearly a decade now, the grouse against the panel, and in particular the
post of the chief selector, has been how thin they have been on international
experience. MSK Prasad, Sunil Joshi, and Chetan Sharma were not
heavyweights in that respect. But if that mattered, it didn’t mean much on the
cricket field, because this period coincided with a team that was both settled
and at its peak. There was a batting unit that had established itself, world-class
spinners, and a pack of new fast bowlers of the sort India hadn’t had before.
Photos GETTY IMAGES
12
But that, as it is becoming clear, isn’t the case now.
Agarkar, in comparison, has 221 international
games under his belt. He is in fact the most
experienced chairman of selectors since
Dilip Vengsarkar occupied the position between
2006 and 2008. He is also just 45 years old, and
unlike his predecessors, has played T20, and
understands the shortest format of the game more
intimately. There is his immediate task of putting
together a team that can win the 50-over World
Cup, just three months away now. But there is also
the bigger job of putting forth a long-term vision
for the team, one which might require nudging
some seniors eventually, while finding the next
crop that could replace them smoothly. This
vision is what has been missing in recent times.
India has had as many as four different stints for
its chairman of selectors since the 2019 50-over
World Cup. Prasad was replaced by Joshi, who
then less than a year later found Sharma taking
his post, who then got the boot, along with the
rest of the panel, after India crashed out of the
2022 World Cup, only to be reappointed and
then sacked again when he became the target
of a sting operation. In this period, the team has
floundered from one big tournament to the next,
their limited overs style of play, especially in the
shortest format, has looked outdated and listless,
and the team has begun to look sorely in need of
some direction and injection of new players.
One cannot help but feel that a pause has also
been hit on the big decisions. Hardik Pandya
has been serving as the captain of the T20 team
for over a year now, and has been found to be
more than capable in that role. But he is yet to be
declared a captain permanently. Rohit Sharma,
by all appearances, still seems to be the captain
of the T20 team were he to take the field, but he
and Virat Kohli haven’t played a T20 since the
team’s semi-final exit at the 2022 T20 World Cup,
presumably to keep them fit for this year’s 50-over
World Cup. What happens when that tournament
concludes and preparation for next year’s T20
World Cup begins? Will they return to the team?
What about the Test format, where the team’s
celebrated batsmen have been copping criticism
for underperforming, and many of whom would
be beyond their mid-30s when the World Test
Championship final begins?
Agarkar has his task cut out for him. He will
need all his experience as he tries to help the team
make a successful transition.
By LHENDUP G BHUTIA
17 JULY 2023
 ANGLE
CRIME AND OVER-PUNISHMENT
Should leaking exam papers
really merit life imprisonment?
By MADHAVANKUTTY PILLAI
P UTTING A MAN or woman in
jail for life is usually reserved for
crimes of extraordinary gravity.
Someone who commits a deliber-
ated murder or an acid attack should
deservedly be barred from society
because the damage caused is irrevers-
ible. Likewise, hardened criminals
who are a constant threat to others
should, having expended the patience
of the state, be stowed away so that
the rest can live in peace. After capital
punishment, life sentence is the last
card to be pulled out and it ought
to be a weapon wielded with
circumspection. Should it therefore
really be used against the leaking
of examination papers?
This is what the Rajasthan govern-
ment is about to do. Paper leaks became
a hot potato political issue in the
state two years ago after it happened
in an exam that selects teachers in
government schools. Chief Minister
Ashok Gehlot is also facing rebellion
within his party from Sachin Pilot
who has turned such leaks into one of
his main planks. Gehlot’s solution, as
tweeted this week: “It has been decided
to bring a Bill in the upcoming Assem-
bly session to make life imprisonment
the maximum punishment under the
law against paper leaks.” Last year, it
had already been made 10 years of jail.
What are the odds that anyone who
continues to do it, despite the threat of
a decade in prison, will be deterred by
life? And is any rational judge even go-
ing to give this maximum punishment
for such a crime?
17 JULY 2023
Indians like to believe they are
governed by law but in reality, as
anyone who has stepped into a police
station or court knows, it is mostly an
illusion. It is a struggle to register cases
and even more taxing for a conclusive
justice in the judicial system that
grinds at a snail’s pace under the load
of its own chaos. Elites fare better but
even they can fall into the black hole
of the system, like Shah Rukh Khan’s
son. But because the illusion has to
be maintained, the solution govern-
ments and political leaders come up
with is to make new laws, toughen up
old ones on paper, or apply stringent
ones reserved for special cases to other
crimes. In Madhya Pradesh, there was
the shocking case of a man urinating
on a tribal labourer that was caught on
camera, a deplorable act that rightly
outraged everyone. But he is being
charged with the National Security
Act (NSA). The Scheduled Caste and
Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atroci-
ties) Act, which has also been applied,
is a tough law and appropriate in this
case. Applying NSA is just political mes-
saging, hardly the purpose for why it
exists. But in an imploded system, what
sanctity can the intent of a law retain?
Using NSA to a man who urinates
on another human being is not going
to evoke disagreement because of the
anger the public feel against him. But
that is then setting a precedent to use it
for any case arbitrarily, the process by
which life imprisonment for leaking
exam papers becomes a casual an-
nouncement no one is surprised by.
IDEAS
CLONE
Ever since the unrest in
Twitter began, many new
social media platforms have
cropped up. There is Mastodon
and Bluesky, which offer the
idea of a decentralised social
network, and then there is
Donald Trump’s Truth Social.
None of these however have
gained any traction. And
now comes Meta’s Threads.
But where many have failed,
Threads stands a good chance
of upstaging Twitter. That’s
because Meta clones and
copies very well. Back in 2016,
when Snapchat became very
popular with its concept
of disappearing ‘stories’, it
incorporated that idea into
Instagram and Facebook.
Last year, when TikTok’s short
videos were becoming a threat,
Meta rolled out a near-identical
format called Reels. Threads
currently looks like a platform
that is a bit like Twitter and
a bit like Instagram. But
Meta will no doubt tweak
that as it learns what sticks
and what doesn’t.
WORD’S WORTH
‘Good artists copy,
great artists steal’
PABLO PICASSO
ARTIST
www.openthemagazine.com 13
INSIDER
THE BIDEN-MODI O
f all the US presidents he has interacted with, Prime
Minister Narendra Modi might find himself most at ease

CONNECTION
with Joe Biden. Despite media commentary on similari-
ties between Donald Trump and Modi—“strongmen” and “right
wingers”—the comparison is superficial and shallow. For one,
Modi’s social media engagement is never over the top and his pub-
lic speeches are not intemperate. Trump was not an easy person
to deal with although a strong convergence of India-US interests
marked his term. Barack Obama and Modi wrote joint opeds but
did not always agree and the former liked to take the odd swipe at
“religious freedom” in India. Biden has been far less ‘ideological’
than many other US presidents and sees a genuine need to build
common ground with India. He has an ear for Modi’s views and
thoughts, too. The 2021 Quad summit hosted by Biden at the
White House saw a discussion on the Indo-Pacific during which
Modi is understood to have pointed to the need to build an “insti-
tutional” response to China, keeping in mind long-term scenarios
other than the more immediate disputes. The view found a
resonance in the meeting and over time led to more specific initia-
tives that built the India-US relationship and should, over time,
improve India’s technological and military capabilities. Among
the various agreements, the Indian acquisition of US high-altitude
military drones is a very important development that adds a sig-
nificant punch to the capabilities of the armed forces. The US-India
joint statement describing the relationship as one that stretches
from the “seas to the stars” is not such an exaggeration. Days before
the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese and Russian leaders
declared that “there were no limits to Sino-Russian cooperation
and no forbidden zones.” The Indian-American joint statement has
broken more than a few limits, something that will not be missed
by either Moscow or Beijing.

CUTTING RED TAPE

T he government’s efforts to clear backlogs in appointments

and promotions are making headway after undoing some knotty red
tape. When Minister of State (MoS) for Personnel Jitendra Singh began to re-
view cases, some stuck for long periods of time, he was struck by the frequent
references to matters being “sub-judice” being a reason for things being put
on hold. On inquiring whether there was indeed a specific direction from
a court not to proceed in a case, it more often than not turned out that there
was no such injunction. Disputes of an intra-departmental nature must be
resolved and decisions arrived at, officials were told. This led to a depletion
of pending cases as the government took the view that an officer should be
informed whether he was fit for a certain role or not.

14 17 JULY 2023
 Illustrations by SAURABH SINGH

COROMANDEL NEGLIGENCE?
The buzz at Rail Bhawan is that the tragic accident in Odisha that killed 292 people might be a case of human error and negligence. The
report of the commissioner of rail safety, understood to be ready, apparently mirrors the initial suspicions of senior officials who visited
the accident site near Balasore. The possible cause is neglect in following protocol in order to adopt shortcuts to clear the passage of
trains quickly. The mistake was the “point level” where trains are diverted from one track to another. The “interference” with the points
and crossings system, a key element of railway infrastructure, led to the crash when the Coromandel Express travelling at high speed
slammed into the stationary freight train carrying heavy iron ore. The CBI inquiry is continuing and will examine not just culpability but any
likely wilful tampering or criminal neglect that might have led to the crash. It does appear that more measures are needed to supervise and
reinforce the training of maintenance staff so crucial to ensuring rail safety on a network used by thousands of trains daily.

MAYAWATI’S OPTIONS
T he word from Lucknow is that BSP leader Mayawati is not keeping as low
a profile as has been the case for a while. While keeping her distance from
the opposition’s ‘unity’ moves—a wise decision in view of the differences
between AAP and Congress at the first such meeting and NCP’s splintering
thereafter—she is assessing options before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Congress
could be ready to ally with SP but the seats it wants are far in excess of current
ground realities. Meanwhile, ‘Behenji’ might be willing to consider Congress
an ally too, calculating that this could consolidate Muslim votes which, along
with her loyal Jatav voters, can pose a challenge to BJP. This might serve her
purpose as BSP could be back in the reckoning while SP leader Akhilesh Yadav
GRAND GST would find himself cornered between BJP and BSP. But much of this, commen-
tators admit, is speculation; except the possibility of SP and BSP joining hands,
SUCCESS which is pretty much ruled out. In the previ-

T he continued buoyancy in GST

collection has led to increased
confidence about the revenue receipts
of both the Centre and the states. For
some time now, demands that the
compensatory regime of five years
for states be extended have not been
voiced. For one, the Centre made
it clear that the scheme will not be
extended and then the size of the
ous two General Elections, traditional caste
and community counts simply did not work
as BJP was able to cut across such distinctions
to a considerable extent powered by a Modi
wave. As things stand, Chief Minister
Yogi Adityanath seems to have further
solidified BJP’s dominance going by the
recent panchayat poll results.

revenue cake has increased. Veterans
in the finance ministry recall the bitter
political deadlock that preceded the
passage of the GST Bill and Congress’
decision to boycott the launch of the
new one nation, one tax that ended
multiple state and Central impositions.
Both the states and the Centre gave
up some autonomy in tax matters for
mutual gain. The functioning of the
GST Council has also, despite the
heated politics of the day, reflected a
rare consensus and true federal spirit.
On the completion of six years of
GST, it can be said to be an
unadulterated success.
NITISH’S DILEMMA
T he ED chargesheet in the railway jobs for land scam names Bihar Deputy
Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav along with his parents Lalu Prasad and
Rabri Devi, and has set in motion the next round of political exchanges in the
state that have a bearing on the Lok Sabha polls. The Modi government is deter-
mined to give investigative agencies a free hand in pursuing high-profile cases,
making the “fight against corruption” a key part of its agenda. The Yadav clan’s
problems are in turn more trouble for Bihar
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar who once prided
himself for his adherence to “clean” politics—a
major point of distinction with Lalu Prasad’s
brand of public life. But having burnt his
bridges with BJP for good, Nitish has no option
but to join the unconvincing chorus claiming
that his allies are victims of “vindictive politics”.

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 15

 INDRAPRASTHA
T HE LAST WORD in the maha
drama in Maharashtra may not
have been written yet. Don’t rule out
Sharad Pawar himself surprising
everyone by jumping on the
National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
bandwagon. At least, that is not
beyond him given his reputation for
doing all manner of somersaults. The
fact that he had blessed the original
Fadanavis-Ajit Pawar government,
which had lasted all of 36 hours,
ought to give you some idea of his
ability to spring surprises. For when
it comes to the wily old fox of Indian
politics, nothing can be ruled out.
With his closest lieutenant
Praful Patel teaming up with nephew
Ajit and partnering the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), Sharad Pawar does
cut a lonely figure in the Nationalist
Congress Party (NCP) rump.
At 82, relying on playing the victim
card to revive his political fortunes
remains an iffy task. For, his daughter
Supriya Sule has barely soiled her
hands in the rough and tumble of
grassroots politics, something
Ajit Pawar, it is widely acknowledged,
was very good at. Sule was the face of
NCP in the high society of Mumbai by
dint of being her father’s daughter.
Ajit Pawar is a quintessential
regional politician, having shown
no interest in national politics
while uncle Pawar at one time did
reckon his chances of being prime
minister. He missed that bus long ago,
especially because nobody was ready
to trust him. The humble farmer from
Karnataka, HD Deve Gowda, was
trusted, but a far more cosmopolitan
and well-versed in world affairs
Sharad Pawar was not.
Remember that the novel idea
to privatise vast tracts of defence
16
Virendra Kapoor
land was first mooted when Pawar
Sr was defence minister. Indeed,
they say land and Pawar Sr have an
inextricable relationship—how
much land he controls directly or
indirectly in Maharashtra remains
a guessing game for minor politicos
in the state.
Old-timers will tell you how
when in 1967 the late YB Chavan
nominated a 27-year-old Sharad
Pawar to contest the Assembly
polls from Baramati against stiff
opposition from far more established
aspirants, he barely could afford a
change of clothes. Today, by common
consent, he counts among one
of the wealthiest politicians in the
country. Not only him, the extended
Pawar khandan has seen its fortunes
grow a million-fold apparently
thanks to Sharad Pawar’s stellar rise
in Maharashtra politics. So, it is
ironical when Pawar Sr talks of
corruption charges against
Ajit Pawar and others who have
turned their backs on him.
Besides, Pawar at 82 may only be
concerned about securing a political
future for Supriya, whereas Ajit and
others who have gone and joined the
Shinde-Fadnavis ministry have an
entire future to look forward to. It was
unfair of him to want them to stay
under his tutelage even as he firmed
up Supriya’s feet in the political soil
of Maharashtra, and farther afield on
the national stage.
In other words, if it was a rebellion,
it was against a blatant attempt by a
doting father to groom and foist his
inexperienced daughter as a leader on
widely experienced men and women
who had spent a lifetime in building
NCP, but who were unready to
transfer their loyalties and mortgage
their future to a socialite daughter
who would rather party with the rich
and famous and the filmy set than
join the suffering farmers in
Baramati or Ratnagiri.
Methinks Sharad Pawar being
“hoist with his own petard” is just
deserts for his blatant show of
daughter love.
S OMETIME AGO IN this
column, I wrote about the only
oddity in the high-value Khan Market,
which commands one of the highest
commercial rentals in all of Asia, of
a humble barber’s salon staying put
despite massive allurements from
the moneybags keen to set up shop
in this high-visibility marketplace.
Sorry to report, at long last, the loud
drumbeats of commercialisation
have consumed him too. Serving
and retired high court and Supreme
Court judges, senior government
secretaries, well-known TV anchors
and editors and a mix of mid-level
businessmen had all patronised this
competent but modest hair salon.
Now, he is gone. But to be fair to him,
he was generous enough to give as
gratis 11 months’ wages from the
huge packet he received for vacating
the shop to his four or five employees.
The last holdout against market
forces has fallen.
17 JULY 2023
 FIRE BOLTT
BO
- NINJA
N FIT
SMART
SMA
MAR
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 OPEN ESSAY

By IQBAL CHAND MALHOTRA

THE OPIUM JIHAD

How Pakistan created the world’s most dangerous narco state

ENERAL ASIF NAWAZ JANJUA, who succeeded General Mirza Aslam Beg as COAS [chief of army staff] of

G
the Pakistan Army, was an upright and straightforward officer. He was one of the last officers of the Pakistan
Army to have graduated from Sandhurst in the UK. By the time General Janjua succeeded a chastened and
vindictive General Beg on 16 August 1991, Lt General Asad Durrani, under the secret orders of General Beg and
Lt General Hamid Gul, had started planning to dislodge President Najibullah’s government in Kabul. Gul was of
the view that Afghanistan needed to be brought under a strict Islamic regime, which would enable the consoli-
dation of opium cultivation and its processing into heroin for export to Europe and North America.
With a consensus among the three on the path of Islamification of Afghanistan by force of conquest, by early
1992, Lt General Durrani began an intensive training regimen for the formations that were to evolve into the Taliban.
It seems that apart from the process of playing midwife to the Taliban, Durrani also played off Janjua against
Nawaz Sharif, who was earlier successfully convinced by Lt General Hamid Gul to get into the Afghan poppy trade in a compre-
hensive manner. An unknowing General Janjua expressed his frustration to Durrani about the policy approach in Afghanistan he
believed was being followed under Sharif’s orders. Janjua was raring to go for Sharif’s hide. Little did General Janjua know that
Lt General Durrani’s hard work on the formation of the Taliban was continuing unabated. However, there was no end to the ever-
unfolding intrigue. An insecure Sharif found that he could not prevail upon Lt General Durrani to spy on his boss General Janjua,
who, in Sharif’s view, was conspiring with Benazir Bhutto to get rid of him. Sharif now put pressure on General Janjua himself to ap-
point Sharif’s ‘own man’ Lt General Javid Nasir as DG ISI. An unsuspecting General Janjua transferred Lt General Durrani to GHQ.
General Janjua also had strong disagreements with Nawaz Sharif over Lt General Hamid Gul. General Janjua wanted to bring
Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud into the post-Najibullah Afghan government. In fact, General Janjua, accompanied by
Nawaz Sharif and Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, flew to Kabul on 29 April 1992 to welcome the Massoud-supported
Sibghatullah Mojadidi government, which took charge after Hekmatyar’s forces had been routed from Kabul. Here General Janjua
was shocked to learn that Hekmatyar was being advised by Lt General Gul not to sign the peace agreement. On his return from
Kabul, Janjua transferred Gul to a nondescript position, as chief of the ordnance factory in Taxila. Gul refused to move and Nawaz
offered him a job in the defence ministry. This led to a total break between Nawaz and Janjua, who, at this point, is known to have
intensified his parleys with both Ishaq [then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan] and Benazir to plot Sharif’s dismissal. General Janjua
also struck at General Beg by blocking the disbursement of an already sanctioned amount of Pakistani Rs 30 million to an NGO run
by him called Friends. By now, Sharif, Beg and Gul were all baying for General Janjua’s blood.
General Janjua died of a heart attack on 8 January 1993 while working out on his treadmill at home. He was succeeded by
General Abdul Waheed Kakar. In early April 1993, General Janjua’s widow Nuzhat went public with her allegation that her husband

18 17 JULY 2023
 Back row (L-R): Hamid Gul,
Asad Durrani and Nawaz Sharif
Middle row (L-R): Mullah Omar
and Benazir Bhutto
Front row (L-R): Pervez Musharraf
and Mirza Aslam Beg

Illustration by SAURABH SINGH

BECAUSE BOTH THE TRADE IN NARCOTICS AND NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY HAD ONLY RECEIVED LUKEWARM
SUPPORT FROM BOTH BENAZIR AND SHARIF DURING THE PRECEDING FIVE YEARS, THE ARMY HAD DECIDED TO
CAMOUFLAGE THESE ACTIVITIES UNDER THOSE NEEDED TO STEP UP THE KASHMIR INSURGENCY. THE NEWLY
APPOINTED DGMO MAJOR GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF CHARMED BENAZIR INTO ORDERING THE REVIVAL
AND ESCALATION OF THE KASHMIR CAMPAIGN. HOWEVER, CONCEALED UNDER THIS UMBRELLA WERE THE
HIDDEN AGENDAS OF BOTH KRL AND THE THRUST INTO AFGHANISTAN

had been poisoned. She identified Brigadier Imtiaz, chief of Paki-

stan’s Intelligence Bureau, along with Nawaz’s brother Shahbaz
Sharif and the debonair political assistant Chaudhri Nissar Ali, as
his assassins. In the midst of the furore that this created, Presi-
dent Ghulam Ishaq Khan sacked Nawaz Sharif’s government.
Sharif appealed against this before the Supreme Court, which in
a historic decision reinstated him on 26 May 1993. However, only
eight weeks later, Nawaz Sharif voluntarily resigned because
the process of governance became impossible. The political
crisis in Pakistan came to an abrupt halt when both Sharif and
Ishaq Khan resigned after two weeks of intense negotiations be-
tween the Nawaz Sharif government, Benazir, and the army. The
resolution of the crisis was unique because for the first time in
Pakistan’s history a government had voluntarily stepped down
in order to avoid a possible military intervention. Interestingly,
the negotiations had been mediated by General Kakar, chief of
army staff, paving the way for the third general election in five
years and Benazir Bhutto’s return to power in October 1993.
M EANWHILE, LT GENERAL Hamid Gul’s protégé, the
virulently anti-American Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was
out of control and fighting the leaders of the coalition with
whom he had formed a government the previous year. Waves
of incendiaries rained down on Kabul, leading to the deaths
of more than 1,800 civilians, with 500,000 forced to flee from
a city that would be besieged by Hekmatyar for the next three
years. Basically, the ISI had lost control over Afghanistan and
its lucrative opium cultivation.
Further, the Pakistani deep state was finding AQ Khan
increasingly difficult to control. Khan’s special target was
Pakistan’s leading theoretical nuclear physicist Professor
Pervez Hoodbhoy of Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
After Hoodbhoy wrote an article in 1993 questioning the
security of Pakistan’s bomb, in which he described a system
known as Permissive Action Links (PALs)-command-and-con-
trol mechanisms used in the West to prevent a bomb from
being hot-wired or triggered accidentally, Khan launched a

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 19

 OPEN ESSAY
Asif Nawaz Janjua
IT SEEMS THAT APART FROM THE PROCESS OF
PLAYING MIDWIFE TO THE TALIBAN, DURRANI ALSO
PLAYED OFF JANJUA AGAINST NAWAZ SHARIF,
WHO WAS EARLIER SUCCESSFULLY CONVINCED BY
LT GENERAL HAMID GUL TO GET INTO THE AFGHAN
POPPY TRADE IN A COMPREHENSIVE MANNER
vindictive campaign to destroy him. The professor received a
call from General Shamin Alam Khan, chairman of the joint
chiefs of staff. While waiting to be invited into the general’s
office, Hoodbhoy saw Khan emerge and glower at him as he
walked out. General Shamin was frank and asked how PALs
worked. A horrified Hoodbhoy revealed that none of them,
AQ Khan included, knew anything about PALs or had even
thought about securing Pakistan’s bomb.
Benazir Bhutto won the general election in October 1993.
Within days of assuming office, the army called on her for a
special briefing. Money was in short supply. Key projects like
KRL’s export thrust, consolidation of opium cultivation in
Afghanistan and reinvigoration of the Kashmir insurgency
needed a boost. However, because both the trade in narcotics
and nuclear technology had only received lukewarm support
from both Benazir and Sharif during the preceding five years,
the army had decided to camouflage these activities under
those needed to step up the Kashmir insurgency. The newly
appointed DGMO Major General Pervez Musharraf charmed
20
Benazir into ordering the revival and escalation of the Kashmir
campaign. However, concealed under this umbrella were the
hidden agendas of both KRL and the thrust into Afghanistan.
Benazir took a shine to the wily Musharraf because she
needed the army on her side. Musharraf worked alongside ISI’s
Joint Intelligence North division to begin the recruitment drive
at the Afghan refugee camps run by the ISI. Next, Musharraf ap-
proached Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and convinced them to supply cad-
res to be trained as fighters. Then he went to the Jamiat-e-Ulema
Islam (JUI) and got them on board. Maulana Fazlur Rahman ran
this organisation. The first batches of Talibs from the madrassas
run by Maulana Fazlur Rahman were trained by the Frontier
Constabulary Corps and the Baluchistan-based Sibi Scouts in
training camps near the Baluch border with Afghanistan. Next
to fall in line was Markaz Dawa Al Irshad (MDI), which was a
new organisation, having been founded only in 1987.
Osama bin Laden had contributed $1 million to it. MDI had al-
ready created a military wing in 1990 called Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
Musharraf brilliantly engineered the transition of all MDI
graduates to LeT. Musharraf’s patronage made LeT the largest
jihadi-terror organisation in Pakistan.
But Musharraf’s real coup de grace in Afghanistan was
to use the ISI’s Joint Intelligence North to locate and groom
a one-eyed former mujahideen fighter called Mullah Omar
into the supreme leader of the now-emerging Taliban to fulfil
the army’s agenda in Afghanistan. Mullah Omar attained his
battlefield laurels during the Soviet jihad when he fought
alongside one Haji Bashir Noorzai within the ranks of the He-
zbe-Islami (Khalis faction) Tanzim. The Khalis faction was led
by Yunis Khalis, who worked systematically to gain power in
the poppy-rich eastern Nangarhar province, where he battled
with other mujahedeen for control of the poppy fields and the
roads leading to heroin refineries and hashish shops that he
ran along the border. His deputy, Jalaluddin Haqqani, operated
along the Pakistan border and had close ties with Arab fighters,
who would later form al-Qaeda, and with powerful weapons
smuggling networks. Former US officials and mujahedeen say
those commanders such as Hekmatyar, Khalis and Haqqani
did not personally muddy their hands by moving drugs. They
had subordinates who ran the narcotics operations by proxy
and took a cut of all the profits in their control zones.
Additionally, there was Haji Bashir Noorzai, son of Issa
Noorzai, who at the time of Musharraf’s search played a major
leadership role in the Quetta Alliance, trucking, and smuggling
mafia. Both Haji Bashir and his father controlled poppy cultiva-
tion in Kandahar’s Maiwand District and supplied opium to the
refineries controlled by Lt General Fazlul Haq and the ISI.
Haji Bashir also owned the small mosque in the village of
Sangesar in Kandahar, where Mullah Omar took up the job of a
preacher after the Soviet jihad was over. Haji Bashir effectively
became the cut-out and conduit between Mullah Omar and the
ISI. In fact, the first tranche of cash and equipment that Mullah
Omar received from the ISI was through Haji Bashir and con-
sisted of $250,000, six pickup trucks and an undisclosed number
17 JULY 2023
of arms and ammunition. The same US document reveals that
the ISI, through Bashir, maintained a heavy influence on Mullah
Omar’s Majlis-shura, of which Bashir was also a founding and
participating member. Thus, Mullah Omar was the ideal candi-
date to lead this new force, which was being created to establish
the unquestioned writ of the Pakistani deep state in Afghanistan.
Mullah Omar had spent a lot of time in Pakistan and was re-
ported to be an alumnus of Jamiat-ul-Uloom-il-Islamiyah run by
Maulana Mohammed Yusuf Binnori in Karachi’s New Town sub-
urb. Mullah Omar was responsible for boosting the recruitment
drive from this seminary. ISI’s existing protégé in Afghanistan,
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was floundering and almost rendered
incapable of dislodging the Mojadidi government. The only vi-
able option was the Beg-Durrani-Musharraf Taliban, which was
being structured and nurtured as a client army that could poten-
tially become a client government of Pakistan. The Taliban was,
therefore, largely structured from four sources—the Haqqania
madrassa, the JI, the JUI and MDI. Since the JUI was close to the
merchants who ran the cross-border trade and the heroin refiner-
ies, Benazir’s interior minister Major General Naseerullah Babar
provided official sanction to this project as the front for the ISI.
already established close contacts with North Korea. He was
in a race to develop his own missile designs and workshops
at KRL. However, these were inferior to those of his enemy
Munir Khan’s at PAEC [Pakistan Atomic Energy Commis-
sion]. AQ Khan feared losing out to Munir Khan and being
cast aside from his position of eminence. He established a line
to Pyongyang by giving them a US Stinger missile in 1990. He
took the process further by setting up a barter for the North
Korean No-dong missile with KRL’s uranium enrichment
technology in a deal discussed with North Korean Foreign
Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Kim Yong-nam when
the latter visited Pakistan the previous year.
Benazir landed in Pyongyang on 29 December 1993. She
deftly struck a deal with the North Korean supremo Kim-Il-
Sung, who handed her a bag full of computer discs containing
information on the missiles. Upon landing back in Islamabad,
she handed the bag over to Major General Ziauddin. Having done
her job, Benazir was pushed to the sidelines. AQ Khan, Ziauddin
and Musharraf took charge of the Pakistan-North Korea nuclear
barter. The ISI also stepped in and Major General Shujjat of the
Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous, the ISI’s clandestine procure-
ment division, was assigned as the project controller.
Meanwhile, the Taliban conducted its first ‘confidence

I N LATE 1993, a somewhat anxious Benazir broached the

subject of what amounted to KRL’s [Khan Research Laborato-
ries] illegal exports rather hesitantly with General Kakar. While
target’ operation in the spring of 1994 in the village of
Sangesar, located near Kandahar. In a daring raid, Taliban
fighters led by Mullah Omar captured a local governor whom
denying outright any such activity, General Kakar suggested the villagers had accused of kidnapping and raping two
ring-fencing KRL by placing the army in control of KRL’s perim- young girls. Without trial, Mullah Omar ordered the
eter. This would ensure that the army controlled ingress into and governor to be hanged from the barrel of a tank.
egress from the establishment. Kakar suggested placing By mid-summer, Mullah Omar had 15,000 fighters within his
Major General Khwaja Ziauddin in
charge of this. Major General Ziauddin
was then DG SPD at the joint staff HQ in
Rawalpindi, overseeing the security of BY 1994 SUMMER, THE AFGHAN TRANSITIONAL GOVERNMENT WAS
Pakistan’s then fledgling-yet-undeclared
nuclear arsenal. Benazir agreed to this STRUGGLING TO FORM FUNCTIONAL MINISTRIES AND FEND OFF HEKMATYAR’S
arrangement. Little did she know that OFFENSIVES THAT WERE THREATENING KABUL. MASSOUD’S EFFORT TO
Ziauddin was a close ally of Beg and Gul, NEGOTIATE AN INCLUSIVE GOVERNMENT WITH TALIBAN PARTICIPATION
both generals, and was also the nephew WAS REJECTED OUTRIGHT. REGARDLESS, MASSOUD HELD OUT FOR A YEAR
of Lt General Ghulam Jilani Khan. The
latter was DG ISI between 1971 and
BEFORE FINALLY WITHDRAWING HIS FORCES FROM THE CITY
1978 and one of General Zia-ul-Haq’s co-
GETTY IMAGES

AFP

plotters in the coup that overthrew her

father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
Pleased with Benazir’s acqui-
escence, General Kakar drafted
her directly into the act of nuclear
proliferation in the winter of 1993.
Kakar got AQ Khan to invite her to
visit Pyongyang in North Korea in
December 1993. Khan wanted to
acquire intercontinental missiles from
North Korea. Benazir agreed. Khan, it Ahmad Shah Massoud Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
appears, concealed the fact that he had

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 21

 OPEN ESSAY

ranks, making him a serious contender for heading the Afghan By this time, Pakistan was stone broke. The industry had
transitional government, which was still struggling to form fallen idle, inflation had climbed to almost 14 per cent and for-
functional ministries and fend off Hekmatyar’s offensives that eign reserves had fallen to a low of $500 million, the equivalent
were again threatening Kabul. The Taliban formations advanced of two weeks’ imports. The Karachi stock exchange looked as
northwards towards Kandahar city from their intermediate if it was about to plunge into a free fall. An inspector from the
staging bases in Maiwand District in Kandahar Province. Many IMF who visited Islamabad blamed the country’s arbitrary
victories brought additional fighters and heavy weapons into stop-and-go policies for the crisis and called on the government
the Taliban fold as the majority of local warlords, with their to rope in the military and prevent them from implementing
much smaller militias, chose to join the Taliban rather than fu- a substantial increase in military spending. Undoubtedly,
tilely resist them. One province after another fell to the Taliban, Pakistan had become a stop-and-go country, characterised by
with many of their inhabitants welcoming them as liberators a chain of violence interrupted by the occasional moment of
and hoping for the stability promised by the Taliban’s Sharia law peace. There was no money at home but the military remained
as an alternative to the horrific chaos of the anti-Soviet jihad. The in clover because of their control over the heroin trade. During
psychological preparation that the Pakistanis had established her second innings, Benazir caught only occasional glimpses
as part of their Afghan conflict-
extending measures clearly
smoothed the way for their THERE WAS HAJI BASHIR NOORZAI, Haji Bashir Noorzai
Taliban proxies to conquer large SON OF ISSA NOORZAI, WHO AT THE
swathes of the countryside.
The Taliban, now aided TIME OF MUSHARRAF’S SEARCH
directly by the ISI and units of PLAYED A MAJOR LEADERSHIP
the regular Pakistani Army, ROLE IN THE QUETTA ALLIANCE,
captured Herat in a surprise at-
tack in September 1995. There-
TRUCKING, AND SMUGGLING
after, in the spring of 1996, a jet MAFIA. BOTH HAJI BASHIR AND
chartered from Afghanistan’s HIS FATHER CONTROLLED POPPY
state-run Ariana Airlines CULTIVATION IN KANDAHAR’S
landed in Jalalabad, inserting a
volatile player into the rush for
MAIWAND DISTRICT AND SUPPLIED
control of Afghanistan. Osama OPIUM TO THE REFINERIES
CONTROLLED BY LT GENERAL

bin Laden’s return to Afghani-
stan, allegedly sponsored by FAZLUL HAQ AND THE ISI
the ISI, opened a new chapter
in the Taliban saga, one that
would forever change modern
history. Although there are reports that he was short on funds
when he arrived from Sudan, Osama bin Laden, using ISI-
supplied funds, quickly made friends with Afghanistan’s new
power brokers, helping to finance the Taliban’s takeover of
Kabul. The ongoing siege of Kabul was reinvigorated, though
Massoud continued to hold out and was even able to continue
consolidating power under the transitional government. In
addition to the Taliban rockets, the Pakistanis added indis-
criminate artillery bombardment and even used their ground
attack aircraft to pound Kabul and its outskirts. Massoud’s
effort to negotiate an inclusive government with Taliban
participation was rejected outright. Regardless, Massoud held
out for a year before finally withdrawing his forces from the
city, still in good order, to prevent more needless death and
destruction. But in Pakistan, the ISI once again succeeded in its
attempts to dislodge Benazir. On 5 November 1996, invoking
the notorious 8th Amendment, which he had promised never
to use, President Farooq Leghari sacked her, citing corruption,
instability, and nepotism. The pot was calling the kettle black.
GETTY IMAGES
of what was going on and was never able to join together all the
dots to picture the extent of the KRL secret sales project.
The Taliban conquest of Afghanistan provides a fascinat-
ing and complete doctrinal example of modern unconven-
tional warfare. The Pakistanis employed a predominantly
indigenous force, the Taliban, to overthrow the legitimate
transitional government and install a pro-Pakistani regime
purely in order to consolidate and expand the heroin trade.
Armed with Pakistani weapons, trained by Pakistani advisers,
sympathetic to Pakistani interests and with Pakistani soldiers
eventually fighting directly alongside them, the Taliban
conquered Afghanistan. Thus was born the modern world’s
most dangerous narco-state. Q
This is an edited excerpt from The Bomb, the Bank,
the Mullah and the Poppies (Bloomsbury,
223 pages, `799) by Iqbal Chand Malhotra. Malhotra
is an award-winning TV producer and the author of,
amomg other titles, Red Fear: The China Threat

22 17 JULY 2023
COVER STORY

SHARAD PAWAR

ALAMY
24 17 JULY 2023
 THE
LONELINESS
OF THE
PATRIARCH
NCP’S BEST LOK SABHA TALLY WAS NINE SEATS
TWO DECADES AGO BUT THAT NEVER
CAME IN THE WAY OF SHARAD PAWAR BEING
PROJECTED AS A PRIME MINISTERIAL CANDIDATE.
THAT IMAGE OF THE WILY STRATEGIST HAS BEEN
SHATTERED BY AJIT PAWAR’S DEPARTURE
By PR RAMESH

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 25

 COVER STORY

RICKETER SADASHIV GANPATRAO ‘SADU’ SHINDE WAS A

talented leg spinner who played seven Test matches between

C
1946 and 1952. He was born in August 1923 and died young
while still in his thirties, in 1955. He was known for his googlies
but would have been astounded at how, in 2023, his long-forgot-
ten name was suddenly catapulted to the centre of politics in his
home state of Maharashtra. About Sadu Shinde, cricket writer
Abhishek Mukherjee writes: “Though brilliant, he could play
only seven Tests, and was dropped for good.” Shinde had a good
leg spin, but his strength lay in his two googlies. Apart from the
conventional one, there was another—described beautifully by Sujit Mukherjee in Playing for In-
dia: “[C]oming after the orthodox wrist-crooked wrong-un, this delivery invariably sprang a nasty
surprise. Ripped off the top of the third finger, it hastened unexpectedly off the pitch. Its tendency
to pitch short nullified its efficacy as secret weapon but was practically unplayable when properly
pitched”. Sadu Shinde’s daughter, Pratibha, went on to marry Sharadchandra Govindrao Pawar,
four-time chief minister of Maharashtra and president of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
The NCP supremo had used cricket analogy to describe the short-lived arrangement under which
Devendra Fadnavis became chief minister and Ajit Pawar deputy chief minister in 2019. That was
how the dots connected.
Shinde’s googlies, and Pawar’s, popped up in the mainstream political debate when Maharash-
tra’s Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, in a recent interview to a private news channel
about the events that followed the 2019 Assembly election, decried stalwart Sharad Pawar’s version
as “half truths”. He went on to claim, “Everything will come out at the right time.” It sounded the
warning bell for what was to happen on Sunday (July 2), two days later.
Fadnavis acknowledged that Pawar had indeed bowled a googly. “But his googly bowled out
his own nephew Ajit Pawar,” he asserted. With the Shiv Sena walking out of its alliance with the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the election and Uddhav Thackeray trying to cobble together
an alliance with others, Fadnavis and NCP’s Ajit Pawar had taken oath as chief minister and dep-
uty chief minister, respectively, on November 23, 2019.Their alliance lasted merely 80 hours, as
Sharad Pawar did not give his final approval for the arrangement.
Fadnavis disclosed in that same interview that Sharad Pawar had, in fact, met him to discuss the
blueprint of a possible BJP-NCP coalition government after the 2019 Assembly polls. In end-June,
Pawar himself acknowledged that “Fadnavis has rightly said they met me and various issues were
discussed. He said in his interview yesterday that I changed my stand within two days after that

26 17 JULY 2023
meeting. The question is, why did Fadnavis take his oath after
two days and that too, early in the morning, keeping everyone
in the dark?”
Taken in by the celebrations in the opposition camp as its
‘Chanakya’, a master strategist who could tighten the nuts and
bolts of a formidable anti-Modi alliance, Sharad Pawar took the
‘googly’ bit from Fadnavis as a personal compliment. “I don’t know
if it was a political game or not but let me tell you that my father-in-
law Sadu Shinde was a very good googly bowler. At the same time, I
have served as president of the International Cricket Council. So, I
know how to bowl a googly (to stump Fadnavis) even if I have not
played cricket myself,” he said. A googly is a ball that turns in one
direction while it is expected to turn in the other. Pawar, no doubt,
was basking in self-flattery and praise related to his father-in-law
with whom he compared his own skills on the political field.
However, Sharad Pawar’s seemingly clever retort was about
2019. What the NCP supremo seemed to have forgotten is that
this time round, the defining political googly was delivered by his
AJIT AND SHARAD PAWAR IN MUMBAI, MAY 2, 2023
17 JULY 2023
own nephew, Ajit Pawar. In one fell stroke, Ajit managed to bust
the myth of uncle Sharad as a political wizard, a strategist par excel-
lence in Maharashtra politics, even weaning away the best men
on his team, including staunch loyalists like Dilip Walse Patil and
Chhagan Bhujbal. This is the third time Ajit Pawar has taken oath
as deputy chief minister of his home state since November 2019,
twice as part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and once
with the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). He also served as deputy chief
minister twice before 2019.
Sharad Pawar took away senior Congress leaders Govindrao
Adik and Sushilkumar Shinde in his 1978 rebellion, torpedoing
the Vasantdada Patil government 45 years ago. At the time Pawar
had walked out of the Congress government with 40 MLAs.
Ajit Pawar has proved a quick and efficient learner, checkmating
his mentor and uncle in the game. It turns out that the “instant
coffee” (as Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule described the events)
was a caffeine high for the BJP combine in power in Mumbai and
a hard blow against the already floundering opposition.
www.openthemagazine.com 27
 COVER STORY
The BJP leadership’s ability to wean away the rebel NCP mem-
bers, even making eight of them ministers in the state govern-
ment, is a morale booster for NDA in the run-up to both the state
polls and the General Election. To that end, it cannot be perceived
merely as a comeback to the humiliation it suffered in 2019 in
Maharashtra or even a retort against the loss in Karnataka, the
only southern state BJP had in its kitty. Nor can the gains be seen
only through the prism of Maharashtra. True, Ajit Pawar’s troops,
including veterans like Dilip Walse Patil, Chhagan Bhujbal and
Praful Patel, besides Dhananjay Munde and Anil Patil, not only
bring their individual strengths to the table but Pawar Jr himself
fills the desperately needed Maratha leadership gap in BJP, a con-
stituency among whom the party has found itself very weak in
the state so far, thanks largely to NCP.
A T THE VERY LEAST, BJP in Maharashtra is politically en-
riched by the eight ministers from the rebel NCP who took
oath as ministers, and fully armed for the state elections in Octo-
ber 2024 scheduled after the Lok Sabha polls.
At the most, the party is closest to hitting the gold vein in 2024,
for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. Of the 48 Lok Sabha
seats in the state, BJP won 41 in alliance with the Shiv Sena and
the Republican Party of India (RPI) in 2019. Of its own, BJP won 23
and 18 seats in Maharashtra and West Bengal, respectively. While
BJP won 23 seats in the key western state, the undivided Shiv Sena
had notched up 18. Of the undivided Shiv Sena’s 18 MPs, 13 later
joined Eknath Shinde’s faction which formed the state govern-
AJIT PAWAR AND OTHER NCP MINISTERS WITH CHIEF MINISTER EKNATH SHINDE, DEPUTY CHIEF MINISTER DEVENDRA FADNAVIS AND
28
ment with BJP, currently in power in Mumbai.
Maharashtra, West Bengal and Bihar account for 48, 42 and
40 Lok Sabha seats, respectively. To make up for perceived weak-
nesses in the first despite Shinde and his men on its side, NDA is
aiming to top the 41 seats of 2019 by at least another four, strength-
ened by Ajit Pawar and his troops. Shinde knows as well as BJP
that it is likely to be difficult without Pawar Jr, with possibilities
still open that Uddhav Thackeray could dent the alliance’s tally,
especially with less than a year for the General Election and just
over a year for the Assembly polls. There is also the sword of dis-
qualification of Shinde’s 16 MLAs by the Supreme Court hang-
ing over the government. With this major blow to NCP, BJP can
seriously hope to cross a big hurdle in Maharashtra with a stable
government in place till the 2024 elections.
With NCP out of the equation in the emerging anti-Modi
opposition—Sharad Pawar was gearing up to play a key role in the
unity effort for that alliance—BJP has paved the way for a smooth
run for NDA at the hustings.
The recent developments are a relief for BJP which has now
gained time to focus on Bihar first and then West Bengal after the
Lok Sabha polls. Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, his
father, veteran politician Lalu Prasad, and his mother (and former
chief minister) Rabri Devi have all been formally charged in the
railway jobs for land scam, even as Chief Minister Nitish Kumar
struggles to keep his men with him in the run-up to the elections.
The developments in Maharashtra and Bihar have now likely
ensured that NDA and BJP are on a sure footing for 2024, keeping
their earlier tally, or perhaps even topping it up.
17 JULY 2023
 Striking political deals came naturally to Pawar Sr, in a career bean, paddy, finger millet, corn, bajra and onion, he got down to his
spanning several decades—he was chief minister of Maharashtra actual business—negotiating terms for the formation of a BJP-NCP
four times and a Union minister thrice—during which his acolytes government in the state.
and beneficiaries spun a myth about him that comprised a string of Pawar had a wishlist—Fadnavis should not be chief minister
adjectives, from astute politician to clever strategist to deal-maker and BJP was free to choose another leader. The second was that his
extraordinaire, etc. One writer noted candidly: “He flips loyalties daughter Supriya Sule should be made Union agriculture minister.
and calls it politics. The ethics of [his] politics remains anyone’s Both these conditions were unacceptable to the prime minister.
guess.” On this long road to earning the formidable superlatives, Modi, sources in NCP close to Pawar told Open, was not averse to
Sharad Pawar is reputed to have made friends out of enemies and Pawar joining the government with the big portfolio, but not his
broken up with more than one friend more than once, bargained daughter. He also told Pawar that there could be no compromise
hard, negotiated harder, and struck many tough deals. over Fadnavis who was already projected as the chief ministerial
It was not any different on the morning of November 20, candidate. But Modi was open to a wider discussion on the alliance
2019 when Sharad Pawar sought a meet- and soon, Home Minister Amit Shah
ing with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. joinedthemeeting.WhenPawarrepeat-
Parliament was in session. Pawar reached
the prime minister’s room on the ground REFERRING TO THE ed his conditions, the response was the
same as that of the prime minister. But
floor of Sansad Bhavan a little after 12 SITUATION HE FACED they agreed to get back to Pawar by the
noon. Before entering Parliament, Pawar IN 1980 WHEN HE WAS end of the day. In the evening, Anurag
told waiting reporters that the meeting LEFT WITH ONLY SIX Thakur, then minister of state (MoS) in
was in order to seek urgent intervention
by the Centre in the wake of “crop damage
MLA S , SHARAD PAWAR the finance ministry, was told to convey
to Pawar that both his demands were re-
and rising agrarian crisis in the state”. It POINTED OUT THAT HE jected by BJP.
was a time when there was uncertainty in BOUNCED RIGHT BACK. Sharad Pawar, who revised his auto-
Maharashtra over government formation BUT THAT WAS biography Lok Maze Sangati to add the
and talks were on between NCP, Congress 43 SUMMERS AGO. events of post-polls 2019, admitted that
and the Shiv Sena for an alliance.
After handing over a three-page memo- AND HE WAS IN HIS there were informal talks between him
and BJP leaders about an alliance. Not
randum on the distress of growers of soy- LATE THIRTIES unexpectedly, he chose to deliberately

GOVERNOR RAMESH BAIS AT RAJ BHAVAN IN MUMBAI, JULY 2, 2023

 COVER STORY

underplay the meeting and obfuscate details with “I told Mr Modi dent and prime minister should remain distinct.
that there could be no political truck between us.” Undeterred, he never let circumstances drag him down but
Pawar’s road to the top of the political pyramid wasn’t entirely embarked on new strategies to inveigle himself into a place clos-
smooth, unlike his clout with sugar cooperatives from Baramati to est to the balance of power, time and again. With only nine out of
Marathwada.Alotofhisreputationonthewayislitteredwithapoc- 32 contested seats in 2004, for instance, he managed to leverage his
ryphal stories, a mythical political prowess, and the stuff of legend. perceived towering strength, often bigger than the reality, and grab
Inallthedecadesofhispoliticallife,hewasmanytimeswithinclose key Cabinet posts for NCP in the first Manmohan Singh govern-
reach of the top job, but never able to grasp it. Pawar’s name would ment, to which the Left had lent unconditional support to keep out
crop up each time the issue of national president, party president, BJP. Of the portfolios, both agriculture and food were held by Pawar
prime minister, or any top executive or constitutional position, was himself and considered crucial to furthering the interests of his sup-
debated. Yet he never seemed to make the porters and votaries. He was forced to let
final cut until he became president of his go of the food and consumer affairs min-
ownparty.In1967,hejoinedCongress,left istry in the second United Progressive Al-
it in 1978, and then rejoined and left again PAWAR HAD A WISHLIST liance (UPA) government after a series of
in 1998. In 1999, he founded NCP after IN NOVEMBER 2019— goof-ups and alleged scams surrounding
nursing a grouse for having been pipped FADNAVIS SHOULD NOT food imports and high commodity prices
to the prime ministerial post in 1991 by
BE CHIEF MINISTER. at home. NCP managed to retain its nine

HIS DAUGHTER SHOULD

PV Narasimha Rao despite leading the
strongest contingent of MPs from Maha-
rashtra. In 1997, he was checkmated for
the post of Congress president by Sitaram
Kesri and, in 1998, again for the same post,
by Sonia Gandhi. That he did not endear
himself much to the top party leaders was
well known, especially after he publicly
asserted that the posts of Congress presi-
seats in 2009 but out of a bigger number
of seats (68) contested. Since then, the
BE MADE UNION tally has steadily fallen, with only six
AGRICULTURE MINISTER. seats won (four in Maharashtra) out of
BOTH THESE CONDITIONS 36 contested in 2014 and only five out of
WERE UNACCEPTABLE 36 (four in Maharashtra) in 2019. Despite
the innumerable misses, the NCP chief
TO PRIME MINISTER continued to be considered a strongman,
NARENDRA MODI an indefatigable defender of his own

SHARAD PAWAR WITH PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI IN PUNE, NOVEMBER 13, 2016

30 17 JULY 2023
image, a Chanakya ofrajneeti. As, no doubt, he continues to perceive
himself—a Houdini who could work his way out of complex and
contradictory situations with ease and astuteness.
Sinking the Vasantdada Patil government in 1978 by luring
away Govindrao Adik and Sushilkumar Shinde was not the only
event seen as a treacherous high point in Pawar’s career. In 1978,
Congress split into Congress-U and Congress-I. Pawar joined
Congress-U, following his mentor Yashwantrao Chavan, and
entered the Vasantdada Patil government, formed to keep out the
Janata Party, the single-largest at the time, as industry and labour
minister. But in July 1978, Pawar broke away from Congress-U to
form a coalition government with the Janata Party. At 38, he be-
came the youngest chief minister of Maharashtra. His Progressive
Democratic Front (PDF) government was
dismissed in February 1980, following GETTY IMAGES
2006 that he had misled people on the number of blasts by includ-
ing a Muslim-dominated locality in order to “keep the peace”.
This sort of opportunistic politics over the lives of ordinary citi-
zens killed in a gruesome terrorist attack did not go down well
with the public and exposed Pawar’s suspect ethics.
His stint as chief minister in 1993 witnessed the worst public
calling out of his “Pawar neeti”, leading ultimately to the ouster
of his government. Govind Ragho Khairnar, better known as
GRKhairnar,wasdeputycommissionerintheBrihanmumbaiMu-
nicipal Corporation (BMC) and known to be upright and fearless in
facing political bullying. That year, the civil servant took on Chief
Minister Pawar, accusing him of being both corrupt and unethical.
Khairnar’s public meetings were well attended and at times also

Indira Gandhi’s return to power.

Reviewing Pawar’s autobiography On
My Terms: From the Grassroots to the Cor-
ridors of Power, Suraj Yengde wrote scath-
ingly about the much-vaunted Pawar
neeti: “There is no political wisdom in the
gauntlet of this juggernaut’s life. Pawar
is unwilling to share the tardy nature of
his political ascendency or the untimely
decisions he made at the cost of Maha-
rashtra politics...” Pawar rejoined Con-
gress in 1987, apparently to strengthen the
Congress culture in the state. It was seen
by many as a key reason for the growth
of the Shiv Sena. In fact, even as the Dalit
Panther movement became powerful in
the Marathwada region to redress the ap-
palling conditions of Dalit communities,
Pawarwasperceivedasstymieingthemby
fuelling the growth of the non-Dalit com- SHARAD PAWAR WITH SONIA GANDHI IN MUMBAI, JUNE 30, 2009
munities by ‘surrogating’ the Shiv Sena.
He became chief minister of Maharashtra
again in March 1990 after Shankarrao Chavan was inducted as fi- disrupted by Pawar’s supporters. His reputation as a middle-class
nance minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s Union government. The 1990s hero grew rapidly but he was later brought to trial for alleged insub-
were a mixed bag for Pawar who, with the largest contingent of ordination and heavy-handedness but cleared of all charges. Before
Maharashtra MPs behind him, unsuccessfully laid claim to the hetookonPawar,KhairnarwasalsoatloggerheadswiththenChief
post of prime minister after Rajiv’s assassination, but the Congress Minister Vasantdada Patil in 1985 when, as ward officer, he demol-
Parliamentary Party (CPP) unanimously elected Narasimha Rao ished a hotel run by Chandrakant Patil, the chief minister’s son.
as prime minister. Pawar served as defence minister in the govern- Ironically, Pawar was instrumental in bringing down Patil’s earlier
ment until Rao despatched him back to his home state as chief 1978 government. In 1995, BJP and Shiv Sena backed Khairnar in
minister in 1993 after Sudhakarrao Naik stepped down, having the run-up to the elections and quashed Congress by supporting
failed to handle the Bombay riots. thecauseofthismiddle-classhero.Itwasonlyin1997thatKhairnar
On March 12, 1993, Mumbai (then still Bombay) was rocked won his case against BMC and, in 2000, he was finally reinstated as
by 12 explosions in different parts of the city. This series of blasts deputy commissioner. But his crusade against corruption stripped
left 250 dead and nearly 700 injured. According to some news re- the veneer of the ‘ethical politics’ Pawar was supposedly practising.
ports, the death toll was over 300 and the number of injured stood Pawar founded NCP in 1999. Today, NCP is 24 years old and
at 1,400. A day before the blasts, Chief Minister Sharad Pawar had its best performance was almost two decades ago. In the 2004
addressed a meeting of police inspectors and senior officers. But Assembly polls, it won 71 seats and nine out of 48 Lok Sabha
soon after that the blasts happened, and Pawar later admitted in seats. That was the party’s heyday. Since then, Pawar has been

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 31

 COVER STORY
SHARAD PAWAR (CENTRE) WITH BAL THACKERAY
AND GEORGE FERNANDES IN 1982
looking at his political prowess in the rearview mirror and rely-
ing on negotiations, deal-making and compromises, including
those of the moral kind, to shore up his reputation as the wizard
of vote-bank politics. His best-case scenarios have, for a while now,
rested on dreams of holding the balance of power in emerging
political situations. In comparison, Mamata Banerjee, who floated
her Trinamool Congress a year earlier in 1998, is now third-time
chief minister of West Bengal with 215 seats. Compared to NCP’s
snail-like progress under Pawar in Maharashtra, even the likes of
YS Jagan Mohan Reddy of the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) and
K Chandrashekar Rao of the now rechristened Bharat Rashtra
Samithi (BRS), in business for only about 10-15 years, command
more clout in all corners of their respective states.
With Supriya Sule and others no match for the likes of the
energetic and untiringly ambitious Jagan Mohan Reddy, the
Maratha strongman’s claim that he was readying to retire from
politics should have been easily accepted. But there are a signifi-
cant number of sceptics. Most trust that Pawar, the weathered
political warhorse, will lead his now bloodied party back to health
again instead of laying down arms.
By successfully taking Pawar, the man perceived as the one
with the most political heft, out of the equation in an already
struggling anti-Modi alliance, both in Maharashtra and for the
2024 General Election, a high rate of demoralisation has been
triggered within the opposition. Mamata Banerjee has already
32
announced that she will brook no alliances in her state and
demanded that parties like Congress make way for strong anti-
BJP parties in their home bases to give them the upper-hand.
Akhilesh Yadav is reluctant to part with anything but a handful
of seats in Uttar Pradesh. The Left and Congress are direct rivals
in Kerala where a hard battle for supremacy is on.
Political pundits backing the anti-Modi efforts have dismissed
the developments in Maharashtra as overhyped since NCP was
never a big party. Essentially, what happened in Mumbai would
likely stay in Mumbai and pan-India unity efforts of the anti-BJP
alliance would not suffer a body blow. Meanwhile, Pawar is put-
ting up a brave front and holding out. At his press conference, he
underplayed the recent developments. Referring to the situation
he faced in 1980 when he was left with only six MLAs including
himself, he pointed out that he bounced right back. But that was
43 summers ago. And Pawar was in his late thirties.
Abhishek Mukherjee describes Sadu Shinde as the man who
could never make it big at the top level but made his way indelibly
into the annals of Indian cricket in a completely different way. That
could be an apt description of Pawar himself, with some observ-
ers confessing admiration, if grudgingly, for his untiring skills at
political entrepreneurship and manoeuvring. It remains to be
seen if Sadu Shinde’s son-in-law will rise again, as he did all those
summers ago, and deliver that googly to knock out his opponents.
As of now, it seems unlikely. Q
17 JULY 2023
 COVER STORY
TOTAL POLITICS
AT PLAY
THE SPLITS IN NCP AND SHIV SENA
HAVE EXPANDED NDA AND HURT
THE OPPOSITION’S EFFORTS TO
PRESENT A UNITED CHALLENGE
TO NARENDRA MODI IN 2024
B y R A J E E V D E S H PA N D E
17 JULY 2023
PRIME MINISTER
NARENDRA MODI
AT THE INAUGURATION
OF DEVELOPMENT
PROJECTS IN ITANAGAR
IN THE RUN-UP TO THE 2019
GENERAL ELECTION
AFP
HEAD OF THE 2004 LOK SABHA
polls that the Bharatiya Janata Party
A
(BJP) lost, it had shared a short-lived
alliance with the late PA Sangma,
who had rebelled against Congress.
An articulate and resourceful leader,
Sangma was a well-known politician
who enjoyed a standing quite dispro-
portionate to the Tura Lok Sabha constituency in Meghalaya he
represented. His reputation was well earned and when he met
www.openthemagazine.com 33
 COVER STORY
then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, he presented an alli-
ance of several Northeast parties that could deliver a very handy
bunch of seats. As things turned out, the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) crashed in the polls and Sangma made up with
Congress, only briefly though. In 2013, he formed the National
People’s Party (NPP) and declared support for BJP and its prime
ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.
T HE NEW ALLIES BJP found in the Northeast did help
the party in the 2014 General Election but the shift-
ing sands of the region’s politics often meant alliances
could be easily made and remade. This time round, a cru-
cial development altered a predictable pattern: angered
by what he considered shabby treatment at the hands of
Rahul Gandhi, Assam Congress leader Himanta Biswa Sarma
joined BJP in 2015. The saffron party gained a strategic mind that
not only understood Sangma’s thinking but took it much farther.
The benefits of office no doubt remained the glue that held parties
together but BJP was no longer an also-ran. Modi’s appeal led to
significant gains in Assam and other states and gave BJP a new
heft and Sarma’s efforts, backed by Union Home Minister Amit
Shah, led to the formation of the North-East Democratic Alliance
(NEDA) the next year. The grouping proved surprisingly endur-
RAHUL GANDHI, MALLIKARJUN KHARGE, NITISH KUMAR, LALU PRASAD, MAMATA BANERJEE AND SHARAD PAWAR ADDRESS THE MEDIA
34
ing, gaining ground in all states in the region and even surviv-
ing shocks like the recent ethnic violence in Manipur. Given the
deeply fractious and cash-and-carry nature of politics, it was quite
remarkable that NEDA held on and the BJP-led NDA won elec-
tions, including state polls in Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya
earlier this year. Bit by bit, NEDA changed the way politics hap-
pened in the Northeast and seems now well set to win a majority
of the region’s 25 Lok Sabha seats.
The accretion in BJP’s political presence in the Northeast is part
of a steady addition of smaller parties in many states. BJP’s domi-
nance in Lok Sabha has prevented commentators from fully recog-
nisingNDA’sexpansionwhichhasalsooftenenoughbeenmarked
by the depletion of the opposition’s ranks. After dilly-dallying
with rival choices, Hindustani Awam Morcha leader Jitan Manjhi
recently rejoined NDA in Bihar, adding to BJP’s capacity to take on
the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Janata Dal-United, or JD(U),
combine that banks on a populous Muslim-Yadav combination
as its base vote. Efforts are on to bring both the Pashupati Paras and
Chirag Paswan factions of the Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party (RLJP)
under the NDA umbrella. Elsewhere in Haryana, Goa, Tamil Nadu,
Puducherry, Punjab and Jharkhand, there are small and some-
times splinter groups allied with BJP, improving its reach and in-
fluence. Even as BJP has sought to grow on its own accord in states
like Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Telangana, it has not lost sight
17 JULY 2023
 of the need to ensure numbers and political out, this may not have been enough.
support. The strategic blunders in 2004— THE ACCRETION IN The BJP-Shiv Sena (Shinde) govern-
when BJP broke with the Indian National BJP’S POLITICAL ment was plodding along but there
Lok Dal (INLD) in Haryana, the Asom Gana PRESENCE IN THE was a need for additional support
Parishad (AGP) in Assam and, most crucial- NORTHEAST IS PART OF as, despite the split in the Sena, the
ly, with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
(DMK) in Tamil Nadu—had resulted in
A STEADY ADDITION OF Uddhav Thackeray-NCP-Congress
combine could pose a stiff chal-
decisive reverses. The new BJP leadership SMALLER PARTIES IN lenge by strongly consolidating the
that took charge of the party in 2014 has not MANY STATES. BJP’S anti-BJP vote. The consequences of
forgotten the consequences of those ill-con- DOMINANCE IN LOK Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)
sidered decisions.
Maharashtra is an important part of BJP’s
SABHA HAS PREVENTED leader Sharad Pawar’s decision to
appoint daughter Supriya Sule as
Lok Sabha calculations, having won 41 of the COMMENTATORS FROM working president were not hard
state’s 48 seats in 2014 and 2019, an impres- FULLY RECOGNISING to predict and it remains a mystery
sive result on the back of 48 per cent and 50 NDA’S GROWTH why the veteran did not, or could
per cent votes. In 2019, the party was able to not, anticipate the turn of events.
sidestep the threat of ‘Maratha’ dissent over NCP leader Ajit Pawar’s decision to
the demand for a quota by inducting several leading politicians join NDA and split his party provides the ballast BJP was seeking
from the community. But in both the Lok Sabha polls, BJP and as it now hopes to make gains in the sugar belt of western Maha-
the Shiv Sena were partners, and this changed for good after the rashtra. At any rate, Ajit Pawar’s departure causes serious damage
2019 Assembly election (held after the Lok Sabha polls). The to Pawar in his own bastions and weakens MVA. NCP and Sharad
split in the Sena that led to the ouster of the Maha Vikas Aghadi Pawar were the muscle and brains driving MVA with Thackeray
(MVA) government was the first important step towards BJP re- chipping in as he still commands the loyalty of a section of Shiv
gaining pole position in the state. But, as party managers point Sainiks. Congress has been the weakest link and its claims that it

AFTER A MEETING OF OPPOSITION PARTIES IN PATNA, JUNE 23, 2023

GETTY IMAGES

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 35

 COVER STORY
will step up to the job of being the main opposition lack convic-
tion and unlikely to inspire its own rank and file.
The support of the Sena and NCP factions has expanded NDA
at about the right time. BJP leader and Maharashtra Deputy
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is seen as the hand behind
both developments, revealing a subtle political mind with,
ironically enough, comparisons drawn to the political dexterity
Sharad Pawar has displayed in the past. Fadnavis has aggres-
sively targeted rivals, breaking an unwritten rule between par-
ties and leaders that certain constituencies and ‘interests’ were
out of bounds. His approach closely reflects the ‘Total Politics’
that Modi and Shah have practised since they assumed charge
of BJP. This mantra adds to a strong advocacy of Hindu cultural
ANGERED BY SHABBY TREATMENT
AT THE HANDS OF RAHUL GANDHI,
HIMANTA BISWA SARMA JOINED
BJP IN 2015. MODI’S APPEAL LED
TO SIGNIFICANT GAINS IN ASSAM
AND OTHER STATES AND
GAVE BJP A NEW HEFT
identity, a big role for the state in directing economic policy, and
implementing welfare programmes and specific outreaches to
farmers, the rural and urban poor and artisanal communities.
The welfare schemes are universal in their reach but touch key
political constituencies like the Other Backward Classes (OBC)
and the poor more generally. Alongside such governance mea-
sures is an enhanced use of technology to increase transparency
in government functioning and an anti-corruption campaign
that a large section of the opposition says is selective but which
the Modi government insists is a war against graft in high plac-
es. Again, it has often been the case that rivals did not pursue
cases against one another beyond a point but that ‘consensus’
is pretty much broken now. The strategy carries a risk—loss of
office could bring a vindictive rival to power who would seek
36
vengeance irrespective of whether a case has any merit or not.
M ODI HAS INDICATED that the mantra is not likely to change
even after BJP’s defeat in Karnataka, barring a tweak or two.
Rather, he has doubled down on accelerating development work
and will shortly be on a tour of four states to inaugurate or lay the
foundations of 50 projects worth `50 crore. He has iterated the
need for “saturation” coverage of ongoing schemes relating to
financial inclusion, housing and health access, signalling that he
may concentrate on delivery rather than newer schemes. Modi
contrasts this political-governance approach to the opposition’s
unity efforts which he characterises as a cabal of the corrupt and
dynasts. The splits in the Sena and NCP do raise the question of
morality but politics is very much the art of the possible. When
MVA was in office it was clearly focused on preparing for the next
election. The weaknesses of the Thackeray and Pawar clans led to
revolts in their parties and BJP was not going to be a disinterested
bystander. The opposition meltdown allows NDA to claim an at-
tribute that was once a Congress monopoly—that it alone could
run governments. The bounce in the opposition camp after voters
dumped BJP in Karnataka is proving to be short-lived. Apart from
splits and desertions, cases are piling up.
The latest Directorate of Enforcement (ED) chargesheet
in the 2004-05 railway jobs for land scam has named Bihar
Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, RJD patriarch Lalu Prasad
and his wife Rabri Devi, rattling the coalition that JD(U) leader
and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar leads. Regional parties
have presented stronger resistance to BJP than Congress which
has lost most of its direct contests with NDA. Congress leader
Rahul Gandhi has sought to shake off the losing tag through
contact programmes like the Bharat Jodo Yatra but his theme
largely centres on the charge that the Sangh Parivar has
‘captured’ institutions and that neither the judiciary nor the
Election Commission acts in a free and fair manner. The nar-
rative of Indian democracy in terminal decline greatly pleases
the anti-BJP commentariat but the constituency, endorsed by
sections of the media (including Western media), has not gained
significant adherents. State Congress leaders in Karnataka studi-
ously avoided issues raised by Rahul (such as the Adani shares
controversy) and the leader himself had a minor role to play in
the campaign. The Karnataka Congress chose instead to bank
on populist promises and BJP’s governance deficits. In a national
election, the focus will once again swing back to Rahul and if
the Congress media machinery’s articulation is any indication,
there is no change or rethink. Indeed, the June 23 meeting of
opposition leaders in Patna was underwhelming considering
that Lalu’s ‘advice’ to Rahul to trim his beard and get married
made it to the headlines.
The war of narratives includes building alliances but does not
stop at that. The prime minister’s advocacy of a Uniform Civil
Code (UCC) can strike a strong chord with voters. In the weeks
following the Law Commission’s invitation of suggestions on
UCC, BJP took note of the feedback from various segments that
17 JULY 2023
 UNION HOME MINISTER AMIT SHAH AT A RALLY
IN TELANGANA, APRIL 23, 2023

suggested the issue had an immediate
resonance. Modi’s comments on UCC
mark the start of the debate that will
intensify in the months ahead, further
sharpening the difference between BJP
and its opponents. UCC bill is expected
to be introduced in Parliament and will
MODI’S ADVOCACY OF The construction of a Ram Mandir in
A UNIFORM CIVIL CODE Ayodhya will feature as a major achieve-
ment when the 2024 campaign begins.
CAN STRIKE A CHORD Taken in their totality, the rapid re-
WITH VOTERS. AFTER alignments in the opposition and BJP’s
THE LAW COMMISSION’S hard sell of its agenda and achievements
INVITATION OF are shaping the discussion in the run-up

SUGGESTIONS, BJP
likely be sent to a parliamentary com- the General Election. State polls at the
mittee for examination. It is unclear end of the year will no doubt be read as an
whether any legislation can be passed TOOK NOTE OF THE indication of the popular mood but, here
before the next Lok Sabha polls but the FEEDBACK THAT again, BJP will hope that recent events
government will almost certainly try to SHOWED THE ISSUE can sway doubters and fence-sitters as
do so. Even if the process is not complete,
UCC will find pride of place in the BJP
HAD AN IMMEDIATE also counter local discontents and com-
mon grouses, such as inflation. With the
election manifesto. With Article 370 and RESONANCE monsoon defying gloomy predictions re-
the Ram Mandir pledges out of the way, lating to the El Niño phenomenon, the
UCC is the last of BJP’s and its progenitor Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s rural economy should remain buoyant, or at least not experience
‘core agenda’. Till as recently as 2014, when these issues found a the distress associated with deficient rainfall. The government
brief mention in BJP’s election manifesto, it was argued that the may consider measures to ease prices and healthy revenues
party had reduced its ideological agenda to a passing reference. provide the opportunity to do so. Q

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 37

 POLITICS

A VERY SPEC
IS VK PANDIAN THE SECOND MOST IMP

I
By AMITA SHAH

N EARLY MAY, as a cyclonic storm passed over the

Bay of Bengal, three men, all in white, met over a simple
and traditional lunch in Bhubaneswar. The host was
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and the guest, his
Bihar counterpart Nitish Kumar. The third man, over
20 years younger than the two septuagenarians, was
V Karthikeyan Pandian, Patnaik’s private secretary,
his importance underscored by the fact that even
Lalan Singh, the national president of Janata Dal (United), or JD(U),
who had accompanied Kumar from Patna, was not at the table.
Kumar, who was anchoring a meeting of opposition parties, was
hoping to get the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) leader on board. Though the
meeting between the two, both former Cabinet colleagues in the
Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, went off cordially, Patnaik, accord-
ing to JD(U) sources, politely turned down the proposal saying the
timing for it was not right. The two leaders are understood to have
talkedabouttheirdaysintheBharatiyaJanataParty(BJP)-ledNational
DemocraticAlliance(NDA),asPatnaiksatattheheadofthetablewith
Kumar to his left and Pandian to the right.
Pandian’s presence may have been unexpected for the high-
level delegation from Bihar, but not in the power circles of Odisha,
where he is acknowledged as Patnaik’s most trusted lieutenant.
The chief minister’s right-hand man, the Indian Administrative
Service (IAS) officer is in the line of fire of political rivals—BJP and
Congress—in the state, over various allegations, which they say
amount to crossing the red line as a civil servant. Two bureaucrats-
turned-politicians—BJP MP Aparajita Sarangi and Congress leader
Bijay Patnaik—are in the forefront of the opposition attack against
Pandian. Sarangi, along with BJP state chief Manmohan Samal,
lodged a complaint with the Department of Personnel and Train-
ing (DoPT) on June 24, saying Pandian was using state helicopters,
attending public receptions and announcing new projects in
violation of the All India Services (Conduct), or AIS, rules. Patnaik
also alleged violation of AIS norms, saying Pandian has appeared
on hoardings bearing the BJD symbol and was making public
announcements of grants to various institutions.
What triggered the recent attacks was Pandian hitting the road,
touring various districts of the state, mingling with the crowds, shak-
ing hands, being warmly greeted by people, particularly women who
form a large chunk of Patnaik’s support base, listening to grievances
and collecting petitions. Characteristically dressed in a white shirt, AFTER BJD RETURNED TO POWER
he is no stranger in Odisha where he is seen as the emissary of the BEING PRIVATE SECRETARY TO THE
longest-serving chief minister in the country. IAS OFFICER. HE HAD THE CHIEF
38
IAL OFFICER
ORTANT PUBLIC FIGURE IN ODISHA?

VK Pandian with
Odisha Chief Minister
Naveen Patnaik on the
Jagannath Heritage
Corridor

IN ODISHA IN 2019, VK PANDIAN WAS APPOINTED SECRETARY 5T, ALONG WITH

CHIEF MINISTER. BY THEN IT WAS NO SECRET THAT PANDIAN WAS NOT JUST ANY
MINISTER’S EAR, IN A WAY NO BUREAUCRAT IN THE STATE EVER HAD
www.openthemagazine.com 39
 POLITICS

BJD dismisses the opposition allegations. According to party

leader Pinaki Misra, when the chief minister decided to revive and
give a push to the grievance redress mechanism which had to be
discontinued during Covid, Pandian, as part of the Chief Minister’s
‘‘
Those who say Pandian is dictating
party affairs are underestimating the
Office (CMO), started a tour of the districts, along with three-four chief minister’s grip on politics
other officials, asking people whether they were benefitting from and his political and
Patnaik’s pet flagship projects. So far, he has visited around 15 dis-
tricts and collected thousands of grievance petitions. Since Patnaik intellectual brilliance,
didnotusetheofficialaccommodationgiventohimandlivedinhis which also shows how
own house, he converted that building into a grievance redress cell. well he disguises it”
“Ordinarily,collectorsholdmeetingsatthedistrictlevelonaregular
basis. This is just an extension of that. As the chief minister’s private PINAKI MISRA BJD leader
secretary, Pandian has been told by the chief minister to go out and
gather [information on] public grievances from all 30 districts and
get back to him. It is a quicker way of addressing the complaints Patnaik’s swearing-in as chief minister for a fifth consecu-
than via collectors. Word goes out that there will be, and indeed tive term on May 29, 2019, which incidentally coincided
has been, instant redress. This is what has raised the hackles of the with Pandian’s 45th birthday, the latter reportedly changed
opposition. He is not saying vote for BJD or for Naveen Patnaik.” his number, becoming inaccessible to many people. He has
changed his number often even after that, say party sources.

B
After BJD returned to power in Odisha, Pandian was ap-
JD’S RIVALS SAY Pandian is flouting bureaucratic pointed secretary 5T (Transparency, Teamwork, Technol-
norms, crossing into the domain of politics. It is said that ogy, Time and Transformation), along with being private
Pandian had a say on strategy, candidates and campaign secretary to the chief minister. By then it was no secret that
in the run-up to the 2019 General Election, though many familiar Pandian was not just any IAS officer. He had the chief minister’s
with developments in the party insist it is Patnaik who takes the ear, in a way no bureaucrat in the state may have had.
call. It was Pandian through whom the press could get interviews A minister in the Patnaik government recently referred to
with the chief minister. He was as elusive on social media or phone Pandian as “Sir” while defending him against opposition charges,
as Patnaik was in person. The only way of getting through to saying he was just reviewing projects on directions of the chief
Pandian was on the messaging service Telegram. Soon after minister. The honorific did not go unnoticed. His clout in the chief
minister’s office, making him
one of the most powerful bu-
reaucrats, is believed to have
caused heartburn even within
certain sections of BJD. But all
agree on one of his traits—he
delivers, and fast. A Tamilian
who speaks Odiya, the 49-year-
old wakes up before the sun
rises and goes for an 8-10 km
run at the Kalinga Stadium
which was spruced up in 90
days when the state accepted
the challenge to organise the
2017 Asian Athletics Champi-
onships. Pandian was behind
the push to get recognition
for the state, which hosted
the Men’s Hockey World Cup
Bihar Chief Minister
Nitish Kumar (left), 2018 and 2023, as a sports
Naveen Patnaik destination. A workaholic,
and VK Pandian at teetotaller and sparse vegetar-
Patnaik’s residence ian eater, he often has Vishnu
in Bhubaneswar,
May 2023 Sahasranama, mostly sung by
MS Subbulakshmi, playing in

40 17 JULY 2023
the background. Senior party leaders have routinely got messages
from him at 4AM. That is when his day begins. “Sharp, efficient and
hard-working,” is how party insiders and political analysts in the
state describe Pandian.
“It’s unconstitutional for a serving civil servant to be openly
involved in politics, collecting political funds, distributing
tickets and holding public rallies. This is an untenable situ-
ation and must not be allowed to continue,” says BJP leader
Jay Panda, who quit BJD in 2018. A founding member of BJD, Panda
was close to Patnaik and the two frequently had dinner together.
But around 2017, a chasm started widening between them. After
he was suspended from the primary membership of the party for
“anti-party” activities and “conflict of interest” in January 2018,
Panda blamed it on a conspiracy by Pandian. The party MP from
Kendrapara resigned after Patnaik and other BJD leaders skipped
the last rites for Panda’s father Bansidhar Panda, an industrialist
who was close to Biju Patnaik, saying that was the “last straw”.
Pandian is not the first bureaucrat to have gained the trust of
a chief minister. When Nitish Kumar became chief minister in
2005, he made IAS officer Ram Chandra Prasad Singh, known as
RCP Singh, his principal secretary. Kumar had got acquainted
with Singh in the late 1990s when he was railway minister and
Singh, an Uttar Pradesh cadre officer, was on Central deputation.
In 2010, Singh took voluntary retirement from the civil services
to join JD(U) and got a Rajya Sabha seat. He went on to become
national president of the party and got a berth in the Union Cabi-
net in 2021. Unlike Pandian, who is not an Odiya, Singh was from
Bihar and that too from Nalanda, Kumar’s home turf. Pandian
caught Patnaik’s attention as the collector of Ganjam, the Odisha
chief minister’s constituency. He was brought to the state capital
in 2011 and ever since there has been no looking back. Before him,
Patnaik had turned to Pyarimohan Mohapatra, a bureaucrat-
turned-politician who was his father Biju Patnaik’s principal
secretary, for advice. Mohapatra had his nose to the ground, un-
derstood the state, and remembered names of people and places.
Naveen Patnaik’s dependence on Mohapatra, whom he referred
to as “uncle”, had caused resentment among some within BJD.
Mohapatra came to be seen as ‘Chanakya’ in the state’s politics
but things started souring between the two from 2009. In 2012,
after Patnaik heard of Mohapatra’s unsuccessful coup attempt
‘‘
It’s unconstitutional for a serving
civil servant to be openly involved
in politics, collecting political
funds, distributing tickets and
holding public rallies. This is
an untenable situation and
must not be allowed
to continue”
JAY PANDA BJP leader
17 JULY 2023
when he was abroad, he was suspended from the party. By then,
Pandian was already by Patnaik’s side.
“Those who say Pandian is dictating party affairs are underesti-
mating the chief minister’s grip on politics and his political and in-
tellectual brilliance, which also shows how well he disguises it. He
has this inverse snobbery. People do not realise the extent to which
he has his finger on the pulse in each of the 147 Assembly constitu-
encies. He does not show it, but he is aware of the merits and demer-
its of each party aspirant,” says Misra, who is a four-term Lok Sabha
MP from Puri. Pandian has more than one office in Bhubaneswar,
his 5T designation giving him access to several departments, but
not one at Sankha Bhavan, the new party headquarters, he quips.
M
ISRA DISCARDS AS mere speculation that Pandian
or his wife—Odiya bureaucrat Sujata Karthikeyan
Pandian who heads Mission Shakti, an endeavour to
empower women economically through the promotion of self-
help groups—has political aspirations, saying their only loyalty
is to the chief minister and to ensure he wins a record sixth term.
The chief minister’s initiative launched in 2001, Mission Shakti has
been elevated to the status of a department.
A former BJD leader also dismisses speculation about
Pandian intending to make a foray into politics, in a party in
which so far a second-rung leader has not emerged, saying it
was unlikely that he had political ambitions beyond ensuring
that Patnaik remained in power. BJD’s strategies, policies, flag-
ship schemes addressing basic needs, promotion of sport, wom-
en’s empowerment, and revamping of temples have retained
Patnaik’s popularity, posing a challenge to BJP. BJP has, how-
ever, managed to wrest the main opposition space from Con-
gress, winning eight of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 and
even increasing its vote share. But BJD’s landslide victory
in the zilla parishad elections has only bolstered the party’s
confidence. Political analysts say it is difficult to pinpoint
which of the state government’s decisions was initiated by
Patnaik and which was Pandian’s brainchild.
Many policies were picked up from other states, refined and
tailor-made for the needs of Odisha, says Misra. “Pandian and
his CMO team understood the ecosystem Naveenbabu likes
to function in. To coexist with someone as sharp as him for 12
years requires bright minds.” In his view, since any attack on
the chief minister, who also has a good personal equation with
PrimeMinisterNarendraModi,backfirespolitically,theopposition
has started gunning for Pandian.
According to political analyst Rabi Das, since the chief minis-
ter, at 76, is unable to go everywhere, he sends the man he trusts
most. “Pandian has been given the mandate by the chief minister.
I have never see this kind of trust, but once this bureaucrat says
some work will be done, it will be done. He delivers.”
While the opposition wields him as a weapon against BJD,
Pandian is busy touring various districts, meeting people and
collecting information about people’s grievances, on the direc-
tions of the chief minister who is preparing for the 2024 polls. Q
www.openthemagazine.com 41
TECHNOLOGY

BLUE CH
Illustration by SAURABH SINGH

With the US and China engaged in a trade war over

India is stepping up to take a slice of the global
 By ULLEKH NP

IP
A
R EMARKABLE EXTRACT FROM
Chris Miller’s book Chip War: The Fight for
the World’s Most Critical Technology captures
the incredibly complex world of semicon-
ductors in the size of a paragraph: “Chips
from Taiwan provide 37 percent of the
world’s new computing power each year.
Two Korean companies produce 44 percent
of the world’s memory chips. The Dutch
company ASML builds 100 percent of the world’s extreme ultra-
violet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips
are simply impossible to make. OPEC’s 40 percent share in world
oil production looks unimpressive by comparison.” Such chips are
then sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.
Speaking to Open, Miller, however, talks of countries that will
become bigger players in the semiconductor sweepstakes, and one
of the two countries this Fletcher University academic is betting
big on is India. “I am bullish about India’s prospects in the field,” he
asserts in an interview.
Not everyone is as excited as Miller about the Indian play in the
world of chips. In fact, recent commentaries following the federal
government’s reopening of the window several weeks ago to invite
fresh applications for its ambitious `76,000 crore incentives scheme
for setting up “fabs”, or microchip manufacturing plants, are wor-
thy of note. An analysis was quick to announce the “floundering” of
India’s chipmaking plans. While the Indian government called such
pronouncements a knee-jerk reaction from certain quarters that do
not want to see India’s progress in the sector, the new window had to
be opened from June 1—which will remain open until December
2024—after the three proposals the government had received ran
into rough weather, meaning they failed to either measure up to the
daunting task or could not find technology partners with the expertise
to make chips of the required size. The government opened a window
for applying to this production-linked incentive scheme (PLIS) first
in January 2022 and closed it within 45 days.
The Vedanta-Foxconn joint venture, which had applied for a
28-nanometre fab, couldn’t seal a deal with companies that could make
them.AnotherproposalbyISMC,whichwasbackedbytheAbuDhabi-
based Next Orbit and Israel’s Tower Semiconductor, had to back off in
thewakeofapendingmergerbetweenIntelandTowerSemiconductor.
The third proposal by Singapore’s IGSS Venture did not make the cut.
Even so, a survey of experts and government officials shows that
Miller’s enthusiasm is contagious and that India possesses many
strengths to forge ahead in the chipmaking business. Contrary to pes-
simistic noises from a small section of pundits, the country appears
to have pluses that far outweigh the minuses, experts affirm. India

semiconductors, expects its semiconductor market to be worth $63 billion by 2026.

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology
business Rajeev Chandrasekhar brushes aside the perception created around
the “reopening” of bids. Chandrashekhar tells Open, “There are no
bids. Unfortunately, after the policy was announced, a window for

www.openthemagazine.com 43
 TECHNOLOGY

applications was kept open only for 45 days for fab proposals.
Subsequently, changes were made in policy to also encourage
legacy node fabs, and opening of the window is to also encourage
proposals in line with this modified policy.”
He goes on to add, “It is true that there are limited companies
with access to critical manufacturing tech for silicon fabs, and
that many countries are pursuing them. But India represents a
very different and strategic opportunity for them and I am confi-
dent that we will see investments and tech transfers soon.”
Most experts in trade and chipmaking aver that the govern-
ment was right in its response to the situation that emerged
from last year’s applications. Ajay Srivastava, former additional
director-general, foreign trade, Government of India, who is also
the founder of the economic thinktank Global Trade Research
Initiative, points out, “We need to do course correction all the
time. This shows the government is wide awake.” The new win-
dow also means that current contenders can update and resubmit
their plans for chips of various sizes.
India’s biggest advantage is the domestic market which
otherwise depends on fragile supply chains amidst growing de-
mand for vehicles and consumer durables in a robust economy.
A McKinsey article titled ‘Coping with the auto-semiconduc-
tor shortage: Strategies for success’ had as early as 2021 given
enough and more indications of where maximum demand for
chips will come from within the country—catering to those seg-
ments will mean hitting the jackpot by meeting specific needs of
specific industries. “Industry demand for semiconductors varies
by node size. Chips in the smaller size ranges … are often used
in leading-edge technology applications but aren’t required by
many automakers. Our analysis reveals several knock-on effects
of large-scale technology adoption that the auto industry must
consider. For example, an expansive 5G rollout requires a large
number of radio-frequency semiconductors manufactured at
the same, larger node sizes as auto chips. The same is true for
power-electronic chips needed to boot up servers and PCs…”, the
paper had said. In the wake of supply chains whipsawed by the

“It is true that there are limited companies with access to critical manufacturing
tech for silicon fabs. But India represents a very different and strategic
opportunity for them and I am confident that we will see investments
and tech transfers soon” RAJEEV CHANDRASEKHAR MoS, electronics and IT

REUTERS

44 17 JULY 2023
pandemic and not yet back to normal, Easwaran Subramanian,
partner, consulting, Deloitte India, subscribes to the view that
Indian chipmakers will click if they make semiconductors fo-
cused on these two segments that offer a loyal, regional market
for them. Subramanian leads the supply chain and network
operations practice for the firm in India.
Such captive markets are not the sole attraction for pro-
spective India-based players in chipmaking. Malaysia-based
Jan Thomas Nicholas, executive director at Deloitte who had
co-authored a report not long ago on the Indian semiconductor
business, tells Open that he is glad that India has implemented
significant incentives and outreach to foreign companies to es-
tablish a stronger presence in India. “We’ve seen multiple an-
nouncements of FDI since that report was written,” he says.
Nicholas feels that one key factor that India should focus on is
the development of the local domestic supply base for semicon-
ductor manufacturers. “Established hubs such as Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore, Malaysia, and Mainland China have had time to de-
velop a robust local supplier network, on which the chip factories
depend for materials, equipment, consumables, and services.
New entrants will need to build this network from the ground up,
which will take time and hard work to become a mature ecosys-
tem,” he explains, emphasising that the semiconductor industry
is limited by talent, and it is very difficult to develop local talent
without a local industry hub.
H
E GOES ON: “Countries that want to grow a domestic
semiconductor industry will need to acquire these skills
from other countries, because educating and training the
engineers will take too long.” India has its pluses on that count,
he says. “India has many capable and highly educated citizens in
Silicon Valley and elsewhere that it can use to accelerate skill de-
velopment at home.” Nicholas’ report said that India has “strong
design and engineering talent, though it lacks domestic chip-
manufacturing capabilities”.
Amidst such observations, the call to tap its market before
heading to other regions where bigger players dominate is only
getting louder. A senior Delhi-based government official well-
versed in technology says that it is always prudent as well as
commonsensical to make chips that will have a steady stream of
takers within India and other developing countries constrained
by supply chain woes. “Again, with most big players focusing on
microchips, for example, that are of 2nm and so on, India will
therefore be able to get its base for slightly bigger chips and then,
after having established itself, compete with bigger players that
entered the market much earlier,” he says, requesting anonymity
since he is not authorised to speak to the media.
India had, in fact, thought about the importance of semi-
conductors much earlier than most others, including Taiwan,
as early as 1983, when the country set up the Semiconductor
Laboratory in Mohali.
And then what happened? How did we miss the mega op-
portunity that Taiwan and others tapped? “We lost track in the
17 JULY 2023
1990s. Not only in semiconductors but in all manufacturing. We
were busy opening up the economy and ignored building it up.
China zoomed ahead of us during this time. In short, we acted
stupid,” rues Srivastava of Global Trade Research Initiative. He is
impressed that work is in progress to put things on track lately.
To the question if he is uneasy about the slow pace with which
Vedanta-Foxconn Semiconductors is progressing, David Reed,
CEO of the joint venture, tells Open that he welcomes the govern-
ment’s decision to reopen applications under a modified policy.
“It requires multiple fabs for the country’s electronics ecosys-
tem to develop. We are aligned with India’s vision of becoming
a global high-tech manufacturing hub and we are on course to
establish our semiconductor fab in the country.”
Vedanta-Foxconn Semiconductors has signed an MoU with
the Government of Gujarat and are putting in place a team
comprising the best global talent in the semiconductor manu-
facturing sector, Reed added. “We have made several strategic
leadership appointments for our semiconductors business,
including Lawrence Wong Chee Yoong as senior director, hu-
man resources, Terry Daly as advisor, and Mike Young as senior
vice-president for the project management office and manufac-
turing operations. We have a strong pipeline of global talent
coming to India and working with us to ensure the success of
our venture,” Reed says.
On the challenges and opportunities in chipmaking in India
in a segment where the country is a late entrant, he notes, “There
is a huge opportunity for India to ramp up its share in the global
semiconductor ecosystem. India already has a strong technol-
ogy foundation with a well-established design ecosystem and an
impressive track record in its IT/ITeS industry. What is missing
is the engine—that is a semiconductor fab.”
He also agrees that the key to India’s success in the chip-
making business will be local demand. “India has a growing
population with a burgeoning demand for consumer goods
and electronics that is currently being fulfilled largely through
imports. The import of electronic goods was of the order of $51.5
billion in 2017-18, which went up to $73.5 billion in 2022-23. A
high-tech manufacturing ecosystem would significantly reduce
these dependencies and allow India to become a net electronics
exporter once the ecosystem fully matures,” Reed says, in agree-
ment with the argument that it is best to focus on strengths before
tackling bigger challenges like taking on the high and mighty in
semiconductors.
The semiconductor business is beset with endless traps. From
ensuring availability of ultra-pure water (which has to be a thou-
sand times purer than drinking water) to competition from exist-
ing and deeply entrenched players and the constant fear of new
technologies becoming obsolete at a fast clip—not to mention
grand incentives to chipmakers that rich nations such as US dole
out—the challenges here are such that even the best battle cut-
throat competition to be ahead of the game. A season of anaemic
sales can be disastrous for even established players. It is to such a
landscape that India is making an entry with the hope of staying
afloat in the long haul.
www.openthemagazine.com 45
 TECHNOLOGY

Reed is also of the view that of tech,” the minister says.

one of the biggest challenges is the Chandrasekhar had earlier said
gestation period for the ecosystem that the likes of TSMC, Samsung,
to develop. Once the government and Intel will have to set up bases
approvals are in place, it will still in India. “Our market expansion,
require time and commitment for our emergence as a trusted partner
the Indian ecosystem to catch up in global electronics supply chains,
to countries with legacy semicon- our growing semiconductor talent
ductor capabilities, he says, add- base, momentum in semiconductor
ing that the time to start has never “India already has design, innovation, and research all
been more ripe, and India can lead a strong technology make India under Prime Minister
the charge even as other economies foundation with a Narendra Modi a strong partner for
join the race for developing these global leaders in tech and electron-
capabilities. Like many others, in-
well-established design ics and semiconductor,” the minis-
cluding those in the government, he ecosystem and an ter adds in the interview with Open.
also feels that India offers strategic impressive track record Chandrasekhar also tweeted on June
advantages for even big chipmakers. in its IT/ITeS industry. 23 that Modi’s US visit will act as a cata-
“Electronics permeates all sectors of What is missing is lyst for the chipmaking sector in India.
the economy, and the electronics in- He was referring to announcements
dustry has cross-cutting economic
the engine—that is a made during the prime minister’s
and strategic importance. Currently semiconductor fab” tour of the US by Micron Technology,
valued at around $2 trillion [`150 DAVID REED CEO, Vedanta-Foxconn Applied Materials and Lam Research
lakh crore], the global electronics Semiconductors that they will invest in the country’s
market is expected to grow signifi- semiconductor business. He termed
cantly given the increasing penetra- their commitment as a “significant
tion of emerging technologies,” he and meaningful milestone” and “cen-
opines, referring to 5G, the internet tral piece” in the growth of India’s
of things, AI, robotics, smart mobil- semiconductor ecosystem.
ity, smart manufacturing and others. Although Indo-pessimism is in
Like author Chris Miller, Reed the air, especially when it comes to
is upbeat about India. “Given the manufacturing, experts the world
dominant tide of India in the global over insist that the country is expect-
economy, it offers not only an exten- ed to gain massively in the chip war
sive domestic consumption market between the US and China, which
but also an alternative gateway to “Foxconn assembles is also a war for global hegemony.
Asian and global markets. India’s As Miller puts it, if Beijing succeeds
strong geopolitical standing and its most of its Apple in developing its own semiconduc-
diplomatic relations with several products in China, but it tor technology to free itself from
countries of strategic importance builds some in Vietnam America’s “chip-choke”, “China will
make it a lucrative base for building and India, too. I am remake the global economy and re-
manufacturing and supply chains,” set the balance of military power.”
he elaborates.
bullish about India’s Miller reminds us that while World
But Ajay Srivastava cautions, prospects in the field” War II was decided by steel and
“India has to sharpen its strategy to CHRIS MILLER author aluminium, the Cold War defined
benefit substantially and not be hap- by atomic weapons, the rivalry be-
py merely with assembling simple tween the US and China may well
components.” be determined by computing power.
Meanwhile, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, himself a former chip- Until that happens, India has a glaring opportunity to seize
maker and a technologist, sees the growth of India’s semicon- the moment. Even the most sceptical among technology ex-
ductor market exceeding expectations and outperforming all perts and forecasters see immense sense in India making big-
other comparable countries. “The demand for a new generation ger chips for local industries that face the onslaught of global
of computers and devices to power computers; automotive/in- supply chains to start with. “That is the way to strike gold,” says
dustrial, and wireless [segments] is relentlessly on the rise and an official. Accept the limitations and then go beyond them,
India can be at the centre of it as both a market and as a producer he advises. Q

46 17 JULY 2023
 BUSINESS

SECOND COMING
From Louis Vuitton bags to auctioned Air Force 1 sneakers,
Indians are embracing the market for pre-owned luxury

By LHENDUP G BHUTIA

I
T WAS ABOUT three years ago, right
in the midst of the pandemic, that
Kimaya Banga opened her cupboard
Punit Anand (left),
founder of Luxury Pop,
and began counting the number of
and model-designer designer handbags she owned. “I was
Gabriella Demetriades overwhelmed,” the 32-year-old corporate
banker in Mumbai says. “There were 52
of them. I thought I must do something
about it.” So, Banga, who has been col-
lecting handbags from leading fashion
houses like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and
Dior ever since she got her first designer
one at 18, did what she had anyway begun
to do in smaller numbers for a few years
now. She put up half of them for sale.
So, how many handbags does she own
now? “I don’t count anymore,” she says. “I
must have over 50 of them again.”
Banga may have begun acquiring
luxury products like designer handbags
and shoes from retail outlets, especially in
her travels abroad, but she rarely ever buys
them from stores anymore. For her, like for
a growing number of Indian shoppers of
such luxury goods, purchases come with
an unusual provenance—a past owner.
“It is preowned. Who cares?” she says.
“These are high-end handbags. So, they are

Celebrity closets,
when they become
available, are one
of the most popular
sections in the
resale scene”
PUNIT ANAND
founder, Luxury Pop

www.openthemagazine.com 47
 BUSINESS

obviously well-taken care of. Thier previ-
ous owners probably used them a couple
of times or so.” Banga, who now buys
about one or two second-hand designer
handbags every month, apart from shoes
and accessories like belts and wallets, be-
fore selling them once she tires of them
so she can move on to her next purchase,
points out that out of the 50 or so hand-
bags in her wardrobe, just about seven
or eight have been picked up first-hand.
“You get bored very soon now,” she says.
“Earlier trends changed every season or so.
Now, it changes like every three months.”
The market for luxury goods has been
luxury products. There have been few at-
tempts to gauge the depth of the second-
hand luxury market in India. But accord-
ing to a recent report by the International
Market Analysis Research and Consult-
ing Group, the second-hand luxury goods
market in India reached $555 million last
year. By 2028, the report estimates, this
will be worth $1,060.8 million. People like
Banga are scouring the internet, turning
up at pop-up events and checking out
the outlets and websites of what is called
recommerce brands, looking to pick up
high-end designer handbags, clothes,
and accessories, sometimes in mint con-

Varun Ramani
and Ashri Jaiswal,
cofounders
of Ziniosa

Millennials
and Gen Z
prefer to
rent and
re-wear rather
than buy
something
new today”
ASHRI JAISWAL
cofounder, Ziniosa

Photograph by RAUL IRANI

growing rapidly in India. Considered to be
one of the fastest growing markets in glob-
al luxury today, a report by Euromonitor
International estimates that the luxury
market, which includes goods like high-
end fashion products, apart from things
like luxury cars and wines, is estimated to
be worth about $8.5 billion by this year.
Another report, by Bain & Co, claims this
market will grow to be worth over $200
billion by 2030.
Parallel to this growth, has been an
equally large growth in the until recently
non-existent market of second-hand
dition and sometimes with a bit of wear
and tear, on the cheap. “The whole scene
for preowned luxury has just exploded
in India,” says Punit Anand, the Mumbai-
based founder of Luxury Pop which sells
second-hand luxury goods.
It should come as no surprise that there
is value in second-hand luxury products,
given how much they cost in the retail
outlets. But in class-conscious societies
like India, there has historically been an
aversion to anything second-hand. You
sell something from your wardrobe only
if you fall on bad times, and, if you have the
means, you never buy second-hand. And
if you did buy something second-hand,
you did it with great shame and guilt, and
never told a soul where you had acquired
the product from. But those who run re-
sale businesses claim that when it comes
to second-hand luxury products, an atti-
tudinal change is occurring. “There was
a big stigma about seven, eight years ago,
but today, buying something preowned
is getting completely mainstream,” says
Anvita Mehra, whose business
Confidential Couture, started in 2014,
is among the oldest platforms that sell

48 17 JULY 2023
 Anvita Mehra,
founder and CEO
of Confidential
Couture

second-hand luxury goods. She points
out that when she started the business,
she called it Confidential Couture, to im-
press upon buyers and sellers the idea that
the entire exercise was being conducted in
secrecy. Confidentiality today, while guar-
anteed, however, is rarely sought. And
Mehra was confident enough of this, she
says, that she opened a physical outlet in
Delhi, where buyers of second-hand goods
brushed against each other all the time.
According to Ashri Jaiswal, the
Bengaluru-based cofounder of Ziniosa,
which sells and rents preowned luxury
goods, it is the growth of HENRYs (high
earners not rich yet), a growing demog- There was a
raphy of aspirational young profession- big stigma about
als with large disposable incomes in
India who are fuelling this demand for seven, eight years
second-hand luxury goods. “Millenni- ago, but today
als and Gen Z prefer to rent and re-wear buying something
rather than buy something new today,” preowned is
she says. “They want to be seen on Insta-
gram carrying designer handbags. They getting completely
want to make a style statement,” she says. mainstream”
The relative affordability of second-hand ANVITA MEHRA
products, and the need to be seen online cofounder and CEO,
carrying them, and preferably changing Confidential Couture

17 JULY 2023
 BUSINESS

them frequently, is fuelling demand for

these products. According to one buyer,
you wear something, be seen on social
media a few times with it, get the likes,
and then sell it back and move on to the Some people have
next purchase. insane collections
in India. A room
full of sneakers,
P RIYA (NAME CHANGED upon
request), an HR professional in
Bengaluru, recently bought herself a
imagine that”
PRABAL BAGHLA
Louis Vuitton handbag for around `60,000 cofounder,
that she claims would cost her close to `1 SoleSearch
lakh had she bought it first-hand. “You
can’t even tell it has been used before,”
she says. According to Priya, who began
buying second-hand handbags and shoes
during the pandemic, there is a unique
pleasure that comes from rifling through
these items to find something you like,
that is absent when you pick up some-
thing off the rack. “You have to really put
your mind to the search,” she says. “And
you find something really personal and
rare sometimes, things that you can’t get
in a store anymore,” she says. Banga, for
instance, had been looking for a Louis
Vuitton handbag that was made in collab-
oration with the Japanese contemporary
artist Takashi Murakami—a celebrated
collaboration in the brand’s recent history
that led to each style of the multi-coloured
monogram line becoming a major status
symbol in the 2000s before it was phased
out in 2015—before she finally found it
at a recommerce platform two months
ago. “I was looking for it everywhere and tally sustainable. From Gucci to Rolex, by the main cast of the popular Netflix
I picked it up for `40,000,” she says. Balenciaga to Coach, many luxury brands show The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood
Banga today is a regular at the second- in several markets now, either take back Wives, and those owned by the model-
hand market. She doesn’t just buy but their old products to be recycled or sell designer Gabriella Demetriades, who
also sells products she bought first-hand preowned goods at a reduced price. After recently merged her preowned luxury
or earlier at a resale platform. “You buy yearsofpushingonlythenew,thesebrands brand, VRTT Vintage, with Luxury Pop.
something abroad, but you return and are now beginning to embrace the old. Ce- Anand is currently working to bring the
think it doesn’t work. So, you land up sell- lebrities are also catching on to this new closet of the popular blogger and influ-
ing it,” she says. buzzword, recycling their wardrobes for encer Malini Agarwal, better known as
One of the reasons behind the boom in eventsandfestivals,andgivingtheworldof Miss Malini, onto the platform.
second-hand luxury is the way it has been preowned a push by selling their personal One way to appreciate how big this
rebranded. Second-hand is not second- collections. Earlier, the actress Katrina Kaif market has become is by looking at the
hand anymore, with all the baggage that sold some 42 items of her personal collec- number of reseller businesses that have
the word carries. Second-hand is now pre- tion on the resale platform Saritoria. emerged in recent years. From Luxury
owned, or, in the words of its millennial “Celebrity closets when they become Pop, Confidential Couture, renters and
and Gen Z users, preloved. It is also being available are one of the most popular sellers of preowned goods Ziniosa, to the
embraced by the world of high fashion in sections in the resale scene,” says Anand, recent arrival of big international chains
its attempt to become more environmen- whose Luxury Pop has sold items owned like Poshmark, a US-based company of

50 17 JULY 2023

second-hand goods, and many more,
these recommerce platforms are drop-
ping the latest and the rare, teasing audi-
ences about upcoming collections, and
transforming the market. According to
them, while much of it is centred in the
big metro cities, a lot of their orders now
come from smaller towns and cities in re-
mote corners of the country.
Even as the second-hand market for
luxury goods rises, there has been a notice-
able increase in the popularity of another
new type of luxury—that of preowned
sneakers. The sneaker market of course
operates in a distinct way. There is the
price at which a sneaker is sold by a brand
in an outlet, and a price at which it gets re-
sold, often much higher, once it goes out of
17 JULY 2023
A sneaker wall
at the SoleSearch
outlet in Mumbai
stock at the retail level. Much anticipated
sneakers like Nike’s Air Jordans or Adidas’
Yeezys (now discontinued after Adidas
cancelled its partnership with its creator
Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye),
which can disappear from shelves min-
utes after their launch, are seen more as
an alternative asset class than shoes that
can be worn. And like other forms of col-
lectibles, such as art, their worth rises or
decreases over time, decided by a number
of factors from the rarity of the sneaker,
its condition, nostalgia associated with
it, to the cultural capital attached to its
creator. Driving the worth of the entire
market is its audience, who often identi-
fy themselves as sneakerheads, a culture
that has been growing rapidly in India too.
Accordingtothemarketandconsumerdata
aggregator Statista, the sneaker market in
India is forecast to generate a revenue of
$2.63 billion this year.
Prabal Baghla, a 25-year-old from Mum-
bai, who owns an enviable collection that
he estimates is somewhere between 100
and 200 sneakers, including Air Jordans
and Yeezys, remembers walking into the
house of his friend, the TV host Rannvijay
Singha, to find a room dedicated to over
11,000 sneakers. “Some people have insane
collectionsinIndia.Aroomfullofsneakers,
imagine that,” he says. Baghla, who often
struggles to find sneakers of his size in In-
dia (a UK size 12), partnered with a cousin,
Param Minhas, and Singha, two years ago,
to resell sneakers online. On this platform,
called SoleSearch, sneakers are traded like
commodities. Individual resellers and ven-
dors put up their sneakers on this platform,
and buyers can either buy them directly at
the asking price or place a bid lower than
that.ThemarketplaceforsneakersinIndia,
unlike in the West, has traditionally been
cluttered and disorganised with many in-
dividual resellers and vendors. But brands
like SoleSearch are now transforming
the scene. It opened an outlet in Mumbai
about a month ago, and another one in
Hyderabad is close to opening, apart from a
mobile app that is being developed. So far,
SoleSearch has sold two shoes between `7
lakh and `8 lakh, both Nike’s Air Force 1s.
The most expensive shoe currently listed
on its platform at `11.34 lakh is a metal-
lic gold version of the celebrated Nike
Air Force 1 made in collaboration with
Louis Vuitton by the American designer
Virgil Abloh.
It was somewhere around 2019 when
Banga and her sister sold one of the most
expensive possessions in their cup-
board—a classic version of a Chanel bag.
The two had bought it in 2010 and had
now sold it for `2.5 lakh. “It was in mint
condition and the value of a Chanel bag,
because it is rare, always goes up,” she says.
“Had we waited and sold today, we would
have made a lot more.”
Does she regret it? “Not really,” she says.
“We didn’t want a beige bag anymore. So,
we used the money to buy something else,”
she says. Q
www.openthemagazine.com 51
 CINEMA

“To
To Make a
Film that
SALON

Reaches Out
and
Resonates
with People
Is a Big Thing
Thing”

ANURAG KASHYAP’S NEW FILM ON AN EX-COP RECEIVES CRITICAL

FESTIVALS. THE FILMMAKER SPEAKS TO KAVEREE BAMZAI ABOUT

52 17 JULY 2023
 It’s
been 30 years since Anurag Kashyap,
now 50, landed in Mumbai on the
Punjab Mail, with the ambition of
making one movie. He’s already made
17 films, among them modern classics
such as Gangs of Wasseypur I and II
(2012). His latest movie, Kennedy, pre-
miered at the Cannes Film Festival and
is now travelling the world, restoring
the filmmaker’s confidence in himself,
and that of his legion of admirers in
his unique sensibility that is able to see
beauty in the dark side of the moon.
Excerpts from an interview:

What was it like to be at the Cannes

ACCLAIM AT INTERNATIONAL
FAILURES, HOPES AND LIVING ON LESS
Film Festival and get so much love?
It’s been quite reassuring. Kennedy got
made, travelled to the Cannes Film
Festival and the Sydney Film Festival
and is travelling to the Neuchâtel Film
Festival. It’s been a difficult time getting
to make the kind of films I want to
make. At one point you feel, can you
ever do it again? You fall, then you rise
again. It’s a tough time. Nothing seems
to be working. People are not going to
the cinema halls. It’s not merely in India.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon. When I
spoke to filmmakers all over the world,
everyone had the same thing to say.
Kim Jee-woon in Sydney was talking
about how it was the same in
South Korea now as it was in the ’70s.
People were watching five films a year,
compared to 20 until recently. Everyone
is struggling with that. At a time like
this to make a film that reaches out, to
which people are reciprocating and to
find that it is resonating with them is a
big thing, especially as it is something
I’ve not done before, even if it is in the
same zone as the thrillers I like to make.

But it’s not that you stopped

making films.
I’ve always been making films, but
I’ve been sitting on so many scripts. It’s

GETTY IMAGES
17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 53
 CINEMA
“It’s always easier to go out and do a remake rather than an
It’s a new kind of film, doesn’t have
“Sometimes, I get irritated when people ask for selfies and
Show me the ticket. I pose for more selfies than
always easier to go out and do a remake
rather than an original film like
Kennedy that has so many question
marks. It is a new kind of film, doesn’t
have big stars, how will people react to
it? Such good films like Bheed and
Afwaah were released recently. People
just didn’t go to see them. Then the
question is what do we do? In India,
movies like The Kerala Story are finding
an audience, getting so much govern-
ment support. If an Ormax study is to
be believed, it is a new kind of audience
that doesn’t usually go to the cinema.
Everybody is under pressure: should
we play the game, not play the game?
Filmmakers in Mumbai have very
bravely resisted the temptation. Only
a few opportunists have jumped on to
the bandwagon. Everybody wants to be
in the safe zone. Filmmakers who are
known for action are making big action
films, those who are known for comedy
are making big comedies. Karan Johar
is making a love story. He has shelved
Takht, everybody who was trying some-
thing new has put it aside. Ab kya karen
(What to do)? This too shall pass.
Did you feel this pressure?
See I don’t have much to lose. People
have big budgets and big star casts.
People don’t see me as a successful film-
maker whose films do well at the box
office. I stay within my budget. At the
same time, it’s very disheartening when
no one goes to watch your movie. But if
I don’t find any audience then there’s no
point in making movies.
Yes, for instance, Almost Pyaar
With DJ Mohabbat. It had such a
lovely theme and great music. Yet
no one went to see it.
54
I think the title of the film went wrong.
What has also become a problem is that
people associate you with a certain kind
of film. Such good performances from
Alaya F and Karan Mehta. In a way it
happens to all my films. Look at
Return of Hanuman. It came out in 2007
and people are discovering it now in the
context of Adipurush 16 years later. But
no one went to watch it when it came
out. If you just stand your ground and
make the film you feel is coming from
you and is good enough, people will find
it. It has to be honest and truthful to you.
You’ve not had an easy time
personally too, right?
Yes, my health collapsed completely. It
hit rock bottom. I fought my way back
with friends and through will power.
There were a lot of things. The hate I
was getting, the trolling on social me-
dia, my daughter’s anxiety, everybody
around me was suffering because of me,
my opinions, my being so vocal. I had a
heart attack, got a stent, and from then
on, it was downhill for a year and a half.
I imploded. It started in 2020 and just
went on. I finished shooting Dobaaraa
in the first week of April 2020. May 21
was when the heart attack happened. It
was a mild heart attack, and I was at the
hospital in time but still. My exercise
stopped. I had hematoma. I busted my
calf muscle. I was in a wheelchair for so
long I got irritated and went and acted
in Kuttey. I told Aasmaan [Bhardwaj, the
director] just kill me, if not literally, at
least metaphorically. I want to die.
That’s your new goal? You want to
die in films?
Yes, I’ve already acted in seven films
where I die. You’ll see them soon. They’re
all brutal deaths. The only way I can
do things is to laugh at myself. Like in
Vikram Motwane’s AK Vs AK. The idea
was what will people troll me about? I
will troll myself.
It’s been 30 years in this industry.
That’s an achievement, isn’t it?
I have nothing to complain about. I
have made more films than any of my
contemporaries. I have been around 30
years working, still standing. I came here
hoping to make one film, I didn’t know
what would happen. So much
has happened.
How do you see us as a society?
We had learnt to clothe our hatreds, our
shortcomings, our illnesses, our repres-
sions. But all the clothes are off now, and
we are fully naked.
But you don’t usually complain.
Do you?
No. But sometimes I get irritated when
people ask for selfies and I want to
ask them what film of mine have you
watched? Show me the ticket. I pose for
more selfies than the tickets sold for
my movies.
Your name still means a lot
to any newcomer to the Hindi
film industry.
People eulogise you, mythologise you,
jiska koi nahin, uska Anurag Kashyap hai
(any newbie without a godfather can
count on Anurag Kashyap). I’m quite
tired of that. I want someone to be there
for me. Mera papa kaun (Who is my
godfather)?
So is the burden of everyone’s
expectations too much?
17 JULY 2023
original film like Kennedy that has so many question marks.
big stars, how will people react to it?”
I want to ask them what film of mine they have watched.
the tickets sold for my movies” Anurag Kashyap, filmmaker
Everyone who makes his first film
wants to show it to me. Anyone who
writes a script wants me to read it. I don’t
have the mind space anymore. I can’t do
it anymore. I’ve learnt to say no. I got a
button from Sydney which says no in
ten different ways. I just want to sit qui-
etly and read. I’ve read Don Winslow’s
City of Dreams. I’m reading graphic
novels. I read the graphic novel by
Alexis Nolent on which David Fincher’s
SUNNY LEONE
next film is based. I read All the Sinners IN KENNEDY
Bleed by SA Cosby.

What did you watch?

I saw 40 movies at Cannes and Sydney.
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall,
Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper,
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower
Moon, and Louis Garrel’s The Innocent,
and so many more.

And just the joy of being in the

community of filmmakers...
It’s so lovely. When I meet filmmakers
from all over the world, I feel so happy.
It’s only when I come to Mumbai that
I feel like I don’t belong. Look at Tamil
Nadu. Five films from five first-time
filmmakers have been successful.
Things are happening. At a time when
mid budget movies were not doing well,
Zara Hatke Zara Bachke came around.
It gives you strength.
And acting with people like
Vijay Sethupathi in
Nithilan Swaminathan’s Maharaja?
He’s so lovely. Acting with him makes
me a better actor. The way he thinks
about cinema. He reminds me of Irrfan.
How did the failure of
Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat
affect you?
People find it difficult to believe but that
film came from my heart. I put all my
savings into it. I wanted to make it, put
it out there. I really believe in love. And
it’s not a dead idea. It’s breathing, as is the
film. People will discover it whenever
they want to. That for me is worth it.
When I came out of it, I was
completely broke.
So how do you survive?
I’m acting, doing so many things. You
don’t need much to live on. I moved back
to my old house. I cut down my expens-
es. I’m happy I didn’t have to make some-
thing I didn’t want to in order to survive.
Circumstances didn’t force me to make
something I didn’t want to.
But you used to keep an open
house. Is it still like that?
Not anymore. My need was to be away.
My priority is my health. I want to read. I
want to write. In the next four-five years
I plan to be extremely selfish. I’ve given a
lot of myself.
So, what next?
I’m writing a lot. Whatever takes off
first. I’ve got at least three scripts for TV
series and six film scripts. Filmmakers
inspire me. People like Hansal Mehta
and Anubhav Sinha who have rein-
vented themselves. Sudhir Mishra and
Vikramaditya Motwane inspire me. I see
these young filmmakers from the south
like Joby George, Fahadh Faasil,
Arjun Das, Vijay Sethupathi,
Tovino Thomas, Basil Joseph, or
Vetrimaaran, look at what he did with
Soori in Viduthalai Part 1.

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 55

 ART
Now and Ever
( L- R ) A P H A D PA I N T I N G O F M I G R A N T L A B O U R ; A P H A D PA I N T I N G O F N A N D I , W I T H T H E S TO R Y O F S H I V
ward-winning artist Kalyan Joshi prays over
a blank stretch of canvas with a mixture of love,
reverence and hope. A young girl of the family then
daubs the 30-feet long handloom scroll or phad,
with a few brush strokes. Joshi takes over and after one and a
half months of painstaking creative labour, the phad or religious
scroll will teem with over 2,000 finely etched figures from the
life story of the main deity who is the focus of the scroll painting.
When the eyes of the central sacred figure are painted, the scroll
will come alive and be imbued with divinity. Only then, will
Joshi lay down his brush.
Phad painting, which was a dying folk art form, is now seeing
a timorous revival. This art form originated in the former prince-
ly state of Shahpura, Bhilwara, Rajasthan, and the Joshi family are
its original custodians. Indeed, Kalyan Joshi traces his lineage to
phad painters going back to the 13th century.
“Today, only around 18 artists from the Joshi family are
full-time phad artists, and 50 students of the Chitrashala (Phad
Painting Training and Research Institute), are practising this art
form,” says Joshi. (The school was set up in the ’60s by Shree Lal
Joshi, Kalyan Joshi’s father and a Padma Shree recipient.)
Till a little over 60 years ago, the art of phad was a closely
guarded secret of artists in the Joshi family that had once shield-
ed the techniques of these extraordinary colourful scrolls, from
the prying eyes of the world. The family is now trying to pull
this art form back from the brink of extinction.
Indeed, their efforts have borne fruit for Joshi recently led
56
A FAMILY IN RAJAST
AGE-OLD TECHNIQ
a team of 15 artists from Bhilwara to create a 75 x 9 feet phad
artwork, which now adorns the new Parliament building in
New Delhi. They laboured for three months to create the opus on
the theme of democracy. The building showcases antique phad
paintings in its interiors as well.
As interest in India’s traditional folk art forms wanes, Joshi
and his brother Gopal are also adapting the art form to suit
modern day needs in home décor. They are creating smaller
paintings and using more contemporary themes like wedding
processions and hunting scenes. They are even creating can-
vasses that pivot around social messages regarding climate
change, water conservation, etc. But they emphasise that they
do not compromise on the age-old techniques.
Joshi started honing his artistic skills when he was just eight
years old. Today, the master artist has held numerous exhibi-
tions abroad and over 200 workshops all over India. He even
conducts Maestro courses on a one-of-a-kind art app called
Rooftop, which makes Indian art accessible to art lovers, enthu-
siasts and even the art-agnostic across the globe.
For over 700 years, these religious scrolls or phads have
served as mobile temples for the nomadic Rabari tribe, essen-
tially camel herders who trudged across the trackless deserts
of Rajasthan by day and stopped in the villages at night.
The bards (called bhopa and bhopi) commissioned the
paintings and then wandered along with their vivid art works
from village to village, singing and dancing and bringing to life
stories of a brave local chieftain Pabuji, and of Dev Narayan,
17 JULY 2023
HAN REVIVES A DYING FOLK ART FORM BY COMBINING
U E S W I T H M O D E R N T H E M E S By Gustasp and Jeroo Irani
A N D PA R VAT I ’ S W E D D I N G ; A R T I S T K A LYA N J O S H I
KALYAN JOSHI AND HIS BROTHER GOPAL
ARE CREATING SMALLER PAINTINGS AND USING MORE
CONTEMPORARY THEMES LIKE WEDDING PROCESSIONS,
HUNTING SCENES AND ARE EVEN CREATING CANVASSES
THAT PIVOT AROUND SOCIAL MESSAGES REGARDING
CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER CONSERVATION
an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. In the process, they developed
a visual storytelling technique that fostered community spirit
and enthralled and engaged their viewers. (Later, phad paintings
included tales from the Ramayana, Tulsidas’ Hanuman Chalisa,
a devotional hymn in praise of Lord Hanuman, and other
mythological traditions.)
The bhopa functioned as an exorcist, too, and would purge
illness from livestock and villagers afflicted with evil spirits
that had invaded and taken possession of their bodies. Acts of
penance would be shared with the family to protect them from
the slings and arrows of misfortune. At night, the performance
would begin; the balladeers would sing about the shining deeds
of the folk deities, their voices piercing the silence of the desert.
Their scrolls dense with colour and symbolism would light up
the clotted darkness of the night with magic even as the desert
wind whistled and hooted over shifting sand dunes.
We met Parveen Joshi, Kalyan Joshi’s brother, at the histo-
ry-webbed Shahpura Bagh, a luxe homestay in Shahpura, a town
where the royal and the rural have been in lockstep for centuries.
We sat near the pool with its array of white-curtain-draped
17 JULY 2023
pavilions, and the paintings that Parveen unscrolled dazzled as
much as the sun that glinted off the blue waters in the pool. Dense
with luminescent detail and vibrant with natural colours extract-
ed from stones, herbs and flowers mixed with gum and water, the
phad is done on handwoven cloth, Parveen explained. The phad
handloom cloth is soaked overnight to thicken the threads and
then starched to get a smooth surface. It is subsequently dried in
the sun and rubbed with moonstone for a smooth finish.
The scrolls that Parveen unfurled were peopled with figures
clad in traditional garb and headgear and the canvasses had the
stamp of traditional vocabulary. Indeed, the 30-feet-long and 5-feet-
wide phads can teem with 2,000 figures while the 20-feet ones may
showcase up to 800—each one etched in exquisite detail, Parveen
explains. The scrolls are large enough to accommodate the various
episodes in the life of the deities and the figures face each other to
create an impression of interaction and movement. (Prices may
vary from `75,000 for a traditional phad to `2 lakh to `3 lakh and
more, depending on the size of the canvas and the work that has
gone into creating it. Smaller contemporary artworks, but done in
the traditional style, can go for as little as `3,000.)
The scrolls, according to tradition, glow with rich hues of
orange, yellow, green, brown and red. Yellow is used for the
ornaments and clothing, whereas orange is the favoured hue for
the limbs and torso. Green is evocative of nature and brown for
architectural elements while red is suggestive of royalty and is
used to paint thick borders. Women generally paint the borders
but not the main artwork.
As we sat at Shahpura Bagh, listening to Parveen’s narration
and gazing at the phads that he unrolled, images from the past
invaded our mind’s eye—of dusk cloaking a village square,
while children sat in a semi-circle, eyes alight like fireflies on a
dark night. The men and women of the village sat behind them
forming a protective human barrier against the unseen forces of
the night. The performance was about to begin and excitement
rippled across the audience like waves in a limpid lake. The strains
of the ravanhatta, a two-string Rajasthani instrument, rose on the
soft evening air like the sweet lament of a jilted lover.
After cleaning and sanctifying a space, the priest-singer
and his wife unravelled a 30-feet-long and 5-feet-wide scroll
painting, fixed it to a bamboo frame and lit an oil lamp to light
up the canvas.
The veiled woman then began to sing and dance while
the man narrated mythological stories of their local deities.
The rivetted audience would occasionally clap and voice its
appreciation to encourage the performers to amp up the drama.
As dawn lit the skies above in fiery colours, silence would fall
like a curtain after a stirring theatre performance, and the sacred
recital would be wrapped up with an aarti. The villagers would
retire to their homes, energised and spiritually uplifted. 
www.openthemagazine.com 57
 BOOKS

SHRIKANT VERMA
Illustration by SAURABH SINGH

RANJIT HOSKOTE SHIKHA MALAVIYA

 Surveyors with a Spyglass
Three collections of poetry tell of time and transitions, ancient cities and kingdoms
W
HEN A POET TURNS his
gaze onto the universal, he
is making a choice to look
at the things that bring us together, not
the things that tear us asunder. And for
over three decades now, Ranjit Hoskote
has been a master of documenting and ex-
plaining these cultural encounters across
history that end up marking both parties
indelibly. In his latest (eighth) collection
of poems, Icelight (Hamish Hamilton; 128
pages; `399) Hoskote writes, in a poem
called ‘Retreat’, “The surveyor continues
to look / for a world at the other end / of his
spyglass / knowing it’s out there /
a distant cousin to the one / that’s
blowing up around him”.
The ‘surveyor with a spyglass’
is a typical Hoskote protagonist,
an adventurer to faraway lands.
They may or may not be able
to explain the kinship with
explorers past and the cultural
resonance that they feel, but they try to ar-
ticulate it all the same. They’re essentially
trying to piece together a kind of race
memory if you will, things that our ances-
tors did, things that are coursing through
our veins (and not merely lying dormant
in our history books). Here, for instance,
is the entirety of a short, sharp shock of a
poem called ‘Spur’. “Am I the boy / who
climbed this spur / and laid claim / to the
scrubland sweating / in its shade? // What
coiled through me / and sheared into
space? / a memory of colours churning
wet / obsidian saffron jade / transmitted
from other lives // Have I stood here before?”
Icelight is full of startling moments
like the concluding line above. If, as
Amitav Ghosh and others have sug-
gested, the novel is basically an artful
way to represent the passage of linear
time, then the accomplished poet is
surely the Scrambler-in-Chief in charge
17 JULY 2023
By Aditya Mani Jha
of non-linear time. With poems like
‘Spur’, Hoskote’s historicity isn’t con-
fined to the human—again and again
in this collection, human actions are
rendered small and fleeting by the enti-
ties witnessing them. Which is to say,
the trees, the moon, the earth itself. This
realisation both humbles Hoskote’s pro-
tagonists and anchors them to concepts
bigger than themselves or any grandiose
ideas of adventurism they may have.
In Icelight, there are few direct or
explicit responses to art, but the ones
you spot are in a darkly funny mode. The
lovely, rhythmic poem ‘Crow
Hymn’ has lines like, “bring us in
whispers news from all corners
of the world / bring us in glass jars
storms from all quarters of the
world”. Every alternate stanza
in this poem ends with the itali-
cised crow-chorus that goes kaf-
kafkafka — ‘Kafka’ means ‘crow’
in Czech, which is why it was the name
writer Franz Kafka chose for himself.
Hoskote also knows that ‘history’
doesn’t include just written texts or even
orally passed down texts. It must also
make room for hearsay, for suppressed
truths, for rumours that evolve into
cautionary tales. Here’s how a poem
called ‘Exit’ begins: “Choose / your exit
// Oxygen mask clamped / to your face /
your switch toggled // Or as summer fades
/ into monsoon rain / hearing the flame
whimper / in a cistern of its own wax // Or
after single-minded years / of following
your Schwanz / running out and hugging
/ a broken carthorse / that a man was
whipping / to death in the street”.
The first ‘exit’ here is involuntary,
someone tied down to a hospital bed.
The second ‘exit’ being described is often
described as ‘natural causes’ — indeed,
Hoskote’s summer-monsoon line even
bestows upon it kinship with nature. The
third ‘exit’ is where Hoskote gets funky
and it is very much the sort of death that
causes a poet to stop and think.
Although Hoskote doesn’t spell this
out, the incident being described here
is a well-known but unconfirmed tale
explaining the descent into insanity
and eventual death of the philosopher
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-
1900). Apparently, in 1889 Nietzsche saw
a horse being cruelly whipped in the
streets of Turin. The experience caused
a mental breakdown—Nietzsche alleg-
edly uttered “Mother, I am dumb,” and
did not speak another word for a decade
and died in a mute state.
Hoskote is almost daring us to see the
third ‘exit’ as voluntary but in reality it
is neither suicide nor a ‘natural’ death—
which is rather the point. Icelight is a col-
lection that will always keep the reader
on their toes. It never presumes to lecture,
and yet it delivers discrete little packets of
wisdom in an orderly, elegant manner.
A
BOOK OF POEMS that also
works as a biography — the
idea felt like a publishing gim-
mick. However, Darwin: A Life in Poems, a
biography of Charles Darwin written by
Ruth Padel, a contemporary
poet and critic (who also
happens to be Darwin’s great-
great-granddaughter) does
precisely that. A reader will
be enthralled by the book’s
formal range, its expansive
humanity and the sheer inti-
macy of writing in Darwin’s
voice, recreated with the help of diaries/
correspondence as well as accounts writ-
ten by his friends, family, and colleagues.
Shikha Malaviya’s Anandibai Joshee:
A Life in Poems (HarperCollins; 136 pages;
www.openthemagazine.com 59
 BOOKS
MAGADH CAN BE READ AS A SERIES OF EPISODIC POEMS
— OR AS A SINGLE LONG POEM LAMENTING MANKIND’S
FAILURE TO LEARN FROM ITS HISTORIC MISTAKES.
SHRIKANT VERMA’S OVERARCHING SUBJECT IS NOTHING
LESS THAN CAPTURING THE RHYTHM OF TIME ITSELF
`399) uses a similar methodology to as-
semble a de facto biography of its subject,
the first Indian female physician and the
first Indian woman to receive a medical
education in the US, back in the 1880s.
In the preface, Malaviya confesses that
she had her reservations about embark-
ing on such an ambitious project — even
if most narratives around Anandibai’s
life were filtered through the lens of her
husband being “her advocate and guide”.
“I wondered if I were to tell Anandibai’s
story through poems in her own voice,
what would that mean? How would it
change the narrative? Would it give her
agency back to her? Would it give South
Asian Americans a deeper sense of roots
and history? And supposing it did, was I
the right person to undertake this task? I
was a poet after all, and not a historian.”
Malaviya is selling herself short with
that last line, for Anandibai Joshee is impec-
cably researched. More importantly, these
poems do feel like we’re listening to a
time capsule, like Anandibai preserved
everything important in her life in a pot
that has been unearthed a century later.
Here she is, for instance, describing the
gender-segregated childhood that so
many Indian women experienced (and
continue to experience today), in a poem
called ‘A Different Kind of Arithmetic’.
“(…) the haveli halved into two sec-
tions / the mardana and the zenana // a
different kind of arithmetic— / the louder
the men spoke // the softer the women
/ never in the same room // next to each
other / unless an auspicious occasion”.
One of the book’s many impressive
achievements is the portrayal of
Anandibai’s marriage. At nine she was
married off to a “fanatically liberal” man
in his mid-20s. He threatened to leave her
if she did not receive a formal education.
It’s a fascinating relationship. There’s
60
abuse here, there’s co-dependence, there’s
the spectre of ‘forced progressiveness’ but
there’s also a grudging respect.
Malaviya writes: “His tongue is a
sickle; when the words come out they
cut me like a handful of grass, uprooting
me from where I stand. Dullard, lazy,
incompetent, adjectives he swings at me
again and again (…)”.
These lines are from a concrete poem
called ‘Consumption’—Anandibai died
from tuberculosis before she could start
practicing medicine. A concrete poem
forms a specific shape on the page via
blank spaces and typography—this
poem forms a sickle, taking off from the
first line (“His tongue is a sickle”). It’s
difficult to adequately convey how well
this works without actually recreating
the page, but suffice it to say that it is
only in the rare concrete poem that form
and content dovetail so beautifully.
Malaviya is also alert to the politics of
Anandibai’s position as a pioneer—the
fact that she’s born to an upper-caste
family is explored in poems like ‘Caste
Away’. Similarly, in the poem ‘A Com-
mendation from the Queen’, Anandibai
remarks on the quandary of receiving a
letter from Queen Victoria, the person in
whose name the British were stripping
India of its wealth. “Empress Victoria,
whose men continue / to plunder our
land, the Koh-i-noor snug / against her
chest shining bright, commanded / her
secretary to reply how she read the news
/ of my graduation with great inter-
est—and that / I should be all smiles, my
success spread far & wide.”
C
LEARLY, STATECRAFT —
whether monarchic or demo-
cratic — is a tough nut to crack
and a tricky process to capture within the
formal constraints of poetry. And yet,
Shrikant Verma’s Magadh (1984), one of
the classic works of 20th-century Hindi
literature, pulls it off with an incredibly
pared down, minimalist style (there are
barely any adverbs in the book, for ex-
ample). Rahul Soni’s English translation
was first published in a bilingual edition
(Hindi on the left, English on the left) by
Almost Island in 2013. Since then, the
Hindi rights have reverted to Rajkamal
Prakashan and now, the translation has
been republished in an all-new edition
(sans the original Hindi text) by Eka (144
pages; `599), alongside an all-new transla-
tor’s note by Soni and critical essays by
Ashok Vajpeyi and Mantra Mukim.
As Apoorvanand (a Hindi professor
from Delhi University) notes in the pref-
ace, Magadh can be read as a series of epi-
sodic poems — or as a single long poem
lamenting mankind’s
failure to learn from its
historic mistakes. Verma’s
overarching subject here
is nothing less than cap-
turing the rhythm of time
itself. At the individual
level, this means making
one’s peace with one’s
own death in particular and mortality in
general. At the societal level this means
understanding the cyclical nature of his-
tory, how kingdoms live and die, only for
a new one to take the place of the fallen.
In the poem that lends the book its
name, Verma seemingly addresses the
readers by saying, “But there is / neither
Magadh nor Magadh / You too have
been searching / brothers, / this is not the
Magadh / you’ve read about / in books, /
this is the Magadh / that you / like me /
have lost”. The bit about “neither Magadh
nor Magadh” is a typical demonstration
of Verma’s faux-circular logic as well as an
air of artful nihilism that pervades these
verses. It reads like an admission of guilt,
partially because of Verma’s complicity in
the structures of (ill-fated) power. He was
a leading figure in the Indian National
Congress in the 1970s, and as
Apoorvanand notes in his essay, this fact
contributed to the critical ambivalence
around Magadh back when it was pub-
lished for the first time in 1984. Q
17 JULY 2023
 BOOKS
The Good
Fight
The trial of Julian Assange
and its implications
for press freedom
By Ullekh NP
EN YEARS AGO, independent
T
news outlet Democracy Now!
interviewed the then 25-year-
old Kevin Gosztola for his views on
whistle-blower and former US soldier
Bradley Manning’s trial for sharing with
WikiLeaks nearly 7,50,000 documents.
These included classified military files,
for which the publisher of WikiLeaks,
Julian Assange, is on trial. Gosztola
was then described as a civil liberties
blogger at Firedoglake, a collaborative
online news space, and was among
the handful of journalists who covered
the Manning trial daily.
Since then, Gosztola has acquired a
prominent status as a journalist taking
up the cause of whistle-blowers and
publishers whose crime was journalism.
As managing editor of Shadowproof,
a reader-supported online news site,
Gosztola went on to report extensively on
Assange’s extradition hearings live from
Woolwich Court in London, not far from
Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, where
Assange is imprisoned. The Australian
publisher of WikiLeaks was kidnapped
from the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019
where he had taken sanctuary since 2012
fearing a show trial, and extradition to the
US—where he expects no justice.
The Trial of Julian Assange (2022), by
Nils Melzer, a former United Nations
Special Rapporteur on Torture, had
argued the key reason why the US was
after Assange—because WikiLeaks
published in 2010 details of American
war crimes. The worst to happen for the
US was the ‘Collateral Murder’ video,
which showed what happened on July
12, 2007 in a residential area of Baghdad,
17 JULY 2023
Julian Assange
Iraq, where US soldiers indiscriminately
fired at and killed people, including
a Reuters staff member and his
potential rescuers.
Gosztola goes much further in
Guilty of Journalism. He not only dissects
the injustice meted out to Assange but
also traces the draconian provisions of
the Espionage Act. In the process, he
exposes the media and government
institutions that perpetuate lies while
maintaining a veneer of impartiality.
In the foreword, American
journalist Abby Martin writes, “Years
after the liberal establishment—who
once heaped praise upon Assange—
abandoned him in droves, Kevin has
not relented in his dedication to the
case.” The perception created—to the
extent that it was widely touted as
truth—was that Assange had been a
Russian agent since 2016. However,
Assange’s indictment and extradition
trial has nothing to do with the 2016
election, but, as Gosztola lays bare
through testimonies and investigation,
GUILTY OF JOURNALISM
THE POLITICAL CASE AGAINST
JULIAN ASSANGE
Kevin Gosztola
Seven Stories Press and
The Censored Press
256 Pages | 1,270
AP
has everything to do with the
publishing of war crimes.
Some chapters are revelations in that
Gosztola details how a private security
agency named Undercover Global spied
on Assange who was living in the Ecuador
embassy. Another chapter investigates
the history of whistle-blowers. Another
one examines the testimonies submitted
in the extradition trial from journalists
who had worked with Assange, who, they
aver, stuck to “standard news gathering
practices”. Chapter 12 is worthy of a
re-read because it looks at how certain
news outlets, including The New York
Times, CNN, The Guardian, and others
“aided and abetted” the US prosecution
against the WikiLeaks publisher.
The opening line of the book reads:
“Julian Assange is a journalist.”
Why make that statement? It is
important because the whole narrative
built by the US administration with the
help of “prestige media” is that Assange
is not a journalist. What then, if not
journalism, is the courage to publish
incriminating documents that very few
editors would have the guts to publish?
In Ithaka, a film made on Assange’s
family’s fight to save him, his father
John Shipton is also asked this question.
He lists the journalistic awards Assange
had won.
This book by Gosztola, which tells the
story of how the FBI targeted Assange,
carries, in the end, 30 WikiLeaks files
the “US government doesn’t want you
to read”. It lists coups, foreign policy
atrocities, human rights abuses, spying
on leaders of other nations, and so on.
This is journalism. Q
www.openthemagazine.com 61
 SOFT POWER Makarand R Paranjape
AI and the Death of Liberal Arts
The cognitive gap caused by machines is set to widen
N MY PREVIOUS
I column (https://shorturl.
at/eBES6 ), I showed just
how revolutionary artificial
intelligence (AI) already is
when it comes to blurring the
distinction not only between
pseudo and real cognition
but between human and
alien intelligence. In the
field of pedagogy, especially
in liberal arts, AI already
poses unique and far-reaching challenges. Much of our effort
as educators was to train students to think and write clearly.
But if AI can do that faster and better than humans, then will
the latter, paradoxically, be defined by being ungrammatical,
muddle-headed, and incoherent?
The crisis is of endemic proportions, with many
postgraduate students being unable to string together
five sentences cogently, let alone produce longer, well-
researched, and solidly substantiated research work. Those
who complain of the unfair advantage of the English-
educated in India fail to realise that many in this so-called
category would be unable to read a play by Shakespeare
or even a novel by Charles Dickens. Without calling them
neo or barely literate, one would have to accept that their
language skills are severely limited.
Unfortunately, this is equally true of the mothertongue-
wallas. It is not that they are automatically better equipped
to think, write, or speak clearly in their native tongues. The
same problem of linguistic incompetence persists across
languages. This becomes especially poignant when we
come, rather dimly, to recognise that deep cognition may
be among the few crucial characteristics of a real human
being. But with most human beings incapable of it, where
does that leave us?
Those who don’t understand or underestimate the
capabilities of AI take heart in its dismissal by the likes of
prominent linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky scornfully
pooh-poohed large language models (LLMs) as lacking in
basic intelligence. He was sceptical about AI’s capabilities to
truly understand human language. In multiple interviews
and articles, he argued that LLMs simply mimic patterns
without understanding the meaning behind them. While
he acknowledges the success of neural networks in pattern
recognition tasks, he asserts that this does not equate to
human-level comprehension. Instead, he claims that LLMs
62
fundamentally lack the necessary intelligence to engage
with language at a level akin to humans. True. But the issue,
as I have argued earlier, is different. The problem is that it
will increasingly be harder to tell the difference.
AI has exhibited an unprecedented ability to generate
coherent, relevant content much faster than humans.
By drawing on extensive databases, AI text generators
construct intricate responses based on linguistic patterns
acquired through machine-learning processes. These
breakthroughs not only streamline information production
but also enhance accuracy and stylistic consistency. While
it is valid to question whether current AI models can grasp
the intricacies of language at a human level, dismissing
their potential as “superficial and immature” overlooks
appreciable advancements in the field. For example, AI
technologies have been applied to various tasks such as
translation services, content summarisation, and even the
generation of academic essays, which are even better than
what most of us can produce.
I STILL REMEMBER the very first class I taught. Rhet
105 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where I had just entered as a graduate student in Fall,
1980. Rhetoric was the art of speaking and writing clearly,
considered mandatory for all students of the university.
Even engineers. My course was actually subtitled “Rhetoric
for Engineers.” It fell to my lot as a newly hired teaching
assistant (TA). I was not yet 20. Many of my students
were older. The course was called “the pits.” You cut your
pedagogic milk teeth in the pits before you graduated to
teaching introductory literature courses.
My students, though not hostile, were resistant and
resigned to suffering foreign TAs, whom they usually
considered below par. Initially, I, too, felt rather unsure
of myself. I discovered, however, that there was a longer
history of English in India than in the families of many of my
students, whose forebears had come to the US within the last
50 years from non-English speaking parts of the world.
By the end of that semester, it was clear to me that
however frightening the prospect of teaching rhetoric
to overworked and indifferent engineering students, it
was something they needed badly. Most couldn’t write
intelligently and intelligibly, let alone develop a well-
researched and substantiated essay that conveyed their own,
if not original, arguments. What is more, by grading their
assignments week after week and guiding them to finish
their longer term-paper at the end of the semester, I myself
17 JULY 2023
 Illustration by SAURABH SINGH

borrow not only exact words and sentences

but ideas and arguments too.” Just as you aren’t
thieves, you shouldn’t be plagiarists.
Nothing is totally original, I told my
students, but acknowledging and engaging
with the ideas of your predecessors is what
research is all about. Catching out instances
of plagiarism and teaching students how to
think and write clearly is much of what a
liberal arts education is about. In a nutshell,
creativity and critical thinking. But now, all
that has changed. The rapid advancement of
AI technologies, which has sparked concerns
and debates in various fields, poses special
challenges to educators and students. As AI-
based tools such as automatic essay generators
accelerate in efficiency and quality, teachers
face new challenges in ensuring academic
integrity and assessing student work.

T
HE MOST IMMEDIATE concern
arising from AI’s influence on education
is the potential proliferation of automated
plagiarism. Historically, educators have relied
on specialised software to detect instances
JUST AS MUGGING UP TABLES BECAME of plagiarism in student writing. However,
OBSOLETE ONCE WE HAD CALCULATORS, sophisticated AI algorithms now enable anyone
to generate unique essays instantaneously,
THINKING, WRITING, AND CREATING limiting the effectiveness of traditional
UNIQUE ESSAYS, POEMS, SHORT STORIES AND plagiarism detection methods. Worse, even a
THE LIKE WILL ALSO BECOME OUTDATED halfway clever student doesn’t have to plagiarise
at all. An AI writer will produce just as good an
essay, references included, as a human being
can. Perhaps, even better. For those who go in for
learnt not just how to write, but also how to read and think. the paid programmes, the choices are legion.
Returning to India, I found that plagiarism, even in Just as mugging up tables became obsolete once we
universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, was had calculators, thinking, writing, and creating unique
rampant. The idea that you had to acknowledge other essays, poems, short stories and the like will also become
people’s ideas was not only alien but copying exact outdated. To return to Chomsky’s original critique of
sentences and passing them off as your own was also AI, what’ll happen to Chomsky if AI does an even better
not considered unethical. Right through high school job at showing its own limitations than Chomsky can
and undergrad years, students routinely cut and pasted, even imagine? But there’s the rub. Imagination, feeling,
mistakenly and conveniently believing that words, sentience, inspiration, and ultimately, consciousness.
sentences, ideas, and thoughts were common property. It Machines don’t have that now. But LLMs can simulate
was all just data in their minds; there was little difference much of that too even without experiencing it. Probably
between information and knowledge. even sooner than we can think, and better.
In my research methodology classes, I often asked, The cognitive divide will become much vaster and
“Would you take money from your roommate’s wallet or more dangerous than the class, race, gender, national, or
purse in their absence?” Most students said, “Of course, not.” economic divisions. Even if AI does not destroy the human
“But suppose,” I countered, “you had to, in an emergency. race as some fear and predict, smart machines serving a
What would you do?” They usually replied, “We would very small section of smarter humans are definitely likely
ask permission or inform them of the reasons for doing to control the rest of us. Will that trigger a fundamental
so.” “Precisely. And, I hope, pay back later?” I asked. Almost alteration in our existing social and power relations, but
everyone agreed. “That is what you need to do when you also more dismally, the end of humanity as we know it?

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 63

67,56
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 S T R E A M I N G S M A R T

Awesome Threesome
Sweet Kaaram Coffee Santhy Balachandran,
Cast: Lakshmi, Madhoo, Santhy Balachandran Lakshmi and Madhoo
in Sweet Kaaram Coffee
Director: Bejoy Nambiar | Tamil | Prime Video

A
grandmother
who ought to
be grieving for
her husband
but is pining for her lost
love. A wife who is devoted
to her husband and son
but is secretly suffocating.
A daughter who is being
gaslit by her cricketer
boyfriend and being told
that women’s cricket is still
not “quite there”. All three
women of the household
decide to take a road trip
to Goa, leaving the men to
fend for themselves. The
grandmother is convinced
her son wants her to
depart forever and join her
husband. Her daughter-
in-law is repeatedly told
by her husband that she
can’t take care of herself
and has to be protected
and sheltered. And the
daughter just wants to
get away from a broken
Why Watch it?
An all-woman road trip
spanning three generations,
the catchline delivers exactly
what it promises
heart. The magnificent
Lakshmi, who plays the
feisty grandmother, is the
star of the show, but the
lovely Madhoo (whom
everyone remembers
from Mani Ratnam’s 1992
classic Roja) shines as the
woman who knows it all
but is afraid to express
herself. The journey is the
joy in the series, which
manages to rise above
clichés with some fine
performances and excellent
cinematography. Is a
second innings possible
in life, whatever the age, if
one stops operating from
a position of fear? Yes, and
Sweet Kaaram Coffee is here
to show us how and why.

Monster School B oarding schools have been the sites for mystery, thrills and horror for
a long time. Indian shows are only just beginning to tap into this rich
genre with sufficient sophistication. School of Lies on Disney+Hotstar did
Adhura
Cast: Ishwak Singh, Rasika Dugal so recently with a great degree of care, mapping
the often suffocating mindscape of a group of boys Why watch it?
Director: Gauravv K Chawla Bone crunching,
and Ananya Banerjee stuck together in a remote location at a time of great neck twisting, blood
Hindi | Prime Video physical and psychological change. Adhura returns spurting action, with
to that territory with more than a taste of terror. some emotional
The school is in Ooty in the middle of a forest, and scenes. Ishwak Singh
Ishwak Singh and is excellent, as is
Rasika Dugal in Adhura therefore full of mist, clouds and green. It’s the site Rasika Dugal
for first crushes, first heartbreaks, first lessons in
adulthood. It is also where terrible bullying can take
place. Survival skills are learnt. And those who don’t, carry the scars forever.
The timelines shift between present-day and 15 years ago, when a young
man was killed on the last day of school. When the Class of 2007 meets for
a reunion, strange things start happening to the group. Is the ghost of one of
them who was killed back to haunt them? And who killed him? The mystery
takes time to unravel but in a way that teases and thrills.

17 JULY 2023 www.openthemagazine.com 65

 STARGAZER
ER
KAVEREE BAMZAI
AI
MANUSHI CHHILLAR
À When Mr Seth Won a Genie
Kangana Ranaut’s Emergency
is likely to get a lot of traction
when it releases later this year, but
the 25th anniversary of one of the
most powerful films involving
Indira Gandhi has been forgotten.
Such a Long Journey, based on Rohinton
Mistry’s book and referencing to
the infamous Nagarwala scandal,
was released in 1998 and fetched its
lead actor, the brilliant Roshan Seth,
a Genie Award for Best Actor in a
Leading Role. In this Indian-Canadian
film, Seth plays a fine, upstanding
householder and bank clerk Gustad
Noble, who gets caught up in a
diversion of funds meant for the then
freedom fighters of East Pakistan.
The money, or so Mistry’s book says,
were misappropriated by the then
prime minister for personal use. The
case details remained murky and
Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala died while
in prison. Naseeruddin Shah plays
Major Jimmy Bilimoria who uncovers
the scandal and Om Puri plays his
dear friend Ghulam. Soni Razdan is
Gustad’s much harassed wife. But the
subtext is that corruption is creeping
into the democracy so dear to Gustad.
Unfortunately, the film was never
released in India. Ronnie Screwvala,
its line producer, bought the rights
when he ran UTV but they crossed
over to Disney when the latter bought
the former. I asked Screwvala where
the rights were now, and he said they
were vested in Disney. Perhaps
it’s time for them to air it on
Disney+Hotstar. Directed by Sturla
Gunnarsson, the movie was set in
1971 and shot in Mumbai. During the
66
ROSHAN SETH
course of the shoot, Mistry and Seth
became good friends, and this led to
Seth adapting a particularly moving
death scene directly from the book.
Though nominated for a Genie, Seth
didn’t travel to Toronto for the award
ceremony because he didn’t want to be
disappointed by not winning. He won,
and when you see the performance,
you know why. It’s sublime. The New
York Times’ AO Scott described Seth’s
performance as arresting, saying he
plays “a man who without undergoing
a dramatic transformation—he is
consistently anxious, temperamental
and mistrustful—nonetheless
manages to win our sympathy”.
Roger Ebert was as effusive, saying
Seth “plays an everyman, an earnest,
worried, funny character always
skirting on the edge of disaster,
exuberantly immersed in his life”.
Now if only we could get to watch
it on a streaming service.
À Life after Miss World
There was a time during her
duties as Miss World 2017 when
Manushi Chhillar couldn’t remember
which city she was in. It was during
a particularly hectic two months of
travel. She has had to summon greater
reserves of patience and alertness as
an actor in the Hindi film industry,
given she waited for more than three
years for her first release, Samrat
Prithviraj. It didn’t do well at the box
office despite its supposedly careful
attention to detail and lavish budget.
But Chhillar hasn’t let disappointment
deter her. Instead she’s been busy
this year, acting as a “sort of spy” in
SANJAY
MAITREYI
LEELA
BHANSALI
Tehran with John Abraham and as a
working woman, a “simple, yet layered
character”, in Operation Valentine,
the Hindi-Telugu bilingual film co-
starring Varun Tej. Chhillar makes the
most of downtime by prepping for her
next role, be it working on her diction,
her appearance, or her fighting skills.
“My body is my tool so I have to keep it
in good working condition,” she says.
As for dejection, she is philosophical:
“As an actor you can only give it
your best shot. A lot of energy comes
together to make a movie work.” If
Miss World was like taking a tough,
competitive exam, being in the movies
is what adulthood is all about, she says.
“Miss World was all about sisterhood,”
she recalls, “we all helped each other.”
Not quite the vibe in the film industry
with all its intense ambition.
À Scene and Heard
Baiju Bawra, directed by Vijay Bhatt,
is one of the greatest tragedies
on the Indian screen, starring
Bharat Bhushan and Meena Kumari.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali has been living
with the film for the past 20 years.
As soon as he completes his ode to
Lahore’s courtesan classic Heeramandi
for Netflix, he will start working on
the remake of the 1952 classic. This
will be his second reinterpretation of
a classic movie after the 2002 Devdas
which took off from Bimal Roy’s film
of the same name. Now if only he
could get Ranveer Singh and
Alia Bhatt to stop screaming at each
other as they seem to be doing in
the trailer for Rocky Aur Rani Kii
Prem Kahaani.
17 JULY 2023
 State Partner Technology Partner

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